A Small Indiscretion (38 page)

“It’s the eclipse,” Jonathan said.

We all three instinctively looked up at the sky.

“Don’t look directly at the sun,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

He ducked into the garage and found a pair of welding glasses. Clara and Polly looked through the glasses, then I looked. The sun was a circle of light around the moon. It reminded me of the halo effect in the photograph of the White Cliffs. Light and shadow. Shadow and light. The things that had been exposed the least now exposed the most.

“It’s the first annular eclipse visible in the continental United States since 1994,” Jonathan said. “The moon’s diameter appears smaller than the sun’s.”

I left him with the girls and went inside for the pie I’d bought for
dessert. The computer was open on my kitchen desk, and as I had come to do so many times each day, I checked my inbox for word from you. Then I checked the home phone for messages. Then I checked Facebook, and my cellphone for a voice mail or a text.

Then. Then.

The Skype icon on my screen began to flash, and the screen opened, and Skype made its unmistakable sound for an incoming call. I hit the answer button, and on the screen of my computer, like the first sighting of the sun, was your face, nearly hidden inside a wild helmet of hair. You looked like a prophet, or a savior.

“Robbie!” I screamed out.

“Hi, Mom,” you said, smiling.

I called out for your father. He came running, just as he had almost nine months earlier, when I’d held a burning phone in my hand.

Y
OU
’
D TAKEN PASSAGE
on a cargo boat that had never asked for a passport. The boat took you from Japan to Thailand, then you traveled overland into Myanmar. You had sat in silence for one hundred days. At some point, you had been slipped a note informing you that your parents were trying urgently to reach you. Now it was 101 days, and here you were.

I was watching your face closely as you spoke. I was watching it for signs of the as-yet-unanswered question: If Jonathan was not your father, who was? It was a question that was mine to answer, but that you didn’t ask, which was a relief, because I didn’t want to answer it while you were still a world away from us.

You told us you were not going to dedicate your life to walking the Buddha’s true path to spiritual liberation. One hundred days had been enough. You hoped to pick up where you’d left off and spend
the fall studying in Oxfordshire. Before that, you wanted to travel, not in Asia but in Europe. You planned to buy a Eurail pass and do some backpacking.

“Excellent plan,” your father said.

“I have money,” you said. “All my savings over the years.”

“Don’t worry about the money,” I said.

“How did you … how did you find me in the end?” you asked.

“There was a clue,” I said, “in the hatbox.”

“Oh, that.”

“Was that you?”

“I barely remember putting it there. It was right after I came home from rehab. I walked past your room, and I saw your wedding photo on the bed. I’d never seen it before, so I just walked into your room and picked it up. There was a hatbox sitting there, full of papers and folders and photos. For some reason I had the card in my hand, and all of a sudden it was like I wanted to get rid of it. But it was like I’d memorized it, too. It was the coma dreams all over again. Something you want out of your mind but that won’t leave you. I wasn’t planning anything then. I just stuck the card in there. I don’t know why. Then, when I got to Japan, I kind of fell apart. Before that, even, I was … Ever since—”

Your father finished the sentence for you: “Ever since Christmas Eve.”

You looked at us steadily. “Yes. Ever since Christmas Eve,” you said. “In Japan, I just couldn’t deal. I couldn’t sleep. I’d just lie there. I felt like I was going crazy. I had to do something. And I kept remembering the silent retreat center in Myanmar, so I just decided to go there. I’m sorry about disappearing.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Consider yourself officially exonerated,” your father said. “But where did the card come from? How did you know about that center?”

“I don’t know. It could have been given to me during the time that I don’t remember.”

“It must have been Emme,” I said.

Your face colored brightly inside your frame of Jesus hair.

“You’re probably right,” you said. Then you cleared your throat. “Speaking of Emme …”

And you told us that your first stop in Europe was going to be Paris, since you’d been in touch with Emme, and she was living there with her uncle.

Emme. Like the letter. Like an eclipse. A force of nature that keeps coming around, taking out the lights.

J
UNE HAS ARRIVED
. For the second time in less than twelve months, I find myself on a plane to Europe. I made sure to book my flight so that it would land a half-day ahead of yours. You don’t know I’m coming, and it’s critical that I find you before you find Emme.

I take a folder out of my bag. I set the folder on the gray flip-down tray in front of me to study the evidence. A copy of the results of your tissue tests, and of your father’s, and the explanation of what those results mean. The record of the DNA tests that were garnered from Daisy’s blood, then compared to yours. The letter from Daisy’s uncle. The photograph of you and Daisy at the pool, and the one of Daisy’s—and your—deceased father, Malcolm Church, and his deceased wife, Louise, standing on the chalk down of the White Cliffs of Dover. The spire of Dover Castle hovers over their heads, poking through the fog, as if it knows it will be the last photograph ever taken of Malcolm, and it is trying to lift him toward the light. I scanned it and cropped it before I had it printed, so that only Malcolm and Louise remained.

I haven’t brought all those other pages of white paper on which I scrawled my barely legible revision, my plea, my tangled attempt to
finally see the past and let it rest. I know now that I wrote it mostly for myself. It’s my story those pages contain, not anyone else’s, and the only story you need now is your own. So the stack of white paper has been left behind. I’ve moved it from the hatbox to a safedeposit box, where the story it tells can’t do any more harm.

I
STARE OUT
the window of the plane. I watch the land shrink behind us, and inside, I feel a sea of emotion. Because in spite of all the words I wrote since the letter arrived from Emme’s uncle on Valentine’s Day, some part of me must have believed I’d be allowed to keep from you pieces of the truth—namely, the secret of who you are, and who Emme is, and who you are to each other. The secret I’m afraid might really break your heart.

I close my eyes and listen to the white noise of the airplane’s engines. I remember sitting in the car the night we brought you home from the rehab center at Christmas, when your body was healing and your heart was still whole and the house was strung with lights. We listened to that old song from your infancy, and your father cried, and I knew that we were blessed and lucky. I remind myself that we are blessed and lucky again, now that you are found. I remind myself it is the same mother’s love I felt that day in the car that is bringing me to you now. And if the news I have to give you breaks your heart, I will tell you I am sorry, and I will trust that your heart will mend. I will trust that your father’s will mend, too, in time. I will remember Polly, in bed last summer, touching my face, and my tears, and reminding me what matters.

L
ABOR
D
AY WEEKEND
, exactly a year since your accident. It was Jonathan’s weekend with the girls, but he invited me to come to Gold Hill on Sunday. He said there was a carnival day at the pool. A dunk tank, a water slide, bobbing for apples. Good clean fun, he promised. I didn’t know about going back to that pool, given the memories, but I wanted us to be a family, so I went.

The girls were already at the pool. The neighbors next door had walked them up. Jonathan said there was a house for sale down the street. Did I want to come take a look at it?

I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to jinx anything. We walked the block in silence.

The owner showed us around herself, since the house wasn’t yet on the market. It was beautiful, with pale walls and pale wood and big windows looking out over an expansive view. There was an elegant contemporary fixture over the kitchen island, a deconstructed chandelier with brilliant glass crystals hanging in a line from a chrome rod, interlaced with strands of tiny rice lights. It made an impression—an entirely new thing shedding light on the ancient slab of granite below.

As we walked back, I asked Jonathan why the woman was selling.

“A divorce,” he said.

“That’s sad.”

“Yes. It is sad.”

“It’s a beautiful house.”

“Yes.”

“If Robbie ever decides to tear himself away from Oxfordshire and needs a place for a while, he could have the guesthouse out back.”

“Yes,” he said. “I thought of that, too.”

He reached over and took my hand. The back of my neck began to tingle with—what?

“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.

So we went for a drive, up a windy road under towering pines to the top of Skyline. We parked at the end of a dirt road where we could see the whole valley and the bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. He leaned across the center console and kissed me. It was the first kiss in many months, and it reminded me that it was only inside Jonathan’s kisses that I had ever felt entirely known.

He opened the door of the Suburban and put the hatch up and the tailgate down. He spread out an old towel and lay on top of it. I lay down next to him. For a minute I didn’t know what was going to happen, then he reached his hand under my skirt, and I did know.

“This is not very dignified,” I said after it was over.

“Sure it is,” he said. “And anyway, there’s no one around to see us.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The towel beneath us smelled of chlorine and sex. We were naked, stretched out in the back of an SUV, our bare feet and calves extending into the open air. That’s all anybody would see of us. His hairy calves, my shaven ones. My unpainted toenails, clipped short. His heels, hacked up with calluses, as if he’d carved pieces out of them with a pocketknife.

There was a breeze sighing in the trees. The sky was very blue. A formation of geese appeared above us, honking as it moved toward the horizon. How shocking to stumble upon a scene like this, I thought, inside an institution as battered and tenuous as our marriage.

“This is not the kind of thing married people do in the middle of the afternoon in a car,” I said.

“We’re not really married,” he replied.

“We’re not?”

“Not properly. We don’t live together.”

“That’s true.”

“But we will.”

“We will?”

“Sure. Why not? Let’s put an offer in on that house.”

“Okay. But can we afford it?”

“As a matter of fact, we can.”

He told me about the deal he’d struck with a large trade publishing house that planned to purchase a half-share of his business in exchange for exclusive rights to proprietary content he’d acquired from various doctors he’d met at Stanford in the fall. We would have plenty of money for a down payment, even if we didn’t immediately sell the house in the city.

“What about school for the girls?”

He’d thought of that. He’d interviewed the principal of the local elementary school. He’d filled out the forms, just in case.

“What do you want to do about the lease on the store?” he said.

“I don’t know. It’s been so nice spending time with the girls this summer. Maybe I should close the store for good and stay home. Start volunteering, or something.”

He looked right at me. “You need your store,” he said. “The world needs your store. There’s a retail space in Palo Alto coming up for lease. Right downtown, next to an art gallery.”

“That beats a lingerie store,” I said.

He leaned toward me and kissed me. I laid my head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around me. We seemed not to have recovered what we’d lost, but to have forged something different, something older and heavier, a precious compound neither of us knew could be made from the material of our marriage. I felt a rush of love such as I had not felt in years. But did he feel it, too?