Tell Me One Thing (15 page)

Maggie shakes her head, a tiny shake without looking at her mother.

Lucia backs off. Okay, she won’t push. If this is what Maggie needs to process all the changes that she has thrust upon her, well then, Lucia can wait.

BUT MAGGIE DOESN’T TALK THE NEXT DAY
and the day after that, and Lucia spends those days watching her intently. Suddenly there’s nothing casual or easy about her interaction with her daughter. Now she must pay close attention at all times because Maggie volunteers nothing and will answer only with a shake or nod of her head.

Bernadette, who has never had children, tells her to give it a while. Max, who has two grown boys, agrees.

“Children go through phases,” he tells Lucia on Sunday night as they sit in the backyard, late, Maggie asleep upstairs in the apartment, Bernadette and Lucia sharing a bottle of wine, Max drinking a beer.

He tells her about Noah, his youngest, who wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t white for, oh, it must have been about two years. Pasta, butter, white bread, ranch dressing, potatoes—that was about it.

“What did you do?” Lucia asks him. “Weren’t you frantic?”

Max shakes his head. “Our pediatrician said not to make a big deal about it. He was of the school that believes kids know what they need better than we do.”

“Do you buy that?” Lucia asks him.

“Not really, but I didn’t have a better answer. What was I going to do, hold him down and force-feed him?”

“And Janie, their mother, had just died,” Bernadette adds to bring some context into the conversation.

“Oh, I didn’t know.…” Lucia says quietly. “That must have been such a difficult time.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m telling you,” he says. “Children find their own way of dealing with difficult times.”

“She’s not being willful,” Lucia says, needing validation.

“Of course not,” Bernadette agrees.

“She’s waiting.” This last judgment from Max.

AFTER LUCIA GOES UP TO BED
and curves her body around her sleeping child, Bernadette and Max remain in the yard, talking in whispers.

“Did you tell her Richard’s been calling?” Max asks.

“No. I thought about it, but no.”

“Do you think he believes you—that you don’t know where she is?”

“I don’t know. I told him we don’t have any room for them, that you have a small house. Luckily, he’s never been here to see
that.”
And she gestures toward the garage apartment, then puts her feet up on the chair Lucia vacated and changes her tack. “A lot of us do what Lucia did.”

Max looks at her, puzzled.

“Oh, you know, commit to a starter marriage for all the wrong reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Lucia had no idea what to do with herself after graduation, so she followed Richard out here. Problem solved.” Bernadette sighs. “And a new one created. No one knows what they truly want when they’re eighteen or twenty-two or even twenty-five.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Okay, I was completely clueless.” And then Bernadette reads Max’s face. “But not you and Janie.”

“No.”

A moment and then Bernadette says, “And that made her death so much harder.”

Max takes her hand, grateful she isn’t jealous. “We need to stay out of this mess, Detta.”

“I know,” Bernadette agrees, but without much conviction in her voice.

IT’S SUNDAY NIGHT OF THE WEEK
Lucia left, and Richard hasn’t slept more than a few hours since the Thursday evening he came home to find the apartment empty. He’s started smoking again, something he gave up when he started graduate school and began running. Now he sits at the kitchen table, Lucia’s note permanently in front of him, unaware that he’s rocking slightly back and forth as he smokes one cigarette after another. The ashtray overflows. He’s staring at his laptop screen, trying to craft the perfect e-mail, the one that will bring her back. So far he has written, “I love you,” and nothing else.

He deletes it. That’s the wrong approach, he thinks. He needs a grand gesture, something that will wake her up, something that will make her see just
how much
he loves her. It seems an impossibility to get that into an e-mail. His heart is bursting with love for her. How can she be throwing all that away?

IT’S BEEN EXACTLY A WEEK SINCE
Maggie stopped talking, a week in which Maggie and Lucia have spent every hour of every day together. And without consciously planning it, Lucia has stopped expecting Maggie to speak and has begun to speak for her. If asked, Lucia would have said that she was taking the pressure off her daughter, not demanding something—speech—that Maggie wasn’t ready to give.

But what Bernadette sees as she watches them together is that
already, in a week, any separation between mother and child has evaporated. Lucia reads Maggie’s sighs and translates those into wants. She studies Maggie’s shrugs and facial expressions and immediately knows, or thinks she does, when Maggie’s anxious, or bored, or needy, all without a word being spoken.

Bernadette can see these two dark-haired and spritelike creatures begin to spin their own communication, to build a universe of only two. It feels so intimate that sometimes Bernadette has to turn away, as if she’s witnessing something too private to be shared.

The only time Maggie leaves Lucia’s side is when she goes to visit the bees with Max. And in those few minutes, on those nights when the four of them eat together or get together after dinner for coffee and homemade cookies in the backyard, it is then that Bernadette has an opportunity to talk to Lucia. But what to say—
Are you sure it’s good for Maggie to spend so much time with you?
How can Bernadette say that to any mother, especially since she’s raised no children of her own? No, it seems she must watch this drama play out from the sidelines. She must observe a child attach herself to her mother and begin to grow into her flesh. And say nothing.

Well then, isn’t it fair for Bernadette to suggest that Lucia let Richard know where they are? Should she describe what his daily phone calls are like? How he sounds frantic and bewildered and furious, sometimes in the same sentence. How he goes on and on without needing Bernadette to say one word. Of course, Bernadette isn’t surprised by any of this. She’s always known that within Richard the precise, detail-oriented scientist is in tension with the extravagantly emotional man. That combustion is part of his charm and what makes him so exasperating.

Bernadette is mulling all this over as she parks her car in the college parking structure and begins walking to the anthropology
department office, her briefcase stuffed with graded finals, her mind preoccupied with her concerns about Maggie and Lucia and Richard. That’s why she doesn’t see him until she’s practically on top of him. He says nothing, simply stands alongside the path and watches her approach, smoking, looking like he’s dropped fifteen pounds in the ten days his family has been gone.

“Oh, Richard,” Bernadette says, and all resistance flees. He looks haunted, horrible. She has to tell him some version of the truth. “Let’s sit somewhere.” And Bernadette leads him to a bench tucked into a small green space, one of the many pocket parks that seemed to have sprung up around campus in the past year.

She sits. He doesn’t. “They’re with you, aren’t they?”

Bernadette doesn’t answer.

“At first I thought she’d gone home to Ohio and I tried her parents. When they said she hadn’t contacted them, I thought they were lying, because, after all, they’d be protecting her, you know? But their story never changed—they didn’t know where she was. They hadn’t known anything was wrong. She told them nothing. Finally, it made sense to me. Her parents are the last people she’d tell. Leaving your husband isn’t something you do in Lucia’s family. She wouldn’t go home to her parents. She wouldn’t want to hear what they had to say, but you, Bernadette, you’ve left two husbands, so there you are—the logical person to support Lucia’s insanity. That’s how I figured out she’s with you.”

Bernadette takes all this in without rancor and says nothing. She watches him smoke and pace, head down, not looking at her, lost in his version of events, wound up to a degree she’s never seen. She proceeds carefully.

“She seems quite clear and resolved to me, Richard. This isn’t a whim.”

“Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?! She walks out of an eight-year relationship with no explanation. She leaves a
husband who loves her more than anyone ever will. That’s sane?! That makes sense to you?!”

And before Bernadette can utter a word, Richard begins to weep. He turns his back to her, but his shoulders rock with sobs and strangled gasps of grief pour out of him.

Bernadette waits. She doesn’t try to comfort him or interfere. It seems clear he has to do this, as if he needs to show her just how devastated he is. Finally he subsides and turns around, wiping his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“I have to see her. Alone. You need to tell her that. Otherwise, I swear to God, Bernadette, I’ll follow you day and night until you lead me to her.”

Gently Bernadette says, “She has some rights here.”

“NO!” explodes from Richard’s mouth. “She owes me an explanation.”

Bernadette nods. She agrees with that, if not with the way it is said. “I’ll speak with her and I’ll call you.”

“She needs to see me, you tell her that” is put forth as a final threat.

It occurs to Bernadette as she continues on to the anthropology office that Richard didn’t mention Maggie’s name. Not once.

THAT NIGHT AFTER DINNER
, after Lucia has put Maggie to bed and come back down to the backyard, she finds that Bernadette is the only one there. Max has made himself scarce and Lucia knows, even before Bernadette opens her mouth, that she’s seen Richard.

“How did he find me?” Lucia says as she sets foot on the grass.

Bernadette sighs; this isn’t a conversation she’s eager to have. “Come sit with me.”

And Lucia does, in the lawn chair next to Bernadette. The two women stare out over the backyard in silence, each bracing herself in her own way for the words to come. The light from the kitchen
windows pools a warm yellow on the patio where they sit, but the rest of the yard is in darkness, the sky overcast again, no stars or moon this night.

Bernadette begins to speak. “He needs an explanation, Lucia. It’s killing him not knowing why.”

Lucia nods. She knows Richard well enough to know he has to understand. What she doesn’t know is how to explain it all to him so he hears her. He’s never been big on listening. He gets impatient with points of view that don’t contain his own brand of logic.

“Why has all this come as such a surprise to him? Usually when couples separate, they leave behind a long trail of arguments and trips to the therapist’s office.”

“I know, but Richard really isn’t interested in anything but his own point of view. I’d talk and he’d interrupt and tell me that none of what I was saying mattered because he loved me so much.” She shrugs. “What I had to say seemed irrelevant.”

“So you stopped talking,” Bernadette says carefully.

“Yes,” Lucia says, but Bernadette can tell that Lucia is too caught up with the appearance of Richard to catch her implication. Our children watch us.

“Well, now he says he wants to hear.”

“I don’t love him. Can I say that?” And before Bernadette can speak, Lucia answers her own question. “I can’t. I can’t say that. It’s too painful.”

“Well, you have to say something,” Bernadette says with a trace of irritation. It’s one of those moments when she wonders whatever has she done by inviting Lucia here. “Because if you don’t talk to him he’s going to show up here.”

“You didn’t tell him—?”

“Of course not, but you know Richard. All he has to do is hide out at school and follow me home.”

“And he would.”

They arrange to meet in a public place. On the bluffs above the Pacific is a narrow park with a path that runs north to south along the rim, high above Highway 1. There are benches situated along the cliff, placed straightforwardly ahead to maximize the ocean view.

Lucia gets there early and waits on one of them. She wants to be prepared. She doesn’t want Richard catching her unawares. All morning as she gave Maggie breakfast and brushed her unruly hair into shining black curls and brought her to Max at the beehives, where they had plans to check on the Queen, she kept a running monologue in her head. She told herself to be strong, to be clear. To say what she felt. She promised herself she wouldn’t let Richard do all the talking.

Richard, in his motel room at the Surfsider, rehearsed various opening sentences—“I love you more than my own life.… I can’t live without you.… Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you.…”

She sees him walking toward her and she’s stunned by how he looks, as if he hasn’t slept in the two weeks they’ve been gone, or eaten, or showered. Richard, who has always been so meticulous about his appearance, could have been mistaken for a homeless man. Rather than being overcome with sympathy, Lucia’s suddenly furious by this kind of self-indulgent excess. This is exactly what she’s run away from.

Richard looks up and sees her sitting there, small, composed, always that air of elegant calm about her, and he wants nothing more than to pick her up in his arms and spirit her away. It would be so easy. She’s so much smaller than he is. She’s weightless in his arms.

Lucia doesn’t stand as he nears. She doesn’t move from the bench, but there’s no way Richard can sit down now. “Can we walk?” are the first words out of his mouth. His voice is raw, from smoking, from emotion.

She nods and they take the path north, the shallow waves of
the Pacific Ocean on their left, far below them. The morning overcast is beginning to lift, the sky brightening as they walk, the sun burning through, a hazy circle now. Lucia says nothing. She’s waiting to see whom she’s dealing with here. Is he as out of control as he appears?

Finally he says, “I need to know why you did this.” Each word sounds like it’s being ripped from his throat.

“Because I’ve been unhappy for a long time.”

“How can that be?!” explodes from his mouth. It’s an accusation and an outrage. “I love you, Lucy, more than life itself.”