7. “Sunday Two” #2
I put my hands on his chest.
I could feel the steady beat of his heart under the cotton of his shirt.
The shirt was the gray one. The Christmas Eve sweater from when I was sixteen had been replaced by the simpler thing he wore when he came to the compound after work.
Underneath it I could feel the shape of him.
The small ridge of an old collarbone fracture I had noticed on Friday night and not asked about.
“When,” I said.
“After next Sunday. After everything is settled with Ardent. After the FBI finishes with Marcus Ellery. After we can breathe for five minutes without worrying that something’s about to blow up.
Then I’m going to ask you in the boathouse.
In front of everyone who matters. And you’re going to say yes. ”
“I’m already saying yes.”
“Say it again Sunday.”
I kissed him.
It was not a kiss like Friday’s. It was not desperate or urgent or the kind of kiss that came from four years of waiting. It was a quiet kiss. A promise. The kind of kiss that happened in the dark when you already knew the answer to every question you were about to ask.
He held my face.
His hands were warm.
“Your father told me something else,” he said, against my hair.
“What.”
“He told me that your mother gave him Marilynne Robinson a long time ago. Before you were born. And she told him it was because she wanted him to understand what patience was. What waiting was. What it meant to believe in something you couldn’t hold yet.”
My throat tightened.
“She knew,” I said.
“She knew. She was asking him to wait for your father to grow into the right version of himself. She was asking him to understand that love wasn’t something you could rush or force. It was something you had to be patient enough to recognize when it finally came.”
“And she was asking him to wait for me.”
“She was asking him to wait for you.”
I sat down on the leather couch. Not because I wanted to sit. Because my legs were not entirely on my side at that moment.
He sat beside me.
The dock creaked in the dark outside. The wind moved across the surface of the Sound and the water made the small slapping sound it made against the pilings and somewhere across the water the running lights of a fishing boat blinked very slowly: red, white, red, white.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
“Eden — “
“Tell me. Tell me what I missed. Tell me what she said to you the year my father got elected. The year she gave you Robinson. I have been listening to you and my father talk about her for ten years and I have never asked you to tell me what she actually said. So tell me.”
He was quiet for a long time.
The small wood stove had not been lit. The room held the cold of the Sound around us. He took my hand and he turned it palm up in his lap and he ran his thumb across the small line of veins on the inside of my wrist and he started.
“It was 2017,” he said. “Your father had just won his third race. He had been running for six months and he had not slept in five of them. Your mother was managing the household, you, Aspen, and a thirteen-year-old Sloane in a townhouse in Georgetown that the campaign had rented because it made for better optics. I came down for the swearing-in. I stayed at your house for three nights. The first night, your mother put you in pajamas and you came downstairs in the green sweater you wore that Christmas and you sat in the chair by the fire and you watched me open the book she had given me and you smiled at me in a way that I did not yet know how to look back at.”
“I didn’t understand what you were looking at.”
“Neither did I. Not yet. But your mother remembered. She watched me watch you. And the next morning she handed me a copy of Gilead and she said: Atlas, this is what I’m reading right now. I think you should read it too. I think you’ll find it useful for the next twenty years.”
“What did she mean.”
“At the time, I thought she meant the law. I thought she meant the way the book is about the things a man does and doesn’t say to his son.
I thought she was making a comment about Caleb, who was seven, and who I had no idea how to be a father to.
So I read it. Three times that year. Each time I thought I understood another piece of what she was telling me. ”
“And then.”
“And then she got sick. I did not read it again until the year after she died. I read it that year because I didn’t know what else to do with the grief.
I read it three more times. And the seventh time I read it, you were twenty-one, and you were home from your fellowship in London for spring break, and you were in your father’s kitchen barefoot pouring a glass of wine for me, and I understood for the first time that the book she had given me was not about the law.
It was about a man who had loved a woman for so long that by the time he was allowed to say it, he could not say it without weeping. ”
I started crying.
It was not a sob.
It was the small quiet kind of crying that happens when you understand something for the first time and the understanding is bigger than your face.
He did not move.
He did not try to wipe it away.
He held my hand on his lap and let me cry for a very long minute.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“My mother told you to wait for me.”
“Yes.”
“And you waited.”
“Yes.”
“You waited four years after I was old enough.”
“I waited three. The fourth was you. The fourth was watching you marry the wrong man and try not to throw a chair through a window.”
I laughed.
The laugh came out wet.
He gave me his sleeve.
I wiped my face on his sleeve like I was twelve years old and he was my favorite uncle, and the absurdity of that — of using a forty-six-year-old divorce attorney’s sweater as a handkerchief — broke something open in me, and I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder and let myself stay there.
He put his arm around me.
The wind moved against the boathouse window.
A loon called somewhere across the water, and then again, the second time farther away.
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“I want to take you back to the city tomorrow night. To my apartment. I want you to see where I have been when I have not been at your father’s house. I want you to see the books on my nightstand. I want you to see where I read your mother’s book the seventh time.”
“Yes.”
“I want to do it slowly. I want to do it with the door locked and your phone off and no one in the world knowing where you are except me.”
“Yes.”
I lifted my head.
I kissed him very softly.
He did not deepen it.
He let it stay what it was, which was a kiss between two people who were in no rush.
Then he pulled back and he tipped my chin up and he looked at me and he said: “Your father is going to be in Hartford on Wednesday. The penthouse will be empty. I will pick you up from the office at six.”
“Yes.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever happens this week, hold your face.”
“I will.”
“Whatever Ardent does. Whatever Tristan does. Whatever your father asks. Hold it.”
“I will.”
He stood up.
He gave me his hand.
I stood.
He was looking at the door.
I followed his eyes.
The boathouse had a small narrow window inset in the door, a porthole really, half-frosted with a strip of clear glass at eye level.
Through the strip of clear glass I could see, very dimly, the face of a teenage boy.
Backlit by the path lights up the lawn. Standing absolutely still on the dock outside.
His mouth was open.
His hand was on the doorframe like he had reached to push it and then frozen.
I knew his face from photographs in my father’s office.
Caleb.
Atlas’s son.
Sixteen years old. Six feet tall. Driving age for two months. Standing on the boathouse dock in Connecticut at 9:47 on a Sunday night, having driven himself up from the city in his mother’s car for reasons we would not know for another forty seconds.
Atlas crossed to the door.
He unlocked it.
He opened it.
The cold came in.
Caleb stepped into the boathouse with the keys to his mother’s car still in his hand and his eyes moving from his father to me and back to his father and his face doing the thing a teenager’s face does when it has not yet decided whether to be furious or relieved.
He looked at me.
He looked at Atlas.
He said, very quietly: “Dad.”
That was all.
That was enough.