UNHAPPY PLACE
AN HOUR OUTSIDE INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
A QUIET BI-LEVEL at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. A place where everything is familiar but nothing belongs to me. Trees standing too still in the stiff humidity. Mosquitoes buzzing, moths gathering around the streetlights, the screech of cicadas emanating from the woods.
I managed to put this off for a long time, but I couldn’t anymore. It meant too much to him.
At the doorstep, I ask, “What if we leave? We can pretend our flight got delayed.”
“Delayed for what?” Wyn says. “It’s June.”
“Too sunny,” I say. “The pilots couldn’t see with all that light.”
He cradles my face in his hands, his brow knitting. “I’m great with parents, Harriet. Talking to old people is one of my very few God-given skills.”
I’m too anxious to call out the self-deprecation. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
His fingers thread into my hair. “If you want to run, we can run. But I’m not scared.”
“I’m making them seem terrible,” I whisper, “and they’re not. I don’t know why I get so anxious just being here.”
His mouth nestles into my temple. “I’m here too. I’ve got you.”
The words dissolve into my skin, fast-acting relief. “Just . . . please still like me after this.”
He draws back, looks down the plane of his face at me. “Are you planning to stab me or something?”
“Only if there’s no better way to put you out of your misery.”
“Harriet.” His mouth moves to the peak of one of my eyebrows and then to the other. “If it was possible to stop loving you, I would’ve managed it in that first year of desperately trying to. I’m here. For good.”
“Well, if I’d known you needed help getting over me, I would’ve brought you to Indiana much sooner.”
Holding my gaze, he reaches one hand over my shoulder and rings the doorbell.
My parents answer the door looking like a tired Norman Rockwell painting. Mom’s wearing an apron, and Dad’s got a David Baldacci book in hand, an immediate confirmation that they were in separate rooms until three seconds ago.
They take turns stiffly shaking Wyn’s hand, and despite having braced myself for an awkward reception, I’m still embarrassed by the stark contrast between a weekend with the Connors and a Kilpatrick family welcome.
After several seconds in the doorway, I ask, “Did Eloise make it?” “In the kitchen,” Mom says, our cue to go inside.
In the dining room, Eloise shakes Wyn’s hand from so far away they both have to lean forward to make it work, and then we all sit right down to eat. There’s a lot of fork and knife action, unpleasant scratches and squeaks against the plates. I imagine Wyn is wondering whether this is actually a group of strangers I hired over the internet to pose as a family.
But somehow he’s convincingly enthusiastic about everything: the sweet-tart-flavored Ohio Riesling, the very tame stroganoff, and even the conversation.
He tells my family how he and I met, as if they asked, and about our favorite park back in the city. He talks about how much we’ve missed Cleo since we last visited her up near her new farming job north of Montreal.
I probably did tell them about Cleo’s international farming adventure at some point, but they’ve never met my friends, so I doubt they remember who Cleo is. Still, they nod along.
“And you’re a cosmetologist, right?” Wyn asks Eloise, who stares at him for a second like she’s trying to remember who he is and how either of them got here.
“That’s right.”
“Well, she’s in cosmetology school,” Mom says. Eloise picks her fork up and goes back to eating.
“She’s really good,” I say. “When I was in high school, she always did my makeup for dances.” Those were some of the few sisterly moments to pass between us. We’d barely speak, but they were nice memories all the same, having her tip my chin back and forth as she dusted bronzer on my cheeks and taught me how to use shadow to make my small almond eyes pop.
It was the only time I ever really felt like I had a sister.
“This girl was smart as they come,” Dad says, jerking his noodle-laced fork in Eloise’s direction. “Even skipped the third grade. Wanted to be an astronaut, same as I did when I was a kid. But she fell in with the wrong crowd in high school.”
Eloise doesn’t even roll her eyes. She is perfectly unflappable as she drags her steak knife through her stroganoff and stuffs another bite in her mouth. My hairline is sweating.
“I was never good at school,” Wyn says. “And I can’t blame the crowd, because there were like forty people in my grade.”
“But you got into Mattingly,” Mom says. “You’re clearly very intelligent.”
“He is,” I say, right as he says, “I was a student athlete.” “Well, to get into medical school, anyway,” Dad says.
I full-body wince, but Wyn squeezes my knee reassuringly. “I’m actually not a med student,” he says.
“He’s in law school, Phil,” Mom says, irritable.
“That’s Sabrina and Parth,” I say. “Wyn works at the bookstore and does furniture repair.” You know, I think, the one I’m engaged to. But I think it with a smile that hopefully says, No big deal that you don’t remember the slightest thing about the love of my life.
“Oh.” Mom tries to smile pleasantly. She and my dad exchange the briefest of looks, allies for a second.
“Have you thought about the wedding at all?” Eloise asks.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s way too early for that,” Mom says. “Harriet’s still got a couple of years of medical school. And then she’ll have to do a long residency.”
Anxiety gurgles through my gut. “We’re figuring it out.”
Under the table, Wyn’s hand finds mine, and he laces our fingers together. He drags the pad of his thumb over the callus where I burnt my index finger with Sabrina and Cleo on our first trip to the cottage. I got you. “We’re not in a rush,” Wyn says. “I don’t want to do anything that gets
in the way of Harriet’s career.”
It’s the perfect answer for my parents. My chest relaxes at my mom’s pleased smile. Eloise downs her glass of wine and sets her napkin on the table. “I should get going,” she says. “I’ve got work early in the morning.”
“Who gets their makeup done early in the morning?” Mom asks, like it’s an entirely innocent question and not a thinly veiled expression of two decades’ worth of disappointment.
“Brides.” Eloise pulls her denim jacket off the back of her chair. “Like Harriet.”
Mom starts to stand. “At least let me put some leftovers together for you.”
Eloise holds her off, insists she’s too busy the next couple of days and won’t get around to eating them, and Mom sags a little but relents. After quick waves and nice to meet yous, Eloise sees herself out.
“More wine?” Mom says.
We have another glass, sitting around the cleared table. Some of the awkwardness and tension fades as we sip, largely because Wyn brings up the research position I’ve scored for the summer, how proud he is of me.
“You know,” Dad says, “we never had to worry about Harriet. Never even had a rebellious phase.”
“Never got a detention,” Mom says, “had perfect grades, got plenty of scholarships. No matter how stressful anything else was, we always knew Harriet was fine.”
Wyn gives me a look I can’t read, a tenderness around his mouth but concern in his brow.
He’s good at getting them talking about themselves too: Mom talks about her receptionist job at the dentist’s office—“Of course it’s not brain surgery,” she says brightly, “but it’s fast-paced work, and it keeps me busy; I don’t do well with boredom”—and Dad tells Wyn about teaching eighth- grade science.
“It wasn’t the plan,” Dad says, “but it’s all been worth it. Our girl Harriet is going to change the world.”
It makes me beam. It makes me ache.
It’s this feeling like the universe is compacting around me, while something in my rib cage is expanding. I’m the culmination of their lost dreams, their missed other lives, and at the same time, they’re proud of me.
Before they shuffle to bed at nine forty-five—the same time they’ve gone to sleep my entire life—I follow my mom into the kitchen to finish the dishes.
“So,” I say. “What do you think?” “About what?” she says.
“About Wyn,” I say.
“He’s a very nice young man,” she says.
I wait for her to go on. For a minute, we’re both drying plates and putting them away. Finally she faces me and smiles wanly. “Just don’t rush anything. You’ve got your whole life, your career, ahead of you. And you know, feelings come and go. Your career won’t. That’s something you can rely on.”
I make myself smile. “But you like him?”
She sighs and sets the hand towel aside, facing me with a creased brow. “He’s sweet, honey,” she says in a low voice, eyes darting toward the
doorway, “but frankly, I don’t see it.” My heart jitters. “See what?”
“Him making you happy,” she says. “You making him happy.” “I am happy,” I say.
“Now.” She nods, glances toward the dining room again. “But that’s the kind of boy who’s going to want to move home and start having kids. He’s going to want someone who’s at home, who has a life that matches his. I pictured you with someone who had a bit more going on, who wouldn’t expect more from you than you were able to give.”
I blink against the stinging sensation in my eyes, the whole front of my face.
She softens a little. “Maybe I’m wrong.” She picks up the towel and goes back to drying dishes. “It’s our first time meeting him. Just be careful, Harriet.” She hands me another dish, and I robotically towel it off.
Inside, I feel like I’m a log she’s split with one swift swing of an ax.
I miss Wyn from the other room. I miss our apartment with its hissing radiator and its friendly book-moving ghost. I miss sitting on the rocks in Maine, shivering in the cold with Cleo’s arms wrapped around me, both of us bundled up in old Mattingly sweatshirts while Parth and Sabrina argue over the best way to make a s’more.
Perfectly golden, according to Parth. Utterly burnt, if you ask Sabrina.
The four of us say good night in the living room, and then, when they close their bedroom door and it’s just Wyn and me, I slump against his chest, and he holds me for a long time, kissing my head, rocking me back and forth.
“I missed you,” I tell him.
He cups my face. “From the kitchen?” I nod in his hands.
“Me too.”
“I want to go home,” I say.
His arms tighten across my back. “We will,” he says. “You and me. In two days. But first I want to see everything.”
“My boobs?” I joke.
“Those too,” he says. “But I was thinking more like your boy band posters and embarrassing diaries.”
“Joke’s on you,” I say. “The periodic table was my boy band poster.” He groans. “God, you’re such a nerd.”
I lace my fingers against the back of his preternaturally warm neck. “But you still like me?”
“You,” he says, “are my periodic table.”
I laugh into his chest. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means when we get home,” he says, “I’m covering our walls in lewd posters of you.”
“It’s always fun to have a home improvement project.”
Circling the first floor, examining the minutiae of my home with him, is a fun-house version of our trip to Montana. Instead of a fridge crammed with out-of-date holiday cards and time-yellowed crayon drawings, there’s a smooth stainless steel surface with a whiteboard mounted to it, a grocery list tidily written in Mom’s handwriting. “Yogurt,” Wyn reads, tapping the list. “Fascinating.”
“Well, you didn’t think all of this,” I say, gesturing toward myself, “could come from a home without yogurt.”
He kisses the back of my hand. “I still have no idea where this came from.”
He tugs me back into the lamplit living room. Instead of washed-out pictures in macaroni frames of me and Eloise in homemade Halloween costumes, like I’d seen of Wyn, Michael, and Lou, my degree sits in a frame, off to one side rather than centered. There was already an empty frame on the other side, waiting for my medical degree. They’d bought it as soon as I called them to tell them I got into Columbia.
“Where are the baby pictures?” Wyn asks.
“There’s a box of albums in the basement,” I tell him.
“Can we get them out?” he wants to know. So we go down and click on the overhead bulb, dig around until we find the right box, and carry a couple of albums back to my room.
My parents’ story has never been much more than a corkboard of haphazard mental snapshots, and the photo album does little to fill in the gaps. There are a smattering of photographs to capture their whirlwind courtship in college, and a couple over the course of Mom’s surprise pregnancy. Five pages’ worth of pictures to capture the shotgun wedding, where Mom’s belly was straining at her dress’s seams, and a few more covering Eloise’s infancy. My parents look tired but happy. In love. If not with each other, then at least with Eloise.
But then the pictures get more sporadic—a couple of birthdays and Christmases, a trip with my aunt and her first husband—and my parents’ tiredness has transformed.
Not staying-up-all-night-with-a-crying-baby exhausted, but bored- beyond-belief-chafing-at-their-new-roles fatigued. You can practically see their deferred dreams reflected back in their eyes.
There’s a fairly large gap in time where there are no pictures at all, and then I’m born. And my parents do look happy again, in love again, cradling my wrinkly little baby body in my much-too-large pink onesie. Maybe not quite as overjoyed as the first time around. In six years, Mom’s transformed from a cherub-cheeked near teenager to a full-fledged and stern-jawed adult. Dad’s gained some weight, along with a vague terseness in the corners of his mouth. Even when he’s holding me on his hip at the zoo, Eloise dangling from his other hand, smiling in front of the giraffes, he looks distracted.
Not miserable. Just like it’s not enough. Like he and Mom both know there are other universes where they’re more, bigger, happier.
As we flip forward through pages and times, Eloise becomes increasingly sulky, always standing a ways off, whereas I start to smile like my life depends on how visible my teeth are.
Wyn pauses on a picture of me with my first-place science fair trophy, grinning despite my missing front tooth. “My little genius.” He touches the edge of the picture. “I hope our kids have your hair.”
Kids, I think. It knocks the wind out of me. The way he says it—so easily, so lovingly. That familiar homesickness, that longing, roars awake.
But what my mom said sneaks in too, a quiet whisper at the fringes of my mind.
“What if I’m bad at it?” I ask. “Being a parent.”
He sweeps my hair back from my neck. “You won’t be.” “You don’t know that,” I say.
“I do,” he says.
“How?” I say.
“Because you’re good at loving,” he says. “And that’s all you have to do.”
My throat tightens. My eyes burn.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I always felt like I was balanced on the edge of something. Like everything was so . . . tenuous, and it could all crumble at any second.”
“What could?” he asks softly.
“Everything,” I say. “My family.”
His hand runs down my spine, turning soothing circles at the curve at its base.
“There was never enough money,” I say. “And my parents were always exhausted from their jobs. I mean, tonight was the most positive I’ve ever heard them be about their work. And then when Eloise got older, they’d get into these huge fights with her, and they’d tell her she had no idea what they’d sacrificed for her, and how she was throwing it all away. And then she’d storm out, and they’d go to separate rooms, and I would be so sure that was it. That Eloise wouldn’t come back. Or my parents would split up. I was always waiting for something terrible to happen.”
Wyn’s fingers graze back up my spine, settling at the base of my neck. He listens, waits, and like it always has, his presence pulls the truth out of me. Like whispering secrets into a box and shutting it tight, I used to think.
“I used to make these bargains with the universe,” I say, smiling a little at the ridiculousness of it. “Like if I got straight As, then everything would be okay. Or if I won the science fair a second time. Or if I was never late to school, or if I always did the dishes before Mom got home from work, or I
got her the perfect birthday gift, or whatever. And I know my parents love me. I’ve always known that,” I say tightly. “But the truth is . . .”
Wyn squeezes the back of my neck: I’ve got you.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make it up to them.”
Wyn tucks a curl behind my ear, ever patient and calm, warm and safe. “That we cost them so much,” I go on. “That they didn’t get the lives
they wanted, because of us. But if I could be good enough . . .”
“Harriet,” he says, crushing me in against his chest, tightening his arms against me, a human barricade. “No.”
His voice takes on a throatiness. “Sometimes when things go wrong, it’s easy to blame someone else. Because it simplifies things. It takes any responsibility out of your hands. And I don’t know if your parents did that to you and your sister or if somewhere along the way you took that blame on yourself, but it’s not your fault. None of it. Your parents made their decisions, and I’m not saying their situation was easy, or that they didn’t do the best they could. But it wasn’t enough, Harriet. If you could even think that, if you could ever even fucking wonder if they regretted you, then they didn’t do enough.”
But he doesn’t understand. They’ve done everything. Shelled out for tutors, paid the fees for every club I signed up for, chauffeured me back and forth, helped me study when they were dead tired from work, cosigned my med school loans.
My parents aren’t people of words, but they sacrificed so much. That’s love, and I hate that I want more from them. That I can’t just feel grateful for all they’ve given me, because at all times I’m aware of what it cost them.
“You,” Wyn says roughly, “are the very best thing that’s ever happened to me. And they were lucky to have you as their kid. Even if you hadn’t bent over backward to make them proud, they still would have been lucky, because you’re smart and you’re funny and you care about the people around you, and you make everything better, okay?”
When I don’t answer, he says again, “Okay?”
“How can love end up like that?” I ask thickly. “How is it possible to love someone so much and have it all just go away?”
The thought of resenting Wyn like that is torture. The thought of him resenting me is even worse. Of holding him back, keeping him from what he wants.
“Maybe it never goes all the way away,” he says. “Maybe it feels easier to ignore it, or turn it into a different feeling, but it’s still there. Deep down.”
He takes my face in his hands and kisses my tears as they break. “Do you want me to promise I’ll love you forever, Harriet?” he whispers. “Because I will.”
An ice-cold rush of adrenaline, a spurt of terror, a whole-body bracing, every muscle drawing tight to keep the words from sinking into my heart.
Because it won’t matter.
Because he can promise me anything, but in the end, feelings could come and go, and we’ll be powerless to stop the change.
“Just promise,” I say, “we’ll end things before we ever let them get like that.”
Hurt flashes across his face. I want to take it back, but I don’t.
This is all I can give him, all I can give myself: some tiny measure of protection.
The only way I can bear loving anyone this much is knowing it will never turn to poison. Knowing we’ll give each other up before we can destroy each other.
“If we’re making each other unhappy,” I say as evenly as I can, “we can’t keep going. I couldn’t stand living every day knowing you resent me.”
“I won’t,” he says softly. “I couldn’t.”
“Please, Wyn.” I touch the muscles along his jaw. “I need to know we’re never going to hurt each other like this.”
His eyes travel back and forth across my face. “I’m not going to stop fighting for you, Harriet.”
My vision blurs behind tears. He pulls me in, holds me tight. “I’m not going to stop loving you.”
It’s not the answer I asked for. It’s the one I desperately want.
Years later, when it’s late and I can’t sleep for the phantom ache in my chest, I pull this memory out and turn it over. I think, We did the right thing. We let each other go. That too is a kind of comfort.
