The Last Romantics(97)
“Come on out back,” said Luna. “I made us some tea.”
I followed Luna through the house: large woody rooms, floors made of wide scuffed boards, beams visible overhead. A pair of glass-paned doors led onto a large circular room lined with windows through which I saw, dimly in the near dark, a view of the water. Two steaming mugs of tea sat on a square coffee table. Toys lay scattered across the floor, and the toddler scrambled out of Luna’s arms and ran to a set of wooden train tracks.
“That’s Alfredo,” Luna said. “My son. He’s two. He looks just like my husband, Dima.”
Alfredo had thick blond curls and a little bow mouth. He pushed the train across the floor with his chubby pink hands, chanting, “Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga.” As with all children, I found him intoxicating but also somehow threatening, like a hard drug I’d tried once and knew I should never do again. Although of course I hadn’t tried it, not even the once.
“He’s adorable,” I said. “And I say that about very few babies.”
“He’s a handful,” Luna replied. “And I just found out I’m pregnant again.” She laughed in a nervous way, though about the pregnancy or something else, I couldn’t say. “We weren’t expecting it. I’m forty-one. It’s a gift, you know? We haven’t told anyone yet, actually.”
I felt a small thrill at the sharing of this confidence. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“Do you have kids?” Luna asked.
I shook my head. “No, my husband and I decided not to. I’m the editorial director at an environmental NGO. And I’m a writer. I write poetry, I’m working on a lengthy project now. I have a book out next year. Will teaches history.” I told Luna about my work, Will’s research into indigenous populations of the American Southwest, the strange, desolate quiet of our trips to the desert after the tidy chaos of the New York City suburbs. Behind my streaming monologue sat the disquiet that arrived every time I said these words to a mother: no children. First a small flash of shame and then, following swiftly, defensiveness. It was my own instinctual reaction, irrational and unfair to both of us. Even with Caroline sometimes I still felt it, and now with Renee, large and happy as a house. Everyone makes different choices, Caroline had said to me recently as comfort and apology. Everyone’s life is complex.
“It must be so much easier for you and your husband without any kids,” Luna said. “All your traveling?” Her face was curious, without judgment.
“Yes,” I said. “The luggage is certainly a lot lighter.”
Luna smiled and told me in turn about the business she and her husband ran, an organic farm that supplied produce to restaurants in Seattle. “The farm-to-table movement, what a boon to growers like us,” she said. It had taken years to become certified organic, but now they barely kept up with demand. They had five year-round employees and hired dozens of seasonal workers; they delivered produce boxes to homes and ran a store in town.
An awkward silence descended, punctured only by the click-click of the dog’s claws on the hardwood floor, Alfredo’s singsong whisper as he played with the trains. “In the station here’s the house, Mama, Papa, RoRo. Bye-bye, good-bye.”
I reached for my purse. I had come here to give her the ring, of course, but now, sitting on this leather sofa, drinking mint tea from the thick ceramic mug, I felt a shyness that registered almost as ambivalence. Finding her had been a deep, interior goal for so long, its significance barely acknowledged even to myself. But maybe this was not the time to introduce Luna into our lives. All the painful memories she would provoke. I wasn’t sure. I wavered between giving her the ring, inviting her to New York, and leaving immediately, throwing the ring away, never again speaking her name.
Perhaps the idea to fulfill Joe’s last wish now, so many years later, was ridiculous. Perhaps it had always been ridiculous.
But a deep tremor of the old impetus returned to me. Joe’s last wish. The very last.
I said, “Luna, I came here to give you something. I found it in Joe’s apartment, but I think it’s yours.” I pulled the ring box from my purse and placed it on the coffee table.
She looked at it but said nothing.
“It’s for you,” I said.
Luna began to shake her head, but then she reached forward and picked up the box, lifted the lid. She closed it immediately and placed the box back onto the table. “This isn’t mine,” she said.
I thought for a moment that she didn’t understand, and so I explained. “It’s an engagement ring. Joe never had the chance to propose, but he loved you, he wanted to marry you.”
Luna shook her head. “It’s not mine,” she repeated. “I don’t want it.” She met my eyes. “Joe happened so long ago. I’m married now, I have a family. I only want to forget that time.”
“Forget my brother?” I felt a sudden crumpling, a collapse, as though a hand had squeezed the internal workings of my chest.
“No, that’s not—” Luna stopped. “I made a horrible mistake that day. You should keep this for your family. Your sisters’ children. I can’t take it.”
A disappointment cracked open and grew wider every second that I sat here, Luna across the table from me, the ring between us both. The manuscript of The Love Poem weighed down my purse, but I could not give it to Luna. Not now. I had written a book of poems that imagined the truest love, a lost love, a tragedy. But look at all that Luna had now. She was surrounded by love, she was rich with it.