Picture Us In The Light(57)

“But you just said—”

He drains the rest of his wine. His eyes are bloodshot. “It’s not a good job, Daniel. It doesn’t pay enough. So everything is still the same.”





My mom takes me to see the new place the day before we move in when she goes to sign the rental agreement. By car, which I’ll never get to use anyway because they sold my dad’s, it’s almost half an hour without traffic, off a freeway exit I’ve only ever driven past. It’s on a street with four lanes and a forty-mile-an-hour speed limit, all gray, everything gray, and cars that barrel past so relentlessly it’s a full five minutes before I can make the unprotected left turn into the parking lot.

The apartment has linoleum floors and stained matted carpet, a single bedroom and bathroom and all of two closets, a cramped balcony off the living area that overlooks a collection of dumpsters in the parking lot, and locked stairwells that feel like somewhere you get murdered. We’re on the third floor. Noise from the neighbors above and around us seeps through the walls: a faucet turned on, a toilet flushing, a short burst of laughter, and then nothing. I think, until seeing the place, I didn’t actually fully believe this was happening.

“You get the bedroom,” my mom says. She tries to smile. “Baba and I will sleep out on the couch.”

She’s nervous. I can tell she was dreading showing me this.

“Where are you even going to put your stuff?” I say stiffly.

“There is another closet outside on the balcony, too. It’s very big.”

“What about your garden?”

“I am writing an instruction manual for the next renters. Maybe sometimes after I leave the Lis’ I can stop by and check on—”

No one wants some random woman coming into their yard all the time. “What about your friends? How are you going to have everyone over for holidays now? What did they say?”

“We aren’t telling anybody.”

“What do you mean you aren’t telling anybody?”

“You never know what people—” She hesitates. “It doesn’t matter. Maybe we won’t see them so much anymore. People are busy, you know.”

She’s just not going to tell them and then, what, ghost them? Those are her best friends. I can’t imagine keeping something like this from Regina and Harry.

But maybe it shouldn’t surprise me at all. Apparently it doesn’t bother them to keep things from the people who need to know.

“I think your bed could go right here. Yes? Then if you put your desk right here you can look out the window while you draw.” She’s watching me, hopeful in a way that feels bracingly obtuse. She thinks I’m going to draw here? Like my life just went on the same way as always? I don’t answer.

“The closet is bigger than your closet at home, I think.”

Great. Perfect. Woo, a better closet. I have to leave my friends and my life and my home, but at least my closet picks up a few more square feet. “’Kay.”

“And the bedroom is nice, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s small, but has the big window.” She scans my face hopefully. “We thought about getting a studio apartment, because it’s less expensive, but then we thought, No, Daniel should have his own room. So we chose this instead.”

I don’t have it in me to answer that. I shouldn’t have come with her. I pull my phone from my pocket and pretend I got a text. At the door she pauses.

“It isn’t so bad, right?” she says. “Not as bad as you imagined.”

“Are you kidding me?”

I expect her to raise her voice in return, but she’s quiet. “You can stay here while I turn in the deposit,” she says finally, but a few seconds later I hear her slide the balcony door open instead. When I go into the living room I see her out there, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking.

And right on cue comes the same ugly feeling I always get in the aftermath of arguments, that guilt hangover. In the heat of the moment whenever we fight I want to hurt them, want to say something barbed and incisive, and it works for as long as they’re angry back, as long as my words have no powers of weaponry. When I do actually hurt them, my heart crumples like a piece of paper. I’ve heard it said the worst thing in the world is to get exactly what you want, and I don’t know how true that is, but it’s true when you win a fight with someone you love.

I should go out there and tell her it’s fine and that the bedroom is fine, is great, the window or whatever it was she pretended to like about the room is great. I should do it. I know what it’s like to look back on all those times you wish you’d said something different, chosen kindness so at least later on you’d still have that. I swore to myself I’d never do that again.

A train rumbles past. I stay in place, my chest tight. Outside a car goes by. A headlight flickers over her, illuminating her for one brief moment—she looks like a statue—and then casting her shadow, long and dark, back across the bare apartment walls.



Saturday night. My last night at home.

The walls in my bedroom are a ghostly, empty white again. My eyes keep forgetting—the space where my drawings used to pulse with life keeps catching me off guard when I see it in the corner of my eye. When my dad came in with the quart of paint he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He offered to help—I said no—and then he told me to make sure I took pictures of my walls so I had them someday. I know it cost him something to say that, to acknowledge what I was losing. Which is worse, actually—at least if he were flippant about it I could get pissed. It would feel at least briefly satisfying to just blow up.