The sun wakes her. Or it is the unmistakable smell of breakfast—coffee, bacon, and eggs—moving upstairs to where she lies?
Margot rolls onto her back. She runs her hand through her hair and considers the room. It is small and wood-paneled and musty and warm now from the sun pouring in through the shadeless window. There is not much to it. An old bureau with a mirror above it is the only furnishing other than the simple wood-framed double bed.
She is naked. Her bag, unzipped from when she carried it up the stairs yesterday afternoon, sits in a corner. The previous evening comes to her then, the wine and the food and the storm, but mostly the frantic sex before she fell asleep in front of the fire. She has a vague memory of Henry leading her upstairs. She has an even vaguer memory of him climbing into bed with her what seemed only a few hours ago, turning for a moment and seeing the misty dawn rise off the lake out the window behind her head before curling into him and falling back asleep. And now she is not sure she wants to leave this warmth. There is something pleasing about not moving, she thinks, for when you don’t move, there is no possibility you can ruin everything.
Margot reluctantly rises and dresses in shorts and slips a T-shirt over her head and makes her way downstairs. The room smells equally of bacon and woodsmoke. The big windows look out to the lake and a sunny day and the sliding glass door to the deck is open.
“Hey, you’re up,” Henry says, turning from the stove to look over his shoulder when she reaches the bottom step and enters the room.
“Barely,” Margot says, and she goes to him, wraps her arms around him where he stands scrambling eggs. “I would kiss you, but I am afraid my breath would melt a dragon.”
“I wouldn’t care,” Henry says.
“I would,” she says.
“You missed the coyotes.”
“Coyotes?”
“They were out last night. Magnificent. Everywhere.”
“Don’t tell me. I won’t go outside again.”
Henry laughs. “They’re more afraid of us. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
They eat breakfast at the outdoor table on the deck, the umbrella shielding them from the bright morning sun. There is a light wind and the sunlight plays off the water, and when Margot looks down the narrow expanse of lake from here, it is like thousands of tiny pieces of glass reflecting back at them.
Margot takes out her phone and it occurs to her that she has not looked at it once since she has been here. This must be a first, not being permanently tethered to it, and then she also realizes she doesn’t have a signal, and a slight feeling of panic comes over her and pulls her back to the rest of her life. What if Chad has been trying to reach her? Alex or Emma? Anyone?
“I need to call home,” she says.
“There’s a phone inside,” Henry says.
“No, I can’t use that. I’m supposed to be in Massachusetts. I won’t be able to explain the caller ID.”
“Of course,” says Henry. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I forgot we were being illicit.”
After breakfast, they go for a walk, the way they came in, up his narrow dirt road to the other dirt road. There is a hillside Henry knows about where you can get a cell signal. It is not far, he tells her, though they walk what feels like two miles, past old farmhouses tucked up tight on the sides of the road, unleashed dogs running up and barking at them as they walk. They go by another smaller lake, this one without houses, a wall of evergreens coming up to the shoreline on all sides except for the road that runs past it. Then they are climbing a road that is little more than a driveway, parts of it washed out from the rainfall last night, and at the top of it they find themselves in a broad, high meadow, with waist-high grass as far as the eye can see.
“Check now,” Henry says.
Margot removes her phone from her pocket.
“Two bars,” she says.
She has three texts. All of them are from Chad last night. The first one says, “How are u? Having fun?” The other two are simply question marks, as she didn’t answer the first.
For a moment, the guilt gathers over her like a small storm and she thinks of her husband in his office right now, looking down through the canyons of buildings, and for all her doubts about what he does with his time, in truth she has no evidence that he has ever strayed from her, and here she is, four hundred miles to the north in a field with another man, still able to feel him inside her from the night before.
Margot types back. “Sorry. Battery died and fell asleep early last night. All well.” The amazing ease of texting, she thinks. She could be anywhere.
Margot looks up from this intrusion and sees Henry smiling at her.
“Come here,” he says.
Margot walks to him and he opens his arms and she moves into them. He brings her tight to him and she buries her face in his chest.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Henry says from above her.
Margot shakes her head in his chest. “I don’t want to know.”
Henry says, “They made me write that letter.”
Margot steps back from him. “Which letter?”
“The one I sent you on the Vineyard. After what happened at the winery. A guy who worked for your father came to see me. I don’t remember his name. Tall guy with a British accent. He sat in my parents’ kitchen.”
“Kiernan.”
“Yes. That was his name. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. They said if I wrote it, they would drop the charges and I would be allowed to finish school.”
Margot shook her head. “You didn’t have a choice. It was so long ago. Please, let it go.”
“I know. But I have carried it with me all these years. What if I’d said no? There is no greater act of cowardice for a poet than a failure to tell the truth.”
“You were a kid, Henry. They would have ruined your life.”
“It felt ruined anyway. Until that moment I saw you standing across from the Shake Shack. How I felt then reminded me that I had been asleep for a long time, you know? Just going through the motions. I keep asking myself, Is this real? You know what I mean?”
Margot nods. “Can we go back? I want to swim. I don’t want to think anymore. I just want to swim.”
And on the walk back to his cabin, down the long stretch of dirt road, Margot hates the conversation they just had, not just for what he said, which doesn’t surprise her, but for how she handled it. That she managed in that moment to be strategic in her response, as if he were someone she was having a debate with, someone on one of her boards, and not the man she had opened herself to more than any other. Worse still is why she did it. As if by downplaying how Henry responded to the box her father put Henry in, as he had put so many others in over time, could somehow erase the big weight she has never unburdened herself of and that she knows she cannot go one more night carrying alone.
Henry is the first one in the water. She admires him as she walks down the small hill to the dock, admires his long torso as he hurls himself in a smooth dive off the end of it, curving up in the air before slicing cleanly into the lake, so clear that she can see him underneath it, a long silvery shape, moving out deep into the cove before surfacing.
“Come in,” Henry says, on his back now, his head out of the water, improbably halfway to the peninsula. “It’s great.”
Margot stands there for a moment, considering the water, feeling slightly silly in her bikini, then remembering he has seen far more of her than this, and that the thing about water is that it doesn’t get any warmer by staring at it.
“Do it,” Henry shouts.
And she lets herself go then, and there is the feeling of being in the air, of her feet leaving the rough-hewn wood of the dock, rising up in an arc, and then the clear, cool water taking her breath away as she plummets underneath it, propelling herself forward with long strokes toward Henry.
* * *
Margot waits until dark. She waits until after dinner. She waits until the two gin and tonics have erased her doubt.
They are out on the deck. Henry grilled salmon and corn for dinner and afterward they did the dishes together, washing them by hand in the small sink, drying them and putting them away, moving around each other with the ease of the long-married couple they should have been. At one point, Henry turned to her and she proffered her face to him and he leaned down and kissed her and looked at her with his dark eyes, gazing right through her and saying, “Holy shit, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, and in saying it, she hoped it would be enough to carry them through.
Now, as they sit on the bench next to the railing over the lake, all traces of the sun are gone and the moon is caught in the trees on the opposite shore, not yet risen. The stars are not out yet and the sky is a brilliant sweep of blue. The woods around them breathe with night sounds.
“Henry,” Margot says.
“Yes?”
“There is something I have to say.”
From a foot away, he shifts his position, sensing something in her voice, and leans in toward her. Margot is grateful for the dark, so that he cannot fully see her face. She is worried she is going to cry and then she is crying, the sobs coming fast, and she cannot stop them.
“Honey, what is it?”
“I can’t,” Margot says.
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Henry,” she says. “I don’t know how to say this.”
“It’s okay. I can handle anything. Really.”
Margot stands up then. She walks away from him in the dark. She paces a few feet away and then turns back toward where Henry sits looking up at her expectantly.
“My children have been my life, you know? Alex and Emma. For so long they defined me. They were who I was. They gave me a purpose. And now they are both out of the house and it’s different. And I am a terrible person.”
“You’re being hard on yourself.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not being clear, I know. This is so hard.”
“I don’t understand,” Henry says.
“Alex, Alex will turn twenty-one next spring. Do you understand?”
“I’m confused. What do you mean?”
“That night before … the night before my father was there. That night in the vineyard?”
“Yes?”
“We made a child that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Alex is your son, Henry.”
The silence comes then, and Margot can hear Henry breathing in the pregnant dark across from her and she can hear the timid slap of the lake against the dock below them, the wake from a small boat whose running lights they can see far over on the other side, moving back and forth, trolling for trout.
Henry is on his feet. Please say something, Margot thinks. Say something. Anything.
Margot watches as he walks away from her toward the far railing and then comes back. She can feel his intensity coming off him in waves. She needs him to speak.
“Say something,” she says. “Please.”
Henry’s voice cracks as he says, “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re fucking kidding. Please tell me you’re fucking kidding.”
“No,” Margot says softly. “I’m sorry.”
There is nothing else for her to say, and she realizes that since she has let this out into the world, it is all on his terms, and his time, as it should be. She listens to him pace back and forth. She knows he is gathering his words now like the clouds gathered over the hills earlier and that when they come, they will be forceful. She braces herself.
When Henry finally speaks, his voice surprises her. It is soft and distant at first and he says, “When my father died.”
“Yes.”
“Well, before he died. When he was dying. I visited him in hospice. My father was a very quiet man. He barely spoke. He almost never expressed emotion. But he was a good man. And the way you knew that was never from anything he said, but from how he lived. How much he loved my mother. How hard he worked. It’s funny that I became a poet when the father in my life avoided words. But when I visited him in hospice, he was honest with me in a way that only the dying can be. I asked him … I asked him … oh, shit,” says Henry, and he starts to cry.
Margot stands and Henry says now, his voice rising, “No, sit. Please. I am sorry. But sit.”
Margot sits down.
Henry steadies his voice. “When he was dying, I asked him, I asked him if he had any regrets. I expected him to say no. He was not someone who ever complained. About anything. But you know what he said?”
“No,” Margot says.
“He said he wished he had a grandson. And the reason he wished this,” Henry says, talking fully through tears now, “was not because he didn’t love his granddaughter, which he did, for like me, she was his everything. The only time I ever really saw him light up was when Jess came in the room. He was a different person around her. But my father wished he had a grandson because he was old-school, my father, and in the Jewish tradition, sons are very important. They provide the continuity between generations. And looking at my father in bed, the tubes in his arms, the machine beeping every time his oxygen dipped, like some clock counting down the moments to his death, I felt this incredible sadness and an almost paralyzing guilt. I saw all my own failings. Could I have done things differently with Ruth? Where did we come apart? My God, we had a beautiful child and Ruth had always wanted another one, but I had this nagging doubt, and maybe it’s because I knew my marriage would fail. That it would be my fault. But what if I had worked harder? Done more? Found a way to be present? Maybe we would have stayed together. Maybe we would have had another child. Maybe we would have had a son. And my proud father, selfless to the very end, the best goddamn man I have ever known, a man I will never be, would have gone to the other side without a single regret.”
“I see,” Margot says.
“I’m not looking for affirmation,” says Henry.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” Henry says. “You just need to know what you stole from me.”
These last words cut her, the sharp diamond edge of truth, and they are cruel only in their honesty, and she knows this, but it is as if his knife just punctured her lungs in a search for her heart, and now she is struggling to breathe.
“I’m sorry,” Margot says.
“How?” Henry says, raising his voice to a shout through his tears. “How could you do this to me?”
“I don’t know,” Margot whispers. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, God,” Henry says, spinning away from her. He moves to the railing and leans over it. Margot listens to him crying now, the sobs catching in his throat, gagging like he might vomit, and she wants more than ever to go to him, but she knows she cannot.