If I Forget You(36)

Once she is away from the protection of the dunes, the wind picks up and blows her hair back and presses her clothes against her body. The beach is empty. Where the ocean meets the sand, the surf slaps hard against it over and over.

Looking up at the expanse of ocean stars, Margot finds it hard to imagine it is the same day. That a single day, one rotation of the planet, can contain an abundance of lives, the way the sky can contain stars that stretch and curve away from her toward Europe somewhere far out beyond the blackness.

She remembers then a night—could it have been a week ago?—when she sat outside the small cabin near the lake with Henry. They sat cross-legged on the grass with a bottle of wine open and he had his arm around her waist and they looked up at the sky, the same sky she is looking at right now, almost as pronounced, though the black of the ocean at night does something to draw the stars even closer than they were under those open fields.

She remembers looking over at Henry and in the dark his face was tilted toward the firmament, the wide gauzy stripe of the Milky Way, and the expression he wore was one she recognized and loved, half wonder and half amusement and just pure poetry, his mind spinning like a clock, rotating and whirring as he took in the possibilities.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“They’re f*cking amazing, aren’t they?”

“The stars?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you think if we could see the backs of them, they would look the same?”

“The backs of them?”

“Yes,” Henry said. “The backs of the stars.”

Margot shook her head. “How do you come up with this stuff?”

He didn’t answer with words. He just turned and kissed her.

Now, looking up at the great, ineffable beyond, she listens to the crashing of the waves, and she walks on the sand hardened by the endless beat of the swells, and the hard truth that she will never see Henry again, can never see Henry again, rolls over her, heavy and unyielding as the surf.





Henry, 1991

The inside of a Greyhound bus might be the saddest place in America. It is, Henry thinks, looking out the window, the old dirty dog of its name cutting through the ugly seam of an otherwise-beautiful country.

He has thirteen days until his next court appearance. David dropped him off at the bus station in Syracuse after Henry resisted their pleas just to stay with them, and now he is streaming down the interstate on a gray, rainy day. Henry looks around the bus. It is half empty. Some are sleeping. A few are reading. Some, like him, stare blankly out at the flat landscape, as if somewhere out there are answers to whatever question has them traveling this lonely stretch of road on this particular day.

With the myriad of stops, a trip he could drive in six hours becomes double that, and by the time he finally steps off the bus in Providence, it is dark out. His parents don’t know he is coming. He debated calling them, but his mother is not good on the phone—it makes her hyper, every word a small emergency—and his father looks at the phone when it rings as if he is seeing it for the first time.

Instead, he just walks the eight blocks home, his duffel bags slung heavily over each shoulder. He is exhausted and hungry. Soon he is away from downtown and back in the old hood, and it looks even shabbier in the dark than he remembered, the paint peeling off the triple-deckers visible in the light from the streetlamps. He has also forgotten the smells, coming past the diner with its vent out to the sidewalk, the overwhelming smell of old frying oil, and the sounds, too, the raised voices, a “Hey, f*cking Johnny, get back here” shouted out into the night from a third-floor apartment.

And in this way, Henry arrives at the house, the apartment, he grew up in. It is just past nine at night and he can picture, before he even walks up those three flights of stairs, the scene inside. His mother is flitting around the kitchen, the dishes already done, but making herself busy. His father sits in front of the television, the Red Sox game on if he can get it, an old movie if he cannot, a can of Coke in his hand.

Henry takes a deep breath. And then he climbs the stairs, aware of every creak from the thin wood, his footsteps a foreshadowing of the profound failure he is about to present to the two people he least wants to present it to.

When he reaches the door, he can peer past the curtain on the door window, and it is as he expected: There is his mother in her customary black, moving around the kitchen, and from here even he can hear the roar of the television in the other room. Henry knocks and he sees his mother stop, her eyes narrow as she turns toward the door.

When she opens it, he stands there for a moment and then drops his bags.

“Oh, Henry,” she says. “What? Why are you here?”

Henry steps forward and holds out his arms. His mother hugs him. With his hands, he can feel the curvature of the spine that will grow more conspicuous over time, until she is one of those women who are permanently stooped over. But for now he just holds his mother and she holds him until she leads him inside to the small table in the kitchen.

“Karl,” his mother shouts. “Henry is here.”

“I’m hungry,” Henry says.

“Let me fix you something.”

And like that, adulthood melts like ice. His mother is at the fridge for the eggs, and then is stirring them with a fork. A pan warms on the stove. His father is suddenly filling the doorframe, giving a nod, as if he understands something has happened.