by Susan Wiggs
“Bah.”
She reached over and wiped his chin. “This—whatever—with Noah is the last thing I expected to find when I came here,” she admitted, her thoughts drifting again. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m falling in love with him.” She clapped her hand over her mouth and mumbled, “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Charlie imitated the gesture and laughed. Sophie swooped him up and rolled back on the blanket, holding him overhead as she savored the feeling that swept over her. Contentment. No, it was stronger than that. Happiness. Joy. Yes, that was it. She had nearly forgotten what it felt like.
It wasn’t that she was a miserable person. And life had indeed given her moments of joy. But not like this. Never like this.
She found an oldies station on the radio and sang to Charlie as she warmed a bottle of milk for him. “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues. “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel. How did she know the words? She didn’t remember ever studying them. Some things just stuck with you, lodging in memory through a secret door.
She fed the baby and, while he drowsed in her lap, she put the TV on low, flipping channels to see even just a flicker of international news. It was far easier to find an interview with a tattooed biker laying claim to a rich heiress’s new baby than a report on national elections in Umoja. For the first time in decades, the Umojan people were going to the polls, yet here, it was a nonevent.
She clicked past a home-improvement show of a garage being transformed into a Qigong studio. Paused on a guy hawking a device that scrambled an egg right in its shell, which, inexplicably, she found herself craving. There seemed to be a hundred celebrity news stories to be watched at any given time. There was a talk-show host, apologizing for the umpteenth time for something he said. And here was the starlet du jour, radiantly showing off her new baby. And there was Ashton Kutcher, laughing off criticism that he was too young to be with Demi Moore.
In spite of herself, Sophie thought Ashton Kutcher was hot. Shaking off the lascivious thought, she changed the channel and glared at Headline News until they delivered thirty seconds of “international news,” covering a polar bear in a German zoo. Still holding Charlie, she moved into the study and surfed the Web to a video report on the Umojan elections. The newsreader began, “In their first free elections in more than two decades…”
“I did that,” Sophie whispered to Charlie. “I was on the justice team that made it happen.” She expected to feel a surge of emotion, but instead merely felt distracted. The Web site was surrounded by blinking ads for nasal drip solutions and solicitations for matchmaking sites, which gave her a headache. She went back to the radio, which was now playing a song she didn’t like to consider an oldie—“Jump” by Van Halen—because it made her feel…well, old.
“And yet I’m a grandmother,” she said to Charlie. “Maybe I’m supposed to be old.”
He finished his bottle and didn’t look sleepy at all. He belched, then chortled as he emitted a small fountain of milk bubbles.
“Such talent,” she said. “How did I wind up with such a talented grandchild?”
The doorbell sounded, startling her. She set the baby on his blanket and went to see who it was.
Oh, she thought when she opened the door. Oh, dear. And then, oh, shit.
“Logan,” she said, moving aside to let him in, and then closing the door quickly behind him so the baby wouldn’t be chilled by the cold air.
“Mrs. Bellamy,” he said.
An awkward beat passed. Then Charlie squealed, breaking the ice.
“Hey, buddy.” Logan turned as soft and sweet as a marshmallow as he greeted his son. Charlie desperately tried to reach for him like a man dying of thirst. There was an almost primal affinity between them, a clear recognition on Charlie’s tiny face that this person was important.
Watching them, Sophie remembered perfectly why Greg had married her all those years ago.
Even so, she reminded herself, this was not Greg. This was Logan O’Donnell—a boy with a troubled past. He was ridiculously handsome and surprisingly tender with the baby.
He went to the kitchen and quickly washed his hands. Nice touch, thought Sophie. She hoped he did that every time, not just to show her how responsible he was. Charlie gave a cranky squawk, straining toward the kitchen.
“Coming,” Logan called. “Hold your horses.” He hurried back to Charlie, sleeves rolled back, and scooped him up. “Did Daisy tell you I might stop by?”
“No, but it’s fine, of course.” What else could she say? “I’m going to fix myself a cup of tea,” she added, mainly to give them some privacy. “Would you like anything?”
“No, thank you.” Logan was grinning at the baby and didn’t look away.
Sophie took her time getting the tea. When she returned, Logan was in the upholstered swivel rocker, holding Charlie facedown across his knees, chortling as Logan spun the chair.
“Daisy tells me you’re in college now,” she said, taking a seat across from him.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m studying finance.”
“That’s good.” She had no idea what to say to this boy. This handsome boy, who had changed her daughter’s entire life.
“It’s all right,” Logan said. “You don’t need to make small talk. With all due respect, we can just cut to the chase. I have a pretty good idea about what you think of me.”
“Do you?”
“You’re thinking I was a dumb high-school jock. I was careless with your daughter. Not to mention an addict who went through rehab. I don’t blame you or anyone for being skeptical of me.”
Sophie was not about to insult him by denying it. “And now you’re trying to live down your past mistakes,” she said.
“I’m not sure what that means,” he said, then flashed her a grin. “Must be the dumb jock in me.”
She felt herself softening toward him. “It’s impossible, anyway. Believe me, I’ve tried it.”
“All I know is that I’m preparing for the future now,” he said, “and Charlie is a part of that future.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure.”
“Is your family supportive of this?”
“No,” he said bluntly. “They haven’t seen him. Not once.”
Sophie never expected to like this boy. To empathize with his situation. She had never expected to regard him as anything more than a bad decision her daughter had once made, and the source of Charlie’s red hair. Yet now, with his pained admission, Logan O’Donnell became someone to her. Someone whose parents took issue with the choices he’d made. And she finally understood why Daisy had liked him in the first place, and why she let him visit Charlie so often.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Perhaps they’ll come around. In the meantime, giving yourself to Charlie is something you’ll never regret.” She stood abruptly. “Why don’t you stay with him while I check my e-mail?” She gestured toward the small workroom where Daisy’s computer was set up.
“Thanks, Mrs. Bellamy.” His smile bore a remarkable resemblance to Charlie’s. “I appreciate it.”
“You can call me Sophie,” she said. “That way I won’t feel so old.”
“You’re not old, believe me,” he said with flattering assurance. “I’ll take care of the little guy.”
While her e-mail loaded, she checked her PDA for the to-do list and upcoming appointments. In the past, the list had been endless, and even with a personal staff, she’d never been able to accomplish everything. That never kept her from trying, though, or from feeling the stress of her endeavor.
These days, the list revolved around her children and Charlie. She had signed up to volunteer for lunch duty at Max’s school one day a week, and the hours spent in the overheated, oniony-smelling school cafeteria, listening in on the boys’ fart jokes and girls’ cliques offered an unvarnished glimpse at the workings of real kids’ lives. She was fascinated by the range of humanity she observed,
from acts of cold-blooded cruelty to heartrending kindness. She watched students being cut out of a group with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, and others having their emotional wounds tended with unschooled compassion. She understood Max so much better now. She understood his need to be liked and admired and approved of—because those on the wrong side of their peers suffered the tortures of the damned.
Then there were the hockey practices and games. She enjoyed seeing Max play, but was no fan of the other moms in attendance. The mom squad. With Nina’s older sister Maria as team mother, Sophie was not their favorite person. She refused to let herself care about that. She simply would not let it matter. During lunch duty, she’d observed that the outcast students who responded to their tormentors with cool dignity were most likely to be left alone, if they could survive that long.
Sophie knew she could outlast the women who regarded her with judgmental disapproval. It was a gift, this ability she had to make something fail to hurt her. Over the years, she’d built a shell of armor around her heart. It was simple survival. If she kept herself open, she was vulnerable. If she closed up and protected herself, she was a rock. But after the hostage situation, her protective armor had cracked open and she was vulnerable to the things she feared most—being hurt. Disappointing people. Failing to connect on the deepest, most important level to her own children.
Looking around the small, cluttered room, she studied the postcards pinned to a corkboard, probably from Daisy’s friends who were now in college or traveling abroad. Sticky notes with lists seemed to be pasted everywhere; most were embellished with doodles or curlicue writing that reminded Sophie of how young Daisy was. A somewhat ominous quote she’d jotted down: “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” And another message from Rocky Horror—“Don’t dream it, be it.” An appointment card for the dentist. To Sophie’s knowledge, Daisy had never voluntarily gone to the dentist in her life.
Her photographs were catalogued and labeled as though by a trained archivist. On one shelf, a grouping of fat albums caught Sophie’s eye, particularly one labeled Family, until 2006. The year of the divorce.
Sophie opened the album to find a chronicle of their life as a family. She viewed the pages with a painful combination of sorrow, accomplishment, regret and nostalgia. They had been like any family, their lives filled with genuinely happy moments—birthday celebrations and holidays, vacations and adventures. Many of the pictures brought on smiles and memories. Daisy had always loved climbing on the larger-than-life bronze Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. There were shots of her, and then of her and Max together, swarming over the well-worn structure amid the other children. There was page after page of holidays, school functions, trips and birthdays.
Compressed within the photographs, the years seemed to have flown by. There was Daisy as a towheaded toddler, standing on a chair and bending forward to blow out two birthday candles. Pages later, there was a shot of her at Camp Kioga on Willow Lake, celebrating her grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Sophie was in many of the shots, but often hovered on the periphery of things. An observer rather than an active participant. Often she was dressed for work in a suit, her briefcase placed somewhere nearby. Because of the way she dressed—dark suits, tasteful pumps, pulled-back hair—she seemed to have changed little over the years. She’d always looked forty, even when she was twenty-five.
Seeing the photographs one after another, she could sense the gradual erosion of her marriage. Here was a pictorial chronicle of a relationship slowly and painfully wearing away. In the early shots, when the kids were little and she and Greg had tried so hard, the smiles had been bright with determination and hope. Bit by bit, the feeling had been lost, eroding so gradually they didn’t notice its absence until it was gone and impossible to recapture. Eventually the strain of the effort showed; the smiles were less genuine, seldom reaching the eyes. There were fewer and fewer shots of the two of them in the same frame. Early on, they had used the camera’s shutter timer, one of them leaping into the shot at the last second. As time went on, they didn’t bother with that so often.
Some of the best—and most revealing—pictures had been taken by Daisy herself. Even with the first point-and-shoot camera she’d had as a little girl, she had shown talent and passion for her art. As a teenager, she’d observed the demise of her parents’ marriage through the viewfinder of her camera. In the shots of Sophie and Greg together, they looked almost like any couple, but there was often some little telling detail in the shot, like a hand gripping a purse handle too tightly or shoulders that touched as they leaned toward each other for the shot, and then turned rigid on contact.
Eventually, Sophie and Greg as a couple all but disappeared from the pictures. Or, if they were together in a frame, they were separated by a gulf filled with relatives or friends in a group shot. Was there something they could have done, should have done? Or was the erosion inevitable, like the constant battering of waves against rock? There were things she would always miss about being a family. She’d miss looking around the dinner table at their faces, or skiing down a mountain together, or getting dressed up to attend a play. Yet she had to admit that there were things she didn’t miss at all—the taut feeling in her chest when she woke up in the morning and tried to figure out how to leave the bed without waking Greg. The lines of unhappiness pulling at his mouth when he didn’t know she was watching him. The way Max used to work too hard to act as though everything was fine, and the way Daisy used to act out just to get a response from someone.
Hearing a sound at the door, Sophie looked up. There stood Daisy, still dressed for outdoors in her parka and boots.
“Hey, Mom,” she said, pushing back her hood.
“Hi.” Sophie brushed at her cheeks. She hadn’t even realized she’d been crying. “I came in here to check my e-mail and give Logan some time with Charlie. I didn’t mean to go snooping around.”
Daisy checked out the open photo album on the drafting table. “I’ve got nothing to hide. What are you looking at?”
“Your family album.” Sophie studied the final images in the book. The second-to-last one showed the four of them on the dock at Camp Kioga two summers ago during the celebration of Charles and Jane Bellamy’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Greg and the kids had spent the entire summer there while Sophie traveled for work. The photograph was a portrait of a woman who simply didn’t belong, who was uncomfortable in her own skin. Greg, Max and Daisy were grinning and tan, their hair sun-streaked and windblown, their feet bare. By contrast, Sophie was indoor-pale, wearing crisply ironed Bermuda shorts and a buttoned-down camp shirt.
There were shots taken a year after that, at another Bellamy family gathering—Olivia’s wedding. All four of them, though dressed for the formal occasion, appeared to be on edge—for good reason, as it happened. Later that same day, Daisy had gone into labor. They had come together as a family for a brief time after Charlie’s birth, but even that heady state of shared wonder was only temporary.
“What a day that was,” Sophie murmured.
“For all of us.” Daisy paused at a shot of herself, clasping hands with her father. The quality was more amateurish than Daisy’s work, having been taken by Sophie herself. “Dad was a surprisingly good coach that day.”
“I’m not surprised,” Sophie admitted. Greg had dutifully attended a full round of childbirth classes with Daisy, determined to see his daughter through the most difficult transition of her young life. “Tell me something,” she said. “Did you ever think about asking me to be your coach?”
Daisy frowned. “You were overseas. I knew you wouldn’t drop everything and attend six weeks of classes with me.”
“You knew?”
“I assumed. Would you, Mom? Would you have done that?”
Sophie stared out the window, watching a droplet of water form on the tip of an icicle, refusing to look away until the droplet fell. “I honestly don’t know,” she admitted, “but I wish you would hav
e asked.” She studied the final shot of her and Greg standing awkwardly on either side of Daisy holding the baby. She was worried now that Daisy had never learned the most critical lesson a child gleaned from her parents—the sustaining power of love.
She closed the book with a gentle thud. “I wish these pictures had shown a different story. I didn’t realize…What I didn’t think about when it was happening was how observant you were, and what my troubles were doing to you. You saw it all, didn’t you? Every minute of it.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wanted better memories for you—”
“I wanted to remember, Mom. Everything, the good and the bad. Why wouldn’t I?”
Sophie hugged her daughter and shut her eyes. Although they were two adult women, holding each other, she felt herself being pulled back through the years. She could perfectly imagine Daisy at every age, from fragile newborn to laughing little girl to independent young woman. “I remember, too,” Sophie whispered. “I remember every minute of it.”
Daisy stepped back, then smiled. “I was just thinking about that today. This is the longest we’ve been together since I was in eighth grade.”
It was all so bittersweet. “You kept track?”
“It’s just something I noticed. But I was always proud of you. Max, too, even though we didn’t always show it. We both know working for the ICC is a bigger deal than being on the band uniform auction committee.”
“Still, I wasn’t there.”
“Max and I were surrounded by people. It’s not like we were raised by wolves.”
“I hate that I was gone so much. I wish I’d been there for you every single day. Maybe if I had, things would have been different for you.”
“Mom. Listen, my mistakes are my own. Not yours or Dad’s or anybody else’s.” She peeled off her jacket, draped it over the back of a chair. “You’re not busy enough.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You need more to do, besides worry about stuff like this. You went from sixty to zero, moving back here.”