Ten
The truth is, Helen hates coming home for the holidays.
She feels a lot of guilt about it, and that doesn’t help. There’s a memorial for Michelle set up in her former bedroom turned study, and it’s always Helen’s first stop during a visit home. She has no idea when in that first year her parents decided to change Michelle’s bedroom, and Helen still remembers the whiplash of coming home for summer break and seeing that long-shut door suddenly opened to a room she had never seen before.
Why didn’t they ask before changing it? She’d been pissed on Michelle’s behalf. I should have protected you from that.
The walls are lined with clean white IKEA bookshelves: The first shelf to the left is full of textbooks on organic chemistry and Chinese test-prep books from the eighties—relics of her parents’ graduate studies. A large section—two bookshelves’ full—is devoted to Helen’s own novels, each row boasting at least a dozen copies of each book in the Ivy Papers series, along with various translations and special book-club editions. Below the one window in the room, a shorter shelf holds the small collection of books Helen and Michelle shared between them—a combination of science-fiction classics that Dad would read to them as children and their own carefully considered Scholastic Book Fair purchases—and on top of that short shelf rests a neat row of silver-framed photos: deceased grandparents, and Michelle.
Helen lights two sticks of incense and bows, then she places the slow-burning incense in the waiting pot next to Michelle’s portrait. The heady scent always paints a memory in the smoke of the first time she did this ritual—with Michelle, when they were visiting China at ages twelve and ten. They were in the countryside with distant relatives and paying their respects to long-dead people they’d never met, at a fireplace memorial in an otherwise bustling kitchen. Helen recalls affecting a serious expression and acting as if she knew what she was doing, and Michelle carefully copying her movements as their elderly relatives clucked approvingly in the background.
If you were here, we’d be at a bar catching up.
The thing Helen struggles to imagine most is her sister today, if things had been normal. It’s as though her brain stumbles, suddenly flummoxed every time: This is the end, you are leaving the city limits of imaginable things.
Michelle would have been anticipating turning thirty next year, but what would that have looked like? Would she be single or possibly married? Would she have a pet? What city would she live in? What would her apartment look like? Helen can’t picture any of it—every conjecture feels half-hearted and paper-thin, less real than all the fictional characters she’s created.
The real Michelle didn’t want to be here.
Helen sits in an armchair by the window and picks out a book—The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She keeps reading from where she left off, her last trip home. Sometimes she’ll find a dog-eared page or an underlined passage telling her where Michelle once left off too. Helen has read through their entire shared collection twice (just in case she missed something).
The other homecoming routines will be mundane from here. Mom always scrubs the floors down to their varnish in anticipation of a visit and has a meal of all of Helen’s favorite home-cooked dishes ready to greet her, no matter what time she arrives. Dad is more gruff—they usually run out of conversation by her second day home (“How’s work?” “I saw this article about another Chinese author . . .”)—but grunts approvingly whenever Helen updates them about life and work.
She shares only the good things—a book announcement, a positive review, news about the show’s development, a writing retreat with friends. She hates the look of worry in their eyes; it reminds her too much of a childhood stifled by parental concern and gives her a wooly, claustrophobic feeling that makes her want to run and run and run until the pavement turns into the California beach beneath her feet.
Helen has never introduced them to any of the men she’s dated over the years. The thought of having to tell them about a breakup is so impossible a concept, it’s laughable.
The white friends in her author groups would balk at this, while her Asian friends would often nod and commiserate.
“But—never? Like not even one?” Elyse had exclaimed with wide eyes.
“They can meet when there’s a ring on her finger,” Pallavi had said, waving it off. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Elyse would say the point is so that your parents know what’s going on in your life. But Helen has created a very special window into her life that’s just for her parents. Don’t look there, the view’s not as good, she would say, pulling the drapes over a messy fourth date, a failed situationship, a bad breakup, and a drunken night out. She stores up bad news like acorns in the winter and metes them out in small doses, when she finally has good news to soften the blow. “The revision’s been tough, but I finally turned it in and my editor loved it!” “I hadn’t heard from Elyse in a while and thought she was mad at me, but it turns out she’s expecting her first child and she wanted to surprise everyone!”
“You feel a lot of responsibility for other people’s feelings,” her therapist once told her, as she described the careful little ways she frames her life for her parents.
She supposes that’s true. Her mother’s knuckles still turn white from gripping the steering wheel whenever they drive down that one stretch of Route 22 on the way to the mall. Helen once boldly asked why they didn’t just move somewhere else, somewhere they weren’t as burdened by the knowledge that there should be two Zhang sisters moving through the world.
“What’s the point?” Mom had said. “We know this place and we’re too old to start new somewhere else and have to learn everything again. Besides, your sister is here.”
Helen knows she doesn’t mean Michelle’s ghost. Her mother is unfailingly turned off by any kind of superstition. She means Michelle’s body is here, in a cemetery over the hill on the other side of the mountain that carves out the boundary of Dunollie, New Jersey, from its neighboring townships.
Helen looks around the study, trying to feel Michelle’s ghost here.
Nothing.
On her third day home, the day before Christmas Eve, Helen tells Mom to take the night off from cooking. She drives to Rhymer’s Pizzeria and orders two large pepperoni pizzas and a bundle of garlic knots from the pimply-faced teenager behind the counter. A few moments later, her first kiss, Ian Rhymer, appears from the kitchen, his eyes crinkled in their perpetual smile, his arms stretched out for a hug that she submits to happily.
“It’s my famous author friend,” Ian says. “I heard you moved to LA and you’re a Hollywood big shot now.”
Helen snorts. “You sound like a cartoon right now,” she says. “Hollywood big shot, fuck off.”
Ian grins and pulls out a chair to sit down with her. “I feel like it’s been ages. What’s going on in your life?”
“My life is the same as always,” she says. “Writing, hating my writing, revising, convincing myself I’m a genius, then doing it all over again. Tell me about your life.”
Ian shakes his head. “Nuh-uh, you don’t get off that easy. You moved across the country, where they don’t even have good pizza. How are you doing?”
“Honestly? The farther away I am from my parents, the happier I am.”
She says this glibly, the kind of joking thing they would have said to each other as teenagers. But does she actually mean it?
“So you like it out there.”
Helen thinks of her condo in Santa Monica, of the podcasts she listens to on her long commutes in the morning, of the bright blue sky and the palm trees and the sound of trucks unloading on the studio lot as she walks to the writers room.
“I do,” she says.
“That’s great, Helen,” Ian says. “It’s nice to see you happy.”
Helen smiles, then nudges him. “What about you? You’re a family man now.”
He grins and whips out his phone to show her pictures. “Deanna’s hoping to go for a second kid next year,” he says. “But look at this little fluff ball. He had so much hair when he was born, Dee almost cried laughing.”
As Helen carries the pizzas and garlic knots to her car, she thinks about how much fatherhood makes sense on Ian Rhymer. He’s not the skinny kid cutting track practice to kiss her in the library anymore; he looks more solid and dependable now.
Like he’s grown up, she thinks, and feels the ache of something bittersweet stretch up.
“Hey,” a familiar voice calls out when she reaches the parking lot.
She turns to see Grant standing across the lot, next to an unfamiliar gray CRV. He clicks the keys to lock the doors with a chirp.
“Hi,” she says, placing the pizzas on the hood of her car. “Fancy seeing you here.”
He looks a little amused at her old-fashioned turn of phrase, and she kind of wants to disappear into the woods.
“What’d you get?”
“Pepperoni. And garlic knots,” she says.
“I never got the garlic knots here before,” he says.
“You should try them.”
Grant looks up at the sky. It’s a thick kind of light gray. “Think it’s gonna snow later,” he says.
She cranes her neck and looks up too. “I think it’s already snowing on the other side of the mountain.”
“Better get my pizza order in soon then,” he says.
“I better get home before they get cold,” she says.
He nods and heads toward the pizzeria. He pauses at the sidewalk outside and turns to wave at her. “It’s good to see you,” he says.
“You too,” she says, and gets into her car.
Would have been nice to find out you were in town sooner.
Grant stares at the text from Lauren on his phone, the one he hasn’t responded to yet.
He’s been busy and he knows she would understand if he told her. He’s been shuttling his mother from their home to his uncle’s house in the next township every day, spending hours at a time in Fred Shepard’s basement sorting boxes of old family photos, saved receipts, and letters—a lifetime of paper.
It’s emotional work for his mom and Grant wishes sometimes they could dump all the boxes in the street with the rest of the trash after Christmas and be done with it. Instead, Lisa Shepard insists on seeing each picture, clucking and cooing over it, explaining to him who each acquaintance featured in the background might be, she thinks, and sighing.
“It’s just such an awful reminder that this is where it all ends up,” she says, looking around the damp basement. “Where we all end up. And then your family ends up going through your boxes, deciding what to keep and what to throw away.”
It’s not even his mom’s brother. Fred was Grant’s dad’s brother—but Lisa grew up next door to both of them, and as Fred never married, they folded him into their family as a bonus member on family vacations, birthdays, and celebrations. “He needs to socialize more,” Grant always heard his parents whispering to each other.
Grant is pretty sure Uncle Fred had resented their concern and he’s wondered more than once if there were an alternate universe where Lisa had married Fred instead of his brother. If it would have worked out better that way for everyone involved, instead of in a marriage that fell apart (or maybe just stopped keeping up appearances) as soon as Grant went off to college.
Would have been nice to find out you were in town sooner.
The truth is, Grant hasn’t wanted to see Lauren during this trip home. It’s been over a year since he last saw her (she was on vacation in Aruba when he was here in the summer), and part of him thinks—aren’t we getting too old for this?
He never intended for this to keep going for as long as it did. It started as a way to pass the hours back home when he was in college, and somehow, over a decade later, it occurs to Grant that this might qualify as his longest relationship.
He always assumed one of them would find a reason to break it off—he’d start dating someone seriously or she would get engaged and he’d see it on Facebook. Instead, she’s become as familiar a landmark in Dunollie to him as Washington Rock, the viewpoint at the top of the mountain where George Washington supposedly observed the British troops once. Possibly.
His sense of decency won’t let the text—slightly accusatory in tone—go unanswered, and a few hours later, he’s leaving the house to meet Lauren at the one bar in Dunollie that’s open after ten p.m.
“You look different,” she says, her eyes raking from his hair to his chest, as they sit across from each other in a booth.
She looks the same, her dark hair pulled back in a clean ponytail. She’s wearing leggings and a warm, oversized sweater.
“You look good,” he says, searching for something to say. “I saw you ran a marathon in April.”
She smiles. “All the girls in the office signed up,” she says. She works in a dentist’s office in the nicer part of Dunollie and she’s been there since graduation, he’s pretty sure. “I got the best time, though.”
He nods and a waiter comes by for their drink orders.
Hers is the same as always—an amaretto sour with two cherries, something so sweet and sugary the taste would linger when he kissed her. He doesn’t really want to drink now—he thinks about ordering a beer so she doesn’t feel self-conscious about her own drink, but finally orders a decaf coffee instead.
Lauren raises a brow. “You’re not drinking?”
“I have to get up early tomorrow,” he says. “There’s guys from the storage facility coming for Uncle Fred’s stuff.”
Lauren nods. She tilts her head as she looks at him. “Are you seeing anyone these days?”
Grant shakes his head and makes a small sound of dissent. “You?”
Lauren shrugs. “No one permanent,” she says.
He’s comfortable around Lauren, he realizes. His body is relaxed in a way it hasn’t been in weeks. He wonders if this feeling is love, then randomly thinks of the way Ian Rhymer had shown him pictures of his family when he stopped by the pizzeria earlier this afternoon.
He gets an itchy feeling as he remembers seeing Helen in the parking lot, and their conversation about Lauren at the wine bar in LAX.
“Do you ever wish . . .” he starts, then thinks better of it, then decides to ask anyway. “Do you ever wish you could find someone more permanent?”
Lauren laughs. “Why, are you trying to set me up?”
Grant shrugs. “What are you looking for? Maybe I know someone.”
She quirks a knowing brow at him, and it would be easy—so easy—to take this conversation down a familiar, flirtatious path.
“My mom’s selling her house,” he says instead, changing the subject. “It goes on the market in January.”
“I’m not in a position to buy,” Lauren says, frowning.
“Yeah, no, I was just . . . sharing,” he says. “She wants to move to Ireland once it’s done.”
“Ireland,” Lauren says, brows lifting.
“Apparently she always wanted to live there at some point in her life, but it was never the right time.”
“Oh.” Lauren studies him for a moment. Then, “Why do you think we never fell in love?”
Grant finds he isn’t surprised by the question. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t . . . I don’t want you to think I don’t care about you. I do.”
She smiles at him a little sadly.
“I know you do,” she says. “I don’t mean with each other. We were never meant to last past high school. I mean, why do you think we never fell in love with other people?”
Grant wants to conduct a thorough investigation of this question—he wants to tape it off and walk its perimeter while he examines it from every angle. But he knows, before he can even untangle the thought, there’s probably something wrong with me.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe it’s just not in the cards for us.”
“I’d like it to be,” she says. “It seems like it’d be nice.”
He remembers suddenly the first blush of their own romance—that weekend in a rented beach house after prom. He had broken up with his girlfriend Desiree because he knew he was going to college far away and he didn’t want to draw it out, but he’d taken her to prom first because he felt like he owed it to her.
“You’re such an idiot,” she had said, after he’d tried to gently end things in the car on the way to Seaside Heights. She’d made him pull over at a rest stop so one of her friends could pick her up and drive her to the same beach house instead.
Lauren had been someone else’s date that weekend—he doesn’t even remember whose. She wasn’t part of their usual crew. She ran more with the stoners and future art majors. But as the end of high school drew nearer, those clearly defined lines separating their friend groups seemed to blur and he remembers drinks in a hot tub, a game of truth or dare, and a first kiss with damp, clinging hair and searching mouths.
She was the first person he’d called after the accident a week later; she stroked his hair while he cried in her lap. He’d been embarrassed to ask so much of someone he barely knew, but Lauren hadn’t seemed to mind. It had connected them, in a strange way.
“Do you want to get married?” she asks. Then adds, “I’m not proposing. Just wondering, generally.”
Grant laughs and thinks of what he told Helen back at the airport. I’d like to be married someday. He meant it and he thinks maybe that’s why he’s telling Lauren about his mom selling the house. Lauren is a dangling thread that keeps him tied to this place and it doesn’t seem very fair to any of them.
“I do,” he says out loud. “Someday. I should probably do something about that.”
Lauren smiles as she tilts her head. The action is so familiar, his heart kind of aches for it.
“I hope you do,” she says.
When they walk out of the bar, Lauren lingers as she searches for her keys.
“Are you good to drive?” Grant asks.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “The drinks get weaker here every year.”
She considers him. “Are you heading home?”
There’s an invitation in that question, somewhere. One last time, maybe?
“I am,” he says. “Get home safe.”
“You too,” she says.
She reaches out and touches his cheek softly, brushing a thumb against his stubble.
He catches her hand suddenly and presses a kiss to the back of it. She laughs, surprised.
“Well, that’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done,” Lauren says. “Merry Christmas, Grant.”
It starts snowing as she says it, and he feels like they’re living out the end of someone else’s rom-com. Maybe every movie ending has extras in the background just trudging through toward the rest of their lives.
“Merry Christmas,” he says back to her.
She opens her car door, then pauses. “You deserve to be happy. I hope you know that.”
Lauren smiles and Grant feels a complicated knot in his stomach tug as he tries to return it. After she gets in her car and drives off, he stays standing there, fat snowflakes floating down from the sky and dusting his hair, his shoulders, and the ground beneath his feet.
He pulls out his phone and numbly swipes until he finds the name he’s looking for. He presses dial before he can talk himself out of it, and he realizes he’s holding his breath, because it releases as soon as he hears the voice on the other end.
“Hello?” Helen says, her voice low and quiet.
“Do you want to get lunch tomorrow?” he asks, as if this is normal for them, as if he calls all the time. “I have to finish clearing out my uncle’s house in the morning, but I’m free afterward and I think I might lose my mind if I spend another day at home alone.”
There’s a pause, then the click of a door shutting in the background. Helen sounds closer to the phone when she speaks again.
“Send me the address,” she says.