O’Neil left Jack with the children and went up to Kay’s room. “Breaking news. I just punched your husband.”
“Did you kill him?” Kay smiled weakly. “You look so happy.”
He showed her his bandaged knuckles. “Just minor damage. Would you like me to?” A joke: but he would do it if she asked.
Kay shook her head. “Maybe later.” She sighed deeply, haltingly. Two sentences, and already she was exhausted. “Right now I’d like to see my children, please.”
He brought the boys to her and waited outside with Jack. It was noon when they emerged: Noah and Simon looking confused and uncertain, Sam holding his face bravely so they wouldn’t know what was happening. Be strong, Kay had whispered to him. Help your brothers. O’Neil left Jack with Kay and took the boys to the cafeteria and tried to feed them, and an hour later Jack came down. O’Neil saw him first, as he passed through the door and stood a moment, drying his glasses and then his face with a handkerchief. Then he strode briskly to the table.
“Okay, boys,” he said, rubbing his hands together.
When O’Neil returned to the room, Kay was sleeping. The morphine button was in her hand, her thumb resting on it. Without opening her eyes she pushed the button. O’Neil watched as the morphine moved through her, like rings on a pond, easing her into a state far deeper than sleep and yet of little use. For years it had been just the two of them. Now, for the first time since Kay had gotten sick, he felt her exhaustion as if it were his own. He knew what she wanted, and wanted it too; he wanted her suffering to end more than he wanted her not to die.
“I’m not leaving,” he told her.
The nurse brought him dinner; he left the room only to go to the bathroom, and once to call Mary from a pay phone. It was happening, he told her. He couldn’t talk for long. Later that evening Kay awoke, moaning. “God, honey,” she said. Her eyes were open but unfocused. Could she see him? Did she know where she was? Her voice was etched with pain; her words seemed to hang in the air, not sounds alone but things with form and substance. “
God,
honey,
God
.” Then she was silent.
He spent the night in a chair by her bed, and the night after, and just as he promised, was there in the room when she died the next morning.
They went to Paris after all. O’Neil had thought to cancel the trip, but when, at the last minute, Mary’s fellowship came through, he agreed to go; there was no telling if she’d ever get the grant again. With the help of one of her professors they rented an apartment for the month of July in Saint-Germaine, a small town near the end of the Metro line where O’Neil had stayed with friends on a trip after college. O’Neil looked after the girls while Mary wrote or worked at the library, and on weekends they took long drives through the countryside in the car that came, unannounced, with the apartment—an ancient Fiat that stank of stale cigarette smoke and had an engine the size of a milk bottle. At night, when Mary stopped working, he cooked for all of them, trying new recipes with ingredients he’d picked up at the open-air market down the street. Even these simple excursions required a constant vigilance that left him dazed with adrenaline; trying to manage the girls and his awful French besides, he often asked for the wrong things entirely, or else bought gigantic quantities of the right ingredients by accident: a loaf of pâté the size of a shoe box, a liter of salt, an entire wheel of Roquefort cheese. It didn’t matter; Mary was working, the girls were enjoying themselves, Nora laughing herself senseless as the dog shit all over the sidewalks, Leah chatting away in a mishmash of French and English that sometimes seemed to be a language all its own.
“I feel so guilty,” Mary said to him one evening. They were lying in bed, a huge four-poster with a curtain. “Cooped up with Nora and Leah all day. You haven’t even been to the Louvre.”
He couldn’t have cared less about the Louvre. “What’s at the Louvre?” he said, laughing. “I’m fine, I’m perfectly happy.” He hugged her to reassure her this was so. “It’s nice just to be here, to spend so much time with the girls. I’ve been away too long.”
Nevertheless, he decided to go. The car would be too much trouble; he planned to use the train. It took him two hours to assemble his supplies and get the girls dressed and ready, and by then they needed lunch. After he fed them, Leah went down for a nap; by the time she woke up, whining for the cup of heated milk that was her habit, Nora was beginning to fade. She slept two hours, until four o’clock, while O’Neil read the
Tribune,
bouncing Leah on his knee. Then he heard Mary’s footsteps on the stairs.
“How was it?” she said happily. She piled her books onto the table and hugged the girls. “Did you like the paintings?
Aimiez-vous les peintures
?”
“Mona is in top form,” O’Neil said. “You know, I somehow always thought it would be
bigger
.”
Mary, crouched, studied him with her eyes. Her face fell with sympathy. “It didn’t work out, did it?”
O’Neil shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said.
Their last night, they hired a baby-sitter and went to eat at a café down the street. While they waited for their meal, they wrote their final postcards to friends back home: Mary’s family in Minnesota, Mrs. Carlisle, the couple next door who were watching over their house. O’Neil hadn’t seen the boys since the day after the funeral, when Jack had told him that he would be taking them back to St. Louis in August. O’Neil thought at first that he meant for a visit, but realized as they were talking that Jack meant permanently, to live. All of Jack’s family was there, and he would need their help raising the boys, especially Noah and Simon. He had found a teaching job there—a temporary appointment, but one which, with luck, could turn into something long term. He had already submitted his resignation and arranged to put the house up for sale. The move would be hard for Sam, he conceded, but in another year he would be off to college anyway.
O’Neil saved the last postcard for Sam. The boy had barely spoken to him since the day in the car when he had asked O’Neil—what? To be his father? O’Neil had never fully known what to make of the request. The boy had been in pain, no doubt, and still was. Sixteen years old, and all his life people had been asking him to be strong when others could not. Noah’s problems, the divorce, his mother’s illness. Perhaps all he had wanted was for someone else to carry his load. But what could O’Neil have done? He looked at the blank postcard—on the other side was a picture of the Eiffel Tower—waiting to find the words. But none would come.
“O’Neil?” Mary looked at him quizzically. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing.” He capped his pen and did his best to smile. “I’ll see him when we get back. Whatever I have to say, I’ll think of it then.”
Mary offered her hand across the table. “I just want you to know how much this month has meant to me. I know how difficult it’s been for you this last year, and now, spending so much time without me to help, taking care of the girls . . .”
“Really, I was happy to do it. We’ve had a great time together. You’ve wanted to come back for years.”
“Still, it means something, O’Neil.” Her face and voice were serious, almost scolding. “It means something to
me
. I’m just telling you how thankful I am. With all you’ve done, I don’t think anyone has said that to you.”
It was true. No one had.
He traveled north one last time, the week before the summer ended and school began. He took the car, as he had done the first time, all those months ago. The weather was clear, the sky a flawless blue; he treated himself and did not cut east from Albany into Vermont, the quickest route, but instead drove north along the lake, and took a ferry across it. The boat ride from New York to Vermont was forty minutes; he passed it lying on the hood of his car, his eyes closed, the sun spilling on his face, his ears and body tuned to the throb of the engine and the slap of water against the steel plating of the ferry’s hull.
A moving van was parked in the driveway, and two men in jumpsuits were carting out the contents of the house: furniture, appliances, clothing, toys. A thousand crates of books. Jack had set aside some things of Kay’s for O’Neil to take with him—a single cardboard box, containing mostly photographs. In the box O’Neil also found her Phi Beta Kappa key, the engraved silver hairbrush she had had since she was a baby, and her senior thesis from college, a slender, yellowed volume entitled “Wayward Women: The Poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.” The last pleased him the most. Reading it, he knew, he would hear her voice.
“It’s not a lot, I know,” Jack apologized. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt circled with sweat; he had been packing for days. “Really, if there’s anything else you want . . .”
“It’s perfect,” O’Neil said. All his anger had left him, long ago. “Thank you.”
The next day he took the boys to Friendly’s for lunch. The house was empty, a silent, ghostly hall. His nephews would spend another day in town, and on Monday Jack would put them on a plane to St. Louis. Then he would drive west to meet them, and together they would begin their new life.
“What’s St. Louis like?” Simon wanted to know.
“Let’s see.” O’Neil thought a moment. “Well, it’s a lot like here. It’s warmer, that’s one difference. It almost never snows.”
“No snow!” the little boy said, shocked.
“Well, it
can
snow,” O’Neil explained. “I’m not saying it
never
snows. It just doesn’t, most of the time. And plus, your grandparents are there. And all your uncles and aunts and cousins.”
“Will you move there with us?” Noah asked.
“No, but I can come to visit. Or you can come to visit me.”
“Where’s Pennsylvania?” the littlest boy asked. He pronounced it deliberately, like a new word he had just learned:
Pen-cil-vay-nee-a
.
“Well, it’s not so far.”
“Mom’s in heaven,” Noah stated. He was doodling with crayons on his place mat, and did not look up as he spoke.
“That’s right,” O’Neil said. “That’s where she is.”
“With her mommy and daddy. Our other grandparents.”
“Yes, they’re all there together.”
“Cool it, Noah,” Sam said. “Let him eat.” He looked at his uncle. “I’m sorry, O’Neil.”
“No, it’s all right,” O’Neil said. “We can talk about it. I don’t mind at all.”
“Did they die too?” Simon asked.
“Yes, they did, a long time ago. But that doesn’t matter. You see, in heaven there’s no yesterday, or today, or tomorrow. It’s all the same in heaven. So, you’re there already, too, with your mom. Think about it. How could it be heaven if she didn’t have you there?”
Noah frowned. “But I’m alive,” he said.
“Yes, you are. And you’ll live many, many years. Your whole life. But when you get there, it will be like only a day has passed. Not even a day. No time at all. That’s heaven.”
Noah eyed him skeptically. “How do you know?”
O’Neil looked at him, then at Sam. If they had been alone, he would have thrown his arms around the boy and told him how sorry he was, how much he loved him.
“Your mother told me,” O’Neil said.
It happened in September. O’Neil had been back teaching four weeks. He had just turned forty; later, he would wonder if this fact had something to do with what occurred. As the day approached, Mary asked him if he wanted her to plan a party, and though he said no, he knew she would do something. That night, a Friday, he came home to a darkened house. As he opened the door he assumed he would be stepping into the party he had refused, but found only Mary and the girls, coloring with crayons on construction paper at the kitchen table. Happy birthday, Daddy, the girls cried, and hugged him tightly. They showed him what they had made: a picture of the two of them, enclosed in a heart. Go shower, Mary said, as he was admiring it. We have a dinner reservation at seven; Mrs. Carlisle will be here any minute. They dressed and drove to the restaurant, and only when they were seated at their table did O’Neil notice the balloons and the gifts and lift his face to find all his friends there, laughing at him, the oblivious O’Neil.
Forty: how unlikely it seemed. As a boy O’Neil had computed his age in the year 2000—an impossibly distant future—and discovered, to his astonishment, that he would be forty years old. Under the eaves of his bedroom he had wondered, What would the world be like then? Would we be living in outer space, in bubbles under the sea, soaring to work in helicopters? Would he even be able to enjoy these wondrous things, being so old? Yet here he was, the same person, living in the same world, none of it truly changed. He drove a car to work, lived in a house twice as old as he was, looked at the stars when he cared to, feeling only the vague appreciation one gave to anything beautiful and useless and far away. Every day he went to school, just as he had as a boy. Amazing.
Was your birthday all right? Mary asked, driving home from the party. Was it what you wanted? Dozens of old friends had come, some he hadn’t seen for years. His college roommate, Stephen, had even driven down from Boston. O’Neil told her it was; it was perfect, he said. You know, in this light, you don’t look forty, Mary said, and squeezed his hand promisingly. My gift to you comes later, handsome man.
She meant she was pregnant. She did not tell him that night, but he thought she would soon; that was how it had been the first two times, Mary keeping the news to herself until she was sure, living alone with her secret like the answer to a question she wasn’t sure anyone had posed. Well, he thought as sleep came to him, perhaps it wasn’t so. She would tell him, or not. She was, or she wasn’t. He would wait to hear. So, in the meantime, his belief—for that’s what it was—would be a secret too.