the same position again that I was in when my mother died. My seventeen-year-old self didn’t think I could survive a second loss, not one that involved him. Signing that contract was more than a financial decision and a dream. It was an emotional security blanket.
“I was not going to take advantage of you that night,” he adamantly protested.
“I know.” That was the problem. He’d told me I wasn’t ready, and I’d thought I was. “But I wanted you to.”
He gave his same argument from back then. “You were still seventeen.”
“I was one month shy of my birthday.” Four weeks didn’t matter. “I knew what I wanted. You wouldn’t have been taking advantage of me.” I’d wanted nothing more than to give him my virginity.
“Your grandmother wouldn’t have seen it like that.”
“She was old-fashioned and ailing, and she wouldn’t have had to know,” I uselessly protested, because all of this conversation was too little too late, and the same thing we’d argued about back then.
“I made her a promise,” he reminded me.
Sighing despite myself, I repeated what he’d said to me back then, what I knew he would say now. “And you never break a promise.”
“Not intentionally.”
I couldn’t not say the words. “You broke your promise when you left me.”
“You tried to fuck my brother.”
Recoiling as if he had struck me, I let ten years of holding in an ugly admission roll off my tongue. “I wanted to believe he was you.”
As if expecting my reply, as if he had been waiting all these years to ask me, he didn’t hesitate with his next question. “Because he had no qualms about statutory rape or because he actually wasn’t me?”
His astute question only twisting the knife, I whispered the truth. “He wasn’t choosing the Marines over me.”
“I was choosing an honest future that would support you.”
My damp hands rubbed down my thighs as my poor upbringing vainly tried to smooth the expensive, wrinkled fabric of my dress. I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t understand that back then. I knew he’d wanted to take care of me, and I’d respected that, but it didn’t make my feelings any less real, even if they were selfish.
And I was too embarrassed back then to tell him food was hard to come by on my grandmother’s meager resources. I didn’t let on that I was always hungry and I’d been worried what would happen once he enlisted, let alone deployed.
I also never told him food had been even harder to come by growing up in Trinidad. I was too ashamed to admit my mother worked the streets to first put alcohol in her bloodstream and second, a very distant second, secure food for herself, then her daughter. It wasn’t until her fifth arrest for prostitution in a brothel that was raided that it was discovered she was sick. And even then, it wasn’t a question of finding a relative to take in her fourteen-year-old daughter. A country with too many stories like mine and not enough resources to help, I’d merely been a statistic until I found a letter in an old shoebox with a return address in the United States.
I wrote to a grandmother I’d never met and asked to come live with her. Sending the letter, I’d had visions of fancy houses with cupboards full of food and driveways full of cars. In reality, the woman who sent me a plane ticket did so only out of obligation, and it’d cost her. A fact she never let me forget in the short time we had together.
But none of that changed the events that led us here.
“I know you were trying to secure a future for us.” I knew he’d always wanted to be a Marine, and I didn’t want to say anything to make him feel anything other than proud of that. “That’s the exact same reason why I’d signed that contract.” I looked up into his impossibly complex eyes. “I was trying to create a future for us too, one where you wouldn’t have to deploy.” Casting my gaze away from his, I gave him the truth of my ten-year-old insecurities. “And I needed a safety net in case you didn’t come home from war.”
Staring at her on her knees, I didn’t want to absorb any blame.
I didn’t want to admit I hadn’t taken her virginity because I was protecting her.
That promise I’d made to her grandmother wasn’t for her.