The Forever Year

by Lou Aronica

  Suddenly, I felt disoriented. Of course I had considered the possibility that she had died, but I dismissed it early on because of the way he “spoke” to her after so many of the stories, and the way he talked about her when he showed me her picture. There had been no question in my mind that Gina was either still walking around somewhere, or if not, had died long after she was no longer a part of my father’s life.

  “She died?”

  “It was terrible,” Theresa said. “It was only a few weeks before they were supposed to get married. God, I haven’t thought about this in so long, I hope I have it right. Gina had been assigned to this commission by the mayor. It took her all over the city, including some pretty rough neighborhoods. Your father – even the deputy mayor – told Gina that she shouldn’t go to these places alone, but I’m sure your father told you that she wasn’t someone who liked to be told what to do. She didn’t want to believe that there was anything she couldn’t handle on her own. So she went to this terrible part of the Bronx and got in the middle of a fight between a husband and a wife. Your father was at Gina’s parents’ apartment waiting supper for her when the policeman came to the door.”

  My aunt turned back toward my father and patted his chest. I wanted to do the same thing, but I found I couldn’t move.

  “Your father was just overcome with grief. He had gone from considering himself the luckiest man alive to being completely destroyed in an instant. For a couple of years, I didn’t think he was ever going to get over it. As you probably know, I had a few problems of my own back then, but even I was worried about him. Slowly, he got back to work, but he never even thought about becoming involved with another woman. He just closed himself off. At some point, though, he met your mother at a neighborhood fair. She was the friend of a friend or something like that. It took a long time, but slowly things happened between them.

  “It was nothing like what there was between your father and Gina. I’ve never seen any couple who sparked the way Mickey and Gina did. But your mother was a very good woman. She was a saint as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t long before they were in love. I think your father knew that she would take care of him and settle his heart a little.”

  She paused and leaned over to kiss my father on the cheek.

  “I guess she never settled it completely, though,” she said, turning back to me. “To think after all these years, he was telling you about this.”

  Once again, she patted him on the chest and then moved back in her chair. She looked over at me, as though to confirm that she had said everything she wanted to say on the subject. Then she reached for a magazine.

  Chapter Thirty

  I slept fitfully for a few hours that night. I couldn’t settle down after hearing the news that my Aunt Theresa had given me. The love affair between my father and Gina had never ended. She hadn’t left him, or tired of him, or grown bitter with him. For all I knew, their love was still on its upward trajectory. For all I knew, that trajectory would never have taken a significant turn downward.

  So many thoughts jostled in my mind. Of course, there was a very good chance that my father and Gina would have faltered as their relationship continued. Certainly, there was no chance that they wouldn’t encounter adversity or a complication in their dreams or a situation that put them on opposite sides of a critical issue in their relationship. That this hadn’t happened in the year that they were together just suggested that they were more fortunate than most. And in fact, they might have been spoiled by that good fortune and completely unprepared to deal with difficulty.

  On the other hand, maybe they hadn’t encountered the obstacle that was going to prove too steep because they were so well connected and cared so deeply for each other that they managed to keep all of the obstacles scalable. Maybe they really did understand that if you cherished and honored your relationship enough, you could maintain the vibrancy and vitality.

  That I was even willing to entertain this notion was a testament to how effectively my father had made his world come real to me. I felt that I knew Mickey and Gina, that I had spent countless hours with them. That I myself had been impressed with the ways in which they touched each other.

  Of course a by-product of that vividness was that I felt the “news” of Gina’s death in a deeply personal way. I took the blow of the loss of this woman much more intensely than I had earlier felt anger at her when I believed she had hurt my father. My heart went out to her parents, long in the grave themselves, and to her brother, who quite possibly still lived somewhere in New York City and still thought back every now and then on the sparkling sister whom he idolized.

  But I felt the loss most deeply for my father. I saw two men in my mind’s eye. One was the bedazzled man in his mid-twenties who couldn’t believe his good fortune to have fallen in love with a woman like Gina. The other was the bowed man in his mid-eighties whose voice got smoother and whose face grew nearly boyish when he talked about this woman who had graced his life. I sympathized with both of them in different ways. For the young man who had love torn from him and could barely understand how his life could be so utterly derailed. And for the old man who could still be charmed by the past while being so indelibly marked by it.

  I understood, finally, why my father seemed so completely transformed in Marina’s presence. He knew that she was a woman who cared deeply and wanted to have an impact, though certainly he’d met other impressive women. He knew that I was in love with her and that she made me lighter and looser, though I know that he’d seen his children in love before. But he also saw the way we blended together, the way we moved so fluidly with one another. And I’m sure he saw in that something he hadn’t seen very often. Quite possibly not in nearly sixty years.

  I now understood his reasons for telling the story. That much was easy. It was the only way he would be able to get the message through to me that I shouldn’t be cavalier about what I had with Marina. That no matter how cynical I had become about love and relationships, that it would be an overwhelming mistake to underestimate the power of this romance. Certainly a series of lectures wouldn’t have done the job. The only way he could help me to see was to bring me as completely as he possibly could into his own experience, to make the young Mickey and Gina come alive for me as much as possible. I even understood now why it was so hard for him to tell the story and why he could only give it to me in little pieces. It must have been agonizing for him to relive that past when he knew what was waiting at the end.

  Yet I’d managed to screw up my relationship with Marina anyway. As I lay in bed, I thought about calling her and asking if I could see her. I even turned toward the phone a couple of times before I thought better of waking her up in the middle of the night. When my phone rang at 3:37, my first thought was that we were so psychically linked that she was in fact calling me.

  But the call was from the hospital. My father had died a few minutes earlier. I guess he could in fact hear us talking in his room after all.

  I got dressed and went immediately to the hospital, though obviously there was no rush necessary. I wanted to see my father’s body before they took it away. He seemed absolutely artificial to me lying there in the bed where he’d died. Though he had not moved in a couple of weeks, there seemed to be so much less of him now. On the drive over, I thought about what I was going to say to him, but once I was there, the idea of saying anything seemed foolish. I spent a few minutes in the room and then left to let the hospital do what they needed to do. I went down to the cafeteria to sit with a cup of coffee. I thought that my father would have liked the coffee because it was so weak and then amended the thought. No, he didn’t like it that way anymore. I had at least given him that much.

  The next several hours spun past quickly. I called Darlene, Matty, Denise, and Aunt Theresa. I made arrangements with a funeral home, picked out a casket, and signed several pieces of paper. It was nearly ten by the time I stopped and thought about everything that lay in front of me. It was then that I realized
I still hadn’t called Marina. She would be at school by this point, and I certainly didn’t want to have her pulled out of class, so I left a message on her machine at home.

  During the first night of the wake, dozens of people showed up, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years or had never seen before in my life. Distant relatives, neighbors from the old house, members of a Senior Citizens’ group my parents had belonged to while my mother was still alive. Matty and his family got in during the early afternoon, and Darlene and hers arrived just before the wake began. Though the room was dimly lit and the setting somber, it seemed bustling to me. People caught up with one another, knelt by my father’s casket, stopped over to say something pleasant about the Mickey they knew and then ask after each of us.

  When there wasn’t someone paying their respects, the four of us, joined at various times by spouses and children, sat in the front row of chairs and talked about my father. My siblings reminisced. They talked about what a good man my father had been, and about how secure he’d made them feel. They talked about how he would now be “joining Mom” and how they would have eternity together. They talked about the legacy he left for them.

  I didn’t say much during any of this. Not that my silence was in itself out of character. But I couldn’t help but believe that the man they were talking about was in some very meaningful way different from the man that I knew. He always had been. But at the end of his life, he had become something very different to me again. I once thought jealously that having my father move in with me would give me the opportunity to share him with my siblings in a way that I’d been denied my entire life. I childishly believed that I could have a “piece of him” that was mine and that I could wave this in front of them as something only I had. But my father had given me something so precious, so invaluable, that the notion of trivializing it by trying to show it off to the others in my family was inconceivable to me. I knew then that I would never share the story of Gina with Darlene, Matty, and Denise. It wasn’t meant for them, and it wouldn’t do for them what it did for me.

  “He loved being with you,” Matty said to me when I was barely paying attention to the conversation. I turned to him to see Darlene nodding in agreement.

  “He called me several times to tell me that he couldn’t believe the rest of us wanted to put him in ‘a home.’” Darlene said.

  “It wasn’t going to be ‘a home,’” Denise said.

  Matty laughed and patted her on the leg.

  “I definitely got that one wrong, huh?” he said to me. “About a month after he moved in with you, he stopped trying to make me feel guilty for not coming to see him more often and started trying to make me jealous over the way you were feeding him and the things you were doing with him.”

  I laughed, but I was feeling a little choked up. My father and I had never had that conversation. While I knew that things had come around between us, I continued to wonder whether he regretted moving in with me. And then when things got tense between us again at the end, I was certain that he would have preferred to be just about anywhere else. That he was presenting things very differently to my three siblings was a very powerful thing to learn.

  I decided to go for a walk because I needed a few minutes by myself. As I got to the back of the room, Marina walked in.

  I didn’t startle. I didn’t take a moment to appraise the situation. I didn’t feel even the tiniest bit of hesitation. I simply walked into her arms. She held me wordlessly, and for a moment, I thought that I was going to break down, even though I hadn’t all day. The longer we were together, though, the steadier I felt. It was as if she were feeding me, making me stronger. I knew I had missed this sensation. I even knew how much I missed this sensation. But until this very moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge just how much, because I wasn’t sure that I would ever feel it again.

  After a while, we pulled back, though we continued to hold hands. Marina looked into the room toward the casket.

  “It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” she said. Her eyes were misty, and I wasn’t sure whether it was for him or for me.

  “It hasn’t completely registered with me yet. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to come out of the coma, but I still kept thinking that he might.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I will be. I’m gonna miss him. But at least I won’t have to keep the eggs under lock and key anymore.”

  She smiled and I desperately wanted to kiss her. I think she might have even welcomed it, but there were things I wanted to say to her first. I took her over to an unoccupied corner of the room and we sat across from one another.

  “I finally heard the end of the Gina story,” I said.

  “He told you?”

  “Actually, I heard the very end from my aunt. The story didn’t turn out at all the way I thought it was going to. It was very sad. I finally figured out what the point was to the whole thing.”

  Marina squeezed my hand. “And what was the point?”

  “That if you’re lucky enough to be gifted with a one-in-a-million love affair you treat it like the crown jewels.”

  She sniffled and held my hand a little tighter. “You mean you stick it in a vault and post guards all around it?”

  I smiled and kissed her hand. “Not exactly where I was going with that. Look, I seem to have trouble picking up on the subtleties, even when the subtleties aren’t particularly subtle, but I think I finally understand that there may be a select handful of people in the world who actually get to keep things going. Love doesn’t always die. Sometimes it transcends everything.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a bad pop song.”

  “And under different circumstances, I might be ashamed of that. But sometimes you have to risk sounding like a lounge singer to get your message across.”

  She smiled. “What would that message be?”

  “That you and I have the chance to transcend everything. That the reason why what we had between us felt different was because it was different. But I kept thinking about it in old ways. My father was right when he called me a moron.”

  “You should have heard what I called you.”

  I reached out for her arm, just to put myself closer to her. “And you were right, too. But the point is that these relationships might be one-in-a-million, but they aren’t so rare that a father and his son couldn’t both have one.”

  She put her hand over my outstretched arm. “I know.”

  I reached over and kissed her then. It was the kind of kiss that asked her to forgive me (which I was guessing she already had), to understand me (which I believe no one did better than she) and to stay with me forever (which was something I was willing to reiterate every single day). When we stopped kissing, we touched our foreheads together as we had a thousand times before. Then she kissed me on the nose, and we stood up together to walk to the front of the room.

  When we got to the first row of chairs, I introduced her to my family. Even Marcus reached out for her hand. Afterward, I sat down and Marina went to kneel before the casket. Her head was bowed as she talked to my father.

  I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I had a pretty good idea.

  A note from the author

  I hope you enjoyed The Forever Year. This was the first book I ever published, though I did a revision of it before publishing this edition, since I’d like to believe I’ve learned something about writing in the time that has passed. Of course, it’s entirely possible that my skills have devolved over the years and that I’ve made this new version worse than the original. If so, sorry.

  The novel originally came out under the name “Ronald Anthony” (Anthony was my father’s first name) because I was reluctant to reveal myself back in 2003. I’d been associated with the book publishing industry for a long time by that point, and I didn’t want my friends and associates judging me too harshly on my fledgling effort. Frankly, the people I was most concerned about were those whose manuscripts I’d rejected over the years.
“You didn’t think my work was good enough,” I imagined them saying, “and this is how you write?”

  I chose yet another pseudonym when I started collaborating on nonfiction (all of my nonfiction is collaborative; as it turns out none of my areas of expertise are book-worthy, though I’m still convinced there’s a market for a volume about driving within ten miles per hour of the speed limit). Eventually, Dr. Rick Levy convinced me to use my actual name on our book Miraculous Health. My next collaboration, The Element, which I wrote with Sir Ken Robinson, became a New York Times bestseller, and finally got me over the whole hiding-behind-fake-names thing.

  I decided to bring The Forever Year back after the publication of my first novel under my own name, Blue. Blue is similar to The Forever Year in that its primary focus is on the characters and their relationships, particularly family relationships. The major difference, though, is that a big chunk of Blue is set in a fantasy world, Tamarisk, that was created several years before in bedtime stories by two of the protagonists, Chris, a man in his early forties going through an especially difficult stretch in his life, and Becky, his fourteen-year-old daughter who is largely estranged from him. Early in the novel, Becky discovers that she can travel to Tamarisk. There’s a reason for this, but I’m not going to discuss that here. I have also published a prequel novella to Blue called Until Again and collaborated on a novel with Julian Iragorri called Differential Equations.

  I love hearing from readers, and I’d be very interested in knowing what you thought about The Forever Year. You can reach me at laronica@fictionstudio.com.

  Thanks for reading.

  About the Author

  Lou Aronica is the author of the USA Today bestseller The Forever Year and the national bestseller Blue. He also collaborated on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers The Element and Finding Your Element (with Ken Robinson) and the national bestseller The Culture Code (with Clotaire Rapaille). Aronica is a long-term book publishing veteran. He is President and Publisher of the independent publishing house The Story Plant. You can reach him at laronica@fictionstudio.com.