I wish I shared something like that with them. Something tangible to tie me to this family, like a nose or an eye color or a last name. And I wonder if Natasha regrets changing her nose every time she sees it on her daughter’s face.
“So. What’s this new girl look like?” Natasha says. She’s looking over my list again. She’s the only person who’s allowed to do that. She flips back in time, to older entries she missed, and I love watching her smile at the things I’ve written. “Goddamn it you are a writer, lady,” she says, reading back a few of my entries in this awe-filled voice that hurts from how good it feels.
“Karissa’s like a fairy,” I say. “Like . . . hipster Tinker Bell. Or punk ballerina. She’s perfect, sort of.”
“Well, don’t rub it in. I’m not that evolved,” Natasha says. But we both know she pretty much is.
“Whatever, she’s not about to be a wife or anything,” I say. “I’m still rooting for you to get him back. We can adopt the girls. You liked the brownstone.”
It’s a nice dream to have, but I could never wish that on Natasha for real. Her new husband is kind, and they have this incredible marriage. He reads her gratitude journals too. I was a little devastated when she first told me, since I thought I was the only one who got that privilege. But really it’s good to see solid proof that closeness, the way I imagine it, exists, even if it doesn’t happen exactly when you want it to.
“We’re a forever thing,” Natasha says all the time. “You and me.”
But I have to let go of the dream, since she’s a forever thing with her husband too. I’m not her daughter. I’m not her best friend or her wife or her sister. I’m not even her stepdaughter anymore.
Other dreams: joining a commune of motherless girls with Arizona. Running away with Bernardo. Moving permanently into Natasha’s apartment. Making a weird sort of family with Karissa where we go to bars and live in her apartment and throw our own pickle-and-wine parties. I’d accept anything, as long as it feels like it will last and be mine.
Anything but Karissa being the next temporary moving part in our nonfamily.
If Karissa hadn’t turned everything on its head, I could see myself sharing the List of Things to Be Grateful For with her too. I ache for how badly I want her to be mine again. I was so close.
“I’m gonna tell you about a boy,” I say to Natasha, testing it out with her the way I did with my sister and Karissa.
“You better,” she says, and pours me more tea and brings me another cookie, and if I didn’t have a pack of cigarettes in my purse and the memory of a bunch of drunk nights in my head, I’d think this was my real life.
“You’re falling in love?” Natasha asks, and I shake my head and say of course not, but the things Bernardo said ring in my ear like a premonition, and I wonder if I could be. Falling, of course. Not fully in. I don’t believe in falling in love too quickly or with someone I don’t know. I don’t believe in anything my father does.
But I like the idea that Natasha can see the beginnings of it, like it’s a scent on me or etched onto my skin, and not the fleeting, ephemeral thing I’ve always thought it was.
Love, as something stable and real and tangible.
I can’t really imagine.
I stay over at Natasha’s, and the girls keep me up most of the night by calling out for me and their mom and dad from their cribs.
I feel like I’m in the CIA, like I have a secret identity where I live part-time as a good girl with a mother.
Natasha didn’t even comment on my hair. Maybe in this light it isn’t noticeable. Maybe her apartment is that transformative.
Between nights out with Karissa, and days in the park with Roxanne, and the memories of the school year spent in a cloud of invisibility and vague friendliness, and Bernardo on my mind, and trying to fall asleep on Natasha’s couch, it’s like I’m living seventy-five different lives and don’t feel fully comfortable in any of them. Arizona digs her heels in on the life she wants, and I’m out here dipping my toes in everything to see if any of it could fit.
It gives me a miniature panic attack. Something stuck in my heart and throat that doesn’t ever bloom but festers and hurts.
I don’t fit anywhere.
I am a mess, I text Bernardo when I’m half-asleep on the couch and too drowsy to stop myself. The leather keeps sticking to my legs, and the girls have lullabies playing too loudly on their baby sound system. Natasha turned it back on when they woke her up a half hour ago, and it hasn’t turned itself off yet.
That’s why I like you so freaking much, he texts back.
I love that he doesn’t try to tell me I’m not a mess.
I want to tell you everything, I say. It’s funny. When someone is romantic and strange and too big to be real, you learn to match them, at least a little. And I want you to tell me everything. I’m thinking of the girl he used to love, and I think I could even handle knowing about that.
Then that’s what we’ll have to do, Bernardo writes back.
I could melt into this thing between us.
June 13