If I Forget You(29)

The two of them are right behind her. If she was to turn around, she would be face-to-face with them. Her heart is in her throat, and for a moment she imagines doing just this, turning around, his daughter a buffer between the two of them, a governor ensuring the encounter is brief and casual. It will be nothing more than old friends saying hello.

But Margot slides to her left, as if moving to the next display, and she feels them displace her, moving toward the topaz, and now she just keeps moving, out of the room and the space they just shared.

Outside, the rain has stopped, but the air smells of it, warm and wet. Margot stands for a moment outside the giant stone building. Her heart feels like it might spring out of her body. She is as alive as an animal, wanting to run into the park like a deer and vanish into the trees.





Henry, 1991

The night is unseemly hot and Henry sleeps with the cabin door open. Because of the heat, he sleeps unevenly, and when he does sleep, the dreams come in waves—there is Margot underneath him and he is moving above her and then suddenly she is there but not there, her face as blank as a sheet of paper. She has no eyes and no nose and no mouth. He wakes at one point in a sweat and beyond the open door the land leading down to the lake is blue with moonlight.

He drifts in and out of sleep, and when the first yellow of dawn comes, he wakes with a start, as if from a sound, and now looking out, he sees the land is full of heavy mist, as it often is this close to the lake. Henry knows that if he was to walk outside, his world would shrink to the several feet in front of him. And then, thinking this and looking out, Henry suddenly sees someone, an outline in the low-hanging fog that begins to take shape, and he feels all his muscles tense intuitively, and a moment later, it is as if he is still dreaming, for there is Margot, leaning against the doorframe, looking toward where he lies on the bed.

“Knock, knock,” she says.

“Holy shit, you scared me,” Henry says.

“Get over here,” Margot says.

Henry climbs out of bed and goes to her. Margot steps inside the doorway and in the dark he takes her into his arms and she says, “I love the smell of you.”

“Sweaty,” he whispers, and she laughs.

Henry pulls her to him tight and buries his face in her hair, and then he pulls back and holds her face in his hands and they kiss. For a long while they are silent, holding each other, and it is a game of chicken they are playing, neither of them wanting to pull away, and Henry finally breaks the silence by saying, “I can’t believe it’s you. That you’re here.”

“I needed you,” Margot says.

After a time they go to the bed, and when they make love, it is with a deep urgency and Henry reminds himself to be slow, but this morning he cannot and afterward, Margot is crying and he thinks he has done something wrong, but she whispers that she is just so happy to be with him and he knows what she means, that love like this is far closer to insanity than it is to reality, the world around them spinning uncontrollably, and their ability to be together is the only thing holding them on the planet. We are gravity, he thinks as he uses his thumb to wipe the tears away from her eyes.





Margot, 1991

The days are midsummer-long, and after a few of them in a row, they begin to take on a routine. Henry wakes with the sun to work in the vineyard and leaves her lying in bed in the small cabin. It feels gloriously unfair to watch him go out the door while she gets to curl back into the pillows and sleep. After work, they swim in the lake, stripping off their clothes at the shore and skinny-dipping, and on their second night there they have dinner at Ted and Laura’s house, and it is surprising to Margot to see how they interact with Henry, how comfortable he is there, opening the fridge like it’s his own, and then how they all pitch in to help cook.

Ted roasts a chicken, and Margot marvels at the simplicity of people preparing food, since in her life she has never cooked a thing. Her parents always had a chef or they ate out. She loves watching how he rubs the bird down with olive oil and garlic and rosemary, how it seems so easy and natural. While the bird cooks, Laura announces that they are going to make baklava.

“That means you, Margot,” she says.

“Me? No. I have no idea.”

“Don’t worry, it’s easy.”

And so in that rustic kitchen with the wide-pane windows that peer out toward the wide blue lake, the four of them lay out rolls of pastry. Margot is in charge of walking back and forth with a small saucepan full of melted butter and a pastry brush and painting, in long strokes, the butter onto the pastry.

Before dinner, the four of them step outside, and while the dog runs off barking into the vines, they stand on the porch and smoke a joint that Ted has rolled.

Now this is something, Margot thinks, smoking pot with older people, and as the joint goes around, Ted unwinds a story about some crazy friend they knew from high school, how he drove his car into the lake after leaving their house one night. The story is meant to be funny and everyone laughs hard, though for Margot her laughter isn’t genuine, for the pot is making her reflective and she hears only bits and pieces. Looking out to the lake and into the fat evening sun still high above the hills, she feels like nothing has ever been more beautiful, and watching the way Ted and Laura feed off each other, the quiet Laura and the gregarious Ted with a smile in his eyes as he unfurls a tale he has undoubtedly told dozens of times, she begins to imagine a future with Henry, something beyond just this moment they are living in.