Chapter Twenty-Four #5
People she didn’t recognize. People she did.
A woman she assumed was Becky, having seen her from a distance a number of times years ago.
A man with thinning gray hair sitting in a chair by one of the windows, talking to a dark-haired young woman.
As people shifted about, Margaret caught a glimpse of a man who might be Cal, dressed in a jacket and tie, holding a plate of food.
He appeared to have his ear turned, listening closely to someone just out of view.
His expression lifted into a smile. It was Cal.
As soon as she saw his face brighten, she knew she shouldn’t have come.
Or she should have come sooner, when it could have been just her and Tom and Felix.
Tom’s letter had taken three days to reach her; she’d waited two days to decide.
It didn’t matter now, she just knew that she hadn’t come to stand in a room with all of them, be a spectacle—certainly not an hour after they buried Felix.
Her eyes moved to the window on the right, and the person standing there, in profile, was her son.
In a light-blue shirt and dark trousers, his suit coat off, his tie tugged down a little from his neck.
He was receiving a kiss on the cheek, Margaret saw, from the dark-haired young woman.
When she stepped away, he lingered in the window, his hands in his pockets, looking at the house across the street, or at the afternoon sky, or at nothing at all; she couldn’t tell.
And then he was looking at her.
Instinctively, she took half a step back on the sidewalk.
But wasn’t hiding from him against everything she’d come here for, or almost everything?
She’d come to see Felix one more time and to pay her respects to the good that they’d shared together.
And she’d come to see her son. She’d wondered, since receiving his letter, if the truth, or some of the truth, had reached him by now.
If he knew about Cal and had even formed some sort of bond with him, so that, with Felix gone—
But if ever there was something it wasn’t her place to inquire about, it was that. Not today, especially—even if today it mattered most.
Would she leave without seeing him, then, without speaking to him, because she still couldn’t face up to what she’d done?
When she stepped forward and looked back up, he wasn’t in the window. Her heart wobbled as she wondered where he’d gone. She couldn’t just stand out here, waiting. She turned to walk back up the street, and she was almost to her car when she heard his voice.
“Mom?”
He’d cut across the Jenkinses’ lawn and was walking toward her on the sidewalk. She reminded herself to breathe.
He stopped within a few feet of her, his brow a bit moist in the summer heat, his chest rising and falling beneath his shirt.
She’d spent so much time peering into his face when he was a baby, and then a boy, looking for evidence of Cal, that she’d never once appreciated seeing herself in him.
There she was—but handsome. Stunning, really.
From what she could tell, at the end of the growing season, Tom was Cal’s size but dipped in her features—like a wick dipped in paraffin. Thirty years old.
“You got my letter,” he said.
“Yes. Thank you for that.”
He nodded, told her she was too late and looked pained as he said it.
They weren’t to hug each other, she concluded.
Because his letter had said so little, she asked him what the illness had been, and she wasn’t surprised when he told her—but lamented that carton of Lucky Strikes she’d mailed to Felix back in 1943.
She lamented all the ones he’d smoked on his own, too, and that she’d never gotten on him to quit.
“I wasn’t sure if I should come,” she said. “I shouldn’t have hesitated.”
“I might have written sooner.”
She couldn’t tell if there was regret in that, or if he was telling her he’d had options. The intensity of his eyes—the same jade as hers—both held her and made her want to look away. As if, with them, he was trying to etch her portrait. “I’m so sorry, Tom,” she said.
His brow lowered. “About Felix?”
Not Dad. Felix. So he knew, then. He was letting her know that he knew.
“Yes. But more than that,” she said, and without knowing she would say it until it left her mouth, “I am sorry about everything.”
Five words that were, for her, a watershed.
And the closest she could come to explaining—how could she tell him what she was still coming to understand herself?
Growing up, she’d so badly wanted her mother to come back and explain.
To say why she’d done what she’d done, and also how she’d managed to live with it.
That explanation, Margaret had thought, might set her free of wondering and change the way she saw herself.
As a child, she’d wanted it so that she could feel better about who she was; as an adult, she’d wanted it so that she could feel better about what she’d done.
But time had either killed the want or made her wiser.
I knew it would be better for you if I went away.
I didn’t understand how to do what I had to do, as a mother.
I didn’t understand how to love you. Would it have changed anything if her mother had appeared at some point—or appeared tomorrow—and said these things to her?
No. Would it change anything if she said them to Tom?
No.
She’d gotten no explanation, but the truth couldn’t be more bluntly obvious: her mother didn’t want to be a mother, and so had stopped being one.
Margaret had removed herself from Tom’s life because she was dissatisfied with her own, and because she’d screwed everything up in such a way that she couldn’t bear to be around when it all came crashing down.
What she wanted from her mother was remorse.
What she wanted—she didn’t fully understand this until she was looking into her son’s eyes, her own eyes—was for her mother to tell her she was sorry. Deeply, truly sorry.
But Tom looked confused by her words. He drew his head back an inch. “Everything?” he said.
“I know there’s nothing I can say to explain why I did what I did. And I can’t blame you for whatever you might think of me. But, yes, I am sorry, Tom. For everything.”
No, no, no. He’d wanted to see his father and his mother in the same room together, to know that, by the time his father died, his parents would have had one more conversation, he didn’t even have to be there for it, didn’t care what it was about, he just had a picture of them spending a few calm minutes together, on the other side of all the trouble, and he wanted that picture to be real so that he could carry it around in his mental wallet for the rest of his life.
He’d wanted her to be there, to see him seeing his father out.
And he wanted to give her the opportunity to explain why she’d walked out on him.
Why she hadn’t even said goodbye. No matter what the explanation was, he would have welcomed it from her.
But not this. He never would have written to her if he’d thought she might show up and try to hand him a blanket apology for things that’d had such a profound and painful impact on his life. He didn’t want to hear her apologize without telling him why.
“You didn’t say goodbye,” he said, instead of asking anything. “You said completely nothing, ever. And you didn’t call.”
“It’s unthinkable, what I did—but it’s way in the past now, this is already such a hard day, and—”
“You’re too late,” he said for the second time.
She knew what he meant—but then realized he meant more than that, and he was full of sorrow at having to point out an unfortunate, obvious fact.
“Tom, no. I need to tell you something, I want to say something to you now. I am sorry—it’s something about me.
But maybe it’s—the thing is, Tom, I did to you what my mother did to me.
I was abandoned as a baby. At an orphanage.
I was an infant, and I was raised there, outside of Columbus, and…
” The words had never left her mouth before.
She sometimes thought he, of all people, was the last who should ever know.
Felix hadn’t known, nor had Cal. And as she said it now, desperate to hold on to him after being away for more than twenty years, she wondered how it helped her case that she’d suffered the same fate.
He might even hear what she said as a paltry excuse—that she’d learned this behavior and couldn’t be held responsible for her actions.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t seem to believe her. Or hear her. His eyes were glassy, and his head was shaking no, almost imperceptibly. From somewhere down the street—life going on, brutal as ever—a lawn mower fired up. He took half a step backward and said, “I should get back inside.”
She hadn’t even shaken his hand. She would have given anything just to touch him. Anything—
He rushed forward, suddenly, and met her, throwing his arms around her, planting his face against her chest for just a moment and saying into the collar of her blouse what might have been I forgive you or even I love you; she would probably never know.
He dashed back into the house.