“But what if, as ridiculous as it sounds, it was my destiny? Who names their kid after the loneliest woman in the world?”
“So what if it
is
true. Parents do worse things,” he says, and we
both nod, an acknowledgment that indeed they do. “And besides, I thought we decided that we don’t believe in destiny, that things don’t have to happen for a reason. That that’s all total bullshit.” He looks over at me now and smiles.
“But what if it’s not?” I don’t smile back.
“Yeah,” he says, “but what if it is?”
Anderson kills the engine
in the driveway. A solitary light near the front door casts just enough of a glow to barely make out the house, which is dark but doesn’t appear deserted. There is a red-and-green Indian blanket strewn across the bench on the porch, trash cans outside of the garage, a rake leaning up against the side wood paneling: all signs of life inside.
“So you’re just going to go up and knock?” Anderson asks.
“Yes.” I exhale. “I am just going to go up and knock.”
“Listen.” His voice catches, and he folds his hand over mine. I tear my eyes from the front porch to meet his.
“What?” I say when he falters. “You okay?”
“It’s nothing.” His hand is off mine now, and he waves it through the air, dismissing whatever has gone unspoken. “We’ll talk another time.”
“Okay.”
“Remind me,” he says, “in case I forget.”
“You’re not going to tell me you love me, are you? That I’ve finally ensnared the ungettable Anderson Carroll?” I am still staring at the porch, wondering how I am going to find the strength to ascend it. Now, with this banter, I’m just buying myself time.
“No.” He laughs. “There are things to talk about before I profess my love for you. Just remind me, okay?”
We fall quiet.
“Want me to go with you?” Anderson asks.
I wobble my head but force a weary smile.
No. People have clanged too much in my ear as of late. If I’d trusted myself earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have all become such a mess. This, I’ll do alone. Not because I have to go alone, always. But because this time, I must.
I collect my breath, which is moving quickly through my core, my heart accelerating along with my trepidation.
“Good luck,” Anderson says, leaning over, kissing my cheek. “I’ll be right here if you need backup.”
I click the door open. The Virginia air is surprisingly cool, with a bite that nips my cheeks and a scent of dead pine. The gravel gives way under my feet as I steer toward the house, each step crunching beneath me toward what I can feel in my bowels is my destiny, what this whole thing has maybe been leading up to.
The house itself, even in the dim light of night, is exactly as I remembered it, exactly how I painted it, and just before stepping up onto the front porch stairs, I pause, lean back, and stare. The paint is peeling around the second-floor windows, and the black shutters are tightly shut in the attic, but other than that, it is as if I am thirteen again, remembering for the first time, remembering all over again.
It’s amazing, I realize, the details that your mind can store: lyrics to every song you’ve ever known, even if you haven’t heard it in twenty years; scents that can place you right back at your sweet sixteen or your first Christmas spent with your husband; small details—a run of notes in a melody, a hint of cinnamon in your apple cider—that embed themselves in your brain forever. Unless, of course, you’re tossed from the sky, and your memory is tossed with it. But even then. Yes, even then, some of those details remain. Bread crumbs to help you make your way back.
The porch boards creak as I ascend the stairs, my hands trembling from a dangerous combination of adrenaline and nerves. I turn to glance back at the hopeful face behind me. Anderson peers out the car window, and I can see him nodding his encouragement. Suddenly, something shifts, and I hover over the porch railing, wondering if, for a fleeting second, I might puke. But then I gather myself and push up the final two steps to the front door.
There’s no bell, so I grab the knocker and rap three times.
Nothing.
I don’t even realize that I’m holding my breath until I hear myself exhale loudly, my entire torso shaking, like I’m exorcising a demon. I wait another ten seconds, and still nothing, so I turn on my heels, the weight of defeat, of the fact that this
whole concept was utterly foolhardy, totally ridiculous, like it could have been as easy as this!
Why did I start listening to myself now when I’ve more than proven that I have no fucking concept what I’m talking about!
—and start back to the SUV. But then I plunge my hand into my pocket and remember: the keys. Found on the top shelf of the gallery. They gave me hope, they gave me a glimmer, a sense that I might be able to tie a bow on this just yet. They are what set me off in the first place. I can’t have come all this way and not at least try.
I pull them out, assessing which one to slide in first, even though they’re all identical, when I hear it: the latch unbolting on its own, and I stare up to face the reaper of what? My past, my present, my future. Yes, all of these. The foyer light inside flips on, and then the porch light, too. I squint, trying to adjust to the changes.
A man, handsome in a rugged way, with crinkles around his eyes, and tanned cheeks even in dying days of October, swings open the door. His face goes slack when he sees me.
“Oh my god,” he says. “You came.”
27
S
he looks exactly like he remembers her from nineteen years ago, though he wonders if this is accurate, since he’s seen her on the news, seen her wary face in
People
magazine. Maybe he’s mixing up what he remembers and what is reality, he thinks, once she’s seated on the couch, sipping the coffee that he’s brewed at this hour, and trying not to stare. But it’s been two decades. It’s hard not to.
“So you live here,” she says, “not my dad?”
“Yes,” he says, for the third time. He’s read about her amnesia, so he knows that it shouldn’t be as jarring as it is, but everything, the lot of it—her showing up, her void of memory—well, he might be as shell-shocked as she is.
“And these keys?” She sets down the coffee and jangles a familiar set of keys in the air. “You sent them to me?”
He nods again. They’ve been over this in the very first minute she arrived.
“Yes, back in March.” He clears his throat. “With a note, too.”
“I didn’t find a note.” Her brow creases, like this might be the most perplexing thing in all of this. That she didn’t find a note.
“I sent one.” He shrugs, then wishes he hadn’t, hoping he’s not coming off as cavalier. “I remember writing it, telling you that my mother had died, that she’d have wanted you to know that, and know that the house was still here and that you were always welcome.” He sighs. “I never heard back from you, and, well, I wanted to be in touch when I saw you on the news, but I took your silence as a sign that you didn’t want to hear from me. Didn’t want to revisit that chapter, which, I mean, just to be clear, I don’t blame you for.”
Shit, he thinks. He knew he should have followed up. Shouldn’t have let his own crap stop him.
“Your mom is Heather.”
“Yes,” he says. “You remember her?”
“Kind of, vaguely. In a dream…” She stops to think, wrapping her arms around herself, like she’s still cold from the outside air. “I don’t understand, though. I have so many questions.”
He eyes her, wondering how much he can share in a singular conversation that won’t send her off the deep end. She seems different than who she used to be, though really, after what she’s been through, who wouldn’t be?
“Your friend, in the car, should you bring him inside?”
She startles, like she’s forgotten, then stands abruptly, rattling the table with her knee, and upends the coffee onto the rug.
“It’s fine.” He waves a hand. “You go get him, I’ll clean up. I’ll get more drinks—I think I have some Coke and wine in the fridge. It’s all I have. I wasn’t expecting visitors on a Monday night.”
She angles her head, faltering for a moment, staring at him in the way that a child does a zoo animal.
“Cokes.” She says it like she’s hypnotized.
“Yes…Cokes. I have some cans in the basement.”
“You—you’re the kid from the dock.”
“I’m sorry? I’m not following.” He steps toward her and guides her back to the couch. She is frail—he can feel that when he moves his hand over her hip—and paler than he remembers. Her eyes have faded—they have a gray hue behind them that wasn’t there. Her cheekbones are sharper, which makes her nose look sharper, too.
“Earlier today, I heard something—a song—and remembered you,” she says. “Of you down at a dock, racing me to a raft, owing me—or rather me owing you—a Coke.”
His face glazes over for a moment, and then he grins, widely, like maybe he did when he was thirteen, too.
“Yeah, that was me.” He laughs. “You almost always lost, though not for lack of trying.”
“And we”—she hesitates, her forehead wrinkling in thought—“I’m sorry, were you, like, my first boyfriend?”
He lets out an honest-to-god guffaw before realizing that she isn’t joking, then buttons himself back up. “No, I’m sorry, you really don’t remember at all?”
“No.” She sits back on the couch, still watching, waiting for her answer.
“Okay, then,” he says simply, sitting down beside her. “We were hardly boyfriend and girlfriend.” He clears the phlegm from his throat. “I don’t know how else to say this, but, in fact, I’m your brother.”
If she is astonished
from the revelation, she doesn’t betray it too much. Wes sees her wince, then her face goes totally ashen, and then, for a moment, he thinks she’s going to pass out.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” he says.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she says.
“Listen, it’s a big thing, what I’ve just told you, and it’s okay to kind of want to fall apart.” He watches her, wondering if she’ll cry, thinking that in the same circumstance, certainly, he would.
“I’ve done a lot of that lately,” she says. “Falling apart.”
“And?”
“And what?” she says. “And now, I’d like to put myself back together.” She squints and sees it then, the connection—that, in an odd sense, in the right light, he looks like Jamie. The blond hair, the creamy skin. Yes, of course, she can see it now. No wonder she had trusted him. It wasn’t that her instincts were so off, it was that they were blurred, misguided. She considers it a moment more: it wasn’t just that. No, she wanted to take that leap, be entirely different from who she was before, so while she can point to the connection—that Jamie shares an odd resemblance to her newly discovered brother—she shoulders some of the blame, too. Not blame, really. She shakes her head, deep in thought. Responsibility. She gambled. She wanted to roll the dice. She did. She lost. There needs to be an ownership in that.
A knock on the front door jolts them both, so Wes rises to unlatch it.
“I’m sorry,” Anderson says. “I was freezing out there.”
“Come in,” Nell waves. “Meet my brother.”
Anderson does a double take as Wes extends a hand.
“Half brother. And let me go get us drinks.”
Nell stands slowly and trails Wes to the kitchen, halting abruptly in the precipice, staring up at the painting over the farmhouse table.
“Your dad’s?” Anderson says, the same question that was posed so many weeks back in Nell’s apartment, back when she reentered her new life, frozen, skeptical, alone.
Déjà vu, she thinks, only now armed with the hindsight that comes with standing on the ledge, taking a leap.
“No, not his,” Nell says, before Wes can answer. Because she already knows. “It’s mine.”
“You left it behind
when you guys left so abruptly,” Wes says, rolling out the wineglasses, pouring the cabernet too close to the rims.
“It’s of the same dock, isn’t it?” Nell asks. She’s gazing at it wide-eyed, unblinking. Finally, she reaches for her glass and swallows fully, leaving just a puddle toward the bottom. Like a ripple, Wes does the same, the wine loosening them almost immediately. Anderson watches them but sips slower, more deliberately.
“Your interpretation of the dock,” Wes answers, which seems self-evident, given the gray overtones, the wood planks that look more like daggers than anything ever originating in nature, how the water appears menacing with shots of light radiating in ways that the sun could never create. “When you left, I begged my mom to send it back to you, because I knew how much it meant to you, but she wouldn’t let me. Well, I mean, she made it clear that we couldn’t be in touch. That your dad had gone back to your family, and whatever was left behind was”—he hesitates, trying to articulate it—“well, whatever was left behind was a necessary casualty. The cost of their warfare.”
“She put it like that?” Anderson asks.
“No, my words, not hers.” He rises to refill the wine. “All of them—my mom, our dad, your mom”—he gestures toward Nell with the corkscrew—“it was like playing a giant game of Battleship. Sunk sometimes at our own expense. That’s how I remember putting it to my mom when you guys left: that she sunk my battleship. Well, that and a long string of swear words. I was angry through the entire fall.”
“It’s sort of a depressing piece for the space,” Nell says. “Or, maybe it’s just depressing that I’d paint something so bleak at thirteen.” She exhales. “Jesus.”