Forbidden Aunt

The first time I noticed Lee looking at me, I was standing in my sister's kitchen, elbow-deep in dishwater, and he was supposed to be helping his mother carry in the groceries.

He wasn't helping. He was just standing there in the doorway, still holding two plastic bags, watching me scrub a pot with more concentration than any seventeen-year-old boy should give to anything that wasn't a phone screen. I felt it before I saw it. That prickle at the back of my neck, the one women my age learn to recognize. Not the casual glance of a kid who wants to know when dinner's ready. Something else. Something that made my hands go still in the water.

"Lee," I said, without turning around. "Those bags aren't going to unpack themselves."

"I know."

But he didn't move. I heard the plastic rustle, heard him shift his weight from one foot to the other. The kitchen smelled like the lemongrass soup I'd been reheating, and underneath that, the faint chemical sweetness of the new plastic bags, and underneath that, something I didn't want to name. I turned around.

He was taller than I remembered. When had that happened? Last Lebaran he'd been a head shorter than me, all elbows and bad skin, and now he stood there with his jaw set and his eyes doing something I couldn't read. He'd grown into his face. That's the only way I knew how to put it. The boy I used to bounce on my knee was gone, and in his place was this stranger with my sister's cheekbones and a gaze that wouldn't drop.

"The bags," I said again, sharper this time.

He set them on the counter. Slowly. Like he was giving himself time to think of something to say. Then he said it. "You look nice today, Tante Ipah."

Tante. The word should have been a bucket of cold water. It was what he'd called me since he could talk. It was what all my nieces and nephews called me, what the neighbors' kids called me, what the man at the warung called me when I bought cigarettes. Tante Ipah. Auntie Ipah. A title that came with a whole life attached, a husband who snored, a mortgage, a body that had started to betray me in small ways I tried not to think about.

But the way he said it. He put a pause before it. Like the word was a door he was standing in front of, deciding whether to knock.

I turned back to the sink. "Go help your mother."

He went. I stood there with my hands in the water until it went cold.

That was three months ago. I've replayed it so many times I've worn the memory smooth, the way you wear a stone in your pocket. I keep looking for the moment I could have stopped it. A word, a look, a door left open or closed. But there wasn't one moment. There was just a slow accumulation, like water finding its way through a crack in the foundation, and by the time you notice the damp on the wall, the damage is already done.

Lee is my sister's son. My sister Ratna, who is seven years older than me, who raised me after our mother died, who still calls me "adik" even though I'm thirty-four and she's forty-one and neither of us is young anymore. Ratna, who married a man from Solo and moved there for ten years and came back after he left her, with Lee still in diapers. Ratna, who has spent her whole life taking care of other people and never once asked me for anything.

I owe her everything. That's not a figure of speech. Everything I am, every good thing in my life, traces back to her. And now I sit in my car outside her house, engine off, keys in my hand, and I can't make myself walk to the door.

Because I know he'll be there.

He's always there now. He started coming by more often after his mother got sick. Ratna's diabetes got worse this year, the kind of worse that means dialysis twice a week, and Lee dropped out of his first semester of university to help. He drives her to appointments. He does the shopping. He sits with her in the evenings and reads to her, actual books, out loud, because her eyes get tired. He's a good son. Everyone says so. The neighbors, the family, the aunties at the mosque. Such a good boy, they say. So devoted.

They don't see what I see. They don't see the way he looks at me when he thinks no one's watching. They don't see the way his hand brushes mine when he passes me a plate, a touch that lasts half a second too long. They don't hear the way he says my name now. Not Tante. Just Ipah. Soft, like it's a secret he's keeping for both of us.

I should have stopped it. I know that. I should have told Ratna, or told him to stay away, or simply stopped coming over. But here's the thing I can't explain to anyone, the thing I can barely admit to myself: I didn't want to.

It started with small things. He'd ask me questions. Not the polite questions relatives ask, the ones you answer on autopilot. Real questions. What did you want to be when you were young? Do you ever feel like you're living someone else's life? Why did you stop painting? I didn't know he knew I used to paint. I didn't know anyone remembered. I'd stopped when I married, when the money got tight, when it became clear that the kind of life I'd imagined wasn't the kind of life I was going to get.

But Lee remembered. He'd seen the old sketchbooks in Ratna's storage room, the ones I'd forgotten I left there. He'd looked through them. He told me I had a gift. He said it with such seriousness, such certainty, that for a moment I believed him.

No one had said anything like that to me in years. My husband tells me I'm a good cook. He tells me the house looks nice. He doesn't tell me I have a gift. He doesn't look at me like I'm a person with a future, like there's still something in me worth discovering.

I'm not making excuses. I know how it sounds. A bored housewife, a neglected wife, a younger man who sees her. It's a cliché, and I hate clichés. I've spent my whole life trying not to be one of those women you see in sinetron, the ones who throw everything away for a feeling. I've been careful. I've been good. I've done everything right.

And then Lee looked at me in that kitchen, and something in me cracked open, and I've been trying to hold the pieces together ever since.

The car is getting hot. I should go in. Ratna's expecting me. She wants me to help her sort through old photos, decide which ones to keep and which to throw away, a project she's been talking about for weeks. It's the kind of thing you do when you're sick, I think. You start trying to make things tidy. You start trying to leave less behind.

I grab my bag and step out of the car. The afternoon sun is brutal, the kind of heat that makes the air shimmer above the pavement. The gate to Ratna's house is open, and I can hear the TV playing inside, some variety show with a laugh track that sounds like it was recorded in the eighties.

I walk up the path. The jasmine plant by the door is flowering, and the smell hits me before I reach the steps. Sweet, almost cloying. My mother used to say jasmine was the flower of memory. I never knew what she meant until now.

The door opens before I can knock.

Lee stands there, barefoot, in a t-shirt that's seen better days. His hair is damp, like he just showered. He looks at me, and there it is again. That look. The one that says he's been waiting. The one that says he knows something I'm trying not to know.

"Ipah," he says. Just that. My name, no title, no hesitation.

My sister's voice comes from inside. "Is that Ipah? Tell her to come in, it's hot out there."

I should say something. I should push past him, go to my sister, sit on the floor with the photo albums and pretend everything is normal. But I don't. I stand there on the doorstep, caught between the heat outside and the cool air spilling from the house, and I look at my nephew, and I feel the whole careful architecture of my life start to sway.

"I brought the old albums," I say, holding up my bag like a shield. "Ratna wanted to go through them."

He nods. He doesn't move. "She's in the back room. She's been waiting for you."

And then, quieter, so quiet I almost don't hear it: "I've been waiting too."

The jasmine smell is everywhere. The laugh track plays on. Somewhere inside, my sister coughs, a dry, persistent sound that's become the soundtrack of her house. I step over the threshold, and Lee steps aside, and the door closes behind me, and I know, with a certainty that settles into my bones like cold water, that something is going to happen today. Something I can't take back.

I walk past him into the house. I don't look at him. I don't need to. I can feel him behind me, a warmth at my back, a presence that has no business being there.

Ratna calls my name again, and I follow her voice, and I tell myself I'm just here to sort through photographs. Just here to help my sister. Just here to be a good aunt, a good sister, a good woman.

The photographs are spread across the dining table when I find her. Old ones, from before Lee was born, from before I was married, from before any of us had any idea what our lives would become. Ratna looks up at me and smiles, and her face is tired and yellow around the eyes, and I love her so much it hurts.

"Come sit," she says. "I found the ones from your wedding."

I sit. I pick up the first photo. And I don't look toward the doorway, where I know Lee is standing, watching, waiting.

But I feel him there. I always feel him there.