CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
"He died a few years ago," Richard said.
"I found out from a lawyer. He'd had two children.
I have a niece and a nephew I have never met, grown now, and a brother in the ground I let our father turn into a stranger, and I did it to be safe, and Jackson, listen to me, because I am only going to be able to say this once and badly.
" His father's voice, for the first time in Jackson's entire life, was not certain.
"When your marriage came out, and I stood in that study and made it about the podium, I heard myself.
I heard our father. I have spent my whole life becoming the man who erased my brother, and I was starting, I was already starting, to do it to you and to a boy named Ethan, and I only saw it because you finally did the thing I never did.
You chose. Late. Badly. In the wrong order.
But you chose, and you said it to my face, and no one in this family has said a true thing to my face since Daniel walked out the door forty years ago. "
"Dad."
"I'm not going to the yard. I meant that.
I don't know how to undo forty years in a yard with a five-year-old and I won't practice on him.
" Richard paused. "But I'm going to find Daniel's children.
That's the thing I can do. I can't fix what I did to my brother, he's gone, but he left two people in the world and I've never met them, and I'm an old man now, and I would like to not die having made his same choice twice.
That's all. That's what I called to say.
Your mother's braver than me. She always was. Go be in the yard. One of us should."
And the line went dead, his father ending the call the way he always did, unilaterally, when he was finished, except this time what he'd been finished saying was the truest thing Jackson had ever heard him say, and Jackson stood in his apartment on the fifty-second floor and understood that the cowardice went back further than he'd ever known, back to a man named Daniel and a father before Richard, a whole inherited architecture of men choosing safety over love one year at a time, and that it had taken a bored intern and a national scandal and a woman brave enough to leave to finally, in the third generation, begin to break it.
POV: Sharon
By the third visit Eleanor had stopped wearing the cashmere coat, which Sharon understood to be significant, the way you understand a foreign language you've started to pick up by ear.
She came in ordinary clothes now, good ones still, she couldn't help that, but clothes a person could kneel in, and she'd learned the yard, learned which of Ethan's games had rules and which were traps, learned that Biscuit accepted exactly one biscuit per visit and would lie to your face for a second.
She and Ethan had a thing now, a whole shared vocabulary built in three afternoons, and Sharon watched it with a complicated heart, because it was beautiful and because it was a thing she'd been denied for five years by the very woman now kneeling in her mother's grass, and both of those were true, and she was getting better at holding two true things without dropping either.
They were on the porch, the two women, while Ethan ran the far end of the yard narrating a train disaster to the dog.
"He asked about his father last night," Sharon said.
She didn't know why she was telling Eleanor.
Maybe because Eleanor was the only other person who loved Jackson and saw him clearly at the same time, which was a smaller club than you'd think.
"Asked why Daddy doesn't stay over. And I did the thing I promised myself I'd do, I told him the true small version.
Mommy and Daddy love each other but they're figuring out if they can live together, and it's grown-up-sized, and it's not his fault.
" She wrapped her hands around her cold coffee.
"And he looked at me, and he said, 'But you do love him.
' Not a question. A five-year-old fact-checking me.
And I said yes. Because it's true and I'm done lying to him.
And he nodded like that settled it, like if the love's there the rest is just paperwork, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that's the one thing that turns out not to be true.
Love's not the paperwork. I know that better than anybody. "
Eleanor was quiet for a moment.
"May I say a thing you won't want to hear," she said. "And you can tell me to mind my business, I've earned no standing here, I know that."
"You can say it. I'll decide after."
"He's not the same man." Eleanor watched her grandson through the yard.
"I've known Jackson for thirty-eight years and I have never seen him the way he is now.
He stood up to his father, which I could not do in forty years of marriage.
He gave up managing that board, which is the only thing he was ever trained to do.
He drives out here and fixes gates and lets your mother be cold to him and asks nothing.
That man did not exist a couple of months ago.
You made him, in a way, by leaving. Your leaving did what six years of my son's own conscience couldn't." She turned to Sharon.
"I'm not telling you to take him back. I would never.
You've more than earned the right to be done, and if you're done, I'll still be in this yard every week you'll have me, because I'm here for that boy, not to lobby for my son.
But I watched you flinch just now when I said he's not the same man.
And I've been a woman who talked herself out of things she wanted because wanting them felt like weakness.
So I'm just going to say, once, and then never again: you're allowed to want it.
If you want it. Wanting it doesn't erase what he did.
You can want it and still make him prove it for a year.
But you're allowed to want it, Sharon. That's all.
Being strong enough to leave doesn't mean you have to be too proud to ever go back, if going back is the true thing.
Those are different. I got them confused for forty years. "
Sharon looked out at her son, who had crashed the imaginary train and was now conducting its funeral with great ceremony, the dog as chief mourner.
"I don't know what I want yet," she said, and it was the truest thing she'd said in weeks.
"That's the honest answer. The day I left, I knew.
I knew so clearly I packed a whole life in three days.
And now he's out here being the man I needed for six years, and I'm so angry that he waited until I left to become him, and underneath the angry I don't know, and I hate not knowing, I've always known things, it's my whole.
I read rooms. I read people. And I can't read my own self on this one.
" She set down the coffee. "So I'm not going to decide it fast. He waited six years to be brave.
He can wait while I figure out if brave-now is enough, or if it's just the right thing at the wrong time, which is its own kind of tragedy and I've been living in one of those already and I won't walk straight into another. "
"That's fair," Eleanor said. "That's more than fair."
"Also I might just be done. I want to be honest that that's still on the table."
"It should be. It should always be on the table.
The day it's not on the table is the day you've stopped choosing and started building pools.
" Eleanor said it lightly, and then caught herself.
"Jackson told me that phrase. Building pools.
He said it's yours, that it means something in your family.
He's been using it about himself. 'I built pools my whole life.
' I didn't know what it meant and I didn't ask, but I think I understand it now, watching you.
" She stood, brushing off her ordinary trousers.
"You come from people who taught you to notice the pools.
That's a gift, even when it hurts. My family taught us to build them and call it love.
Yours taught you to see them. Ethan's going to have both, God help him, the seeing and the building both in his blood, and the only thing that decides which wins is which one he watches his parents choose. " She looked at Sharon. "No pressure."
And Sharon laughed, a real one, the first real one in a while, surprised out of her, and across the yard Ethan looked up at the sound of his mother actually laughing and grinned without knowing why, and for a moment the yard held all of it at once, the grief and the hope and the anger and the train funeral and the two women learning to stand each other, both things, all things, true.