The Tell (21 page)

“I'm sorry, O. I totally lost track of time. I was watching a blind man play 21. It was amazing the way he could read the cards—”

“Shut up, please. Just stop.” It was almost a good story, but he didn't believe her. “What is wrong with what you have, Mira? What is wrong with our life that you do this? That you want to do this?”

She looked to her right at the snow. “It's coming down fast. The driving is going to be awful if it doesn't let up soon. If you don't get going.”

“What is wrong with me?”

“This has nothing to do with you,” she said, and placed a tentative hand on his leg.

“Of course it does. How can it not? I'm part of your life, aren't I?”

“Yes,” she insisted.

“I'm just trying to understand this, because if I can, then maybe I can give you what you need. I can help.” He put his head back and closed his eyes. The snow whispered around the car. “But you have to tell me the truth. No more lying. Are you in trouble?”

“No. No. No. You have to believe that.” It was awhile before she spoke again. “Look. You've asked me not to go anymore, and I get now that's enough—because it's what you want. And that's what we're here for, isn't it? To make each other feel loved?” She sounded more resigned than convinced. “I'm done. I promise.”

“We'll get you some help,” he said. “You'll go see someone.”

“Is ‘someone' code for shrink? God, I don't need help because there is no problem. Isn't what I just said enough for you?” she snapped. “The only thing I need is some sleep. I'm so tired of this.”

“So am I,” he said.

Maybe Mira didn't know herself what she would or could do anymore. Owen's relief was cautious but open, and he appreciated the remarkable insistence of the season's first snow, and his wife already asleep before they'd even hit I-95. He drove carefully on the unplowed roads, white and smooth ahead, and on Whittier Street, where an inch of untouched snow lay on the sidewalks and roofs and balanced on the telephone wires and branches. No one else was out at this hour, and he and Mira would be the first to leave their footprints when they got out and went inside the house.

W
ilton named their visit to Cape Cod a “historic excursion” and “a pilgrim's progress,” four of them squeezed into Owen's Honda on Thanksgiving morning. Between father and daughter, like silent ambassadors, were three pies in pink boxes that Wilton had ordered from Vermont. Bottles of wine rattled around in the trunk. Wilton kept up a ramble of mind-numbing commentary on the view from the Braga Bridge in Fall River, the houses of New Bedford spread out like vinyl-sided Easter cakes, the long swoop of highway by the canal. He glanced at Anya, but she held on to her indecipherable smile. Wilton began to read the highway signs and billboards and describe the clouds; he couldn't stop making some noise to be heard. Owen was tempted to pull over and shake him, tell him not to try so hard, to shut the hell up for five minutes. Instead, he bore the pressure of Wilton's knees bumping up against the back of his seat and into his kidneys. Mira had offered Wilton the front, but he'd wanted to sit in back with his daughter. His hair rose in a static plea to be loved.

Since that first dinner together, and after standing Wilton up a few times, Anya had finally met her father at the Bright, a coffee shop across the street from her apartment. Wilton had reenacted part of the meeting for Owen and Mira, playing both parts with painful perception, reciting their strained, banal dialogue. He burned his tongue on his tea, he whacked the table when he crossed his legs, Anya looked up like a rabbit each time the door opened as though there might be someone to rescue or shoot her. She didn't talk much, while he talked too much. Wilton was no star to her, no celebrity, no hilarious television doofus she might be loosened up by. She might require him to play the part he had no real talent for: the nothing, the no one to her. Still, it had been easier than Owen had expected to get Anya to come with them today; he'd made the case to her on behalf of Wilton's heart, as though it existed outside of the man, a free-roaming, orphaned thing. As they'd stood in front of her apartment where he'd gone to find her one evening, she'd twisted her scarf around one hand and agreed with Owen that they should let Wilton think he'd proffered the invitation first. They would keep this meeting between them. She looked past him to the water and the blinking gas tanks and said she was trying to be nicer to Wilton, but it was hard when there was so much she didn't understand about why he'd so completely disappeared from her life. She wasn't sure she even liked him. From the way she thanked him, Owen knew she probably believed he was looking out for his friend with this advance work, but his motives were not generous. The equation was clear to him now, no longer a hypothetical. If he brought Anya to Wilton, then Wilton might not lure Mira back to the casino with his need for sympathetic company. There it was. A trade.

Mira had been asleep since Swansea. Since their trip to Eagle Run two weeks before, she'd been saying she felt flu-ish, but her illness lurked below the surface and refused to reveal itself. She dragged through her days and came home from Brindle exhausted. Owen played her eager nurse. He babied her with movies and homemade soup. He read out loud to her from Edward's book and lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace that filled the house with smoke. He washed her faded nightgown by hand so it would be fresh for the night. She'd been determined to rally for this Thanksgiving trip to Brewster to meet Edward's girlfriend.

Wilton leaned into the front seat. “Is Mira all right?”

“Still asleep,” Owen said.

Her neck was flushed and sweaty. In the middle of last night, Owen had heard her on the stair landing, where she must have stopped to watch the sharp rain falling between the houses. When she got back into bed, her feet were icy but her skin was overheated.

“Are you worried about her?” Wilton asked. “Do you think she should see a doctor?”

In fact, he'd felt some relief from the worry he'd carried around since the summer. He didn't mind that Mira was mysteriously unwell or that her insomnia was flaring. He suspected casino withdrawal, with its attendant side effects of shame and remorse. He wouldn't mind if the symptoms lasted for a long time. In the evenings, he canceled his tutoring sessions at the last minute to be with her, and at night he pressed himself against her hot back and closed his arms around her. He felt they'd passed through something very dangerous.

Wilton spoke to Anya carefully, like her translator. “Mira hasn't felt well for a few days. What do you think?”

“Me?” She laughed. “What do
I
think?”

“I thought maybe because of medical school,” Wilton said, chided, as Owen received another sharp knee to the kidneys.

The sun was a pucker in a colorless sky. The overhang of trees on 6A, a cool green umbrella in the summer, was a web of black branches in November. Katherine's tentacled condo complex, Ocean View, was one of the many built in the last few decades that always triggered a round of contempt from Edward. The man didn't understand why this part of the Cape had become a vector for retirees. The winters were long, windy, and bleak. People drank too much and a few took to beating one another out of boredom. These bird-watching, water-coloring, concert-going, lecture-attending, adult-learning, book-clubbing white hairs didn't know what they were in for, he said. In the summer, they lined up with their visiting grandchildren at the ice-cream stands, Grandpa clutching his ass-worn wallet, squinting to read the flavors and the jacked-up prices on the board.

Owen was amused that his father, made fickle by love, hadn't mentioned that Katherine lived at Ocean View. He'd given Owen only the address, not the name. Blocks of identical units spread down a wide slope to the bay that lay like a blue sheet kicked to the end of the bed. Weathered gray buildings were set into the landscape with the regularity of dentures. Dead leaves played on the tennis courts and covered pools. The wind was clattery coming from the beach, but there was also deep silence here. Owen imagined Edward restless and itching to be let out. The pond was a riot of life by comparison. A few other cars circled the development, and couples with children in the back strained to read the street names tacked sideways on posts. It was as if they'd all been summoned to a secret meeting at an undisclosed location.

“I see the water,” Anya said and laughed at her own enthusiasm.

Mira inched up and rubbed her eyes behind her glasses “We're here already?”

“Already?” Wilton said. “You missed the whole trip, you poor thing.”

Edward appeared in the doorway of the unit in his usual dust-colored sweater and baggy chinos cinched with a belt. He looked like a castaway. It was so rare that Owen ever saw him anywhere but in his own house or in his own woods or pond, that at first he didn't see how comfortable his father was there, waving like a host, leaning against the doorway. A wobbly baby—Katherine's grandson, Owen assumed—appeared behind Edward, passed by his legs and waddled across the square of lawn that twinkled with frost. It took Edward a moment to realize what was happening, and then he bent with his arms out as though he were about to chase a chicken. The baby held his flapping hands up by his shoulders and shrieked as Edward roared behind him. The kid had speed and purpose and moved to the car. His thin hair and Edward's lifted identically in the wind.

Mira, who'd been leaning down to pull on her boots during the baby's escape, opened her car door at the instant the child came flush with it. The timing was exact, the sound of the baby hitting the frozen winter grass with the back of his head was stomach-turning. Owen saw just below the door, the bottoms of the baby's feet in yellow socks flecked with leaves. Owen rushed out of the car and around to where Edward had dropped to his knees.

“Okay?” Owen asked. “He's okay?”

The child's eyes were open and looking at the clouds zooming in off the water. He blinked, and then seeing Owen's alarmed face hanging over him, started to cry. The wail was furious, sore at being thwarted and full of indignity.

“Oh, shush, Petey, you're fine,” Edward said and scooped the kid up in a single movement. “He's fine. You just went boom, right?” Edward turned the breathless baby to face the sea. “Look, the water.” The baby's new howl was the sound of a passing airplane. “Should we look for boats? Do you see a boat? A bird?”

Mira got out of the car. A bloodless, white circle ringed her mouth and she looked a hundred years old. “He's all right? Is he, Edward?” she asked. “I didn't see him!”

“Babies are tough little buggers. It takes a lot to hurt them,” Edward told her. “He's fine, it's not your fault. He's getting cold out here, though, so I'm going to bring him inside.” Calmed, the baby put his head on Edward's shoulder and looked up shyly at Mira. “Listen, Mira, sweetheart, please don't worry. He's really okay. Remind me to tell you about some of Owen's falls. Take your time, take some deep breaths. I'll take care of your friends.” He led the others inside.

“I could have killed him,” Mira said to Owen as they walked to the water. “I could have. I'm out of it. A second earlier, a little faster and—”

“But you didn't. It didn't happen. Crisis averted. Tragedy dodged. Don't think about it.”

“I just need a couple of minutes before we go inside. Get my head together.” In the longest exhale of low tide, two figures walked on the sandbars. “I had the strangest feeling before, like I was looking down at the baby on his back and at myself, unable to move. It was if I were seconds ahead of the moment, as if I'd already lived it and saw myself useless. It's a scary feeling.” Mira shivered the picture away.

“It's over.”

“I want to tell you something, O.”

Was there ever a more ominous beginning? Seagulls screeched.

“I lost some money. At the casino. I told you before that I didn't, but I did,” she said. “I was too embarrassed. Not much at all, a few hundred dollars at most, but still. I want to be completely honest about it.”

Lost: a blameless word. Lost like a winter glove fallen out of a pocket, lost like a thought or a passion. “The money doesn't matter. You're done now. You're not going back.”