“I think it makes sense,” she murmurs. “Why we’re like that, guarded. I don’t mean that excuses what I did, but... given our childhoods, what we each went through. It makes sense.”
Aleksandr frowns. “My childhood?”
“Oh. Michael—Michael told me some of it. When he tried to talk to me.”
“Ah.” Aleksandr nods. “You know about my past, I know next to nothing about yours. Again, how much I really didn’t know about you. Really, the signs were there, if I looked for them—how in hindsight, you were never fully in it.”
“That’s not true,” she insists. “You weren’t exactly forthcoming about your history, neither of us were.”
“Well, suppose I’d like to know now. About you, your family.”
“Do you—do you really care?”
His gaze narrows. “You think so little of me, still?”
She glances away, flushed. “I mean, you know the outline of it,” she says. “I think I told you early on that my parents died in a car crash. When you asked, the morning after my birthday, if I was spending time with my family. I was young when it happened, six.”
She bites her nail.
She could leave it there: the matter-of-fact details, the clear facts.
She doesn’t want to.
“They left me with our next-door neighbor,” Lili continues. “She babysat me sometimes. My mom had labs to check on at the university, my dad drove her over. Diana, our neighbor, was an art student, knew my mom from school. We’d always do art projects together, when she’d look after me. I was painting, I was happy, and it was sunny. I remember the feeling of dried paint—white and red and pink—on my hands. In my hair, too, for days later.
“Afterwards, I was in a group home for a few weeks, until I got placed with my foster family, up in Marin. That’s where I grew up, I guess.”
“What were they like?” Aleksandr asks. “Your parents.”
His face is impassive, unreadable. But he is watching her.
She looks down at the laces of her shoes. “Brilliant, both of them. My dad worked in tech, business strategy. He’d done time at Bain while my mom did her first graduate degree. She was doing her PhD in physics, when they—when it happened, the accident.”
It feels like pressing on a bruise: revisiting these memories and seeing how fuzzy the recollection has become. Her father’s smile, her mother’s laugh, and her, their only child.
“She, um—she really loved art,” she continues. “My mom, she was crazy about it. Said science and art looped back around, weren’t separate. We went to SFMOMA together, all the time. She’d let me lead her to whatever paintings I liked, listening to me—these little ramblings of a four- or five-year-old, looking at some Kandinsky or Picasso, telling her all about the little characters inside it.
“We’d get falafel near Chinatown afterwards and walk along the Embarcadero. Sometimes we’d meet my dad at the farmers’ market, after his weekend run. If we took the detour up Telegraph Hill, my dad would help me try and chase parrots. One time, my mom actually got one to land on her arm, when she just stood still. ‘That looks likemuchless fun,’ my dad had teased her, and she’d smiled, smug but also delighted.
“He once mixed up contemporary and modern art, when he was talking about some exhibit at de Young, and Christ—she lectured him at the dinner table, saying if he couldn’t understand the difference between Ai Weiwei and Brâncu?i, she’d have to divorce him. He’d rolled his eyes, looking at me like we were in on a joke, and I would grin, swinging my legs under the table, but he was happy. He was so happy with her.”
Even with how heavy this sadness is, she feels a faint smile. Weak with remembrance, the scent of lemon, freshly squeezed—standing on her tiptoes, helping her dad cook dinner. She remembers the sizzle of oil, and fresh air, evening light, and windows flung open, the scent of jasmine growing on the trellis, the sounds of North Beach, Italian grocers, salt air from the marina. How they’d hear her mother walking up the street, laughing as she spoke to neighbors—her laugh,her laugh: Lili remembers it, like a loss at the heart of her.
“I suppose maybe I’d think of them differently, if I knew them now,” Lili says. “If I’d grown up with them. Maybe I wouldn’t have been smart enough for my mom, or maybe I’d have felt stifled by my dad, but it—it feels like it was stolen, how I didn’t get to have that.
“And yes, sure, I idealize them. My mother was easily exasperated, and my dad was a little too sharp when people were slow and unintelligent, or when they assumed I wasn’t his kid, or was adopted—he was very blond, green-eyed; I take after my mother. But they were both—they were both really kind, I think. People did really love them. I remember how theirfriends, our neighbors, their colleagues would talk about them, would watch them. Like their lives felt brighter, sharper, fuller, for having them.
“But, I guess, how much can a six-year-old really remember,” Lili concedes. “I knew them for less time than I haven’t, now.” She forces a laugh, trying to defuse the guilt, thick and drifting, in how little she knows these people who were her parents. “I used to count that—how many more days I’d lived without them, than with them. Waiting for the balance of it to tip. And they were young, really young,” she says. “Barely thirty when they died. That’s—that’s hardly half a life.”
Aleksandr’s phone buzzes in his pocket. Lili flinches, startled.
“Sorry,” she says, a flush of shame. “You should be at work—”
“Ignore it,” he says. “I’m where I need to be.”
She glances at him. He does not look away.
“Right, well—foster care,” she continues, looking back across the park. “It was fine. Other people have it much worse.”
