If I Forget You(26)

One morning she comes downstairs to find her father in the foyer with his suitcase packed, looking at his watch and then out the window to the driveway.

“Where are you going?” Margot asks.

“Singapore for a few days, if the car ever gets here,” he says. “No rest for the wicked,” he adds, and smiles.

That night, Margot invites her mother for a walk. They head out through the dunes and onto the open beach. It is a beautiful evening and the number of people on the private beach is sparse—a few runners moving along the water, people walking dogs. There is not much wind and the surf is light, but it is open ocean and it still falls heavily against the hard sand, and as Margot wants to be as close to the water as she can, she and her mother have to raise their voices to be heard.

“There’s a boy,” Margot says.

“Your father told me. He thinks highly of him.”

“It’s not Danny.”

“Oh?”

“No, there is another one. His name is Henry.”

Her mother looks at her oddly, and for a moment they stop. Margot glances past her mother to the long length of beach, to how the water laps and recedes, laps and recedes.

“I don’t understand,” her mother says.

“Daddy wouldn’t like him,” Margot says.

“Why, is he black?”

“Mom, no. And that is so racist. It shouldn’t matter.”

“Well, I don’t see what the problem is, then. Is it serious?”

“I love him,” Margot says.

“Where is he?”

“He’s back at school. Working for the summer.”

Margot’s mother looks alarmed. “Back at school? Is he a professor, Margot, is that why? He’s older?”

“No, no. He’s a student.”

Her mother looks relieved. “I can’t imagine what it is with this boy that your father would be upset about. He’s quite reasonable, Margot, you know.”

“You know how Daddy can be,” says Margot.

“Your father always wants the best for you. That is true. And so do I.”

Margot looks away to the ocean then, and far away on the horizon she sees the outline of a container ship. For some reason, she wonders how the big ships from a distance always look like they are standing still, when of course they must be moving. Out there on the curvature of the earth, a large, still form, and she suddenly wishes she had decided against this conversation.

As if sensing this, her mother says, “What is he like, this boy?”

Margot looks back at her mother. “He’s sweet. Kind. He writes poetry. He used to be a baseball player.”

Her mother nods, as if weighing this sparse information. “Where is he from?”

“Providence.”

“Rhode Island?”

Margot sighs. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you invite him to visit? He can stay in the guest room,” her mother says.

“He can’t,” Margot says back. “He has to work.”

Her mother considers this. “Well, nothing wrong with work, I suppose.”

“I need a favor,” Margot says. “I need to go see him. But I don’t want Dad to know.”

“I’m not in the business of hiding things from your father.”

“I need this. I just need to know. Do you remember that feeling? Of first being with someone? And how hard it is to be apart?”

Her mother looks back toward the dunes, which from this angle obscure where the house is, and then back to Margot. She smiles slightly. “Of course,” she says.

“Then help me,” Margot says.

Her mother is silent for a moment and they start walking again. “You have one week,” her mother says.

Margot smiles broadly. She moves to her right and hugs her mother, who is smaller, from behind, her head on her mother’s shoulder like a lover. “What about Daddy?”

“I will take care of that,” her mother says. She smiles back at Margot. “We haven’t lasted this long without my knowing how to handle him. Now go.”

An hour later, Margot is on the ferry. The night is clear and the ocean stars bend in a great arc away from her. Normally when she is leaving the island, she looks back with sadness as that hump of land surrounded by sea gets smaller and smaller in the wake of the boat. The place she most identifies with as home. Tonight, though, she stands on the other side, staring at the horn of mainland in front of her. She faces Henry, part of a continent away.





Henry, 2012

One weekend a month, Henry has Jess. Sometimes he drives up and picks her up in Tarrytown and brings her back, and other times Ruth drives her into the city. In the summer, he will often pick her up on his way to Vermont. Henry both looks forward to the weekends and fears them. Henry tries to be kind to Ruth in those brief moments when they see each other, though there is always this exasperated tension between them, more her than him, Henry thinks, which strikes him as fundamentally unfair, for when a marriage unravels, there is plenty of blame to go around, and his crimes are more crimes of omission.

Ruth left him, after all, not the other way around. She was the one who had the affair—with a college administrator, of all things, an accountant type with a name, Steve Johnson, as bland as the work he did. And while Henry was furious when she first told him, in time he came to realize that the affair was as much his decision as it was hers. Henry had turned his back on Ruth a long time ago. For he had married the wrong woman and he knew it even before that rainy day in late May when they went down to city hall with a few friends and made it official.