I sat on one of the sofas, and Nathaniel took something out of one of the side-table drawers: a little black velvet box, about the size of a golf ball.
“What is it?” I asked him, in the idiotic way people do when they’re given a gift, and he smiled. “Open it and see,” he said, so I did.
Inside was Aubrey’s ring. I removed it, feeling its weight in my hand, how warm the gold was. I opened the pearl lid, but there was nothing inside.
“Well?” asked Nathaniel, but lightly. He sat down next to me.
“Well,” I said.
“He said he thought you hated him for this ring most of all,” Nathaniel said, but serenely, and I looked up at him, surprised. “Oh, yes,” he said. “He knew you hated him.”
“I didn’t hate him,” I said, feebly.
“Yes, you did,” Nathaniel said. “You just wouldn’t admit it to yourself.”
“Yet another thing Aubrey knew that I didn’t,” I said, trying and failing to not sound sarcastic, but Nathaniel only shrugged.
“Anyway,” he said. “It’s yours now.”
I put it on my left pinkie and held up my hand for him to look at. I still wore my wedding ring, and he touched it, gently. He had stopped wearing his years ago.
At that moment, I sensed that I could have leaned over and kissed him, and that he would have let me. But I didn’t, and he, as if sensing the same possibility, abruptly stood.
“Now,” he said, businesslike, “when David arrives, I want you to be not just civil but encouraging, all right?”
“I’m always encouraging,” I said.
“Charles, I mean it,” he said. “He’s going to be introducing you to—to a friend of his, who’s very important to him. And he has some…some news.”
“Is he going back to school?” I asked, just to be a brat. Even I knew the answer to that. David was never going back to school.
He ignored the provocation. “Just promise me,” he said. Then, in another abrupt change of mood, he sat back down next to me. “I hate that it’s like this between you two,” he said. I said nothing. “Everything else aside, you’re still his father,” he said.
“You tell him that.”
“I have. But The Light matters to him.”
“Oh god,” I said. I had been hoping we could get through the conversation without either one of us mentioning The Light.
At that moment, the decontamination chamber hissed, and David appeared, followed by a woman. I stood, and we nodded at each other. “Look, David,” I said, and showed him the ring, and he grunted and smiled simultaneously. “Nice, Pops,” he said. “You finally got it after all.” I was stung but didn’t say anything. And anyway, he was right: I had.
Things had been stable between us, which is to say we had, without explicitly agreeing to it, reached a détente. I wouldn’t needle him about The Light, and he wouldn’t bait me about my work. But this agreement could only last for around fifteen minutes, and only if we had something else to discuss: I don’t mean to sound callous, but Aubrey’s death had been very helpful in that regard. There were always details of his chemo to review, and his mood and water intake to monitor, and his pain management to detail. And I had been moved—moved, and, if I have to admit it, a little jealous—when I saw how carefully, how gently, the baby had cared for Aubrey in his final months: how he patted his head with a cold cloth, how he held his hand, how he talked to him in a way that many people can’t to the dying, an effortless, unpatronizing patter that somehow seemed to acknowledge Aubrey even as it made clear he didn’t expect a reply. He had a gift for helping the dying, a rare and valuable gift, one that could have been put to good use in any number of ways.
For a moment, we all stood there, and then Nathaniel, always having to play the negotiator, the mediator, said, “Oh! And, Charles—this is Eden, David’s good friend.”
She was older, in her mid-thirties, at least a decade older than the baby, a pale-skinned Korean, with the same ridiculous hairstyle as David. Tattoos crept from her sleeves and up her throat; the backs of her hands were stippled with a series of tiny stars that I would later learn formed constellations—the left hand was decorated with the spring constellations of the northern hemisphere; the right with the spring constellations of the south. She wasn’t attractive, exactly—the haircut and tattoos and overdone eyebrows, the ink so thick it looked like impasto, had ensured that—but she did have a coiled quality, something lean and feral and sensual.
We bowed to each other. “Nice to meet you, Eden,” I said.
I couldn’t tell if she was smirking, or if that was what her smile looked like. “You too, Charles,” she said. “David’s told me a lot about you.” This was said meaningfully, though I did not engage.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I replied. “Oh, and call me Charles.”
“Charles,” Nathaniel hissed, but David and Eden only looked at each other and smiled, the same smirking smiles. “Told you,” David told her.
Nathaniel had ordered in—flatbreads and mezze—and we went to the table. I had brought a bottle of wine, and David and Nathaniel and I all had some; Eden said she’d just drink water.
The conversation began. All of us, I could feel, were being very careful, which made for a very dull conversation. It wasn’t so bad that we were left to speak of the weather, but it wasn’t much better. The list of topics I was forbidden from mentioning to David was by now prohibitively lengthy, and so it was easiest to remember instead the ones on which I could engage him without taking us into perilous territory: organic farming, films, robotics, yeast-free baking. I found myself missing Aubrey, who knew exactly how to conduct us, and how to redirect anyone who strayed onto dangerous grounds.
David, I reflected, as I often did during these conversations, was still a child, and it was this—his enthusiasm for the subjects he was passionate about, the way his speech would accelerate and his voice would pitch upward—that made me wish that he had gone to college. He would have found his tribe there; he would have felt less alone. He might even have become less strange, or at the very least found people around whom he didn’t seem strange at all. I could see him in a room full of young people, all of them giddy in their excitements—I could see him feeling that he finally belonged somewhere. And yet the place he had chosen instead was The Light, which, thanks to you, I can now monitor as obsessively as I want, but which I rarely have the desire to do. Once, I wanted to know everything about what David was doing and thinking—now I just want to not know, to pretend my son’s life, the things that give him joy, don’t exist.
But the person whom I was really watching was Eden. She was at the foot of the table, David on her left, and she stared at him with a kind of indulgent fondness, as a mother would at her unruly but gifted child. David did not include her in his monologue, but from time to time, he would glance at her, and she would nod, briefly, almost as if he were reciting lines and she was affirming that he’d gotten them correct. I noticed that she’d eaten very little—her flatbread lay untouched; there was a small dent in the scoop of hummus she’d taken, but everything else remained intact, congealing on her plate. Even her glass of water remained untasted, the round of lemon drifting toward the bottom.