His face goes blank. “Ilese?”
“My daughter. Zachary was two when I adopted her. They grew up as brother and sister, and I let everyone think that’s what they were. Zachary suddenly turning out to have a father would have been awkward.”
“As awkward as me finding out I have a forty-two-year-old son?”
I tell myself I have no right to defend myself, that after what I’ve done I should simply stand here and take whatever he throws at me, but I can’t bear the thought that he thinks any of it was easy for me, that there was a single day while Zachary was growing up that I didn’t question the choices I made.
“That isn’t what I meant, Hemi. By the time I did know how to find you, so much time had passed. It was just the three of us for so long. I was afraid—”
He holds up a hand, cutting me off. “I don’t want your excuses. There are no excuses for this.”
“That isn’t what I’m doing. I’m saying I was wrong. No matter what I believed you’d done, I had no right to keep Zachary from you.” Tears blur my vision, tears I have no right to. “I don’t know how else to say it or what else to do.”
He stands with his arms crossed, legs braced wide, unyielding. “What is it you want?”
I stare at him. “What do I want?”
“What do you see happening? Surely you had some sort of endgame in mind when you asked me to come here. What was it?”
“I wanted to make things right between us. To tell you I know I was wrong. Terribly and unforgivably wrong—and to ask for forgiveness anyway.” I wait for a response, unable to tell if my words have had any impact, but his expression remains blank. “Say something. Please.”
A muscle pulses at his jaw. “What would you like me to say?”
“Anything. I don’t know. Tell me where we go from here.”
“We don’t go anywhere, Marian. Not now.”
I nod, closing my eyes. “Yes. All right. For what it’s worth, Zachary is a concert violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he’s getting married in June.”
“Well then, at least I didn’t miss everything.”
His face, so stony a moment ago, seems to shatter before my eyes, and I feel my heart shatter with it. “I don’t know how many times I can say I’m sorry, Hemi, but I’ll say it as many times as you ask me to. I’ll say it forever.”
He shakes his head, his eyes bleak and hollow. “All these years, I’ve wondered if it could have ended differently. I’d remember how it was between us, all the things we were going to see and do, and think maybe there was a way to get that back. That’s why I showed up last night. To see if there was a chance. And then today, for one mad instant, when I kissed you and you kissed me back, I thought there might be. Now I see that we’ve missed it. Zachary was our chance. After all the what-ifs, all the years apart, he was our way back. We might have salvaged something of the life we’d planned. But not now. And the worst part is this time there’s no one else to blame. The letter, the story—someone else did those things. Saboteurs, you called them. But you did this. You were the saboteur.”
He grabs his coat from the arm of the sofa and heads for the foyer without turning back. I watch him walk away, wishing I knew how to make him stay, but I’ve used up all the words I know for I’m sorry. And he doesn’t want to hear them anyway.
Stillness descends as the front door closes behind him, the echo of nothingness threatening to undo me. So complete. So final. I retrieve the photo of Zachary from the bar where Hemi left it and stare down at our son’s face. His father’s face. I had hoped for closure, but all I feel is the opening of old wounds.
TWENTY-THREE
MARIAN
I have always imagined that closing a book is like pausing a film midframe, the characters frozen in their halted worlds, breath held, waiting for the reader to return and bring it all back to life—like a prince’s kiss in a fairy tale.
—Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books
The sunporch has always been my favorite part of this house, a sanctuary at the sea’s edge, even at night. I’ve been sitting here since Hemi left, with the lights switched off and the sound of the sea all around me. There’s not much moon tonight and the dark feels heavy, empty, and yet too full of the past.
I’ve called Zachary and told him about his father. Told him everything. Or as much as a mother can comfortably tell a grown-up son. I kept to the facts, to names and places. He took it like I thought he would, like he’s always taken everything, by asking if I was all right. I told him I was. A lie, but sometimes that’s easier.
I tried to call Ilese, too, but there was no answer. I’ll try again tomorrow, but by then, her brother will have told her everything. They’ve always had a kind of connection, always able to sense when the other needs a shoulder. But it’s done now. The final shoe has fallen. No more secrets festering, waiting to be exposed.
There’s a peculiar sense of closure to it all, a sense of things ended, if not truly finished.
On the table in front of me are the books—Hemi’s and mine. I don’t know why I’ve brought them out here with me. Certainly not to read. Perhaps it’s so I can see them together one last time. Tomorrow, I’ll lay a fire in the parlor and do what I told Dickey to do all those years ago—burn them. My past and Hemi’s, up in smoke. It seems fitting that a thing that once burned so brightly—too brightly, perhaps—will finally be extinguished. A closure of sorts.
But will it be?
For more than forty years, I pretended it already was, shutting myself off from that time, those memories. So very careful. And then in the space of twenty-four hours—less than that, actually—I forgot to be careful. I saw his face and let myself remember, felt his arms, his mouth, and let myself hope.
I’ve clung so voraciously to my anger, steeping myself in blame and bitter memories, as a way to keep from feeling what lay beneath all of it. The unquenchable ache of missing him, feeling him when I’m alone and the house is quiet, gone but a part of me yet. The hollow place the lost years have carved in me. Grief for what might have been, for what nearly was.
Perhaps if I’d told him all of it. How badly losing him had broken me. How much I’ve ached for him all these years—still ache. But no. He made it clear that any window there might have been closed when I decided to keep Zachary from him. He had it right—I was the saboteur.
I gaze out toward the shore, imagining the horizon stretching beyond it, and wonder if I’ll ever be able to put the genie back in the bottle—to forget again. I’m certain the answer is no. This is what I have to look forward to now. Remembering the us that could have been—the family we could have been—had I chosen differently.
I should go in now and get on with whatever comes next. Supper. Bed. Tomorrow. But I don’t want to think about tomorrow. Not yet. I stare at the pebble-strewn beach below, the small crescent of sand where land meets sea, and remember Ilese and Zachary there as children, building castles and collecting smooth, shiny stones in a blue plastic pail. I’ve made good memories here. They’re enough, I tell myself. They’ll have to be.