Someone Else's Shoes(91)

He doesn’t seem convinced. “What about genuine warmth? Love? The desire to do something because you care about someone else?”

“Well, that, too. Of course. I mean . . . I probably wasn’t expressing myself very well.” She feels awkward, wrong-footed, as if she has revealed something she didn’t mean to expose.

He stops at a crossing. She feels his eyes on her and makes sure she looks straight ahead. She thinks he is about to criticize her, say something else about the way she views relationships, but when the lights change, he says, “You look different today.”

Her hand goes to her head. “Ugh. I know. My hair needs cutting and I only have mascara—”

“No. You don’t need lots of makeup. You look . . . beautiful. Happier.”

She bristles slightly in her jacket. “I don’t know why. I have absolutely nothing to my name right now.”

“You have self-respect. You have friends. You have satisfaction every day, of a job well done. You have agency over your own life. These are not small things.”

“Do you never give yourself a day off from this Hallmark stuff?”

He grins. “No.”

She walks for a few strides in silence. Then she says, in a small voice, “I don’t have my son.”

He stops.

“Honestly—I’m happy for around fifteen minutes and then I remember I don’t have my son. He’s been alone for so long. His dad—his dad thinks he . . .” She swallows and takes a breath. “The thing is, Ray—my son—he’s had some emotional issues—probably because he’s spent so much time without his parents being around.”

Her gaze flickers sideways. Aleks’s head is dipped, as if he is listening. “Ray is just . . . he’s the greatest kid. Really. If you met him you’d get him, I know it. He’s smart, and funny, and gorgeous, and kind . . . He knows things—he knows all sorts of stuff I never knew. He’s really good on people. He understands them. But his dad seems to see Ray’s sensitivity and—I don’t know—his sexual orientation as some kind of negative reflection on him. Carl is, like, a caveman. The kind of guy who believes men can only be straight, tough and macho. He hasn’t allowed Ray to travel with us for ages, not for the last couple of years. There was . . . there was an incident a while back. Ray had a bad breakup—first love, you know?—and there was some bullying in his last school and that and all the issues with his dad kind of came to a head. It’s hard enough being fifteen at the best of times, right? But Ray, he—he kind of hit rock bottom. And that to Carl was like—well, it was like the final straw. He saw it as weakness. He cannot abide what he sees as weakness.”

She still cannot even say the thing, the incident, as they called it, for months afterward, before Carl stopped allowing any mention of it at all. The trip in the ambulance, the stomach pump, the hushed warnings to keep all sharp objects and medications locked away for the foreseeable future. She cannot look at Aleks’s face as she speaks. The words are tumbling out of her now, heedless of the enormous lump in her throat, and they keep coming. She is oblivious to the rain, and the cold, and the stationary cars pumping lead into the air beside the traffic island. For the first time in her life she cannot stop talking. She realizes Aleks has taken her hand.

“It was scary. Really scary. And Ray went to a residential facility—a school for kids who have issues, you know? It’s very good. Lots of psychiatrists and special doctors and activities to help kids through it. I mean it comes highly recommended, this place. Super-expensive. Half of Fifth Avenue’s kids have been through its gates, the kind of exclusive thing that the families don’t admit to but people whisper about. And I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t. I agreed because I thought maybe that was going to be the best thing for him. What do I know about good parenting? I come from a long line of fuck-ups. I’m not even very good at friendships. I thought if he went there he wouldn’t have to cope with Carl’s rejection every day, his moods. I thought maybe I could gradually soften Carl, bring him round, make him see how great his son is. But Carl didn’t even want to talk about him once he’d gone. He just wouldn’t talk about him. When he realized he wasn’t going to be not gay, it was like Ray died for him. And then life got really complicated and I guess I took my eye off the ball. I was so busy, and traveling so much, and struggling to keep me and Carl on track.

“I thought we were going through a patch, you know? Maybe a mid-life crisis or something. I’ve seen so many marriages fall apart and I thought I needed to stick by him, to work through it. I thought that would give Ray stability. I thought it would . . . give . . . Ray . . . stability.”

She stops, as a babbling group of schoolchildren feed past them in a moving snake, the teacher holding a red stick aloft. She watches as they cross the road, then gives a tiny shake of her head.

“You know what? That wasn’t it. That was just what I told myself. I’m going to say something terrible to you. So terrible. You probably won’t want to hang out with me any more when you hear it.”

He is still holding her hand, but he has now wrapped both of his around it.

“If I’m honest, I guess I didn’t want my life as it was to stop. I wanted Ray’s problems to just go away. I didn’t feel like I could deal with it all. I wanted to live the life I had carved out, you know? It had already cost me so much. I was afraid that if I lost Carl I would end up where I’d started. I’d be that sad, powerless little person again. So I kept hoping they could fix my family. They could fix Ray.