If I Forget You(49)

“It’s okay. I can handle anything. Really.”

Margot stands up then. She walks away from him in the dark. She paces a few feet away and then turns back toward where Henry sits looking up at her expectantly.

“My children have been my life, you know? Alex and Emma. For so long they defined me. They were who I was. They gave me a purpose. And now they are both out of the house and it’s different. And I am a terrible person.”

“You’re being hard on yourself.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not being clear, I know. This is so hard.”

“I don’t understand,” Henry says.

“Alex, Alex will turn twenty-one next spring. Do you understand?”

“I’m confused. What do you mean?”

“That night before … the night before my father was there. That night in the vineyard?”

“Yes?”

“We made a child that night.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alex is your son, Henry.”

The silence comes then, and Margot can hear Henry breathing in the pregnant dark across from her and she can hear the timid slap of the lake against the dock below them, the wake from a small boat whose running lights they can see far over on the other side, moving back and forth, trolling for trout.

Henry is on his feet. Please say something, Margot thinks. Say something. Anything.

Margot watches as he walks away from her toward the far railing and then comes back. She can feel his intensity coming off him in waves. She needs him to speak.

“Say something,” she says. “Please.”

Henry’s voice cracks as he says, “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re f*cking kidding. Please tell me you’re f*cking kidding.”

“No,” Margot says softly. “I’m sorry.”

There is nothing else for her to say, and she realizes that since she has let this out into the world, it is all on his terms, and his time, as it should be. She listens to him pace back and forth. She knows he is gathering his words now like the clouds gathered over the hills earlier and that when they come, they will be forceful. She braces herself.

When Henry finally speaks, his voice surprises her. It is soft and distant at first and he says, “When my father died.”

“Yes.”

“Well, before he died. When he was dying. I visited him in hospice. My father was a very quiet man. He barely spoke. He almost never expressed emotion. But he was a good man. And the way you knew that was never from anything he said, but from how he lived. How much he loved my mother. How hard he worked. It’s funny that I became a poet when the father in my life avoided words. But when I visited him in hospice, he was honest with me in a way that only the dying can be. I asked him … I asked him … oh, shit,” says Henry, and he starts to cry.

Margot stands and Henry says now, his voice rising, “No, sit. Please. I am sorry. But sit.”

Margot sits down.

Henry steadies his voice. “When he was dying, I asked him, I asked him if he had any regrets. I expected him to say no. He was not someone who ever complained. About anything. But you know what he said?”

“No,” Margot says.

“He said he wished he had a grandson. And the reason he wished this,” Henry says, talking fully through tears now, “was not because he didn’t love his granddaughter, which he did, for like me, she was his everything. The only time I ever really saw him light up was when Jess came in the room. He was a different person around her. But my father wished he had a grandson because he was old-school, my father, and in the Jewish tradition, sons are very important. They provide the continuity between generations. And looking at my father in bed, the tubes in his arms, the machine beeping every time his oxygen dipped, like some clock counting down the moments to his death, I felt this incredible sadness and an almost paralyzing guilt. I saw all my own failings. Could I have done things differently with Ruth? Where did we come apart? My God, we had a beautiful child and Ruth had always wanted another one, but I had this nagging doubt, and maybe it’s because I knew my marriage would fail. That it would be my fault. But what if I had worked harder? Done more? Found a way to be present? Maybe we would have stayed together. Maybe we would have had another child. Maybe we would have had a son. And my proud father, selfless to the very end, the best goddamn man I have ever known, a man I will never be, would have gone to the other side without a single regret.”

“I see,” Margot says.

“I’m not looking for affirmation,” says Henry.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything,” Henry says. “You just need to know what you stole from me.”

These last words cut her, the sharp diamond edge of truth, and they are cruel only in their honesty, and she knows this, but it is as if his knife just punctured her lungs in a search for her heart, and now she is struggling to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” Margot says.

“How?” Henry says, raising his voice to a shout through his tears. “How could you do this to me?”

“I don’t know,” Margot whispers. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, God,” Henry says, spinning away from her. He moves to the railing and leans over it. Margot listens to him crying now, the sobs catching in his throat, gagging like he might vomit, and she wants more than ever to go to him, but she knows she cannot.