Chapter 22 #2
She laughs wetly and then pulls away from me. “Sad and smelly,” she says, looking down at her dress, wrinkled now from embracing my sweaty body. “How long since you showered?”
“Hey, I’ve been wallowing.”
“Well, wallow yourself into some soap, please.” She waves a hand in front of her nose. “Because ew.”
I grumble, pointing at her face. “Don’t push it.”
She follows me to the bathroom in a routine as old as SPOY.
I undress and step into the stream of water as she tells me more about the job, the things she’s excited about and the things making her nervous.
I listen and tell her in various ways that she’s the smartest and most valuable employee anyone could ever hire, that the Metropolitan Planning Agency is lucky to have her, and that if they don’t realize it, they’ll have me to answer to.
As I dress, I feel marginally more human, due less to the cleanliness and more to the normalcy of having Maral in our shared space again. Then I remember that soon this won’t happen anymore, and my chin starts wobbling again.
Mar tries to bolster me. “Nadia says Scope is excited to see your talk tomorrow night.”
My stomach drops. I have been avoiding facing reality for two days, and part of that was ignoring the fact that I have to go up onstage at the Infinitude Symposium tomorrow and be jazz-hands Ana for the two thousand people attending, not to mention the thousands more who will tune in to the Instagram Live that Shanthi will be streaming of the event.
Nadia emailed me over the weekend to let me know that Scope, with whom I’m meeting in the morning, will also be tuning in.
So they can see my screen charisma in action, I guess.
Reading my reaction, Mar says, “I’ll be there with you. It’s going to go great—you can do this talk from memory at this point. I’ll bet they sign you immediately. You’re going to get everything you want.”
I blow out a breath. “Not everything. Not you. Not—” I stop myself, not sure how I almost slipped and said his name when he wasn’t on my mind for once.
Or wasn’t he? Isn’t he always right below the surface, simmering like a riptide, ready to draw me under?
Maral presses her lips together, reading the subtext. I’m wearing sweats and one of her MIT T-shirts—represent—but feel exposed under her gaze.
“Your parents are gonna be pissed,” I say, pushing through the moment. “Just when we dangled the carrot of you moving closer to them.”
“We?” she asks pointedly. Then she sighs. “I honestly don’t think I care. I mean, not that I don’t care. I’m just…making a concerted effort to care less. I don’t want to be guilted into a life I don’t really want.”
My stomach knots. Have I been doing that to her? Guilting her into staying on with SPOY when she would have rather been somewhere else? I feel dizzy again and sit on the edge of my rumpled bed.
“I don’t think you should be, either,” she adds.
I lift my chin. “I’m not being guilted. I’m the one who’s pushing the move to L.A.”
“Yeah, but is that what you really want?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Because it matters,” she says. “What you want matters, Ana. What you feel matters. Your mom doesn’t think so, but it does.”
Whoa. What’s this, now, Throw Our Parents Under the Bus Day? “That’s not fair.”
She scoffs. “You know what’s not fair? Putting all your shit on your child.”
“She doesn’t do that—”
“No?” Her voice is strident now—like she’s had this conversation locked and loaded and is finally getting to pull the trigger. “What about when Vahag died?”
My breath catches, sticks. “What about it?”
“It was all about her. She didn’t let anyone else grieve him.”
“She’d just lost her husband! She was broken.”
“You’d just lost your dad,” she says. “So were you.”
I shake my head but it feels stiff, uncooperative.
“You needed space to grieve just as much as she did,” Mar says. “But she sucked all the air out of the house, didn’t let you share the pain. Didn’t let you even feel it—keeping you running all the time.”
She’s not being fair. I wanted to keep busy, do the arrangements, the paperwork, the upkeep. I wanted to run, needed to hustle. Mom may have benefited, but it was my choice. It was my choice.
“And then that fair-weather fucker wouldn’t let you grieve, either,” she says, and it doesn’t take a leap to know who she’s referring to.
Nathan had never seen that side of me—a side I’d never let into the light of day, because some part of me knew it was unwelcome.
I’d never needed to, until then. I’d always been able to be the bright, sparkling Ana everyone loved, because the Persian rug had never been yanked out from beneath her feet before.
Because she had never lost everything before.
And he didn’t know what to do with it. Suddenly his girlfriend was a completely different person, one he didn’t recognize.
One who didn’t provide a reliable escape.
Who was once always smiling and energetic and ready for a good time, for a hot fuck, for a boost before a tough exam or entertaining small talk at parties.
The girlfriend he signed up for was gone, and in her place was a hollow chasm with smoke billowing out of its center.
No wonder he didn’t want me anymore.
“I wish I’d been there more,” Maral says. “I should have been.”
I shake my head. “You were in the middle of a grueling master’s program. And anyway, I didn’t need someone there with me. I was fine.”
“Fine!” she cries, and it’s loud. Loud enough that I wonder if Henry will come up here and ask what’s going on. “You were not fine, Ana. You were playing a part for your mom and for Nathan, but that’s not the same as being fine. That’s toxic positivity talking.”
What the actual fuck? “What are you talking about?”
She huffs. “Do you ever think about how we were never, like, allowed to feel anything other than happiness? Gratitude? Subservience?”
My brows draw together. “Maral, if you’re mad at our parents over something—”
“I’m not mad at our parents. I’m just seeing things a lot more clearly than I have before. Their way of thinking. How it’s affected us, and not for the better.”
I’m trying to follow what she’s saying, but I’m not sure I’m ready for where it leads. Still, she presses on.
“They went through some tough shit, I’m not negating that,” she says.
“Starting life all over again here, raising us, and trying to integrate into a foreign culture.” She watches me carefully, making sure I’m listening.
“But they used that against us. Anytime we were upset about anything, from a scraped knee to a B on a report card to a mean kid at school, it was always ‘That’s nothing’ or ‘You should be so lucky’ or ‘Do you know what other people have to live through?’ ”
“That was just their way of helping us get over things.”
“Did it help you get over things?” she asks.
“I mean, I never got a B,” I say, buffing my nails on my T-shirt.
Her eyes narrow. “Did it help you feel less shitty when you were feeling shitty?”
I search our surroundings blindly. “There’s nothing anyone can do to help you stop feeling shitty.”
“Yes, there is,” she says. “There are a lot of things. Listening, for one. But they never did, and we stopped telling them. We stopped ever showing any negative emotions around them, because we were only ever berated for it. But we were rewarded for being good, grateful, deferential daughters, so we assumed those roles full-time.”
“Great! So they raised us to be good, grateful people. I’m not seeing the problem here.”
“The problem,” she says, “is that you bury any emotions that aren’t one-hundred-percent positive all the time. Not only with family, but with everyone.”
“Did you ever consider that I’m just a positive person?” I paste on my winningest smile.
“You aren’t. You’re fucking miserable sometimes, and you think you’re hiding it but you’re not. And you shouldn’t.” Her eyes are glistening now.
Something viscous spreads in my throat. At her words, but also at her tears. “Hey,” I say, stepping toward her.
She swipes at a drop that escapes her long lashes. “You’ve always been the rock. For me, for your parents. We’ve relied on you so much. Too much. I’m guilty of it too. I let things go. Let you retreat. I enable it.”
I’m at a loss. She gives me what I need in those moments and thinks she’s doing something wrong? No, no, she has it all backward. “You’re not enabling anything. That’s what I need sometimes.”
Her eyes meet mine, the sadness in them so big that I wish I could spin her a cocoon and protect her against it forever.
“I don’t think that’s what you need,” she says. “I think you need someone to listen, to tell you it sucks, to validate you. To take the shame out of those feelings. Because there is no shame in those feelings, Ana.”
My breathing is funny, requiring too much concentration. I want to end this conversation. “Let’s just drop it.”
“No,” she says, her gaze steady, holding mine. “I’m not letting you steamroll me on this anymore. Not when there’s so much at stake.”
“What is at stake? You’re already leaving!” I cry.
“Not me,” she says. “You’ll always have me, no matter where we live or what work we do.” She takes a breath. “I’m talking about your life.”
“My life is great! Well, not at this very second, I have this fucking annoying cousin—”
“Do you even want to move to L.A.?” she blares over me.
A sound comes from my throat, unsure what it’s trying to be.
Maybe I don’t want to live in L.A. specifically, but it’s not about the location—it’s about what L.A.
will fulfill. I can’t stop wishing to make my family happy.
I can’t just extricate a piece of myself that’s been a driving force my entire life.
“It’s not that simple,” I say. Words I may as well emblazon on my forehead for the number of times I’ve said them recently.
Her head bobs. “It kind of is. I want to be an environmental engineer. I’m doing what I want, and it’s the right thing, even though it’s inconvenient for people I love.
Think about what you actually want, Ana.
Because that matters.” Her voice is soft, coaxing.
“It matters what you want. And it matters how you feel, whatever those feelings may be.”
Why or how my bones become liquid, I don’t know, but I collapse onto the bed, legs unable to hold me up any longer. My breaths are coming too fast. Tears rush up my throat and down my face, as though Maral’s words have turned a faucet.
She sits beside me, pulling me close, and my body droops against hers like crumpling fabric. The sound of great, heaving sobs fills the room. They’re coming from me.
My chest aches, like my heart is skidding on asphalt, scraped up and raw.
I’m not sure how long I cry, but as my sobs recede, my pulse normalizing and breaths coming at a non-alarming rate, I feel lighter.
Like I’ve handed half the burden to Maral, and she’s taken it without even a thought, as trusted and dependable as she’s always been.
It aches to realize how long I could have had this but denied it.
“Why haven’t you brought this up before?” I ask, my voice breaking on the last word.
“ ’Cause you’re so receptive,” she deadpans, and we both chuckle softly.
I sober quickly, though. I’m a long way from living a new truth. I may never be able to get where I want to be—I may have thrown away the opportunity one too many times.
“I fucked up,” I say. I know she knows what—who—I’m referring to.
She swipes at my tears with her thumbs. “You can fix it.”
I nod automatically. But…“What if I can’t?”
She tsks. “You’re too smart to say something that stupid.” She smiles. “You can do anything.”