HAVEN
Once I had composed myself, I pushed off from the wall and walked to the table, where the box Wes brought with him sat. I glared at the offending item. Why he’d left it behind was beyond me. I didn’t want it. I wanted nothing to do with him.
I lunged for it and snatched it off the table, then stomped to the door, ready to take it to the dumpster behind our building. But the force of my movements sent the box flying to the floor as it slipped from my grip, sending the contents tumbling out and across the plank flooring.
I froze in my tracks, staring down at pages and pages of letters, my nine- year-old handwriting in the glittery purple gel pen ink sparkling back up at me.
My throat tightened, and my heart thumped against my ribs. I knelt down on the floor and gathered the pages, taking care to not bend or crinkle any of them.
With slow, precise movements, I stacked them together, putting them in order from the very first letter I’d sent him to the last, while also placing four letters written in his handwriting behind those. The last item on the floor was one of the few pictures I’d sent him—one of the glamour headshots Shirley had done for the auditions and the ballet competitions I was supposed to participate in that spring before my life went to shit.
It was wrinkled and faded, but otherwise recognizable. I had too much makeup on in it, making me look a little older than the nine years I was at the time. I laughed to myself, remembering Jack complaining that I looked way too grown up for his liking.
Another tear fell down my face, but I blinked back the rest, holding back the new torrent of emotions threatening to overtake me. I stood from the floor and walked to the living room, sitting on the plush couch, where I began my deliberate reread of my letters to Wesley.
With each letter, the ice in my veins melted, and I felt my lips beginning to smile. I laid each letter side by side as I finished them, creating a small timeline of one half of our story on the coffee table in front of me.
By the time I got to the final four letters, the ones written by Wesley, doubts were forming in my mind. Why would he keep all of these if he didn’t care?
But that question raised more questions, ones I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers to. I pressed on, picking up the four letters from Wesley and reading them.
I read through each of them once, and then again, and then again. My lip quivered as I set the last one down, the one where he’d asked me to call him, and for the third time that day, tears made their way to my eyes and down my face.
I buried my face in my hands, pressing my palms against my eyes to stem the water trying to escape. The four letters I’d just read collided with my memories and my convictions about who Wesley really was. Everything I thought I knew was jumbling around in my head, mixing together until I couldn’t tell up from down, right from left, or true from false.
I stood up abruptly and walked to my room to grab my phone from my bag on my bed. I pulled it out and unlocked it, then paused, staring at all the missed calls and ignored texts Wesley had sent me that morning.
I groaned. I wanted to run my hands through my hair. But I couldn’t because of the slicked back and tight bun I had in my hair from class that morning.
I paced in front of the foot of my bed. Back and forth, back and forth, the boxes of my pointe shoes creating a gentle tapping noise on the plank flooring of my bedroom. I didn’t want to. But I knew I had to.
I stopped dead center and dialed my mom’s phone number before I could change my mind.
Ring. I popped my left foot up to the side, pushing over the top of my pointe shoe to stretch out my arch.
Ring. I straightened my leg and brushed it out in a degagé, then closed it in front of my right foot into fifth position, my head tilted down to watch my legs and feet.
Ring. “This is stupid,” I muttered to myself, and I almost hung up, but the line clicked as my mom answered.
“Haven! Sweetie! Hi!” “Hi, Mom,” I murmured.
“How are you? How was rehearsal? Wait, no, it’s Saturday, no rehearsals, right?”
I gave her a wry chuckle. “Yes, it’s Saturday. But I still went to class this morning.”
“Isn’t it optional?” “Yes, but—“
“You should be resting! You’re going to wear yourself out, sweetie.” “That’s what Peter said too,” I told her with a roll of my eyes.
“Well, he’s your coach—“
“Director,” I corrected, rubbing my forehead.
“Whatever,” she said, and I pictured her waving me off like she always did. “My point is, he knows what he’s talking about. You should listen to him.”
“Right,” I whispered.
“So it’s decided? You’ll skip class next Saturday?”
I sighed up at the ceiling, holding the phone down against my neck as I prayed to no one for patience. “Sure, Mom,” I gritted out.
“Oh, good! I would hate to see you burn out or get injured when your career has barely started!”
I swallowed and nodded, even though she couldn’t see me.
“So, what else is new? Have you made any other friends besides your roommate? Kaya?”
“Maya.”
“Right, right,” she said.
“Um… no. Not really,” I admitted.
She made a huff of annoyance on the other end. “Well, Lennox stopped by the other day, and—“
“And I’m sure you told him I said to fuck off, right?”
“Haven Wainwright!” I heard my dad shout, and I winced, realizing I must be on speakerphone. “I know you broke up with him, but really, he is a nice young man, and—“
“Yes, yes,” I said, antsy to get past the issue of Lennox. “He was nice enough, but there was nothing special there,” I explained for the millionth time.
I would not explain to them how he wanted things I couldn’t give to him. Not without giving up my own dreams, my own plans for the future. I would not explain to them how he tried to control every aspect of my life when we were together. He was the son of a family friend, and I didn’t want to mess up that relationship for my parents.
“Well—“
“That’s all I’m saying about it!” I said in a firm voice. “Now, I…” I swallowed and pulled my cardigan around me tighter. “I wanted to ask you something,” I said in a timid voice. The voice I reverted to whenever I asked anyone for anything.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Dad asked.
“Do you remember the letter I gave you?” I asked slowly. “The one I asked you to send right after you first adopted me?”
“The one you wrote to that boy?” Mom replied. “Yeah.”
“What about it?”
“I was just wondering if you ever sent it?” I asked. “I told you I sent it, baby, remember?”
“Yeah, I just… I don’t know. Being in California just got me thinking about it and—“
“He would have written back if he really wanted to. We talked about this when it happened eleven years ago. He clearly wasn’t really your friend. You just thought he was since you’d never had a real one before.”
I swallowed at her words and bit back the retort on the tip of my tongue. “No, I know, I just…” I paused and peered out my bedroom door towards the letters on the coffee table. “Maybe they got lost?” I suggested.
“All twenty-something of them?” she replied. “I mean, sure, if it had just been one, I could understand that maybe it got lost. But you wrote to him so many times and never got a response. It couldn’t have gotten lost every time.”
The front door opened, and Maya stepped in, holding two large, reusable grocery bags. She looked around the apartment in caution before closing the door.
“Wes?” she mouthed, and I shook my head at her.
“Like I told you then, Haven, I sent it. I sent all of them. He just didn’t care enough to write you back. Don’t you trust me?” my mom asked.
I inhaled and looked down at my feet. I could feel Maya’s eyes on me as she pulled the groceries out of the bags, so I closed the door to avoid her stare.
“Of course I do,” I mumbled, even though my stomach clenched at my words.
“Okay then,” she said. “Now, let’s just leave that awful, awful boy where he belongs—in the past.”
I nodded again. “Okay.”
“Was there anything else you needed?”
“No, that was it,” I whispered. “Bye, Mom.”
“Bye, Haven!” My dad echoed her farewell, and then the line went dead.
I tossed my phone back on the bed. Torn. I felt so… torn. I didn’t know who to believe. Why would he lie to me about not receiving my letter? He’d always been honest with me. Even in his first letter, he was overly honest.
But why would my parents lie about sending it? What would they have gained from cutting me off from my first and only friend?
“Wanna talk about it?” Maya called to me from the kitchen. “I bought wine?”
“It’s 11:00 a.m.,” I said through the door.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere!” she called back to me.
I shook my head with a laugh. “Just give me a minute,” I told her as I perched on the edge of my bed to take my shoes off.
I stretched and wiggled my toes once they were free and sighed at the sensation of no longer having them constricted by the stiff box. I reached for the hole in the sole of my tights to roll them up over my ankles, but then Maya said, “You better not uncover those stinky ballerina feet!”
“I’ll put socks on!”
“It doesn’t help! Wash them or something!”
I groaned and went into the bathroom, quickly washing my feet to appease my roommate and her weirdly sensitive sniffer.
“What’s with the letters?” Maya asked as I joined her in the kitchen, and she handed me a glass of rosé.
“How is this already chilled?” I asked her as I pressed my nose into the glass to sniff it like she taught me.
“Oh, that one was already in the wine cooler. I had forgotten it was there.” I nodded and took a sip.
“You’re avoiding my question,” she chastised.
“They’re mine,” I told her. “Or, I guess, technically, they’re Wesley’s.”
“Yeah, ’cause that’s not confusing,” she said with raised eyebrows.
I maneuvered around the counter, grabbed one of them, and handed it to her to read.
She skimmed it at first, and her eyes went wide, and she went back to the top and read it again.
“You wrote this?” She held it up to show me the front as she spoke. “You wrote all of those to Wesley?” I nodded. “And he wrote you back? When you were kids?”
“For a few months, yeah. I was nine, and he was twelve.” “Thats-I-wow.”
“Yep.”
She leaned back into the corner of the counter and looked at the letter again. “So why’d you guys stop?”
I leaned my elbows onto the counter and set my wine glass down. “That’s the problem,” I told her. “I-I always thought…” I bit my lip and shook my head. “But now I don’t know what to think.”
“As much as I would LOVE to say I understand, that entire sentence was rather cryptic, so I’m going to need you to start from the beginning,” Maya said as she topped off her glass of wine.
I sighed. “After I was adopted, I gave my parents a letter, and they said they would mail it to him so he would have my new address. He never wrote me back. But he claims he never got the letter.”
“And you spent all these years hating him because you thought he did it on purpose, and now you don’t know what to believe?”
I met her eyes and nodded. “My mom says she sent it.” I shrugged. “Says she sent all of them.”
“Maybe she forgot? Or maybe they got lost in the abyss of the USPS?” Maya suggested.
“It’s possible,” I said. “You don’t think so?”
I hesitated, unsure how much to reveal to her. We were friendly. But we weren’t close. Not for lack of trying on her part. But I just never let anyone in. Not really.
But this was supposed to be my fresh start. My new beginning. And I couldn’t accomplish that if I didn’t try.
“My relationship with my adoptive parents has never been great,” I confessed.
Her eyes softened, and she leaned forward to grab my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
And somehow, I knew she meant it.
“They didn’t even want me to come here,” I continued. “They wanted me to keep my corps position in the company in Salt Lake so I’d be closer to home. They’ve never understood the ballet world, or even tried to beyond the bare minimum, so they didn’t get that being a soloist here in a small company was better than being stuck in the corps forever in a big-name company.” Maya nodded as she listened to me. “I finally had to remind them I’m an adult, and it didn’t matter if they approved of this choice or not. It was mine to make. Then they tried to pull the whole ‘well we won’t help you move’ bullshit, which didn’t matter because Peter had already told me the company would cover all my expenses.”
“Damn, I didn’t realize they’d wanted you that badly!” Maya exclaimed. “Get it, girl!” She lifted her hand for a fist bump, and I rolled my eyes but returned the gesture.
“Here’s my two cents,” Maya said, turning serious again. “I don’t know your parents. So I can’t speak to whether or not your mom is lying to you. However,” she continued. “I do know Wesley. Not well, mind you, but he’s the son of our mayor, and Levi is friends with his brother. And while Wesley Stone may be many things—cocky, arrogant, and a lovable asshole among them—he is most definitely not a liar.”
With that, she downed the rest of her wine, set the glass in the sink, and walked to her bedroom, leaving me alone with my swirling and conflicting thoughts.
