“I don’t know how long I stood there, watching her. She never looked up. The expression on her face—I can’t describe it. It wasn’t despairing, or sorrowful, or desperate. It was just—nothing. But not blank. Attentive, I suppose. As if there were nothing else in her life—no past, no present, no husband or son or house—as if she existed only to try to pump air into her baby’s lungs.
“It didn’t work, of course. Morgan died the next day. Nanny told me about it at last: that I’d had a brother, and that his lungs had been faulty, and that he had died, and that I wasn’t to be sad because he was now with God. Later, when my mother was dying, I learned that my parents had fought; that my father had disagreed with her trying, that he had forbade her from using that instrument. I don’t know where she got it from. I don’t know that she ever forgave him: for not believing, for dissuading her from trying. My father, I learned, hadn’t even wanted to bring him home from the hospital, and when my mother fought to do so—they donated so much to the place that they wouldn’t deny her—he had disapproved of that as well.
“My mother wasn’t a sentimental woman. She never spoke of Morgan, and after he died, she eventually recovered herself. Over the decades, she ran charities, she hosted dinners, she rode horses and painted, she read and collected rare books, she volunteered at a home for unwed young mothers; she made a life in this house for me and my father.
“I never considered myself much like her, and neither did she. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d sometimes say to me, and she always sounded a little rueful. And she was right—I was never one of those gay men who found an affinity with their mothers. Except for the fact that we never discussed who I loved, I did have a kinship with my father. For a long time, I was able to pretend that we never talked about who I was, or part of who I was, because we had so many other things to talk about. The law, for example. Or business. Or biographies, which we both liked to read. By the time I stopped pretending, he was already dead.
“But lately, I’ve been thinking about that night more and more. I wonder if I’m actually more like her than I knew. I wonder who will hold that little air pump for me when it’s my turn. Not because they think it’ll revive me, or save me. But because they want to try.
“I was sitting there, thinking all of this, when the phone rang again. This time I got up and answered it. It was Peter’s new day-shift nurse—a nice guy. I’d met him a few times. He told me Peter had died, and that it had been peaceful, and that he was very sorry for my loss. And then I hung up and I went looking for you.”
He was quiet, and David realized that it was the end of his story. As Charles had talked, he had looked out the window, which had become a screen of white, and now he turned to David again, and David pressed his back into the sofa’s cushions and beckoned to Charles, who lay down next to him.
They were silent for a long time, and although David was thinking many things, he mostly thought about how good this moment was, lying next to Charles in a warm room, with snow outside. He thought that he should tell Charles that he would hold the air pump for him, but he couldn’t. He wanted so much to give Charles something, some measure of the consolation that Charles had given him, but he couldn’t. Much later, he would wish, again and again, that he had said something, anything, no matter how clumsy. In those years, fear—of sounding dumb, of being inadequate—kept him from the generosity he should have shown, and it was not until he had accumulated many regrets that he had learned that his comfort could have taken any form, that what had been important was that it was offered at all.
“I came down here,” Charles finally said, “I came down here and found you. And”—he took a breath—“and you were asleep, with a letter on your chest, beneath your hand. And—I took it from you, and I read it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry, David.” He was quiet. “And I’m sorry for what’s in it. How come you never told me?”
I don’t know, he said, at last. But he wasn’t angry that Charles had read his letter. He was relieved—that Charles knew, that, once again, Charles’s decisiveness had made a difficult task easier.
“So—your father. He’s still alive.”
Barely, he said. For now.
“Yes. And your grandmother wants you to come see him.”
Yes.
“And that place he lived in—”
It wasn’t what you were thinking, he interrupted Charles. I mean, it was. But it wasn’t. How could he tell Charles? How could he make him understand? How could he make Lipo-wao-nahele sound like something different, something better, something saner than what it was? Not a folly, not make-believe, not an impossibility, but something his father—and even he—had once believed in with all the hopefulness they had, a place where history was meaningless, a place that would finally feel like home, a place where his father had gone in anticipation as much as in fear. He couldn’t. His grandmother had never understood it; Charles certainly wouldn’t, either.
I can’t explain it, he said at last. You wouldn’t understand.
“Try me,” said Charles.
Well, maybe, he said, but he knew he would. Charles knew how to help everyone—what if he knew how to help David, too? What was the point of loving him, of being loved back, if he wasn’t going to try?
But first, he had to eat something; he was hungry. He wriggled himself off the sofa, and held out his hand for Charles, and as they went to the kitchen, he thought of his father again. Not as he was in the care home he lived in now; not as he had been in the last days of his stay at Lipo-wao-nahele, his eyes vacant, his face streaked with dirt; but as he had been when they lived together in their house, when he was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, when they were a father and a son, and he had never had to consider anything other than the fact that his father would always take care of him, or at least would always try, because he had promised he always would, and because he knew his father loved him, and because that was the way of things. Loss, loss—he had lost so much. How would he ever feel complete again? How could he make up for all those years? How could he forgive? How could he be forgiven?
“Let’s see,” said Charles, as they stood in the kitchen together, surveying their options. On the counter, there was a loaf of sourdough bread wrapped in brown paper that Adams had set aside for them, and Charles sawed off slices for both of them before holding his aloft. “To your father,” he said.
To Peter, he responded.
“An early New Year’s toast,” Charles announced: “Six more years until the twenty-first century.”
They touched their pieces of bread against each other, solemnly, and ate. Behind them, the windows rattled from the wind, but they couldn’t feel it themselves—the house was too well made. “Let’s see what Adams saved for us,” Charles said after they had finished, and opened the refrigerator, removing a jar of mayonnaise, a container of cold steak, a jar of mustard, a wedge of cheese. “Jarlsberg,” he said, and then, almost to himself, “Peter’s favorite.”
He put his arms around Charles, and Charles leaned against him, and for a moment they were quiet. It was then that he had a sudden vision of the two of them many years later, in some undated time far into the future. Outside, the world had changed: The streets had been overgrown with weeds, and the cobblestones in the courtyard were shaggy with pampas grass, and the sky was a viscous green, and a creature with rubbery, webbed wings glided past them. A car puffed south down Fifth Avenue, hovering a few inches above the ground, hissing air as it went. The garage was a ruin, half decayed, its bricks soft and cakey, and in the middle of it, thrusting its way through the crumbling roof, grew a mango tree, just like the one that had grown in the front yard of the house where he had once lived with his father, its branches bulbous with fruit. If it wasn’t quite the end of things, then it was close—the fruit was too poisoned to eat; the car was windowless; the air shimmered with oily smoke; the creature had settled atop the building across the street, its talons gripping the parapet, its black eyes searching for something to swoop down upon and devour.