In the mirror she applies her makeup. When she is finished, she stares at her reflection and makes small corrections here and there. Margot looks now like someone who spent a day shopping in New York, and she suddenly remembers she should e-mail Cricket to say they had a drink together when they didn’t, but then she realizes that she would rather invite Chad’s questions than Cricket’s. Plus, what are the odds of Chad even saying something?
Instead, sitting on the edge of the bed with her bag packed, a bag she will have to hide in the way back of her SUV, as if she has not been away for a few days, she pulls out the business card Henry gave her earlier today.
She types his number into the phone and then writes, “It was good to see you today. Oh, this is Margot.”
Then she hits SEND and holds her breath.
A reply is back in moments. “It was GREAT to see you.”
Oh, Jesus, Margot thinks, her heart racing. She has a sudden urge to be outside, to run again. Don’t think, she tells herself. She types quickly with her thumbs. “We should do it again sometime. Maybe not on the street.”
“Meet me for a drink. Not tonight. I have Jess. But Monday.”
Margot sits and stares at his sentences on her phone. She feels somehow as if she has already cheated, like she won’t be able to look Chad in the eye when he rises out of his chair to give her a perfunctory hug.
But for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t really give a shit, and this is a good feeling. It has been forever since she has done something that feels true and honest.
She types back. “Where?”
A moment later, her phone lights up again.
“Anywhere you are willing to be,” the poet says.
Henry, 1991
Now this: coming to, bright sun through the doorway, a pounding in his temples from the wine the night before, an awareness that she is not next to him anymore, sentience returning like a migraine, sitting up and then thinking it might be a miracle to stand, wondering what time it is, when he hears raised voices from outside the cabin.
Henry stands and quickly puts on a pair of jeans and pulls on a T-shirt. Holy shit, his head aches. Then the voices from outside are louder now, a man’s voice and then, clearly, Margot’s, unintelligible through the walls but sounding distressed.
Henry is an animal, hangover be damned, the former shortstop, still quick as a cat, out the door and into blinding morning sunlight, which obscures even the blue sky the way it beats down directly on the east side of the cabin.
It is disorienting for a moment, but then coming around the corner, he sees them, Margot and some man, and at first he thinks it must be Ted, the vintner, for who else could be here?
But the man is taller than Ted, and as Henry moves toward where the two of them are standing across from each other, not aware that he is only some twenty yards away, he sees Margot push the man hard in the chest, and then the man reaches for her, in almost a hug, and turns her around, brings her in tight to him, the way someone would subdue a violent child. He is hurting her.
Henry runs into the sun. Around him, it all explodes like stars inside a dream. Margot’s voice is distant, though she is right there. The man’s jaw is a fat fastball down the middle. Henry’s almost leaping in the air as he punches him as hard as he can, and then it’s all terribly wrong as the man goes down.
Margot yells no in that half second before he swings; then she goes down to the ground next to the man while the pain shoots from Henry’s fist up his arm. The man is prone on the ground. His hands hold his face. Thankfully, his legs are moving.
The madness leaves Henry quick as a fever. Margot is saying “Dad” over and over again.
Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, what has he done?
Henry goes toward them and Margot turns from where she is bent down and sees him and says, “Get away from me!”
Henry steps back, and for a while he just paces around barefoot, his hands in his hair. Then Ted is there and it is so surreal: Time has stopped. Margot’s father is on his feet. He is being led away by Ted and Margot.
Thirty minutes later, the police are there, a man and a woman from the sheriff’s office. The conversation is brief. He has broken a man’s jaw. How does he feel about that?
He’s lucky he’s not being arrested for murder, the female cop says. A punch like that can kill a man.
Henry doesn’t try to explain. He looks away from the sun and to the lake, where the steeples of Bannister College can be seen, ancient turrets rising up over the hills on the western side.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I am so sorry.”
They cuff Henry’s hands behind his back. And as they take him away in the car to Seneca Falls, he looks out the window at the passing cornfields that line the rural highway, their tassels nodding slightly in the warm summer breeze, placid witnesses to what he has done.
Henry, 1991
After he is processed, they take Henry to the back to one of the two cells in the sheriff’s office. They allow him to make his phone call and he struggles with whom to call. It certainly isn’t going to be his parents; just the thought of the two of them trying to figure out what to do from so far away, he can’t imagine.
So Henry calls Deborah Weinberg, his poetry professor, and an hour later, she is there with her husband, who teaches comparative literature and whom Henry knows mainly in passing. As they sit in wheeled-in office chairs across from where he is behind bars, he explains it as best as he can, that he didn’t know it was Margot’s father, Thomas Fuller, but thought it was some stranger assaulting her. Oh, if he could have that moment back.
“Wait,” Deborah’s husband, David, says in his soft voice. “Thomas Fuller? From the board of trustees?”
Henry nods.
“Jesus,” David says.
Deborah shoots her husband a look. “First things first,” she says. “We need to get you out of here.”
“They said I am going in front of a judge today,” says Henry.
“You need a lawyer,” David says.
“They’re giving me one, I guess.”
“We know somebody,” Deborah says.
That afternoon, Henry meets with his lawyer, a disheveled older man with the remarkable name of Rudolph Holmes. His office is on Main Street in the town of Bannister and he specializes in Bannister students in trouble.
“I don’t have any money for a lawyer,” Henry says.
“Deborah and Dave are taking care of it,” Rudolph says.
Henry bows his head, for the kindness humbles him and he doesn’t want it, but he also knows he has no choice.
The hearing itself lasts all of ten minutes once it is his turn. It is all a soupy mirage. They rise and move to the tables at the front. There is some kind of announcement that precedes this, which Henry hears as background noise. The woman before him, clearly pregnant, gets sentenced to forty-five days for bouncing checks. Henry tries to figure this out. When she will have the baby?
Henry listens to Rudolph Holmes saying it was all a mistake and that this is a good kid with no priors, a straight-A student, you understand, who thought he was protecting his girlfriend. What person would have done different? And, by the way, there is no history of violence or mental illness.
“A good kid, Your Honor,” Rudolph Holmes says, and then he sits down.
The judge, a small dark-haired woman with thick glasses, looks over at Henry and then back to the assistant district attorney. A few minutes later, he is outside, having been released on his own recognizance and into the custody of the Weinbergs, distinguished professors and unassailable citizens of Bannister.
David pats him on the back as he climbs into the back of their Volvo and then they take him on the same drive the sheriff took him on earlier, though in reverse. In the bright sun, they pass the cornfields, and then the road opens up and he can see the entirety of the lake stretching south toward Watkins Glen.
They pull down the long driveway to the winery, and when they come around the final loop
through the vines to where it opens to a small sandy parking lot, Ted is waiting there, as if expecting them, and next to him are Henry’s two duffel bags. He hadn’t thought this far until now, but it is all he needs to know, and David and Deborah don’t even turn off the engine of the car as he gets out and walks over to Ted.
Ted looks at him and says, “You understand I don’t have a choice.”
“I know,” says Henry.
Ted lifts the bags and hands them to Henry. Henry stares at Ted for a moment and then Ted nods, as if there is nothing else to say, and Henry knows this is true.
David and Deborah take Henry back to their house, a two-story redwood house designed by Cornell architecture students, deep in a wooded lot a mile east of campus. On the way there, they drive through the heart of Bannister College, past the brick dorms and the great stone buildings. Henry has never seen it like this before, practically empty without any students, only a solitary figure visible here and there on the pathways that are normally bustling with young men and women, backpacks slung over their shoulders.
That night, Deborah makes up a bed for Henry in the guest room. The house is like nothing Henry has ever seen before, a great room of wide-plank redwood at the center of it, with bookshelves that extend from the floor to the ceiling, and two ladders on rails for access to the higher books. It might be the most beautiful thing Henry has ever seen, and looking around that room—that library—with something approaching wonder, Henry even forgets the events of the day for a moment.
But after a dinner of grilled lamb chops, a salad, bread, and much wine, it rushes back to him. Deborah says he should feel free to stay with them as long as he likes, and they don’t mention the very real possibility that he might be going away for a while in a few weeks when he returns to court.
“I’m going to go home tomorrow,” Henry announces.
“To Providence?” David asks.
“Yes,” Henry says. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Deborah reaches across the table and puts her hand on his. “You will get through this, you know?”
Henry nods. “I hope so,” he says, and as soon as he says it, he realizes he isn’t thinking about the possibility of prison, or whether Bannister will let him back in, and he isn’t thinking about his future at all, which just a day ago seemed as clear and as promising as mountain water.
Instead, the only thing he can think of is Margot, and right now there is a hole in his heart, where earlier in the same day she used to live.
After Deborah and Dave retire to their bedroom with their books and cups of tea, Henry picks up the phone in the kitchen and dials information and asks for a number for Thomas Fuller on Martha’s Vineyard.
“I have one in Chilmark,” the operator says. “Hold for the number.”
A woman answers the phone on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Is Margot there?”
There is a moment of silence. Then the woman says, “I know who this is. If you ever call here again, I will call the police. Do you understand?”
“I just really need to talk to Margot,” Henry says. “Please.”
There is a click and then Henry is left listening to the metronomic emptiness of a dial tone.
Margot, 1991
Her mother hangs up the phone in the kitchen. Margot has drifted in, having heard it ring, and is there long enough to know who was on the other end of the line. And long enough for her mother to know that she knows who was on the other end of the line.
“Clarity is important here,” her mother says. “You know that.”
Margot nods. She is feeling oddly grown-up and responsible suddenly, though perhaps that is just indicative of how eternal this day has been. She thinks of her father at Mass General in Boston, refusing to be treated anywhere else, the speeding drive to the airport in Syracuse and then Kiernan instructing the pilot to take them to Boston. Her father, following surgery, stuck with his jaw wired shut and her knowing that this man who has made all his money peddling sugar water around the globe will be on a diet for more than a month, when all he will be able to take are liquids. The very virility cut out of him as easily as a knife slices into a peach. And that Henry was the one who did it.
“It was my fault, really,” her mother is saying. “I never should have let you go up there. I mean, who goes upstate in the summer?”
Margot tunes her mother out. She feels now like she might be sick, the hangover, the wine from the night before in a place that feels like a world away, the whirlwind drive to the airport, the two plane flights, first to Boston, where her father was taken to Mass General, and then refueling the Gulfstream before it took her alone to the Vineyard, where her mother was waiting for her.
Maybe, though, it is her mother who is nauseating her. Her mother in her pink Izod with the collar turned up, her gold necklaces and rings and bracelets, her white capri pants snug on her ample ass and the overwhelming floral smell of her, turned up to hide the cigarette she had an hour ago, which Margot still faintly smells, like the sad undertone of sex in a motel room.
She then thinks of Henry, and suddenly her stomach is churning with the stress of it all. She remembers Kiernan making the call from the Town Car on the way to the airport and then his turning to her while her father held his face in his hands in the backseat.
“You can forget him,” he said. “He’s going to prison.”
Now her mother is prattling on, and the bile is rising in her throat. Margot cannot hear her anymore, just empty maternal blather, and now she knows she is about to throw up, and she moves as quickly as she can to the bathroom off the kitchen and gets there just in time to have the vomit land in a torrent in the toilet bowl.
“Christ, Margot,” her mother says behind her. “You’re not one of those bulimics, are you? A lot of the girls are, I hear.”
Margot is about to answer her when she dry-heaves. Emptied, she spins her head toward her mother. “No, I am not.”
“I mean, it’s okay if you are.”
“Mom, no. I’m hungover. I got drunk last night. I should have done this hours ago.”
“Okay, dear. I just meant you can tell me.”
Margot simply glares at her and stands up and straightens herself out in the mirror. She desperately wants to be outside now, like these walls are closing in all around her, and she has a pang of memory as she remembers last night amid the vines, the dewy grass against her pants and the feel of Henry beneath her.
“I’m going for a walk,” she says to her mother.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I really just want to be alone.”
Margot goes through the French doors and out onto the patio and then past the curated landscape and through the narrow path between the half-moons of dunes and onto the beach. The sand is soft and deep here, and she takes off her sandals and holds them in her right hand as she leaves the dunes behind and walks out on the broader beach.
Once she is away from the protection of the dunes, the wind picks up and blows her hair back and presses her clothes against her body. The beach is empty. Where the ocean meets the sand, the surf slaps hard against it over and over.
Looking up at the expanse of ocean stars, Margot finds it hard to imagine it is the same day. That a single day, one rotation of the planet, can contain an abundance of lives, the way the sky can contain stars that stretch and curve away from her toward Europe somewhere far out beyond the blackness.
She remembers then a night—could it have been a week ago?—when she sat outside the small cabin near the lake with Henry. They sat cross-legged on the grass with a bottle of wine open and he had his arm around her waist and they looked up at the sky, the same sky she is looking at right now, almost as pronounced, though the black of the ocean at night does something to draw the stars even closer than they were under those open fields.
She remembers looking over at Henry and in the dark his face was tilted toward the firmament, the wide gauzy stripe of the Milky Way, an
d the expression he wore was one she recognized and loved, half wonder and half amusement and just pure poetry, his mind spinning like a clock, rotating and whirring as he took in the possibilities.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“They’re fucking amazing, aren’t they?”
“The stars?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you think if we could see the backs of them, they would look the same?”
“The backs of them?”
“Yes,” Henry said. “The backs of the stars.”
Margot shook her head. “How do you come up with this stuff?”
He didn’t answer with words. He just turned and kissed her.
Now, looking up at the great, ineffable beyond, she listens to the crashing of the waves, and she walks on the sand hardened by the endless beat of the swells, and the hard truth that she will never see Henry again, can never see Henry again, rolls over her, heavy and unyielding as the surf.
Henry, 1991
The inside of a Greyhound bus might be the saddest place in America. It is, Henry thinks, looking out the window, the old dirty dog of its name cutting through the ugly seam of an otherwise-beautiful country.
He has thirteen days until his next court appearance. David dropped him off at the bus station in Syracuse after Henry resisted their pleas just to stay with them, and now he is streaming down the interstate on a gray, rainy day. Henry looks around the bus. It is half empty. Some are sleeping. A few are reading. Some, like him, stare blankly out at the flat landscape, as if somewhere out there are answers to whatever question has them traveling this lonely stretch of road on this particular day.
With the myriad of stops, a trip he could drive in six hours becomes double that, and by the time he finally steps off the bus in Providence, it is dark out. His parents don’t know he is coming. He debated calling them, but his mother is not good on the phone—it makes her hyper, every word a small emergency—and his father looks at the phone when it rings as if he is seeing it for the first time.
If I Forget You Page 11