I don’t tell him I didn’t have much choice. With my spotty work history and lukewarm references, employment had gotten harder to come by. The whole thing where I’m not good with people isn’t self-deprecation, it’s my reality.
“Did you grow up in the house you’re in now?” he asks as we take our empty dishes back to the kitchen and clean up.
I nod. “The house has been in my family for three generations now. I’ve lived there almost my whole life.” It’s getting old, and it’s a little rundown, but it’s mine. The one place in the world where I feel truly safe.
“Almost your whole life?” Tristan prompts, closing the door on the dishwasher.
“I moved further up the coast for a few years after high school, while I was doing my training.” Mainly to prove to myself I could go out into the world and be all right. It turned out to be less true than I’d hoped. Mum pretended to understand my need for independence, but I know it broke her heart when I left.
Tristan puts the kettle on to boil before taking out some mugs and a cannister of tea.
I grin at the familiar sight. “You bought my favourite tea.”
“Thought it might be good to have some handy,” he says with a sidelong glance. “Plus, it’s growing on me.”
We carry steaming mugs into the living room and sit on the couch. I sink back into the softness. At least this part of Tristan’s home is comfortable.
“You moved back in after your mum passed?” he asks.
“It was either that or sell the place, which I would never do. So, yeah, I went home.” I was heartsick from grief and consumed with guilt over leaving Mum to live on her own, knowing she had no one else. My frequent visits would never compare to living with another person. If the heart attack hadn’t taken her, the loneliness would have.
I’d told myself it wasn’t selfish to leave, to try for a bigger life. But, in truth, the life I’d reached for never sat comfortably around me. During those two years, I’d struggled to hold down a job on top of keeping up with my studies. I’d struggled to make friends. The sheer force of my anxiety had worn me down and my awkwardness dogged my heels every step of the way. After all that fighting and trying, I’d ended up right back where I started. The worst of it, the very worst of it, was how relieved I was to go home.
“Will you tell me about your mum?” Tristan asks, pulling me from my thoughts.
“She was a beautiful person,” I tell him. “Smart, funny, kind. She loved me very much.”
Tristan’s lips turn up in a sad smile. “Sounds like she was a great mum.”
“She was,” I say, nodding quickly. Then my gaze catches on the photo of Tristan and Claire, sitting on the bookshelf behind the couch. If I want to learn more about the things that haunt Tristan, I’ll need to reveal my own ghosts. Trust goes both ways.
“That’s not entirely true,” I begin, my mouth dry and my skin twitchy.
He frowns. “What do you mean?”
I stare down into my empty mug, not at all sure I’m doing the right thing, revealing myself this way. Just me, as I am now, is already so complicated and high maintenance. Adding the weight of my childhood is unseemly. But if I’m going to scare him off, I’d rather do it sooner than later.
“Mum suffered from agoraphobia. It started before I was born but got worse over the years. She became unable to work, then unable to leave our neighbourhood. By the time she died, she hadn’t left the house in several years.”
Tristan reaches out to take the mug from my lax fingers before putting them both on the coffee table. “That must have been hard, for both of you.”
“For years I didn’t realise the way we lived was unusual. We had each other and she taught me everything I thought I needed to know. How to read, how to count, where the different countries were. She was a good teacher.” If academic knowledge were all I needed, I would have been fine.
“What about family?” he asks. “Friends?”
“We didn’t have family. I do remember playing with the other kids in the neighbourhood when I was really young, but I never left my own yard and as we got older, they stopped coming over. For years it was just me and Mum. I didn’t see or interact with anyone else, except at the grocery store or the doctor’s office. The cafe down the road,” I add with a small smile.
“Eventually, Child Safety Services showed up at the door. We don’t know who called them.” I have my suspicions. Mrs Nguyen once told me how happy she was to see me still at home. She’d looked on the verge of tears when she said it. The probable cause of her distress hadn’t clicked until years later. “It doesn’t matter. I realise now it needed to be done. At the time, my mother was too busy drowning in her own guilt to be angry at whoever dobbed us in. When the Child Safety Officer realised I was fed and clean and loved they decided I could stay—on one condition. I had to attend a regular school.
“You can imagine what the first day was like. Twelve years old and I’d never seen the inside of a regular classroom before. I’d never been surrounded by kids. The noise seemed deafening. I didn’t know how to talk to other kids or make friends. They played games I’d never heard of and sang songs I didn’t know. Even the words I used sounded weird to them because the only real conversations I’d held were with a woman in her thirties.” I laugh, but it’s not funny. “There were all these social niceties I couldn’t get quite right and little ways I was out of the loop. Everyone thought I was weird. So I learned I was weird.”
Tristan swears under his breath, his hands reaching for me. “That sounds bloody awful.”
“Yeah, it was.” Really, terrifyingly, traumatisingly awful. “It got better over time. I found a couple of kids I got along with. I started to read the books everyone else read and listen to the same music on the radio. I started to talk more. I met Yolanda.” This time my smile is genuine. “It all helped, but I never got to the stage where I felt like I fit, you know? I always stuck out—obvious, different, inept.”
“Were you angry at your mother?” he asks, gently. “For isolating you all those years?”
“No,” I say, firmly. I talked to one of my meditation teachers about it once. She claimed I was a victim of child abuse. Anger had flooded me until my whole body shook with it. The idea of my sweet, loving mother as a child abuser was absurd. I’d told the woman she had no idea what the hell she was talking about and left the room to stop myself yelling at her. I knew what the strength of my reaction meant, even as it happened, but it took a long time for me to be ready to deal with it.
