VI.
After Harlow left, I felt more alone than ever. Julian was confused about why I didn’t want to ride along with them to the bus station, but he finally let it go. The sympathetic glances they both gave me as they left were the absolute worst.
There’s nothing more humiliating than feeling sorry for yourself while watching other people feel sorry for you too. So of course I spent most of the time while Julian drove Harlow to the bus station moping around upstairs, feeling sorry for myself. I was going to stay up in the guest room the whole time, until Debra called up to me, asking me to come join her in the kitchen.
Once I went downstairs, I saw the kitchen was a blur of pots and pans. The whole room was filled with a delicious scent—a mix of fresh bread and spices and fried grease. Debra’s hands were coated with flour and her cheeks were smudged with some kind of sauce. She reminded me of Harlow for a moment and a sadness welled in my chest. I tried to push it aside.
“There you are,” she said, grinning at me. She walked over to the stove to check on one of the pots. “Looking good, looking good,” she mumbled to herself, and then turned back from the pot to me. “And how are you doing?”
I contemplated deflecting. I knew a standard “fine” would probably get me out of any uncomfortable talk. But I felt too worn down to bother with a lie. I took a seat on one of the kitchen stools, my feet dangling above the floor. “I’m not sure.”
Debra breathed audibly and then whistled to herself. “I hear you, sweetheart. That’s why I’m cooking. Whenever things feel overwhelming, I cook.” She pulled out a cutting board and started chopping up tomatoes. “What about you?”
“Hm?”
She looked over at me, her face glowing with genuine curiosity. “What do you do when you get overwhelmed?”
I thought about it for a moment. “I play the piano. Or I sit in my room and listen to music.”
She smiled a little but didn’t say anything. I knew what she was thinking, though. Julian’s daughter.
“This must be strange for you,” she said. She sprinkled herbs over the fresh tomatoes.
I nodded.
“It’s strange for us, too.” And then she quickly said, “Not in a bad way, of course.”
“I get it,” I said in a way that I hoped let her know that I wasn’t offended.
“You know,” she said, walking back over to the stove to check on a boiling pot, “you’re so much like your daddy when he was younger; he reacted the same way as you when he was overwhelmed. He’d always retreat up to his room to play the guitar after a big fight with his daddy. He’d have the volume turned up so loud it would shake the whole house.”
“They fought a lot?”
Something crossed over her face. Her lips pulled into a straight line. “I’m sure he told you about all that.”
“A little,” I admitted.
She opened the oven door and peeked inside. “Sometimes I think the problem between the two of them was that they loved each other too much. Same with him and your momma.”
I swallowed. The mention of my mother unsettled me slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Julian, he’s like his daddy. He feels things strongly. And sometimes that scares him. I think it makes him lash out because he’s afraid of how much he’s feeling. He gets distant and moody, just like his old man.” She swung a pot holder over her shoulder. “But maybe I’m just another old woman making excuses for my boy and my darling husband. But it’s what I like to think, so I do.” She smiled with her eyes. “That’s the best thing about life. You can think what you want to.”
“But Julian told me that Tom and him fought a lot because they had different ideas of what Julian’s life should be like. Was it the same with my mom? Did she want Julian to be someone other than he was?” Julian hadn’t given me the sense that Mom didn’t want him to pursue music. If anything, he’d given me the opposite impression.
Debra exhaled. She wiped her hands on her apron. “I can’t really speak for your momma. But concerning Tom, I’m not sure he wanted Julian to be someone different than who he was.” She paused and drew her eyebrows together. “Or maybe he did. I think the problem is that sometimes when we love someone, we see a certain version of them. And we get attached to that version. Convince ourselves that that’s the only version, the true version. So for Tom, Julian was his baseball-card-and-toy-train-loving little woodworking assistant. His mini-me.” She laughed at the memory and then her face went serious. “It was difficult for him to accept Julian the aimless and sometimes moody musician. But I believe strongly that we all have multiple versions of ourselves. And the true test of love is learning to accept all of those versions, even when it’s messy. Actually, especially when it’s messy.”
She ambled over to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot, and declared, “Looks like it’s all cooked up.” She turned off the heat. “So what I’m saying is that I think Julian and Tom got hung up on singular versions of each other. And then they told themselves a certain story about the other one. A story that wasn’t necessarily false, but it wasn’t the whole truth either.” She shook her head. “That’s one of the toughest things about love, right? The way the people we love are constantly changing and we have to learn how to accept those changes. Love isn’t a constant thing, you know? It’s active. It’s always growing.” She smiled again with her eyes. She wrung out her hands. “But what do I know? You probably think I’m just a crazy old woman rambling nonsense at you.”
Before I could respond, Julian stepped into the kitchen. He lifted his nose dramatically into the air. “Something smells wonderful.”
Debra playfully hit him with a dishrag. “No need to butter me up.”
“I’m being honest. It smells amazing.” He turned to me. “Doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It smells pretty great.”
And it tasted even better. We sat out on the back porch and crowded around the feast that Debra had prepared. In a big wooden bowl, she’d served a salad of fresh herbs, tomatoes, and mozzarella. The shining star of the meal had been the beer-battered catfish that she’d paired with smashed red potatoes and balsamic-drizzled green beans. My favorite part though, was the endless glasses of sweet tea—sugary, lemony, and poured from a large glass pitcher.
“I think I might burst,” I groaned as I shoved my plate away from me. I wanted to keep eating, but I didn’t think it was physically possible for me to fit any more food inside of my stomach.
“Don’t burst yet!” Debra said as she sprang up out of her chair. “We still have dessert coming.”
As Debra slipped back into the kitchen, I swiveled in my chair to face Julian. I had ignored him most of the dinner, but the delicious food had radically improved my mood. “Were all your family meals like this growing up?”
Julian shook his head and laughed. “Only special occasions. But Mom did always make me beer-battered catfish for my birthdays, because it was my favorite.” His eyes clouded over and he focused on the darkening sky. “It was my dad’s favorite dish, too. One of the few things we had in common.” He turned back to me, a sad smile on his face. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence it’s what Mom chose to make.”
I leaned back in my wooden rocker. Very aware of the fact that the seat I was sitting in had presumably been crafted by Tom. “Your mom seems to think you and Tom aren’t really as different as you seem to think you are.”
Julian’s sad smile disappeared. He drew his eyebrows together in thought. “I feel awful, because I think my bad relationship with my dad really affected my mom.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Debra was still in the kitchen. “My mom,” he continued, “she has the biggest heart of anyone I know. She just wanted us both to be happy, and I think it broke her heart that my father and I—our paths to happiness oftentimes seemed diametrically opposed. That put her in a tricky situation.” He sighed and took a sip of his iced tea. “I’ve always felt guilty for that. But you have to understand, my father and I hardly ever openly fought. It was more about what we didn’t say. My father was a quiet man, sometimes maddeningly so.”
“Is,” Debra said. We hadn’t realized she’d stepped out onto the porch. Her face was drained of color. She looked so much more exhausted than she had just an hour ago in the kitchen. “Your father is a quiet man, Julian. And he’s still alive.”
What she didn’t say was: He’s still alive, for now.
Julian bowed his head deferentially. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Mom.”
I got a shiver when I heard him say that. There’s an S.I.T.A. song called “Sorry, Not,” where Julian famously croons, “I’m sorry, Mom.”
It was too weird to hear it in context. To put faces and specifics to the emotion that I’d made my own. I guess that’s the magic of songs. The very best ones, they let you forget that they were written by someone about something that has absolutely nothing to do with you. Instead, you bend them to your life, matching the “you” of the song with whomever you want. The songs feel so much like your pain, your love, your longing, that you forget they were born from someone else’s.
“No,” she quickly said, setting a silver pie dish down in the middle of the table. “I’m sorry. I just can’t stop thinking about …”
“It’s going to be okay,” Julian said, but it felt like he was trying to reassure himself just as much as her. He stood up and gave Debra a tight hug. She let him embrace her but didn’t quite hug him back.
She sat back down in one of the wooden rockers. She leaned back, resting her arms on the armrests. Her posture reminded me of a tired queen about to announce her army’s defeat in battle. The sadness, but also the relief, that comes with the end.
“I’m sorry,” Debra said. “I didn’t mean to spoil the mood.”
“Mom,” Julian said. “You don’t need to apologize.”
“Please eat.” She gestured eagerly toward the pie dish. “It’s pecan pie. Another one of your favorites.” Then she looked at me. “And if I’m remembering correctly, your mother also loved my pie.”
As Julian cut himself a large slice, he said, “She sure did.”
Oak Falls, 1994–1998
Lena and Julian quickly fell into a routine. At first, they only saw each other three times a week, but before long, they were seeing each other every day. And it still didn’t feel like enough time.
Lena’s cousin was concerned. It wasn’t that she had anything in particular against Julian, except for the obvious—he wasn’t a fellow college student, and oh yeah, he was white, not Muslim, and didn’t speak a single word of Arabic.
“What does that matter?” Lena challenged her cousin one afternoon when they were sitting at the kitchen table, eating a snack of pita bread slathered with za’atar and olive oil.
“We’re in America now. Doesn’t it make sense that I should date an American?” Lena continued, switching from Arabic to English, and the language transition clearly caught her cousin off guard.
“You want to speak in English now?”
“It’s good for us to practice.”
Her cousin shoved more slices of pita in Lena’s direction. “If you marry an Arab, you won’t need to worry about your English.”
Lena bristled. “Untrue. I live in America, regardless of whom I marry. And maybe I won’t marry at all.” Then she added, “Or maybe I’ll marry Julian.”
“Allah y’eanna.” Her cousin blew on the top of her steaming cup of mint tea and sighed.
Lena stretched out on the floor of Julian’s bedroom. She was resting on her stomach, fiddling with her latest project. A miniature collection of women, all carved from pinewood. She’d recently become more intrigued with woodworking after speaking with Julian’s father about the craft.
She studied the miniature figurines. She liked the way they had turned out, but there was something missing.
There was no spark.
Julian slid down beside her and gently kissed her cheek. She turned to him and held out one of her figurines. “Tell me what is wrong with them.”
He took the figurine from her thin fingers and rolled it between his thumbs. “She’s pretty,” he finally said.
“But she’s not saying anything.” Lena sighed and flipped over onto her back. She snatched the figurine back from him. She studied her, and then glanced at the twenty identical copies of her. There was still a surge of pride that would rise in her chest when she observed her own art. This made her feel guilty, and worse, silly even. Childish. But she couldn’t help it. She was still unbelievably giddy that she was finally making art with her own two hands.
She just wished her own work wasn’t also a constant disappointment to her. She wanted to be better. There was an insurmountable gap between her ambitions and the actual product she was creating.
“Be patient,” Julian said. “Keep your ears open and listen. She’ll talk to you eventually.” He gestured toward all the figurines. “They all will.”
“How typical. The musician tells me to listen.”
Julian laughed and wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her close to him. He covered her neck with kisses. “It’ll come. You just have to trust it.”
“I’m not so good at trust, Oliver.”
“I know.”
It frustrated her endlessly that Julian was a more patient artist than she was. She’d wrongly assumed he would be more impulsive. That she would be the calm-headed and steady presence in their relationship.
When she’d first met him that one afternoon, she’d seen the fire inside of him. What she had slowly come to realize was that he kept his fire tucked away. It was always there—a steady simmer in his stomach—but he wasn’t prone to the types of fitful explosions that she was. Julian worked inconsistently on his music. He still worked at the diner, not that he took that job very seriously. He would often convince her to come by in the afternoons and he would sit with her at a booth, the two of them sharing a sub-par vanilla shake, him willfully skirting his server responsibilities.
When she would ask him about his music he would say, “Lena, I’m marinating.”
“Oliver,” she would answer, teasingly but still with a caustic bite to her voice, “marinating is for meat.”
“Be patient,” he would always say, kissing the space between her bushy eyebrows.
Lena was not patient, though. She dutifully worked on her art projects in between her studies. She still hadn’t dropped her premed classes. Her course load was brutal. She had long, grueling chemistry labs and hours and hours of biology homework, memorizing different organisms, mapping out the life cycles of trees.
She knew she should just quit, but quitting felt like fully untethering herself from home, from her promise to her mother. And she wasn’t quite ready to do that yet.
But Julian kept pushing her to.
“Habibi,” he would say, the Arabic word for sweetheart, which he had picked up from her. (She never bothered to explain to him that if he wanted to refer to her, he should say “habibti.” She enjoyed the slight grammatical error. Her American boy.)
“Why are you still wasting your time with that junk that you don’t care about?” Julian would ask.
When she was feeling combative and frustrated, she would snap, “Why are you still wasting your time at the diner? And when are you going to tell your father that you don’t want to run the store?”
But when she was feeling soft and vulnerable, usually when he’d catch her studying in the early-morning light, she’d say, “Because I owe it to my mother.”
“I would love to meet her,” he’d say.
“I’d love that too,” she’d say, and her heart would feel like it was bursting because of how true and untrue that statement was. As the months in America passed, it’d become harder and harder to conjure her mother’s face. She would look at the singular photograph she’d brought with her and slowly that image—that duplicated, glossy, and fake image—became the dominant one in her mind.
She ached for Jordan. Every morning when her eyelids fluttered and she found herself in Indiana instead of in her sun-soaked stone-walled bedroom back home, her insides would throb for a moment and then she would grit her teeth and whisper quietly to herself, “The first year is the hardest.” Sometimes when it was really bad, she would sit up in bed, curl her knees to her chest, press her kneecaps against her heart, and pretend she was back in Amman in that dusty, crowded apartment where she grew up. She would imagine herself sitting on the outside patio with her mother, her mother taking a long drag of a cigarette, Lena dipping a ma’amoul into a milky and sugary tea.
She tried to keep her pain hidden from Julian because she was embarrassed by it. As always, her greatest concern was being perceived as weak. It wasn’t a coincidence that all the miniature figurines she carved had secret holes in them.
Julian didn’t live with his family even though they lived in the same town. Lena found this impossibly strange.
“Your parents don’t mind?” she asked.
“No. They’re thrilled I’m out of the house.”
She frowned. “I doubt that.”
“Maybe my mom misses me a little,” he admitted.
Mrs. Oliver had a warm and generous personality. Like Julian, something inside of her simply glowed. Her frank way of speaking—her country drawl—and her button nose and freckled face had all endeared her to Lena immediately. The first time she’d met Mrs. Oliver, the woman had wrapped Lena up in a big bear hug, pushing Lena’s head against her bosom, and stroked her hair. “You poor thing. So far away from home.”
Coming from almost anyone else, such a personal gesture at a first meeting would’ve put Lena off. Angered her, even. After all, how did Mrs. Oliver know how she was feeling? But somehow Lena felt that Mrs. Oliver did know. And beyond that, that Mrs. Oliver really did care.
Julian’s mother frequently hosted Lena and Julian for dinner. They would join his little sister, Sarah, and Julian’s father, who was almost uncomfortably quiet. Lena would try to ask him a friendly question and he would respond with a monosyllabic answer.
“How are things at the store?” she’d say, carefully spreading one of Mrs. Oliver’s homemade jams across a biscuit.
Mr. Oliver would say something along the lines of “Good” or “Fine” and then ask Sarah about her day.
At first Lena had found Mr. Oliver to be rude. But as Lena grew to know Mr. Oliver better, she began to find him more endearing. Yes, he was impossibly quiet. But on the rare occasions when he did talk, she began to notice his dry sense of humor and self-deprecating wit. Like once, when she asked him about the store and he said, “We’re not Ethan Allen yet, but I’ll be writing to Santa again this year to ask him to grant my wish.”
“Dad!” Sarah had exclaimed, looking up from her plate, which was stuffed with Debra’s homemade macaroni and cheese and fried chicken thighs. “Santa doesn’t grant wishes. He brings gifts.”
“Same thing,” Mr. Oliver had said, casting a knowing sly smile in Lena’s direction.
“Plus, we’re all grown, Dad. We know Santa doesn’t exist,” Sarah continued.
“You don’t say?” he’d said, and reached over to muss up the top of Sarah’s head.
“I think,” Lena said once to Julian, “your father would understand if you just came out and told him. You need to stop making excuses about why you’re still screwing around at the diner instead of apprenticing at his store. If you just were honest, I really think he’d understand.”
Julian brushed this off. And whenever she would bring it up again, he would deflect.
“He can’t handle the truth just yet,” he’d say. Or: “I’m going to tell him next Christmas. Just give me some time.”
When Lena had first met Julian, she’d thought that he was as solid as concrete. But the more time she spent with him, the more she discovered that, like her miniature figurines, he had hidden holes.
The first time it snowed that year, Julian drove Lena to the foot of the highest hill in Oak Falls. Together they hiked to the top and sat on a blanket Julian spread out on the frozen ground.
“It’s so cold,” Lena said, her teeth chattering. She was fascinated by the ghostly presence of her breath. She breathed rings into the air.
“I can’t believe you’ve never seen snow before,” Julian said. Flakes fell lightly around them, dusting their jackets, sticking to the tops of their boots.
“Once in a while it snows in Jordan. I just didn’t stay long enough to witness that miracle.”
Julian gave her a toothy smile. “I can be your miracle.”
She snuggled even deeper into him. She still found his unbridled confidence charming.
In the distance, they watched a plane take off from the snowy tarmac. Oak Falls’ airport was small and only private planes flew in and out.
“Who do you think is on that plane?” Lena asked him.
“Our future selves,” he answered, grinning.
He tilted his head to the sky. “It’s cool to see the planes, but I’m sad the sky’s too cloudy to see any stars.”
“That’s okay,” she said softly, and rested her head on his shoulder. “I’ll wish on you.”
The winter of her senior year, the acceptance letters began to arrive. It didn’t take her long to settle on NYU. The plan had always been to go to New York. It was Julian, after all, who had first sold her on the idea.
“That’s where everyone who wants to be someone moves,” he’d told her, squeezing her hand. That squeeze an unspoken commitment. A promise.
At the time of Lena’s acceptance, Julian had recently switched from working at the diner to working at Mickey’s, the scene of their first date. Mikey, Julian’s best friend from childhood, was the son of the owner of Mickey’s. Mikey and Julian had gone to the same elementary school, been members of the same Boy Scout troop, and built and flown model airplanes together. Julian seemed pleased with his job change, and even more pleased that this change had helped to rekindle his friendship with Mikey.
Lena, though, was not pleased.
“When are you going to focus more on your music?” she would ask him. “When are you going to level with your father?”
“And when are you going to tell your mom that you aren’t actually planning to become a doctor?” he’d fire back.
And maybe he was right. Maybe her anxiety about his lack of progress in his music career was amplified by her feelings of guilt about what her mother would think of her life in America. She still hadn’t leveled with her mother about not wanting—and perhaps, more important, not studying—to become a doctor.
One night, when she was lying on the floppy twin mattress that served as a bed in Julian’s apartment, she imagined what her mother would think if she knew how Lena was living in America. She knew she needed to tell her mother the truth, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She talked to her mother twice a month for exactly fifteen minutes every time. This was before Skype and other means of communication that made long distance more bearable. Every conversation, her mother would ask, “Lena, habibti, are you being a good girl?”
And every time, Lena would answer dutifully, “Yes, Mama.” And each time it was more and more of a lie. The guilt felt like a swamp in her chest—impossible to escape and constantly growing.
“And your studies?” her mother would inquire.
“Wonderful, Mama,” she’d answer. She failed to mention that she was set to graduate in the spring, but not with a biology degree. And she definitely didn’t tell her mother about her acceptance to NYU’s MFA program.
She told herself she would tell the truth if her mother pushed harder. But her mother was always stoic on the phone.
She never even spoke of missing Lena. After she’d made Lena profess that she was a) being a good girl and b) studying hard, her mother used the rest of the fifteen minutes to fill Lena in on all the family gossip she was missing out on—which cousin had just given birth to a baby boy, which cousin had just gotten engaged, which uncle had just purchased a new German car.
Lena, who when she’d lived in Jordan had found that gossip inane, now lived for it. She’d cradle the phone as close as she could to her ear, as if willing her mother’s voice to reach out through the phone and embrace her. Her mother would often end the call by saying something that loosely translated to “Enjoy your life in the rain.” Lena knew she meant it goodheartedly—it was her mother’s way of expressing just how different America seemed.
Lena once told Julian about this and he’d lit up. “That’s so harsh,” he’d said. “And so beautiful.” A handful of years later, Julian would steal this phrase and use it for his hit song “Your Life in the Rain.”
For months, Julian had actually seemed to be making progress with his band. He’d assembled a ragtag group—Lena had actually introduced him to the keyboard player, Marty St. Clair. Marty had been her lab partner sophomore year and she knew he was itching to join a band. She’d put him and Julian in touch.
The band had been practicing several nights a week and managed, thanks to their bass player, Chris, to book a gig at a local dive bar. It wasn’t much. But they would be opening for a more popular campus-based band and hopefully inherit some of their fans.
Lena arrived with Julian’s family. His sister, Sarah, intertwined her arm with Lena’s and whispered, “Isn’t this so exciting? Can you believe it?” Debra seemed equally excited, but Mr. Oliver, in typical fashion, hung in the back, quietly observing everything.
It felt like they waited forever for Julian’s band to come on, standing around in a small room with a low popcorn ceiling; the room smelled aggressively of cheap beer and pot. But finally, Julian appeared on the stage. His eyes found Lena’s, and he smiled.
“Hi, y’all,” he said into the microphone, which Lena found weird. He’d never said “y’all” the entire time she’d known him. “I’m Julian Oliver and we’re Staring Into the Abyss.” There was a smattering of applause that seemed much bigger thanks to Debra’s big yelp.
The band started to play and at first, everything seemed fine. Not great. But fine. But slowly, Lena could tell that something was off. The beat—it wasn’t matching the pace of the lyrics. Julian would no longer look at her. His face was screwed up with frustration.
The crowd began to fidget. Everyone looking at one another as if to say, “Are they really this bad?” They all hoped the next song would be better.
It wasn’t.
It was worse.
Slowly the crowd started to talk among themselves. People peeled off to gather by the bar, to wait for the next band to come on. There were a few “boos,” but nothing dramatic. Later Julian would tell her that he’d wished there had been more “boos,” wished it had been more dramatic. Instead of just the sad, slow unspooling that it was.
After that gig, Julian quit his job at Mickey’s. He started working for his father.
“You’re not quitting music, are you?” Lena would press him.
He’d shrug her off. “I’m not quitting. I’m just being realistic.”
Lena swallowed her disappointment. She hadn’t fallen in love with him for his realism.
So she wasn’t that surprised when he told her he wouldn’t be moving with her to New York right away. But she was angry.
“I can’t leave my family,” he said, his voice knotted with tears.
“Just tell your dad that you want to be a musician. Not a goddamn woodworker!” Lena shouted at him. Her anger was palpable. She felt like she had betrayed and abandoned her family. Why couldn’t he do the same? Why couldn’t he just own who he was?
“I can’t, habibi,” he said, and he fell onto the ragged old armchair that was piled high with his dirty clothes.
She knew it was him, sitting in this chair, solid as ever, but she felt like she was seeing a stranger. “Then I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to New York and I never want to hear from you again.”
The words unsettled her as she said them out loud. But they were more like a wish than the truth at that moment. It took her more than two months to actually leave. There would be more nights like this. Worse nights. And long, painful days. There would be shouting matches and crying and apologies.
But in the end, she did leave. She packed up her bags and boarded a plane. On the flight, she gritted her teeth and reminded herself that this move was nothing.
You’ve crossed an ocean before, Lena, she reassured herself. What’s a couple of hundred miles?