Heart the Lover (34)

I tap the photo of Jack’s peewee team on the fridge.

‘Et tu, Brute?’ you say.

We take our teas to the couches in the family room. You sit on one and I sit on the other. The dogs follow us in and jump up beside you. You look to the wall of bookshelves Silas and the boys built earlier in the summer.

‘I didn’t picture you living in a house.’

‘I know. It’s weird.’

‘After all those tiny rooms. Your room on Pye Street?’

All bed, you once said.

‘And that little closet in Paris?’

‘Chambre de bonne,’ I say.

‘Chambre de merde, didn’t we call it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I can’t believe you don’t see the similarities to the Breach. That radiator.’ You point to our big black radiator in the corner. ‘We had the same one. Remember? In the hallway across from the bathroom.’

‘It’s a radiator.’

‘And the moldings on your doorways, with the circles at the top corners? Same.’

I don’t remember the moldings.

‘It’s uncanny.’



I picture you going back to Atlanta and telling this to Sam. It’s uncanny. She’s re-created the Breach in Maine right down to the moldings.

‘I haven’t lived in a house since then,’ you say.

‘You have. MacDougal Street.’

‘That was just a room. It didn’t feel like a house.’

‘You should rent one, then. Or buy one. Worker bees buy houses.’

‘What would I do with a whole house? It would only make me feel lonelier.’

‘What about Sam? You must see him a lot.’

‘Sam is busy procreating like the rest of you.’

You get up to look more closely at our books.

You have no idea. My body relaxes slightly. I thought perhaps that’s why you’d come.

Silas thinks I should tell you. And here is my chance, right here. For a long time I said nothing out of anger. I punished you with the only weapon I had, silence. Now I feel like I would hurt you more by telling you. You don’t seem strong enough for it somehow.

You study all the books by Churchill—the histories, the memoirs, the letters, the speeches, the poetry—for a long time and make no comment.

On a table beside the shelves are a few framed photographs. You lift up the one of my mother.

‘Silas said she died. I didn’t know that.’

‘It was a long time ago.’



‘Not that long.’

‘Nine and a half years.’

‘He said it was sudden.’

‘It was. She went to Chile on vacation and she came back crumbled up in a box.’

He winces at this. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I know she would have liked the quick painless exit. It was definitely her style. But selfishly I wanted a goodbye. A real goodbye.’

I took that photo of my mother. She’s on her deck in Phoenix, squinting in the sun, waving a hand at the camera. At the edge of the picture, on the chair beside hers, is the lumbar cushion she’d bought me for the back pain I had during the last trimester.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ you say in nearly a whisper.

‘When?’

‘When your mother died.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I guess you’d met Silas by then.’

‘I met him six months later. I was a wreck. But he understood.’

‘I wish you’d called me.’

Above us I can hear Silas and the boys, their bedtime noises, bickering, giggling. One of us tells them a story every night. Silas has a long-running tale of two hedgehogs. This week they have been stuck on an ice floe in Antarctica.



I see you struggling to say something, another reproach I really don’t want to hear. ‘I think Silas needs a closer up there. I better go sing some songs to settle them a bit.’

You nod. You understand I’m cutting you off.

‘Your room’s the first one on the left. Twin bed. Yellow bedspread. Just kidding—it’s blue.’

Early the next morning, before anyone else is up, we eat a bowl of cereal and I walk you out to your car. You open the trunk and hand me a book, the one you talked about yesterday, about Iceland and sheep.

I thank you. We hug. You get into your car.

When you roll down the window, I say, ‘Drive safely.’

‘You know I will.’

We look at each other a bit warily.

Why did you come?

You wait for me to say something else and when I don’t, you lift your fingers briefly off the steering wheel and back out of our driveway. I follow you in bare feet and wave in the road until you’re gone, then walk back to the house.

I sit on the porch steps and look at the paperback you gave me. It’s your copy, a bit worn, the pages swollen, the cover starting to curl back. There’s a scrap of paper wedged in the middle of it. I pull it out. It’s not addressed to me or anyone. It’s just a paragraph. But I recognize it immediately. It’s the Céline passage you read me that time. I don’t know if you meant for me to see it. The handwriting is messier than in your letters.

I read it.