Sam’s heart was beating ridiculously fast. When Lisa got up to leave, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to get up, too. Not a word was said about it, but they walked out to his car, Lisa opened the door and slid into the seat without looking at him, and when he pulled up to her place, she simply took his hand and led him inside. He didn’t leave until the next morning, and even then the only way he could leave was because she was heading out for the hospital, too. By the end of that month, they were living out of each other’s apartments.
“How did I get so lucky?” he asked her, cupping her face.
“Luck never has anything to do with love,” she said, and he thought of his mother.
“Luck has everything to do with everything,” he told her. “Especially love.”
Now, he grabbed the phone and called her, but got her voice-mail. He glanced at the road signs, made a right turn, and then he picked up the phone again. Another doctor was taking his patients, but still, he wanted to make sure everything was all right. He called his service but there were no messages.
Well. Sam had been a doctor for several years and he had never stopped marveling at how lucky his life had turned out. Isabelle used to tell him you could look at anything any number of ways and angles, so you might as well look at it the good way, the way that was most meaningful to you personally.
HE WAS GETTING tired now from driving. The winking lights of a diner shone up ahead: Tick Tock. The sign winked at him.
Sam stopped and got out of the car. The parking lot was full of cars. He needed to stretch his legs. He liked diners. They always reminded him of all those years when his mother used to take him on adventures, the two of them pretending to be all sorts of other people. He remembered one of the last conversations when they were driving. “Always remember,” she had told him. “When you’re grown up, I want you to take your girlfriend, or your wife, or boyfriend—whoever it is you love—and you make sure they know you so well they can read your mind. You don’t even have to tell them what you need, because they already know it. If they don’t—well, it isn’t love.”
Sam felt a sudden flash of sorrow. He hadn’t really known what she had been talking about back then, though he had tried to get her to read his mind. In the car, sitting beside his mother that day, he had thought so hard, Go home, Go home, that it made his brain ache, and of course, she hadn’t. She had kept going forward.
Maybe he’d have some coffee and pie, soak up the atmosphere, have a story to tell later. Before he went inside the diner, he tried Lisa again on his phone. This time, she answered and he felt something switching on inside him. “I wish you were with me,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“When you come home, we’ll talk,” she said.
He went into the diner and ate a plate of fries and a burger—the worst thing for his health and the most delicious—and he over-tipped the waitress so much, she ran after him, asking if there had been some mistake. “Keep it,” he told her.
He got back in the car. He had another half hour before he reached Woodstock, where Isabelle now lived. Woodstock was full of old hippies and people who wanted lively shops and movies but not the buzz and hum of the city. He never expected Isabelle would have moved up here from New York City, and most of all, he had never expected he would see her again after twenty years.
She was the one who had contacted him. Her letter had been a shock. It came to the hospital two weeks after there had been a short piece about him in the paper, a series on the best doctors in Boston. A reporter had come to his office to talk to him because of all the patients who kept singing his praises. A photographer had posed him by the window, his white lab coat jauntily thrown open, his face laughing. “The Doctor Every Woman Loves,” the headline ran, and for weeks afterward, his colleagues teased him mercilessly.
As soon as he saw her handwriting, he had to sit down. His head was thumping and he couldn’t quite breathe. For a moment, he thought his asthma might have returned. “I read about you,” Isabelle wrote. “I wanted to call but I thought this would be easier for you.” Her handwriting was still the same uneven tumble, the scrawl his father used to joke about because no one but Isabelle could ever read it. She was married. She had two children, one of them adopted from China. “It’s been over two decades. Do you think we could see each other?” she wrote.
No, he thought. Of course the answer was no. She had left him when he was nine years old. She had never called, never written, and gradually just vanished into the ether the same way his mother had. He tucked her letter into the pocket of his lab coat, unsure what to do. It had been so long. He felt the letter when he went on his rounds. He swore he heard her rustling when he leaned over a patient to check her heart. He felt it when he sat down to gulp some coffee, and he felt it when he came back home and told Lisa. “What could she possibly want, after all this time?” he said.
“Maybe she doesn’t want anything. Maybe you should see her,” Lisa said.
He startled. “See her? She vanished when I was a little kid. Now she contacts me with this letter.”
“You should at least call her,” Lisa said. She rubbed his arm. “Aren’t you at least a little curious?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said, waving his hands. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to do it now,” Lisa said.
It was like a mosquito bite that he couldn’t help scratching. He didn’t call, though he kept the number by the phone in the bedroom, and after he had picked up the paper so many times to look at it, he had the number memorized. He didn’t know if he should tell his father or not, so he kept silent.
Then, one night at the hospital, he had three deliveries and none of the mothers had really dilated yet. A few nurses padded down the hall, talking to one another. Patients were asleep. He passed the waiting room and a woman was sitting there, avidly reading a picture book, The Runaway Bunny, to a boy leaning against her. His mother had read him that book all the time, though she hadn’t been a fan of it. He still remembered the story, about a baby rabbit that kept threatening to run away, changing into clouds or mountains or whatever he needed to be to escape his mom. The mom rabbit kept insisting that she would always find her baby, that if her baby morphed into a cloud, she’d become the sky. If he was a fish, she would be the ocean. She’d be anything, just so she could be with him. “Now that’s pathological,” his mother had said, but Sam had loved the book. He had asked for it every night.
Sam dug his hand in his pocket and there was Isabelle’s phone number. He couldn’t deny that he missed her. That she had been important to him. That at one point in his life he had thought she was an angel, a conduit between him and his mother. Well. People believed in angels when they were most in trouble, when there was nothing else they could do. His patients whose babies died comforted themselves with the thought that the babies were angels. But he was a doctor now, and he knew there was no such thing.
He took out his cell phone and, before he could change his mind, called Isabelle, his fingers gripped around the phone.
“Hello?” she said, and hearing that voice, he pressed the receiver against his forehead and shut his eyes. His whole life came back to him. “It’s Sam,” he said.
“Sam!” She sighed his name. “I didn’t know if you’d call. I’m so glad you did.”
“I almost didn’t.” Behind him, a nurse was whistling. “But here I am.”
“That article about you! You’re all grown up.” She was silent for a minute.
“I haven’t been a child in a long time.”
“I know that.”
“So. Why didn’t you write before this? Why didn’t you call?” He knew it sounded rude, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Oh, not on the phone,” she said. “I can’t do this on the phone. Please. Can we see each other?”
Talking was hard enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually see h
er, how he might feel. He tapped his fingers on the phone. Behind him, he heard two people arguing. “They charged me for an aspirin!” a voice said.
Did he really want to see her? Was this really a good idea? He could hang up and tear up her number and that would be that. He could pretend she had never called him and his life would go on the way it always had. He’d have his father still. He’d have Lisa and his work.
“Sam?”
He could pretend this had never happened.
“I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just for a few hours.”
Babies in the womb got their senses mixed up. There was an eerie phenomenon where they could hear colors. They could see sounds. He felt as if he finally understood what that must be like, because surely, every sense of his had gone awry. He went to his house and dug out the old Canon. He had stopped taking pictures with it years ago; now he used a digital that required nothing but a steady hand. Still, he had kept it. He traced the camera with his hands.
He made plans. He called his father, attempting to be casual. “Isabelle wrote me,” he said, and Charlie was silent.
“I’m going to visit her. Would you like to come?” Sam asked.
“Another time,” he said. Sam’s father would never talk about Isabelle with him, no matter how many questions Sam would ask. “Did you love her? Did you love her the way you loved Mom?” Sam kept asking. “Why did she leave us?” over and over until he was old enough to see how such questions hurt Charlie, how his father would retreat into the other room, how maybe there really weren’t any good answers, and only then did he stop.
Still, the day before Sam left, Charlie called. His father coughed into the phone and Sam felt the hesitation. “You tell her hello from me,” Charlie said.
BY THE TIME Sam got to Woodstock, it was midafternoon. It was a lively little town, full of shops and restaurants and people ambling on the street. He turned down a road, following the directions she had given him, and there was her house, a big white Colonial with a green lawn, and as soon as he saw the child’s jump rope, like a squiggle, his legs buckled. He wondered if he had made a terrible mistake, if it wasn’t too late to turn around and go home.
He sat in the car, tense and angry, with the motor running. He could be back before Lisa got off her shift. He could go home and pretend none of this happened. He felt nine years old. He had thought she had wings. He put his hand on the gear shift, and then the front door opened and Isabelle flew out.
Her hair was still long but mostly gray now, which somehow made her even more arresting to look at. She was still thin, but her features were softer, and there were fine lines around her eyes.
She was still beautiful.
Slowly, he got out of the car. She hugged him close, but he couldn’t bring himself to put his arms up around her, and instead, he forcibly stepped back. She was crying, but his heart still felt hard. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I can’t stop looking at you.”
“You wouldn’t have missed me if you’d kept in touch.”
She startled. “Do I deserve that, Sam?” she said quietly.
He shifted his weight. Something was burning inside his stomach. “Why did you want to see me?” he said finally.
“Come inside and meet everyone,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”
Everyone, he thought. Who was everyone? As soon as he stepped inside, he heard music, something jazzy, and there were voices in the back. It wasn’t raining, his shoes were clean, but he stamped his feet on her rug. The house was big and roomy. Everything was polished wood and white walls, which were full of her photos. They were all black-and-white images of peoples’ faces, and in every photo a different part of the face was hidden in shadow. Then, there, toward the back, there was an enlarged one of him, at nine, set slightly apart from the others. Maybe she’d hung it up just before he got there. Did she really think that that would make him believe she had cared? There were photos of Nelson, too, his mouth open and yawning. “Nelson,” Sam said. “He was a great tortoise.”
“What do you mean was? He still is. Want to see him?”
“He’s alive?”
“He’s going to outlive us all,” she assured him. She led him to a small room in the back and showed him the tank. Nelson arched his neck when Sam came in, and for a moment, Sam felt that same crazy disorientation. “Remember me?” Sam said, touching Nelson’s smooth shell. Nelson hissed and slid his head back into his shell, making Isabelle laugh.
“Nelson’s unsociable as always,” she said, and then she turned back to Sam. “Are you taking photographs these days?”
“I stopped taking them when I was a kid.”
She put her hand to her face. “How is Charlie?” she asked, and her voice got all funny.
“He’s seeing someone now. She teaches Spanish at Oakrose High.”
Isabelle nodded. “Good. I’m glad. Is he happy?”
Sam thought of his father and Lucy, his new girlfriend. Did they seem happy? Or was it more just a kind of contentment? The last time he had visited, Lucy cooked paella and kissed Charlie and held his hand across the table, but Sam noted that they still kept separate addresses.
“He’s as happy as anyone,” Sam finally said.
Isabelle looked as if she were about to say something, but then a big wooly black dog sprang out from the kitchen, and then a little girl tumbled out, too, Chinese, with almond eyes and straight black hair cascading down her back. Isabelle gave a half smile. “Ah, here’s Grace,” Isabelle said. “She’s six. Elaine, my oldest, is at college.” A man came out, balding and steel-haired, grinning. “You must be Sam,” he said, and he draped an arm about Isabelle, drawing her close, kissing the curly top of her head.
Dinner was long and delicious. Grace had to be coaxed to eat vegetables. “Please don’t eat your zucchini,” said Frank. “Because I really want it for myself!” Grace giggled and grabbed a bite. “And don’t even think of touching the carrots,” he said meaningfully.
Grace shot a glance over at Sam and then pronged a carrot with her fork, popping it into her mouth.
All through dinner, Sam compared Isabelle’s husband to Charlie. Frank was probably the last kind of person he’d expect Isabelle to end up with, big and boisterous, and clearly older than she was. But even though he tried not to, Sam liked Frank. Frank told him how a critic had come in with a fake mustache that had fallen into his soup, how the pastry chef had inadvertently lost her ring in a cupcake and served it to a young woman who thought her boyfriend was proposing. (“He proposed anyway.” Frank laughed.) Frank asked Sam a million questions about his job, about his life. The whole dinner, no one mentioned Charlie at all, but he seemed a presence, anyway.
After dinner, Sam helped with the cleanup. “Why don’t you show Sam the park?” Frank asked Isabelle. “Gracie and I can man the fort here.”
Isabelle nodded. “Go,” he said.
The park was green and leafy, with a fenced-off playground of jungle gyms and swings and a big sign, NO ADULTS WITHOUT CHILDREN ALLOWED INSIDE. He felt Isabelle’s eyes on him. “What?” he said.
“Can I take your picture?” Isabelle asked, lifting the camera.
“You’re now too rich and famous for my budget.”
“Hardly,” she smiled. She moved to another angle and the camera whirred. “Still not using a digital?” Sam asked, and Isabelle laughed.
“I like film,” she said. “It captures every detail. It’s a shame you don’t take photographs anymore. You had a good eye.”
She crouched and he felt prickles all over his skin as she focused on him. When he was a kid, he used to love it when she took his picture. He loved all the hours in the darkroom with Isabelle, not seeing her, but knowing all he had to do was reach out and he could touch her. Watching her, he felt a pulse of anger.
Still crouching, she took another shot. “I’ll send you the prints,” she said, and then she asked, “How is Charlie, really?” Her face was hidden by the camera.
“He’s goo
d. I told you. He loves the Cape. He’s still working. He has Lucy.”
Isabelle stood up, and looked down at her camera. “One of these days I’m going to just show up to see him.”
“Maybe you should.”
She stared down into the camera again. “Is he happy?” she said carefully.
“Are you?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She took two more photos in rapid succession and then stood up, putting the camera away. She shielded her eyes from the sun. “God, it goes so fast, doesn’t it?” she said wistfully.
“I almost didn’t come,” Sam blurted, and Isabelle turned to face him.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to, I was so angry,” Sam said. He felt it all building up inside him, all over again, all the feelings he had tamped down.
She was about to say something, but Sam held up his hand. “I was a little kid when you left,” he said. “I couldn’t believe you would just go like that, that you didn’t write or call or want to see me. That you wouldn’t even answer my letters. All I ever got from you was one phone call, Isabelle, and then I got sick—remember that day when I called you and I was wheezing so hard I couldn’t talk? I kept waiting for you to come see me. How could you do that? Didn’t you even want to contact the hospital to see if I was okay?” he said.
“Sam—” Her face grew pained.
“How could you just leave me? I was a kid. I loved you. Do you know what it did to me? How I blamed myself when you vanished?”
She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out, and he was suddenly so hopeless with anger, he had to shut his eyes for a moment. He swallowed, and when he looked at her again, she looked as if a layer had been peeled away from her, as if she were a thousand years old, all her beauty gone.
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