“He’s become aggressive,” was what Asa had said after hearing the tale. “Like the junkies on the train begging for money.”
Jared nodded. “That’s why I had to ban him from the house.”
Once Mateo went to California and Milly started receiving good news from Drew, a small window of renewed happiness opened for her and Jared, Asa knew that much. Jared and Milly told each other that what Mateo had needed all along was simply to get away from New York, the scene of his crimes, for a while. Some normality returned for them. They’d have dinner in the neighborhood after work, talk about their students and their own art, walk home together through Tompkins Square Park, curl up and watch a movie in bed, fall asleep to it. Milly slept without the dread fear of waking to Mateo coming home in the wee hours, shuffling through the apartment like a ghost.
“I know this might sound cold,” Jared told Asa one night on the way into a movie, “but it’s so nice just to be alone in the house with Mills again and not have Mateo to worry about.”
“He’s an adult now,” Asa said.
“He’s an adult,” Jared echoed, as though trying to convince himself.
But out in L.A. the adult didn’t last. When Milly gave Jared the news about jail and the girl who’d OD’d, Jared merely rubbed his temple and said nothing. His dismay at the news, and at Milly’s fresh wave of grief, trumped any desire on his part to pull a told you so on Milly. But privately, the news confirmed his belief that Mateo was a lost cause. If he thought about the situation for longer than he cared to, he would peer into a window of a whole sector of New Yorkers whose lives, going back generations, were infinitely more scarred and beset with challenges than his own, and he would feel uncomfortable stirrings of guilt, pity, and helplessness. So he’d return to the more conclusive thought that Mateo was, as he suspected, a lost cause — and thankfully one that was no longer his legal responsibility. Their work was done.
But Milly. “She can’t fucking let go,” Jared complained. “Even at this point. She’s fucking in L.A. right now trying to see him. She’s become, like, a masochist to his drama.” The trip of Milly’s galled him. Why would she go across the country to see someone who’d made it clear he didn’t want to be seen, when he — Jared — yearned for more time alone with her? For the first time in their marriage, doubts rumbled darkly within him.
“It would be nice for once to just see Milly happy,” Asa offered.
Jared snorted in derisive laughter. “Milly won’t let herself be happy. She’s afraid that if she lets herself be happy, her mother will go manic again and ruin the seventh-grade dance for her. She needs a disaster to feel normal.”
As for Milly, she’d not felt remotely normal since that moment Mateo had more or less told her he wanted to be left alone, then left her in the Prius with Drew as he walked back up to his halfway house. Drew had driven for several minutes before she asked: “So can I ask what you guys talked about in the café?”
Milly continued to stare out the window. “He said he didn’t want to come back to New York.”
Drew drove on in silence. “You know,” she finally said, “he’s just trying to find himself apart from his parents like any kid his age.”
“I think he wants to cut me out of the picture,” Milly added.
Back home, in the driveway, Drew hesitated before opening the car door. “Millipede,” she said softly, “can I tell you something? You and Jared did an amazing job with Mateo. Whatever you may think based on the past few years, you did. You helped your mother fulfill a promise to his mother, and you took him out of a group home and gave him an amazing education and an amazing life and gave him lots of love. But he’s nineteen now. You know what it’s time for now?”
Milly smirked slightly. “What is it time for now?” she said.
“It’s Milly Time.”
Milly laughed. “And what does Milly Time look like to you?”
“That’s for Milly to find out.”
Milly tried to take this idea back to New York with her and her broken heart. She kept reiterating it in her head as: work and Jared, work and Jared. The work part, actually, was not so hard. She had her students she cared about, and on weekends, she was happy to go to her studio and lose herself in paints and canvases for several hours, to the point where, after about six weeks, coming into the holidays of 2012, she was growing a significant new body of work and having one or two of the new Lower East Side gallerists up for studio visits. The works were studies in whites and grays — how many shades of white and gray could she glob and spackle onto a canvas and still create the illusion of a monochrome if you stepped back ten paces? On breaks, she’d sneak her cigarette and sit in the big, open warehouse window, looking at the Manhattan Bridge and wondering what Mateo was doing at that moment. Would he make it this time? Would he survive the night? Would he ever come home?
The Jared part, however, didn’t go so well, to her frustration. Some nagging, quintessentially Milly, to-do-list part of her brain kept telling her that she had to put the magic back into her marriage, and she would pay lip service to this idea by, say, texting Jared midday and asking if he wanted to meet after work to see a movie. But then, before he could even answer, feelings of rage toward Jared would overwhelm her. Years ago, those feelings of rage, if they had any coherence at all, might have said something like He’s stopping me from making art; now they were more like He doesn’t give a damn if he sees Mateo ever again. He just doesn’t care! And Milly, in a paroxysm of conflicted feelings, would text Jared again: “Sorry have to nix that. Forgot faculty meeting. See you home later.” Then she’d go to a movie alone.
“She’s so brittle at home,” Jared told Asa over a pint. “She can barely look me in the eyes anymore. We haven’t had sex in over a month. Well, anything approaching real sex, I mean.”
“You guys should probably go to couples therapy,” Asa said.
Jared mustered up the nerve to say as much to Milly.
“I already go to therapy!” Milly protested. “I’ve spent my life in therapy.”
“We need to go to therapy,” Jared said. “Mills, come on. We’re growing apart. We have to talk out what happened with Mateo. You know it.”
She could hardly bear to hear Mateo’s name. When Jared wasn’t home, she’d go in Mateo’s room and lie down on his bed and stare at his posters of rap artists she couldn’t identify, save one that was clearly labeled TYLER, THE CREATOR. This young man, with his rubber-faced grimaces and baseball cap askew on his head, terrified her. She would stare at his image and, over time, started irrationally blaming him for Mateo’s downfall, even though she’d never heard any of his lyrics. She supposed she could go on the Internet and listen, but that prospect terrified her more.
She and Jared actually ended up going to couples therapy at the office of Richard Gallegos, MSW, the same guy Mateo had gone to when he was in high school. Going to him had been Milly’s idea. She knew that saying no to couples therapy was all but saying she was through with the marriage, so at least she seemed proactive, being the one to suggest a therapist. Jared actually agreed with Milly’s rationale that at least Gallegos would have some context for them. Really, though, Milly wanted to see someone who, when she said “Mateo,” would see Mateo’s face and know whom she was talking about.
And so, on a Tuesday night, they walked the few blocks to the still-beige office of Richard Gallegos, now a bit stouter. They told him that, now that it was just the two of them in the house again after fifteen years, they had lost “it”—the marriage, the two-ness, whatever had existed before the Mateo years.