22. “Three of Us”
“THREE OF US”
The suite was on the fourteenth floor.
I had not been in this suite since I had stood at the foot of the bed at one in the morning and held a glass of water to Eve’s lips and watched her swallow with the small careful effort of a woman whose body was beginning to let her go.
Chip unlocked the door.
He held it open. He let Eden through first. He let me through second. He shut the door behind us with the same quiet pressure he closed every door with.
The suite smelled like the same furniture polish it had always smelled like.
He poured three bourbons.
I did not protest. He was the senator. The pours were doubles. He brought me one, brought Eden one, kept one. He sat down in the armchair by the window. We sat down on the small sofa across from him.
He took a slow sip.
He set the glass down on the side table.
“Right,” he said.
He looked at me first.
“How long.”
“Six weeks.”
“Since Tuesday.”
“Since Tuesday.”
He nodded.
He looked at Eden.
“And you.”
“Six weeks. Since Tuesday.”
“And before that.”
She did not flinch. She held his eyes.
“Years.”
“How many years.”
“At least four. I have not counted.”
He nodded again. He picked up the bourbon. He put it back down without drinking.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Same question.”
“Yes.”
“How long for you.”
I thought about the answer.
I had been preparing the answer for a week. I had not yet spoken it out loud. I had not been brave enough to say it out loud even to Eden, because saying it out loud meant looking at the years I had been pretending I was a different man than I was.
I said it now.
“I do not know exactly when. I know I noticed at the second Sunday dinner she came home from college. I know I started avoiding the holidays at the compound the year after. I know I became careful around her in a way I was not careful around either of her sisters. I have been careful for a long time, Chip. I am not sure I started counting.”
He looked at me.
He looked at me for a very long time.
“Nine years,” he said.
“At least.”
“Eve told me she had told you to wait.”
I did not speak.
“She told me in 2017. She said: I have asked Atlas to wait for Eden. He does not yet know what I asked. He is going to figure it out.”
The room went quiet.
Eden made a small sound beside me. Not crying. The breath before crying. Her hand found my hand.
I had not known.
I had not known that Eve had told him.
I had thought I had been the only one. I had thought Eve had given me the book and walked out of the room and not told a single person what she had been doing.
She had told the senator.
I put the bourbon down on the side table between us. I put both my hands on my knees the way my own father had held his hands on his knees when he was thinking. I did the breathing my mother had taught me when I was seven. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
I had not known.
I had thought I was the only person who had been carrying the secret for nine years.
I had been carrying it badly. I had been carrying it the way a man carries a thing he is ashamed of. I had been carrying it the way I had carried my divorce, my mother’s death, my own father’s funeral — in the back of my mouth, in the small private room of my chest.
I had not been the only one carrying it.
Eve had been carrying it. She had been carrying it lighter than I had. She had been carrying it the way you carry a thing you have already decided about.
I closed my eyes for a count of three.
When I opened them, Eden was looking at me.
She was not surprised. She had heard her father say it the same as I had. The two of us had heard the same sentence at the same time and the sentence had hit me harder than her because she had grown up understanding her mother and I had grown up not understanding mine.
He watched me.
He let me sit in it.
After a while he said: “I knew. I have known for nine years. I knew when she gave you the book. I knew when she stopped asking you who you were dating. I knew when she said your name in the hospital the second-to-last week of her life and she said: tell Atlas Eden is going to figure it out. He needs to be ready.”
The window had a view of the park. The lights of the building across the street. The slow movement of headlights two stories below.
I looked at my hands.
My hands were not steady.
I was a forty-six-year-old man and my hands were not steady because my best friend of twenty-five years had just told me that his dying wife had given me a book nine years ago and known what she was doing.
Eden was crying.
Quietly. The way she cried. No sound. Her face turned slightly away. Her hand still in mine.
I had not seen Eden cry in front of her father since she was eighteen and Eve died.
I had been at that funeral. I had watched her stand in the third row of the cathedral with her father’s arm around her and her face composed and her eyes dry.
She had not cried at the cathedral. She had cried two days later at the compound, in the kitchen, when she thought nobody was looking, with Mrs. Harris’s arms around her, and I had seen it from the doorway and I had stepped back into the hall because she had not wanted me to see her like that.
She was crying in front of her father now.
He saw it.
He set his bourbon down.
He came across the small living room. He sat down beside her on the small sofa. He put his arm around her and he held her against his shoulder the way he had held her in the cathedral.
He did not speak for a long time.
After a long time he said: “I am not angry, Eden.”
“I know.”
“I am not angry with him either.”
“I know.”
“I am angry with myself.”
She lifted her head off his shoulder.
“For what.”
“For not telling you. Eve told me. I have known for nine years. You came home from your engagement party with Tristan and I sat across from you and I knew you were not happy and I did not say anything because I did not want to be the father who told his daughter who to marry. I let you marry the wrong man for two years. I let you sit in his apartment for two years and try to make a life that you had not chosen. I let you do all of that when I knew. I knew and I did not say.”
“Dad.”
“I am sorry, Eden.”
He did not cry. Chip did not cry. Chip had not cried in front of me since the chapel after Eve’s funeral.
He came close to crying. I could see it. The smallest catch under the words. The line at the corner of his jaw. Then he held it. He held it the way he had held it in the chapel.
He took a long slow breath.
Then he turned to me.
He looked at me over Eden’s head.
His face was the face I knew best in the world.
“Atlas,” he said.
“Chip.”
“I would have told Eve.”
“Yes.”
“She would have known. She would have helped.”
“Yes.”
“Her not being here is not a thing I can fix.”
“No.”
“But she would have wanted us to do this right. So we are going to do this right. We are going to sit at the table tomorrow morning, the three of us, with Mrs. Harris and a pot of coffee, and we are going to write a plan. We are going to call your sisters in for Sunday dinner this week. The whole circle. We are going to tell them at the table, on Sunday, in the dining room, like a family. The press finds out Monday morning, ten a.m., from my office, with a statement Sara writes. Are we clear.”
“We are clear,” Eden said.
“Atlas.”
“We are clear.”
He kept his arm around Eden.
He picked up his bourbon. He held it in his free hand. He took a long slow sip.
“All right,” he said. “Now we go back to the dance. The three of us. We make the rounds. We finish the gala. Nobody knows anything has happened. Tomorrow morning at the compound at seven, my study. The three of us. Mrs. Harris will have coffee.”
“All right.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“Wash your face. I am not having you walk back into that ballroom with your makeup on the wrong side of your nose.”
She laughed. It was the small startled laugh of a person who had not expected to laugh.
She got up. She went into the bathroom. The door clicked.
I sat on the small sofa.
Chip sat in the armchair across from me.
The room was quiet.
He did not speak for a long minute.
Then he said: “I have a question for you. Off the record.”
“All right.”
“Are you going to be good to her.”
“Yes.”
“Forever.”
“Yes.”
“For the rest of my life and the rest of yours.”
“Yes.”
“Do not break her, Atlas. She is the one of my three I worry about least and the one I worry about most. She is twenty-six. She has not yet learned that some of the things she thinks she can survive she cannot. Do not let her find out the hard way.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
He took another sip.
He looked at the window. The lights of the building across the street.
“Eve sat in this chair,” he said. “In 2017. She fell asleep in this chair after dinner because she was too tired to sit through dessert and I brought her up here and she sat in this chair and I sat in the one you are sitting in. We did not say anything for an hour. We just sat. We knew.”
“I remember.”
“I know you do.”
Eden came out of the bathroom.
Her face was clean. Her eyes were a little pink at the corners and otherwise unchanged.
She had reapplied the lipstick. She had pinned the loose piece of hair back into place at the nape of her neck.
She looked the way she had looked an hour earlier when she had stood up on the small stage and read out loud from Marilynne Robinson.
She looked like Eve.
Chip looked at her for a long moment.
Then he stood up.
He held out his hand to her. She took it. She let him pull her to her feet. He kissed her hairline. He held her against his chest for a long second the way fathers do when they have decided to stop holding their daughters that way and have changed their minds for one more time.
He let her go.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The elevator down took twenty seconds.
We took the elevator down together.
In the elevator I held Eden’s hand. Chip stood on her other side with his hand in his trouser pocket and his face the face he wore in public.
We stepped out into the lobby.
He shook the hand of the maitre d’. He kissed the cheek of the foundation chair. He nodded to two reporters. He walked us back into the ballroom at the head of the small group as if he had been with us the whole time.
We made the rounds.
The orchestra played.
Eden danced one more dance with me and one more with Cole and one more with Killian.
She laughed at something Knox said. She kissed Hadley on the cheek.
She hugged her sister Sloane. She got Aspen aside for thirty seconds at the bar and the two of them said something quietly that made Aspen go still and then nod.
Hawk caught my eye from across the room.
He raised his glass.
I raised mine back.
The orchestra started a slow song. Hadley pulled Sterling onto the floor.
Sterling went, laughing, the way men in their late forties go when a woman they have not yet decided whether to love asks them to dance.
They danced two feet too close for a doctor and his sister-in-law’s best friend.
I noted it. I tucked it onto the same shelf where I had put Hawk and Aspen.
Cole watched Sloane finish a dance with the senator from Vermont and step away to find her sister. Cole did not move. He drank his bourbon. He set the glass down. He picked it up again. The glass was the same glass it had been an hour ago.
The boys were going to be the boys. The boys were going to keep being the boys for a long time.
We left at midnight.
The car pulled up to the front of the Pierre and the doorman opened the back door and Eden slid in and I slid in after her. The car pulled away. The Pierre receded behind us.
Eden’s phone buzzed in her clutch.
She looked at the screen.
Her face did the thing her face did when she was deciding what to feel and how much of it.
“What,” I said.
She turned the phone toward me.
A text. Unknown number. Three lines.
Eden. It is Tristan. I need to talk to you. It is about Atlas.
I read it twice. I gave the phone back to her. I looked out the window of the car and I watched Sixty-first Street go past and I did not say anything for a long minute.
I had spent three years trying not to think about Tristan Beauchamp.
I had not enjoyed the three years.