CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1991

I came home for Christmas vacation in 1957, from my first semester at boarding school. Instead of letting me watch kids dance across the television screen or organize my collection of Indian arrowheads, however, my mother insisted I take a piano lesson with Miss Voight. “I don’t want you to forget everything you learned,” she said. “If you don’t practice you’ll lose all that ground”—only I’d never gained any ground to begin with. “You’re just not practicing enough,” my mother would always say, as if she hadn’t heard me protest. “You have the fingers. Miss Voight says you have those long piano fingers.”

“Football is what these fingers are for,” I said, not wanting to be any sort of sissy boy.

My mother had tried for years to play the piano, shaking her head in frustration every time her heavy rings slipped over the white keys. Her fingers jangled discordant notes into the air as I stood on the lip of the living room step, transfixed by her failure. Moira was the only one who called what my mother played music. She would dust the piano while my mother practiced, but Moira was almost stone deaf and liked the vibrations the hammers made beneath the lid. “Jeanette, I feel beautiful music,” she’d say haltingly, as I tried not to laugh.

My mother finally gave up the piano. Instead, she went to the Lincoln Symphony regularly. She took up a black opera singer named Barbara because she claimed the sound of her voice made her feel at peace in her own skin. “I’m living vicariously,” my mother would sigh. She traveled everywhere to see Barbara perform: Chicago, Minneapolis, even New York. She’d meet her backstage with flowers and come home the next day almost in tears. “Barbara’s life has been so hard it breaks my heart,” she had said once, because an opera had not been well attended. “For someone like Miss Voight who’s had everything and is so attractive, success comes easily. It isn’t fair.”

“Miss Voight,” my father said in a strained tone, “is not traveling to New York to play piano, Jeanette. She’s giving lessons in Lincoln.”

“She will be soon enough. She’s still so young. And then she won’t want to give Lowell lessons anymore. She’ll forget all about him.” My mother pressed her lips together. “Just you wait.”

So I waited. I had waited two years for Miss Voight to forget me, to leave me alone, but here I was at fourteen, between Christmas and New Year’s, with the doorbell ringing and Miss Voight standing in the snow on the front step, wearing her purple hat and her enormous purse over her shoulder, with music sheets sticking out. When I opened the door to the cold air and ushered her quickly inside, Miss Voight threw her arms around me, and something felt different. I could feel her body, tight and smooth beneath the layer of her baggy coat. “Lowell,” she cried, pressing my nose into her collarbone so I could smell the dusky perfume hiding there. I quickly threw my arms around her and squeezed. Then I thrust my hands behind my back.

My piano teacher told me she’d missed me and asked if I’d been practicing.

Yes, I wanted to say, but all I could do was stand there.

“No, he hasn’t,” said my mother, coming down the stairs carrying something shiny for her New Year’s party. “He hasn’t even opened the lid. He’s been doing nothing but looking at the new television since he got home.”

“I’ve been playing football,” I said.

“No, you haven’t,” said my mother. “He hasn’t. He doesn’t even play football! His eyes are like saucers. Look at him!”

My face went hot. In those days, I felt that my mother was always embarrassing me intentionally, trying to transform me into her trick-flipping lapdog, something to be poked fun at in front of other people. I couldn’t stand it. I put my hands at my sides and stared down at the carpet. Miss Voight’s heels were impossibly high. I wondered how women could walk in shoes like that as I followed Miss Voight into the living room, watching her ankles balancing on red stick-like heels. My father always said that the future of a woman’s beauty lay hidden in her ankles. If her ankles were fat, the woman wouldn’t age well. If they were thin, she’d get prettier every year. Miss Voight’s ankles were slender and delicate as a racehorse. I imagined myself pinching her tendon between my fingers and running my tongue up and down it as she flexed her feet against the pedals.

I sat down beside her on the bench and banged open the lid too hard. I felt all wrong inside, afraid she could read my thoughts, see the invisible string in my head pulling my lap to hers. Miss Voight had done something different with her hair, which looked deep red and glossy. I wanted to press down her curls and feel them spring back against my piano fingers. Miss Voight pulled a music book out of her bag. For a moment, I couldn’t even lift my hands to play, and when I finally did my fingers were clumsier than they had ever been. Every time I played something wrong, Miss Voight gave me a little sideways hug which only made things worse. “You’re just rusty,” she said.

“He’s just bad.” My father was standing in the doorway in his coat and tie, home for lunch. He put down his briefcase and walked up behind us. “He has no interest or feel for it, really.”

“Maybe it’s me,” volunteered Miss Voight. “I’ve barely been teaching at all.” My piano teacher turned away from me and looked up at my father as if he were the star on top of the tree. “I’ve been practicing for a concert in Chicago.”

“Wow. That’s just terrific,” said my father, rocking back on his heels. “That’s swell! We’ll have to come and see it, won’t we, Lowe?” He hadn’t ever gone anywhere with my mother to see Barbara, though she’d asked him to more than once.

“Please don’t trouble yourself,” Miss Voight said, blushing.

My father told her it was no trouble at all. Then he invited her to our party and asked her to play “Auld Lang Syne.”

“I’ve always found New Year’s disappointing.” Miss Voight squinted when she spoke, as if she were looking straight into the sun. “I never have anyone to kiss.”

“Well, our party has never been disappointing,” my father said, shooting me a wink.

I narrowed my eyes at the sheet music in front of me. I had always found my parents’ parties disappointing, adults making the rotations, talking to me awkwardly, until I had discovered the pleasure in draining the remains of their drinks. After that, everything had seemed funny. I traded gushing compliments for secrets with housewives. I had switched all the music to my Platters and Skyliners records so I could dance with the ladies to the love songs, pressing my cheek to the greatest cleavages in Nebraska.

Miss Voight had a way of hanging her head and biting her lip at the same time, and I imagine her resorting to these usual gestures as my father leaned down and plugged in the Christmas tree bulbs. When he left the room and I continued to play, Miss Voight no longer noticed my mistakes. She looked out at the snowflakes drifting down into the street, the Christmas bulbs flashing against the window, transforming her face into some beautiful blue angel. Clearly, my failed attempts at the keyboard no longer seemed to trouble her.

I prayed Miss Voight would come to my parents’ New Year’s party. For days it was all I thought about. I felt all hot inside, strange, hopeless, frustrated. I kicked the dog, and once she bit me. I endlessly studied my different expressions in the mirror, trying to master a way to look older, wise beyond my years. I wondered what I’d possibly ever be able to give her.

Every year for their wedding anniversary, which fell just before the holidays, my father told my mother he loved her by presenting her with a piece of jewelry, always engraved in script with the date of their wedding: December 10, 1937. For their nineteenth anniversary he had given her a bracelet with emeralds and diamonds set in platinum from Marshall Field’s. Now, for their twentieth, she had received the necklace to match. This year, my mother had given my father a gold pocket watch with a picture of the three of us and Queenie, my mother’s poodle, dangling from the gold chain. This annual exchange was proof enough to me of my parents’ love, of something profound between them I’d never be able to touch.

My mother was no longer a pretty woman. Perhaps she had never been exactly. But when she put her sparkling new diamond necklace around her neck, and the matching bracelet from the year before on her wrist, and descended the stairs in her green New Year’s dress, I could see why my father had given her such precious stones. Her eyes seemed large and full of emotion, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the kitchen as she oversaw the preparations. “Get her out of here,” I remember her saying to me in the kitchen, as she thrust the black poodle in my direction and pressed the heavy necklace against her skin to make sure it was still in place. “Take her upstairs and close her in my room. She’ll just get stepped on.”

I carried Queenie upstairs and dumped her on the pink rug in my parents’ bedroom. She scurried under the bed and peeked her sharp muzzle out from under the dust ruffle. I noticed muddy prints on the arm of my shirt; the dog had stepped in something wet. Staring at myself in the full-length mirror on the door of the dressing room, I tried to straighten myself up, combing my hair back from my forehead and trying to puff it up, more like Frankie Avalon’s. But it wouldn’t stay that way no matter how much I wetted it; it just fell flat. No girl had ever taken me seriously. In ballroom dancing at the country club the beauties always whispered in my ear about the boys they really wanted to dance with and stared past me when I cut in during the multiplication dance. I was that sort of boy.

I stood up straight in the mirror and rocked back on my heels like my father would do when he laughed in that free and easy way women loved, holding one wrist in the other hand by his belt buckle. Outside my parents’ bedroom window, the night was blue and soft with falling flakes. It had been a white Christmas that year. The snow kept falling. I could hear cars rumbling toward the house, see headlights waver and flash over deep drifts. I went over to my mother’s bureau and opened her jewelry box. Digging through the silver and gold, the earrings, brooches, and strands of pearls, I tried to find something Miss Voight would love, a piece my mother would never miss. A gold bracelet, simple and elegant yet slightly exotic, studded with different-colored pieces of stone or glass, looked like it would do the trick.

I imagined myself pulling Miss Voight aside and pressing the bracelet into her palm, saying “Merry Christmas, love.” Her face would light up with joy as she hugged me—no, pressed her red lips against mine. The doorbell chimed. I smoothed out the bracelet, thrust it in my pocket, and ran downstairs.

I waited a solid hour and a half for my piano teacher to arrive, my mother’s stolen bracelet burning a hole in my pocket, my chest puffed up with the importance of secrecy. Finally Miss Voight did arrive, all by herself, looking beautiful in a black dress with red heels and red fingernails, her hair piled on top of her head. I was lucky enough to open the door for her. That was my job, and I did it with what I liked to think of as style.

But before I could say anything, my father was right behind me with a glass of champagne. “There you are,” said my father to Miss Voight. “Watch out for this one,” he warned, beaming as he tousled my hair. “Last year I caught him sneaking the dregs of everyone’s drinks!” My father laughed. He helped Miss Voight remove her coat and thrust it over my arms as if I were a hook; then he grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing tray and presented it to her. She didn’t even look at me.

They were both gone, into the crowd. I remember the candles burning softly, the Christmas tree lights flashing blue as they did every year of my childhood, the clinking glasses, the scent of cheese puffs clashing with cologne. I remember how people kept touching my mother’s necklace admiringly. I could see them bending over and examining the emeralds and diamonds in the candlelight as my mother thrust her neck out from the green collar of her dress for them to see more clearly how much her husband loved her.

In the den, I hung Miss Voight’s coat on the rack with extra care, removing a strand of red hair from her sleeve and wrapping it around my finger for safekeeping. I buried my face in the wool and clutched it in my arms as if I were hugging my piano teacher.

It was close to midnight, and my job was to pour the champagne into the rows of glasses by the bar. People were eyeing the clock. My father took out his pocket watch every few minutes and announced the time. Miss Voight sat down at the piano and people gathered around her. I pushed my way through the bodies to see her better, hoping she’d look at me or say something that would make my offering to her seem justified—more forgivable, I suppose. I wanted her to tell everyone that she was here because of me. I thought how well her black dress looked with the lacquered wood of the piano, and how beautifully the red poinsettias caught her hair. But then my father bent over Miss Voight, putting one hand on the lid of the piano, the other on the small of her long, straight back. Then he traced his finger in a tiny circle over the fabric of her black dress—an almost invisible gesture rippling like a chain from the tip of my father’s finger through Miss Voight’s hands and into my chest. For a moment I wasn’t sure what I had witnessed.

As my piano teacher began to play and my father pulled back, I pushed between the bodies, feeling hot, sick, confounded, that bracelet sagging like a dead weight in my pants. All my effort seemed futile. I did not see my mother anywhere. I looked up at the faces, wondering if anyone else had seen my father and Miss Voight. But every expression looked blurred by drinks and cheer and suddenly older, sagging and ruddy, as if my parents’ friends were aging, disappearing, coming closer to death right there in the living room. I don’t remember the song my piano teacher was playing. I’m not sure I even noticed. As I thrust myself between shoulders and arms and sagging breasts, I was overcome by a heart-wrenching sensation, something on the fringe of excitement that made my eyes swim and my body tingle.

I opened the cellar door against the pantry light and plunged into the cool purple heart of the basement to collect myself, to get my head together while the party churned above me. I was no longer frightened of the sheet-covered furniture and old lamps looming like statues in a house of wax. Something inside me had changed. Frustration, maybe lust, had replaced fear. But when I turned the corner around the stairs, I saw my mother sitting on a case of champagne. Her face was in her hands, her dress fanned out over the box like a bell. When she looked up at me through the shadows, my heart jumped. She’d been crying; I could see the tears shining in the stream of light from the half-open door, the diamond necklace sparkling. I could hear music and laughter, and far away the sound of Queenie’s futile barking made everything seem more still and quiet in the cellar, more ghostly, a world apart. My mother reached out her hand to me. I couldn’t take it, too afraid she’d somehow found out what I’d intended to do with her bracelet. I just stood there staring at her. Her former dignity seemed like a formal outfit, quickly discarded.

“Lowe,” she said. “Come here.” So I went to her and stood over her, but I didn’t know what she wanted. She reached out and patted my leg. “I’m so glad you’re a boy,” she said, clutching her arms around herself and hugging her bare shoulders to keep away the chill. She touched the necklace against her skin. It must have been cold. “When women get old, men don’t love them anymore, no matter how they pretend to. They’re like crows attracted to bright objects. It’s a fact, Lowe. Remember that when you grow up.”

I didn’t know what she wanted me to say, so I said nothing at all. I didn’t even reach down and touch her or try to offer her a bit of comfort. I just stood there frozen, staring down at the top of my mother’s head, vowing to myself to return the bracelet I had stolen. Then, upstairs, the noisemakers started cranking, and the horns blew, and my mother’s words were lost in the commotion. The new year was upon us with all its magic, anticipation, and innocence. I wondered if Miss Voight had found someone to kiss.

Three weeks later, when the minister came to get me out of history class and sat me down on the headmaster’s couch to tell me that my parents had been murdered, that my father had been shot and pushed down the cellar stairs, that my mother had been stabbed, that there was evil in this world only the Christian heart could conquer, I could not cry. I could not feel. Believe. When he escorted me back on the airplane to Nebraska, all I could do was press my forehead to the cold window and look down through the clouds at the frozen lakes and endless flat drifts and the snow coming down all across the land that had been my home. I thought of the necklace my father had given my mother and of the last time I had seen it, twinkling in the darkness of the cellar at me like a thousand winking eyes.

*   *   *

I lifted the flimsy lid of the cardboard box, certain now of what it held. My mother’s diamond bracelet and necklace lay nestled deep inside, shimmering in a cradle of tissue paper. I held the necklace up to the light, and it sparkled as hopefully as the first time she’d worn it. Next to it was my father’s gold pocket watch, their wedding bands, and the bracelet I had almost given Miss Voight. I tested the weight of the watch in my hand, letting the chain slip past my fingers, remembering the way my father had showed off the picture of us inside the lid to anyone who would take the time to look. And everyone did. He was the sort of man who gathered a crowd. Running my thumb around the smooth curve of my parents’ wedding bands, I knew I was glad to have these small tokens, however imperfect their love had been.

I don’t know how much time passed before the sound of tires on wet gravel jarred me. Though I couldn’t see the driveway from the living room window, I was quite sure a car had pulled in. I thought I could make out the sputter of an engine and then an impenetrable silence. Putting my mother’s necklace back in its tissue paper, I rose to my feet. I thought of course that Susan had come, that she had shown up as she always did.

But it wasn’t Susan. Standing by the window, I saw two dark figures coming down the path toward the house. They looked to me like they didn’t want to be seen. Maybe they were intruders who came here regularly: an abandoned summer house. It could not have been easier. They looked almost like children. One had his arm tossed over the other’s shoulders, and I thought I heard laughter.

The intruders stepped up onto the porch and out of my view. In my dark corner, I heard them fumbling with the door, which I had left unlocked. “Weird,” one of them said in a hushed voice, as they slipped through the door. And then louder, another voice: “Is someone here?”

I took a breath and stepped from the shadows to meet them. “You bet someone’s here,” I said firmly. The girl gasped and the boy stepped in front of her. I fumbled for the wall switch. As the light came on, the boy stared from beneath the hood of his blue raincoat, his eyes wide in his narrow face. He lowered two duffel bags slowly to the floor, and the girl stepped out from behind him. It was my daughter.

“Dad,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I almost wanted to laugh, but it was more complicated than relief. In spite of my anger, in spite of her nerve, I wanted to hug her. At the same time, I was embarrassed at having been found out. “My God, Mary, don’t you think I should be asking you that same question? And who’s this?”

“Jack Hinnman, sir.” The boy stuck out his hand, but I didn’t take it. His face turned red and he dropped his arm at his side. In different circumstances, I might have given him credit for trying.

“You’re news to me,” I said. “I don’t recall hearing anything about you.”

“Everything’s news,” my daughter said, biting her lip and suddenly grabbing the tip of her thick dark braid. She was wearing too much lipstick. What had my daughter and this boy come here to do, drugs? Was he going to liquor my little girl up with the intention of taking advantage of her in the blue room with the clouds on the ceiling? “Take off your coats. Stay awhile. Apparently that is what you were planning anyway,” I said. “I’d like an explanation.”

They unzipped their raincoats but left them on and stood there shifting their feet by the doormat. My daughter looked at the floor.

“It was my fault,” this Jack character tried to explain. “I wanted to get out of the city, and I thought we should come here. Mary said it was your real home. I was going to cook dinner. That’s all.” He was older than Mary, but it didn’t seem by very much. He had that awkward look, the same one that had plagued me as a boy when I’d grown so much in one summer that I hadn’t had time to get used to my limbs. But his face was much better looking than mine had ever been. He had one of those square jaws that meant he’d get what he wanted.

“Why should I believe you?” I said.

“Because it’s the truth,” Mary answered.

The boy took off his hood, revealing a small silver hoop in his ear. I was quite sure I didn’t like whatever it stood for.

“Just so you know, I respect your daughter,” he said. “I think she’s amazing.” Mary’s face lit up for just a moment, in spite of all the embarrassment and anger she must have been feeling, and I could tell that what Jack said had taken her by surprise and pleased her. His words pleased me too, in a way he couldn’t have known. I was glad to know my daughter felt she belonged somewhere.

“I’m assuming your mother doesn’t know about this,” I said to Mary. “Where does she think you are?”

“Where does she think you are?”

“I think we should discuss this in private,” I said.

“What about Jack?”

“Jack can wait.”

Mary looked at the boy, and he nodded eagerly. She clenched her jaw and followed me down the hall.

In the living room, my daughter and I stood there, staring at each other in the soft lamplight. “Where does your mother think you are?” I said.

“At Neeley’s.”

“Has Mom met Jack?” I said.

Mary nodded. “She likes him.”

I sat down on the couch and kneaded my forehead with my fingers.

“So, what are you going to do?” she said finally.

I shook my head. “This is unacceptable behavior.”

“Why? Because we don’t want to stay in the city and get drunk like everybody else?” She stared pointedly at my glass of scotch.

“Yes, it’s a drink,” I said. “It’s a glass of scotch. But I’m your father, and I don’t really feel that I should be the one explaining.”

“As if.”

“Excuse me?”

“You never explain anything, Dad.”

“Listen, it’s not—”

“I know,” my daughter said softly, which surprised me. She came farther into the room, took off her raincoat, and put it down on the piano bench. Her shirt was too tight, almost like a leotard, hugging her small chest, her delicate rib cage. She turned around and studied the old piano. Briefly, as she passed, I saw her reflection in it. She was so small, so frail. She didn’t eat enough. Last year her soccer coach had called to tell us that Mary would have to spend most of her time on the bench if she didn’t put on some pounds, and my daughter had gained weight, but it seemed somewhere along the way she’d lost it again.

“Hey, you were playing,” she said suddenly, running her fingers along the piano keys.

“Not exactly,” I said, “just knocking around.” When she turned to face me again, there was an intensity to her expression, an inexplicable radiance, and it struck me how oddly beautiful she was. She resembled Susan’s mother more than either of us, and yet she was more serious and quiet than Susan said her mother had been.

“This boy, I don’t doubt that he’s nice enough,” I said. “And he probably likes you quite a bit, but I don’t approve of you coming here with him. You’re too young to be on your own together like this.”

“See, I don’t think I am too young. I don’t see it that way at all.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose you don’t. And why should you listen to me?”

Mary sat down and, with her silence, acknowledged the truth in what I had said. But the look on her face suggested that her opinion of me might be less harsh than I had imagined. “Are you going to tell Mom?” she said.

I couldn’t think of what to say.

“I think you’re not,” she said hopefully. I didn’t want to disappoint her. Something between us had shifted. We had a secret between us. Her eyes sparkled as her mother’s had when, so many years ago, she’d stepped out from behind my closet door wearing Aunt Clara’s glittering ball gown. I remembered that same expression five years later, when, coming down the steps of the university library, Susan had caught sight of me leaning against the bicycle rack with my hands in my pockets. She’d dropped her customary cigarette and stopped in her tracks, her eyes lighting up. “You again?” she’d said.

“You’ll like Jack,” Mary said, her black hair shining in the dim light. Without thinking, I reached up and touched my palm to the crown of her head. In return, she gave me a funny little half-smile, then caught sight of the shoebox, and leaned over the coffee table so she could look inside. “What’s this?” she said, pulling my mother’s necklace out of its tissue paper cradle and holding it up to the light like a shimmering snake.

“That was your grandmother’s necklace,” I said.

“It’s so pretty,” she said, and turned it over to read the inscription. “What’s December tenth?”

“Their wedding anniversary.”

I spread out my parents’ belongings on the table for her to examine. She touched the matching bracelet, the wedding bands, rubbed her fingers over the stones in the gold bracelet I had tried to give to my piano teacher. Opening my father’s pocket watch, she stared at the face as if she were hungry for something, as if she could decipher some bit of information from the hour at which the hands had stopped. She examined the oval picture of me, my mother and father, and Queenie pasted on the inside of the lid before snapping the watch closed and putting it back down on the table. She sat back in her chair and looked down at her hands.

“This is the necklace she took. And that bracelet,” she said, pointing at the one I had almost given my piano teacher.

“Who?”

“Caril Ann Fugate.” I felt as if a tiny sharp little pebble were scraping at the inside of my heart. “They found the bracelet on the floor of a barn,” she said.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “Who told you this?”

“Hank got a book and we both read it. Are you angry?” she asked.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

She shook her head. “It didn’t tell us what we really wanted to know.”

“Which was?”

“What they were like.”

“Why would you want to know what they were like?” I said. “They were inhuman.”

“Not them. Your parents.”

At times I could barely remember my parents myself. I had hidden them away. Their faces had almost faded from my mind, and yet particular memories were vivid. At times the sounds of their voices still came to me, bringing tears to my eyes at surprising moments, though I could hardly recall the funeral on that snowy day when it seemed the world had stopped. What would my children be able to tell their children about me? He was always a mystery. We never really knew him. He just packed his things and left. I had played so little part in their upbringing. Susan had been the one to get down on her hands and knees with them. She had bought them paints, decorated the house with their drawings, comforted them in the middle of the night, read over their school applications before sending them off. I had been too afraid of getting close to something that wouldn’t last.

I tried to think of something special to tell Mary, just for her, something she would always be able to hold on to.

“My father had a tweed winter coat that he always wore when they went out. It smelled of cologne and smoke,” I said.

Mary smiled.

“He ate shredded wheat every morning even though we had Moira to do the cooking. He was the kind of man everyone wanted to know. He was the president of Provident and Federal Savings, a good businessman, but he was also interested in other things. He took me everywhere. They wanted me to know the world was bigger than Lincoln.”

I told her about a small collection of Mayan artifacts in my father’s possession that had been donated to a museum when he died, about how he had inspired me to set up my own displays of things in the basement. One evening, my father and I came back from one of our semiprecious stone adventures, and my mother was standing by the door biting her lip. She’d never seemed to care about what we came back with, but when we unwrapped the agate and jet rocks and spread them out on the kitchen table for her to see, she picked the stones up and examined them closely in the light, exclaiming about how perfect they were. “Why don’t you go add them to your displays, Lowe,” she said.

“Right now? Before dinner?”

“Yes,” she’d said, “right now. Immediately,” and all three of us had raced down to the basement together. Under a sheet she had hidden a stone buffing machine—for turning our finds into jewelry. She was so proud.

“Where did you pick this up, Jeanette?” my father had wanted to know.

“Oh, I have my ways,” she said, and he picked her up in his arms and kissed her on the neck.

I described to my daughter how we would make the jewelry together. I would stand between my mother’s knees and hold the stone and then my mother would put her hand over mine and guide it over the buffer. And though nothing ever came out the way we had planned, there was excitement each time in the possibility that it might.

My daughter seemed to hang on this little story. She listened to me with her dark eyes as if she were reading instead of hearing, running my memories over in her mind, savoring every word. “Were they happy?” Mary wanted to know.

I thought about this for a moment, about what was the right thing to say. “For the most part, but then there were moments when I suppose they weren’t. Everyone’s life is full of a certain amount of those moments.”

Mary looked down at her hands. “Are you here because Mom kicked you out?”

It was a reasonable thing to assume—Susan should have kicked me out long ago—but I was caught off guard anyway, almost hurt. It had never occurred to me that Susan might have been fed up enough to want me to leave. “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

“Then why are you here?”

“I came to get the jewelry,” I said, “and to do some thinking.”

“Are you getting divorced?” She made it sound so mutual.

“It’s more complicated than that, sweetheart,” I said. Somehow I felt cast off in that moment, with no mooring. I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted to end up this way.

Mary’s face looked troubled, and I wanted to soothe her. “It’ll be all right,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I left her alone with Jack and went outside with my drink and the box of my parents’ belongings, letting the screen door fall softly behind me. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still thick, obscuring the moon. The air smelled of damp leaves and the chill of fall. For a moment I stood there in the shadow of the house, watching my daughter and this boy move around the bright kitchen, getting things ready for dinner. She was standing by the sink washing out a pot, and he came up and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead. My daughter tried to whip him with the dish towel.

Through the trees, I could see a light on in Jane’s upstairs window. Her soft dark shape moved through its glow. She was perhaps unpacking her suitcase, hanging her husband’s paintings, settling in for a life alone. I felt a strange chill, a dark uncertainty. I made my way across the lawn and lowered myself to the cement lip at the edge of our property, my feet dangling over the Hudson River, holding a drink as the sky grew even darker. Beside me sat the open box, my parents’ lives packed neatly away.

I tried to imagine what Susan was thinking, but it was impossible. I didn’t have a clue. She was strong and independent. Why should she want me back? I imagined her at home, in our dusty apartment, drifting through the empty rooms, convinced now that everyone had left her. She runs her hands across the untouched bedclothes and removes her ring the way I have shed mine.

A breeze carried the scent of rain, and the leaves whispered their ancient stories. An animal rustled through the cattails. The lighthouse flashed, and though I couldn’t see the structure around the bend from where I sat, its beam lit the riffles in the current like jewels. I was sure of something.

*   *   *

I left Mary and Jack in Port Saugus and pulled onto the thruway, heading south toward the city. The dash cast a ghostly glow over my naked hands as I clutched the wheel hard, afraid to let go. I sped down the vacant wet road late into the night with my parents’ things beside me—his pocket watch, her necklace, and bracelets, their wedding bands—thinking how close all these treasures had come to meaning nothing. I passed New Paltz and Plattekill. But at Newburgh, I found myself pulling off at a Hess station, plagued by a sudden change of heart. I was nervous now, uncertain as to whether or not I could deliver what was required of me. Standing in the parking lot, gathering strength from a half-dozen packages of peanut butter crackers, I noticed a woman wearing a dirty pink sweatshirt with a piece of paper stuck to her moon boots. Opening the door of a smashed-up minivan, she reclined the seat and settled in for the night. I thought of our apartment, of Susan’s warm body, which I hadn’t touched in so long. She didn’t deserve to spend her life alone, and though there are no guarantees of anything in this world, I was quite sure now that I didn’t want to lose her.

On the road again, I sped past Vails Gate, a pack of truckers traveling in tandem. The sign for the artist colony at Storm King glowed fluorescent in the pool of my headlights. When I got closer to the city, I paid my toll and sped into the glittering skyline, buses and off-duty taxis weaving around me, every light in each building crying something different, my wife waiting somewhere deep within that restless heart.

I parked the car and nodded my head at Eddy when he opened the front door of our building. I didn’t try to explain myself. I stepped into the elevator as Saint Thomas’s bells struck midnight and watched the floors slip by me one by one, the oval light bouncing from number to number.

The apartment was silent, blue and dark, still and shadowed, as if time had stopped. There was not a sound from the city below. I put down my suitcase in the foyer and took my mother’s necklace out of the box, feeling its weight against my fingers, the silver clasp draping around my wrist. I went to my wife’s closed door. I put my hand on the brass knob, turned it, and stood there on the threshold peering into the dark room. For a moment, as my eyes adjusted, I didn’t see her. Panic set in. How ironic it would have been to find her missing. But there she was after all, tangled in the comforter, sleeping soundly in the dim light from the window, her mask over her eyes, her knees curled up to her stomach, dreaming peacefully, I didn’t dare guess of what.

I tiptoed into the room. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, trying not to breathe. It wasn’t until then I noticed she’d cut her hair. Straight gray-flecked gold brushed the edge of the blanket. Somewhere during that day she’d decided to be rid of it and now the hair was short, just above her jaw. I put my legs up on the bed and pressed her body to me, thick and warm with the smell of sleep. I bent my knees to fit my wife’s position and ran my arm under the blankets and around her waist. She shifted and murmured sleepily into the pillow, “You’re home.”

“Yes,” I said. “Shhh.” I took my mother’s diamond necklace in both hands, leaned up on my elbow for support, and slipped it carefully around my wife’s neck, fastening the clasp.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. I put my finger to her lips, and lay there in the half-light, watching the small stones glitter.