Chapter 15
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his, wide and looking at her like she’d just ripped his heart out of his chest. She couldn’t bear to see that look. She couldn’t bear doing that to him. She wondered if it matched the look he had more than four years earlier when he read the note she left. She shook her head and opened her eyes again, looking straight at him. She’d been fooling herself about that day, all this time, telling herself he’d be angry for an hour but by the time he left for
He didn’t say anything, just stood there staring at her with a pain in his eyes she’d never seen from him, not even the week before when he’d exploded in her apartment and told her, most likely on accident, how much she meant to him all those years ago.
“Will you be back Donna? Someday, just when I think I’m going to be able to live a normal life without you, will you come back to pull me in again? With your smile and your eyes and that way you have of… I’m so pathetic, I almost hope you do.”
“Josh, I don’t understand…”
“Of course you don’t understand. How could you? How could you know what it’s like to… to walk into your office one day and find that note? To have everything change in mere seconds. To not understand what…what I did to make you leave.”
She hadn’t really processed his words until much later, once he was gone and she had tried to piece together what had happened, but she was sure, looking at him standing there staring at her, that even then he hadn’t looked as destroyed as he did that very second.
“Josh,” she said quietly, wiping her eyes and willing herself to stop crying.
“You said I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said in a gravely voice she’d never heard from him before, as if his vocal chords were gone and the sound was coming straight from the heart she’d shredded.
“You didn’t,” she said, standing up slowly and taking a step towards him. He flinched and took a step backwards, from the entry way into the kitchen, as if backing away from a predator. “You never did anything wrong. Please just let me explain.”
He didn’t reply, just continued looking at her, taking another step backwards into the kitchen as she took another towards him. She needed to be near him; she doubted she had the courage to say these words if she couldn’t be at least touching him in some small way, and she wanted nothing more than to be close to him. To smell his cologne and feel the warmth from his body, to feel like they were in this together. She didn’t deserve that, she knew, but it didn’t stop her from needing it, and she took one more step towards him as he backed into the refrigerator. “Josh, please,” she begged, tears still streaming unwanted down her face.
He didn’t answer her, but when she took another tentative step towards him, he didn’t move, and three steps later she stood directly in front of him. She reached out, taking his hand in hers and he didn’t fight her, but didn’t respond as she laced their fingers together.
“Make me understand,” he whispered finally, although to her it sounded more like pleading than a request. “I need to understand.”
She nodded, staring down at their joined fingers, hers gripping his hand, his limply being held by hers. She wiped her eyes with her other hand and finally she looked back up at him. “You were larger than life,” she whispered.
“Mom?”
“Donna, my God we’ve been worried. You were supposed to call yesterday. Where are you?”
“
“
“I got a job with the campaign. We’re in
“Already?”
“Well, I’m not technically getting paid yet, but I’m the assistant to one of the head guys. He’s huge here Mom.”
“But he’s not paying you?”
“He will, I’m not worried about that. We sat on a bus all day yesterday and, I swear Mom, he knows everything. He’s brilliant. He talked about policy and press and past candidates and why who voted for what and… it was incredible.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I got to be there the whole time, taking notes, and afterwards he answered all my questions and gave me a ton of stuff to do; important stuff. We’re having a fundraiser in two days and I’m doing all the last minute coordination.”
“And this guy…”
“Josh. You’d like him, Mom. He doesn’t want me to know it, but he’s watching out for me. He made sure the campaign paid for my room here even though some of the volunteers had to pay their own way, and we worked through dinner last night so they’d buy that too. He’s really amazing.”
“You were amazing and smart and funny and… you could do anything.” She stopped and looked up at him. “I came there with nothing and you let me help. You let me be a part of it and for the first time ever, I felt like I made a difference, because you made a tremendous difference to everyone and I made a small one to you.”
He looked away from her, off to the side, and lowered his head, then whispered, “You made a huge difference to me.”
She wanted to reach out and put her hand on his cheek, to lift his head so he’d look at her, but she thought he’d turn and leave if she touched him more than she already dared. “And that made me feel so special and needed. And I couldn’t help it. Before I even realized it, I had…” She stopped then, desperately trying to hold the tears inside and wondering how she’d ever be able to tell him this. Even four years later and after everything he'd said, part of her still felt pathetic when she thought about it.
“What?” he asked quietly, lifting his head and looking at her after the silence stretched.
Honesty, she told herself. If she wanted him to understand, she’d have to tell him. It couldn’t be any harder than what he’d told her and if he’d found the courage, she would too. She took a deep breath and raised her eyes to the light on the ceiling. “I had this huge, huge crush on you. At least that’s how it started. And I felt like a complete idiot because I thought you couldn’t feel the same way.” She stopped and pulled her eyes off the ceiling to look at him, complete shock in his eyes. “You had a girlfriend,” she said quietly. “An influential, smart, educated girlfriend. I was twelve years younger than you with no college degree and no experience in politics and I was sure you saw me as a kid sister, someone you had to watch out for.”
His eyes widened. “A kid sister?”
“You talked badly about Michael, you made sure the campaign paid for my food and hotel, you explained things, you argued…”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see you as a kid sister.”
She closed her eyes. “I'm sorry,” she whispered before opening them and looking at him again. “I just… I looked three, four, eight years into the future and saw myself as your assistant. I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t have been able to do that for years. To pretend that I didn’t…” she stopped, taking a shaky breath and wiping tears off her cheek with one hand while still holding onto him with her other. “…want more. I couldn’t keep watching you with her. What if it had worked out, what if you had married her? I couldn’t stay there and be that close to you and not be with you. If it was that hard after a month, what would it have been like after six or seven years?” She shook her head and blinked, letting even more tears course down her cheeks. “I couldn’t do it.”
His free hand moved then and she watched as he brought it to her face, pausing just before touching her. It hung there in the air for a few seconds before he put it down to his side again. “So you left? Without talking to me about it? I broke up with her... three days before you... I broke up with her to be with you.”
Silent tears turned into sobbing and she choked on her words as she continued. “I didn’t know,” she said, chest heaving and shoulders shaking badly. “Michael came to
He closed his eyes. “How long were you with him?”
She tried to take deep breaths, tried to stay calm, tried to stop crying, but she’d waited too long to say all of it, and along with the words came memories and guilt and remorse and pain. “Not quite two weeks. I was living with my parents, waiting for an opportunity to end it. It came and I did.”
His hand came up then, his palm gliding over her wet cheeks to her ear, his fingers tangling softly in her hair. He pulled her head to his chest, shushing her, the steady beat of his heart calming her immediately. He held her there, his chin on top of her head, his fingers still in her hair. “You could’ve come back,” he whispered almost a minute later.
She shook her head slightly, still crying onto his shirt. “I was trying to convince myself it was just a crush. I thought that after time, life would go back to normal and those feelings would disappear.”
He took his other hand gently from hers and wrapped it around her body, pulling her even closer to him. “Did they?”
“How about you and I escape from real life and hit a movie tonight?”
“Can’t. I have a test on Thursday. I need to study.”
“Ok… how about Friday?”
“Maybe.”
“Donna….”
“Don’t start, Mom.”
“Donnatella, I miss your smile.”
“So do I.”
“Then Friday. Manicures and pedicures, dinner at Casa’s and then a romantic comedy. Just us girls. We’ll see if we can find it.”
“Buttered popcorn?”
“And Milk Duds. My treat.”
“Well how can I turn down free Milk Duds?”
“Now there it is, just a little, but I see it.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Will it ever go away?”
“No. Not completely. Not if it was real. Sorry Baby.”
She stayed still, breathing him in while her own breathing evened out and tears stopped falling. Finally, she pulled back just enough to look at him. “No. I learned to live with them, push them to the background, but they were always there. I stayed with my parents and went back to school, but you still had such an influence on my life. It was…”
She stopped talking, looking down at the ground, and he brought a hand to her chin, tilting it up to look at him. “What?”
“It was almost like I was getting ready for that day in the Shell station. I just didn’t realize it.”
He furrowed his brow a bit. “I don’t under…”
“I was at home one night, a few months after I left, flipping through channels. The Mets were playing the Cubs and I wondered if you were watching. It made me feel a little closer to you to think we might be doing the same thing, so I watched the game the next night too. Before I knew it, I was a Mets fan. You always said children should be our top priority and I’m a semester away from being a child advocacy lawyer. Papers I wrote, positions I took… I always looked to yours. Always wondered what you’d think, wondered if you’d agree, if you’d be proud.”
“I am,” he said quietly.
She smiled at him then, nodding. “I know.”
“But I still wish you’d stayed. I know that’s selfish, but I can’t help it.”
“Part of me wishes I’d stayed too.”
He closed his eyes for several seconds before opening them and looking at her. “Are you going to stay this time?”
“If you let me,” she whispered.
“Then why were you talking to Michael?”