A Small Indiscretion (33 page)

But you stood up and gripped her shoulders and turned her body toward you.

“Emme. Calm down.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Look at me.”

“Fuck you.”

“Emme. Change the channel.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I can’t. I can’t think of anything else.”

“You can,” you said to her slowly. “You can think Zen.”

Zen. It was like the word that ends the spell. The kiss that turns the witch back into a princess. Or so it seemed right then.

She looked at you. Slowly, she let her forehead fall against yours. It reminded me of the moment, some twenty years before, when your father had proposed. There was a potent silence, and I felt we were invading a deeply private exchange. Then you put your arm around her and led her outside.

L
ATER, IT WAS
like the episodes from my childhood of my father’s drinking. I felt the evening more like a dream than a memory, the visuals both bright and tangled, the characters both themselves and not, the meaning clear one moment and lost the next. I could remember her leaning toward me and using that word, but I refused to fit the scene into the movie of my civilized life. I lay in bed unable to sleep. Jonathan lay next to me. He had generously rolled up the camping mat for the night. Was he only pretending to sleep while he mourned his own dead parents, and my inability to appreciate my living ones? Were the things I’d said about my father so mean and small as to justify such rage? I didn’t think so. Had I mistreated Emme in the store? No, I had not. Had I underpaid her? Or expected too much? Or been ungrateful for her hard work? Had I judged her, or belittled her, or bossed her around? I hadn’t. I’d been fair, even generous, if a little remote as the summer progressed.

I thought of the mess she’d lived in in the loft. I thought of her mood swings. Were these signs of a serious mental disturbance I’d somehow overlooked? Maybe it was as you posited when you returned from delivering her back to the loft: She was an orphan, jealous of our family life.

Your father and I had peered out the window after you’d led her from the house, and watched the two of you walking down the street. Not hand in hand or arm in arm, just walking beside each other like friends.

Then I went upstairs to find my mother, who had heard the commotion and taken the girls into Clara’s room and closed the door.

We put the girls to sleep. My mother followed me to my bedroom. My hands were shaking. She sat me on the bed and made me take deep breaths, which brought on tears. She handed me tissues, and when I was calmer, she raised her eyebrows at me.

“I hope he doesn’t end up with that one.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.”

You returned, after an hour and a half, alone.

“She’s all right,” you said. “I walked her back to the loft. I didn’t think she should drive a car. And I figured I may as well walk off the beers.”

“What was that all about?” I asked you. “Why does she hate me so much?”

“She was saying some crazy shit,” you replied. “I don’t think it was about you. She’s got a chemical imbalance going on. Her parents both died, so I guess she feels envious of our family. She knows she has to go see someone right away, though, an actual psychiatrist who can assess the medications she’s on. Meditation isn’t going to do the trick this time.”

“She takes the meditation that seriously?”

You looked at me, surprised. “Yeah, she’s into it,” you said. “I am, too, incidentally.”

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you never say so?”

“I don’t know. You and Dad are so … anti all that.”

“We are?”

“Anyway, the good news is she was sleeping when I left her. I think she’ll be all right.” You handed me her car keys. “I got her to give me these. I guess she’ll want them back in the morning.”

“That was a good move, Robbie,” I said, as I hung the keys on a hook by the door.

Then you reached for your jacket. “You’re not going back to the loft, are you?”

“No,” you said. “I’m going back to Berkeley.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

“She might go find you there.”

“She’s never even been there, Mom.”

“Why not sleep here?”

It was not that I was worried you were still tipsy, though I myself still was. It was that I wanted, very badly that night, to have all my children safe under one roof.

You slipped one arm into your jacket.

“Grandma’s on the fold-out, but you can have Polly’s room,” I said. “I already moved her in with Clara.”

You looked at me. You hung your jacket back on the wall.

“Okay,” you said. “You win.”

“Do you want me to change the sheets?” I asked you as you followed me upstairs.

You shook your head and told me I was crazy.

“I’m not the only one,” I said, and we shared a quiet laugh. I was certain that laugh contained a mutual measure of relief. Because clearly this woman did not belong in our lives. Her outburst over dinner was affirmation that it was time for her to move on, go home to New York, find a way to get better. I would not have to dismiss her, or evict her, certainly. She would see for herself the situation was untenable given her feelings for me, whatever had brought them on.

You grabbed a sleeping bag out of the closet and laid it on top of Polly’s sheets, saying you didn’t want to stink up her bed.

I smiled, because you seemed so like your father just then. So considerate, so oblivious to your own bodily comfort, so invested in family. You flopped down in all your clothes and I shut the door behind me. I had no reason to doubt you were there, where I’d left you, when the phone rang in the morning.

S
TORIES DON
’
T LIKE
to end when you want them to, do they? Loose ends aren’t easy to snip with scissors or tuck inside a hem. They tempt you. They want you to keep pulling until there is nothing left to keep you warm.

April is almost over. The plum tree across the street, which, a few weeks ago, was blooming a flamboyant pink, has already shed its color. My mother called, as she always does on Saturday mornings. She said she had news. I felt a hitch in my chest, thinking it must be news of you.

“What is it?”

“It’s about your father,” she said.

She’d been keeping me abreast of their communication since he’d left in January. He’d been pestering her to come to Maine. He’d been telling her she’d love Little Cranberry Island, and that there was more work than he could do alone, with the garden and the goats. But she’d put him off. She hadn’t wanted to leave with you still missing. On the other hand, aside from a few emails, I hadn’t heard from my father at all.

I could tell from her voice that something had changed. It was a voice I remembered from long ago—thin as blown glass.

“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s off the wagon.”

“No.”

“What then?”

“He’s met someone.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No.”

“Where?”

“AA,” she said. “A widow with a home on the water in Northeast Harbor.”

“Northeast Harbor,” I said. “So she must be wealthy.”

“She must be,” my mother said. Then, “Apparently he’s proposed marriage.”

For a minute, I couldn’t say anything. I was shocked. Not only by the news, but by the strength of my own feelings. Somewhere, deep down, I’d believed my parents would get back together. I’d hoped for it—a reassembling of my original family—without even knowing that was what I’d been doing.

And my mother? What had she hoped for? What was she feeling now? I don’t know, because she never said. She kept whatever was in her heart locked away, where it couldn’t interfere. She forgave him, I suppose, for so quickly finding someone new to love. And I saw that I would have to forgive him, too. If I expected to be forgiven myself, I would have to forgive indiscriminately from now on.

I
SET OUT
for a walk to shake off the news. The sky was bright blue and there were flowers blooming everywhere. I found myself outside the store. The key was still on my key chain. I opened the door and flicked on the lights. There was a stack of mail piled up in a
white plastic bin by the door. My bookkeeper had been fishing out the invoices and checks, but the rest of the mail, months and months of it since your accident, lay unopened in the bin. I flipped through it. I came upon an envelope from London, postmarked a month earlier. I pulled a photograph out of the envelope.

Memory is fallible. Does a photograph tell the truth any better? Or is a photograph an equally unreliable artifact? It was nearly a year ago that I’d received a photo in the mailbox I’d thought was from Patrick and misinterpreted entirely. This one actually was from Patrick.

It wasn’t just one, I realized, after a minute. It was one, blown up, and a dozen more in the standard size, every single one a photograph of me. In all the photos my hair is in a thick dark ponytail nearly to my waist, half hidden, as is my face, by a wide-brimmed straw hat adorned with a simple black ribbon.

I thought at first they were the photos Patrick had taken the day we went hat shopping. I could recall no other time I had worn a hat. But he had not taken photos of me in the shop. He had taken them outside, when we were walking in the rain, and I wasn’t wearing a hat then.

I looked more closely. In the background were clues. Horses. A racetrack. The stands. The white-clothed tables of a dining room. The elegant red-velvet seats of a train compartment.

There was a note from Patrick, explaining. That fall, before Malcolm’s death, when Patrick was living in the cottage in Richmond, Malcolm had asked to borrow a camera. He’d taken some photos with the camera, not quite a whole roll. He’d returned the camera to Patrick with the roll inside it. Patrick had promised to develop the film, but he never had. Then Malcolm had died, and the roll had been filed away in Patrick’s haphazard filing system, undeveloped all this time.

Patrick wrote that since he’d seen me last summer, his father had died and left him the house in Howth. He’d sold the gallery and was moving back to Ireland. He was cleaning out his darkroom, purging more than twenty years’ worth of debris, including dozens of rolls of old film. He’d come across a roll labeled
MALCOLM CHURCH
. Out of curiosity, he’d developed it, and this was what he’d found.

The photos must have been taken the day Malcolm and I took the train to the races. But where did the hat come from? And where was the posture I remembered myself taking back then—aloof, annoyed, self-absorbed? I couldn’t find any evidence of that sentiment in these photos. Instead, I saw in my shadowed face something startling. I was gazing at the camera, and at the photographer, who can only have been Malcolm, with what appears to have been a look of love. Was it possible I had loved him—Malcolm—after all?

I closed my eyes. I dragged the memory of that day out of the darkness of time. I stepped through it, in my head, blurred image by blurred image, until finally, I saw it. A shop next to the stands at the races that sold sundries and snacks. Nuts. Gum. Cigars. Sunglasses. And hats. Finally, I located myself.

I am standing inside the shop, with Malcolm. We are at the counter. He is buying me a hat to keep the sun off my face. He is placing it on my head. He is leaning in to kiss me, and I am not only letting him, I am kissing him back. The hat is falling off. We are laughing, and he is reaching for it, and setting it tenderly, again, on my head.

T
HE HAT NEVER
made it back to my room in Victoria that night. I must have left it on the train. But how can I be sure? How can I be certain I’m not manufacturing a memory to match the evidence? You can’t rely on memory. You can’t rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely only on the sculpture
of your life you carve out of the available material, the one that stands by while you muddle your way into your future.

Patrick’s note said he thought I might like to have the photographs, so he’d included copies but kept the originals for himself. He wrote that he’d enjoyed our night together more than he ought to have, that he was thinking about me more than he should, but that he certainly understood why I had not been in touch, and he would forgive me if I chose not to communicate with him again. He wrote that he was tempted to tell me he had always loved me, but it wouldn’t be true. “It was the tragic mistake of my younger self,” he closed, “that I did not.”

He signed with the single loopy
P
, unchanged all these years.

I placed the photos and the note back in the envelope and stuck them in my purse. I walked home, flooded with feeling. I pulled down the hatbox and buried the envelope at the very bottom, where I need not find it again.