Push(99)

“Don’t say that,” he says emphatically. His voice sounds a bit angry, and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. “Don’t hurt for me. I can’t stand the thought of you hurting. Especially because of me.” His knees are folded up against his chest, and his arms are wrapped around them. He looks straight out over the city.
“I can’t help it,” I say quietly. “That’s what happens when you love someone. Sometimes you hurt for them. Sometimes you want to take the pain they are feeling and put it on yourself instead.” The sun is just starting to go down, and I can’t take my eyes off of him, even though I know he won’t look back at me.
“But you can’t, Emma. You can’t make it better. It’s impossible. Because it isn’t hurt and pain I feel about my mother. It is seething anger. I am angry at her and at my father and at myself. I am angry that I couldn’t fix things for them, no matter what I did.”
“Fix what?”
“Everything,” he says, resting his chin on his knees. “Emma, my mom spent a good part of her life in a deep depression. That’s what I meant when I said she was broken inside. I watched her sink so deep into herself that she stopped caring about everything. I watched her stop eating and washing and talking. I tried to take care of her, and I tried not to rile up my dad. I tried to turn chaos into control. I tried to make it better for both of them, but I couldn’t. And then I watched her die right in front of me, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.” I hear a mixture of sadness and hatred in his voice. David unfolds his arms and reaches into his back pocket. He pulls out his wallet and takes out a piece of paper. I watch him unfold it and smooth it down flat on the rock before passing it to me. It is warped and cracked and watermarked. I can’t read most of what it says because the ink is runny and splattered, and the sun is too low in the sky.
“What is this?” I ask as I look back up. His eyes are on me now. Watching me.
“It’s the note my mother pinned to my shirt just before she committed suicide. I was supposed to be asleep in the car.”
“Oh, David. Oh, no. No.” I look down at the note. I can see that it starts with “My bright little bird,” and I can make out something about whatever his father said not being true, but that’s all. She signed it “From your loving Momma.” I want to cry so badly. I want to crawl over to him and hold him against me. He was only eight f*cking years old. Eight. Who does that to a child?
“I woke up just as she was about to jump off a bridge with sandbags tied to her feet,” he says. He curls himself up again, into a ball, and hugs his legs.
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that two women in David’s life met such a brutal and tragic end—and each at their own hands. Both Anna and his mother jumped from a bridge. Both drowned. And both of their choices made him suffer far more than any man should. I want to squeeze myself in between his thighs and his chest and melt into him. I want to erase all the bad. I want to erase Anna and Lucia and Jenny and Kelsey and everyone else who has ever hurt him.
“I got out of the car and asked her what she was doing,” he continues, his voice soft and husky, “but I think I already knew. I think I knew for a long time that my mom was going to leave me somehow. I tried to grab her when she jumped, but I missed. And then I screamed at her. I think I told her to try to fly, to flap her arms or something. And when she didn’t, I jumped in after her. I felt around in the water for her for a long time, but it was dark and I couldn’t see. She died right in front of me, Emma, and I couldn’t save her.” By the time he finishes, he is crying. His body is heaving with sobs, and I wrap my arms around him. His face presses against the front of my shoulder, and I feel his tears seeping through the fabric of my dress. I am crying now, too. My skin is hot with anger—so much anger—for this woman and what she did to her own son. I should feel sad for her—like I do for Anna—but for some reason I can’t bring myself to pity her. He was a child, for Christ’s sake. A child. I am mad at David’s father for not being there for him, and I’m mad at David because I know that he feels as if it was his fault. But it wasn’t. How could it be? How could he think he was responsible for “fixing” his parents? How could he blame himself for his mother’s choice?
A few minutes later, he pulls away and wipes at his face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry to lay this on you, but...it’s f*cked up, right? I never told anyone that I tried to save my mom because I didn’t want anyone to know that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save my mother.”
I look at David’s face and think about how people all over the world are walking around with massive secrets bound to their backs, weighing them down until their knees scrape the ground. It isn’t just David and me. It is everyone. We all suffer at the hands of secrets, whether we are the cause of them or not. And we are a world of self-made martyrs because of it. We try so hard to hold on to our secrets because we are afraid that no one will understand or that we’ll somehow be judged because of them. People steal and lie and cheat and murder and ignore and deceive, and their victims wear the burden of these wrongs like some kind of godforsaken badge. I am guilty of it, and so is David. But I think David is ready to give up his martyrdom. I think, like me, he is ready to slough off his secrets and move on. He already recognizes that, without them, he wouldn’t be the man that he is. But now, I think he’s finally recognizing that maybe he’ll be a better man without them.