The Last Romantics(100)

Renee looked into the cot and inhaled sharply. “Oh, isn’t he gorgeous?” she said, her voice sleepy but full. She gently stroked his small head.

I leaned forward to hug Renee. “He takes after his mother,” I said.

Beatrix and Lily began to stir, each opened her eyes and issued tired half smiles. These girls. These young women. They were twenty-four years old, the age at which I began The Last Romantic. When I thought about it, which was rarely now, the blog seemed almost quaint, idealistic, innocent. What would Lily and Beatrix do with those experiences? Did they ask the same questions now that I asked then? I suspected the answer was no. They were young, fearless women. Intoxicating. Sometimes I wondered what they thought of us. Did they look at Noni, at Caroline and Renee and me and wonder about the dilemmas that had plagued us? Did they wonder why we’d worried so much about children and work and relationships? My nieces assumed that the world was designed for them, the way they wished it to be. They took, they didn’t ask. And they made it look so simple. I wondered why we had never done the same.

I was watching Beatrix: her long hair streaked with pink, a pierced nose, her cheeks high and freckled, and suddenly she locked her hazel eyes with mine. She issued a wide yawn and then winked.

And beside her was Louis—still asleep, it appeared. His mouth open, a gentle rhythm to his breath. Maybe he was faking it, but I didn’t think so. I knew what fake looked like. Someone should wake him up, I thought. Wake him up so he doesn’t miss anything. Wake him up so he knows how much we need him here.

“Hello, Skinners!” It was Nathan, holding two coffee cups, a candy bar stuck in the front pocket of his shirt. Louis startled with his father’s entry, blinked and yawned with a wide, luxuriant stretch. Nathan placed one of the cups on the table next to Caroline, and she looked up at him with gratitude.

“Noni, it’s good to see you,” Nathan said, crossing the room to hug our mother. She and Nathan had a better relationship now, after the divorce, than during his long relationship with Caroline. Now Noni could appreciate him as a scientist, a teacher, a father, rather than as the man who took from Caroline the possibilities that her life might have otherwise contained were it not for children, home, his career, the goddamn frogs. Now Nathan was simply Professor Duffy, an intelligent, middle-aged white man with a poochy belly and silvery gray hair streaking his temples. Almost like a son.

I was considering all this—Nathan and my fearless nieces and mothers and sons—when Jonathan walked through the door. None of us had seen or spoken to him during Renee’s pregnancy. He’d been traveling throughout the winter, Renee said, and would send the occasional e-mail but these contained only the barest details about his life and cursory questions about hers. He never mentioned the baby, she’d told me, or his impending fatherhood.

Standing in the open doorway, Jonathan looked sheepish, wiry and old. Older than I remembered him, his hair thinning on top so that the pale skin of his scalp reflected the yellow light.

“Renee,” he said, and it was a small hiccup of a sound.

Renee blinked once, twice. None of us said a word.

“Is that . . . ?” He approached the cot. “Can I . . . ?” He looked to Noni for a response, as though the family matriarch controlled the babies here.

But it was Renee who answered. “Yes, you can pick him up. I named him Jonah.”

Gingerly Jonathan picked up the sleeping baby and held him awkwardly, like a football or a loaf of bread. Jonah squirmed and screwed up his face, caught somewhere between sleep and wailing.

“Closer to your chest,” Renee instructed. “Put his head into your inner elbow.”

Jonathan followed these directions. He then began to bounce up and down slightly in a soothing, repetitive motion, and in that moment he looked just like any other new father. The baby quieted, settled against him, and gave a soft little sound of contentment.

“You got it,” said Renee.

I knew there would be no grand emotional speeches here, not with all of us in the room. Jonathan and Renee were both too private and formal for that sort of thing. But I could tell. She was watching him. He did not look at her, only at the face of sleeping Jonah. The drooly, mashable face of his infant son, Jonah Ellis Avery Skinner.

*

I never told my sisters or Noni about the boy Rory. Perhaps this was my greatest betrayal. An unforgivable omission. I wonder now, as you do in old age, how events might have unfolded if I had brought Rory back to New York. If my sisters had seen his young face stamped with the same chin, same nose, same shining eyes as Joe’s young face.

What did I give away that night with Luna Hernandez? But what, too, would have been lost?

We would have lost Joe again in a way. He would have become his son, a different boy living in a different time. We would have fought and struggled over that boy with the same ferocity we should have fought over Joe against Ace and Kyle and all the forces that surrounded him. We let Joe slip away, and so we would have held firm to Rory; we would have swallowed him whole. We Skinners are not very good at compromise. We are all or nothing.

There can be no other Joe. There is only one, and he remains as bright and vivid for me as that first day we visited the pond. He pulled me up from the mossy depths, his own head dripping, blinking away the cold, murky water, shaking me back into myself. That feeling endures even today, all these years later. Joe, you saved me.

Renee will always remember our brother in that moment after she ran from the man in the car, when she heard Joe’s voice calling her name and then the man’s weight lifting off her, releasing her lungs so she could breathe again. Her face was sticky with tears, her body shaking with the effort as she pushed herself up from the ground. Somehow Joe had known—how had he known?—where to find her. Joe, solid as a tree, said, Are you okay? and he’d taken her hand. He’d looked at her with such concentration, such concern, that Renee felt her fear depart, the knitting back together of the ends of herself that in the past hour of running and hiding and fighting had come loose and flown apart. Are you okay? Joe repeated, and Renee had answered, Yes.