I woke up to my mom sitting on my bed.
“Geez,” I said, startling and propping myself up. “Creepy much?”
Mom smiled at me. She reached out and grabbed my hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I yawned. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while,” she admitted. “I’ve been thinking—”
I wrinkled my nose. “About how it’s complicated?”
She nodded. “And about how I need to explain my choices to you.” She let go of my hands for a moment and sighed. “The thing is, I wish I had some dramatic story to tell you.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You know. Something that would make my choices obvious to you. Explain everything.” She shook her head and stood up from the bed. She began to pace across the room. “But it isn’t like that. Over sixteen years ago, I made a choice. And it was a choice driven by grief and shame and fear. A whole lot of fear.” She briefly met my eyes. “And I’m not proud of that. And I think, well …” She paused.
“Mom?” I urged.
“I think one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to talk with you about this is because I was ashamed of how much of my decision was driven by fear. And I didn’t want you to grow up believing that was the best way to make decisions.”
I thought about how she had taught me to be so guarded and cautious. How she’d raised me to be suspicious of new people. “But you did,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I was tired of tiptoeing around the truth. I was so tired of it.
“I know,” she said, letting out another heavy sigh. She sat back down on the bed. “I was torn because I also didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I did. I never wanted you to trust the wrong people.”
“Do you think you were wrong to trust Julian?”
Mom gave me a small smile. “I don’t know.” Her face went blank like she was remembering something. “After all these years, I’m still not sure.”
Miami, 2000
In the days following the news of her mother’s death, Lena spent most of the time feeling like she couldn’t breathe. There was a physical ache in her throat. It was as if her lungs felt guilty for still working when she knew her mother would never inhale or exhale again.
“Let me go home with you,” Julian pleaded with her every night.
But she’d shake her head. She couldn’t go to the funeral. Not in the state she was in. She couldn’t face her family. Lying to them about her career and her studies over the phone was one thing; lying to their faces was completely different.
“You’re going to regret it if you don’t go,” Julian said to her as he held her, whispering into her hair.
“You don’t get to tell me how I’m going to feel,” she snapped, and pulled away from him.
But he was right. She did regret it. And she tried to nurse her regret by attending more of S.I.T.A.’s after-parties and social functions.
But the parties only made her feel worse. They amplified her feelings that an insurmountable gulf was growing between Julian and her. She, the grieving nobody whose artistic pursuits were going nowhere, and he, the rock star who was growing more popular and beloved by the day.
She hated that she resented his success. It made her dislike herself even more. She felt like she had disappointed her mother, and now, she felt as though she was disappointing Julian. She felt stuck in a cycle she couldn’t escape: her jealousy made her upset, and the more upset she got, the more jealous she became.
It didn’t help that at these parties she saw how many girls flirted with Julian. And how he flirted back. She was convinced he had cheated on her. Or if he hadn’t, that he was on the verge of it, which somehow seemed even worse, in the way that the anticipation of something awful is sometimes worse than the thing itself.
Whenever she’d raise her concerns to Julian, he would shrug her off. He’d get annoyed, offended. Downright self-righteous.
“Lena, I’ve tried to do everything for you. And it’s never enough,” he would say, and then would leave the room in a huff.
And that was the problem. Nothing was ever enough. And she wasn’t sure why.
At the last party she attended, she got there after Julian. She looked around for him and found him near the tiki bar, surrounded by girls. One of them, in a pink cocktail dress, was practically pawing at him.
She felt possessive. And then she hated herself for it. She made her way to the bar and ordered a drink. The bartender handed her something very tropical. Very Miami. She hardly ever drank, but she gulped it down in three sips.
“Whoa, there,” a guy she didn’t recognize said to her. “You’re Julian’s girl, right?”
She nodded tersely.
“I’m one of the new sound guys. Joel.” He stuck out his hand. She shook it reluctantly.
“Your boy’s a big star. He’s got lots of new friends,” Joel said. She could smell the alcohol on his breath.
She watched Julian put his arm around the girl in the pink cocktail dress. She was only a few feet from him, but he didn’t see her. That was the problem. She felt like he never saw her anymore. She felt invisible.
And she was tired of it.
She hadn’t crossed the Atlantic Ocean to feel invisible.
She thought about what her mother would think if she could see Lena now. And she knew her mother would be deeply disappointed, ashamed even.
That’s when Lena knew what she was going to do. She would leave.
She would reclaim her life. She would become a doctor like she had promised her mother all those years ago when she’d boarded the plane to America. Maybe not the type of doctor her mother had expected, but it would be something.
And something was better nothing.
II.
When Mom finished talking, she looked emotional. She wasn’t crying, but somehow that seemed worse. Like she was still holding all of it in. I thought about the sadness that oozed out of Julian’s songs and realized that it wasn’t only his sadness to own. It belonged to Mom too.
“So you left?”
“Yeah, HB, I left,” she said, her leg brushing against mine. I scooted over to give her more space and she wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “At the time, it seemed like the only thing to do. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.”
I wondered if Debra had been partially right. That a big part of love is learning to accept different versions of the person you love, but that it’s also important to love the version of yourself that the person you love brings out. That sometimes it’s possible to love someone fully, but still need to leave.
That seemed heartbreaking to me. And that’s how I knew it was true.
“It was the most difficult choice I’ve ever made,” Mom said. “Well, second most difficult.”
“Leaving Jordan was the most difficult?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t know about you when I initially left. But then a few weeks later I … well, I discovered I was pregnant.” She leaned into me, resting her head against my shoulder.