My Only (13 page)

Olivia obviously didn’t value a tidy bedroom. I wondered if she noticed how organized mine was in comparison, then wondered if it mattered.

When I saw the strap of a discarded bra, I forced myself to look back at her. “So you like living with your grandparents?”

“Yeah,” she said, voice light like I was used to. “It’s better than at E.R. I mean, she’s got almost as many rules as they did, but at least she’s family.”

I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything. “Does she miss your mom?”

“Sometimes I wonder about that,” she mumbled. Then she sat up and crossed her legs while tucking her hair behind her ears.

I didn’t think I heard her correctly, “Hmmm?”

She tugged off her hoodie and again, I averted my eyes to remove the temptation of solely focusing on her body. When I heard the heavy garment hit the floor, I looked up. Did she real y have an issue with putting clothes away? I found it amusing and thought it was a good thing her grandmother couldn’t make it upstairs. It would have probably been a bone of contention between them.

“Yeah, she misses my mom. They didn’t get along much, but I know it’s hard on my grandma.” I raised an eyebrow. “My grandparents didn’t exactly agree with my mother’s ‘lifestyle’.”

“What does that mean?” I asked as I leaned back against the wal and stretched out my legs.

“My mom was a dancer.” The information did not surprise me. “She did bal et from the time she was four. Studied at one of the oldest bal et studios in Chicago. My grandparents were never rich, but they made sure she attended the classes every week and they sent her to New York City every summer for training.” Olivia took a deep breath. “And she moved to New York—apparently against Grandma’s wishes—in order to dance for the New York City Bal et. She must not have done her research because you can’t just audition.” Olivia stared at a photo across from her. I couldn’t see it, so I scooted closer to the bed. It was a picture of a young woman in bal et costume—

obviously her mother.

I could no longer see Olivia as my back was to her, but she continued speaking. I looked at each photo on the wal . “Anyway, she lived there for a bit after high school, then got pregnant with me and couldn’t be a bal erina anymore. She moved back home, had me, and then moved back east as soon as she could.”

“Why did she come back at al ?”

“She had no place to go. She told me the guy who I guess is my father wasn’t even real y her boyfriend, so it wasn’t like she had anyone to help.

So—”

Her voice revealed nothing, so I craned my neck to look at her. She looked back at me and raised her shoulders. I must have been looking at her like she was a pitiful orphan or something because she shook her head. One side of her lips curved up and her eyes brightened. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything. I never knew him, so it’s not like I knew what I was missing.” Olivia seemed awful y wel -adjusted for someone who truly
was
an orphan. I turned back around, wanting to break the visual connection in order to have a chance to real y think about how al of this affected her.

“So back in New York and no longer a bal erina, she danced in clubs.”

My eyes widened as I twisted to look at her again. She was revealing so much, but I had no idea how she could say some of this with such a flat, almost emotionless tone. She didn’t know her father’s name and her mother was a club dancer. I felt like I was lost, unable to comprehend such a vastly different life from my own.

“She didn’t strip!” She said.

I didn’t know what other kind of dancing happened in clubs. Biting down on the inside of my lips, I stayed quiet, not wanting to offend her.

“She was a go-go dancer, which . . . yeah, she danced in
very
little clothing, but she didn’t take it off.”

“Oh.” It was al I could offer.

“She also choreographed some
really
off-Broadway productions. And then Anatolius Malenkov asked her to dance with him.”

“Who?”

“He was a pretty awesome Russian dancer. He toured and did special performances in major cities.”

“Was?”

“Yeah, he died a year after my mom joined his troupe.”

“So what did your mom do with you while she toured?”

Olivia slid graceful y off the bed and sat next to me. “I went with her.”

“And your grandparents didn’t like that?”

“No.”

“Is that why you said they wouldn’t let you go to school for dance?”

“Um, that’s part of it,” she said.

“What’s the other part?”

She rubbed her eye then arched her back as if she was trying to crack it. “They’re old?” It sounded like hedging to me, so I said, “They’re not
that
old, Liv.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

It was clear to see that she was uncomfortable, so I decided to drop it. “I think we’re ordering pizza tonight. Do you want to come over? We’l get you something without cheese.”

Olivia looked away from me and she nibbled her bottom lip as she studied the photographs of her mother above her dresser. “Do you miss your mom, Adam?”

Something heavy settled upon me. “I don’t know. I never knew her, so like you said about your father, it’s hard to miss something you never real y had.” I paused. “I mean, I guess I miss
a
mom, you know? I wish I had one. I wish I knew her. I wish . . .”

“Did you hear that Maya girl in class the other day? Talking about her mom?”

Maya had been going on and on at the end of Current Events on Friday about how much she
hated
her mother. I didn’t hear
why
she hated her, just that she did. If she was like the other morons who said stuff like that, it was because she hadn’t been al owed to do this or buy that. “Yeah.”

“Sometimes I want to hit people like that.” She turned to me with a sad expression. “And I’m a nonviolent person.” The truth of her words wasn’t lost on either of us. We might’ve spoken about it before, but it was important to both of us. Some people took everything for granted. Olivia and I didn’t have the luxury of hating our mothers. I tried to picture what it would be like and invited her to participate.

“Who knows? Maybe if ours were stil alive, we’d be complaining about them, too.”

“Yeah,” was her breathy reply. “Maybe.”

But I knew it wasn’t true. I knew that if our mothers were here, we’d cherish them.

I leaned back against the side of Olivia’s bed and together we stared at pictures of her mother’s lost life. I knew the girl next to me was thinking of the woman she knew, and I was sitting there regretting not knowing more about the woman who gave me life.

We sat in silence. After a long time, Olivia took a deep breath and said, “I miss her.” I understood the feeling.

Olivia declined the invitation to have pizza at my house, so I walked across the street alone, my head congested with the memories of the day and the thoughts Olivia had inspired about my mother. When I entered my house, my father was up, and I heard him and Aaron discussing the itinerary for the week. Aaron always had something new to do.

My dad was lenient because he knew that after a certain point in the evening he would be gone, and during the day he’d be sleeping. There was only so much overseeing the man could do with the schedule he kept. But he expected us to be forthcoming and honest about our lives. My father was ful y informed of my brother’s active social life, just as he was completely aware of my lack of one.

Olivia inspired a lot within me, but also, she was just plain inspiring. The way she handled being on her own, without a parent, was amazing.

Even though we weren’t very close, I relied on my father a lot—not just financial y, but emotional y. I
liked
seeing him every day. I liked being able to look at him and see just a little bit of myself in his face.

The two of them were in the living room. A sports news program was on TV, but neither was watching it. Dad was on the couch and Aaron was in the recliner.

I stood at the edge of the room for a moment before taking the step down into the sunken living room and alerting them to my presence. Aaron searched my face, probably for clues about how my day with Olivia had gone.

I sat down at the opposite end of the couch and Dad shifted so he was facing me. Although I thought he preferred Aaron’s company, my dad had always been decent about trying not to show it. It made me happy that he was focusing on me now.

“How’d it go?”

I could’ve given him a rundown of my day, or told him about how exciting it was to slowly discover who Olivia was. I almost wanted to, but like with many things, I felt better keeping it to myself. I wanted to keep al of my memories of today—Olivia kissing her fingers and pressing them to the glass, Olivia laughing, Olivia grabbing my hand and racing through the aisle to get away from Beast—in the little treasure chest I carried within my head. Tel ing people about it would cheapen it.

“Was Mom good at anything?”

Dad was obviously not ready for the question. He sat stil ; the only things moving were the shifting muscles in his face. His eyebrows stitched together as his lips pursed. He looked as if trying to figure out a riddle. “What?”

“Was Mom good at anything?” I repeated. “I mean, what did she like to do and what were her talents?”

“I, uh . . .” he trailed off. He glanced at Aaron for a quick moment, then he looked back at me. “Crys was good a lot of things.” He looked uncomfortable as he scratched his neck then pinched his eyes with his hand. “She liked making little animals out of paper. What’s that cal ed?”

“Origami,” Aaron said.

“Yeah, that’s it. She’d do it al the time. Our first date, she made a fish out of the paper menu.” He shifted his eyes from me to an imaginary spot on the wal . I started to feel bad about bringing up the subject of my mother.

Just when the quiet got real y uncomfortable, he looked back at me and said, “She was a cheerleader. She was the one at the top of the pyramid. And she was smart, like you boys. Things just made sense to her. Things clicked in her head and she just got it.”

“Did she like music?” Cheerleading was considered a sport, so Aaron must’ve gotten some of her athleticism. I wanted to know what I got.

“She liked listening to music, but she didn’t play an instrument. Beyond the paper animals, she wasn’t very artsy.” I sighed. “What subjects did she like in school?”

My dad looked at me, his expressed fil ed with deep sadness. I felt bad for him, but I was tired of not knowing. “I don’t know, Adam. High school was a long time ago. She liked al her classes.”

“Did she want to go to col ege? Did she want to study something before she got pregnant?” Again, he pinched his eyes, digging his fingers into them. “We talked about col ege, yeah, but it was ‘what-ifs.’ Her parents weren’t going to be able to afford to send her and by the time we graduated, she was already a couple of months pregnant.” I glanced at my brother but I couldn’t read his expression. If I had sat down and done the math, I would have realized earlier that not only had she been pregnant wel before they were married, she’d been pregnant before high school was over. She didn’t have a chance at going to col ege.

Especial y after learning she’d have twins. Maybe she wanted to get an education and we’d ruined that for her.

I thought about al of the lectures and comments my father had made about if we were going to have sex, that we should practice safe sex. I thought about his wil ingness to make sure that happened—at least for Aaron, since he was the only one of us actual y having sex. Thinking about how passionately he told us not to get a girl pregnant made me uncomfortable now.

“Did you and mom not want us?”

For a moment, Dad’s face shifted into a mask of neutrality, but then his eye narrowed, his jaw jutted out, and his lips settled into a straight line.

He let out a hard breath. His voice was firm. “We were just kids, and we were scared out of our minds about having a baby. And when the doctor said two, we both nearly crapped our pants, but of course we wanted you both.”

His hands were bal ed into fists on top of his thighs. “Your mom wanted you boys so badly that she . . .”

“What?” I said. “That she what?”

“The doctor put her on bed rest for the last two months. One, she was a smal woman,” he said, “so having two babies growing was risky enough, but then the doctor could tel that your cords were probably entangled. We didn’t know it was around your neck, but she took every precaution she could to make sure you two were okay.”

My eyes began to water. “Wel , what happened when she died? Was it . . . was it . . .?” I couldn’t finish the question. The speed of my breathing had increased, and I felt like I shouldn’t be asking al of this. My brother sat quietly in the chair, not looking at my dad or me. Dad was looking at me with an intense expression. His jaw was clenched. He didn’t look angry, just
intense
. “Did she get to hold Aaron or even
see
me?” He turned his eyes up to the ceiling and leaned back, resting against the couch. “We’ve talked about this before.” We hadn’t real y talked about it. He’d told us she died right after delivery, but it wasn’t a discussion. It had been so long ago that I could barely remember what was said. “But did she—?”