Russell's love life was progressing with fewer upsets than my own. I didn't see much of Mia, and I don't know if he took special care to keep her away or if things just turned out that way. He grew calmer and more content, and the little things I did didn't bother him so much when he'd spent an evening with her. I was violently jealous of Mia's effect on him, and uncomfortably aware of it. I wished a terrible car accident or a new lover on her with an emulsion of vindictiveness and guilt - guilt not for wanting Mia dead but for wanting to take her away from him. I began to worry that her presence was making me redundant. It played out too easily in my head, them getting serious, finding a house to move into together, and Russell sitting me down at the kitchen table to tell me firmly that there was no room for me in his life anymore, that he had made arrangements with the appropriate authorities to have me sent to a foster home. I ran through that scenario over and over until it was not just conjecture but inevitability, and tortured myself at night with it, before falling asleep in a pillow damp from scared tears.
I had to do something about it. I tried to be good and for the most part I succeeded. I kept the living room clean and did the dishes and tried to make the house nice enough and clean enough that all he'd have to do when he got home was make dinner, which he enjoyed doing anyway. I asked him for homework help and we had long conversations about his days in school and what good this or that had done him in real life. I tried to get good grades to show him just how much good he was doing me by letting me stay here. I paid attention in English and brought home insight on some of his favorite books. I think he liked that.
His birthday was on March 4th, and that afforded me the perfect opportunity to do something to make him feel special. I had little enough money, but a few hungry lunches at school and I had enough to buy him a cake (I wouldn't dare try to make one on my own); the real problem was what to do about a gift. I consulted Bonnie.
"I don't know," she said, bewildered. "You said he likes books, right?"
But I had no idea what book to buy him, and barely enough to do it with, and no way to get to a bookstore without him having to drive me. I thought about trying to make him dinner, but the potential for failure was too high; cleaning the house was something I did anyway; I was out of ideas and Bonnie wanted to talk about something else. "It's not the thought that counts, anyway," she said. "It's how much you suffer to make it happen."
As it happened, March 4th was a Thursday, and he had plans to celebrate his birthday with Mia - alone - the following night. When he came home I leaped up off the couch, set my homework aside and told him we had to go out again, and made him drive me to the Baskin Robbins at the mall and sit in the car while I brought out a cake, cleverly hidden in a paper bag but unmistakable nonetheless, and put it in the trunk. I watched him on the ride home and saw a smile curling up the side of his face.
As though he didn't know exactly what I was up to, I sent him to the living room while I ensconced the cake in the freezer, and let him make dinner as usual. Then we put on a movie and while Russell was occupied, I went to check on my creation. It was small and round and garnished with crumbled Oreos, and they had written on it in black icing: Happy birthday Russell! There was plenty of room for candles, and to my horror, I realized I had forgotten them. Oh well - I slid it onto a plate anyway and instead of singing, I just walked it out and set it in front of him, and said, "Hey. Happy birthday."
To his credit, he pretended to be surprised, but we both knew better. "I didn't get you anything," I said. "I couldn't think of anything."
"This is perfect," he said. He cut two slices and I returned it to the freezer. "How did you know it was my birthday?"
"You remember when I had your driver's license," I said.
"You remembered that? The date?"
I shrugged.
"Well, when is yours?"
"November."
I looked down at my cake, suddenly miserable with the uncertainty of
it all.
"You're gonna be around next November, right?"
"Yeah," he said. "Of course."
I glanced at him. He looked startled, as though it hadn't occurred to him that he might have freed himself of me. I felt a little better. "Okay," I said. "Good."
"What did you do on your birthday last year?" Russell said.
He thought I was asking because last year's had been less than I'd hoped for, perhaps, and I leaped on it. "I almost got arrested for shoplifting."
"What? From where?"
"The big Safeway on Market."
"They let you go?"
"I'm glad they did. I'd be in some shitty foster home right now or something."
I had planned it like this. The cake wasn't the real gift. I wanted him to know I trusted him enough to tell him this, and I wanted to impress upon him the superiority of my living arrangements. I had never been happier.
Once upon a time I had lived with my mother and my brother and we were a happy family. And then my mother got sick.
That was what I had told him the second time I had met him, and it was as far from the truth that day as it had been back in October. I started the story honestly but I couldn't bring myself to come clean, to tell him that my mother wasn't really dead but that my brother was; I didn't want him to know what I was or where I had come from, or what had happened to make me leave home. And at the end of it, he thought I was from Colorado, had lived in a poor part of town, and that everything had gone to shit when my mother got cancer. What had happened to me happened in an alley and I had done nothing to deserve it. By the end I was in tears - not because of the content of the story but because it was nothing but a lie. Russell deserved the truth and I wasn't brave enough to give it to him.
"I'm sorry," I said. "This was your birthday."
"No," he said. He didn't try to touch me, and it was so nice of him that it made my heart break. And when he said, "I'm glad you told me," it made my heart break a little bit more.
