“You never told me that.” I was really surprised to hear this. I watched him, his white hair sticking up from his head. He looked so strangely familiar to me—I don’t know why I say strange, but that is the feeling I had. “You never told me that,” I said again.
“I’d sort of forgotten it. Except not. And I never told anyone. But last night it came back to me, that’s why I thought about carrying Becka around when she was so small.” William sat forward with his elbows on his knees. “Here’s the thing. The teacher there, this woman—God, that woman was nice. She’d pick me up and carry me around. I remember her doing that, carrying me around.”
I started to speak, but William raised his hand for me to stop. “One day my parents had to come in to see her. So they came there, to the little nursery school, and I went to play in another room. This was at the end of the day. They finally came to get me in that other room, and then on the ride home my mother didn’t say a word, but my father was very serious, and he said to me, ‘William, you have to stop having that teacher pick you up so often. She has a whole roomful of kids that she’s responsible for.’ Something like that he said, and I just remember feeling so ashamed on that ride home.” William looked at me then. “That teacher never picked me up again.”
I was absolutely amazed; he had never mentioned one bit of this to me.
William stood up. “But why was my mother even putting me in that place when I was so young? She wasn’t working. Why wasn’t I home with her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
* * *
—
We spoke more about Catherine, about her feeling “blue,” as she would put it. I didn’t fully understand until then that this had been such a part of William’s childhood. “Well,” William finally said. “She was blue because she had left behind her kid.” He added, “She left behind her little baby girl.”
And he looked at me with such pain in his face.
Oh William, I thought.
Oh William!
* * *
—
That night he gave me a hug before he said, “See you in the morning, Button.”
* * *
I could not fall asleep that night, even with the tablet that I have taken for years when I need help falling asleep. I kept thinking of William’s observation that I was self-absorbed, and I did not know what to do with it; I was really uncomfortable thinking about it. I did what people do when they are accused. I thought of different people I knew and how self-absorbed they all were. Well, I thought, this one is so self-absorbed that he tries to hide it all the time and as a result he is not very generous, and that one is self-absorbed and she doesn’t even know it… And after a while I said to myself, Lucy, stop.
* * *
—
But my mind went various places.
* * *
—
I remembered this:
One day we were in Florida, the girls were around eight and nine, Catherine had died that summer. And we went to Florida in the winter for a few days—one of our first trips without her—and there was a place to do laundry in a building nearby where our room was, and I remember walking back from putting some laundry in, I was walking across a little lawn, and I was wearing a light-blue denim dress, and what I remember is that it was like a small bird flew through my mind. And the bird was this: a thought: Maybe I will have to kill myself. It is the only time I can remember thinking this. And the thought came and went like a small bird through my mind. I had no idea it would arrive. I have thought about this since, and I think it must have been that William had started his affair with Joanne by then and I did not know it but felt it. This is what I think.
Never would I kill myself. I am a mother. As invisible as I feel, I am a mother.
My own mother would threaten to kill herself when I was young. She would say, “I’m going to drive far away and find a tree and hang myself from it,” and I was terrified that she would do so. She would say, “I won’t be here when you get home from school,” and each day I came home scared. And each day she was there. And then I started to stay after school, every day I stayed after school, I started to do this to be warm—because our house was so cold, and I have always hated being cold—and then I did it because it felt a relief to me to be there, and to be able to do my homework, and I also at times remember thinking about my mother, Go ahead and do it then! Meaning, Go ahead and kill yourself. But I was worried that if she did we would become even odder than we already were in that small town.