I stopped, unsure if I should say anything. I laughed once, nervously, and looked around. Only the brush overheard our conversation.
“He’s really nice, and he loves music, and he loves Satie. You’d like him, mom, he played your favorite song.”
Hot tears came out of nowhere, running down my cheeks. I didn’t bother to wipe them. Gone was the anger I had felt while talking with my dad. All that was left was a gentle sorrow. The dissonant notes of the Gymnopedie played low in my mind.
“We can’t be together, but it’s just nice to know that I can like someone. And someone can like me… like that. Nobody ever looked at me like that before.”
I thought of Eliot’s eyes on me and my body shamed me by reacting instantly to the memory. A heat spread through me, and I brushed the wetness from my cheeks.
“Anyway, I’m coming to visit you, mom. It’s been a long time since you left but I’m finally coming.” My voice cracked, and a host of terrible images flew through my mind like blackbirds on wing. I shook them away and reached forward, pressing my hand into the cool bark.
“I can’t wait to see you, mom. I love you.”
Fate was often cruel to me. My hips were too round to wear a sleek princess’s gown, and I could never imagine myself in any fairy tale that did not end in tragedy. How could I? All of my life I had known sorrow, and it became too easy to retreat from reality into academics when I needed to.
The wicked mother and stepsisters, both perfectly beautiful, were real enough. Hissing spite at me between breaths, they convinced my father that I was inferior. He hated me, I knew it, because I reminded him so much of her, of my mother. My mother had left him to go to her own mother in Hungary—I remember their arguments over her leaving— and that was how he remembered her. He must have thought that I would blame him for my mother’s death, and to prevent that judgment from coming down upon him he made of me a monster. I was only a child.
Occasionally I remember the insults that have been thrown at me, either casually or in malice, and their barbs still prick. The torment only ended when I left to live with my Nagy, when she came to America to rescue me, but the echoes of my stepfamily’s words still resonate within me. After so much damage, I cannot fully trust words. Unlike mathematics, words can be twisted too easily to deceive, to cover up, to hurt. It pains me to write when I know I cannot write the truth as it is exactly. Nobody can. So I do my best, and when I fail I go back to my proofs, the lines and numbers that match up perfectly and never, ever lie.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My plane trip from California to London involved two layovers and an interminable amount of time over the Pacific Ocean spent behind three rows of high schoolers who apparently took international vacations every semester. They yelled back and forth about how much beer they planned to drink when they landed in England. I remembered the type from high school, but they were no less obnoxious now that I had graduated. Only two things kept me sane on the journey. One was the vague hope, now turned real, of visiting my mother’s grave. The other—god save me— was the thought of Eliot’s hot lips on my skin, his piercing blue eyes staring into mine. I thought of him and everything else melted away. I would have to be careful. I didn’t want to lose my heart to someone I could never be with, but it seemed that I was already far, far gone.
At the London airport I got off of the packed plane gratefully, wiping my bleary eyes. I had only managed a few hours of sleep, and couldn’t wait to be in Budapest and finished with my trip. I checked my transfer information with one of the agents at the gate. She took my ticket and frowned.
“Gate Oh-Thirty? Hmm. I don’t know that one.” Her voice sounded exceedingly British, and although my stomach jumped with nerves, her smooth voice settled it back down.
She took me over to the information desk through the mobs of people with cardboard cups of coffee in their hands. My body wanted to collapse and sleep, and the world had taken on a hazy sort of fuzz to its edges. I slung my bag to the ground. It seemed to have grown thirty pounds since the last layover.
“Do you know Gate Oh-Thirty?” she asked.
“Gate Oh-Thirty?” The older man sitting at the booth took up the ticket to examine it. “Oh yes, see here at the corner. It’s one of the private hangars.” He looked up at me with evident surprise and stood up from his chair. “I’ll see you to your gate, miss.”
“I can find it,” I said, a bit annoyed. “Just tell me where it is.”
“Not at all,” the man said. He came around the booth and motioned the female agent away as he picked up my backpack.