I nodded, no longer capable of speaking. A heartbeat was echoing in my ears. I didn’t know if it was mine or his.
“But promise me you won’t fall in love with me out of pity,” he whispered timidly.
I laughed and tried to hold on to that splinter of joy Trey had managed to find. And the feeling of it spread through my arms and legs like a warm, restoring bath.
This wasn’t a trivial moment. Nothing that was happening to me there was trivial. Nothing at all.
16
Leave a Mark on Their Lives
I want…
I couldn’t sleep, and I kept repeating those two words over and over.I want, I want, I want…They reverberated inside me. It was painful, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
I sat on the windowsill and leaned my head against a pane of glass. Outside, the night swallowed everything.
You just have to believe in yourself, Trey had said. But I also needed to get my thoughts in order, meditate on my dreams, choose which of them mattered most. And that meant no longer being so scared of rejection that I strove to satisfy people, to impress them and live up to their expectations.
Accept all the times I tried to say no and said yes instead.
I thought of all I had accomplished up to then. Being a model student with grades that had brought me the admiration of my professors, an internship at a prestigious publisher that a lot of people would have sold their soul for…and? What else? Those two things summed up my entire life. Study and work. Every damned hour of the day.
And my father still didn’t see me.
Because that discomfort in my chest was always about him.
I felt terrible.
Nothing I ever did would be enough. Nothing.
Another what-if occurred to me. Another maybe.
And I started panting, and my lungs burned.
Why was I still trying to deny it?
I would never win him over. I’d never get his acceptance. Or his admiration. Or his… love.
For sixteen years, I’d been trying to make a place for myself in his life. How much longer would I have to keep going before I could convince myself it would never happen?
To hell with him! I was the one who mattered!
I tried to dig around in myself and find a shred of happiness, no matter how tiny, for all the things I had, for all I’d done, without any help from anyone. And what I found was nothing.
Emptiness.
Just plain emptiness.
I didn’t have friends. Not real friends, not the kind you go out to dinner with, take vacations with, the kind who want to share your thoughts. The closest were my brother and sister. But I hardly ever saw them; we just talked on the phone.
I was totally, horribly alone.
Alone and empty.
I had deceived myself, thinking it wasn’t that way. Had used my time wisely. Had set goals, overcome challenges, kept climbing upward. I’d imagined myself in a big office. My name in the papers. My photo in one of those lists of most influential people. Touching the sky. Being a star. None of it would be enough to make him say those four words, the four words that mattered most to me:I’m proud of you.
I walked over to the bed, tossed the pillow aside, and picked up my book and my grandmother’s letter. I reread it. I hadn’t done that since I’d left Montreal.
