Mara’s eyes are already welling with tears, but I need to explain this to her, before she gets the wrong idea again. Before she builds the narrative she wants to believe.
“I was four years old,” I tell her. “She already knew something was wrong with me. She’d been fooled by my father when they met, but since then she had learned to know him. To see the blankness on his face. His casual cruelty. His lack of normal human warmth. And of course, in his brother Ruben, she saw the fullest iteration of what we are. The family curse.”
I give a hollow laugh.
Mara shakes her head, wanting to object, but I speak too quickly, determined to tell her everything before she can interrupt.
“She hoped I wasn’t like them. She hoped I was kind, like her. But I was already cold and arrogant, and too young to know better than to tell the truth. I told her how little worth I saw in the people who scrubbed our toilets, cleaned our house. I told her how our gardener disgusted me because he was stupid and could barely read, while I was already finishing entire novels. I could see that I was smarter than other people, richer, better looking. At four years old, I was already a little monster.”
“You were a child,” Mara says.
“That’s what she thought, too. She bought me a rabbit. A large gray one. She named him Shadow, because I didn’t care to give him a name. I hated that rabbit. I hadn’t learned how to use my hands and my voice yet. I was clumsy with it, and it bit and scratched me. I couldn’t soothe it like my mother did, and I didn’t want to. I hated the time I had to spend feeding it and cleaning out its disgusting hutch.”
Mara opens her mouth to speak again. I bowl over her, my lungs full of all this fresh, green air, but the words coming out dead and twisted, falling flat between us.
“I took care of that rabbit for three months. I loathed every minute of it. I neglected it when I could, and only fed and watered it when she reminded me. The way it loved her and the way it hated me made me furious. I was even more angry when I’d see the disappointment in her eyes. I wanted to please her. But I couldn’t change how I felt.”
Now I have to pause because my face is hot and I can no longer look at Mara. I don’t want to tell her what happened next, but I’m compelled. She needs to understand this.
“One morning, we went down to the hutch and the rabbit’s neck was broken. It was laying there, dead and twisted, flies already settling on its eyes. My mother could see it had been killed. She didn’t chastise me … there was no point anymore. Looking in my eyes, she saw nothing but darkness. She hung herself that afternoon. Years later, I read the last entry in her journal: I can’t change him. He’s just like them.”
Now I do look at Mara, already knowing what I’ll see on her face, because I’ve seen it before, in the only other person I ever loved. It’s the look of a woman gazing upon a monster.
Tears fall silently down Mara’s cheeks, dropping down on the soft green moss.
“You didn’t kill the rabbit,” she says.
“But I wanted to. That’s what you have to understand. I wanted to kill that fucking rabbit every time I held it in my hands. I only didn’t because of her.”
I’m still waiting for the disgust, the repulsion. The understanding that what my mother believed was true: at four years old, I was already a killer. Heartless and cruel. Held back by my affection for her, but who knows for how long.
“But you didn’t do it,” Mara says, her jaw set, eyes locked firmly on mine. “You were a child—you could have been anything. She gave up on you.”
Mara is angry, though not at me.
She’s angry at another mother that failed in her eyes. A mother that looked at her own child and only saw ugliness.
“She was right to give up on me,” I tell Mara. “I didn’t kill the rabbit, but I killed many more.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you’ve done!” Mara cries. “I only care what you do now that someone loves you!”
She flies at me, and I think she’s going to hit me. Instead, she grabs my face between her hands and kisses me, as ferociously, as passionately as ever she’s done.
“I love you!” she cries. “I fucking love you. Your life starts here, today, now that I’ve told you.”
I look at Mara’s furious face.
I touch the tears running down on both sides. I kiss her again, tasting the salt on her lips.
In that moment, I finally realize what Mara knew all along:
She won’t die like that rabbit. I WILL keep her safe.
11
Mara
I understand now why Cole has always stayed in this house.
He destroyed his father’s office but not the garden. He kept the garden living and growing for his mother, long after she was gone.
I wonder if that one act kept a spark of humanity burning inside him, in all the years that followed.
Cole seems strangely light since he told me this last piece of his history. He’s unburdened—finally understanding that I do see who he is, without judgment.
I can’t judge anyone. I’ve been a fucking mess for most of my life. A literal crazy person at times.
Everyone is a mix of good and bad. Can the good cancel out the bad? I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care. If there’s no objective measure, then all that matters is how I feel. Cole is a shade of gray I can accept.
He suits me like no one ever has.
He understands me.
How can I reject the only person I’ve ever felt connected to?
We were drawn together from the first moment we saw each other, when neither of us wanted it. Like recognized like. We bonded in place, like mercury atoms.
If Cole is wrong, then so am I.
When he pushes me to change, the change feels good.
It’s like his corrections to my paintings—once he points out the improvement, I can see its merit just as clearly.