“Pardon me?” I sputtered.
“It wouldn’t have to be full time if you didn’t want; we could work something out so that you spent almost as much time with Em as you always have. But living with me around the clock isn’t good for you, Jim.” She smoothed an invisible wrinkle on the front of her navy swimsuit. “I suppose you don’t have to live with Nora. I could get an apartment for me and Emerson, and then Nora would feel more comfortable coming to our house. Or something. I just sense that things would be better if you and I had our own spaces.”
“But the house is yours,” I said. On the one hand, her suggestion made me sad. Yes, we had been bickering more than we used to, but I actually liked living with Lou; almost all the things that had made me love her kept me liking her, too.
On the other hand, it was as though someone had just dropped a key into my cage. The idea of living with Nora—officially, rather than this back-and-forth routine we had been doing for a full year—was appealing. And I suspected Nora would agree.
I stared out at the lake, which was pale and calm. A freighter grew smaller and smaller in the distance, until it finally disappeared from sight. “How will we manage that?” I said after a minute.
“The way we always have. We’re flexible people, Jim. Aside from love, that’s probably the primary reason Em’s doing as well as she is.”
I frowned. “Two homes for her, though? I’m not so sure that will keep her doing well.”
“She’s young, and two good homes are better than one bad.”
“Our house isn’t bad,” I protested.
Lou gave me a small smile. “No, it’s not. But if we want to keep it that way, something’s got to change.” She stood and shook the sand from her body. “Do you mind if I go for a walk?”
“Not at all.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back in a few.”
I watched Lou stroll down the beach, past a pile of driftwood and around the bend, until she, like the ship, was no longer visible. I owe her so much, I thought as she came back into view. She had given me her love—only for a short while, true, but at great expense. She had given me a child. In many ways, she had given me the best years of her life.
As she walked toward me, growing larger on the horizon with every step, I thought, There may be something I can give her in return. I wasn’t sure how exactly I would do it. But I had an idea of how I could try.
On the last day of our visit, as you and Lou napped in the hammock, I took out a legal pad and wrote a short letter. My handwriting was nearly illegible (“What is handwriting?” you will probably wonder as you read this), but Rob had been deciphering my chicken scratch for most of his life, I reasoned—at least up until he kicked me out of it. Before I could second-guess myself, I went to the post office, bought a book of stamps, and sent it on its way.
When we got home the next day, I wrote another letter, slightly longer this time, and mailed it, too.
The following week, I wrote a very long letter, and then a short one again, and so on and so forth, until I had mailed eight letters in two months.
Every letter was worded differently but contained essentially the same message:
I know you can’t forgive me, and I don’t expect you to. But you can forgive Lou. Please, even if you don’t want to. Even if it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do. It was me who led us down the wrong path, not her. I was too blind and stupid to understand that what she needed was to heal—not another wound. Now I understand that what I thought was a single act set a much larger chain of events in motion, and that has directly impacted the lives of every person I most care about in this world. Especially you and Lou.
Lou and I have a daughter, and I know that probably tears you apart even as it brings me joy. But I believe that if you meet our child, it would not hurt so much. She is so much of Lou, and you will adore her.
You and Lou were happy once. I used to envy that. Now I see that it took work, even if your love sometimes kept it from feeling that way.
Lou still loves you, Rob. She always will; she told me as much. I have a feeling you still love her, too. If that’s true, please—even if it takes you next to forever—give it another shot. Don’t make the biggest mistake of your life because of me.
TWENTY-FIVE
2012
“I! Want! Mamaaaaaa!”
I wanted Mama, too. You had been sick with strep throat and a double ear infection for days. Unfortunately, those days had coincided with Lou’s four-day trip to New York, where she was meeting with her agent and seeing friends. And Rob, I hoped, though I didn’t ask for fear of tipping my hand. I had not heard back from him, but my letters had not been returned. Knowing Rob as I once had, I suspected this meant he was mulling over what I had said.
“I can come home,” Lou told me when I called to tell her how you were doing, but I insisted I had it under control. Now, as I attempted to get you to swallow thick pink goop that would kill the bacteria at the root of your distress, I was forced to admit that I was a liar and quite possibly an unfit parent.
“Emmy, love, will you open for me?” Nora said, crouching in front of you.
Nora and I had moved into a two-bedroom condo in her complex the previous fall. You spent weekends with us as well as the occasional weeknight when Lou had plans. But your main house was the one I had purchased, which now, for all intents and purposes, belonged to you and Lou.
It was strange to have to knock on my own front door. Still, splitting homes had worked out as Lou had anticipated (which is to say far better than I had been expecting). You had taken to the whole situation like it was completely normal, and any lingering tension between Lou and me dissipated not long after I moved.
Even if it had not gone well, I’m not so sure I would have reverted to our previous arrangement. Because I was, as Lou teased, “in looooooove.” Living with Nora was not always a cakewalk. My standards of cleanliness did not meet hers, to say the least, and she was vocal about it. She read legal briefs at breakfast, in the bathroom, and even while we were supposed to be watching a movie together (and I, in turn, was vocal about this). But now I understood that these were normal conflicts, not a sign I had chosen the wrong partner.
“No!” you shouted, and slapped the plastic cup from Nora’s hand, sending a spray of bubblegum-colored liquid across the bathroom.
“That’s a bummer,” said Nora, completely unfazed. She leaned in toward you conspiratorially. “What if I give you a popsicle after you take your medicine? That would help your throat feel better.”
The demon in possession of your body immediately vacated at the mention of high-fructose corn syrup. “Okay,” you agreed.
“Lou doesn’t like her to have sweets,” I pointed out. “Especially when she’s sick.”
“Lou isn’t here,” Nora said pleasantly. “And when you have strep, that’s about the only thing that you can manage. I bought a pack of popsicles on the way home from work.”
“Man, you are really the best.”
She grinned. “I know.”
After you were in bed, Nora and I sat side by side in our own bed. She was reviewing a brief, while I was reading a book. From the other room, you began to whimper. Within thirty seconds, you were crying.
“Want me to go?” said Nora.
“No, I’ve got it.”
You were wailing by the time I reached you, and I rushed to your side. “What’s wrong, love? What is it?” I asked, stroking your forehead, which was damp from sweat and tears.
You shook your head.
“Do your ears hurt?” I asked.
More vigorous shaking, more tears.
“You want water?”
You wailed in response.
I was starting to get desperate. “Your throat? Your nose? What is it, Em?”
You looked up at me with huge eyes. “Hug me, Daddy,” you whimpered.
As it so often happens in life, the right answer happened to be the most obvious one. As I held you in my arms until you
fell asleep again, I thought about how much you had changed in three short years. I promised you the world the day you were born, but as many a man before me, I had since learned that it is far easier to become a father than to be one.
Yet how lucky I was, that you became my daughter when you did. Like my mother, my father had not been affectionate. Perhaps if he himself had been born at a later time, when expectations for a parent were different, when it was acceptable and even expected that a man was to be tender with his own child, he could have loved me the way I loved you.
That September, Lou turned thirty-seven, and I turned forty. But how could I possibly be forty, I wondered the morning of my birthday, when I was just twenty-five a few days ago?
I peered in the mirror, trying to pinpoint the ravages of time. I was still barely gray, with only a few strands near my temples, but there was a flock of fine lines around my eyes that guaranteed I would never again be carded when ordering a drink. And while I was pleased to not yet have developed my father’s drum of a gut, my once-muscled legs were not anymore. But I could mark the next decade of my life by joining a gym and lifting weights, like Rob always told me I should. I shook my head and turned away from the mirror, vowing to be more proactive in the coming years.
Nora threw a birthday party for me at our condo. At my request, it was a small affair—though let’s face it, it couldn’t have been any other way. As my family expanded, my circle of friends grew smaller, and so the usual suspects were in attendance: you and Lou, my father and Miriam, Pascal and Winnie, Nessa, Craig, and a couple other coworkers, Yvonne, Cassie, and a handful of Nora’s friends.
As I greeted this person and got a drink for that one, I could not help ruminating about who was not there. My mother, for example. In the years since her passing, the rough edges of our relationship had grown smoother in my mind, and now I only missed her. Wisnewski, too, whose birthday would have been in June. How great it would have been to hear him holler birthday wishes at me.
And of course, Rob.
He had turned forty in May; I wondered how he had celebrated. There was so much I wanted to know. There was so much I wanted to say. I was still waiting to hear back from him—or if he would not directly respond to me, receive some sign that he was considering what I had written to him about Lou.
How he would adore you, I thought as I stopped to watch you in the living room. As the party went on around you, you were building a domed, multitiered building out of magnetic tiles. You positioned the last tile, took a look at your creation, then knocked it down and began to create a new, even more complex structure. You had that perfect mix of intelligence and creativity that Rob loved. And you were a miniature Lou, so much so that every once in a while I would look at you and think, She could have been Rob’s child.
After we ate, Nora brought out a cake that she had baked with you the night before. It was dripping with chocolate ganache and coated in rainbow sprinkles—your finishing touch. You sat on my lap, with Nora just behind me, her hand on my shoulder. Lou was across the way, beside my father, both of them smiling widely at me. Candles blazing, the people closest to me in this world sang “Happy Birthday,” and I grinned like a fool and tried not to cry because it was so wonderful and so disarming—almost like being transported back to a moment in childhood that I had not actually lived through.
I blew out the candles, and everyone cheered. “Thank you all for being here with me,” I said, too choked up to manage more. It is so easy to go through your days stewing about someone stealing your parking spot without giving the same attention to your child’s arms around your neck, to grumble about the ever-increasing cost of groceries without realizing just how good it is to have warm toast and a fresh cup of coffee while sitting across from the one you love.
But on that day—if only in that moment—I felt the full expanse of my blessings. Life had not turned out as I had hoped or expected it might. I don’t know that I even had a clear vision in mind when I stepped into my twenties, but at forty, I at least knew that I had abandoned my dream of writing a book, which felt like a new failure each time I had to admit it aloud.
Smaller goals, too, had been discarded: I had never attempted a hundred-mile bike ride, for example, or lived in a big city, even though the opportunity had presented itself.
But it’s not too late, I thought as I bit into a piece of the cake you had made just for me.
I would appreciate my life more. I would do more and love more in the years that followed. I would finish the things I had started.
The party petered out, until only Nora, Lou, Pascal, Winnie, and my father remained. We were standing in the kitchen when you wandered in from the living room, rubbing your eyes. I remember thinking I, too, was exhausted.
I held my arms out to you. “Come here, pequeñita,” I said, using one of the nicknames my father had given you. It means “little one” in Spanish, and you were a tiny thing—surely no more than thirty-five pounds. But no sooner had I hoisted you into my arms than you slipped through my grasp and fell onto the ground.
You let out a yelp, then looked up at me from the tile with anger. “Daddy! You dropped me!”
What could I say? I had dropped you, which was the very thing I had told myself not to do the day you were born. It had not been a miscalculation or a result of you going boneless, as you sometimes did when you were upset. It was that I had not been able to maintain a grip on you—not with my arms, and not with my hands.
“One too many,” said Pascal. His laughter was canned. “Happens to the best of us.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to manage a laugh myself as I bent down to attend to you. In fact, I had been so busy making sure that everyone else’s cup was full that I had only sipped one drink hours earlier. “I’m sorry, Em,” I said, tilting your chin up with a finger. “Daddy needs to exercise more.”
“Hmph,” you said, arms crossed over your chest.
“Extra book before bed?” I said, though books would put you even further past your bedtime, which would likely lead you to have a complete meltdown before you passed out.
“Mommy puts me to bed!” you cried.
“Emerson, that’s not very nice. It was an accident, and it’s Daddy’s birthday,” scolded Lou. She looked at me and mouthed “sorry” like the only thing we were dealing with was a minor tantrum. (I would later learn that she hadn’t seen me drop you and thought nothing of it at the time.)
But my father had seen everything. “Son?” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
Anxiety was spreading through me like spilled ink. Somehow I knew that I was not, in fact, okay. “I don’t know, Pops,” I said.
TWENTY-SIX
2013
I don’t care if lovers swear it to each other and the devout sling it around as a future reward for their faithfulness. As far as I’m concerned, forever is the worst long time. At least with adversity and illness, there’s a general idea of what to expect. We don’t know a damn thing about the uncharted horrors of eternity.
Yet one day I was walking through our neighborhood with you; your warm little hand was in mine and the sun was shining on our backs. You stopped to examine a pill bug, which you gently set back on the ground. You bent to pick a dandelion, then to sniff a tulip that was the most extraordinary shade of purple.
And I thought to myself, God—if there is a forever, please let this be what it feels like.
I digress. I was not okay, as you know. And yet it took the better part of a year to confirm that. I spent the first few months in denial. “You’re as healthy as can be expected for a man your age,” said the prepubescent medical resident I had seen for my annual physical exam.
Well, that makes sense, I thought. If I had not been operating like I was still twenty-five, rather than the forty-year-old I had become, I would not have dropped you. After all, one of my colleagues, who was also in her forties, had recently had a seizure in the middle of a department store. A dozen tests later, it was determine
d she didn’t have epilepsy or a brain tumor. In fact, her doctors couldn’t find a single thing that was wrong with her. It was, they speculated, just one of those random things that mostly seemed to happen to people who were no longer young.
So I sought ways to stave off middle-aged decay. I began seeing Nora’s personal trainer, a brute who sent me home with shaking legs and a sense of general incompetence. I traded alcohol for protein shakes and ate an obscene amount of egg whites and leafy greens. I even began taking multivitamins, which I had long regarded as encapsulated snake oil.
And wasn’t the slight bulge in my biceps evidence that it was not for naught? Was waking at five without an alarm not evidence that I was bursting with vitality? I had color in my cheeks, a spring in my step, and new hope for my future.
I was the picture of perfect health—except that I found I could no longer type for more than ten to fifteen minutes before the words stopped appearing on the page as they should. My legs cramped, particularly at night, which is why I ended up getting out of bed at an hour that was too early for even Lou. That spring in my step? It was more like me overlifting my knees to compensate for my leaden legs. And as Lou had ascertained long before I ever did, eating was no longer all that fun. In fact, it felt a lot like a chore.
The signs were there, and still I put my head down and plowed forward.
Four was an explosive year for your mind; it was astounding to see you make the leap to a fully cognizant being. You had questions—so many questions. How do spiders make the silk for their webs? Do plants sleep? Do all animals have blood? What happened to woolly mammoths?
Bedtime was your favorite time to remind me of how little I knew. “What are people made out of?” you asked me one night.
“You know,” I said, trying to figure out how best to explain human anatomy to a four-year-old. “Bones and blood and tissue. And lots and lots of water.”
Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Page 20