The Remedy for Regret

by Susan Meissner

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after eight. You should go back to sleep, okay? I just didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”

  “Mmmm,” he says.

  “Bye, Zany Zane.”

  “Bye, Testy Tess,” he says lazily, eyes closed. But his mouth is upturned slightly as we exchange these names we have for each other.

  “I love you,” I whisper, wondering if I said it loud enough for him to hear.

  “Yep,” he says back. He heard me. And answered back in his own way that he loves me, too.

  My dad is waiting impatiently at the door to the garage when I come back into the kitchen. Shelley pretends not to notice and comes to me, folding me into her embrace.

  “Thanks for coming to my birthday party!” she says. “And thanks for the Peabody Hotel PJ’s. I can’t wait until it warms up enough so I can wear them.”

  “You’re welcome.” I return the hug and whisper, “Thanks,” in her ear.

  I start to follow my Dad out to the car.

  “Say hi to Simon for us!” Shelley says as she stands at the door and watches us get into my dad’s car.

  “I will! Bye, Shelley.” I give her a look that my father can’t see. A look that says, “Wish me luck!”

  She smiles back at me and nods. Shelley watches as we back out of the garage and make our way onto the street. She waves until I can no longer see her.

  “So where do want to go?” my dad says, looking at the road, not at me.

  I suddenly decide I want to be at the airport when I tell him what I came here to tell him. Despite what Shelley thinks, I’m not brave. I want to be able to just walk away when I need to go. I don’t want to get back in the car and ride in strained silence to the airport.

  “You know what, Dad? Let’s just get some doughnuts and coffee to go and eat at the airport. Then we won’t have to rush.”

  “Fine with me,” he says.

  Traffic is light but we are both quiet as we run through the nearest Dunkin Donuts and then on to the airport. I make a few comments about Zane’s game and Shelley’s party. I am tempted to tell him I plan to marry Simon later this summer, but that will lead us too quickly down a road I am not ready to travel just yet.

  We arrive at the airport and my Dad finds a parking space in the short-term lot. Inside the terminal, I check my suitcase and then we walk to a seating area near the security checkpoint. A few other travelers are seated nearby.

  We sit down and I open our little bag of doughnuts. I watch as my dad reaches in for the maple Long John he picked out. I have no appetite.

  I have forty-five minutes before my flight leaves and there is no line at the security checkpoint. So far so good.

  “Tastes pretty good,” my Dad says, taking a bite and then a sip from his cup.

  I fidget in my seat. Help me say it. Help him hear it.

  “You’re not eating,” my dad says, his own mouth full.

  “I will,” I attempt a sip of coffee. It is too hot for me. It burns my tongue.

  “So you must be anxious to get back your job.”

  “Yes,” I absently reply. “No. I mean, I am not going back to work right away.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to share a couple of things with you Dad, before I left. That’s why I wanted to have breakfast with you. Alone.”

  He just looks at me.

  “I am not going back to work right away because I am taking a little trip.”

  “Another one?”

  “I’ve decided to go to England. I am leaving tomorrow. I want to see where Mom grew up, where you and Mom met. I… I want to see if she still has family there.”

  “What are you talking about?” He leans back in his chair. It almost sounds like he is saying, “What do you think you are doing?”

  “I want to see where Mom grew up, Dad. And I want to see my uncle Martin.”

  “This is the craziest thing I have ever heard,” he says, half-smiling. “Are you telling me you are just going to get on a plane tomorrow and go to England? Just like that? Have you even talked to Martin?”

  “No, I haven’t —”

  “Yeah, and you know why you haven’t? Because he wrote you off a long time ago, Tess.”

  He must be angry. Or afraid. I’m sure he can’t know how much what he just said hurts me.

  “Maybe he did at one time, but people sometimes do things they later regret.”

  “Well, why hasn’t he tried to contact you then?”

  “Why haven’t I?” I reply right back.

  “I’m telling you right now, Tess, you are setting yourself up for heartache.”

  I am used to it, I think in my head. But I don’t say this.

  “What if he’s like me?” I say instead. “What if he’s thinking that he has been mistaken all these years? What if he wishes he could go back and do it all over again and this time do it differently? What if he wishes he had stayed in contact with you? With me? What if he wonders all the time what ever became of his sister’s child?”

  “Well, why hasn’t he done anything about it?”

  “Maybe for the same reason I haven’t. I have been afraid to. I let myself think all these years that because he never did try he never wanted to. I know now you can want something without being brave enough to attempt to have it.”

  “You don’t even know where he lives.”

  “Do you?” I ask, giving him the opportunity to help me.

  “Tess, I haven’t talked to the man in nearly three decades!”

  He says nothing about the address I carry in my pocket.

  “I’ll manage,” I say.

  “This is absurd.” He puts the end of his doughnut down on the table next to him. “Supposing you do find him. What are you going to do if he slams his door in your face?”

  “I’ll try again the next day and the next until I have to come home. And there are other things I want to do while I am there.”

  “Like what?” my dad says thoroughly perturbed.

  “Like visit her grave.”

  I don’t have to say whose grave. He knows. He says nothing but his face softens a bit like he almost wishes he could come with me and visit my mother’s grave, too.

  “I never got to say hello or goodbye to her, Dad. I want to see the place where she rests. I want to just sit there on the grass and tell her I am there. Tell her what I am like. Tell her I miss her.”

  My dad looks away. A vein in his neck is twitching. He looks at his watch. He wants our encounter to be over. But I am not finished.

  “Dad—” I begin, but he interrupts me.

  “I don’t want to talk about this here,” he says curtly.

  “You never want to talk about this! And you don’t have to do the talking this time. I will.”

  “Not here,” he says evenly.

  “Yes, here.” I match his tone. “I’ll make it brief. I promise you. And when I’m done saying what I have to say, I’m going to get on the plane and go back to Chicago. You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Simon told you,” he says, in an almost child-like voice.

  “Simon told me nothing. I finally just figured it out.”

  “Figured out what?” That vein is twitching away like mad.

  “Figured out how hurt you were when Mom died. How you needed to blame someone and you didn’t mean to, but you blamed me. And still do.”

  He stiffens and his nostrils flare the tiniest bit. I imagine he must feel a tiny bit like he got just caught—after years of deception—with his hand in a cookie jar.

  Or in a purse that doesn’t belong to him.

  “You don’t know what you are talking about,” he says, looking away from me.

  “Isn’t that why you didn’t talk to me about it when I called you from St. Louis? Simon begged you to ask me about it, didn’t he? He knew the guilt was tearing me up inside. He told you it was destroying me. He begged you to talk to me, to tell me it wasn’t my fault, didn’t he? But you didn�
�t.”

  “It’s none of Simon’s business!”

  “But it’s our business, Dad. It has always been our business. And you refuse to talk to me about it.”

  He looks at me then, and the pain on his face startles me.

  “I never once told you it was your fault,” he says, his voice breaking on every other word.

  Oh, God. This is harder than I thought it would be. He doesn’t understand.

  “You didn’t have to say it. I felt it,” I say, imploring him with my eyes to search his heart. “With every unspoken word I felt responsible. When you wouldn’t tell me how she died I went looking for the answers. I know how she died! I know it was an embolism. I know pieces of my hair and skin got into her lungs! I know the doctors couldn’t save her.”

  “Stop it!’ he whispers and his voice is raspy and uneven.

  “Yes, Dad. I want to stop it. That’s exactly what I want to do. I want to stop feeling guilty and I want you to stop feeling bitter. It was no one’s fault, Dad. No one’s. And you and I are just going to have to learn to live with that.”

  He looks away, blinking back tears that I’ve never seen my Dad shed. One droplet escapes, though, and he reaches up and flicks it away like it is an annoying mosquito.

  “Dad, I want you to know that I understand why you did it. And that you didn’t mean for me to feel this way. I am not angry with you. And I forgive you.”

  Another tear forms in his eye and I can see him willing it to stay put.

  “You’re going to miss your flight,” he says calmly.

  “No, I’m not.”

  He swallows and looks down at the table. “Can’t we please be done with this?”

  When he says this, I feel a deep longing rise to the surface of my soul. “That’s all I have ever wanted, Dad.”

  I know he will not apologize. I know he will not say something like, “Oh, Tess! I had no idea you felt like this all these years! I am so sorry. I never meant to hurt you!” But I think the look on his face is communicating something close to this. At least, I can imagine it is. And that gives me the strength I need to rise from the table, gather my things and say goodbye. I expect him to rise, too, but he does not.

  “Does Shelley know about this?” he says quietly. His voice sounds like his own again.

  “Shelley has always known about this,” I say gently, hoping I have not caused trouble for her.

  “I’ll call you when I get back from England,” I continue. “I’ll let you know how it went.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” he says, slowly rising from his chair.

  He looks suddenly aged to me; far more than his fifty-four years.

  “I meant what I said. I am not angry with you. And I do forgive you.”

  I reach for him and put my arms around his neck. His return embrace is weak and effortless. I wait for the peck on the cheek but it does not come. I give him one instead.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  I know how hard it is for him to say the same thing back to me. He doesn’t say it very often. So I am not surprised when the words don’t come.

  “Sometimes you remind me so much of her,” he says instead and his return embrace is strengthened just for a second. But he quickly breaks away. As do I. He has never said that to me before.

  “Bye, Dad,” I whisper.

  He just nods in a sad kind of way and puts his hands in his pockets.

  I walk away toward the security checkpoint, stopping to look back at him. He is watching me with that sad look on his face. I wave and he nods and I can’t help but notice that my doughnut and coffee sit untouched on the chair next to mine.

  Moments later, as I wait for my plane to begin boarding, I reach into my canvas bag and pull out the photo of my mother that I always carry with me, the one where she is sitting on the steps of their home on Terceira. I have often thought I looked like her and Blair, Jewel and Corinthia all said I favored my mother when I showed them this picture. But Dad had never said anything about it before today. As I gaze at the photo I begin to understand a little more about the man who loved my mother; the man who raised their child after she died and who had to look at that child’s face every day and pretend it did not move him.

  Twenty-four

  Oxford, England

  The train I boarded in London is chugging its way through beautiful countryside but I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open. It is one o’clock in the afternoon but it feels like the middle of the night. I want so very much to see everything that rushes past the train but my eyelids are so heavy.

  It’s not just jet lag that pulls at me. The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of travel, discovery and soul-searching, and I am as anxious as ever to finally be at peace. I want to lie down at the end of the day, of every day, and feel like nothing has been left undone.

  It was harder than I thought it would be to leave Simon after seeing him again, for just one day. As motivated as I am to make this pilgrimage to England and to make it now, it was still difficult to say goodbye to him. I had clung to him at O’Hare, long enough that it made him worry that I was taking on too much at an already stressful time for me. But somehow I had managed to assure him that I’d be okay.

  I had clung to him the day before, too, when I arrived in Chicago from Dayton. When I saw him sitting in baggage claim waiting for me with roses on his lap, I’d run to him, causing quite a few stares.

  We had spent the rest of the day cuddled on the couch while I told him about my weekend in Dayton, about Shelley coming to my aid, about my Dad’s reaction. Simon, of course, was not surprised.

  “So are you okay?” he had asked when I was finished.

  “I will be. It could have gone worse. And I think in time my Dad will come to the same conclusion the rest of us did. But I know he will have to discover it on his own. He can’t be told it and then just be expected to accept it. He has to solve it for himself. I can be patient. It’s not my burden to bear anymore.”

  “You should never have had to bear it at all.”

  “Let’s not go there,” I said. “What’s done is done. I don’t want to be burdened with that in place of the guilt.”

  He had smiled then. “You sound like me. I tell myself that every morning I get up and look in the mirror.”

  I hadn’t given much thought to Simon’s healing, being so concentrated on my own. I asked him if he was doing all right.

  “I still have my moments,” he had answered. “I still wrestle with remorse and maybe I always will. But I am learning to give each day over to God, as soon as I get up and before I do anything else. I find I can make it through the day when I do.”

  I had told him then about the conversation with Corinthia on the way to Jonesboro, how she told me God was not avoiding me, He was pursuing me. I had asked him if he could understand what that was like because I knew I would have a hard time describing it. He had nodded.

  “I think I know exactly what it is like,” he had said. And I was suddenly very glad we were beginning this odyssey toward understanding God at the same time, the same place.

  “Tess,” he had said next, and his voice was very tender. “I need to tell you something. Something I hope you will understand. I’ve been thinking about it a lot while you have been gone.”

  He paused.

  “What is it?”

  “I am going to sleep on the couch tonight, Tess. And when you get back from England, I am going to move in with my brother until we are married.”

  My first reaction had been amazement. The only times Simon had ever slept on the couch was when he was sick or I was. I wasn’t sure what to say at this point but strangely enough, I felt like I knew where these thoughts came from; a desire to do things right the first time.

  “I just think we’ve been doing everything backwards,” he continued. “We’ve been enjoying all the benefits of marriage without the commitment. All this time we have been together we’ve been saying to each other and to the world
that we value our independence more than our love for each other. I don’t want to do that anymore. I could leave you right now and no one could fault me. No one. I can’t handle that. I don’t want to do things backwards anymore.”

  “I don’t either,” I had whispered.

  And so we stopped.

  This morning when I woke up, I came out into the living room to see my beloved Simon, curled up on the couch, clutching a sofa pillow to his chest. As I sat with a cup of coffee in the kitchen and waited for him to wake up, I planned my wedding.

  The train’s whistle blasts and I realize I have dozed off. We are pulling into the station in Oxford. I sit up straight, trying to see the skyline and the yellow stone steeples and towers of Oxford University but the train station itself is all that fills my vision.

  The train comes to a halt and the passengers arise as one and we all begin to grab our bags. An older gentleman insists on carrying my suitcase outside to a rank of taxis. I thank him and a driver in the nearest cab gets quickly out of his vehicle, takes the suitcase and places it into his trunk. I start to open the back passenger door, but the driver reaches for it first and opens it for me. I get in.

  The driver runs around to the front of the car and gets in.

  “Where to, love?” His accent is thick and melodic. Like Corinthia’s but in an entirely different way.

  “The Randolph Hotel,” I start to say but then I change my mind. “Wait. Can… Can we just drive around Oxford for a few minutes first? Maybe you could show me where things are?”

  “Ah, first time in Oxford, then?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, unable not to smile.

  “Right,” he says. “I can show you.”

  He zips away from the curb, sending me tottering toward the passenger door. The streets are narrow and there are lots of people walking around and riding bikes.

  “May is a busy time ’ere,” he says. “Tourists start to come and they don’t stop until November. Are you a tourist then?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “My mother was born here. And… And she’s buried here. She died when I was born.”

  “Och, that’s too bad, love. You were born ’ere, then? You sound American.”