“I came to see my grandfather. I wanted to know how he was, and I wanted to talk to him a bit. And this was the only way to do it.”
“It’s inappropriate, barging into someone else’s house like this.”
“Why would I call? So you could find an excuse to keep me from coming? No thank you.”
“Don’t you speak to me in that tone, Maya.”
“Did you honestly believe for one second thatIwould come here to ask forgiveness fromyou? I have nothing to apologize for. I never did anything wrong.”
“Oh, you did nothing wrong? You’ve always been an embarrassment, and you’ve never appreciated everything I…”
“Listen to you: I, I, I, me, me, me. Just stop it! It’s not about you and it never was. It was always me: my life, my career, my efforts.”
“How dare you say that!”
“It’s the truth, though. You treated me like a thing, as if you owned me, and you toyed with me and you broke me and didn’t even care. Who does that to another person? Only someone who’s cruel. Wicked.”
“I’m sorry, what did you call me?”
“Grandpa always forgave you. He used to tell me that if I’d seen the environment you grew up in, you with your family, I’d have understood. I believed that, and I ignored all the times you shouted at me, humiliated me, punished me. But that’s over. I tried to force myself to be better for you. No more. You want to know why? Because I suffered, too, every minute I was growing up with you, but I’m still a good person and I could never deliberately hurt anyone. And that means you don’t have an excuse.”
My cousin came downstairs just then, and I looked away from my grandmother and up at him. I could tell he’d heard most of what I’d said, but surprisingly, he seemed pleased by it as he said with a grin, “Come on. Otherwise you’ll miss your train.”
I nodded and we walked out. I turned back once before the door closed to see my grandmother standing immobile in the doorway, as though she were truly seeing who I was for the first time.
For me, though, this was the last.
64
When you’re living through things, they always seem enormous, but as time passes, they shrink and go blurry at the edges, and eventually you even forget them.
My grandmother had always been like a wall holding me back, one I was incapable of jumping over. And now she was just the dust that floats in the air after that wall has collapsed, and I knew a breeze would soon come through and carry it away.
I realized I was breathing lighter now, that I no longer felt corseted. I had left something behind in that house, a burden, a sense of things undone, and being free of all that was wonderful. The pain I’d carried around my entire life was gone.
My cousin turned to me. “She’s…complicated, isn’t she?”
I had been watching the city pass outside the window. I turned to him now and said, “I wish she was just complicated. But it’s so much more than that. You can’t even imagine.”
“My parents talk about you two. My mother never liked how she treated you. It actually worried her, but Dad always told her it was none of her business and she should stay out of it.”
It was nice to think my aunt had cared enough to say something, even if just a little. “She couldn’t have done much for me,” I responded.
“We’ll never know. They don’t get along well—my mother and your grandmother, I mean. As soon as Grandma showed up here, she decided she was the boss and everything had to be done her way. She cuts Mom down all the time. It’s gotten a little easier, but at first she caused all kinds of fights between my parents.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“Why are you sorry? It’s not like you did anything.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I guess it’s just a habit, apologizing for everything. And it’s a hard one to break. Things didn’t seem too tense in your house, though.”
“We’ve worked it out. I mean, Mom’s not alone, she has me and her other children, and we supported her as soon as we realized what was happening. I would never let someone run my own mother down in her home. By the way, I heard everything you said.”
He took a hand off the wheel to switch gears.
“I know.”
“I had no idea she treated you so badly,” he admitted.
