But then the song had changed to something angry and volatile, and Jax realized “Alice” must have been composed weeks ago. It didn’t mean Ari still felt the same.
The “Push/Pull” post had a snippet of intense dialogue between the piano and the violin. It was electric and left chills down his spine—an argument in song.
“Solo” made his lip tremble. There was no violin in this piece, just a piano, and it sounded sad.
So Ari had basically written him an entire album, every song either about Jax or their relationship. And he hadn’t told Jax. Why? What did it mean?
Was it meant to be a surprise? A secret forever? Surely Ari hadn’t thought Jax would never notice.
Jax didn’t know whether to be grateful or not that “September 27” wasn’t sampled on Instagram. He wasn’t sure he was ready to listen to Ari describe their sex life with a violin.
His mother found him on the couch, watching the “Alice” clip on loop.
“What are you doing?”
Jax jumped and stared at his mother for a long moment, then finally admitted, “Listening to a clip from Ari’s new album.”
“Jax….”
“It’s called ‘Alice.’”
“Oh,” she said. For a moment she looked too taken aback to say anything else. Then she shook herself and said, “Right. Turn that off—it’s not helping—and come help me make cookies. We have a lot of baking that needs doing before we go see your sister tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jax said with a mock salute, and she threw one of her cold gloves at his face.
Laughing, Jax set his phone on the coffee table, lobbed the glove back at her, and ducked into the kitchen to escape retribution.
“CHRISTMAS” DINNERwas a strange one that year, not that these dinners didn’t always strike Ari as odd. He’d never had a Christmas with a Christian family, but he was pretty sure that the TV-inspired mashup his family did wouldn’t feel authentic to most Canadian families.
Still, this year was weirder than normal, since they’d decided to delay until the twenty-eighth in order to invite Theo after his return from his family home. He’d expressed an interest in experiencing Persian family life, even if he didn’t know his own ethnic heritage exactly—“23AndMe is terrifying,” he once said apropos of nothing before diving back into his textbook—though Ari found it hilarious that his first full Persian family dinner was a holiday no one else celebrated.
Ari was the last one there again, once more by design. Afra had asked for some time to prepare their parents for the news that she and Ben had started the adoption process. By now, though, she’d had plenty of opportunity.
Ari could tell as soon as he went inside that no one had tried to cook the North American classics this year, for which he was grateful. He’d never forget the turkey dinner debacle of ’04. The poor bird had been black on the outside and raw on the inside. In its place, his father appeared to have cooked every Persian holiday food known to God and man.
Whatever their other shortcomings, his parents welcomed Theo with open arms, and though, as Ari had surmised, there was no turkey, it seemed they were simply trying to stuff Theo instead.
After dinner his mother took him aside. “Ari… I’d like to talk to you privately.”
He’d eaten too much to fight her on it.
When the door to her study closed behind him, she reached for his hands, but when he didn’t reach back, she stepped away and clasped hers in front of her. A flicker of hurt showed on her face, but it quickly disappeared under her usual put-together mask.
Ari put his own hands in his pockets in order to avoid the urge to fidget. “What did you want to talk about?” He glanced behind him at the door. It felt strange to be closed in a room with her. They were a tight-knit family; they didn’t often keep secrets.
Or at least, until recently he’d thought they didn’t.
She sighed and gestured to her desk, but instead of sitting behind it as she had when he was a child, she sat in one of the two armchairs on the opposite side.
Ari was thankful, a moment later, that she waited until he was sitting down to say, “I owe you an apology.”
He was so taken aback he couldn’t form words. In his entire life, his mother had never apologized for anything. It took him a moment to manage, “Oh?”
She broke his gaze, her hands still twisted together in her lap so tightly that the brown skin was turning pale. But she took a deep breath and persevered, once again meeting his eyes. “One of the most important parts of raising a child is making decisions that are in the child’s best interest. It’s part of why we moved to Canada in the first place, because we knew we wanted our children to have more choices than we did. It’s part of why Afra gave her baby up for adoption when he was born.” She let out another long breath. “And it’s a very difficult habit to break when our children grow up enough to make their own decisions about what’s best for them.”
It was more of an apology than Ari had ever hoped for, but it didn’t explain everything to his satisfaction. Honestly, now he had more questions. “I don’t understand why it’s so important to you that I stay in London. You always said you wanted me to be happy. You supported my dream of playing music professionally. You didn’t think, when I went to college in Boston, that I’d come home and sign up with the London Symphonia?” The London orchestra didn’t have the budget or the schedule of a larger orchestra, and most of the members taught or performed with several groups in order to support themselves.
Before she could answer, he added in frustration, “And I don’t see why it’s so important that I marry a doctor, Maman.”I wish you could have loved Jax as much as I do.
