“Yeah, well, life doesn’t always work that way.”
I do know that. Ten years after my parents divorced, Margo called in a tearful rant about an auto accident that she claimed Mom wouldn’t have been anywhere near if Dad hadn’t made her feel so unwanted that she dated anyone who asked, including a guy with a history of DUIs. An auto accident. She was dead before I could ask her about all the things I didn’t know.
Which is about me. But we are talking about Jack. “Where’s your dad now?”
“Berkeley. He gave it a couple of years here, but the memories were hard to take.”
“I’d have thought you’d leave, too.”
Bending, he picks up a rock and wings it into the sea. “And let your father off the hook?” he asks almost distractedly. “Are you kidding? I want him to see me here in this house, year after year after year, and remember the family he destroyed.”
I can’t imagine nurturing that kind of bitterness. “How do you do that—live with constant anger?”
A piece of driftwood is bobbing in the shallows. Sloshing over, he catches it and lobs it toward the firepit. Then he straightens and puts his hands on his hips, thumbs bearing the weight while his fingers lie long and loose against the cotton tee. He takes a visible breath. “My work helps. Animals appreciate what you do for them. Pets give the unconditional love parents can’t.”
I want to tell him that what I feel for Joy is unconditional to the extreme. But Elizabeth never felt that. Nor, really, did my mother, or she’d have answered the questions I lacked the courage to ask.
With mention of Jack’s work, we’ve come full circle, but I don’t want to leave him just yet. I always felt a connection to the boy he used to be. Time and adversity haven’t changed that. I hated the anger between us twenty years ago and would give anything to replacethose memories with kinder ones. It has nothing to do with my being the peacemaker and everything to do with my feelings for Jack. The past may be over. But I want us to be friends.
Returning to the splotch of a firepit, I sit on one of the logs at its edge and hug my knees.
He continues to stand for a while, ankle-deep in the surf as he studies the midnight sky on the far horizon. Looking for Elizabeth, as Anne claims? No. He’s looking there because it’s beautiful, because it puts provincial Bay Bluff in context and reminds us that we’re part of a larger world. Way back when, we used to look at that horizon and imagine the places we’d go and the things we’d share. I know he has gone places since. I googled him after he called, of course I did. He got his degree in veterinary medicine at UC Davis, one of the best, and I’m sure he didn’t limit his travels to California. I’m sure he traveled. But I refuse to believe it was the same as we imagined, because I went places, too. It wasn’t worse without him. Just different.
But this is history, and here we are in Bay Bluff eyeing that same horizon. We often talked about the comfort of the sea. Surprising, given the circumstances, I feel it now.
Apparently Jack does, too, because, after several minutes, he joins me at the firepit. Once upon a time, we shared a log. Margo would glare each time, and while I cared, Jack did not. Now, though, he sits one log over with his legs sprawled.
We don’t talk. I might have remembered nights when this fire blazed and we were all here, or nights when it was just Jack and me. But I don’t want to remember. Right now, I’m the me who lives in the moment, and this moment is nostalgic in an undemanding way.
“Why did you call me?” I ask. I haven’t planned to speak, but there is my voice.
And then his. “Because I felt bad. I shouldn’t interfere with your daughter—”
“I mean in New York. After my father showed up at your house. Why did you call me and not Margo or Anne?”
“Because you’re the only one in the family with brains.”
“That’s not true.” Margo is the intellect of the family, and Anne is running a successful restaurant.
“The only one with common sense.”
“They have it.”
“Not when it comes to your parents.”
“And I do?” I make a guttural sound. “That’srich.” When it comes to my parents, I’m raw emotion in an airtight jar.
“Well, you’re the only one I trust,” he states in the deep voice that I’d loved once.
And okay. Yes. Maybe that’s what I need to hear. Maybe I need to know that a little of the past remains for him, too. If I say it, of course, he may deny it, or start in on my father again. So I just nod and lower my arms around my legs, folding my body in two.
“Cold?” he asks.
I shake my head, and focus on the waves. Their rhythm is a lullaby—sweet, soothing, elementary—that takes me back in the best of ways. And I’m definitely back there when I feel Jack’s foot brush mine, warmth in the night chill as he shifts his legs. Was it accident or intention? I don’t know. But I don’t move, barely breathe. That one glancing touch brings so many memories that I’m momentarily engulfed.
“Your father knows.”
Pop.The bubble bursts. Convinced that I imagined his touch, I turn my head so that my cheek rests on my thigh. His face is in profile—the nose that is too sharp for beauty but so reflects his manner as to be laughable—his bearded jaw, chin, and upper lip—the protrusion of his brow that tells of a frown.
