My mom practically bounces on the balls of her feet in excitement as I lean in for a hug. She squeezes me tightly for a solid thirty seconds, then takes me by the shoulders. “Oh, sweetie, I’m just so glad you’re here!”
“Thanks,” I say, probably a little too sarcastically. Would it kill her to sound a tiny bit less thrilled that I’ve seemingly dropped a marble into a sort of Rube Goldberg machine of misfortune, the end result being my arrival back in Maryland?
I guess the thought shows on my face, because her smile turns contrite as she says, “I do wish it were under better circumstances, but it’s good to have you home. It feels like years since I saw my baby.” She releases me and pinches my cheek.
I frown and tilt my head, attempting to escape her crab fingers. “It’s only been six months, Mom.”
“And look how much has happened in those six months,” she says.
She has a point. When I was here for a brief visit over winter break, everything was goingsowell. My boyfriend, Cole, had accepted an assistant professorship at UMass Boston starting this fall, marking the end of three excruciating years of long distance. We’d be getting an apartment together at the beginning of the summer. And the chair of the history department at the small liberal arts college where I’d been teaching had promised me a multi-year lecturer position. I remember telling my mother how much of a relief it was to know I’d no longer need to plan my life in nine-month contractual increments.
Fast-forward to the first week of June and now there’s no Cole, no shared apartment, and, it turns out, not only no multi-year lecturer position but no position of any kind for me at Malbyrne College anymore. How much has happened in six months, indeed. (Although all of that actually happened within the last three days, because I’m nothing if not an overachiever.)
“Thanks for letting me stay here,” I say. “I promise it won’t be for long. I’ve already started looking for a new—”
“Nonsense. This will always be your home too, Ninabean. You stay as long as you need.”
“Thanks,” I say, tears nearly spilling out again. Ugh. The only time I’ve ever cried this much as an adult was when I babysat a colleague’s kids and they made me watch every episode ofBluey. “I’ll grab my stuff.”
She flicks her hands dismissively. “Leave it. We’ll have your father come grab it all. You know how he loves feeling useful.” I’m not sure this is actually true. My father loveshaving a task. Any task. Whether it’s a useful one or not doesn’t make much difference to him. The way I am with long-term goals, he is withextremely short-term ones. But I’m not going to complain about not having to haul everything inside on my own, in front of the neighborhood, in some sort of walk of shame designed specifically for adults upon whom life has recently shat. Mom links her arm with mine as if we’re off to see the Wizard and says, “Now, let’s get you settled inside. I made banana bread this morning.”
I sniffle. “With cookie butter swirl?”
“Of course, with cookie butter swirl. What is this, amateur hour?”
I follow her up the walkway to the house where I grew up—the one that apparently once again shares a wall with Quentin Bell, the first boy to ever break my heart.
•••
As soon asI enter my old bedroom after my mother has completed her maternal duty of stuffing me full of pot roast and baked goods while telling me all of the latest hot goss about locals I’ve either never met or don’t remember, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the dresser opposite the door. My splotchy, swollen face is framed by my high school friends’ senior pictures that I for some reason glitter glued to the wooden edges. All of those seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds posed in fields, leaning on fences, or draped in velvet in a photography studio, holding roses or band instruments or footballs. Those kids look ready to go out into the world, to reach their potential. And then present-day me, there in the center like Alice fromThe Brady Bunchif she’d showed up for filming the show’s opening the morning after a bender. Welp. I’m officially back at the starting line a decade and a half after the pistol sounded, looking as haggard and defeated on the outside as I feel on the inside.
It’s kind of hysterical. And not in a haha-this-is-so-funny way, but like a suffering-from-literal-hysteria way.
I don’t have time for a full emotional breakdown right now, though, because my father has caught up with me in the doorway. Considering there was a substantial period of time when he couldn’t even walk, it’s always reassuring to see him up and about. In fact, it seems he’s taken Mom’s request to unload my car as a personal challenge to do it in as few trips as possible. He was able to grab most of it in one go; he’s got my weekender and duffle slung over one shoulder, a large tote and another duffle over the other, and my suitcase trailing behind. All that’s left, I think, are a few boxes with my kitchen items and sentimental tchotchkes in the trunk. The books I shipped should get here in however long media mail takes to arrive. Everything else I already sold or donated over the last few months in preparation for my imminent move.
Cole and I were supposed to move into a gorgeous Somerville two-bedroom today. I thought we were equally excited about it, but apparently he was just a little more hyped than I realized. That’s the only reason I can fathom that explains why he decided to move intwo weeks earlyby himself. It had to have been that and not the reason he gave me: that he came up to Boston without telling me he was in town because he “wanted to enjoy the space a bit before he had to share it with someone.”
Because that’s totally fine and normal when it’d been four months since we’d last seen each other in person! Not at all a problem that, when I was texting him how disappointed and upset I was about losing my job and that I wished he were around to comfort me, he responded with stuff likeMe too, babe, when he was actually only two miles away, drinking with mutual friends at Backbar. Nothing wrong with it at all, accordingto him. In fact, when I told him that I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone I couldn’t count on or trust, his expression alternated between annoyed and confused for so long I thought I might have short-circuited him before it finally settled back into its usual flat dismissiveness.I don’t understand what the problem is, Nina. You weren’t expecting me until tomorrow anyway.
“Where’d’ya want me to put all this stuff, Ninabean?” Dad’s gruff voice brings me out of my thoughts like someone turning down the knob on a stove, and I no longer feel on the verge of boiling over. Instead, I’m back to the previous slow, steady simmer of ire and pain that seems like it might never fully evaporate.
“Over there on the floor is fine,” I say. “I’ll put it away later.”
He unloads everything at the foot of the twin bed, which still sports the bright orange and hot-pink floral comforter from JCPenney I begged my parents for when I was fourteen. It’s bold, I’ll give it that. Staring at the garish, narrow bed reminds me how much I already miss my queen-size mattress—the one I sold for twenty-five dollars on Facebook Marketplace last night to avoid having to strap it to the roof of my car and haul it all the way to Maryland. I have many fond memories of waking up in my small-but-sunny apartment in my soft cream linen sheets, burrowing farther beneath the soothingly neutral blush-brown duvet cover I paid too much for even on sale at CB2. I stare at my suitcase, where my beloved bedding is currently compressed within an inch of its life inside a vacuum bag. Symbols of a failed attempt at adulthood, packed away, while that orange-and-pink comforter waits for me, a print so loud it’s practically screaming. And not even some fun, irreverent message, likeWelcome back, bitch!but a steadyAhhhhhhhhh!that buries itself deep into my brain.
The last time I lived in this room, I knew it was temporary. Ihad plans—so many plans—to get out of Catoctin, to do big things, to succeed. Now I basically have to start over again, and I do not currently have the wherewithal to figure out how to go about doing that. It’s possible I will still be here when I’m fifty, sleeping alone in this loud, too-small bed. That thought, however melodramatic, makes my pulse race and my stomach drop. No way can I let that happen. I quickly add, “You can leave the boxes in the trunk. No point in hauling them in just to have to haul them back out in a few days.”
Dad gives a short hum of acknowledgment and a murmured goodbye as he leaves my room, almost certainly heading back to his basement workshop to fiddle with some rotary telephone or Swiss cuckoo clock he’s repairing for someone or bought at a yard sale to fix up and resell. I’m left alone, in my childhood bedroom, trying to determine whether it would be more depressing to settle in and unpack or to live out of my suitcase in a state of denial for however long I’ll be here.
Deciding that is a tomorrow-morning problem, I turn on a lamp and throw myself onto the bed. This place is basically a Teenage Nina Museum. I’ve been back to my parents’ house since moving away for college, have spent nights here with the debate tournament medals hanging from the doorknob and my collection of burnt CDs stacked precariously beside the massive old purple boom box. But during those brief visits they felt like someone else’s belongings—artifacts of the person I was before I grew up and left it all behind. What used to act as a reminder of how far I’d come now feels like a taunt.Not so far after all.
This blows.
I pull out my phone and check my email, my chest aching with the desperate hope that something good might be there. A surprise job offer, or maybe even an uncharacteristically self-awareand sincere apology from Cole (if I’m going to dream, might as well dream big). Of course my inbox is actually filled with increasingly desperate-sounding political fundraising emails and promotional messages from the fancy multi-tool store I purchased my dad’s Christmas present from last year. I’m about to close the app when I hear a quiet thump from the other side of the wall. My thumb freezes, hovering over my phone screen. My pulse pounds in my fingertips as I wait in absolute stillness to see if I can pick up any other sounds. A few seconds later, there’s a louder thump and the whine of a door.
Quentin.
I sit up, tossing my phone onto the bed as an intense urge hits. I don’t actuallywantto do it. In fact, a distinct sense of nausea that comes with a particularly severe wave of anxiety takes hold of my stomach as soon as it occurs to me. Yet I still find myself sliding down onto the floor, sitting beneath the room’s only window. It’s a reflex, like when the doctor taps at your knee with the little hammer. It’s as impossible to resist this as it is that involuntary kick. Embarrassingly, it was such an ingrained habit I even resorted to it a handful of times after Quentin moved away. Not that anyone answered then. No one will probably answer now.