It's Complicated (28 page)

Niece. Cousin. Technically, they were cousins, but considering the seven-and-a-half-year age difference, and the fact that Josie had practically helped raise Darla after their dads died in the car accident, they just called each other “aunt” and “niece,” finding it easier. There was no rhyme or reason to it—Darla had just started calling her Aunt Josie when she was four and they lived together while their moms recovered in separate hospitals, and it stuck.

“It’s going. How about you?”

“
Booooooooring
. Everything is so
booooooring
here. Nothing fun ever happens. I’m about to drive home from my shift and it’s
soooooooo
dull.”

“I see nothing’s changed back home.”

Darla snorted. A cash register dinged in the muffled distance. “Nope. What about you?”

She thought about spilling her guts about Alex, but stopped herself. Her mom and Aunt Cathy always hoped Josie would meet and marry a doctor, and then everything would be just perfect, as if she’d be rescued from her own life. For Marlene, she knew, a physician for a son-in-law meant money. Maybe access to pills. Ah, the delusions of a woman with the conscience of a cockroach and the narcissism of Kim Jong Il.

Her hesitation made Darla ask, “Josie? You got something to say?”

“No. Not really.”

“‘Not really’ is different from ‘no.’” Darla was fishing, and she was right—Josie wanted a friend to talk to, and Laura hadn’t answered her texts or two voicemails yet. She was bursting.

“True.”

“
Aaaannnnnnd….?
”

“Hypothetically…”

“Unicorns and fairies are hypothetical.”

“So is my story, if I’m going to tell it.”

“Fine.”

“Hypothetically, imagine you’re dating a guy who makes you feel like you can trust him. Like he doesn’t judge you.”

“Oh, look!” Darla shouted. “A unicorn with a fairy on its back, shitting gold coins!”

Sigh. “I know. Right? Impossible.”

“Hey, if you found one of those guys, I wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s like having a winning lottery ticket. You cash it in all quiet-like and don’t say a word. Just go off on a trip to Disney World and act like you’re in the hospital for a bunion or something.”

“You’re comparing the guy I’m dating to a bunion?”

“You’re dating? Josie, you never
date
! You make fun of men, grind into them with your body, and only spare them the black-widow treatment if they’re lucky.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re my idol. That wasn’t a criticism.”

“It’s so touching how you support me emotionally, Darla.”

“I aim to please.”

Josie laughed, the air now cleared of any desire to pour out her heart. “Why did you call? To bust my chops?”

“No.” Darla’s voice went quiet. “I just missed talking.”

“You could come out and visit, you know.” Every phone conversation ended like this. “I’ll pay for the plane ticket.”

“If you do that, Aunt Marlene will wonder why you didn’t send her the money for one.”

“So we’ll find a way. What my mom thinks shouldn’t stop you from visiting.”

“You aren’t the one who has to live around her and hear the non-stop bitching.”

Bile rose in Josie’s throat. Getting away from the enmeshed chaos of her mother had been nearly impossible, but she’d done it. That Marlene could somehow manipulate family dynamics so that Darla felt she couldn’t even come to Cambridge for a visit made her temper explode and her heart crack in two at the same time. How could she hope to have some sort of future with Alex when her past was such a burden? His clinical psychologist mother was from a different world. Her mom was a harpy in Lycra with a massive entitlement complex.

Shit, she’d probably hit on Alex if given the chance. The thought made Josie gag.

“Ewww, you sick? Or was your cat hacking up a hairball?” Darla asked.

“No, just thinking of something unpleasant.”

“Like home?” Darla laughed; Josie joined her, though neither added much mirth to it.

The sound of wind filled the phone. “You outside?”

“Yeah. Gotta go get in the car and head home. I’ll check in with you later in the week.”

“Okay.” Josie felt deprived. Empty. Full. Like an abyss of everything and nothing dragged at her from the belly. As Darla got off the phone, Josie stared at her living room. A quick flash of Crackhead confirmed the cat was still alive. Dotty wasn’t eating all the cat food, then.

She felt utterly alone and in need of a good talk. A quick check of her phone and—nope. No answer from Laura. Between her mother’s dominion over everyone in Ohio, holding them captive through sheer craziness and narcissism, and Laura’s new, baby-filled life, she felt like the only way to manage the churning newness of Alex was to hold it all back. Shut it down. Close up and stick to what she knew.

His comment, after their amazing oregano sex, about Josie meeting his mom, made her gut seize up and her lungs freeze. He was so normal. His mom was a clinical psychologist superwoman who had a baby as a teenager and raised him to be a doctor. They were normal people, not like her family. No dead father, no mom who tried to fuck the band director at her college graduation. And the band director wasn’t the only faculty member her mom had come on to.

Marlene’s insatiable needs were legendary. Of all the parts of the brain to be injured and never recover, the worst was the sexual filter. It just…broke. Josie flashed back to the night before, with Alex, and how it felt to take risks. Not the outdoor sex, strangely.

The very internal risks she took with him. Wanted to take with him.

Wanted to take
for
him.

She’d been ignoring Alex, leaving his text messages unanswered, and the two voicemails hung out on her phone like dark, wet clouds waiting to unload their burdens. The tension that came from not replying to him and her own internal struggle to figure out what the hell to do about her fear, about her sense that this was going too fast and that she couldn’t give Alex what he really wanted, had made her grouchy and confused.

Tears welled up, threatening to make her voice break and to rack her body with sobs. This was all too much. Too many feelings. All these layers of integrating what had happened when she was eleven, of growing up with an irrevocably changed mother, of fleeing her childhood home and coming to Boston to hit “reboot,” to redo life living under a shell of normalcy.

Alex threatened that because he was normal. Accepting. Loving? Could she dare use that word? And if so, was it a weapon or a talisman?

He lived in an emotional reality she couldn’t fathom. What was it like to be raised by a mother who loved you so much and who struggled to reach her fullest potential—and to instill that in her child? Josie had gone to college in spite of Marlene. Not because of her. How many nights had she endured the grousing about wasted tuition money (
which Josie had earned and paid for herself
) and wasted gas in the car (
which Josie had paid for
) and how she’d never succeed?

Getting away had been so hard.

And yet she really hadn’t escaped anything, had she? Marlene was all-pervasive, affecting Darla’s travel here, influencing what her extended family felt they could and couldn’t do, and infiltrating Josie’s finances. And worse—living inside Josie, the voice of doubt and self-criticism and ragged pessimism.

Why should Alex accept her as she was? Who was Josie, really? Just a person who ran away from something bad, but who didn’t have an inner core. She was defined by what she wouldn’t be—couldn’t
let
herself be—but other than that?

How do you build a world with someone when you don’t know what you are? How do you offer something to someone when you spend your life being
not that
? For the past decade she’d been so focused on the counterdependence of making sure she
wasn’t
Marlene that it hadn’t occurred to her that maybe she needed to zero in on what she
was.

That gaping hole inside her couldn’t be filled with Alex. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t have a hole like that, and she certainly couldn’t ask him to fall into hers just because she was so damaged and incomplete.

Better to hide it.

Because letting him in meant he could plummet through the endless abyss.

And right now, she knew
exactly
what that felt like, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Not even Marlene.

Meeting his mom for lunch had seemed like a great idea at the time when she’d offered it but now, with three days of complete silence from Josie, Alex was dreading the event. Meribeth Derjian was a force of nature. Pregnant at seventeen and
rotund
as she walked across the stage to accept her high school diploma, she had juggled single parenthood, college, and later, a master’s and a Ph.D program throughout Alex’s childhood.

She looked like Alex’s older sister and even now, at forty-six, just eighteen years older than her son, most people assumed that she was a sibling and not a mother. The way that she treated him, however, was purely maternal. Her drive and good-natured calmness had infused in Alex an amalgam of her, his educational role models, and his grandfather.

Blessed with the same chocolate brown eyes and dark hair as Ed in his youth, Meribeth had inherited his grandmother’s tininess. She looked like the average man could pick her up and snap her in two. At just over five feet tall, she was even smaller than Josie. Alex’s height came from his biological father, whom he’d never met. Meribeth remained tight-lipped about him, though over the years as she’d moved into clinical psychology she’d shared more. Alex was the product of Meribeth’s short-lived high school romance with a Harvard exchange student from Finland; he assumed that was where he got his height.

What his mom lacked in height and girth, however, she made up for in spirit. Never needing to know exactly when she was arriving, he could sense a change in the energy of the atmosphere in any social setting and know instantly that his mother was present. Today was no different.

As he sat in the Ethiopian restaurant in Cambridge, drinking water and sipping clove-flavored espresso, the sound of the door’s bells had fooled him once or twice as other diners entered, and then
boom.
Like a genie in a puff of smoke, there was his mother.

The giant, tight hugs, the kisses on cheeks and the assurances that he looked ragged and exhausted and that she would start to call the chief—she just said chief and never really indicated
who
she meant—to berate him for tiring out her poor child at the hospital were par for the course. Sitting down, she sighed deeply. Dressed in a light and airy peach combination of floating fabric and tight cotton knit, he didn’t know quite what to make of her. The necklace around her throat was a series of chunky gemstones and twisted silver, her lips were painted a darker shade of peach from her clothes, and her eyes
glowed
when she narrowed them and stared at him intently. If he hadn’t already known she was clairvoyant, he certainly would have realized it today.

She’d always possessed the uncanny ability to look at him and know what he was thinking, and he’d learned to just let her. Years ago he’d tried to fool her, thinking about baseball, or the
Watchmen
, or Mentos and Diet Coke experiments on YouTube—but none of it had dissuaded her from figuring out what was really going on inside him emotionally. Perhaps it really was a mother’s intuition, but he suspected that she was part witch and that someday an invitation from Hogwarts would come for him.

At least, that’s what he had hoped when he was a teenager. Alas, no invitation had arrived, and instead he’d gone off to UMass Med School. Which, while more expensive than Harry Potter’s world, still taught him a means to fight evil. In a manner of speaking.

They knew the menu backwards and forwards and ordered Injera, the giant sourdough pancakes that came in a communal dish with various savory meals piled on top. From curried cabbage, carrots and potatoes, to some unidentified beef dish with a little bit of field greens, tomatoes, and feta in the middle, this was his favorite meal and his favorite restaurant. Meribeth tolerated it—she enjoyed the food well enough, but Thai was more her flavor.

As they waited for their food to be delivered, she ordered a mango drink. And then, the formalities dispensed with, she leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said, “Who is she?”

“She?” Alex said, playing the game.

“Alex.” Meribeth drew the word out. “Don’t make me drag it out of you.”

Mom would like Josie
, he thought. They were both small and feisty, smart with sharp wits—but where Josie was closed off and behind a shield, Meribeth was all open and out there. She’d never held any secrets and she’d never really patronized Alex as a kid, choosing to err on the side of letting him explore the world and discover for himself where his own boundaries were. As he’d grown into adulthood he’d appreciated that more.

Josie was more the type to set up the boundaries and stay inside the lines until forced out of them. While Meribeth had never given him any lines, she’d just let him draw them himself. Except when it came to talking about his love life. Then she crossed
all
the lines.