Here to Stay (42 page)

Outside was purple, velvety twilight. The air was a soft towel blotting away the sweat of their lovemaking. They were isolated deep in the woods, not a human soul around and only the sounds of nature creating a low background hum. Hand-in-hand they went down the short path to the edge of the lake and waded into its cool depths.

As the water closed over his head, Erik’s skin and bones dissolved. He couldn’t tell where he stopped and the lake’s embrace began. He came up, raking his fingers through his hair, running them over his face, then toppled back into the drink. Over and over, they both sank beneath the surface, rinsed themselves clean, wrung themselves out, then dropped under again.

Suffused with a beautiful weariness, he moved to a shallower place where he could kneel in the soft sand. She swam up to him, floated into his lap, her arms around his neck.

“I’m so happy right now,” she said. “I didn’t think I ever would be again.”

He cradled her to his chest, fell into the green of her eyes as he went looking for her mouth again.

“I love you,” he said. “You’re the love of my life.”

He turned in the silky circle of her arms, drawing them around him from behind. “Hold on.”

With her cheek snugged tight against his, he pushed off and glided toward the middle of the lake. She streamed out behind him like a cape.

Hold on,
his heart sang.
Hold onto me.

DAISY’S ORIGINAL DUE date arrived. Kees should have been born today. Or perhaps he would’ve been born already.

The day bristled with a strange longing, looking from Daisy to Erik and back like an expectant puppy with a leash in its mouth. They took themselves for a long walk down country roads. They sighed a lot but didn’t say much.

In the late afternoon, they lay in the hammock at the far end of the porch at La Tarasque.

“What are those flowers?” Erik asked, pointing to the drifts of magenta pom-poms on the other side of the railing.

“Monarda,” Daisy said. “Bee balm.”

The fluffy flowers were thick with bees. And as Erik and Daisy lay still, hummingbirds began to approach. First one. Then two more. Hovering with blurred wings as they fished for nectar.

“Messengers,” Daisy said. “They get into dark places and heal.”

“I’ve never seen them this close,” he said.

“Maybe they have a message.”

They swung a while in silence.

“It’s not like he had a personality yet,” Erik said. “Although when I saw his face and he looked so serious… And my mother said it was how I looked. He became a person to me. Like I could see that would be part of who he was. Or who he was supposed to be.”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Daisy asked.

“I don’t know. Why? Do you feel like he’s gone to be born somewhere else? As someone else?”

“He was ours,” she said. “I mean, we made him. We shared him. He was born of us.”

“Our cathedral,” he said, seeing the new spire rising above stained glass and bells.

“I’ve always gravitated toward the idea that souls are an eternal source of energy and these bodies of ours are just shells,” Daisy said. “Going through IVF really solidified it for me. Seeing pictures of the dividing cells and it was all happening in a dish, in a lab. Was Kees’s soul present at that time? What about those embryos we froze—is the soul frozen inside them? I can’t believe it is. Bodies are just the shell. Gender is part of the shell. The soul comes along later, by choice. I really believe this. Souls have a purpose and their energy belongs with a certain other energy. They go where they belong. It’s not random…”

Erik closed his eyes, perched on the edge of whatever she was going to say next. “Go on.”

“Kees was supposed to be ours. That soul belongs to us. It just caught a bad ride this time.”

“A bad ride?”

“A body that didn’t work out. A defective shell. The soul is still ours. It’ll come back. Maybe as a boy again or maybe as a girl. But it’ll come back to us.” Beside him, he felt her shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s dumb, but it makes me feel better. I can believe in it. I mean, you came back to me. So Kees will, too. Somehow.”

Erik was quiet. As she spoke, a cloud of sparkling yellow lights began to creep across the inside of his eyelids. Moving left to right like fireflies. Something loosened in his chest. Daisy’s words fell into place like Tetris blocks, each one turning and rotating to accommodate the next, assembling a greater structure.

The soul caught a bad ride this time.

It’ll come back.

It’s ours. It belongs to us.

“I believe it too,” he said. “I didn’t know I believed it until I heard you say it.”

For the first time since the stillbirth, Erik felt a flicker in his heart. A tiny spark of hope. He cupped his hands around it. Breathed gently. Treated it like a feather of memory. Or a newborn baby. He couldn’t grab for it. It had to come to him.

“I can still feel him in my hands, Dais,” he said.

“I’ll always feel him in my hands. Our hands were born to feel that soul.”

“It’ll come back then.”

“It will.”

Daisy curled into him. He ran his mouth over her hair.

“When we get home, let’s finish that damn screened-in porch,” he said. “And then plant bee balm all around it.”

DOWN IN KEY WEST, Erik dreamed often of his father. It was a dream he’d had for fifteen years. In a golden boat, on a lake, hauling in golden fish, while Byron stood on the shore, cheering his son’s catch.

Who do I look like?
Erik yelled over the water.

And Byron called back,
You look like me.

“Come take a walk,” Erik said to Christine.

It was an overcast day. Every now and then a bit of lazy rain came through. But the air was soft and the waters of the Gulf were warm. He and Christine gathered a few shells, then sat on the beach to talk.

“You told me once,” Erik said, “you’d never forgive the father of your children. But you’d listen to the man you loved.”

“He was the love of my life,” Christine said, arranging her shells on the sand in front of her.

“You also told me he gave you the necklace when you signed divorce papers,” Erik said. “But that’s not what happened. Is it?”

Staring at her collection, Christine shook her head.

Erik set the backs of his fingers on her cheek. “I’m not angry and I’m not accusing you of anything,” he said. “I just want the story. Nothing will upset me now, Mom. Nothing.”

“It was the only lie I told you,” she said, hugging her knees.

“You were protecting me,” he said. “I understand. Did he leave it behind?”

“On the bedside table,” she said. “I never saw him again.”

“But why…” He took his cap off, scratching his head then replaced it. “Why pass yourself off as divorced? Why not just let him be missing? Or say he was dead?”

“Missing was too hard to explain,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you and Pete he was dead because what if he showed up again? Missing was cruel and left the door open for too many questions. Divorce worked best. You boys could accept it and it got everyone else to shut up and leave me alone. I was slightly out of my mind at the time. Deep in survival mode. I got us out of Clayton, slapped together a skeleton story and beefed it up by saying I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Erik wrapped arms around his knees as well. “And the child support payments for me and Pete?”

“That was Farfar,” she said. “He sent those. He helped me keep up the pretense until you were both eighteen.”

The shoreline blurred as Erik’s eyes welled up.

“You naming the baby after him,” Christine said, touching his arm. “He would’ve been so proud.”

Erik sniffed hard, turned his head to wipe his face on his windbreaker. “What do you think happened to Dad,” he asked. “If you never saw him again, if the divorce was a fabrication, then in your heart, what do you believe? Do you think he’s dead?”

“No. He’s alive.”

Erik reared back a hair. “You believe or you know?”

“I believe.”

“So…?”

Christine didn’t say anything. She sat cross-legged now, her hands twined against her ankles. The wind blew wisps of her silvery-blonde hair around. Her face was tanned, lined and far away.

“You kept his ring,” Erik said.

She nodded.

“And you kept his name,” he said, the revelation dawning as if the clouds parted to let a sunbeam through. “You won’t marry anyone because he wouldn’t be able to find you.”

She smiled at the waves. “We all have our weaknesses.”

“You could marry Fred and not change your name.”

She didn’t answer. Her smile hinted Erik was sadly missing the point.

“Do you think it was another woman?”

“It was the river world.” She looked at Erik then. “It gets touchy-feely from here,” she said. “You don’t have to believe what I believe. I’m just telling you the context I had to put it in.”

“Something happened after the accident,” Erik said. “Didn’t it? Trudy and Kirsten told me he was never the same after.”

“But they knew him before,” Christine said. “I didn’t.” She drew a deep breath, running a hand through her damp hair. “We didn’t have the knowledge back then, Erik. It was nineteen sixty-two. Trauma was barely a concept, much less a medical condition. The terminology to address traumatic brain injury didn’t exist, let alone treatments. I don’t remember even hearing the diagnosis of TBI until the Iraq War. Back then, the diagnosis was one word: lucky. They said he was lucky simply to be alive.”

“But something was changed.”

“So many words for it now,” Christine said. “Pick one. PTSD, you know about it all too well. Or you could say he suffered absent seizures. Or he had problems with emotional processing. An empathy deficit or a depersonalization disorder. Alexithymia—that’s a word and a half, it means you have difficulty recognizing or describing emotions.”

She picked up one of her shells and flung toward the waves, watched it plop in the shallows. “Your father called it the river world. Because it all started when he was floating in the river. After he was thrown out of the boat.”

“When what started?” Erik said, confused.

“He would turn off. He had episodes when he would be present and cognizant and functional, but he had no emotional connection to anything. He felt nothing. He said the color would go out of the world. His
adjectives
would disappear. Like he was a harp and one by one his strings were unplucked until he was just a hollow frame. An empty shell, standing in the center of his life and none of it meaning anything to him.”

“For how long?”

“Sometimes minutes. Sometimes hours. Then he’d come back. He said coming out of the river was the reverse of strings breaking. Instead of one at a time, he came back with a glissando.” Christine’s hand fanned through the air, sliding along the keys of an invisible piano. “He’d
slam
back into himself, as if being concussed again. It was terrifying. It would leave him in tears.”

Erik flailed for a question. “Did his parents know?”

“They took him to doctors,” she said, nodding. “They did a lot of studies up in Montreal. But not much could be done for him. It was episodic. And between episodes, he was completely functional. While having them, he didn’t become psychotic or catatonic. He didn’t convulse on the floor or pass out. He just…”

“He’d get a faraway look in his eyes,” Erik said softly. “Like he was listening to music no one could hear.”

Christine leaned away a little. “Who said that?”

“Mike Pettitte.”

She blinked, her chin nodding a little. “I wonder if he knew. Of course Farmor and Farfar knew, but they didn’t discuss it. They felt lucky their son was alive. If this occasional detachment issue was the only after effect, so be it. They took it in stride, carried on and kept it to themselves. It was their way. Your father said it didn’t bother them when he was in the river world. Coming out with a huge outburst of emotion was what upset them. As he got older, he learned to hide the returns. Or at least manage them.”

“When did you find out?”

She drew patterns in the sand. “I saw it for the first time at Xandro’s funeral. Everyone went back to the hotel afterward for coffee. I didn’t know anyone. I felt awkward and shy so I went for a walk by the river. I saw this boy sitting on the rocks and he was crying. Crying with his whole body. I recognized him as Xandro’s brother. I don’t know why I… You’d think I’d have gone away and given him some privacy. Instead I went up to him. I sat on another rock and… I just sat. Because next to him was where I was supposed to be.”