Chapter Thirteen
NASH
Across from them, the tip of Roosevelt Island showed off its lighthouse. Beyond it, Astoria was on display, buffering the island and showing off parks of its own. Towers punctuated the landscape. The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge seemed to move with headlights of cars zooming across it.
Nash beckoned Kiran to a bench overlooking the breathtaking view. To their backs, a park still held remnants of action from visitors. Dogs played in the dog park, and the distant sound of basketballs bouncing against the court echoed among the buildings around them.
Nash exhaled deeply and shot a glance at Kiran.
Her hands were in her pockets, and she sat a couple of feet away from him. Her legs crossed at the knees, and she gazed out at the river. Her shoulders hunched.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“You may ask for a refund.” She offered a tight-lipped smile.
“Are you tired? We’ve walked around thirty blocks tonight.”
“A little. Are you tired? Do you want to head back?”
No, Nash wanted to say, I’d rather spend the night here with you.
But he bobbed his head. “We have a rooftop deck, right?”
“Yes. I haven’t been up there much, but it’s nice!”
“Want to grab some beers and chill there for a bit?”
“Sure.”
“Cab’s on me. Let’s get home.”
A half hour later, she had procured beers from her fridge and brought them up for them.
“Akash left them at my place a while back. He’s forgotten by now, I promise you.”
The rooftop had wicker furniture grouped around tables in a surprisingly cozy atmosphere. No one else from the building was up there.
They settled into two chairs across from each other. Kiran slid her Toms off and crossed her legs, her bare feet tucked underneath her knees. Nash extended his legs out on the table in front of them.
There was intimacy here, the two of them in a smaller space, sharing a drink that decreased inhibition and heightened emotion. And when Kiran’s hair moved in the breeze, he wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to run his fingers in it and see the black run across his skin.
“So tell me about your family, since I’ve talked about mine,” Kiran proposed. “No siblings for you, right?”
What. A. Buzzkill.
“Nope. It was just me and my mom growing up.” That was a bit of a stretch, because Nash had largely grown up alone, but it seemed like the simplest explanation.
“You must be close.”
“Oh.” Now Nash squirmed. “Not so much.”
Kiran waited. But Nash didn’t elaborate.
For a summer night on a rooftop, the temperature around them had unexpectedly hit subzero and not for the first time that night.
A beat passed between them. Nash couldn’t meet Kiran’s eyes, and he could sense that she was looking anywhere but at his face.
“Well…it looks like it was my turn to make things awkward,” Kiran said after a few moments, offering him a small smile. “I’m sorry if I hit a sore spot.”
Nash shifted his weight. “It’s not a sore spot. It’s a…it’s a void. She’s gone.”
“Tell me, Nash.”
Maybe it was the alcohol. She said his name like a tender lullaby, and it disarmed him completely. He was unused to endearments and softness.
And her eyes—how had he not noticed the depth? Until he’d looked at Kiran’s eyes, brown had always been a shade so dark that details didn’t exist…but now, even in the muted lights of the city, he saw her irises cast light like whiskey bottles in sunlight or honey fresh from the comb. Clear. And deeper than he’d ever imagined.
“My mom,” he said, his voice croaking on the words. It had been so long since he said them. “My dad… Sorry, I don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning,” she said gently. She put her beer on the ground and leaned in a few inches.
Nash took a deep breath, willing himself to think back to twenty-five years ago, when his first memories came to the surface.
“My dad was amazing,” he started. “I guess every kid thinks so, but he was a nice guy. My parents were young when they got married. Just out of high school, I think. My mom got pregnant immediately afterward. Maybe beforehand. She worked as a receptionist, and he was a mechanic who tinkered in shop class and got himself a job at a beat-up auto shop. They had me, and I like to think they were happy for a while.
“Then my mom lost her job…and she couldn’t get another one because most people required college degrees—and who would want to hire a teenager with a baby and no degree when they could have someone educated, reliable, and single? My parents had bought a really small trailer to live in, and my dad was struggling to pay the bills, I guess, on one income.
“The story gets muddled here. I don’t know what’s fact and what’s speculation.”
He looked at Kiran, who was hanging on his words, and was mollified when she didn’t look away. Her eyes were trained on his face, unmoving and fortifying him.
“My aunt Kate says my mom got bored being a stay-at-home mom and got back together with some of her high school friends, who were all in a partying phase. My dad, who already couldn’t afford a house, a wife, and a kid, couldn’t handle the partying. My mom said my dad fell out of love with her. All I remember is them fighting and the door slamming, and my mom leaning up against it and crying. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Nash,” Kiran sighed sadly and imperceptibly shook her head.
“Eventually, we lost the trailer. We moved into a rough neighborhood. I…”
“You what?”
“I stole. I mean…I didn’t think it was stealing at the time, but my mom had me ask neighbors for lunch money. She’d take my hand and hold onto my shoulders and mention to the neighbors that she’d be paid Friday from her gig at the gas station, but she needed to buy me a sandwich. And she’d collect all this money, and we’d still go hungry. I’m not sure what she did with it, but I know I wasn’t getting any sandwiches with it. Maybe it went toward alcohol.”
Kiran’s hands made a sudden movement, as though they were about to fly to her mouth, but she forced them into place on her lap.
“It wasn’t all bad. I had Brandon and his family…and my aunt Kate, my mom’s sister, who tried to help her.” At the mention of Kate’s name, Nash couldn’t help but grin. “She took care of me. Ice cream trips. School shopping. Doughnuts for every time I came home with good grades. I’d find ten dollars with Post-it notes in my backpack all the time. I think my mom knew about those, but she didn’t touch them. They were my special gifts, and for all her flaws, she respected that.
“And my mom tried. Eventually, she sobered up for a while. She tried to come to some of my basketball games. She asked me if I wanted to go to college someday when she realized I was at the top of my class.”
“Did she try and help you?” Kiran asked. “My dad didn’t go to college, but he’d come home with information about schools, and I’m not sure where he even got it from.”
Nash nodded, letting out a chuckle. “She actually spoke to one of my counselors, I think. He called me into his office in tenth grade, saying he’d gotten calls every day that he needed to meet with me and tell me what my options were, even though counselors were scheduled to do that during junior year anyway.
“Junior year rolls around. She’s doing okay, my mom. She’s got a job at a restaurant as a waitress. She works long hours, but she seems happier. Turns out, she’s seeing this guy. She’s excited about him, you know? Like her face glowed for the first time in my life and her skies were blue. She seemed more energetic, tried to cook more often, spent time at home talking to me. She got thinner, put on more makeup, and took care of how she looked. She had so much energy. We got closer.”
Nash’s words were coming faster now, as though he was watching a reel of his life spinning in front of his eyes. He was taken back to various ages in his life: five, ten, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, like a train running out of control and heading toward a destination that he couldn’t go back and change but that he didn’t want to think about.
“I found the needles, spoon, and drugs in her drawer when I was looking for cash for milk. It was in this tin box…those cookie boxes you get for Christmas with those awful store-made shortbread cookies? It was green. I don’t know why I remember that.
“I confronted her. Told her I didn’t want to live with a junkie. That I didn’t want to lose her. That we were finally on our feet and I was proud of us. She promised she’d get clean and that she’d break up with the boyfriend who had gotten her into it. And for a while, it seemed like she was on the up and up. I’d check the dresser sometimes and other places in her bedroom, and there was nothing to be found.
“I got into Vanderbilt. The funny thing is, I didn’t tell her first. I told Brandon’s family and Kate. They wanted to celebrate, but I really wanted to tell my mom. It felt like I’d finally done it…like I’d beaten the odds and maybe I could lift us out of this with a little more hard work. We could live in a nicer apartment. I could have a bed that wasn’t pushed up against a wall in the living room. We’d be able to afford a car if I graduated with my degree.
“I came home with this giant envelope, and there she was at the table, with that goddamn cookie tin.” His voice grew hard.
“Oh, Nash, I’m so sorry. What did you do?” Kiran whispered.
“I just silently slid the envelope across the table. I don’t even remember what I said—if I said anything at all. I stared at her. She cried and told me she’d get help. I stayed with Brandon’s family for a few months while she went to a rehab facility that his dad recommended.
“By the time she’d gotten back, I was into my senior year and working at Dr. McGuire’s—Brandon’s dad’s—medical practice as an assistant. Basically, I ran and got him things, made coffee, cleaned up. I was saving up for college. She was clean. Graduation was approaching.
“I asked her to come to graduation sober and to be proud of what we’d done, because we hadn’t let life’s shit get to us and we’d made it this far. I remember how happy she looked. She smiled and told me she loved me and that it would be an honor to come to my high school graduation and she couldn’t wait to see me walk across the stage at my college commencement either. We joked we’d go to Disney World when I did that, on our first family vacation with the two of us—like a redo of the time we went with my dad. A do-over.”
Pain scratched lines into Nash’s face as he spoke. “It was about a week before our ceremony. We’d finished finals and the rest of the school was taking theirs, so we had a few days off where all the seniors would goof off. We had picnics, parties, field trips… Brandon and I had gotten back from a friend’s bash, and I needed my swim trunks for a trip to the pool.
“When Brandon pulled up to the housing complex, there were police cars at the apartment, and one of the cops was speaking to Kate. She was teary, trying to explain that my mom had called her and sounded out of it, apologizing for something and saying my name over and over.
“I don’t even remember pushing past the police trying to get in the door, but I unlocked the apartment, and there she was.”
Kiran’s lips had parted, and her hands were clasped as though she were praying—but Nash knew prayers were too late now. They were too late even back then.
“She was on the kitchen floor. She’d been dead a couple of hours. An overdose.”
Kiran’s hands flew to her face, her skin pale in the night. “Nash…”
He shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”
But he closed his hands into fists and crossed his arms, certain he could still feel his mother’s cooling skin on his fingertips and the paramedic’s hands on his shoulder as they pushed him away and tried to resuscitate her. The tiled roof around him transformed into cheap linoleum kitchen flooring, and he was no longer a thirty-year-old man but eighteen, a week before his graduation, with the echoes of Kate’s cries howling in his ears. He stared into space, recalling how his mother’s eyes had done the same thing—still, unmoving, and blank…and maybe even a little relieved.
Arms around him brought him back to the rooftop in Manhattan.
“I’m so sorry,” Kiran whispered into his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
He hugged her back, resting his hands on the curve of her waist.
“It was a long time ago,” he whispered again.
“You’re here now,” she said as she pulled back and searched his face.
Despite the pinpricks behind his eyes, ones that he knew he wouldn’t give in to—he never had—he wasn’t broken. Kiran was right.
He was here.
He was alive. He’d made it through Vanderbilt. And while the loss of his mother wasn’t one he spoke about often, as he felt Kiran’s hands on the back of his neck as she hugged him again, he couldn’t think of a single place he would have rather been.