Latent Beginnings

When the words met his eyes, hellfire would break.

And then I stepped into the fire.

“Just show me,” Patrick pressed.

I handed Patrick the notebook. I could almost see the embers flickering. I imagined him battering fists on the table. Closing the basement door behind me.

My truth would be his demise. My truth would be his perception of immorality. My truth would be the one thing that forced him to look closely at himself, yet he could never see what I saw. He would be a Narcissus by the pond who only loved and trusted his own reflection, shaped by his own experience with the world; sculpted by doting parents and linear, logical thinking that made him both brilliant and parochial. The thinking that made him verbally critical, and in some cases manipulative, of anyone whose thoughts diverged from his own.

As Patrick reviewed the record of my conversation with my dad, I stared at the picture of the Virgin Mary, framed on the bedside table. I felt the pang of my empty stomach; I hadn’t eaten much that day. Sobbing had been too distracting. I had sat in work meetings off-camera, on mute. I filled an entire trash can of tissues. The salt from the tears cracked on my skin.

During the call, the house had closed in on itself, each room occupied, wood buckling under the weight of the people in it. Patrick sat hunched over his work computer in his room. Isadora, his mom, banged pots and pans in the kitchen. Earl, his dad, tapped out Morse code in the basement. The living room seemed too naked, too invasive, blaring the most recent COVID-19 news on CNN. I had asked whether I could take the call next to Grandma Cara’s bed, scrawling notes on the table where the full-length mirror sat. Dolls, flanking the mirror, were staring at me.

If I didn’t take notes, Patrick would suck every last anecdote out of me. “Anything else?” he would bark when I thought I finished, and “You owe me the Cliffsnotes version” when I said the call was good, and that there was nothing to report. I pictured the yellow-striped Cliffnotes books my classmates would buy to cram for high school exams, filled cover to cover with private thoughts from my own life.

My eyes drifted up to Patrick’s diploma, and then to his face. His eyes moved back to the top of the page as he reread, his grip tightening on the paper. He frowned. Then he twisted his mouth into a grimace, shaking his head.

“Your dad thinks I should be ‘falling over himself to try to make it right?’ What the fuck. What the fuck.”

I felt myself stop breathing, diaphragm waiting, air shelved.

“I’m not going to bow down to anyone.”

“Patrick—” I gasped.

“I won’t sign up for this.”

“Patrick, I’m so sorry,” I said as he shoved his way past me.

At the door’s threshold, he turned to me. “I can’t stand these people. I despise these people.”

He struck his fist against the wall.

I followed him into the kitchen. Patrick stood by the stove, glowering. His mom stood directly next to him, a perplexed look on her face. His dad had his back to me, rubber gloves immersed in dishwater, but he had swiveled his head towards me. Their eyes, red hot, driving holes into my soul.

“My dad’s going to come pick me up,” I said. Shit. Not what I meant to say. I didn’t feel like I had spoken: it was a voice more deeply nested, something suppressed that flooded into the open.

Dishes stopped clanking. The cats looked up. Grandma Cara put her fork down. The whole room languished in every millisecond that passed. The entire house poised to crumple.

“He what?” Isadora barked.

“I mean...I meant to say, he offered to pick me up.”

“You said exactly what you meant.” Isadora took a step forward, her voice a higher pitch than usual. “I can’t believe it. You just fucking broke up with him. How could you? Who are you?”

I looked at Patrick. His face contorted into an expression I had never seen before. Anguish. A rawness that uncloaked the exterior that showed no emotion but rage.

“Fuck you,” he said. He looked as though he wanted to lunge at me, pound his fist on the table, break something. But he stood still. A sense of violence lurked within the stillness, almost as though the stillness itself were violent.

“You didn’t think to even talk to him about this?” Isadora spat.

We had talked, in the days leading up to this moment, about possibly ending the relationship. They had told me to go home, to see how lonely it would be before I came crawling back to Iowa to people who actually loved me. Earlier that day, Isadora had said that Patrick deserved much better than my family, convinced they harbored a hatred for him. Patrick had asserted that our relationship was basically ruined: it was right on the edge, teetering on an invisible precipice.

That was after he had given me the ultimatum that I had to choose him or my parents.

“I thought we did,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I thought we did. You told me to go home. You said we can either break up, be on a break, or try to make it work.”

“That was different,” cried Patrick.

I imagined the words written in the air, turning on themselves, curling and unfurling into different words entirely, attached to opposite meanings.

It didn’t have to be this way.

“Why? WHY?” Isadora screamed.

I flinched. A dog cowering before its master.

“You know what? Fuck you for just deciding without even asking Patrick,” Isadora said. “And you had the nerve to eat dinner with us.” She turned to Earl. “She fucking had the nerve to have dinner with us!”

Then she turned to Grandma Cara, who was forking what was left of her chicken. I watched as she gummed down a bite, and I had the sudden urge to approach her, wrap my arms around her, give her a hug and say how sorry I was that she had to stay here, in this house, where hatred reigned.

“Guess what?” Isadora said, screaming in Grandma Cara’s direction. “She just broke up with him!”

“You’re kidding,” Grandma Cara croaked. She said this with the words drawn out, agonizingly slow, evenly spaced. I watched as her fork fell from her loose grasp, clanging on the plate.

“Yeah, that’s right! She broke up with him,” Isadora continued. “You know why? Because her parents told her to!”

Earl spat into the dishes. “There’s steam coming out of my ears.” I imagined his face reddening, cartoonish, as gusts of steam rushed out. A sense of unreality, even now. “She is such a piece of shit.”

“Patrick,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“Look what you did to her!” Isadora gestured towards Grandma Cara, whose eyes had narrowed. She tipped her head up, eyes turned down slightly, mouth hanging open. There was a painful vulnerability to her posture, a disbelief as she said how good a boy her grandson was, how he didn’t deserve this. But I also sensed she knew about the explosive anger; the intolerability of it all, being in this house, listening to the way their words would lacerate each other.

This will be over soon.

“I never meant to hurt you,” I said to Grandma Cara. “I’m so sorry for hurting you.” And then, too quiet for any ears but my own: “You don’t deserve this.”

Then, the verbal bullets came. Earl’s arsenal unleashed itself in my direction: “these fucking people,” “what a fucking bitch,” “what a bunch of drama queens,” “low-level sons of bitches.” The words hurled and turned and cut through my flesh.

I followed Patrick into his room, taking cover from the words that punctured. His eyes had started welling up. He had never cried in front of me before. He had taken great pride in the fact that he rarely cried as an adult: he’d harnessed his emotions such that he only allowed himself to shed a tear when his grandfather died, and when his childhood dog died. And now this.

“Why would you do this to me, Laura?” Patrick’s legs began to shake. He looked to the door threshold, where his mom stood. His eyes widened in desperation as the shaking became more intense.

I wished I could tell him that I left part of myself behind somewhere along the road to this point of the relationship, in the way he had belittled the itinerant way my brain works, my taste in small things like literature and music, and big things like friends and family. In the way I had relinquished my control in life, for reasons beyond the pandemic—how he refused to compromise in where we lived together, how he and his mother forced me to weave myself into the fabric of his family; eat what they ate, watch what they watched, work whenever and however they pleased. The way that he somehow convinced me that no one in the world measured up to him and his family, and now I knew that wasn’t true. The way he abused and twisted my perceptions, perhaps unintentionally, and confused my sense of hurt with weakness.

“Patrick, you should sit down.” His mom’s voice rang from the doorway. Even in this moment, she made her presence known. Patrick sat on the bed, hands to temples. His mouth was slightly open, eyes darting, head shaking back and forth in disbelief.

Isadora turned to me. Her face puckered. “You fucking monster. WHY?"

“I’m Satan,” I said. “I’m the devil.”

I sensed something beneath the self-deprecation: a shield. A vision of hope. Something I couldn't quite see, but made itself known as a concept.

"Oh, come on," she said. "Not helpful. What?!"

"I...I just became so afraid of everyone’s anger,” I said. “I deserve to be treated like Patrick's partner, not child. I deserve to have my feelings validated. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

I had convinced myself that it was my fault he hated my mother, my fault for inadvertently offending him And his reluctance to commit himself to a lifetime of it, I believed it was my fault. And there was also this twisted-gut feeling that I couldn’t quite name, an intuition that maybe I shouldn’t be blaming myself for my breaking spirit. Something real, surfacing.

“You bitch,” Isadora spat. “We took care of you. We took you in. We got you groceries. Your family doesn’t give a shit about you, and we loved you! We’re all you have!”

“My parents knew how stressed I was when you and Earl would fight,” I said.

And the fact that they forced me to live with them.

“You were fucking spying on us too?” Isadora cried.

“Lying bitch,” muttered Earl from the kitchen. I didn’t even know he could hear us, but sound had a tendency to travel through these walls.

“What else did you say to them?” Isadora said. “Might as well get it all out.”

I paused. Opened my mouth to speak, a dam waiting to break. Closed it again. Shook my head.

“Well? I’m waiting."

A beat. Then, a deluge: “How you yelled at Grandma Cara for things she couldn’t help. And the dog for licking the sore on his paw. And me, whenever I didn’t do something right. I was scared. All the anger scared me.”

“Unbelievable,” Isadora said, puckering her mouth, narrowing her eyes. Her complexion twitched. “She’s a little spy!”

I looked at her. The lines between her eyebrows deepened. I felt my hand land on my forehead, smoothing the creases on my own.

“What else?” She put her hands on her hips.

“There wasn’t anything else.”

“Liar.”

“I promise that was it,” I said. “I barely told them anything.”

“I think you should leave,” Isadora said.

“I’ll warm up the car,” said Earl. “I’m taking that bitch to a fucking hotel.”

“Fuck you, Laura,” Patrick hissed, pulling my bag from the back of the couch. “No wonder you only have one friend. You burn bridges.”

It was an image of fire, oppressive heat licking the unsuspecting wood. I pictured myself on one side, feet cooled by grass, smiling as the wood crumbled and fell off the precipice, down to the unknown. It disgusted me, and yet I remained shielded somehow. Armor deflected the hatred.

I began tearing clothes from hangers, unhinging my work monitor, grabbing books from behind the shelf, stacking them in my backpack. Wondering, for an instant, whether I should leave or take Christmas gifts from them—took some, left others, in no particular order. Time to think was scarce. Nonexistent. Illogical.

A shadow appeared in the door. It was Patrick. This time, softer. More vulnerable.

“What did I do wrong?” Patrick sounded weak. His voice wavered.

“You didn’t care about my feelings,” I said evenly. It was the first time I had ever told him this. "I couldn’t ever disagree with you. I became so afraid of making you angry. I tried to be kind. I tried to do as much for you as I could. And I still upset you no matter how hard I tried.”

“What else?” he said, smooth as silk. It was as though he had detached himself, ripping out the emotional part of his being and setting it aside. All that was left was stoic stone.

“You hated my friends. You hated my family.”

“Anything else?”

I just looked at him. The side of my mouth turned upward into a smile, realizing for the first time—for myself—I could tell the truth.

“Let these be your last memories with me.” He turned away.

He returned to the living room. Isadora’s voice rang from the hallway as she brought another load of miscellaneous items. She reappeared in the doorframe as I slipped my glasses into their case. She told me how good she was to me, how despicable that I repaid her this way. I told her how I was never enough. She told me I was a poor little rich girl; the words stung.

But somehow, I had no urge to cry. A presence, almost divine, hovered somewhere in this room. As I packed, something haloed my body, shielding me as I went to the basement to get another box, as I shoved clothes into my bag. A salve, an elixir. Something almost divine, and ineffable.

“Her parents are probably going to kick her out after a month. And she’ll go somewhere, and she’ll get COVID,” Patrick said. A few “yep”s punctuated these predictions. He didn’t say the next thing that usually followed a prediction about COVID: maybe she’ll die.

The sounds of hatred drifted over from the next room as I consolidated my things. And yet as I picked and stuffed, and turned my head away as I went down the stairs and up again, packing my bags and stacking my books, I recognized and was also perplexed by this sense of calm that protected me from the hatred.

The below-zero cold stung my face as I made trips back and forth from the car, hauling bins and the orange suitcase, miscellaneous grocery bags. Earl began to take a few items to the car.

“I can do it, don’t worry,” I said.

“I want you out,” he said. “And if that means that I help you, then so be it.”

A few minutes later, the house had been cleared of most evidence of my presence. I looked into the living room for the final time. The dog lay on the floor. The cats curled into their usual positions. Grandma Cara sat in her chair as she always did. Isadora had her arm around Patrick, rubbing his back as they both fumed.

“You may not believe me,” I said, “but I really am grateful.”

“No, you’re fucking not,” seethed Isadora. “You are fucking not.”

Patrick threw my gloves at my feet. “You forgot these,” he spat.

“Thank you,” I said to him. His back was turned to me.

The cold from outside beckoned.

Wind turned to condensation on my face, a relief that washed over me: a freedom that waited for me on the other side.

I closed the door for the last time.