“It’s Michelle,” Paul said, already standing. “I’ll be right back. It’s Michelle.”
Norah watched him move toward her as if pulled by gravity, Michelle’s face lifting at the sight of him. He cupped her face lightly in his hands as they kissed, and then she raised her hand and their palms touched briefly, lightly, a gesture so intimate that Norah looked away. They crossed the park then, heads bent, talking. At one point they paused, and Michelle rested her hand on Paul’s arm, and Norah knew he had told her.
“Mrs. Henry,” she said, shaking hands when they reached the bench. Her fingers were long and cool. “I am so sorry about Paul’s father.”
Her accent, too, was faintly exotic: she had spent many years in London. For a few minutes they all stood in the garden, talking. Paul suggested that they go for dinner, and Norah was tempted to say yes. She wanted to sit with Paul and talk long into the night, but she hesitated, aware that between Paul and Michelle there was a warmth, a radiance, a restlessness to be alone. She thought of Frederic again, perhaps already back in their pension, his tie falling across the back of a chair.
“How about tomorrow?” she said. “What if we meet for breakfast? I want to hear all about your trip. I want to know all about the flamenco guitarists in Seville.”
On the street, walking to the metro, Michelle took Norah’s arm. Paul walked just ahead of them, broad-shouldered, lanky.
“You raised a wonderful son,” she said. “I’m so sorry I won’t get to know his father.”
“That would have been hard in any case—to get to know him. But yes, I’m sorry too.” They walked a few steps. “Have you enjoyed your tour?”
“Oh, it’s a wonderful freedom, traveling,” Michelle observed.
It was a soft evening, the bright lights of the metro station a shock as they descended. A train clattered in the distance, echoed through the tunnel. There were mingled scents: perfume and, underneath, the sharper tang of metal, oil.
“Come by around nine tomorrow,” Norah told Paul, raising her voice over the noise. And then, as the train came nearer, she leaned forward, close to his ear, shouting.
“He loved you! He was your father, and he loved you!”
Paul’s face opened for an instant: grief and loss. He nodded. There was no time for more. The train was rushing now, rushing toward them all, and in its sudden wind she felt her heart fill up. Her son, here in the world. And David, mysteriously, gone. The train stopped, squealing, and the hydraulic doors burst open with a sigh. Norah got on and sat by the window, watching a flash, a final glimpse of Paul, walking, his hands in his pockets, his head down. There, then gone.
By the time she reached her stop, the air had filled up with the grainy light of dusk. She walked across cobblestones to the pension, painted pale yellow and faintly luminous, its window boxes spilling flowers. The room was quiet, her own strewn things undisturbed; Frederic had not arrived. Norah went to the window overlooking the river and stood there for a moment, thinking of David carrying Paul on his shoulders through their first house, thinking of the day he had proposed, shouting at her over the rush of water, the cool ring slipping down her finger. Thinking of Paul’s hand and Michelle’s, palm to palm.
She went to the little desk and wrote a note: Frederic, I am in the courtyard.
The courtyard, lined with potted palms, overlooked the Seine. Tiny lights were woven into the trees, the iron railings. Norah sat where she could see the river and ordered a glass of wine. She’d left her book somewhere—probably in the garden at the Louvre. Its loss filled her with a vague regret. It was not the sort of book one bought twice, just something light, something to pass the time. Something about two sisters. Now she would never know how the story ended.
Two sisters. Maybe someday she and Bree would write a book. The thought made Norah smile, and the man who was sitting at an adjacent table, dressed in a white suit, a tiny aperitif glass by his hand, smiled back. So these things began: there was a time when she would have crossed her legs or pushed back her hair, small gestures of invitation, until he rose and left his table and came to ask if he might join her. She had loved the power of this dance and the sense of discovery. But tonight she looked away. The man lit a cigarette, and when it was finished he paid his bill and left.
Norah sat watching the flow of people against the dark shimmer of the river. She did not see Frederic arrive. But then his hand was on her shoulder, she was turning, and he was kissing her, one cheek, and then the other, and then his lips on hers.
“Hello,” he said, and sat down across the table. He was not a tall man, but he was very fit, with strong shoulders from years of swimming. He was a systems analyst, and Norah liked his sureness, his ability to grasp and discuss the larger whole and not get bogged down in the minutiae of the moment. Yet it was the very thing that sometimes irritated her too—his sense of the world as a steady and predictable place.
“Have you waited long?” he asked. “Have you eaten?”
“No.” She nodded at her wineglass, nearly full. “Not long at all. And I’m famished.”
He nodded. “Good. Sorry to be late. The train was delayed.”
“It’s all right. How was your day in Orléans?”
“Humdrum. But I had a nice lunch with my cousin.” He began to talk and Norah sat back, letting the words wash over her. Frederic’s hands were strong and deft. She remembered a day when he’d built her a set of bookshelves, working in the garage all weekend, curls of fresh wood falling off his planer. He was not afraid to work or to stop her in the kitchen while she cooked, sliding his hands around her waist and kissing her neck until she turned and kissed him back. He smoked a pipe, which she did not like, and worked too hard, and drove too fast on the highway.
“You told Paul?” Frederic asked. “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. He’s meeting us for breakfast. He wants to complain to you about arrogant Americans.”
Frederic laughed. “Good,” he said. “I like your son.”
“He’s in love. And she’s quite lovely, this young woman he adores: Michelle. She’ll come tomorrow too.”
“Good,” Frederic said again, weaving his fingers through her own. “It’s good to be in love.”
They ordered dinner, brochettes of beef on rice pilaf, more wine. The river moved below, darkly, silently, and as they talked Norah thought how lovely it was to sit quietly anchored in one place. To sit drinking wine in Paris, watching the birds burst into flight from the silhouetted trees, the river moving calmly below. She remembered her wild drives to the Ohio as a young woman, the strangely iridescent skin of the water, the sheerness of the limestone banks, the wind lifting her hair.
But now she sat still, and the birds flew up darkly against the indigo sky. She smelled water, and exhaust, and meat roasting, and the dank mud of the river. Frederic relit his pipe and poured more wine and people strolled by on the sidewalk, moving through this evening that was giving way to night, the nearby buildings fading slowly into the darkening air. One by one lights came on in windows. Norah folded her napkin and stood up. The world wheeled away; she was dizzy from the wine, the height, the scent of food after this long day of grief and joy.
“Are you all right?” Frederic asked, from far away.
Norah touched the table with one hand, caught her breath. She nodded, unable to speak above the sound of the river, the smell of its dark banks, the stars roaring everywhere, swirling, alive.
November 1988
HIS NAME WAS ROBERT AND HE WAS HANDSOME, WITH A shock of dark hair that fell across his forehead. He went up and down the aisle of the bus, introducing himself to everyone and commenting on the route, the driver, the day. He reached the end of the row, turned around, and went through the whole thing again. “I’m having a great time here,” he announced, shaking Caroline’s hand on his way. She smiled, patient; his grip was firm and confident. Other people would not meet his eye. They studied their books, their newspapers, the scenes slipping by outside
the window. Yet Robert went on, undaunted, as if the people on the bus were as much to be remarked upon, and no more expected to respond, than trees, rocks, or clouds. Within his persistence, Caroline thought, watching from the last seat, deciding again every second not to intervene, was some deep desire to find a person who would really see him.
That person, it appeared, was Phoebe, who seemed to brighten, awash in some internal light, when Robert was around, who watched him move up and down the aisle as if he were some marvelous new creature, a peacock perhaps, beautiful and showy and proud. When he finally settled down in the seat next to her, still talking, Phoebe simply smiled up at him. It was a radiant smile; she held nothing back. No reserve, no caution, no waiting to make sure he felt the same surging love. Caroline closed her eyes at her daughter’s naked expression of emotion—the wild innocence, the risk! But when she opened them again Robert was smiling back, as pleased by Phoebe, as wonderstruck, as if a tree had cried out his name.
Well, yes, Caroline thought, and why not? Wasn’t such love rare enough in the world? She glanced at Al, who sat next to her, nodding off, his graying hair lifting as the bus traveled over bumps, around curves. He’d come in late last night and would leave again tomorrow morning, earning overtime to pay for the new roof and gutters. These last months, their days together had been mostly consumed with business. Sometimes a memory of their early marriage—his lips on hers, the touch of his hand on her waist—swept through Caroline, a bittersweet nostalgia. How had they become so busy and careworn, the two of them? How had so many days slipped away, one after another, to bring them to this moment?
The bus sped across the ravine, up the incline to Squirrel Hill. Headlights were already on in the early winter dusk. Phoebe and Robert sat quietly, facing the aisle, dressed for the Upside Down Society’s annual dance. Robert’s shoes were polished to a high shine; he wore his best suit. Beneath her winter coat, Phoebe wore a flowery white and red dress, a delicate white cross from her confirmation on a slender chain around her neck. Her hair had darkened and grown thinner and was cut in a short flyaway cap around her skull, clipped here and there with red barrettes. She was pale, with light freckles on her arms and face. She stared out the window, smiling faintly, lost in her thoughts. Robert studied the billboards above Caroline’s head, ads for clinics and dentists, maps of the route. He was a good man, prepared in every moment to be delighted by the world, though he forgot conversations almost as soon as they were finished and asked Caroline for her phone number every time they met.
Still, he always remembered Phoebe. He always remembered love.
“We’re almost there,” Phoebe said, tugging on Robert’s arm as they neared the top of the hill. The day facility was half a block away, its lights spilling softly across the brown grass, the crusts of snow. “I counted seven stops.”
“Al,” Caroline said, shaking his shoulder. “Al, honey, it’s our stop.”
They stepped off the bus into the damp chill of the November evening and walked in pairs through the dusky light. Caroline slid her hand around Al’s arm.
“You’re tired,” she said, seeking to break the silence that, more and more, had come to be their habit. “You’ve had a long couple of weeks.”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I wish you didn’t have to be away so much.” She regretted her words the moment she said them. The argument was old by now, a tender knot in the flesh of their marriage, and even to her own ears her voice sounded strident, shrill, as if she were deliberately picking a fight.
Snow crunched under their shoes. Al sighed heavily, his breath a faint cloud in the cold.
“Look, I’m doing the best I can, Caroline. The money’s good just now and I have some seniority built up. I’m pushing sixty. I have to milk it while I can.”
Caroline nodded. His arm beneath her hand was firm and steady. She was so glad to have him here, so tired of the strange rhythms of their lives that kept him away for days at a time. What she wanted, more than anything, was to have breakfast with him every morning and dinner every night; to wake with him in bed beside her, not in some anonymous hotel room a hundred or five hundred miles away.
“It’s just that I miss you,” Caroline said softly. “That’s all I meant. That’s all I’m saying.” Phoebe and Robert walked ahead of them, holding hands. Caroline watched her daughter, wearing dark gloves, a scarf Robert had given her wrapped loosely around her neck. Phoebe wanted to marry Robert, to have a life with him; lately this was all she talked about. Linda, the day facility director, had warned, Phoebe’s in love. She’s twenty-four, a bit of a late bloomer, and she’s starting to discover her own sexuality, We need to discuss this, Caroline. But Caroline, unwilling to admit that anything had changed, had put the discussion off.
Phoebe walked with her head slightly bent, intent on listening; now and then her sudden laughter floated back through the dusk. Caroline inhaled the sharp cold air, feeling a surge of pleasure at her daughter’s happiness, taken back, in the same moment, to the clinic waiting room with its drooping ferns and rattling door, Norah Henry standing by the counter, pulling off her gloves to show the receptionist her wedding ring, laughing in this same way.
A lifetime ago, that was. Caroline had put those days from her mind almost completely. Then last week, while Al was still away, a letter had arrived from a law firm downtown. Caroline, puzzled, had ripped it open and read it on the porch, in the chill November air.
Please contact this office regarding an account in your name.
She called at once and stood at the window, watching the river of traffic, as the lawyer gave her the news: David Henry was dead. He’d been dead, in fact, for three months. They were contacting her to tell her about a bank account he’d left in her name. Caroline had pressed the phone to her ear, something sinking deeply and darkly through her at this news, studying the sparse remaining leaves of the sycamore trees as they fluttered in the cold morning light. The lawyer, miles away, went on talking. It was a beneficiary account: David had established it jointly in both their names, and therefore it stood outside the will and probate. They wouldn’t tell her how much was in the account, not over the phone. Caroline would have to come in to the office.
After she hung up she went back out onto the porch, where she sat for a long time in the swing, trying to take in the news. It shocked her that David had remembered her this way. It shocked her more that he’d actually died. What had she imagined? That she and David would both somehow go on forever, living their separate lives yet still connected to that moment in his office when he stood up and put Phoebe in her arms? That somehow, someday, whenever it suited her, she would seek him out and let him meet his daughter? Cars rushed down the hill in a steady stream. She couldn’t figure out what to do, and in the end she’d simply gone back inside and gotten ready for work, sliding the letter into the top desk drawer with the detritus of rubber bands and paper clips, waiting for Al to get home and help her gain perspective. She hadn’t mentioned it yet—he’d been so tired—but the news, unspoken, still hung in the air between them, along with Linda’s concern about Phoebe.
Light spilled from the center onto the sidewalk, the brown stems of grass. They pushed through the double glass doors into the hallway. A dance floor had been set up at the end of the hall and a disco ball turned, scattering bright shards of light over the ceiling and the walls and upturned faces. The music played, but no one was dancing. Phoebe and Robert stood on the edge of the crowd, watching the light shifting on the empty floor.
Al hung up their coats and then, to Caroline’s surprise, he took her hand. “You remember that day in the garden, the day we decided to get hitched? Let’s teach them how to rock and roll, what do you say?”
Caroline felt quick tears, thinking of the leaves fluttering like coins on that long-ago day, the brightness of the sun and the humming of distant bees. They had danced across the grass, and she had taken Al’s hand in the hospital, hours later, and said, Yes, I will marry you, yes.
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Al slid his hand around her waist and they stepped onto the floor. Caroline had forgotten—it had been a long time—how easily and fluidly their bodies moved together, how free it made her feel to dance. She let her head rest against his shoulder, inhaling his spicy aftershave, the clean scent of machine oil lingering beneath. Al’s hand was pressed firmly against her back, his cheek to hers. They turned, and slowly other people drifted onto the dance floor, smiling in their direction. Caroline knew almost everyone in the room, the staff of the day center, the other parents from Upside Down, the residents from the facility next door. Phoebe was on a waiting list for a room there, a place where she could live with several other adults and a house parent. It seemed ideal in some ways—more independence and autonomy for Phoebe, at least a partial answer to her future—but the truth was that Caroline could not imagine Phoebe living apart from her. The waiting list for the residence had seemed very long when they applied, but in the last year Phoebe’s name had moved up steadily. Soon Caroline would have to make a decision. She glimpsed Phoebe now, smiling such a happy smile, her thin hair held back by the bright red barrettes, stepping shyly onto the dance floor with Robert.
She danced with Al for three more numbers, eyes closed, letting herself drift, following his steps. He was a good dancer, smooth and sure, and the music seemed to run straight through her. Phoebe’s voice could do this to her too, the pure tones of her singing drifting through the rooms, making Caroline pause in whatever she was doing and stand still, the world pouring through her like light. Nice, Al murmured, pulling her closer, pressing his cheek to hers. When the music shifted to a fast rock number, he kept his arm around her as they left the floor.
Caroline, a little giddy, scanned the room for Phoebe by long habit, and felt the first filaments of worry when she didn’t see her.
“I sent her down for more punch,” Linda called from behind the table. She gestured to the dwindling refreshments on the table. “Can you believe this turnout, Caroline? We’re running out of cookies too.”