Zen and Xander Undone (23 page)

He hands us the envelope. Xander takes it from him, unfolds it reverently, and holds it down on her lap so that we can both read it at the same time.

 

Dear John,

 

I hope this letter finds you well. I'm writing because I have some terrible news. I have breast cancer, and they've only given me another few months. When I found out I was sick, I wanted to call you. I should have. But I know you've remarried, and I want you to be happy. I suppose I still feel guilty about everything that happened, and so I've kept my distance.

The last time I saw you, I'm afraid I was cruel. I'm sorry for that.

Every time I look at those doves, it makes my heart hurt a little. I remember you so well, especially now that I have so much time to sit here and think. Please know that you were a great love in my life. Part of me wanted to come with you. But in the end, I had to make the choice I knew I could live with.

I could not believe a love that begins in the destruction of a family has a chance of surviving. This is how I learned to let you go. I taught myself to believe that we would not have been happy together. Despite my sadness over you, I have been very happy with James and the girls. If any family could mend a torn heart, it is mine.

But still know that I think of you often. In these last moments of my life, I've wished so much that we could say goodbye.

I'm a very lucky woman to have been loved by two men such as you and James. To know you both, to love you, has been a great honor.

I'm returning these doves to you, John, to enjoy and remember me by. I wish you a long life and tremendous happiness with your family. Take it from one who knows, every moment you have with them is precious.

Yours always,

Marie

 

Xander finishes before I do, and she raises her eyes to John's. “So you did? You did have an affair?”

“I'm afraid so.”

The words drop like chunks of ice, making the room cold.

Phillips looks between the two of us, seeming to comprehend something. “Oh, no!” He leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “When we met,
I
was married. That's why she didn't want you girls to know. She was ashamed she'd had an affair with a married man.”

Xander wilts against me. I lean back against the couch. I never thought of this. Never once. Slowly the stunned feeling seeps out of me.

“I wish I could say something that would absolve her.” He stands up, walks behind his desk chair, and leans against the back of it as he talks. His eyes remain on Mom's letter, which rests in Xander's lap. “We were very young. And I'd married a woman who wasn't good for me. Who made me unhappy. But it was wrong.”

“What about our dad?” Xander asks. I don't have to look at her to know she's trying hard not to cry. “Was she already with Dad at the time?”

“No.” He slices the air with his hand as if trying to cut away any doubt. “Not at first. She began dating him shortly before she and I split.”

The room is deadly quiet. Through the open door I hear a television come on, some sticky-sweet children's program. The little boy giggles. He's so lucky not to know about this.

“Look, girls,” John says. “Your mother was a very good person who made a mistake. She realized how serious it was before I did. And she was the one who broke it off. Long before she married your father.”

“But why did you send her the statue
after
she got married?” Xander asks. Her eyes are hard, and I realize that she doesn't trust what he's telling us.

He takes a deep breath. “Because my first wife left me after Marie married James. Your father. And I wanted Marie back.”

“So you tried to steal her away from Dad?”

“I sent her the statue with a note that I was in town and would be waiting for her in a hotel room.” The memory seems to sap his strength, and he sits down in the chair again.

“Did she come?”

He looks at us both, seeming to measure us. “Yes. She did. She tried to give me back the statue, but I wouldn't take it. And she left. I never saw her after that.” He blinks twice, and I see a glisten in his eyes. Quickly he lifts his fingers to his face as though checking for tears.

“You really loved her,” Xander says quietly.

For the first time, he smiles at us. “Of course I did.”

N
OW
I
CAN ALMOST SEE
whatever it was Mom saw in him. He's small, and skinny, and his face is pleasant, not really handsome. But when he smiles, his face takes on a masculine quality that reminds me of Adam somehow. There's something very decent about him.

I look at Xander. Her expression is still hard. She doesn't believe him.

The phone rings somewhere in the back of the house, and I hear little feet running for it, then a squeaky “Hello?” followed by “Daddy!”

“Just a moment,” John says to us before getting up.

Once he's out of the room, Xander darts off the couch. “Are you buying this?”

“Yes.” I'm sick of her suspicions. “He's given us no reason to doubt him. You saw Mom's letter.”

She half shrugs, then plops back down on the couch, arms crossed over her middle.

I hear the murmur of John's voice. By the tone I'd judge he's not talking to a student. There's none of the professional distance in his voice, but there is a nervousness, as though he's a little afraid of the person he's talking to. Slowly his voice gets louder as he makes his way back to the study, and his words become clear. “They seem fine to me . . .”

I look at Xander. She is staring at me with round eyes.

“They're right here . . . I'll get them . . .” John comes back in the room and holds out the phone to Xander. Of course she waves it away, the coward, so he hands it to me and stands by the window.

“H-hi, Dad,” I stammer.

“Do you have
any idea
what you've put me through?” He is literally snarling.

“I'm sorry!”

“Answer my question!”

“I thought it was rhetorical.”

“Are you seriously going to give me attitude at a time like this?” This is just like something Mom would say. To hear it come from Dad sounds a little weird, but somehow comforting too. “You are grounded for the rest of the summer.”

“We probably deserve it.”

Xander is biting her bottom lip as she listens. She has broken into a sweat.

“How did you find us?” I ask.

“Nancy told me you've been sniffing around the whole John Phillips thing. Asking questions, reading your mother's documents, snooping around, and generally being two hideous little miscreants.” I have never known my dad to be so angry. I can actually hear his spit hitting the phone as he talks. “Who told you to go around asking questions? Your mother's past is
none
of your business!”

“Nancy wasn't supposed to say anything! We didn't want this to hurt you!”

“Nancy didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.”

This stops me cold. All this time we could have asked Dad about this. We could have avoided so much heartache! “So you know about Mom and John Phillips?”

“Of course I do. She was gone for two days—you think I wouldn't notice that?” He clips the last word, as though trying to bite back the whole sentence.

Two days.

“She was gone for
two days?
” I ask him, my eyes on Phillips.

His face colors.

Xander's head pops up.

The line is silent for a couple beats. “What did he tell you?”

I can hardly make my voice work. It feels like rusty gears. “That she went to see him at his hotel and left right away.”

Phillips drops his head into his hands and hides there. Xander stands up and paces back and forth behind the coffee table, two steps up, two steps back, like a caged cougar.

The phone line is quiet for so long that I begin to wonder if Dad hung up, but then he clears his throat. His voice is thready. “Nancy is booking me on the next plane out there. I'll be there at eight o'clock this evening. You're to drive to the airport to meet me.”

“Dad!” I say, trying to cling to him somehow with my voice. I feel like the whole fabric of my life has been shredded and all I have are tendrils of false memory.

“We'll talk about this later,” he says, and hangs up.

I put the phone down on the coffee table in front of my knees. Phillips sinks into his desk chair again. Xander and I both stand over him, waiting for an explanation. He does not meet our eyes, just rubs at his Adam's apple, seeming to think through some complicated problem in his head.

Xander sits back down. In a deep, threatening voice, she says, “Start again. The truth this time.”

He spins his chair a half turn and looks out the window behind his desk. I look too. There's a hummingbird feeder outside, and a tiny little buzzing bird darts around it, sucking at sugar water with its long, thin beak.

I turn to see Phillips working his mouth like he's trying to relearn how to form words. “She didn't want you to know,” he said. “That's why I lied.”

“I need the
truth.
” Xander is crying. I don't have to look at her face to know that.

I'm not crying. I'm too numb.

He looks at the floor as he speaks, each word carefully considered before it is laid before us. “She came to my hotel room. She was crying, and holding the bird statue. She wanted to give it back to me. She said she had a new life now and she needed to forget about me.”

I have to look at the floor. I can't look at his strained face as he talks.

“I wouldn't take it. And I asked . . . begged her to just stay with me. Just to talk. She'd had an argument with James, and every time she tried to leave, I took advantage of her confused feelings and I got her to stay.” The room is silent for a while, and I hear the weird, distant sound of a children's song coming from the TV. The strangeness of the contrast between this room and that room turns my stomach.

“I thought when Marie left Hanover to be with your dad that I could somehow put the pieces of my own life back together. I tried to make it work with my first wife. I really did, but something had died between us, and she finally gave up. She knew that I was still in love with your mother.”

Something in his voice changes, and I look at him. With a jolt, I see that his eyes are on me, and there's such longing and sadness in his expression, I realize that he's seeing Mom in me. I pick up a couch pillow and bury my face in it. I can't have him looking at me that way. It just makes me know all over again that Mom is dead and Xander and I are all that's left of her.

“By then, your mother was married, but I came for her anyway. It took a lot of talking, and coaxing, but I got her to listen to me. And for about twenty-four hours, I had her convinced that she and I belonged together.” I hear a strange sound and look up to see that he's chuckling to himself, though there's no humor in it. “That was the happiest twenty-four hours of my life. Until Jeremy was born, that is.”

The room feels stuffy, like the air is too thick to breathe or talk through. My mind is jammed up, and I can't make myself think. When someone finally speaks, it's Xander. “Where were we during all this?”

He smiles sadly. “With your grandmother. You don't remember any of this?”

We both shake our heads. “We'd have been toddlers still,” Xander says.

We're all awkward, and silent, until Xander speaks. “In her note, Mom said she was sorry for being cruel.” It's not a question, but she's asking something.

He rubs his scalp with his fingertips, back and forth, hard. “We spent the night in my hotel, and the next day we decided that the best thing would be to leave town, let your dad get used to the idea. She always planned on coming to get you girls when the dust settled. I want to make that absolutely clear. She contemplated leaving your father, but never you. Never.”

His gaze is steady as he pauses, looking at both of us, willing us to believe him. And I do. I know he's not lying. At least this much I know about Mom. She would never have abandoned me and Xander. She loved us too much. It doesn't really help, though, knowing that she wanted to take us from our dad. It feels sickening to know how close my family came to breaking apart forever.

“But she came back,” Xander says, her voice sounding dry like frayed cotton.

“We got as far as Montpelier before she
made
me turn back.”

He stops there, but Xander and I only wait. The story isn't finished. I need to know everything.

He sighs. “I tried to convince her. I begged her. She had to scream at me because I refused to understand. She finally said, ‘I love James more than you.'” He tries to laugh, but his eyes are sad. “‘I love him more.' That's how she was cruel, since you want to know.”

He shakes his head; his gaze drops. By his expression, which is full of pain, I know for sure. This is exactly what Mom said to him.

I love James more.

The room is quiet, except for the faint sound of cartoons. Finally Xander speaks. “Can we see it?”

He is boneless in his chair, his eyes rubbed raw, his skin sallow. He looks like someone who has just gotten over a terrible disease. He nods, and leads us through his house, to the back behind the kitchen. It's a tiny pantry, barely large enough for the three of us to stand in, filled with soup cans and boxes dusted with flour. John reaches to the top shelf and pulls down a small shipping box that is hanging open with lots of bubble wrap spilling out. He holds it, staring into the box for what seems like a long time. Then he swallows, audibly, and hands the box to Xander.