Aside from this small inconvenience, Jules was an excellent host, in that he treated the house as if he, too, were a temporary inhabitant. He didn’t care about it, so it really didn’t matter who else lived there. He was an easy housemate—if quick to get irritated, even quicker to forget what was bothering him. A parade of people came through: friends, lovers, loud laughing guys from his lacrosse team, distant cousins who also hated being Cabots. Jules was in an a cappella group called Pitch Slapped, and they regularly rehearsed and got high in the living room, their songs floating up the stairs and getting stuck in our heads.
One day I was in the library, a room on the northern side of the house that never got any sun, when Jules came in. I wasn’t sure what he did all day—he didn’t seem to have a job, and Cyrus had told me he was touchy about being asked what his plans were. After college, he’d started a website called Sellyourshit.com, which seemed for a while like it might compete with eBay, but eventually it crashed, taking some of his father’s money with it. After that his parents gave him the house and a small allowance, which was their way of cutting him off. Cyrus had met Jules’s parents a few times, been to their house in the Hamptons and in Savannah, Georgia, where they spent the winter. It’s not that they weren’t nice to Jules, just that they had no expectations of him. “They smile in this creepy way,” Cyrus said, “and nod as if Jules is slightly, you know, not quite there and they have to humor him. It drives him crazy.”
I had just been through another soul-killing seminar with Dr. Stein, and to make myself feel better, I was deep in an armchair with three scratchy blankets over my legs, reading 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Oh, there you are, I’ve been looking everywhere,” Jules said. “It’s Cyrus.”
“Did something happen?”
He sat down beside me. “No, we just— It’s the anniversary of his mom’s death next week. I think we should do something.”
I felt like an imposter for not knowing the date. “I had no idea.”
“He doesn’t like to talk about it. But he can’t be alone.”
“I can take the day off. Does she have—is she buried somewhere?”
“He scattered her ashes in Port Townsend, that’s where she was from.” Before I could ask, he said, “It’s on the West Coast, near Seattle. He hitchhiked all the way there when he was sixteen.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Jules was staring into the cold fireplace. “I came out to my parents right around the time that Cyrus’s mother died. It was late—I’d known for years, but I was afraid to tell them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I asked, “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“One of each. They make bank and play golf. I’m the youngest, the runt.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes I think of a world where my parents died in an accident so I would never have had to tell them.”
“What happened when you did?”
“Everything changed. It was like they disappeared, like they were right in front of me but they were ghosts.”
“I saw Cyrus’s mother at school sometimes.”
“What was she like?”
“She was beautiful. It looked like she’d had him when she was very young.” Something came to me. “She loved Ella Fitzgerald. I remember that about her—she sang at the parents’ talent show.”
“You guys had a parents’ talent show?”
“The school needed money, so the parents put on a show where they paid to see each other do stuff. The teachers did it too—I’m still haunted by the sight of my algebra teacher singing Cat Stevens.”
“Hippie Cat Stevens or Muslim Cat Stevens?”
“Hippie.” I looked over at Jules. “So should we practice a song?”
“I don’t know—are you any good at singing? Because we all know that I am awesome.”
“I’m Bengali,” I said. “It’s in my blood.”
* * *
The following week, on the twelfth anniversary of the death of Poppy Jones, Cyrus disappeared. I woke up in the morning and found that he was not on the other side of the bed. He was not downstairs in the kitchen and he was not outside in the garden and he was not in any of the rooms on any of the floors of the house. He did not answer his phone. He did not reply to text messages or emails.
Jules was eating peanut butter out of the jar when I gave him this news. “How long has he been gone?”
I checked my phone. It was eleven thirty. “I don’t know what time he left, but I haven’t seen him all morning.”
Jules nodded. “He’ll be back in a few days.”
“A few days? Are you kidding me?”
Jules took a gallon of milk out of the fridge and gulped straight from the carton. “I told you, his mom’s death is still raw.”
“You are the only person I know who consumes real dairy,” I said. “And why the fuck didn’t you say anything to me sooner?”
“What, that Cyrus likes to do a runner? It’s his thing.”
“His thing? And you never thought to warn me?”
“You got married before I even learned your name.”
He was right. “A few days? Do you try to get in touch with him in the meantime?”
“Nope. You just leave the door open, and he comes back when he’s ready.”
Early the next morning, Cyrus slipped into bed beside me. I’d fallen asleep after hours of staying awake and checking my phone every few minutes, so I thought I heard him say he was sorry, but I might’ve just been imagining it. I took my cue from Jules and didn’t ask where he’d been. That night we put Poppy’s photograph in a frame and surrounded it with candles. In the piano room, where there was a decaying concert grand, we arranged small bunches of poppies in coffee mugs. And then Jules and I did a duet of Ella Fitzgerald’s “A Sunday Kind of Love.” Jules had an excellent baritone, and I didn’t completely embarrass myself either, because I’d practiced nonstop while Cyrus was away.
Afterward, Cyrus lay down on the carpet. I sat beside him and he rested his head on my lap. He cried and cried. “Mama,” I heard him whisper. I felt pulled toward him, drawn to what he sometimes called the dark behind his eyes, and I was also a little afraid, because I saw now that this man walked around with a hole in his heart, and I thought about how hard I would have to work to fill that hole, and I was worried that I wouldn’t ever be able to.
And after that, the three of us—Julian, Cyrus, and I—definitively and permanently became a tribe.
* * *
At Thanksgiving, I went home to tell my parents everything. I was going to wait until Thursday, when Mira could be there to cushion the blow, but while we were unloading the groceries the day before, it all came out in one breath: Mrs. Butterfield’s funeral, meeting Cyrus again, moving in with him. I left out city hall, but I said I was in love and that Cyrus made me want to be married, which wasn’t completely true but at least wasn’t an outright lie.
“Who is Cyrus?” my mother asked.
“He went to high school with me. But then he dropped out.” Why? Why did I say that?
My mother pointed a sweet potato at me. “A dropout?”
I turned to my father, hoping to find an ally. “He’s actually very smart,” I said. “Reads a lot.” Inside I was thinking, Reads a lot, that’s the best you can do?
My mother stood up and hovered behind my father’s chair. “Explain this to us so we can understand. You’re telling us about a boy, fine. We are okay with boyfriends, you’re old enough to make your own decisions now. If you wanted to go out with a girl, that might be different.”
“Don’t be homophobic, Ammoo,” I said.
“But what’s this about getting married? Why do you have to marry him?”
“I don’t have to marry him, I want to marry him.”
I didn’t tell them that I’d already married him.
My parents didn’t want to be pharmacists. My father had spent his entire life hoping to someday publish his novel, the details of which he had never revealed to any of us. All we knew was that every night after dinner, he would shut the study door behind him, and we would have to finish picking the rice from the place mats and do our homework on the dining table. And my mother, although she loved putting on that uniform every day and giving people advice about spider bites and hormone replacement therapy, really came alive during the annual performances of the Long Island Tagore Society, in which she would direct the Bengali writer’s most famous work. Right now she was in rehearsals for Chitrangoda, a musical play about a warrior princess. I figured that’s why she reacted to my news like I was challenging her to a dual.
“You’re too young to get married. Full stop.”