After the Moment (23 page)

Well, that helped to explain. For his father, shaving was a moment of daily accountability. What guided his behavior with others was knowing he had to face himself in the mirror.
Only do what you can live with
was Clayton's creed. Leigh was tempted to remind his father that he didn't yet shave every day, but there was no call to be a jerk when Clayton was doing his best. It was his last chance
to work on their bond,
as Janet had put it three years ago when she'd asked Leigh to move to Calvert Park.

"Okay," Leigh said, wondering if he should add
Thanks.
"Okay, I'll keep that in mind."

"Millie will miss you," Clayton said. "Janet too. It's been, well, she says it's been ... a joy having you here."

Leigh wanted to laugh. Or maybe just wait to tell Maia this and then they could—oh, God. How long before she stopped weaving into his thoughts? Angry with himself, Leigh said with more edge than he meant, "I'll miss you too, Dad."

"Okay, then," Clayton said, getting up and pausing by the door. "Okay."

Leigh watched him go. With Clayton there would be no talks like with Pete, and certainly no hugging. But if Leigh were in trouble, his father would be somewhere close by, working on a Canadian visa or its equivalent.

That was something he could count on. And if on some morning while shaving, he saw the shadow of failure or error in the mirror, well, then Leigh would know that what mattered was finding a way to live with i t.

During the dinner party in the huge apartment high above the city, Leigh felt certain that there was no way to live with Maia Morland being so close and yet so beyond his reach. He realized that his failing her was the shadow in the mirror. One that he saw daily but could not bear to notice. With something akin to dread, Leigh remembered what Janet had told him when Millie's father died.

Your heart can break a thousand times, but never more than once for the same person.

He had believed her. At seventeen, he'd had no reason to question the older woman's experience when it came to the end of love. But looking at Maia now, Leigh lost faith in his stepmother's statement. While he knew his heart wasn't breaking, the mere sight of Maia Mor-land had cracked something inside of him.

~~~

At the wide, almost laughably long table, Leigh was seated directly across from Maia. It would be more accurate to say that Maia was seated, quite on purpose, next to the guest of honor, with Leigh carelessly placed between Kathleen's boss and the wife of a German banker. The banker himself was several seats away, near the head of the table, across from Kathleen and next to the party's host. Kathleen's boss, somewhat understandably, couldn't be bothered with Leigh, but the banker's wife was more than happy to talk about a recent shooting on a college campus.

She had been reading in the American papers that people thought each student on campus should have been armed. That it was the belief of the Americans in charge, that more guns would mean less shooting. Could this be right?

Leigh sighed, not really wanting to talk about gun laws, but he tried explaining about the NRA and how restrictions differed from state to state. If this party had taken place two weeks before, he would have been in a conversation about the behavior of (and outfits worn by) British sailors released from Iranian captivity.

The conversation at parties was always the same; only the details were different.

The banker's wife, Liesl Klein, spoke at some length about guns and violence, making a variety of obvious points, which allowed Leigh to listen without paying much attention. He was watching and listening to Maia, who was having an involved conversation with the guest of honor, a Ms. Anne Rudling. Anne Rudling was at the party in order to raise money for a foundation that collected the forensic evidence necessary to prosecute war crimes.

No, that was wrong. The foundation
fundraised
for organizations that did the forensic collecting needed by and for tribunals.

Leigh thought of Franklin and Kevin Staines's mother, who had worked for a fundraising firm. Once Oliver Lexham and his friends went off to college, had Mrs. Staines gone back to work? Franklin and Millie were still friends, Leigh knew, but the status of that friendship was in constant flux between romantic and platonic. Leigh dragged his mind back to the table. It was clear, based on what he overheard, that Josh Pierce's money was the target, and it explained Maia's proximity to Ms. Rudling. Josh had been scheduled to attend and had had to send an associate to accompany Maia at the last minute.

Leigh ate his salad, and the fish course, and then the braised veal, all served by a staff of five. He registered that Maia Morland, although surrounded by people, was eating her entire meal with ease. He watched her throat to check; no problems swallowing.

He was entirely unprepared to be so close to her—if he'd wanted, he could have easily put his foot on hers—and yet so unable to reach for her. He had thought the only visual memories left from that year were the bloody socks, paper tape on his room's crown molding, and a romance novel lying in a rain puddle. But it turned out that his body's silent space had absorbed much more: the times he'd breathed in against her skin, seen her smile, or traced his hands over her burn marks, secure in the knowledge that he would never let harm befall her again.

Leigh was careful to keep an eye on how often he let the staff fill his wineglass. Maia, he noticed, put her hand over her glass and shook her head no whenever anyone offered her wine. As Anne Rudling turned to a conversation with the man on her left, Maia caught Leigh looking as she, once again, refused some wine.

She leaned across the table and beckoned with her finger for Leigh to do the same.

"I always tell people I'm on antibiotics," she said, with an easy smile, "but you'll be glad to know that I have a no-drinking rule when I'm going to be around men I don't trust."

Leigh allowed himself a quick glance around the table. "Who here don't you trust?"

"In this town?" she asked him, her whisper full of mirth and disbelief. "Every man I meet."

"You look beautiful," he whispered back, because it was true, and because if he couldn't touch her he needed some way to reach her, and
You look beautiful
seemed safer than
It's killing me to look at you.

"Don't be ridiculous," Maia said.

"Okay," he said. "But you do."

"Well, thanks," she said, and sat back down in her chair.

Leigh saw her turn to the man on her right, but before Maia had a chance to start talking, Leigh leaned in and asked him, "Do you think you can explain how over thirty students died in a shooting spree? I'm doing a terrible job."

The man took the bait and began talking to Liesl Klein.

With ease and quickness, the banker's wife was guided away from talking about the sad, blighted campus and into a conversation about the significance of six Shiite cabinet ministers resigning from the Iraqi government. Leigh was awed and impressed at the verbal dexterity it had taken. Although, maybe it had simply required some attention or effort. All of
his
attention was currently taken up in debating the wisdom of pointing out to Maia that when they first met, the war had barely started. The past was, perhaps, not a great conversation starter with a girl who had been his girlfriend during the year she was ... whatever it was she had decided happened to her.

Since she hadn't gone to court, Maia could call it whatever she wanted and no legal decision would contradict her. While Leigh was casting around for something to say to her that didn't include the words
It's killing me,
Maia leaned across the table again and said, "I hear you're going to Senegal."

"Yeah, right after I graduate."

"You'll be a great journalist," she said. "I've never met anyone as focused on details as you."

"Well, that remains to be seen," he said.

"Everything remains to be seen," Maia said, and when she smiled a dimple on the right side of her face flashed out at him.

Had that always been there? Had Leigh forgotten how her face looked when she was happy? Had he simply never noticed it? He felt himself growing warm under his shirt and hoped he wasn't visibly flushed.

"I just meant that it was almost impossible to find a job," he said.

Leigh, after sending his résumé and clippings to every paper with a mailing address, interviewed with seven of them; but with no offers on the horizon, he thought he was going to have to look outside of journalism for a paycheck. Then, on Pete's recommendation, Leigh applied to a few places abroad—wire services, mostly—stressing that he could speak French and, for the most part, get by in Spanish. CNBC was launching an African bureau and hired him as a stringer to file stories on West African economic and business issues.

"With that lined up," he told Maia, "I begged this French newspaper in Dakar to hire me. And they did."

"Millie said you were e-mailing her in French so as to practice."

"You talk to Millie?"

But of course she did. How did he think Maia had found out about his job in Senegal? Well, he hadn't thought, actually. And, in four years, he'd always been careful not to mention Maia to his sister. Millie had been to visit him the year he'd spent in Montana, working for the
Missoulian,
and to Chicago during the two years into which he'd crammed three and a half years of college. Millie had been to see him several times here in the city when he'd transferred to Columbia.

Leigh, if asked, would have said he knew his sister really well. And yet all this time while he was floundering around, Millie had remained friends with the one woman he most desired to talk to, hear from, or see.

"I felt like I owed her, you know, to stay in touch," Maia said. "She loved me like I walked on water."

"I loved you like that," Leigh said, glad they were both whispering. "I would have done anything to stay in touch with you."

To be heard at this table, you either had to lean in and whisper or make everything you said a kind of pronouncement, and she whispered back, "No, you loved me like you walked on water."

It was like being hit, and Leigh looked down so that no one could see the mark on his face. His hands, which were braced on top of the tablecloth, were very close to Maia's. Her nails were polished, no sign that she had ever bit her cuticles until they bled. Their noses were almost touching as they talked, neither of them wanting to risk being overheard.

Instead, they were looked at and puzzled over.

"What are you two discussing so intently down there?" the host asked. "How to stop the war?"

The conversation about Iraqi ministers had turned into the inevitable one about the war and had spread across the table to everyone but Leigh and Maia.

"It's not a question of stopping," Maia said, sitting back into her chair, her eyes still on Leigh. "It's how to get out."

"That's what you were talking about?" Anne Rudling asked. "You weren't catching up on everything since high school?"

"Maia, you were in high school with him?" the host asked. "I remember your graduation as being all girls."

Leigh tried to remember his name. Andrew? Anthony? Josh Pierce's business partner, who had held down the fort when Josh was in prison. Anthony. Anthony Kearn.

"From the school before that," Maia said. "We were friends."

"I was her boyfriend," Leigh said, still furious over her comment about how he had loved her.

Let her deny it. Go ahead. She couldn't hurt him.

A murmur of
how sweet
and one
God, I'm old, my high school boyfriend has five kids
ran across the table. Leigh's statement of fact did have the one benefit of chasing exit strategy proposals out of the general conversation.

"Oh, he was more than my boyfriend," Maia said, smiling as if she had both a secret and a great prize to give away. "Leigh Hunter is one of the last, great gentlemen."

"Oh, my God," Leigh heard Kathleen Tahoe say. "You're that Maia."

"I am," Maia said, looking around to check.

Yes, she had a captive table. All eyes were on her.

"Some boys at our school were rather unkind to me," Maia said, in a bright, hard voice. "And Leigh put one of them in the hospital. My hero."

She almost pulled it off—the transformation of the mess unleashed by Preston, Kevin, and Oliver into a throwaway story—and in a few more years, Leigh had no doubt that she would be even better at presenting it as something that had never touched her. But not yet. Some softening in her voice or a dullness in her eyes gave her away, and the guests were silent, the way the cafeteria had been in the moments after Preston Gavenlock's body went still.

Something bad had happened to Maia Morland, and in the silence, the guests were trying to gauge it.

"My honor was restored to me," she said. "It was all very sweet."

That fixed any suspicion that she was not okay, and conversation rose up, with Liesl Klein asking Leigh about the American universities he had gone to and how safe he had felt. He told her that he had lived in a terrible neighborhood in Chicago but had always felt safe.

"I grew up in New York," he said. "Safety is all relative."

How to explain to her about how safe his parents had kept him? Ever since the war had started, Leigh had been young, strong, and in possession of perfect eyesight, yet the most danger he was ever in was the kind everyone faced when they got on the subway.

After a decent interval, as dessert, brandy, and espresso were served back in the living room, Leigh slipped into the bathroom across from the coat closet in the apartment's massive front hall. The apartment where he'd lived with Lillian would fit easily into the entrance area. But real estate was not on his mind, and Leigh dug his cell phone out from a pocket of his suit's confusing array of them.

Millie answered right away. She never left the house on Thursdays, recording and then watching her favorite TV show so she could fast-forward over the commercials. They exchanged hellos; she told him what was happening to all the characters and asked about his French. He managed to talk as much as was possible while in a bathroom full of embroidered hand towels and light fixtures with shades.