Standing Still

Just enough

Luis knows I’m not in love with him, although he’s never asked. I can tell by the way he fits himself around the space where the question would go, always aware of the outline of it, the sharp edges that would catch and cut him if he got too close. Some days I wish he would put words to it, so we could build something on that truth or move on with our lives. Other times I’m thankful for the omission. Until the question is asked, until it’s answered, we can exist in the balance of just enough. Just enough companionship. Just enough affection. Just enough in common to make it through the long, lonely afternoons of youth’s end.

He’s nine years older than me, divorced, and father to a young son named Ant who calls me Ms. Seneca. Ant splits his time between his maternal grandmother’s house and Luis’s, a situation that no one seems to particularly like. I asked Luis about it once, and the only thing he said was, “The boy needs some kind of mother.”

The arrangement is unofficial. Ant goes where he goes based on everyone’s work schedules. It’s the sort of situation that Luis could easily use to his advantage, ghosting away under the pretense of longer shifts. He hasn’t, though. Ant comes over a few nights a week and takes up the corner of the living room with the spare bed. From his small backpack, an explosion of things pours forth. Notebooks, shoes, toys, clothes. Doritos crumbs, like a flaming comet tail across the tan sheets. Within five minutes he’s nested so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine the space without him there.

I don’t usually stay long on these nights because Ant makes me uncomfortable. His presence introduces an element of uncertainty about who is central and who is peripheral. It’s less complicated for all of us if I just find somewhere else to be.

Tourism

Luis drives a delivery van for a local mattress shop. All day long he carries mattresses in and out of houses. Up and down stairs, through doorways that are too small. Around cracked paving stones and angry dogs and overturned bicycles. He sees inside so many houses that the novelty is gone. It’s rare that anything shocks him. Dirt, filth, neurotic cleanliness. Women who see the color of his skin and clutch their cell phones until he’s gone. Men who bark commands as if he were a clumsy child, saying things like, “Carefully, carefully. Stop, stop, stop. You need to watch where you’re going, son.” As if he hadn’t wrestled hundreds of mattresses around people’s valuables in the last five years.

“What have you learned from it?” I asked him, the first time he talked about finding a different job.

“That poor people tip better than rich people,” he said. “And that most people own way too much shit.”

I work for an upscale neighborhood grocery store, one of those places where you can get homemade beeswax candles and organic bok choy along with your toilet paper and condoms. If Luis asked me what I’ve learned from it, I’d say: “That I’m afraid of the unidirectional nature of success.”

Not that exactly. Those words have come only after years of contemplation, and they sound pretentious even in my own head. What I’d really say is that I’m afraid to move on, afraid to get a professional job. I’m afraid the added responsibilities will weigh too heavily on me. That once I step onto that treadmill of professionalism, I won’t ever step off. I’ll jog along in place, pulled ever onward by the reward of retirement. I’ll stop living and start wanting.

And yet I’m aware of the liminal space I exist in. I lurk on the edges of poverty. I’m a visitor on those gritty shores. I’ve got a college degree and parents with connections. Upward mobility is not an impossibility if I’m willing to compromise for it. If there’s one thing Luis has taught me, it’s that poverty is a different ball game when you know you’ll never escape. All those things that give me a sense of freedom are crushing weights to him.

“I will never work in a cubicle,” I said one day, as we watched people coming out of downtown offices at the beginning of the lunch hour.

“Me either,” he said, studying the calluses on his hands.

A statement of rebellion for me. A statement of fact for him.

Stick figures

Sometimes I wonder if I’d be in love with Luis if it weren’t for Ant. I sense that Ant wonders it too. I read it in his face the first time I met him, a feeling of being unwanted that you could almost see in his features. I thought about the nine-year-old I had been, all fat cheeks and loud voice and unabashed self-promotion. It took me until the end of grade school to learn that the world didn’t cater to my whims. Ant must have been born with this knowledge.

Perhaps because of this, Ant exists carefully within himself. Sometimes he just sits and stares out the window for long stretches of time. Or watches whoever happens to be in the house, his face devoid of expression.

“You okay, bud?” I asked him, the first time this happened. Luis had been called into work unexpectedly, so we’d been left alone together.

“Antony,” he said. No resentment or petulance. Just a neutral statement.

“Are you okay, Antony?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, not breaking his stare.

I went back to my phone, thinking about all the passive-aggressive things adults say to children in these types of situations. Don’t you know it’s rude to stare? Didn’t your parents teach you manners? In the end I just looked up from my phone again and stared back. For almost five minutes, we sat looking at each other. I couldn’t manage eye contact for that long, so I looked at his nose and the curve of his jaw, mostly. The air around his head. His pudgy hand resting on the windowsill. He stared at me without any of the same self-consciousness. I broke first, plunging my eyes back to the safety of my phone screen.

Months later he stopped looking at me altogether. That was almost as disconcerting. I’d ask him something, and he’d keep his eyes averted as he answered. It made me wonder if he’d been looking for something in particular and was conveying his disappointment about not finding it. What was he looking for, though? A maternal instinct? The promise of kindness? Beauty? Intelligence?

“I think he’s just fascinated with faces,” Luis said when I asked. “He’s been that way since he was a kid.”

The next time Ant came over, I waited until he was in the bathroom and then snooped through the notebooks on his bed. I was hoping to find my face rendered in incredible detail on one of those pages or at least some suggestion of savant-like talent. Anything that could provide an explanation for his staring. I found the sort of scribbles and doodles you’d expect from any nine-year-old. Stick figures and boxy cars. Disembodied eyes. A spiral that went on and on across the spine of the notebook.

I put everything back in its place before he caught me.

Mustard

On the rare occasions Luis, Ant, and I are in public together, I often pretend we’re a happy family. I can’t explain why except for a deeply instilled belief that you hide dysfunction from others. I lean forward when Ant speaks, acting as if I were raptly interested in the things he’s saying. I laugh at his jokes. I offer to buy him things. Ant’s too smart not to recognize the charade. Life has made him keenly aware of all the stages of rejection, even the ones that look like affection.

There are limits to the performance, of course. Once, sitting outside a hot-dog stand downtown, I caught myself in the act of reaching toward Ant to wipe mustard off his chin. It was an innocuous gesture, really, but it felt so motherly that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t bear to have him pull his face back from my hand or, worse, bury it in Luis’s shoulder, that yellow glob smearing into the worn fabric of his father’s T-shirt. I couldn’t stand to see him undo my careful lie of domestic tranquility.

I pulled my hand back and muttered something to Ant about the mustard smear. He left it there for the rest of the evening. Eventually his dad scratched it off with a fingernail before we all got in the car to go home.

Sex

My favorite times with Luis are when we’re alone together in the evenings, sitting out on his porch and watching the world go by. He lives in the basement of an old house that’s been broken into apartments. The porch is communal space, so we’re never guaranteed to be alone. I savor those times when it’s just the two of us. In the summer the heat lingers around us like tangible desire. I can’t be in his presence for too long without wanting him to lead me down the long stairway to his bedroom. This is our conversation, I think, as he peels off my clothing. This is the way we tell each other about our days, in the pace and tenor of our lovemaking.

Afterward, he talks. It’s always dim in his apartment, so I can’t see his face. I stare at the ceiling and imagine his features—his large dark eyes and heavy brow, a slightly hooked nose, soft lips, and a chin that falls a little too quickly away to neck. It’s an attractive face, rendered even more so in my visualization of it during those soft moments in his bed, our mingled sweat cooling on us. Sometimes my mental image of him will be so strong that I’m shocked when I finally see his real features again.

I wonder if he does that to me: edits my face when he’s not looking at me. Gives me straighter teeth and eyes that are a little wider apart. Fixes all the things in my most self-abrasive thoughts. Maybe he makes me beautiful, undeniably beautiful.

What would I give to live confidently in either attractiveness or ugliness? On the back of Luis’s motorcycle, I wish idly for a gentle crash, a slide across the pavement that would tear up the skin of my face, just so I would finally know for sure. Just so I could stop wondering. It’s not a real wish. It’s not a hankering for self-mutilation. On all but my worst days, I exist in an uneasy truce with the uncertainty. I just wish I knew, when Luis or another man looked at me, what they really saw.

When Luis is done talking, we shower and make dinner. We turn on the lights, and sometimes in that harsh fluorescence, our thoughts curdle into complaints about bosses and housemates and friends. It’s as if there isn’t enough goodness in the world to discuss for an entire evening. Eventually we have to move on to the things that hurt us. As we talk, Luis’s relaxed body will tighten slowly, like someone is cranking a wrench. One click, his jaw clenches. Two clicks, his back grows rigid. Three clicks, his palms clench and unclench, spreading veins across his arms like lightning.

Flying

This is what it’s like to be on the back of Luis’s motorcycle: free. Freer than I’ve ever been. The motorcycle is old and barely gets to speeds above 50. We take back roads instead of highways wherever we’re going. Luis complains about how slow the bike is, but all I know is that it’s faster than my anxieties. For those thirty minutes as we zoom, fluid, through the air, my mind stops racing. My chest opens up and I breathe deeply. The helmet clenches my head, the thickness of Luis’s old leather jacket smothers me, but I feel strangely weightless. I feel lifted outside of myself.

I used to think middle-aged men on motorcycles were laughable. I thought it was about chasing youth, about trying to reclaim a spot among the reckless. Now I understand that it’s more than that. It’s about striving to be greater than the sum of what you watch and eat and fear and crave. It’s about feeling that life is still full of possibilities, not just doors to rooms you’ve already been in.

It’s a lie in motion, I guess.

Stagnancy

Luis commits to things. Not often, but more often than me. He was married once, to Ant’s mother. He stood in the front of a church and committed to spending his life with one other human. He committed to having Ant, not before he was conceived, but afterward, when he and his wife decided whether or not to keep him. And after that, when his wife left, Luis committed to still being present for Ant. He committed to having a job that would let him buy the things his son needs to fit in at elementary school: new clothes, nice sneakers, a tablet, Lunchables. The sort of accessories that allow even a kid like Ant to fly under the radar.

What have I committed to? Luis asks me this often, directly and indirectly. It’s one of those arguments that we spin around and around in our hands, trying to mold into something. It never really changes, though. We never really change.

“Friends,” I say. “I’ve committed to my friends.”

Abbie and Christa and Emmaline and Sutter. Friends from high school and college. Friends who ask nothing of me except to be available sometimes to listen and drink with them. That’s the sort of commitment that doesn’t take anything from you, and Luis knows this. He’s not satisfied with the answer.

“My job,” I tell him. It’s not true, but it should be. It’s a nice enough place to work. The pay is terrible, but the hours are decent, and I’m not exhausted at the end of the day. I’ve been there long enough that a lot of customers know me by name and think we’re friends. I should love that, I guess. I’m a fixture in the community. A few months ago a kid saw me out and about and called me “the co-op lady.” For just a moment I thought I could lean into it, but then I realized that a nickname like that means you’ve been somewhere too long. And so I spend hours in the evening scrolling through Craigslist, looking for new beginnings. I can’t abide the thought of standing still.

“Relationships, Seneca,” Luis always says, at a certain point in the commitment conversation. “I’m talking about whether you’ve ever committed to a romantic relationship.”

He knows the answer. I’ve told him about everyone I’ve dated. He was interested—jealous—and I like lists. (One) Warren, in high school. Wasn’t too much going on upstairs, but he had nice hands and a car that we’d drive in for hours. (Two) Sam, freshman year of college. Two months of drunken sex in our dorm rooms when our roommates were out. My first pregnancy scare. (Three) AJ, sophomore year of college. Talked too much. Wore polos tucked into chinos and made backhanded comments about my mom for months after he briefly met her. (Four, five, six) Ryan, Matty, Nikola. Booty calls, really. One of them used to cry at war movies, but I can’t remember which one. (Seven) Marcus. Broke my heart. (Eight) James. We ruined a perfectly good friendship trying to date. (Nine) Luis.

Luis always homes in on Marcus, but I tell him that it doesn’t matter much. He’s just the only person who ever really got to me.

I’m only the second woman Luis has dated since his divorce. The first, Stella, was a classic rebound. They were engaged after only two months of dating, and they muddled through another year and a half before realizing it was a mistake. He and I have been together for almost as long. Only once did he say anything about those comparable timelines that really meant something.

“Sometimes I think I’m the only one in the world looking for something serious,” he said before I left one evening. I’d been talking about moving, traveling, changing—doing something other than standing still. I hadn’t realized how thoughtless it was, telling him about all my plans to live without him. I guess I didn’t really think he’d care. No, that’s a lie. Honestly, I just didn’t think about it. When he said that, I felt everything folding in on itself.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, laughing painfully. “I know what you’re really saying.”

That was almost six months ago. I don’t know if I’d still be with him if he hadn’t said that. Guilt is a powerful immobilizer.

Impermanence

My friend Abbie, who’s married now, told me once that she never dated anyone she couldn’t see marrying.

“What’s the point, Seneca?” she asked me. “How can you enjoy something you know will end eventually?”

“How can you enjoy something you know won’t end?” I asked.

She laughed a little until she realized I was serious. We never talked about it again.

Friends

Abbie knows about Luis, but she’s the only one. When I’m out with other friends, I don’t mention him by name. I don’t even acknowledge having a boyfriend. Stories about Luis become about “a friend.” He blurs into everyone else in my life. You would realize he’s a common thread only if you were paying really close attention.

Abbie knows about him by accident. My car died when I was over at her house one time. It was still a few days away from payday. Calling Luis was my only option. He came right away, even though he was helping one of his friends move. This was early in the relationship, when gestures like that seemed important. He showed up in Abbie’s neighborhood on his raspy motorcycle, blasting ’90s hip-hop. He was wearing a white undershirt covered in dirt and sweat from carrying boxes all day. Seeing him standing on Abbie’s pathway, in between two well-manicured rose bushes, I felt a deep-down flicker of shame, like I’d broken some unspoken rule by bringing him there. After I saw that Abbie was warming to him, the feeling faded but didn’t completely go away. A few of Abbie’s neighbors drove by, slowing way down when they saw him working on my junky car. I should have been infuriated by those looks, by that clear demarcation of otherness. Instead I felt a desire to somehow show myself as one of them, to cross that invisible line separating people who belonged in the neighborhood and people who didn’t.

Now, sixteen months later, I erase Luis’s existence from my life in all the stories I tell my friends. I tell myself that it’s what I’d be doing in any relationship nearing its end, but I wonder. And I do really like Luis. That’s the complicated part. I like the feel of his callused hands on my skin, the smell of him. I like how he fixes things with spare parts from other things: washing-machine belts, bed frames, pedals from exercise bikes, old faucet handles, even the insides of a gumball machine. I like the way he thinks, so different from anyone else I know. That he sings without realizing it when he’s lost in a task. Most of all, I like that he isn’t like the people I grew up with, how dating him sets me apart from all of them. How I’ll never have neatly tended roses if I stay with him.

But none of these things can feed love, raise it from a helpless infant to something that can stand on its own.

The beginning

“You don’t like my dad much,” Ant says one day when we’ve been left alone together. Luis needs a root canal and has been picking up all the extra shifts he can get. This is the sixth afternoon in a row I’ve been stuck with babysitting duties, and I’m getting really tired of it.

“What?” I say. It’s the first time I can remember him initiating a conversation with me.

“I can tell,” he says. “Ms. Stella used to look at him the same way near the end.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, looking back at my phone. I’d hide my face if I could. Now that I know Ant can read me like that, I feel unsettled, naked. Every twitch of my mouth feels like a broadcast of my deepest thoughts.

“Are you going to marry my dad?” he asks.

I sigh and look up at him with exaggerated slowness, as if the question were unbearably heavy. It strikes me that he’s chosen to look at me again, after all those months of looking away. To hell with it, I think. If this is how it ends, at least I can get out of babysitting.

“No,” I say.

“I didn’t think so.”

We both go back to doing our own things. He stares out the window. I scroll through Twitter without really seeing anything. After a few minutes I get up and go to the bathroom. I stare at myself in the mirror and pretend I’m talking to Luis. I look at what my features do, and try to find which one betrays me. My eyes in the mirror look old and hard, surrounded by little wrinkles I swear weren’t there before. There’s a flicker of movement in the mirror. I glance over my shoulder to find Ant watching me through the crack in the door.

“See?” he says.

Later that night I lie in Luis’s bed and stare at the ceiling. My whole body feels strung tightly. I jump at every little floor creak.

“Does Ant see a counselor?” I ask.

I’m pretty sure Luis is asleep. A few long seconds go by, and then he mumbles, “My kid’s not crazy.”

“It could be good for him. Give him someone to talk to about his feelings.”

“He’s a kid. What feelings could he possibly need to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Loneliness, sadness. That sort of thing. He’s been through a lot.”

Luis lets out a snort. “If he can’t handle those feelings at age nine, he’s in for a rude awakening,” he says.

“I’m worried about him,” I say. Even as the words leave my mouth, though, I realize it’s not true. What’s keeping me awake isn’t worry about Ant. It’s the unsettled feeling that he knows a secret I was sure I was hiding so well.

Frog

Luis and I take a trip to the coast on his motorcycle, pulling off on the shoulder every time a fast truck comes up behind us. The two-hour trip takes almost four hours this way, but neither of us minds.

Ant stays home with his grandmother. He texts a picture of a squashed frog he found on the pavement outside.

“My strange son,” Luis says, showing me the photo and laughing.

“Does he have friends?” I ask.

Luis shrugs and tucks the phone back into his pocket. We ride on until we get to our motel. It’s all gray wood and rusted handrails, but the linens are clean and the door locks behind us. We don’t leave the room again until it’s full dark outside. In the restaurant Luis strokes the inside of my thigh with his work-roughened thumb, and I let myself simply enjoy being with him.

It’s the perfect evening. Somehow, it seems to encapsulate the entirety of our relationship, like that old saying about the universe being contained in a grain of sand. Lying sleepless in bed hours later, I realize that this is the beginning of the end. There’s something too good about this day, as if we’ve reached the crest of our relationship and have nowhere to go but down.

We leave early the next morning to get Luis home in time for work. As the silhouettes of the trees slip past in the predawn light, I wrap my arms tightly around his waist and press the side of my helmet into his back, pretending we’re still lying in bed together.

Knowledge

“Maybe we should get to know each other,” I say to Ant the next time we’re by ourselves.

“Why?” he asks.

“It seems like a good idea,” I say.

“Do you actually care?”

“Yes,” I say, surprised to find that it’s true. Or, more to the point, I’m interested in finding out how a nine-year-old can read me like no one else can. Anything more than that, and I’m bound to get bored.

“Weird, but okay,” Ant says, making a face.

We stare at each other for a while. I try to think of normal questions to ask a kid. Is it like getting to know someone on a first date? Or is there more subtlety to it than that?

“What do you like to do?” I ask.

“What do you like to do?” he counters.

I think of all the lies I’ve told men over the years, the unbounded space we both exist in before our personalities take shape. How it’s so much safer to answer this question second, so I can pick and choose parts of myself. I’m just starting to get into rock climbing. I love reading Dostoevsky too. I’m a big fan of the craft-beer scene. If I’m lucky, the person figures out the lie gradually. All at once, and the relationship is doomed to fail. Nice and slowly, and maybe I can keep it going for a few more months. It’s like letting air out of a balloon.

“I like riding on your dad’s motorcycle,” I say. “I like going out with friends and drinking and making fun of other people at the bar. I like scrolling through my phone until my brain feels sort of numb and heavy.”

“I like finding dead things on the road,” Ant says. “I think it looks really cool when they are squished and their organs are coming out.”

“Do you squish them yourself?” I ask.

“Of course not,” he says, looking affronted at the very idea. A little while later, he says, “I like pretending I’m rich.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because then people would like me.” He shrugs.

Fantasy

I meet someone else when I’m out with friends. Brian. He sits across the table from me, and we don’t talk much, but he haunts my thoughts for days afterward. I imagine the endless conversations we’ll have. All the things we’ll have in common. The look of arousal and wonder on his face when I undress in front of him for the first time. The ease with which he’ll get along with the people I care about.

I know it’s not about him, not really. It’s about the potential of him. A new story. Another chance for happiness, timelessness. That endless feeling of being young and free.

Really, though, it’s about believing I’ll be a better person the next time around. That selfishness is just a side effect of an unfulfilling relationship, not a permanent way of being.

Park

Ant and I go to the park. Luis is a week out from the root canal, and all I can think is: Seven more days. Seven more days. I look over at Ant as we walk, and wonder if he’s thinking the same thing.

When we’re halfway there, he puts out a finger and touches the back of my hand. Quickly, furtively. Just a quick touch and then the hand is back in the pocket of his sweatshirt before I can say anything. His touch lingers on my skin, sticky with sweat and the remains of a popsicle he gobbled before we left. I feel like wiping my hand on my jeans but resist the urge. All I can think of is that flattened frog with its guts coming out. How Ant must have bent down and looked at it for a long time, inspecting it this way and that with the same silent stare he used on me when we first met. For just a moment I move outside of my own selfishness and think about what it must feel like to be that alone. Then I take a step farther away from him as we walk so he can’t touch me again.

At the park I sit on the edge of a stone wall and bury my head in my phone. I don’t want to engage with any of the other adults. I don’t want to answer any of their questions or try to hide the fact that I don’t really like kids. One of the mothers sits down a few feet away and turns her body toward me. I sense she’s ready to pounce the moment I look up from my phone. I don’t give her the satisfaction. After a few minutes she lets out a judgmental sigh and walks away.

Not much later, a kid starts screaming. I look up to find that one of the taller boys is bleeding from his nose, heavy droplets falling into his cupped hands. I look around, waiting for someone to come to his aid, only to find I’m one of very few adults in the vicinity. There’s a father trying to slow down his daughter’s swing and that mother, grappling with two squirming toddlers. I meet the mother’s eyes, and she looks at me for a long moment before returning to her task. I sigh and get to my feet.

“Where’s your adult?” I ask the kid.

“At home,” he says, gesturing vaguely to a row of houses. I step back to avoid a splatter of blood.

I fish a tissue out of my purse and hand it to him gingerly. He grabs it and shoves it up to his nose.

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask.

“Probably,” he says. “Mom always says it’s not a big deal.”

I look at the other two adults for help, but they’ve both stopped paying attention now that someone has taken charge.

“Cool,” I say. We all stand there for a moment—this bleeding kid, Ant, a little blond girl who must be related to the girl on the swings, and me—then I turn and walk back to the wall.

“That’s my mom,” Ant says, behind me. I look up, expecting to see Natasha, his birth mother, striding toward us across the grass. I’ve seen pictures of her and would recognize her sharp chin anywhere. There’s no one new in sight, though, and as I sit down, it hits me. He’s talking about me.

“She’s very pretty,” the girl says.

He’s talking about me.

“Yeah,” Ant says, shrugging. Then he slaps a hand on her arm and says, “Tag, you’re it.”

And they’re off again, the tall kid trying to run with one hand pressed to his face. No loss of equilibrium for any of them. Meanwhile, I feel like someone has flipped me upside down and spun me in violent circles. Mom, I think. The word tastes like bile in my mouth.

It happens all of a sudden, the kernel of a thought growing to a roaring voice in my head growing to an action within the space of a breath. Before I can really think it through, I’m walking away from the park. I can still hear the shrieks of Ant and his new friends on the playground. I shove my hands into the pocket of my sweatshirt and pick up the pace. Tell Luis you blacked out for a while, an inner voice says. You don’t know what happened. And, a moment later, Ant will come home on his own. He’s smart. There’s no counterargument to that. Later, I’ll tell myself that if I had actually thought, Maybe he won’t make it home okay, I wouldn’t have left. I would have interrupted my momentum and been able to turn. This lends credence to the blackout theory. That excuse, initially intended to get Luis off my back, becomes the only sense of self I’m able to hold onto.

Voices and faces

Home, bedroom, door closed, headphones in. The sunlight moving across my ceiling. Afternoon to evening to night.

Luis’s voice on the phone saying, “Where’s Ant, Seneca?”

My own voice saying, “He’s not home?”

A Facebook post from Ant’s grandmother: “Please help us find our angel. Antony Moreno nine y/o last seen near Farragut Park in N Portland. Wearing a gray sweatshirt & red basketball shorts.”

Luis’s text message saying, “PICK UP THE PHONE.”

My cold face in the mirror. Eyes that I don’t recognize anymore.

And then Luis, his fists thundering against my front door. My roommate coming out of her room in a T-shirt and pair of underwear, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, asking if she should call the cops.

It’s not just Luis, when I open the door. It’s Luis and Ant, holding each other’s hands in a death grip. Ant looks tarnished and terrified, and I think through the consequences of nine hours, what sort of horrors those can hold.

“I’m sorry,” I say to him.

“You don’t talk to him,” Luis says, shoving Ant most of the way behind him. Ant’s dark eyes peer at me from around his father’s arm. I can’t bear to look at them any longer.

“He called you Mom, and you walked away,” Luis says.

“I don’t remember . . .” I start.

“You fucking bitch,” Luis says, and there’s anger matching the despair in his voice. I look up to find him making a fist and imagine those knuckles flashing into my skin, the bruises blooming across my paleness. For a moment I even long for it: an act of violence that will absolve me of all I’ve done. I imagine the retelling of it in the years to come, my decision diminishing in contrast to his, fading into a footnote instead of the main event.

Luis’s fist finds my doorframe. Wood and bone splinter simultaneously, and Luis gives a yell, tucking his hand into the crook of his elbow.

“You fucking bitch,” he says again, now crouching over from the pain, taking in shaking breaths. Over his father’s bent back, Ant continues to look at me, now with an expression of loneliness deeper than any I’ve seen. Deeper than the well that’s inside of me by far.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Ant again.

He shrugs and looks away.

“It’s okay,” he finally says.

The three of us stand there for what feels like an eternity.

“Don’t ever come near my son again,” Luis says, finally, standing up. His voice is quiet and resigned. He doesn’t look at me again.

“Luis, Ant,” I say to their retreating backs, but neither of them turns.

Moving on

There’s a trick I’ve learned over the years, a survival skill, really, once a relationship ends. It involves reframing the narrative into something I can live with, forgetting some things and highlighting others, making it into a story I can remember with a detached sort of fondness. I eventually managed to do this with Luis, keeping the good and discarding the bad. Ant, though—Ant continues to elude me. No matter how hard I try, I can’t reshape him. I can’t change our story into anything else. I’ve always considered myself a neutral force, selfish but not inherently bad. Just someone trying to live my life the way I want. I’m not certain of it anymore, though. Doubt has crept in.

The other day, I was out with someone new, and we got on the topic of past relationships. Without thinking much about it, I launched into my usual list. I was almost to the end when my date interrupted.

“You’re not obligated to tell me about everyone you’ve ever been with,” he said, laughing.

I opened my mouth to say I didn’t mind, because it felt so important at that moment to let him know that I was someone who moved on without looking back. That I was someone who lived without tethers. Outside the window, a dark-haired boy walked by with a dog. For a moment, I saw Ant’s face so vividly that my heart squeezed up in my chest. It struck me then that what I was going to say about Marcus—he was the only one who ever really got to me—was no longer true. Now there were two.

“Sorry,” I said, once the moment had passed. I looked down to find I was holding on tightly to the edge of the table. I forced a smile. “What do you want to talk about?”

“What do you like to do?” he asked.

I looked at him and considered all the possibilities, including telling the truth.

“You go first,” I said.

Read more from Issue 19.1.