33. Julieta
Chapter thirty-three
Julieta
“I stopped.”
Larissa gapes at me. Somehow things have been flipped during our lunch hour, and now I’m the one with stories to share.
“Stopped?” she asks, dumbfounded. “Why the hell did you do that?”
The hard thing about letting people into the ins and outs of your life is when you inevitably have to tell them things didn’t work out. When you have to tell them you quit, and you failed.
“It was affecting my work. The case. I don’t know. Barbara let me have it.”
“Fuck Barbara. She sucks.” That aggressive crunch of the baby carrot seems somehow apropos here.
My eyes widen at her outburst.
“You know she sucks. It’s okay to admit it. Don’t think I haven’t looked for other places to work.”
“What’s keeping you here?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. The commute is nice. I like the people I work with.” She shrugs.
What’s keeping me here?
“You know I messed up the Lorenzo case. I really fucked it up. He was counting on me, and I let him down. I prioritized myself instead of my job. Instead of helping those that need it.”
“Both things can be true. Both things can be done. It’s just a matter of balance.”
“I don’t know what that word means,” I say tersely.
“It takes practice. I know you know that one,” she counters. But her tone is kind and compassionate. Larissa herself is compassionate and warm, friendly and thoughtful. A team player I have been so lucky to have on mine.
“Thank you for helping me last week.”
“You told me thank you a million times. It’s my job. Thank you for asking for help. That’s what I’m here for.”
I smile at her response. “It meant a lot.”
“Anytime,” she beams.
Our lunch hour is over, but I don’t want to rush to get back into the office. I just want to enjoy this nice outdoor weather a little bit longer.
“So, how are you and that instructor then?” she asks.
“Not good,” I shake my head. That’s certainly an understatement. “I royally fucked up that, too.”
The only good thing. The best thing. And I gave it up because I thought I didn’t deserve it.
“My life feels like a bunch of falling dominoes lately,” I lament.
“Well,” she says, snacking on her last piece of cheese. “With dominoes, soon enough they’ll stop falling, and you can pick them all back up again.”
Some days, perpetually optimistic Larissa is just who I need.
Once I drive home, late at night, I fall back into the same routine. Like somehow it knew I would be back, and it didn’t let me forget.
I go up the elevator alone and walk into my apartment. I take a shower, slip into pajamas, and bring my case to the table, working quietly.
T barges into my apartment without knocking shortly after, the usual.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
“Working,” I state from behind my laptop, not looking up at her. I’m sure I know why she’s here.
“Gavin said you bailed on Logan.” There it is.
“I swear to God, the way news travels around all of you.” I huff in annoyance.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The question, probably meant with good intention, feels like a punch to my very injured heart.
“What everybody always expects me to do.”
“What does that even mean?” She throws her hands up like she’s tired of my shit, too.
I slam the laptop shut and stand up to walk to her. “It means that I should have known better than to make any plans or try to change any trajectory of my life. My whole life has been consumed by guilt, dictated by guilt. It’s always been about the next person I need to appease.”
“You don’t need to appease anybody.”
“Of course I fucking do,” I retort. “Were we not at the same dinner? Did you not listen to the shit I got?”
She just rolls her eyes like that dinner was so minuscule, such an unimportant thing. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t even know! I have no idea what I want to do. Everything has always been about what other people wanted for me.”
“You wanted to dance, didn’t you? You made that plan by yourself; you went in there alone.”
“Did I? Or was I influenced by those shoes? Those fucking shoes.” The words spill out of me in a bitter tone, and I hate it. “Shit. You don’t even know what that guilt feels like.”
“I don’t? Really?” She rears back like she’s been hurt, and her voice gets louder. “That’s a hell of a thing to say. I know guilt, too. I’ve seen guilt and I’ve lived it, and you know what I did? I took the other fucking turn. I didn’t let that dictate my life. I chose to live my life. This was your choice.”
“No, it wasn’t.” I shake my head, my eyes starting to burn from the tears I’m fighting against.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to need to stop playing the victim and start taking responsibility for your actions. It is all a choice.” Her words are delivered with bitterness, too, loud and raw, but she means it.
“You don’t understand.” I might be pleading, my voice rising in volume to match hers, but who knows for what.
“Don’t fucking condescend me, Julie. Talk like that to your work peers if you want to, but don’t you dare fucking say that to me. I’m in this family, too. I’ve lived this life, too. We have seen all these problems firsthand and together. We just chose different ways to handle them. And I’m living. What the fuck are you doing?”
The knockout punch.
“You’re a bitch,” I spit out.
“No, Julie. I’m a realist.”
“You’re. A. Bitch!”
We’ve reached screaming levels.
“You know what the fuck you want, and you need to go out there and do it. Just do it . What the hell is stopping you? Don’t answer that because I already know. But do you know the answer? It’s you. It is you .” She points her finger straight at me, aiming for her shot, and hitting.
And then I cry. Loud, angry sobs that would feel cathartic if I wasn’t so pissed off.
She exhales sharply, falling onto the couch. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” I yell through tears, accusatory.
“Yes, I am. I’m sorry, Julie. I love you and I’m just so tired of watching you let life pass you by. I’m so tired of watching you make these stupid decisions that I know are making you miserable, but you’re willing to appease your family no matter what it takes. And for what? It’s not their life. It’s yours.”
I crash down on the couch next to her, drawing in my own ragged breath.
“I was so excited when I found out about all this shit you were doing,” T says. “When you went to the Alley Cat, when you came out after work. When I found out you were dancing, and you wanted to go to San Diego? I mean … Julie . You were fucking doing it just like she would have wanted.”
“You think so?” I ask, still crying.
“ Yes . Fuck.”
“Sorry, sorry.” I cross my arms in front of me, making myself smaller as the tears start to slow.
“You’re a shit liar and an unconfident lawyer,” she teases.
I can’t help but laugh, snot in my nose. “You’re an asshole.”
“I know.” She smiles. But she isn’t. And she knows that, too.
“I let him down.”
“You didn’t let him down, Julie. You let yourself down.”
And fuck, if she isn’t right.
“I just thought maybe it could be as easy as doing one thing every day that scares me,” I explain.
“Yes, but it sounds like you took on several days at once.”
I huff out a laugh. “Beginner’s mistake, I guess.”
“You’ll learn,” she says, with a smile.
And then I wrap my arms around her in a truce. “Love you, T.”
She hugs me back, squeezing. “I know.”
Later on, sometime after T leaves and I eat my feelings in the form of an Uncrustable, I grab the empty shoebox that I had stowed away in my closet. I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe I think about putting the shoes back, hiding them away so I don’t have to look at my failures. As I grab them, I find another pair of shoes in my closet. The ones I wore as I child when we moved here. White Mary Janes with worn soles and a now rusty buckle. My mother held onto them then gave them to me in a box of my baby things when I bought this place. I think about that confused little girl, that scared girl that was taken out of her comfort zone and brought to a new place. I think about how I loved those shoes and wore them out. About the parallels between those and the ones that were gifted to me. Both of them working as a means to a new life.
There must be some sort of symbolism here with all the shoes I’m hoarding.
I grab the empty shoebox, opening it out of habit, and I come face to face with the card she’d left with them. The simple, but direct instruction written on it: Para Julieta.
For me.
The paper is thick cardstock, heavy as I rub it between my fingers, feeling the indent of her handwriting on it. Except as I rub it between my fingers it moves, something that slips and slides. Because this isn’t just a piece of cardstock, I realize, but a card, folded over, that must have, in the years it sat in the closet under the shoes, gotten stuck closed. And when I peel it open, I come face to face with more of her writing: Te mereces la alegría del tango.
You deserve the joy of dancing.
And it takes everything in me to hold it together. But everything in me is not enough, and still, I fall apart.
There was one other time—one of the last times I saw her, one of the last shows she competed in. I was out of law school by then, working for another law firm, and I left early to go watch her compete. And at the end of it during an open dance, she’d invited me to dance with her. I celebrated her win, danced my heart out with her. The wild abandon I’d searched for buried deep within me and reaching for the light. Reaching for the music, for her hand. She taught me some moves, but I remembered some basics I’d picked up from watching her for so many years.
“No te olvides de esto, Julieta,” she was almost pleading. Don’t forget about this. “Tango will always be in your heart.”
She saw what I feared: that I loved this dance. That I wanted it to be a part of my life. That I worried about taking the wrong step, upsetting those who made this life possible for me.
How quickly I forgot all of it.
How quickly I continued to keep myself within comfortable parameters.
I gave up my joy for the comfort of others. I can’t do it anymore.