The girl is so excited, the joy on her face is so real, that I don’t regret what I’ve done. She shrieks and squeals and says oh my God she can’t believe it, she’s missed him so much, and then he tells her he’s gotta go.
“I love you,” he tells her, and she says, “You have no idea.” He hangs up and I refuse to meet his gaze.
I just shrug and say, “Only trying to help.” I imagine this was what he was thinking when he told Yuri about the play idea before I had decided to go all in on it. But he doesn’t seem mad.
“It’s fine, Sterling,” he says.
Then he puts his arm around me and I let him keep it there. I know it’s not going to go any further than that, this time. I thought he’d be livid after what I had just done, but he just seems tired. “Are you really ready for the show?” he asks.
And I just stand there, I can’t even think of an answer.
“Sure,” I tell him. “Sure I am.”
Then I see he’s still clutching that stupid poem, and I’m mad at him for writing it but also sorry for being so mad, so I snatch it out of his hands and walk away without even looking at him. He doesn’t say anything as I stumble out. All I hear is Mama laughing at me all the way out the door.
I was livid the summer Mama decided to invade me and my grandmother’s trip to Sevastopol, or rather, when she finally accepted my grandmother’s standing invitation to join us, because why the fuck not, she was starting chemo in a month, and it was her last summer on Earth, just a few months before I would catch her singing and bury her not long after that—though we didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Not only was Mama encroaching on my very sacred grandmother time, but I was also particularly mad at her then because she basically ended my latest relationship. My college dropout drummer-slash-poet boyfriend Jake, the non-cunt-punter, and I were making out in his car outside our house when Mama yanked open the door in her stupid bathrobe, looking beautiful and furious, and declared, “It’s past your curfew.” The comment scared him off for good, reminding him that I was still in high school, after all, adding poor Jake to the list of men Mama had gotten rid of as swiftly as she killed those poor sick animals of my childhood, clobbering them with a frying pan in the yard during the night while I watched from my bedroom window, too scared to say something because, what—I was afraid I was next?
Cut to two weeks later, when Mama and I got to my grandmother’s seaside cottage after the boy stopped returning my calls. There I was, alone and drummerless on the Black Sea, gritting my teeth around my mother, trying to enjoy myself around my grandmother, but mostly ignoring her too as a result, finding refuge with Ivan the bartender on the beach, a hairy bear of a man who barely spoke a lick of English, which was just fine for my purposes. I hated Mama for ruining Jake for me but was also freaking out about her impending procedure, wondering if that was what she thought about anytime she looked out at the ocean, but I was too afraid, or maybe just too self-absorbed, to ask her.
Most of the time that trip, she was laughing away at one thing or another with my grandmother, but one morning, my grandmother said she was taking a few hours to “meet a friend,” and went off on her own. Though I hated her for being disloyal to my grandfather, I knew there was nothing I could do about it; if hosting a dying woman didn’t stop her from running off to one of her men, then nothing would. Mama and I exchanged glances but did not say anything about it, and until then I didn’t realize that this wasn’t just a secret I had kept. My parents had long known about it too. And I was sad for my grandfather of course but happy that Baba was still able to chase after a bit of joy. Except this meant I was alone on the sea with Mama for basically a lifetime, hours and hours of just getting baked by the sun and saying almost nothing, until Mama stood up, as if summoned, to stare out at the water.
I watched her at the edges of the waves, just staring out with her long soon-to-be-gone wavy black hair falling on her pale back, like she was the last person on Earth. I followed her to the water, though I didn’t have anything to say. And she turned to me with a big smile, like she had been waiting for me to come to her, even if she had spent all morning beside me on a towel saying nothing.
“When you were a little girl, I was out of my mind with sadness,” she said. “It took me years to find work in America because I had such a hard time learning English. It was just full-blown depression, I see that now, but at the time, I just felt like my thoughts were the truth, that I needed to take myself out of the equation and that you and your father would be better off. Thank God we didn’t have guns lying around! That would have been the end of me….” she said, laughing a bit.
I could see how the general coldness I remembered from her when I was a kid was more like sadness, but the whole suicide angle was too much and I was both horrified and annoyed. Who wants to talk about almost-attempted suicide on vacation, let alone her own mother’s? I was still feeling pretty sorry for myself, after Jake dumped me, and having a mother with cancer and all, so this was just too much to take. I was glad, after a moment, when I saw that she was not waiting for me to say anything, that she was just thinking.
“Your grandmother saw how upset I was, more than your father, I think. Remember that first dump where we lived in America, that awful-smelling apartment next to the big dirty swimming pool? She would see how sad I was and would say, ‘Oh darling Valentina, why don’t you just go for a swim in the pool?’ Like that would solve anything! I never set foot in that dirty pool, it was beyond me, but your grandmother swam in it every day when she visited….”
I laughed a little bit. “I do remember that,” I said. “She had a big smile on her face the whole time, keeping her head above water.”
“Exactly,” Mama said. “And then, one summer, we took her to Wildwood, but I didn’t think she’d actually go in the dirty water, though she did. And you followed her! I trailed along and I watched you going into the water. You were maybe nine and a good swimmer, but I was still nervous as you walked farther and farther into the choppy waves. The sun was beating down on me, everyone was in a good mood. But there I was, thinking, no, I can’t kill myself, Natasha still needs me, I still have to look out for her, I can’t let her drown. But then you swam on just fine, right toward your grandmother, and I thought again, no, Natasha’s a big girl now, she can take care of herself, she doesn’t need her mother anymore after all…and, well, that fall, your grandmother knew someone who knew someone who got me my first part-time accountant job, and she basically saved my life. No, no, she did save my life, I see that now.”
I was standing there, tears streaming down my face, while the sun was shining down on us just like in the story, mad that I was feeling so much, that I never knew the depth of the pain I had caused her until that moment, wishing I could help. What was I supposed to say—what difference does it make that she saved your life if you’re just going to go and die anyway?
“The water’s pretty warm today,” I said pointlessly, but Mama looked at me directly now, the spell was broken. She was no longer reminiscing, and she was maybe even mad that she had let herself reveal so much, let her guard down instead of being tough, tough, tough.
“What happened to your drummer?” she said, a bit meanly even.
“You scared him away,” I said, swallowing down everything she had told me.
A thin smile crept along her face. “Good.”
“Why do you like seeing me get my heart broken?”