If I Forget You(28)

Like the afternoon before, Margot takes a left onto his street, and this morning she is happy for the rain and the umbrella, which feels like a disguise. She moves down the street on the opposite side of his building, and when she is directly across from it, she finds a spot under a tree and slightly to the left of the front door of the nondescript place across, as if she is a woman on her way to work, just casually waiting for her car to show up, albeit wearing a baseball hat.

Margot waits. In the buildings around her, men and women march out with their bags and their work clothes and move briskly past her. No one pays her any attention at all. Every time the door to Henry’s building opens, she holds her breath and has this urge to duck into shadows that don’t exist at this time of day and in this rain.

A half hour goes by. To move her legs, she walks at one point to the end of the block and then returns to her station again. She is nervous that perhaps she missed him, and then she chides herself for this silliness. For all she knows, he doesn’t have a class until the afternoon. She could be standing here all day.

Yet she cannot move. Has she lost her mind? Has she somehow become again the girl she once was, the one who did things impulsively, even if they could ruin everything?

After about an hour, though, Margot’s patience is rewarded, though she doesn’t know it at first. A late-model Volvo wagon comes slowly down the street from the east. It is dark red and loud, and clearly needs a new exhaust pipe. It stops in front of Henry’s building.

The woman driving has a thick head of curly hair and she gets out of the car with the engine still running and walks around to the other side. Margot can see a child in the back, and the woman opens the back door and for a moment the child is shielded from Margot’s view, but then Margot sees the door to Henry’s building open and here is Henry himself, fifty yards away from her, in jeans and a button-down shirt. The child runs to him, and Margot can see now it is a little girl. She leaps up into Henry’s arms and he picks her up in one smooth motion. Margot takes a step back at first, and then removes her phone and pretends to be on it. She looks away, then glances back to the scene across the street.

“Sunday at noon,” Margot hears Henry say to the woman, who has not moved closer to Henry than when she opened the door to the car. Henry’s voice goes right through Margot, rich and resonant, though she can still hear the trace of a nasally accent, which she is glad he has not lost.

The woman blows a kiss to the little girl, who Margot can see is adorable, as all children that age are. She has her mother’s curls and they tumble down on either side of her face. Black buttons for eyes. Henry puts the girl down and goes to the door of the building and opens it, though he doesn’t go in, just reaches in and comes out with an umbrella. The Volvo drives slowly away. Henry opens the umbrella and takes the girl’s hand in his own. The two of them begin to walk away from Margot toward Amsterdam.

It is a small moment she has just witnessed, more of a ritual than anything, one that plays out across the country on weekends and one that tells her in an instant a lot about Henry’s life. He is divorced and this is his daughter. She lives with her mother somewhere else.

While there is nothing intimate in any of this that has been revealed, Margot, standing in the rain, watching them walk away from her, nevertheless feels a twinge of shame for having watched it. But, after all, it is public space, isn’t it? It’s not like she has sneaked into his apartment under the cover of darkness, right?

Margot looks up the street and sees that the two of them are halfway up the block. She should leave now for Darien and go back to her life before she puts everything in jeopardy. But she has come this far. She begins to walk after them.

*

On busy Amsterdam, Margot struggles to keep up with the two of them, losing them briefly in the crowd of people with umbrellas making their way down the avenue. But then she spies them just in time before they take a left and head toward Columbus. When she turns onto quiet Eighty-first Street, she once again shares the side street with them, though they are almost at the end of the block, and oblivious to her, a father and daughter holding hands and moving toward, she imagines, the park.

But then on Columbus, Margot watches as they cross the street, heading to Central Park West, and then there is the great facade of the American Museum of Natural History. She has the memory of taking her own children here, how it was once the most magical place on earth for the two of them, the awe they had looking at the Barosaurus in the lobby, the taxidermy animals that appeared as if they might at any moment leave their perches and scoop small children into their huge mouths. This memory pangs her a little bit—what a thief time is—but she knows without a doubt this is where Henry is going.

Margot gives them a ten-minute head start and then she enters the building as well. She has this immediate fear that the security people will figure her out and detain her, for she has to be only the middle-aged woman in the place without at least one child at her side. But this is, of course, silly. Thousands of people pass through these doors every day.

And so Margot follows Henry and his daughter through the museum. She tries to keep her distance, staying half an exhibit away, though at one point she loses the two of them in the Hall of Gems. Margot is standing looking at a topaz display when she hears Henry’s voice, and it moves through her like electricity.

“Look at this, Jess,” he says, and that is how Margot learns his daughter’s name.