But how could it not be about him? Given space to reflect on his shortcomings, Viola might find a thousand reasons to desert him. He had failed to hold the family together. All his efforts to shield them from the world had only resulted in its implosion. And the wreckage revealed his repeated lies, his parental deficiencies. By now she must have seen through all the falsehoods and fake presents, through his stuffed and insufficient Susan.
It would be nice to have someone else to blame. But it was hard to see beyond the common factor; Al had been left behind too many times to blame anyone but himself. His only defense is that he lacked the language, the sophistication, to talk about Susan in the way she deserved. And for a long time, he was still angry.
Go see her, Tillie said.You’re not doomed to repeat things in life.
So, on their monthly video call, he said:
I’m coming for your graduation.
Really? Are you sure?
The gratitude in her voice cracked him open. Another future appeared suddenly possible; Viola would come home and the world would be unified—his daughter sitting on the sofa reading and Tillie doing her sudoku and Sebastian crashing about in the kitchen. He determined to do whatever it took to make it real.
“Dad!”
Here she is, waiting on the train platform under a close, uniform sky. Is she taller? Thinner? Something about her face—more makeup. It’s colder here and he feels underdressed in his short-sleeve polo. She gathers him off the platform, asking about his journey, new intonations transforming her questions.How did he find the flight? Did he manage?He wonders whether she is losing herself or finding herself.
Insistently, she carries his suitcase, which rattles and bumps down cobbled streets. His lodgings are separate from her lodgings. How far he has come to stay so far away from her, at an inn across town from her college that she insists is the best. He walks more slowly than her natural pace, not because he is tired, but because he would rather the seconds didn’t pass so quickly.
“So, how does it feel?” he asks. “That it’s all ending?”
“Odd. It feels like it ended a while ago and we’re just lingering before something else begins,” she says, adding with a smile, “not necessarily in a bad way.”
She talks him through the schedule for tomorrow, the ceremony, a restaurant she has booked for lunch. They pass a group of her peers, andfondly she promises to catch up with them later. When they have gone, she tells him all of their names with great significance. He forgets them almost instantly. He cannot help it—his mind ascribes no importance to them. How fleeting were his own college friendships? In years to come, these rounded, fleshy people with surnames and specific opinions and obscure tastes will become no more than archetypes in her mind, outlines of fortunes that may or may not arrive.
At a creaking backstreet pub, they order beer-battered fish. Al’s appetite is warping with his sense of time, hours and days collapsing into years. He eats ravenously.
“How is Sebastian?” Viola asks.
“Good. I think. It’s hard to say.” He smiles at her and she raises an eyebrow knowingly. “He’s been coming home a bit. It still feels like he’s avoiding me.”
“I see.”
“You know, I think when you come home, it will really help him.”
Viola’s forehead twists into a knot. She chews slowly. “So,” she says. “About that.”
She tells him she has been accepted into a master’s program in London. That she has found some funding and it would be a shame not to take the opportunity.
“You sound unsure about it.”
“No, it makes sense.”
“Did you look at other programs? You know, if you came to Harvard, we could get your tuition waived—”
“I’m also seeing someone.”
Someone behind him opens the door and a gust of cold air moves a napkin across the table. A part of his brain is still reminding him to search for the London program when he’s back in his room tonight, to check the ranking and the reviews of the professors, the safety of the campus area. And another part has stopped moving entirely, is fixated on the daughter who has become an unknowable woman.
“Is he a student?”
“No, he’s older.”
So this is the change he felt in her—love! An image forms of this older man, some English boy in his twenties, gone to the city for work. What would it take to steal her heart? He feels sick with the realization that Viola is as old as Susan was when they met. How little they knew about the world then, how useless were all other choices when they had found each other.
“Is it serious?”
She laughs a little bit and says: “It’s not, you know, a terminal illness.”
