“I was sorry to hear about her passing, despite what she did to me.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He was waiting for me to ask. I didn’t want to hear him pass the blame onto my mother, but I traveled all this way, and I needed to know what his excuse was.
“What did she do to you?” The question tasted bitter in my mouth.
“You don’t want to hear this about your mother,” he said.
“You brought it up.”
He sighed, glanced out the window at the building across the street for a moment, then looked back at me. “Your mother was having an affair. We fought about it. A lot. We tried marriage counseling. Things were getting better for a while, but one day I…” He paused, pursing his lips. “She gave me an STD. I couldn’t even look at her after that. I filed for divorce and I left. Every day I’m sorry that I didn’t take you with me. I was so angry when I left that I just wanted to keep going and never turn around. There are so many things I wish I could have done differently. I would have left your mother a lot sooner. I probably would have stayed in San Diego if I had, but then I never would have met Cheryl and had the twins and Caden.”
“When did you finally remember me? It took you fifteen years to write to me.”
“I thought at the time that it was best to wait until you were grown up to reach out to you. I didn’t want to cause any tension between you and your mother. And then I heard about what happened to her, and by the time I tried to get in contact, you were long gone. I had no idea where you had gone. A few years ago, Cheryl showed me how I could find your address online, but it seemed like every time I wrote to you, you had already moved. When you took seven months to call me, I thought my letter had been lost in the mail.”
I didn’t want to believe a word he said. I was ready to get up and go back to San Diego when something caught my eye in another booth. It was a flash of blond hair and blue eyes. I craned my neck to see better. Two identical faces were watching me from a few booths down. Next to the twin girls was a boy, a little younger, watching me with equal interest.
I had decided when Joel told me about my siblings that I was never going to meet them. It wasn’t fair to expect me to. It would have felt like a betrayal to my mother, to accept this life that my dad had created away from us. But everything changed when I saw them in the coffee shop that day. I looked at Joel, and then back at the kids. They were waiting to see if their older brother would accept them.
I didn’t even know them, but I already knew that I couldn’t abandon them.
I moved into the building where Joel worked a week later. I flew back to San Diego to get my things, then drove through eight states to get back to Miami. I made sure to stay far away from Dallas on my way.
I didn’t have much. Just my clothes, my car, and a few boxes of personal belongings. I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out my box of Naomi’s letters. I headed for the front door of the building. I wondered if I would ever be able to write to her again. I would have to ask Joel how he found my address. Maybe I could find hers the same way.
As the thought crossed my mind, a woman stepped through the door and stopped to hold it open for me. Her red hair caught my eye. I almost tripped and dropped my box. It felt like time slowed as I approached. All I could do was stare at this woman and try to remind myself of what Naomi looked like. I knew that this wasn’t her. Naomi had never moved out of Oklahoma. Miami was a big city and there were probably thousands of redheads here. It was just a coincidence that I happened to be thinking of Naomi at the exact moment this beautiful woman opened the door.
“Thank you,” I said as I walked through. She let go of the door and went on her way. I stood there in the middle of the lobby, watching her through the window until she disappeared.
“She’s a looker, huh?” Joel said from the security desk.
I turned to face him. “Does she live in this building?”
“Yep. She’s kind of a local celebrity. She covers for the weatherman sometimes, so we get to see her on TV once in a while.”
I knew that it couldn’t be her, but I had to ask anyway. “What’s her name?”
“Naomi Light,” he said.
I must have heard him wrong. He couldn’t have said her name. I was convinced that it was my own mind that planted her name in his mouth when he spoke. “What?”
“Naomi Light,” he repeated.
I looked at the box of letters that I held, then back out the window. She was long gone, but it was her. Of all the apartment buildings in all of the world, I had just moved into hers.
“No fucking way.”
* * *
The sound of the door slamming behind me solidifies every doubt I had about whether this was a good idea. I can hear the click of the lock, like she’s scared I might try to come back inside. I’m not really sure what I expected, but I guess I hoped it would go better than that. In her letters, she’s been asking to meet me for a while. Every time I show up, she doesn’t seem to remember that she invited me. I guess it’s not fair to say that she doesn’t remember. The truth is, she didn’t know that I was the one she was inviting over. There were many times I was about to tell her, but I chickened out every time until now.
It kills me that she thought that she was the one deceiving me. I had never meant to drag this out as long as I did. I tried to put some distance between us the last few days, but the damage was already done. I had lied to her.
It had hurt her enough that Joel had lied to her. What I did was so much worse. I knew that no amount of distance would make the lie any less hurtful. I could only hope that it wasn’t too late to tell the truth. I thought that writing a letter might make it easier. I thought she liked the real me enough that she might be glad we were the same person. I realize now that I was being naïve. Writing that letter was a stupid idea.
I turn around and step toward the door so that she can hear me through it.
“Naomi? Can we please talk?”
