Leaving the World Read Online Free Page A

had never cried when Dad left us. I had never cried when he had to cancel so many of our planned weekends in the city after he’d relocated down there. I had never cried when he moved to Chile and kept telling me that, next year, he’d fly me down for a few weeks and never got around to it. I had never cried when his response to my straight As at Smith, my election to Phi Beta Kappa – all that damn striving to please him – was silence. And in an attempt to get some sort of recognition from him I wrote that letter. All it did was make me face the looming truth I never wanted to confront: my father always distanced himself from me. Buy yourself something nice . A hundred bucks and a five-line note to assuage his guilt . . . that is, if he even had any guilt. Yet again, he was brushing me aside – but this time, I couldn’t respond by trying to shrug off his detachment. This time all I could do was cry.
    Tom tried to console me. He kept telling me that my father didn’t deserve such a great daughter, that he would come to regret his dismissal of me, that my success undoubtedly unnerved him, because he himself had failed so badly in everything he had ever undertaken.
    ‘Of course he’s going to push you away,’ Tom said. ‘How else is he going to handle your brilliance?’
    ‘Stop flattering me,’ I told him.
    ‘You’re resistant to flattery,’ he said.
    ‘Because I don’t merit it.’
    ‘No – because you have convinced yourself that your idiot father is right: why should you merit your success?’
    But my sadness wasn’t just bound up in my father’s brush-off of me. It was also rooted in the fact that Tom and I were about to part. The terrible thing about this split was, we didn’t want to break up. But I was heading to Harvard and Tom was off to Trinity College Dublin for postgraduate work. Though neither of us wanted to admit it, we knew that once we were separated by the Atlantic, we’d be finished. What made this knowledge even more agonizing was the fact that Tom had been accepted by Harvard to do his Masters in History. But he had decided to take the offer of a place in Dublin – reassuring me that it would only be a year and then he’d join me at Harvard for his doctorate.
    ‘You can come over for Thanksgiving,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back for Christmas, we’ll spend Easter together knocking around Europe . . . and the year will pass before we both know it.’
    I wanted to believe his protestations. Just as I decided that I wouldn’t force his hand or use the sort of emotional blackmail (‘If you really loved me, you wouldn’t leave me’) that I had heard my mother use against my father in the years leading up to his departure.
    ‘Of course I don’t want you to go,’ I told him after he informed me that he was putting Harvard on hold and heading to Dublin. ‘Of course I’m not going to stop you.’
    That’s when the reassurances began. The more he uttered them, the more I knew he wanted to cut and run. On the day that my dad’s five-line letter arrived – and Tom tried so hard to comfort me – I blurted out the uncomfortable truth: ‘As soon as you get to Dublin, we’re finished.’
    ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said. ‘I’ve never intimated that—’
    ‘But it’s going to happen, because—’
    ‘It is not going to happen,’ Tom said, getting vehement. ‘I value you – us – far too much. And I understand exactly why you’re feeling so vulnerable right now, but . . .’
    But what you don’t understand is what I understand: men vanish when threatened.
    Well, he did head off to Dublin – and we did promise each other that love would see us through and all the other usual romantic clichés. The rupture happened right before Thanksgiving. He was due to come back to the States, with me then meeting him in Paris for Christmas. Fair play to Tom – he didn’t feed me a lie or keep me dangling while he said that, due to unforeseen circumstances, he wouldn’t