Page 69 of Rebound
“You broke your promise and my heart.”
He frowns. “When?”
“Back at camp. You promised never to leave me in the middle of a game, but you did. You went home one year and never came back.”
It takes him a minute, but when it clicks, his face falls. I see the devastation in his eyes and he rubs a hand over his mouth and jaw. When he speaks, his voice is strained and I hate everything all over again.
“Fuck, Tamara. I…I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you, not when I was so madly in love with you. But…things happened and,” he chokes on the words and in a whisper says, “Can we talk about this at home?”
Twenty-Three. Win you back
Patrick
When I imagined us talking again, this was not how I thought it would unfold. We went from being strangers for almost two weeks to being a couple to get her a job to talking about our past. I didn’t expect her to apologise, especially now that I know why she’s been so angry with me. I don’t fault her for holding onto it for twenty-something years. Back then, everything stung and hurt and it was a lot to process. Teenage hormones, or whatever. I was heartbroken when I came back and she wasn’t there either. I get it. I fucking hate that I did it to her.
We ride Nyx back home in silence, her arms tight around my waist as the city blurs past us. I think of all the ways I can explain this to her without making her cry more than she probably will. When we walk into the apartment, the two of us take our time removing our shoes and setting our things down. I grab us water while she settles at one end of the couch. Her mouth is turned down, eyes brimming with tears when I join her.
“My grandmother died a week before that summer,” I start, clearing my throat to fight back the emotional onslaught of memories. “I’d told her I’d met the girl of my dreams at camp. How I couldn’t wait to go back so we could plan our escape. She was really excited for me.”
I laugh sadly. My Ammachi?1 was my favourite person and when she heard I had another favourite, she encouraged me to make her more.
“She’d been sick for years, but bounced back easily. The doctors kept misdiagnosing her and we could never figure out what the problem was. Towards the end of her life, they discovered it was cancer. By then we couldn’t do anything to save her and she didn’t want to live in pain anymore. I didn’t think she’d die,” I whisper.
As the eldest grandchild, I spent so much time with my Ammachi. I learned cooking and other life skills from her and my Appacha?2. They were my pseudo parents while my own were working long hours and then bringing Elias and Nina into the world.
I don’t look at Tamara, because I know the minute our eyes lock I’ll be unable to finish the story.
“I was so excited to come back to you. My bags were filled with gifts. Ammachi made you a crochet coaster with our initials and everything. The week before I was to leave I went to visit her and she was gone. I found her.” I close my eyes, remembering the moment I walked into her bedroom and saw her lying in bed, not breathing, lips blue. “It was the worst time of my life. I didn’t know how to function or what to do. I’d lost one of the most important people in my life. Grief took over and nothing but my pain mattered.”
My parents did their best to help me with what I was going through, but nothing worked. For almost a year, I was basically catatonic. My grandfather had died a few years before and my grandparents’ home, the house I grew up in, was empty. A shell of what it once was. A house, but not a home. My siblings didn’t understand what I was going through either, because while they loved our Ammachi, their relationship with her was different. And I couldn’t put into words to anybody else how special she was to me.
“I came back the next year. But when I got to camp, they told me you dropped out of the programme.” She nods, lips twisted to the side. I sigh and add, “I asked them if they had your contact details, but they refused to share because of confidentiality or whatever.
“I never meant to hurt you or make you think I didn’t want you. I searched for you. I joined Facebook in the hopes of finding you and when it came up empty, I deleted my profile. I didn’t know where you were or how to find you and outside of coming to Chennai and stalking you, I was lost.”
I rub the back of my neck, struggling to find the right words to say. I don’t want to make it seem like this is her fault. Because it’s not. Our communication skills were shitty when we were kids and clearly it’s not improved much.
“I waited, Lotus. I looked for you for years. But then it got too hard. I realised in all of that time, you’d probably moved on and found someone new. Found the kind of love you deserved, the love I thought I could give you.”
“I didn’t,” she whispers, voice cracking as she shakes her head.
Fuck. “I didn’t either. It took me years to move on and even then, I fucking hated letting you go.”
“I thought…I thought you’d had enough of me and you’d moved on,” she tells me softly, sniffling and tumbling over her words. “That I wasn’t enough.”
I inch forward, closing the gap between us. “You were so much more than enough. I never meant to leave you. I was always going to come back for you. I had a plan.”
She nods, looking away from me as she says, “I’m sorry about your grandmother, Trick. I remember how much you loved her.”
“I loved you so much too, Tamara. They say teenagers don’t know love and that’s bullshit. I knew…I knew you were my one true love even then.”
Her eyebrow arches and I realise my slip. But I don’t take it back or correct myself. Tamara Chandy was my first love and I know she’ll always be the one that got away. Unless sitting here together, thinking about our future as a couple as we raise our kid means she never gets away from me. I edge closer, our eyes locked. I need to touch her and hold her. I need to know this is real.
“My therapist says my issues with abandonment started with my parents and then were fuelled by you,” she admits softly and I stop moving. My heart’s being yanked out of my chest slowly and painfully. I know her parents died when she was little, but to have what I did to her be compared to that stings.
“I don’t think that’s true, though,” she continues and I close my eyes. “It’s obvious none of you intended to leave me, but my brain doesn’t know that. I carried all this guilt that maybe I wasn’t good enough and that’s why I lost the people I loved most.”
“Lotus…”
