He thought of his brothers, the three Robinson boys all cleaned up for church. His mother with her wintergreen Life Savers and stickers and coloring books to keep them quiet. And Daniel never needed them. He was always looking for Sophia. Did that hurt her feelings then?
She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew. She sat on his bed at night and tried to get him to talk to her, thinking she could get closer to whatever faraway thing it was he kept from her. She’d loved him as much as he’d let her. More than he’d let her; you couldn’t control everything.
Then he’d disappeared without a reason, without ever giving her a moment of satisfaction. She didn’t deserve that. There was a hole there still. He knew it if he was honest with himself. It was his as much as hers. He wished he could feel about himself now the way he’d felt then.
And here he was, sitting perfectly well and alive outside her house. But what good did that do her? What good did it do him?
I don’t want to go forward, I want to go back. He didn’t want to go forward, but he always wanted to get another chance. He was all starts and endings, where people like Molly lived in the middle as if it was all they had.
He found himself wishing that Molly would come out of the house. He thought of her crooked front teeth and her freckles and her fuzzy gray hair and he ached with missing her. But she didn’t come out. Why would she? He sat alone in his car.
It wouldn’t have been much different if he was dead. His memory made him invisible over time, even to the people he felt he knew and loved most. Not even they knew him or cared about him anymore. You could pretend you were in control of all the relationships when the people you loved didn’t know you anymore.
He was more like a ghost than a person, watching people, waiting for people. Not to talk to them or hold them or build a life with them but just to remember them.
LUCY GOT A little drunk when she was with Daniel. He took her to nice restaurants, always ordered wine for them, and confidently paid the bill. She eagerly drank whatever it was. She was in a perpetual state of fuzziness with him.
Why do I do that? she wondered. She didn’t do it other times. She liked to keep her wits close by. Why was she so eager to part with them when she was in his company?
Now came the end of dinner, melting chocolate cake somewhat romantically shared for dessert, and the bill was on its way. He must earn a lot of money at his job, she decided.
She looked at him across the table. She could hardly remember the old Daniel, she had worked so hard to conjoin the two faces. She felt a moment of boldness and let her mind wander back to an old conversation they had had.
“You used to call me Sophia,” she said.
“When was that?”
“In high school. At that miserable last party. You can’t have forgotten that.”
He ran his forefinger along the clothed edge of the table. “You used to be Sophia.”
“A long time ago, right?” She was definitely tipsy.
“Yes. Very long.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“I just do. Some people remember a long time back.”
“I wish I could remember.”
“It’s not all good,” he said.
“Do you remember Constance?”
The pretty waitress came across the room with the bill. He examined it as he answered her. “Of course.”
“How do you recognize someone? From one life to another? I don’t understand how you do that.”
He signed and stood up. “Let’s go outside, okay?”
He didn’t wait for her to agree, so she just followed him through the gauntlet of the coat check and the valet parking and all the tips she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to pay. She usually tucked a few dollars here and there just in case.
Standing in front of the restaurant, he turned to her and grabbed her in one motion. His lips were on hers before she could equivocate. He always wanted to kiss her and grab her in public places, which was the opposite of what she wanted.
She tried to respond, but her body was shaking, her ribs and her knees and her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering too much to kiss. She pulled away to spare him.
“Will you come home with me?” he asked, putting a couple of fingers under the waistband of her skirt. “Please?”
Would she? She couldn’t. She wanted to drink so much wine that she could, but she hadn’t found that much yet. “I can’t.”
She remembered, with a flush, how eager she’d been to have his knee under her dress in high school, how she’d been kissing him before they’d exchanged ten sentences. She was beginning to wonder how much or little the soul really counted for.
The car arrived via the eager valet before he could get his hands into her tights. He drove a Porsche, which gave him things to say to the valet, and that was a relief.
“Why can’t you?” he asked, sitting her on his lap on the hood of the coveted car after the valet had gone off to park an SUV.
“I have classes tomorrow. I have a studio crit. I’m supposed to finish a model.”
He nodded acceptingly. He didn’t seem to know that three excuses were as good as none. He thrust his hands under her coat and shirt, and burrowed them under her bra. He did know about some things.
His hands were cold on her. That’s why she was still shaking.
“Next time?”
“Next time,” she said. It was a ritual between them. It was always next time.
He lit a cigarette and walked her to her shitty car, which she’d parked at the edge of the lot. She was embarrassed to turn it over to a valet.
“Tell me about Sophia,” she asked, her breath making a cloud. Her cloud was a white puff, and his was a gray twist. She wanted something to hold on to so she could believe in next time.
“Like what?”
“What did she mean to you?”
He drew his hands away. “She was my wife.”
“Was she?”
“Yes.”
“Did you love her?” It was the wine talking. It was next time talking. He wasn’t even touching her and she felt the shaking and the chattering as though she was afraid. I’m not afraid. What do I have to be afraid of?
He looked at her. “Not as well as I should have.”
“HE’S REALLY DIFFERENT NOW.” Lucy was trying to explain her dinner with Daniel to Marnie. She had hoped Marnie would be asleep when she came in, but Marnie had been sitting on the sofa in their miniature living room, alert, with her computer in her lap, when Lucy eased open the door.
“How much difference can a few years make?” Marnie asked. Marnie, typically, was asking the right questions, and Lucy was copping out.
“Well, in his case . . . big.” Lucy guessed they were talking quietly because Leo was asleep. She took a long time about her coat and hat and boots and socks.
“What do you mean?”
Lucy wanted to explain what she really meant, but how could she? Marnie thought she wanted to know, but did she really? She’d caused Marnie plenty of consternation already. Marnie missed the old friendship, when Lucy told her everything; she didn’t understand what had happened to change it. Lucy missed the old friendship, too, but she couldn’t get back to it. Nor could Lucy bring herself to tell Marnie the truth. Because the truth wouldn’t be comforting and wouldn’t bring them closer again.
“Just that . . . it’s hard to explain.” How much do you really want to know? was what she wanted to ask her.
“When are you going to bring him around? Are you hiding him? I want to see.”
Lucy was absolutely hiding him. How could she possibly account for the fact that he bore no physical resemblance to the Daniel she knew? It had been painful enough dismantling the universe to make room for him. She couldn’t bear to force all that on Marnie. “No. No. He’ll be around sometime. He works in D.C. He’s got a real job, and he’s busy.”
Lucy slowly
unwound her scarf and hung it carefully on a hook in the closet instead balling it up and tossing it on the hall table as she would have ordinarily done. She took her time looking through her bag for her phone.
“I think I’m different, too,” she said into the hungry silence. “Definitely different than I was in high school.”
Marnie stretched her legs out in front of her. “You don’t like him as much as you used to like him is what you’re saying.”
“No, it’s not that,” she protested reflexively. “I was so stupid then, as you’ve pointed out.” Lucy fiddled around with her cell phone charger. She didn’t want to sit down in the chair across from Marnie, because then she’d have to be honest.
Marnie looked wistful. “Well, I liked you stupid. And anyway, I never said that.”
“You know what I mean. I was just . . . slavering over him. I don’t think I’m like that anymore.”
Marnie looked particularly sober. She circled her slack computer cord around her foot. “Why aren’t you?” She had to credit Marnie for keeping on asking, even as she must have feared what it would bring.
She held Marnie’s eyes for a minute and then let them drop. Lucy was the coward around here. “Just older, I guess.”
“Did you kiss him this time?”
“A little.”
“How many times have you gone out with him?”
“I don’t know. Seven or eight, maybe. Something like that.”
“You kissed him a little? Are you twelve?”
“I have a crit tomorrow.”
Marnie shook her head. “Is this the same Daniel?”
Lucy swallowed and nodded.
“You don’t like him anymore.”
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, 2009
DANIEL WAS DRIVING from the VA hospital to Charlottesville early one evening after a long, tiring shift, and when he saw the traffic backed up on the beltway he decided to take a different way.
He found himself thinking of his grandfather Joseph, Molly’s father. He thought of Joseph not so much as he was when he was old and sick in hospice in Fairfax, but as he was when they lived in Alabama by the pond. There were geese in the pond through the winter, and they fed them bits of stale bread almost every morning. It wasn’t easy to get a goose to trust a couple of humans, but they had succeeded. They didn’t plan it, really. They were both early risers, and they showed up there. He could still picture Joseph’s delighted expression in the center of a whirling globe of black heads with white chinstraps and gray wings and dark, squawking beaks. Geese paired up like humans, Joseph explained. Better than humans, because geese stayed true.
Daniel also remembered the days in the spring when the first flocks would go back up north to Canada or wherever they came from. He and Joseph would look up at the racing V overhead, a single thumping bird soul, and watch them with the excitement of travel and the sadness of being left again. Daniel remembered envying them their purpose and connectedness, and how they could just fly away. He collected feathers as a way to hold on to them. His grandma said they were dirty, but his mother secretly let him keep them.
Joseph dreamed of being a pilot, and he would have been if he hadn’t had polio when he was a teenager, which left his leg weak. Daniel told Joseph that’s what he would do, too, and he fully meant it at the time. After they moved, Joseph used to send pictures of the planes he thought Daniel should fly. Daniel felt sorry that he ended that life before he could do it.
HE WAS TWO miles out of town on a small road and heading south when he realized that the road was familiar to him, and it explained why he kept thinking of Joseph. He kept going for another couple of miles, looking for the cemetery on the left, where his grandmother Margaret and undoubtedly Joseph, were buried. Instead of keeping on, he surprised himself by turning left and driving under an alley of oak trees.
He was partly surprised because he almost never thought of grave-yards. They meant so much less than most people thought they did. He remembered a woman from his old neighborhood in St. Louis driving fifteen miles to the cemetery every day to mourn her long-dead husband at a cold gray stone, while the husband was busy selling milk at the 7-Eleven just half a mile down the road from her house.
Daniel hadn’t seen his grandfather since he’d died, though he had been keeping an eye out for him. They would likely be about the same age now. He’d thought they would have crossed paths, being as close as they were. But they hadn’t, and it made him wonder if Joseph had lived his last life. It fit, as he thought of it, and it made him sad. Some chances you really did lose.
He parked the car and walked up to a hilltop. It was good to get out and walk a bit. He was drowsy, and his focus turned so deeply inward he half expected his body to stop breathing.
His grandfather’s gravestone looked as he thought it would, except that it didn’t have the bunches of dahlias he had pictured. He looked around and saw the familiar flowers a little way down the row, an armload of them, fresh-cut and deep pink. He was confused by that, and slightly alarmed. Was there a new death in the family? He hoped his brothers were all right. Curiosity drew him down the row to the decorated grave. He read the name twice before it meant anything to him. “Daniel Joseph Robinson, beloved son of Molly and Joshua.”
It was possible he really had stopped breathing, as his breath came fast and painfully now. They’d engraved the name they’d given him second and the name he’d given himself first. There were not only flowers but two candles and a photograph in a frame. He didn’t want to look at the photograph, but he reached for it anyway.
It was him, of course. It was him in his cross-country uniform, standing next to Molly. He was sweaty, the hair on his neck in wet spears. It was just after a race, and Molly carried the trophy. She wasn’t holding it up for the camera, just dangling it in her hand. He won most of the races, and she knew he didn’t care about the trophy.
He must have been about fourteen. He wasn’t quite as tall as her yet. He was leaning his head against her shoulder. His eyes were closed, and he was laughing about something, not posing but really laughing. He knew why she kept this picture. Maybe there had been a moment or two of satisfaction for her.
He never looked at his own graves. He never wanted to see an old picture of himself. He had avoided those things, not knowing exactly why, and now he knew why. He sat down. He realized he held his car key in his hand and it was shaking. He put the key in his pocket.
He remembered the races. He remembered being fast, just effortlessly fast in that body. He remembered those autumn days and his favorite course that wound through the hemlock forest of the land trust. He’d never been so good at running before. No matter how much diligence and strategy you brought to a race, those legs were just faster than the others.
He thought of Molly tending this grave, bringing these flowers, lighting the candles. His impulse was to go and find her. “I’m fine,” he wanted to say to her. “I still love you, and I think about you all the time. I’m not down there, I’m right here.”
He looked at the photograph again. He looked down at his hands and remembered his old hands—the nail of his left middle finger, which grew in funny, his bony knuckles, his freckled skin. Those hands weren’t here; they were down there. Or whatever was left of them. Those fast legs weren’t here; they were buried, too. That was him, Molly’s son, and he was under there; he wasn’t right here. That was me.
He missed that body. He heard music so well in that body. His fingers were graceful and quick on the piano keys. It was a talented body, and it was a shame to throw it away.
As he looked at Molly’s face in the picture, he knew he hadn’t loved that body because it was fast and heard music well. He would have liked to think so, but he knew it wasn’t true. He loved it because he’d been loved. Because Molly had loved him.
In this present body he hadn’t been loved, and he found almost nothing to love about himself. He didn’t want to give a mother that kind of power, but Molly had it anyway.
It was a
mazing how he thought he could take his whole self with him to every new life, not remembering that when you left someone like Molly, you left a part of yourself behind forever. Sometimes he wondered if his memory for the important things was really very good at all.
He glanced at the photograph for the last time before he got up on trembling legs. He hadn’t been able to see it or accept it then, but it seemed so obvious now. He’d looked just like her.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2009
ON THE FIRST Friday of spring break, after Lucy had turned in a research paper on Jefferson’s “pet trees” at the Grove in Monticello and taken two exams in three days, Daniel showed up in the lobby of her building and called up on the intercom a little after noon. She was so surprised and anxious at the thought of him standing there that she went racing out of her apartment and down three flights of stairs without considering changing out of her sweatpants and T-shirt or putting on a bra.
He held out his arms for her, and she reluctantly went into them. Because she failed to look up, he kissed the top of her unshowered head. “I have a huge surprise for you,” he said. He was obviously excited.
His being there, in the bosom of her life, felt like a huge enough surprise. She didn’t know if she could take another one. She shuffled him toward the alcove with the defunct pay phone. She didn’t dare take him upstairs, because Marnie and Leo were asleep up there. “What’s that?”
He pulled some papers from the pocket of his long coat and held them out for her, not to take but to see.
“Plane tickets?” she asked.
“Yes. Well, not the actual tickets but our itinerary.”
“ ‘Our itinerary’?”
“It’s your spring break, isn’t it? You said you didn’t have plans. I’m taking you to Mexico for a week.”
She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know their relationship could contain this kind of thing. If somebody had told her a few months ago that Daniel would come back into her life, and furthermore, that he was going to sweep her off to Mexico for a week, she would have been ecstatic. But now she felt skittish and unnerved.