15. Margo #2
“I believe you love her.” My father’s voice is quiet, and heavier for it. “I never doubted that part. But you’re going to sit there a moment and let an old man say a thing to you, because I think you need to hear it from someone who’s got no reason to be kind.”
“Say it.”
“Love isn’t enough. You’ve learned that this week, I think, but you’ve not felt it yet, not all the way down.
” A pause, and I picture him turning his tea mug in his hands the way he does.
“My girl spent five years loving a man who couldn’t work out how to love her back.
She made herself small to fit your world, and your world kept finding ways to spit her out.
Your mother. Your people. The whole great machine of your life that never once had room in it for her. ”
“I’m trying to change that.”
“I can see you’re trying. I’ve watched you all week. On my boats, with my grandchild, the way you look at my daughter when you think there’s no one to see it.”
Another silence, longer.
“You’re a better man than I took you for, Sebastian.
I’ll give you that freely. But you’re not a finished one.
And here’s the hard part, so listen close.
If you can’t be sure, all the way to the bottom of yourself, that you won’t do this to her again, then the kindest thing you will ever do for her is to stop.
Stop turning up. Stop making her hope. Let the wound close.
If you love her the way you say, then love her enough to let her heal, even if it’s not with you. ”
The quiet after that goes on so long I think it’s over.
Then Sebastian, barely more than a breath: “I understand.”
***
He finds me in the garden.
The same garden. Dorothy’s scales are still on the path where the tide of this whole day started, and I’m standing in the last of the light with my arms wrapped around myself, and I don’t turn when I hear him come through the gate.
“I heard you,” I say. “You and my father.”
“I thought you might.”
“He’s right. About all of it.”
“I know he is.” Sebastian stops a careful distance away, the way he’s learned to. “That’s the trouble with your father. He’s right in a way that doesn’t leave a man anywhere to stand.”
I turn around. In the failing light he looks older than I’ve ever seen him, worn down to a plain honesty, all the polish stripped off and nothing left but the tired man underneath.
“What she did today,” he starts. “My mother…”
“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. “Don’t you apologize for her. Her cruelty was never yours to carry, and I won’t have you standing in my mother’s garden taking the blame for a thing she did with her own mouth.”
“I should have seen it coming. I should have been here.”
“You were busy being a hero at the docks, apparently.” At his flinch, I almost smile. “The whole harbor’s heard. My mother heard. You threw your own mother off the island and threatened to end Therese, and you did it where everyone could watch.”
“I meant every word of it.”
“I know you did.” And that’s the maddening thing, that I do know, that I believe him now in a way I couldn’t two weeks ago. “It doesn’t undo what happened in this garden while you were doing it.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
We stand there in the dark, and I wait for him to push. To argue, to plead, to make one of his cases the way he always does, the way he did on the cliff and in the café. I’ve built my footing around the pushing. I know how to hold a line against a man who’s coming at it.
He doesn’t push.
“I’m going to go,” he says instead.
A cold weight drops through me, fast, and I hate that it does.
“What?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll go back to the city. The board, my mother, the whole mess I’ve been letting rot while I’ve been here.
” He says it evenly, but there’s a tremor under it he can’t quite hide.
“I’ve been thinking about what your father said.
And about what my mother must have said to you today, the shape of it, even if I don’t know the words. And I keep landing in the same place.”
“Which is?”
“That I keep doing this to you.” His voice cracks, just at the edge.
“I turn up. I make you hope. I get you to lower your guard an inch, and then some catastrophe of my own making walks up your garden path, my mother, my company, my own dense skull, and you get hurt all over again. And every time, it’s you who bleeds for it. Not me. You.”
“Sebastian…”
“I’m not giving up.”
He says it fast, as if he needs me to have it before anything else.
“Understand that. I’m not walking away from you, and I’m not walking away from us, whatever’s left of it.
But I’ve spent this whole time pushing. Turning up on your doorstep, kneeling on your cliffs, filling up all the space in your head so you couldn’t hear yourself think.
And that’s just one more way of making it about what I want. ”
He drags a hand down his face.
“You deserve to decide this without me standing over you. You deserve room to breathe and think and choose, on your own, without me in your ear every hour making you feel things you’re not ready to feel. So I’m going to give you that. The one thing I never once gave you in five years. Space.”
I don’t have an answer. For the first time in this whole exhausting war, he’s disarmed me by refusing to fight.
“You’re leaving,” I say slowly, “to stop hurting me.”
“I’m leaving so you can hear yourself again.
” He almost smiles, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve seen.
“And if, when your head is clear and no one’s crowding it, you decide there’s nothing here worth saving, then I’ll sign every paper you put in front of me and I’ll never trouble your harbor again.
But it’ll be your choice. Made in the quiet.
Not a thing I talked you into on a bad night. ”
The whole day rises up in me at once, Dorothy and the fish and the prophecy still ringing in my ears, he’ll choose the company, he always does, and here he is choosing to leave me my own mind, and I can’t make the two of them fit inside the same man.
“Come here,” I hear myself say.
“Margo, I don’t think…”
“I’m not asking you to think. Come here.”
He crosses the space between us, slow, and I reach up and I pull his face down to mine, and I kiss him.
It’s nothing like the boathouse.
There’s no war in it, no fury, no five years of grievance clawing to get out. It’s slow. It’s aching. It’s the kind of kiss you give someone when you’ve run clean out of words and there’s still so much left to say.
His hands come up to cradle my face like I’m a thing that might break, and I let them, and I taste salt that could be the sea and could be one of us crying, and I don’t try to work out which.
I kiss him goodbye, even though he swears it isn’t goodbye.
I kiss him as if it might be, just in case.
When we finally part, he presses his forehead to mine and just breathes, and neither of us says the thing we’re both thinking, which is that we’ve become very good at kissing each other at the exact moment everything is ending.
“Goodnight, Margo,” he says.
“Goodnight.”
He walks out through the gate, past his mother’s scales on the path, and he doesn’t look back, and I stand in the dark garden with my mouth still warm and my heart in open rebellion against every sensible thing I’ve decided this month.
***
I wake to gray light and cold sheets and a house too quiet.
There’s a note on the kitchen table, in his hand, weighted down with the saltshaker so the sea breeze through the window wouldn’t take it.
Margo,
I’m not going to fill this with sorry, though I am, for all of it, for the husband I wasn’t and the years I wasted and the woman I let you become when I wasn’t looking. You’ve heard my sorry. You’ve earned the right to never hear it again.
So instead: I’m leaving you the quiet. Take it. Take as long as you need. Decide about me the way you decide everything, with your own clear head and nobody leaning on the scale. Whatever you choose, I’ll honor it.
I came for you once, a long time ago, and got there too late. I’m not too late this time. I’m just learning, finally, that loving you sometimes means stepping back and letting you be the one who reaches.
I’ll be waiting. Not pushing. There’s a difference. It took me far too long to learn it.
Yours, still and always, S
I read it three times. Then I fold it in half, and in half again, and I press it flat against the table with my hand like I can hold the whole of him there under my palm.
I don’t cry. That surprises me. I just sit in my mother’s kitchen with the gray dawn coming up over the harbor and a folded note under my hand and the strangest feeling in my chest, not grief exactly, not relief exactly. A third thing, in between. The feeling of a held breath, finally let out.
Now, no one is standing over me, asking me to decide.
The house is mine, the quiet is mine.
The choice is mine.
The door creaks. Sandy stands in it, her elephant tucked under one arm, her curls a wreck, her eyes still soft with sleep, and she looks around the empty kitchen with a small crease forming between her brows.
“Mommy?” she says. “Where did Daddy go?”
And I realize I have no idea how to answer her.
Because for the first time, I’m not sure if the answer is away, or ahead of us, waiting.