Mary Kate Prince
Hey, Mary Kate. I know this is random, but just thought you should know…the reason I really left is because I think your son is falling for Robert. Sorry. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.
“Susan,” I tell my sister, who is in my room to borrow my Chi straightener, after I read the text from David. “Get me some Pinot Grigio, please. Now.”
“What?” Susan asks, barely glancing back. “It’s ten in the morning, and why do you sound so faint, anyway? My husband said-”
I shove the text in front of her face, then listen as she sets down the straightener.
“Gotcha, then. One bottle, comin’ up.”
At first I don’t want to believe it. I want to think David is just being jealous and crazy. But then the signs start adding up in my head. The way they kept disappearing, the way there was always a sort of tension in the air around them, the way Eliot keeps wanting to talk to me about Robert, when they never even knew each other to begin with…
It dawns on me slowly until falling on top of me all at once, like a house dropping onto a witch in the land of Oz. Oh my God, I’ve been so depressed about my divorce, I think I just overlooked the fact that my son wants to sleep with my ex-husband.
At that very moment I turn out toward the back yard. My stomach flinches – it’s them. There they are. Right there. They’re walking out to the dock area together, and something in the way their bodies are situated, something about the look on Eliot’s face, makes me lose all the feeling in my body.
I know Halvard Eliot Prince better than anyone in the world. I delivered him via emergency caesarean section at 12:47 PM while watching The Young and the Restless on a Wednesday afternoon. And David was wrong – Eliot isn’t “falling” for Robert.
Eliot is already in love with him.
~
Later that day I’m collapsed in the bathtub, my bottle of wine dangerously close to empty as I mess with the faucets with my feet.
I should’ve known. I should’ve fucking known. I invited my son, who is so gorgeous his own high school teachers were known to joke amongst themselves about having crushes on him, on vacation with my ex-husband, who is also so attractive he gets hit on by both sexes – and even crazier, women don’t even care that he’s gay. Even after Robert came out, women would pursue him, knowing he probably wouldn’t be interested. But they still tried anyway. Eliot has looked like an adult since he hit the ninth grade, and Robert simply does not age. Of course this was going to happen. Of course. I am so stupid…
At first I want to think Eliot has betrayed me. But this isn’t about me at all. It’s not really like there was anything to betray in the first place. If I’m being honest with myself, we haven’t had a relationship in years. Not where it counts. And all because I bungled his “coming out” worse than anything I’d ever bungled with him.
There were signs, of course – the Kelly Clarkson posters, the strange way he would become a little obsessed with certain male friends, and find ways to unnecessarily mention them and bring them up all day – but I just didn’t want to face it. I didn’t care about what he was – I never did at all. I was just terrified to the point of paralysis. I was terrified for him, and terrified that I’d say the wrong thing and mess it all up, too. Because when Robert “came out” to me, I made every mistake in the book. I couldn’t do that again. And when I get scared, I shut down and shut the person out of my head.
So when Eliot finally opened his life to me and told me he was gay, I freaked out and pretended it never happened. I fucked everything up, but I didn’t know how to fix it. In the three years since then, we’ve maintained a completely shallow relationship. His sexuality is his identity, his life, and I don’t know how to talk about it – so that leaves nothing for us to talk about. Now it’s all just a big mess, a slow-motion train wreck. I don’t even know my own son, and now he’s falling in love with my ex-husband.
Jesus Christ. Maybe I did this. Maybe I pushed Eliot away so thoroughly, he went into the arms of Robert. Once I overheard something out of my mother’s mouth, back during one of my tantrums when Eliot was five or six, that I wished I’d never heard at all: “Some people just aren’t meant to be parents.”
She was right, of course. I’m a bad mom, and it’s something I’ve struggled with my entire adulthood. Sometimes I hate myself so much I can’t even look at him. Motherhood is propped up in society as the best and most valuable thing a woman could ever do; everything else is considered secondary. And from the first moment, I just wasn’t natural with it.
I got too stressed out, I got overwhelmed by little things, I required too much alone time to ever really “be there” for him one hundred percent. Some women acted like motherhood completed them. All it did was make me feel even more incomplete. How could I ever be there for someone else when I had a kid at barely twenty years old and didn’t even know who the hell I was, myself?
The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s also hard to really hate Robert for this. I’m not saying it’s not shocking. Clearly he stepped over some huge lines. But it’s never as simple as it seems. Sure, I can look at this in black-and-white, in yes-or-no, right-or-wrong terms. But this is more complicated than that. I’m the one who knows Eliot better than anyone. And someone would be stupid not to love my son.
People around Eliot have a tendency to become hopelessly devoted to him – there’s just something about him that endears him to people. I’ve seen little teenaged girls make fools of themselves over him, and he never realized any of it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when poor David hatched that stupid plan to keep him around by giving him a ring. It was crazy, but it wasn’t any more far-fetched or useless than when this girl Rebekah asked me if she should hire a sky-writing plane to ask him to homecoming. (And of course David is trying to get revenge by ratting out Eliot to me, that little worm. I’ll never tell Eliot, but I was happy when he left.) By now I’m used to the grand gestures. I just didn’t think any gestures would come from my former husband.
For a moment I wonder what they must be like, how their dynamic is developing. I know it’s weird, but I can’t help myself. When I wasn’t acting like a maniac, Robert was the most caring person in the world – he’d pull the car off the highway just to pick me some wildflowers he’d spotted, or he’d write me a handwritten note on some computer paper for no reason at all. I wonder if he’s doing the same for Eliot, and then I cringe and smile at the same time. But then it changes into a full-on smile, making me more confused than ever.
What is wrong with me? Why am I smiling about this?
Then I realize – nothing is wrong with me. All I ever wanted, from the moment they put Eliot into my arms twenty-two years ago, was for him to be happy. And I failed. I want his happiness now more than ever – I had gay friends in school, and I would see the way the majority of the world would isolate them, freeze them out in a million little ways, never fail to let them know they were different.
So I think about it from a different angle. If my son really has found happiness, who would I be to begrudge him of that – especially after the kind of mother I’ve been to him?
And there’s always the other option. Eliot is an adult, and an incredibly independent and mature one, to boot. What if I forbid him from seeing Robert, and he does it anyway and cuts me out of his life for good? Our relationship has always been precarious. What if this is the final nail in our coffin?
A deep, guttural cry escapes from my throat, but instead of sounding angry, it’s more frustrated and overwhelmed.
I sink deeper into the tub and finish off the bottle. That’s when I know this can go one of two ways: I am going to kill both of them, or I am going to have a total meltdown, spill my guts to Eliot in a way I have never spilled before, give him my blessing, and walk away.
I just have no idea which option is going to actually happen. And right now, the “murder” option is fully possible…