“Back to what?”
“To this,” he says hoarsely. “To you.”
I resist the words. Words are easy. “But when Rory went to San Francisco . . . When she told you . . .”
He looks away, as if pained by the memory. “Twenty years sober, and I never needed a drink like I needed one that night. I can tell you, club soda isn’t much help for that kind of news. It was like she ripped the scab off all of it. My mistakes and my bitterness, my goddamn pride, everything I’d thrown away, and I couldn’t bear to look at it. She was asking me to own it, and I wasn’t ready.”
“And now?”
“Now everything’s changed. Last night, I saw your face, and all the poison came rushing back. I thought I’d come here tonight to end it, that I’d hand you back the rosary and it would be over. Now I realize it’s never going to be over, and I don’t know what to do with that, except to finally own it—and say I’m sorry. About the years we lost. About our daughter. About believing my father’s lies.” He reaches for my hand, stroking the back of my glove with a tenderness that makes my breath catch. “And about this.”
When I don’t resist, he raises my hand to his lips. I feel the warmth of his mouth against my knuckles, and I turn my hand, cupping his face as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if no time has passed at all. The memory can play tricks. The heart too. And I marvel at how the simple touch of a cheek, the landscape of a face, can erase years of loss and pain—and leave you vulnerable.
He covers my hand with both of his, as if afraid I might pull away. “Tell me what you want, Soline, and I’ll do it. If you want me to go, I’ll walk out that door and you’ll never see me again. But if you want me to stay, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to give you back the years we missed.”
My eyes pool with tears until his face begins to blur. “We can never get those years back, Anson. They’re gone.”
He nods and lets his hands fall, stepping away from my touch. “I suppose they are.”
My throat closes as I watch him move toward the door, and I think of the morning I left Paris. If I had known then that forty years would pass before I saw him again, would I have allowed us to be separated? Can I allow it now?
As if in answer, Maman’s words drift back to me. There are times for holding on in this life and times for letting go. You must learn to know the difference.
And suddenly, I do know.
He’s turning up his collar, preparing to duck out into the downpour, when I catch his arm. Because I don’t have another forty years to waste, and neither does he. “We can’t get those years back, Anson, but perhaps we can make something of the ones we have left.”
FORTY-SEVEN
SOLINE
31 October 1985—Boston
We wake together with the sun streaming in. Anson smiles sheepishly as our eyes meet, and for a moment it’s as if no time has passed. We’re the same people who met in a busy corridor of the American Hospital, a handsome hero and a frightened volunteer. But we’re not those people. Time has left its scars on us both and made us into different people. People who will have to work hard to discover one another again. But we’ve decided to try.
There are gaps to fill, empty years and hollowed-out dreams, and we have begun to fill them. I have told him about the Roussels and our strange vocation, and he has told me about the faces that still haunt his dreams and sometimes jolt him awake in the night—ghosts from his time in Moosburg. There is more to tell, of course, for both of us. We have each collected our share of shadows over the years, but there have been bright places, too, and eventually we will get to it all.
We lie amid the tangle of sheets, flushed and awkward, tripping over our tongues as we endeavor to navigate this new reality. It’s been a long time since either of us has awakened to a lover’s touch. The sharing of a bed and our bodies, and of all that comes after, is unfamiliar ground.
Now and then, one of us will go quiet and simply stare at the other, or venture some small touch, reassurance that all of this is real, and I suddenly realize that this is how it would have been—should have been—after that first night all those years ago. We would have risen with the sun, young lovers with a newfound wonder for the world and each other. We were cheated of that morning, but we have been given a do-over, as Rory calls it, a chance to do it differently, to do it better.
We get up finally, and I make coffee while Anson uses the phone in my study to make a few calls. Later, I take him to Bisous Sucrés for croissants, and we walk the few blocks to the Common. The trees are nearly bare, the ground littered with papery leaves, and there’s a bite to the morning air. We stroll around Frog Pond and eventually find a bench in the sun. We’ve been talking nonstop, filling in the blanks left by forty years apart, but suddenly there’s a lull in the conversation. I watch as a child of two or three toddles after a pair of ducks, her mother close behind.