I squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t have all the answers. I just know what I know…and it’s not running away. I promise you…” I said the words, but my heart wasn’t in them today. I just wanted him to hold me. I wanted us to enjoy being in each other’s company. “I’ve learned the hard way that things are not permanent. That everything is temporary.”
“They do end up being temporary if you move on before they can become permanent,” he said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I can’t expect you to understand.”
“Maybe you should give me the chance to.”
I leaned away from him, settling against the back of the couch, and his hand fell from my hair back into his lap. “You pretty much know it all…until I was five, I lived in a completely different country that got the shit bombed out of it. My sister and I were sent away. My papa made all kinds of promises, but they never happened. I never saw him again. The end.”
William was watching me intently now. He shifted so that he was fully facing me. “He couldn’t have known he was going to die.”
My breath shivered. “He could have come with us. Then he wouldn’t have died in that shitty, pointless war. Instead, he told me I had to be brave. ‘Go to America,’ he said. ‘You’ll be safe and we’ll all be together again soon.’ He was a liar.” Sudden emotion rose up and choked me. I covered my face, not just to hide the tears from William, but to hide my utter shame at what I’d said. I didn’t mean that, Papa. Forgive me.
I felt the weight of William’s arms around my shoulders. I leaned against him, tears streaming quietly down my cheeks. With him this close, I felt the same sense of safety that I’d felt the night of my Disneyland firework freak-out. His solidness was comforting. Soon, I was telling him things I hadn’t told anyone else…ever.
“And then we came here to live. We moved around in those days, stayed a year or two at a distant relative’s home, had our own apartment for a while. Then we lived with family friends after we lost that place when the rent went up. And, as I told you, I met Brock and fell in love when I was a teen.” I sniffed.
“Mama wanted me to go back—‘come home, it’s time,’ she’d said. But I couldn’t because it wasn’t home. I’m no more Bosnian now than I am German or Canadian. Brock was here, and Mama was so mad that I’d give up the chance to live with my own family. But I was so dumb and young and in love that nothing else mattered. So I hurt my Mama and stayed here instead. Brock and I were going to be together. I was counting on that until…” My voice faded as emotions seized me once again.
“Until he died.”
“Yes. People seem to do that around me.” That darkness rose up, and it was blinding.
“What, do you think you’re cursed or something?”
I took a deep breath and let it out in a shivery hiss. “I should have been the one driving him home that night. That was the plan. We’d gone to a party and there was drinking. But I was tired. We argued and I told him I was going home to sleep. I was sober. I could have driven him. Instead, he got a ride home later with a friend who’d been drinking too much. I…I wasn’t there for him.”
He shook his head. “That’s not logical to blame yourself for something that you could not have predicted. No one can know the future.”
“But I know my future. It’s change. Always change. Once anything starts to become permanent, I get nervous…itchy.” I stifled a sob and sniffed back my tears like a toddler. They clogged my throat just as quickly. “I lived with Brock’s family for a while after he died. I was depressed, but somehow I finished high school. I didn’t want to leave to go to college, until his mom said I must. That it would be the best thing for me to get on with my life. So I did…but moving on meant moving again.” I sighed heavily. “There’s a legend in my family. Baba—that’s what we called my grandma—used to say we had Gypsy roots. The Roma are wanderers. They have no home, and sometimes I feel this connection to that part of myself. Like I was never meant to be pinned down in one spot. That these things in my life happened to teach me that.”
He scoffed. “It’s easier to move on and forget the past when things are painful. Or at least try to forget it.”
I looked at him, wondering about that strange and accurate insight, so rare from him. Did he speak from experience? “So you still think I’m running away?”
“I think that sometimes a person can believe something about themselves so much that it becomes the truth.”