Page 57 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
There are more steps yet to this formula. Once Parker decided, on his own accord, to apply to business schools in LA, I had to help him with the applications. Make him sound so brilliant, so amazing, that no school admin in their right mind could possibly turn him down. I helped him with his résumé and his essays and all that other bullshit required to get himthrough the doors. All done in such a way that he didn’t think I was helping at all. It would’ve hurt his ego too much if he realized how much I was responsible for. It was okay; I wasn’t doing any of it for recognition. I had a clear goal in mind: get to LA, no matter what. So when the acceptance letters started coming in, I had to suppress my tears of joy. I let Parker revel in his success, and privately, I lifted an imaginary toast to myself. I did it. I was finally going back to LA.
What I didn’t foresee was how, by moving to LA, I was going to ruin everything.
An Interlude
IZZY
I give Nainai a look.
“What?” she says.
“You can’t do that!” I cry.
“Do what?”
“Say something ominous like ‘I was going to ruin everything’ and then leave me hanging.” I expected Nainai to laugh and admit that she has a flair for the dramatic, but instead, she grows quiet.
“Yes, well,” she says finally, “I did ruin everything.”
“Oh, Nainai.” I link both my arms through hers and squeeze. “No, don’t say that. Look at what you’ve built. How can you say you ruined everything?”
She smiles sadly at me. “All of this, Izzy, I would give up in a second if it meant I got to be with my loved ones.”
I can’t say that didn’t hurt. “I’m your loved one.”
“Yes, you are. But you didn’t come along until much later,my dear.” She pats my arm and we continue walking down the dark street.
“The way you talk about Yeye…” I say after a while.
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s just so confusing. Did you love him?”
She mulls over that. “I did, yes. As much as I could’ve loved any man who was content to exist within a system designed to oppress me. Does that answer your question?”
“I’m going to have to sit on that one for a bit.”
“You do that.”
“But, like, if the two of you had existed outside of this culture, like say there’s no patriarchy, that total equality has been achieved, do you think you’d have loved Yeye?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. Because we would’ve been two completely different people. You can’t just extract the person from their surroundings and expect them to be the same people. I was as much a product of the Chinese-Indonesian upbringing as your Yeye was. Who can say what we would’ve been like if we’d grown up outside this culture? Silly question, Izzy.”
“There are no stupid questions!” I say, laughing.
“Oh, there definitely are.”
We walk for another long bit without talking, until I feel the weight of her sorrow growing so immense that I can’t stand it any longer. “Okay, Nainai. I’m ready to hear it. How did everything fall apart?”
“Well…” she says with a sigh. She looks up at the stars, and I’m surprised to see tears shimmering in her eyes. “I guess you could say it all began when I arrived in LA to find Ellery waiting for me.”
Chapter 20
MAGNOLIA
2010
Iris was renting an apartment in Pasadena, close to her new workplace. Well, I say “new,” but by the time Parker and I moved to LA, she’d been working there for close to a year. It had taken that long for me to convince Parker he needed to apply for an MBA and for him to go through the application process. I couldn’t believe how much Hazel had grown. I feared that she might’ve forgotten me, and she was hesitant at first, which cracked my heart, but then she toddled over to me and said, “Wia?” I knew she was trying to say my name, and the sound of it coming out of her little mouth was too much. I grinned through my tears and scooped her up into my arms.
