If I Forget You(48)
For a moment, the guilt gathers over her like a small storm and she thinks of her husband in his office right now, looking down through the canyons of buildings, and for all her doubts about what he does with his time, in truth she has no evidence that he has ever strayed from her, and here she is, four hundred miles to the north in a field with another man, still able to feel him inside her from the night before.
Margot types back. “Sorry. Battery died and fell asleep early last night. All well.” The amazing ease of texting, she thinks. She could be anywhere.
Margot looks up from this intrusion and sees Henry smiling at her.
“Come here,” he says.
Margot walks to him and he opens his arms and she moves into them. He brings her tight to him and she buries her face in his chest.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Henry says from above her.
Margot shakes her head in his chest. “I don’t want to know.”
Henry says, “They made me write that letter.”
Margot steps back from him. “Which letter?”
“The one I sent you on the Vineyard. After what happened at the winery. A guy who worked for your father came to see me. I don’t remember his name. Tall guy with a British accent. He sat in my parents’ kitchen.”
“Kiernan.”
“Yes. That was his name. I felt like I didn’t have a choice. They said if I wrote it, they would drop the charges and I would be allowed to finish school.”
Margot shook her head. “You didn’t have a choice. It was so long ago. Please, let it go.”
“I know. But I have carried it with me all these years. What if I’d said no? There is no greater act of cowardice for a poet than a failure to tell the truth.”
“You were a kid, Henry. They would have ruined your life.”
“It felt ruined anyway. Until that moment I saw you standing across from the Shake Shack. How I felt then reminded me that I had been asleep for a long time, you know? Just going through the motions. I keep asking myself, Is this real? You know what I mean?”
Margot nods. “Can we go back? I want to swim. I don’t want to think anymore. I just want to swim.”
And on the walk back to his cabin, down the long stretch of dirt road, Margot hates the conversation they just had, not just for what he said, which doesn’t surprise her, but for how she handled it. That she managed in that moment to be strategic in her response, as if he were someone she was having a debate with, someone on one of her boards, and not the man she had opened herself to more than any other. Worse still is why she did it. As if by downplaying how Henry responded to the box her father put Henry in, as he had put so many others in over time, could somehow erase the big weight she has never unburdened herself of and that she knows she cannot go one more night carrying alone.
Henry is the first one in the water. She admires him as she walks down the small hill to the dock, admires his long torso as he hurls himself in a smooth dive off the end of it, curving up in the air before slicing cleanly into the lake, so clear that she can see him underneath it, a long silvery shape, moving out deep into the cove before surfacing.
“Come in,” Henry says, on his back now, his head out of the water, improbably halfway to the peninsula. “It’s great.”
Margot stands there for a moment, considering the water, feeling slightly silly in her bikini, then remembering he has seen far more of her than this, and that the thing about water is that it doesn’t get any warmer by staring at it.
“Do it,” Henry shouts.
And she lets herself go then, and there is the feeling of being in the air, of her feet leaving the rough-hewn wood of the dock, rising up in an arc, and then the clear, cool water taking her breath away as she plummets underneath it, propelling herself forward with long strokes toward Henry.
*
Margot waits until dark. She waits until after dinner. She waits until the two gin and tonics have erased her doubt.
They are out on the deck. Henry grilled salmon and corn for dinner and afterward they did the dishes together, washing them by hand in the small sink, drying them and putting them away, moving around each other with the ease of the long-married couple they should have been. At one point, Henry turned to her and she proffered her face to him and he leaned down and kissed her and looked at her with his dark eyes, gazing right through her and saying, “Holy shit, I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, and in saying it, she hoped it would be enough to carry them through.
Now, as they sit on the bench next to the railing over the lake, all traces of the sun are gone and the moon is caught in the trees on the opposite shore, not yet risen. The stars are not out yet and the sky is a brilliant sweep of blue. The woods around them breathe with night sounds.
“Henry,” Margot says.
“Yes?”
“There is something I have to say.”
From a foot away, he shifts his position, sensing something in her voice, and leans in toward her. Margot is grateful for the dark, so that he cannot fully see her face. She is worried she is going to cry and then she is crying, the sobs coming fast, and she cannot stop them.
“Honey, what is it?”
“I can’t,” Margot says.
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Henry,” she says. “I don’t know how to say this.”