After she met the man she’d mistakenly believed to be her father, a surprising thing happened—she and Jeremy James became friends. There wasn’t much tentative about it; they dove in, more like long-lost siblings than a sixty-three-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who turned out not to be related.
When Elizabeth Childs died, Jeremy and his family had been in Normandy, where Jeremy had used his sabbatical to research a subject that had long fascinated him—the possible link between luminism and expressionism. Now, as his academic career was winding down and retirement loomed, Jeremy was trying to write his book on luminism, an American style of landscape painting often confused with impressionism. As Jeremy explained it to Rachel, who knew less than zero about art, luminism grew out of the Hudson River School. It was Jeremy’s belief that the two schools shared a link, even if prevailing theory—dogma actually, Jeremy would scoff—held that the two schools had developed independently of each other in the late 1800s on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
A man named Colum Jasper Whitstone, Jeremy told her, had worked as an apprentice to two of the most famous luminists—George Caleb Bingham and Albert Bierstadt—but vanished in 1863 along with a large sum of money from the Western Union office where he was employed. Neither the money nor Colum Jasper Whitstone was ever heard of again in the Americas. But the diary of Madame de Fontaine, a wealthy widow and arts patron in Normandy, twice made mention of a Callum Whitestone in the summer of 1865, referring to him as a gentleman from America with good manners, refined tastes, and a cloudy heritage. When Jeremy first told Rachel this his eyes were lit like a birthday child’s and his baritone voice grew several octaves lighter. “Monet and Boudin painted the Normandy coast the same year. They would set up every day, just down the street from Madame de Fontaine’s summer cottage.”
Jeremy believed these two giants of impressionism had crossed paths with Colum Jasper Whitstone, that Whitstone was, in fact, the missing link between American luminism and French impressionism. All he had to do was prove it. Rachel pitched in with research, aware of the irony that she and her not-father were searching for a man who’d vanished into the dust and void of a hundred and fifty years when together they couldn’t identify the man who’d fathered Rachel a little over thirty years before.
Jeremy often visited her apartment during research trips to the MFA, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Public Library. She’d departed the Globe for TV by then and had moved in with Sebastian, a producer at Channel 6. Sometimes Sebastian was there and would join them for dinner or drinks, but mostly he was working or on his boat.
“You’re such an attractive couple,” Jeremy said one night at her apartment, and the word attractive left his mouth sounding unattractive. He had developed an ability to say all the right things about Sebastian—taking note of his intelligence, his dry wit, his good looks, his air of competency—without sounding like he meant any of them.
He examined a picture of the two of them on Sebastian’s beloved boat. He placed it back on the mantel and gave Rachel a pleasant, distracted smile, as if he were trying to come up with one more positive thing to say about the two of them but had drawn a blank. “He sure works a lot.”
“He does,” she agreed.
“He wants to run the whole station one day, I bet.”
“He wants to run the network,” she said.
He chuckled and carried his glass of wine to the bookshelves, where he zeroed in on a photograph of Rachel and her mother that Rachel had almost forgotten was there. Sebastian, not a fan of the photo or its frame, had crammed it at the end of a row of books, backed into a shadow cast by a copy of History of America in 101 Objects. Jeremy removed it gently and tilted the book so it remained standing. She watched his face turn both dreamy and desolate.
“How old were you in this?”
“Seven,” she said.
“Hence the missing teeth.”
“Mmm-hmm. Sebastian thinks I look like a hobbit in that picture.”
“He said that?”
“He was joking.”
“That’s what we’re calling it?” He carried the photograph back to the couch and sat beside her.
Seven-year-old Rachel, missing both upper front teeth and one lower, had stopped smiling for cameras at the time. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Elizabeth found a set of rubber fangs somewhere and used a Sharpie to black out one of the upper teeth and two of the lower. She’d had Ann Marie take a series of pictures of her and Rachel vamping for the camera one drizzly afternoon at the house in South Hadley. In this, the only photograph to survive from that day, Rachel was wrapped in her mother’s arms, both of them beaming their hideous smiles as broadly as possible.
“I’d forgotten just how pretty she was too. My goodness.” Jeremy gave Rachel an ironic smile. “She looks like your boyfriend.”
“Shut up,” Rachel said, but it was unfortunately true. How had she never noticed before? Both Sebastian and her mother looked like Aryan ideals—hair several shades whiter than vanilla, cheekbones as sharp as their jawlines, Arctic eyes, and lips so small and thin they couldn’t help but appear secretive.
“I know men marry their mothers,” Jeremy said, “but this is—”
She nudged an elbow into his paunch. “Enough.”
He laughed and kissed her head and put the photograph back where it belonged. “Do you have more?”
“Pictures?”
He nodded. “I never got to see you grow up.”
She found the shoebox of them in her closet. She dumped them out onto the small kitchen table so that her life took the shape of a messy collage, which seemed all too fitting. Her fifth birthday party; a day at the beach when she was a teenager; semiformal during junior year of high school; in her soccer uniform sometime during middle school; hanging in the basement with Caroline Ford, which would have been when she was eleven because Caroline Ford’s father had been visiting faculty for that one year only; Elizabeth and Ann Marie and Don Klay at a cocktail party by the looks of it; Rachel and Elizabeth the day Rachel graduated from middle school; Elizabeth, Ann Marie, Ann Marie’s first husband, Richard, and Giles Ellison at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and again at a cookout, everyone’s hair a little thinner and a little grayer in the latter; Rachel, the day her braces were removed; two of Elizabeth and half a dozen unidentified friends at a bar. Her mother was quite young, possibly still in her twenties, and Rachel didn’t recognize any of the other people or the bar where they were gathered.
“Who are those people?” she asked Jeremy.
He glanced at it. “No idea.”
“They look like academics.” She picked up the photograph and the one below it, which appeared to have been taken within a minute of the first. “She looks so young, I figured it was taken when she first got to the Berkshires.”
He considered the photo in her right hand, the one in which her mother was caught unaware, her eyes on the bottles behind the bar. “No, I don’t know any of those people. I don’t even know that bar. That’s not in the Berkshires. At least not any place I’ve ever been.” He adjusted his glasses and leaned in. “The Colts.”
“Huh?”
“Look.”
She followed his finger. In the corner of the frame of both photographs, just past the bar, at the entrance to the kind of paneled hallway that usually leads to restrooms, a pennant hung on the wall. Only half of it had made it into the frame, the half with the team logo: a white helmet with a dark blue horseshoe in the center. The Indianapolis Colts logo.
“What was she doing in Indianapolis?” Rachel said.
“The Colts didn’t move to Indy until 1984. Before that, they were in Baltimore. This would have been taken when she was at Johns Hopkins, before you were born.”
She laid the picture in which her mother wasn’t looking at the camera back down on top of the collage and they both peered at the one where the principals looked into the lens.
“Why are we staring at this?” Rachel eventually asked.
“You ever know your mother to be sentimental or nostalgic?”
“No.”
“So why did she keep these two pictures?”
“Good point.”
There were three men and three women, including her mother, in the center of the frame. They’d gathered at one corner of the bar and pulled their stools close together. Big smiles and glassy eyes. The oldest of them was a heavyset man farthest to the left. He looked to be about forty, with muttonchop sideburns, a plaid sport coat, bright blue shirt, and wide knit tie loosened below an unbuttoned collar. Beside him was a woman in a purple turtleneck with her dark hair pulled back in a bun, a nose so small you had to look for it, and barely any chin. Next to her was a thin black woman with a Jheri-curl perm; she wore a white blazer with the collar turned up over a black halter top, a long white cigarette held up by her ear but not yet lit. Her left hand rested on the arm of a trim black man in a tan three-piece suit with thick square glasses and an earnest, forthright gaze. Beside him was a man wearing a white shirt and black tie under a velour zip-front pullover. His brown hair was parted in the middle, blown dry, and feathered along the temples. His green eyes were playful, maybe a bit lascivious. He had his arm around Rachel’s mother, but they all had their arms around each other, huddling close together. Elizabeth Childs sat on the end; she wore a billowy pinstriped blouse with the top three buttons undone, publicly revealing more cleavage than she ever had in Rachel’s lifetime. Her hair, which had always been cut short during her years in the Berkshires, fell almost to her shoulders and was, true to the times, feathered on the sides. But even with the fashion fails common to the era, her mother’s sheer force of self pulled one to her. She stared back from a remove of more than three decades as if she’d known as the picture was being taken that circumstances would one day put her daughter and a man she’d almost married in the exact position where they now found themselves—searching her face, yet again, for clues to her soul. But in pictures, as in life, those clues were opaque and fruitless. Her smile was both the most brilliant of the six and the only one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She was smiling because it was expected of her, not because she felt it, an impression underscored in the other photo, which looked to have been taken seconds before or seconds after the posed shot.
Seconds after, Rachel realized, because the tip of the black woman’s cigarette glowed a fresh red in the second photo. Her mother’s smile was gone and she was turning back to the bar, her eyes on the bottles to the right of the cash register. Whiskey bottles, Rachel was mildly surprised to note, not the vodka bottles she would have expected her mother to show an interest in. Her mother was no longer smiling but she looked happier because of it. Her face bore an intensity that Rachel would have characterized as erotically charged had its focus been anything but the bottles of whiskey. It appeared as if her mother had been caught in a reverie, in anticipation of an encounter with whomever she was leaving that bar with or meeting up with afterward.
Or she was just glancing at whiskey bottles and wondering what she’d have for breakfast tomorrow. Rachel realized with no small amount of shame that she was projecting at a nearly unforgivable level because she wanted to find value in photos that had none.
“This is silly.” She went to get the bottle of wine they’d left on the counter.
“What about it is silly?” Jeremy placed both photos side by side.
“I feel like we’re looking for him here.”
“We are looking for him here.”
“It’s two photographs from a night at a bar when she was in grad school.” She refilled their glasses and left the bottle on the table between them. “Nothing more.”
“I lived with your mother for three years. Except for pictures of you, there were no pictures. Not one. I now discover the existence of these two, tucked away somewhere the whole time I lived with her but never to be shared with me. Why? What’s in these pictures on this night that matters? I say it’s your father.”
“Could just be a night she was fond of.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Could just be two pictures she forgot she had.”
The eyebrow stayed up.
“Fine,” she said. “Make your pitch.”
He pointed at the man closest to her mother, Velour Man with the feathered brown hair. “He has the same color eyes as you.”
Fair enough. Like Rachel, he did have green eyes, though his were a much brighter shade; hers were so light they were almost gray. And like Rachel, he did have brown hair. The shape of his head wasn’t far off from Rachel’s own; the size of the nose was about right. His chin was quite pointed, whereas Rachel’s was more squared off, but then her mother’s had been squared off too, so one could argue she’d simply gotten her mother’s chin but her father’s eyes and hair. He was a handsome man, porn ’stache notwithstanding, but there was something lightweight about him. And her mother did not have a known affinity for the lightweight. Jeremy and Giles might not have been the most overtly masculine men Rachel had ever come across but there was steel at the core of both of them and their intelligence was prodigious and immediately identifiable. Velour Man, on the other hand, looked like he was on his way to emcee a Junior Miss pageant.
“Does he seem like her type?” Rachel said.
“Did I?” Jeremy asked.
“You have gravitas,” Rachel said. “My mother dug gravitas.”
“Well, it’s not this guy.” Jeremy put his finger on the heavyset guy with the eyesore of a sport coat. “And it’s not this guy.” He put his finger on the black guy. “Maybe the cameraman?”
“Camerawoman.” Rachel showed him the reflection in the bar mirror of a woman with a mane of brown hair spilling from underneath a multicolored knit cap, the camera held in two hands.
“Ah.”
She looked at the other people who’d been inadvertently captured on film. Two old men and a middle-aged couple sat midway down the bar. The bartender made change at the cash register. And a youngish guy in a black leather jacket was frozen in midstride after coming through the front doors.
“What about him?” she asked.
Jeremy adjusted his glasses and hunched in close to the photo. “Can’t get a good enough look. Wait, wait, wait.” He got up and went to the canvas backpack he took everywhere on his research trips. He removed a magnifying glass paperweight and brought it to the table. He held it over the face of the guy in the leather jacket. The guy had the surprised look of a man who’d almost stepped into a photographer’s shot and ruined it. He was also darker skinned than he’d appeared from a remove. Latin American or Native American possibly. But not in line with Rachel’s own ethnic makeup, in either case.
Jeremy moved the magnifying glass back over to Velour Man. He definitely had the same color eyes as Rachel. What had her mother said? Look for yourself in his eyes. Rachel stared at Velour Man’s magnified eyes until they blurred. She looked away to readjust her vision and then back again.
“Are those my eyes?” she asked Jeremy.
“They’re your color,” he said. “Different shape, but you got your bone structure from Elizabeth anyway. Do you want me to make a couple calls?”
“To whom?”
He placed the paperweight down on the table. “Let’s take another leap and consider that these were her fellow students in the Ph.D. program at JHU that year. If that presumption is correct, everyone in this picture is probably identifiable. If it’s incorrect, I’m only out a few phone calls to friends who work there.”
“Okay.”
He took pictures of both photographs with his phone, checked the images to make sure they were captured correctly, and put the phone in his pocket.
At her door, he turned back and said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine. Why?”
“You seem kinda hollowed out suddenly.”
It took her a minute to find the words. “You’re not my father.”
“No.”
“But I wish you were. Then this would be over. And I’d have a cool guy like you for a dad.”
He adjusted his glasses, something she learned he did whenever he felt uncomfortable. “I’ve never in my life been called a cool guy.”
“That’s why you’re cool,” she said and kissed his cheek.
She received her first e-mail from Brian Delacroix in two years. It was brief—three lines—and complimented her on a series of stories she’d done two weeks before on allegations of kickbacks and patronage in the Massachusetts probation department. The head of the department, Douglas “Dougie” O’Halloran, had run the department like his personal fiefdom, but now, based on work done by Rachel and some of her old colleagues at the Globe, the DA was prepping indictments.
When Dougie saw you coming toward him, Brian wrote, he looked fit to shit a collie.
She caught herself beaming.
It’s good to know you’re out there, Miss Childs.
You too, she considered writing back.
But then she saw his PS:
Crossing back across the southern border. Returning to New England. Any ’hoods you’d recommend?
She immediately Googled him, something she’d consciously refrained from doing until now. There was only one picture of him in Google Images, slightly grainy, which had first appeared in the Toronto Sun coverage of a charity gala in 2000. But there he was, in an incongruous tux, head turned to the side, identified in the caption as “Lumber scion Brian Delacroix III.” In the accompanying article, he was described as “low-key” and “notoriously private,” a graduate of Brown with an MBA from Wharton. Who’d then taken those degrees and become . . .
A private investigator in Chicopee, Massachusetts, for a year?
She smiled to remember him in that shoebox office, a golden boy trying to reject the path his family had laid out for him but clearly conflicted about this choice he’d made. So earnest, so honest. If she’d walked through any other door, handed any other private investigator her case, he or she would have done exactly what Brian had warned her they would—bled her dry.
Brian, on the other hand, had refused to do so.
She stared at his photograph and imagined him living a neighborhood or two over. Or maybe a block or two over.
“I am with Sebastian,” she said aloud.
“I love Sebastian.”
She closed her laptop.
She told herself she’d respond to Brian’s e-mail tomorrow, but she never got around to it.
Two weeks later, Jeremy James called and asked if she was sitting down. She wasn’t but she leaned against a wall and told him she was.
“I’ve identified pretty much everyone. The black couple are still together and both work in private practice in St. Louis. The other woman died in 1990. The big guy was faculty; he passed too a few years back. And the guy in the velour pullover is Charles Osaris, a clinical psychologist who practices on Oahu.”
“Hawaii,” she said.
“If he turns out to be your dad,” Jeremy said, “you’ll have a great place to visit. I’ll expect an invitation.”
“But of course.”
It took her three days to call Charles Osaris. It wasn’t a case of nerves or trepidation of any kind. It was rooted instead in despair. She knew he wasn’t her father, knew it in the pit of her stomach and in every electromagnetic strand of her lizard brain.
Yet some part of her hoped for the opposite.
Charles Osaris confirmed that he had been in the Johns Hopkins Ph.D. program in clinical psychology with Elizabeth Childs. He could recall several nights when they went to a bar called Milo’s in East Baltimore, where, indeed, a Baltimore Colts pennant had hung on the wall to the right of the bar. He was sorry to hear Elizabeth had passed away; he’d found her an intriguing woman.
“I was told you two dated,” Rachel said.
“Who on earth would tell you something like that?” Charles Osaris let out a sound that was half bark, half laugh. “I’ve been out of the closet since the seventies, Miss Childs. I never had any illusions about my sexuality, either—confusion, yes, but illusions, no. Never dated a woman, never even kissed one.”
“Clearly I was misinformed,” Rachel said.
“Clearly. Why would you ask if I dated your mother?”
Rachel came clean, told him she was looking for her father.
“She never told you who he was?”
“No.”
“Why?”
And Rachel responded with the explanation that, with every passing year, seemed more ludicrous. “For some reason she thought she was protecting me. She confused keeping something secret with keeping me safe.”
“The Elizabeth I knew was never confused about anything in her life.”
“Why else keep something so big a secret?” Rachel asked.
When he responded, his voice was newly tinged with sadness. “I knew your mother for two years. I was the only man within a ten-mile radius who wasn’t trying to separate her from her clothing, so I probably knew her as well as anyone. She felt safe with me. And, Miss Childs, I didn’t know her at all. She didn’t let people in. She liked having a secret life because she liked secrets. Secrets were power. Secrets were better than sex. Secrets, I firmly believe, were your mother’s drug of choice.”
After her conversation with Charles Osaris, Rachel had three panic attacks in one week. She had one in the employee bathroom at Channel 6, another on a bench along the Charles River during what was supposed to be her morning jog, and the third in the shower one night after Sebastian fell asleep. She hid them all from Sebastian and her coworkers. As much as one could feel in control during a panic attack, she felt in control of herself; she was able to continually remind herself that she wasn’t having a heart attack, that her throat wasn’t permanently constricting, that she could in fact breathe.
Her desire to remain indoors intensified. For a few weeks, only conscious effort and internal howls of defiance pushed her out the door every morning. Weekends, she stayed in completely. For the first three weekends, Sebastian assumed it was part of the nesting instinct. By the fourth, he’d grown irritable. Back then, they were on the guest list to just about every party in the city—any gala, any charity function, any see-or-be-seen excuse to imbibe. They’d become a power couple, fixtures of gossip items in the Inside Track and Names & Faces. Rachel, try as she might, couldn’t deny how much she enjoyed the position. If she had no parents, she’d realize in retrospect, at least the city welcomed her into the tribal fold.
So she got back out there. She shook hands and kissed cheeks and drank in the attention of the mayor, the governor, judges, billionaires, comedians, writers, senators, bankers, Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, and Celtics players and coaches, and college presidents. At Channel 6, she rocketed through the ranks, racing from freelance to the education beat to crime to general assignment in sixteen months flat. They put her face on a billboard with Shelby and Grant, the evening anchors, and prominently featured her in a commercial to introduce their revamped logo. When she and Sebastian decided to marry, it felt like they’d elected themselves homecoming king and queen, and the city applauded the decision and gave its full blessing.
It was a week after the invitations went out that she ran into Brian Delacroix. She’d just interviewed two reps at the statehouse over a projected budget shortfall. Her crew went to the van but she decided to walk back to the station. She’d just crossed to the other side of Beacon when Brian walked out of the Athenaeum accompanied by a shorter, older man with ginger hair and a matching beard. She experienced that electric bolt of confusion and recognition that usually only occurred when she passed someone famous in the street. It was a feeling of I know you. But I really don’t. Both men were ten or twelve feet from Rachel when Brian’s eyes found hers. A flash of recognition was followed immediately by a flash of something she couldn’t identify—was it annoyance? fear? neither?—and then that flash vanished and was replaced with what, in retrospect, she could only describe as manic joy.
“Rachel Childs!” He crossed the distance to her in one long stride. “What’s it been—nine years?”
His handshake was firmer than she expected, too firm.
“Eight,” she said. “When did you—?”
“This is Jack,” Brian said. He stepped aside so the smaller man could step into the space he’d made and now they were a threesome standing on the sidewalk at the peak of Beacon Hill as lunchtime crowds streamed around them.
“Jack Ahern.” The man shook her hand. His handshake was much lighter.
There was a strong whiff of Old World to Jack Ahern. His shirt had French cuffs with silver cuff links that peeked out from under the sleeves of his bespoke suit. He wore a bow tie and his beard was precisely trimmed. His hand was dry and uncallused. She imagined he owned a pipe and knew more than most about classical music and cognac.
He said, “Are you old friends with—?”
Brian cut in. “Friends would be a bit strong. We knew each other a decade ago, Jack. Rachel’s a reporter on Channel 6 here. She’s excellent.”
Jack gave her a polite nod approximating respect. “Do you like the work?”
“Most days,” she said. “What kind of work are you in?”
“Jack’s in antiquities,” Brian said in a rush. “He’s up here from Manhattan.”
Jack Ahern smiled. “By way of Geneva.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” Rachel said.
“Well, I live in Manhattan and Geneva, but I consider Geneva home.”
“Isn’t that something?” Brian said, even though it wasn’t. He glanced at his watch. “Gotta go, Jack. Reservations for twelve-fifteen. Rachel, a pleasure.” He leaned in and kissed the air to the side of her cheek. “I heard you’re getting married. Very happy for you.”
“Congratulations.” Jack Ahern took her hand again with a courtly bow. “I hope you and the groom will be very happy.”
“Take care of yourself, Rachel.” Brian was already moving away with a distant smile and too-bright eyes. “Great seeing you.”
They walked down to Park Street and took a left and passed from view.
She stood on the sidewalk and took stock of the encounter. Brian Delacroix had filled out some since 2001. It became him. The Brian she had met had been too skinny, his neck too slim for his head. His cheekbones and chin had been a little too soft. Now his features were clearly defined. He’d reached the age—thirty-five, she was guessing—where he’d probably begun to resemble his father and had stopped looking like someone’s son. He dressed far better and was easily twice as handsome as he’d been in 2001, and he’d been plenty handsome then. So in regards to personal appearance, all changes to the good.
But the energy that had come off him, cloaked in pleasantries though it may have been, struck her as mildly unhinged and anxious. It was the energy of someone trying to sell you a timeshare. She knew from her research that he ran International Sales and Acquisition for Delacroix Lumber, and it saddened her to think that nearly a decade in sales had turned him into a glad-handing, air-kissing showman.
She pictured Sebastian, working away at 6 right now, probably leaning back in a chair, chewing a pencil as he cut tape, Sebastian the king of the crisp edit. Actually, everything about Sebastian was crisp. Crisp and clean and squared away. She could no more picture him in sales than she could picture him tilling the land. Sebastian was attractive to her, she realized in that moment, because there was nothing desperate or needy in his DNA.
Brian Delacroix, she thought. Such a shame life turned you into just another salesman.
Jeremy walked her down the aisle at the Church of the Covenant, and his eyes were wet when he lifted her veil. Jeremy, Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte all came to the reception at the Four Seasons. She only saw them a couple of times, but it was as comfortable with Jeremy and as awkward with Maureen and the children as it had always been.
After their first meeting, when Maureen had seemed genuinely pleased Rachel had found them, she grew more distant with each subsequent encounter, as if she’d only been welcoming of Rachel because she’d never expected her to hang around. She wasn’t rude by any means, or cold; she was simply not present in any substantive way. She smiled at Rachel and complimented her looks or clothing choice, asked about her job and Sebastian, and never failed to mention how happy Jeremy was to have her back in his life. But her eyes refused to lock onto Rachel’s and her voice carried a tone of strained brightness, like an actress trying so hard to remember her lines she forgot their meaning.
Theo and Charlotte, the almost half siblings she never had, treated Rachel with a mixture of deference and furtive panic. They hurried through all conversations, bobbing their heads at the floor, and never once asked her a question about herself, as if to do so would confer upon her the stature of the factual. Instead, it seemed imperative for them to continue to see her as something out of the mythic mist, inexorably moving toward their front door, but never actually arriving.
When Maureen, Theo, and Charlotte said their good-byes, about an hour into the reception, the relief at standing five steps from the exit door was so total it infused their limbs. Only Jeremy was shocked by the abruptness of their departure (both Maureen and Charlotte feared they were coming down with summer colds, and the drive back was long). Jeremy took Rachel’s hands in his and told her not to forget about the luminists or Colum Jasper Whitstone on her honeymoon; there’d be work to do when she returned.
“Of course I’ll forget,” she said, and he laughed.
The rest of the family drifted out to the valet stand to wait for the car.
Jeremy adjusted his glasses. He fiddled with his shirt where it bunched up around his belly, always self-conscious around her about his excess weight. He shot her his uncertain smile. “I know you would’ve wanted your real father to walk you down the aisle, but—”
She gripped his shoulders. “No, no. I was honored.”
“—but, but . . .” He shot his wavering smile at the wall behind her but then looked at her again. His voice grew deeper, stronger. “It meant the whole wide world to me to be able to do it.”
“Me too,” she whispered.
She placed her forehead on his shoulder. He placed his palm on the back of her neck. And in that moment, she felt as close to whole as she imagined she ever would.
After the honeymoon, she and Jeremy found it difficult to get together. Maureen wasn’t feeling well, nothing serious, just age, he supposed. But she needed him around, not gallivanting off to Boston to while away the summer in the reading rooms of the BPL or the Athenaeum. They managed to squeeze in lunch once in New London, and he looked weary, the flesh on his face too gray and tight to the bone. Maureen, he confided, was not well. She’d survived breast cancer two years ago. She had endured a double mastectomy, but her latest scans had come back inconclusive.
“Meaning?” She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.
“Meaning,” he said, “her cancer could have recurred. They’re going to run more tests next week.” He adjusted and readjusted his glasses, then looked over them at her with a smile that said he was changing the subject. “How are the newlyweds?”
“Buying a house,” she said brightly.
“In the city?”
She shook her head, still coming to terms with it. “About thirty miles south, give or take. It needs updates and renovations so we won’t move in right away, but it’s a good town, good school system if we have kids. It’s not far from where Sebastian grew up. It’s also where he keeps his boat.”
“He loves that boat.”
“Hey, he loves me too.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Jeremy shot her a wry smile. “I just said he loves that boat.”
Four days later, Jeremy suffered a stroke in his office at the college. He suspected it was a stroke but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, so he drove himself to the nearest hospital. He drove his car halfway up onto a curb and staggered to the entrance. He made it to the ER on his own two feet but promptly suffered a second stroke in the waiting room. The first orderly to reach him was surprised by the strength in Jeremy’s soft professor’s hands when he grabbed the lapels of the orderly’s lab coat.
The last words Jeremy would speak for some time made little sense to the orderly or to anyone else, for that matter. He yanked the orderly’s face down to his own and his eyes bulged in their sockets.
“Rachel,” he slurred, “is in the mirror.”