Chapter 7: The Card in His Pocket
I went back the next day.
Alone this time.
Leo was at work.
Mrs.
Johnson knew — she had given me a look over her teacup that morning that said everything without saying anything.
Goldi answered the door in proper clothes this time, a grey jumper and dark trousers, her hair combed.
She had been expecting someone, though not necessarily me.
"Arthur."
"I brought something." I held out the card.
She looked at it without taking it.
At the envelope, at the slight yellowing of it.
"What is this?"
"I bought it the week Leo was born.
I never sent it." I kept my hand out.
"It's yours."
She took it slowly.
Turned it over.
Read the front — it was a simple card, flowers, nothing remarkable — and then opened it.
She read what was inside.
She stood in the doorway for a long time without speaking.
"Come in," she said finally.
We sat in the front room again.
She held the card in both hands.
"I owe you an apology," I said.
"Not for being angry.
I think I was allowed to be angry.
But for — for the story I told myself about you.
For eighteen years of believing you were someone you weren't."
"You believed what the evidence suggested."
"The evidence was incomplete."
"Yes." She looked at the card.
"It was."
"I want to understand something," I said.
"And I need you to answer honestly."
She looked up.
"If you had known — if you had known you'd go into remission, that you'd still be here at sixty-one — would you have made the same choice?"
She didn't answer immediately.
She looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece.
Leo at five, Leo at nine, Leo at fourteen, that gap-toothed grin getting steadily more self-conscious and then, somewhere around sixteen, opening back up again into something more settled.
"No," she said.
"I don't think I would have."
"Then we lost eighteen years for a future that didn't happen."
"Yes."
The word sat between us.
"I'm not saying that to punish you," I said.
"I'm saying it because I think you need to hear it from me.
That it wasn't worth it.
That I would have stayed.
That Leo and I would have been all right."
Her jaw tightened.
"You don't know that."
"No.
But I know us.
And I think we would have been."
She looked down at the card again.
At those eight words I had written twenty-one years ago.
*For the mother of my son.
Wherever you are.*
"I've been so afraid," she said.
"For so long.
Afraid you'd come and it would be — recrimination.
Anger.
Justified anger.
Afraid you'd look at me and I'd see what I'd done to you reflected back."
"And?"
She looked up.
"And you brought me a card."
"I brought you a card."
Something crossed her face — not quite a smile, not quite tears, something between the two that was more honest than either.
"I'm sorry, Arthur," she said.
"I'm so sorry.
Not for loving you both enough to make a terrible decision.
But for making it without you."
I leaned forward.
Rested my elbows on my knees.
"I know," I said.
"I know you are."
We sat together in the pale morning light, the card between us on the small table, the photographs of Leo watching from the mantelpiece.
After a while she said, "What do we do now?"
"I don't know exactly," I said.
"But Leo wants to come on Thursdays.
And I thought — if you were willing — I might come on Saturdays."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Just to talk," I said.
"No pressure.
No — I'm not asking for anything you don't want to give.
I just think eighteen years is long enough to go without talking."
"Yes," she said quietly.
"I think it probably is."
Outside, a car went past.
A dog barked somewhere down the street.
The lavender in the window box moved slightly in the breeze.
"Saturday, then," she said.
"Saturday," I agreed.
I stood to leave.
At the door she stopped me.
"Arthur." She was holding the card against her chest.
"Thank you.
For keeping it."
"I didn't keep it on purpose," I said.
"I just couldn't throw it away."
She nodded.
As if that made complete sense.
As if that was, in fact, the most honest thing I could have said.
I walked home the long way.
Past the school.
May you like
Past the park where Leo had learned to ride a bike on a Saturday morning eleven years ago, wobbling and furious and finally, suddenly, not.
Past all the ordinary things that had made up a life.
