Back To Us (21 page)

“About?”

Justin shook his head. “It’s nothing important.”

I didn’t press him to tell me what was on his mind. Instead I looked up at him and smiled and said,” I love you.”

“I love you too, Jess. I love you, forever.”

In school I’d learned about the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang. It was the first time I’d been able to put a name to the way my life seemed to work. For every high, every happy moment I had, there seemed to be an equally painful and low moment that lurked around the corner and waited for me to let my guard down.

On Sunday afternoon when I turned the key to unlock the door to my apartment and heard music blasting from my brother’s room it didn’t occur to me that my low was getting itself ready. Even the smell of marijuana wafting into my bedroom from my brother’s didn’t clue me in. Normally I would have ignored both, but the music was just a bit
too
loud even for me. There was no point in knocking on Mike’s door, he wouldn’t have heard me. I pushed his door open. He was sitting on his bed, back against the wall, knees bent smoking a joint and bopping his head to the beat of the music he was listening to.

I walked over to the speakers and turned down the volume. “What is going on with you? Are you trying to wake the dead?” I was surprised the neighbors hadn’t called the police already.

I knew my brother liked to smoke, and that he liked his music loud, but something about the expression on his face told me there was more going on. I prayed it didn’t have to do with Mel, because that would be bad, real bad.

“Same old shit.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He looked at me square in the face. “It means I’m a stupid piece of shit.”

“Oh come on, Mike. You are not.”

“Yeah, I am. If you don’t believe me, just ask your parents.” He held up a letter that was in his hands. “It’s all right here.”

“What is that?” I asked almost afraid of the answer.

“It’s a letter from your dad.” By the way he was calling our parents ‘your parents’ and our father ‘your dad’ I knew whatever was written on that letter was something I wouldn’t like. It was something Mike and I had been doing for years, referring to our parents as yours instead of ours, like neither one of us wanted to claim ownership for either of them. I knew reading the letter Mike held wasn’t a good idea, but curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed it out of his hands.

“Why is he writing now anyway?”

“Like I said, I’m an idiot.” I stared at my brother, waiting for the real answer. He took another puff from his joint before replying. “I emailed him. I thought he might be interested to know that I’m getting married soon. I even asked if he thought him and Ma could make it for the wedding. Mel really wanted me to try, and so I did, for her. . .and a little bit for me, too.”

“What did he say?”

“You have the letter, read it.”

The paper was a bit crumpled. I smoothed it out and looked down at my father’s familiar handwriting, and with my heart thumping in my chest, I began to read.

I would like to say it was a pleasure to hear from you and to congratulate you on your upcoming wedding, but I can do neither. For days after receiving your email I asked myself why you bothered to let me into your life again now, and inform me of your news, and then the answer came to me. A wedding needs to be paid for by someone, and why not your parents who you have always viewed as simple and foolish immigrants? Your mother and I struggled for years to do our best to raise you and your sister and provide you with things we never even dreamed of when we were children. What did we get in return, you ask? The answer is nothing. When your mother and I left Croatia we were in search of the American dream, what we wound up with was a nightmare. Insolent, spoiled children who care little for their family is what we ended up with. You think because you are getting married I should be proud of you. Well, I am not. Marriage is a commitment, something you will certainly fail at as you have failed at everything else. I will not be a part of a celebration for a marriage that will go nowhere.

As I told you before your mother and I returned to Croatia, you and Jessica are my biggest disappointments in life. We have no son and no daughter. You are dead to us, and I am formally closing all forms of communication between us. My email address will have changed by the time you receive this letter. My only hope is that one day when you have children of your own they will give you what you have given me and your mother. Unfortunately, I will not be around to see that wish come true.

Regards

“What the fuck is this?” I asked after I finished reading my father’s words. Without question I knew they were his. He was always exceptionally good at turning words into weapons even though English wasn’t his native language. “You invited him to your wedding? Are you crazy?” My brother was supposed to be smarter than me. How had he expected anything less from our father?

Mike snatched the letter out of my hands. “Great, now my sister thinks I’m a piece of shit, too.”

“I do not. You know I love you. But if I wrote a letter to Mom and Dad and got this back you would have told me I was an idiot for expecting anything less.”

“I know, I know. I don’t know why I let Mel convince me to reach out to them. She just doesn’t get it. No one does. No one understands how a mother and a father can just decide they want nothing to do with their own children.”

He was right. No one got it. When I lived in the group home people assumed I was there because my parents were drug addicts or alcoholics or something like that. But they weren’t, my father was plain crazy, and he and my mother just didn’t love me and Mike enough. I sank onto my brother’s bed. “Don’t let him do this to you, Mike. A wedding is supposed to be good and happy. Don’t let Dad take that from you. You know he’s messed up in the head.”

“Yeah, I do know that. But what I don’t know is why it hurts so much.”

That was a question I wished I had an answer for, because it wasn’t just Mike hurting. It felt like someone was inside my chest piercing my heart with sharp pieces of glass. My father’s words were bad enough, but seeing what they were doing to Mike really got to me.

For all the times my parents had hurt me and let me down I should’ve built a strong enough wall around my heart so nothing they said or did could ever get to me, but a wall like that probably didn’t exist. I still remembered like it was yesterday waiting in the courthouse for the family judge to decide on visitation. I’d been living in the group home for a few months and even though I was relieved to be away from my father and thankful that I didn’t have to be scared anymore, it hurt that my parents never showed up. They weren’t interested in being parents any longer. They’d convinced themselves I was a strung-out teen who was beyond redemption, even though that wasn’t even close to being true. I wasn’t a perfect child, but I certainly wasn’t the devil child my parents made me out to be. A few weeks later I found out my parents had left the country for good. They’d left me and Mike behind without even saying good-bye.

The open bottle of wine on my brother’s nightstand called to me. Without even asking for permission I reached for it with a shaky hand and took a few swallows. I was not going to cry. The more I drank, the madder I got. It had been years since I’d had contact with my parents. The last time we talked I’d hoped for an apology from them for how badly they’d hurt me, but that apology never came. They didn’t see things the way Mike and I did. To them we were ungrateful spoiled children who defied their parents and showed them no respect. They saw themselves as immigrants who worked themselves to the bone for children who turned out to be failures and disappointments. I couldn’t understand how they’d arrived at that version of events. Mike was at the top of his class when he graduated high school, and while I wasn’t as smart as Mike, I made good grades in school. Mike didn’t experiment with drugs until after my parents decided to leave us behind, and I never had. Sure, sometimes I drank too much, but even that I didn’t do very often.

“Promise me you’re not going to be writing them any more letters. You know nothing good can come of it,” I said, after drinking enough that the hurt was pushed away by the murky feeling that came with too much alcohol.

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to. Remember what the letter said. ‘I am closing all forms of communication’.” My brother’s attempt at imitating my father’s Croatian accent had me laughing so hard tears started streaming down my face.

“You’re such a loser.”

“Yeah, well you’re a whore.”

“And you are not a man, you are just a little boy.”

Mike and I hurled insults at each other. The same ones my father did when we were growing up. Somehow turning the hurt into jokes made things better, but that was a lot easier to do when I was goofy from half a bottle of wine. 

The next morning I woke up with a splitting headache. It would have bothered me more, but the heavy feeling in my heart distracted me from the throbbing in my head. It took me a minute to remember what was eating at me, and then the memory of reading my brother’s letter the day before returned to me. I tried to brush it off as I dressed. I had a class to get to by ten and I didn’t need to be distracted by thinking about my father of all people. 

My brother had already left for work. There was a note taped to the door of the fridge.

Thanks for making me feel better yesterday J. See you later. Mel’s coming over.

I smiled at the thought of a visit from Mel. It felt like forever since I’d seen her. I was almost ready to leave for class when there was a knock on the door. Normally, I wouldn’t have answered it. Our next door neighbor had three loser sons who mixed up our door for their dad’s all the time. But for some reason I decided to see who it was. I unlocked the door, but left the chain in before opening it. There, standing in the hallway, was Justin’s mother. I closed the door to release the chain before opening it again.

“Is Justin okay?” I asked, sure that the only reason she would show up at my door was because something had happened to him. Something bad, because otherwise he would have called me.

“Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

I stepped away from the door. “Of course.”

Mrs. Lambert eyed my apartment with poorly hidden disgust.

“How did you know where I live?” I didn’t like that she’d just shown up on my front door. The last thing I’d wanted was for her to see my apartment. She probably knew all along that I was a poor college student, but seeing where I lived with her own eyes was confirmation.

“I needed to speak with you alone, so I made it my business to find your address,” Mrs. Lambert replied, simply.

I walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. “Do you want to sit?”

“No that’s all right. What I came to say shouldn’t take very long.” Her tone was sharp and I knew whatever was coming I wasn’t going to like. “Let’s get back to your original question about Justin.”

“What question?”

“You asked if Justin was all right—well the answer is no. Justin is not all right. He is not all right at all.”

If something was wrong with him, why hadn’t he called me? “What happened?”

“What happened is that he thinks he’s in love, and he believes you are, too.”

I stared at Justin’s mother like she had four heads. Who the hell was she to tell me whether or not I loved Justin? “I
do
love him,” I said, defensively. Suddenly, I was afraid of the direction our conversation was going to take. I’d been avoiding Justin’s mother hoping that it would never come to the type of confrontation she clearly wanted to have.

“You see him as a ticket to your way out of this.” Justin’s mother swept her hand through the air to indicate that she was talking about my shithole of an apartment. “And I’m here to tell you to stop stringing him along.”

“I am not stringing him along.” My voice rose. I took a deep breath to calm myself down before continuing. “Look, I know you think I’m only dating him because he has money, but I liked him long before I knew about any of it. He was working at the community center when we met, you know that.”

“The two of you are not going to work out, you must see that.”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

“Justin has special needs, needs I seriously doubt you are prepared to help him deal with.”

“And why not? I know about his legs, and I know about his PTSD, and I don’t care about either one of those things.”

“Jessica, you’re young and you’re pretty and having someone like Justin spoil you with fancy dinners and expensive presents might be fun right now, but what’s going to happen when you realize that being with Justin isn’t all fun all the time? What’s going to happen when he has a complication from his amputation and you have to wheel him around everywhere? What about when he wakes up at night screaming from one of his nightmares? You’re just some girl, you’re not his family, you don’t care for him the way his father and I do.”

“You don’t get to tell me what my feelings are.”

“Jessica. . .”

“No, wait, you listen to me.” I held my hand up and kept talking. “Want to know what I think? I think you keep Justin around as a trophy. You put him up on your mantle to show all your friends that your son is a hero who lost his legs fighting for our country. You want him around because of how it makes you feel, and you don’t even bother to take the time out to think about what Justin wants. You should be encouraging him to move out on his own and become independent, but instead you make him think that that’s not a possibility for him.”

“He needs his family,” she replied angrily “If you cared about him, then you would have insisted he celebrate his birthday with his family instead of pulling him away from us.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about. You knew we spent the weekend together and you just couldn’t stand it.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of Mrs. Lambert’s mouth. “He’s twenty-six, not six. What grown man do you know would rather hang out with his family on his birthday instead of his girlfriend?”

Mrs. Lambert looked like I’d just slapped her in her face. She was afraid of losing her son to me. I wondered if she’d feel that way if I had a Park Avenue address instead of a Brooklyn one. “You will never fit in with our family, Jessica. The sooner you realize that the better.”