“Where did you see him?” Nick asked. “You couldn’t have seen him, because he’s only been outside.”
“I’ve seen him through the window.”
“Yes, but only from faraway. You’ve never seen him up close.”
“I’ve seen him, I’ve heard him.”
“How could you hear him?”
“He’s been to the house,” Jip said. “Many times.”
“That’s not what he looks like anyway. His arms aren’t as long as that.”
“What do you know? You don’t know what I make—”
With one knuckle, Tim tapped on the door, and the boys halted their conversation immediately. Like a ghoul in a horror movie, he opened the door as slowly as possible so that its hinges squealed, and he stepped into the room in a stiff-legged gait. They had moved furtively to the bed, papers rustling beneath the blankets. Guilty little buggers. “What’s all this, then?”
“Nothing,” Jip said. To silence his conspirator, all he had to do was gaze in Nick’s direction.
“A secret,” Nick said.
“It’s not nice to keep secrets from your father.” Tim folded his arms across his chest, but when no confession was forthcoming, he relaxed and smiled at them. “Boys will be boys, and every one of them a scoundrel.”
The quilt twitched up and down like a mouse hopping in the bed, and Jip quickly removed a bare foot from under the covers.
“You boys trying to scare me? How about some beans and toast for lunch and a couple of fried eggs?”
Excited by the prospect of their favorite meal, the boys sprang from the bed. In their wake, they left a trail of paper in the folds of the blankets, and Tim was tempted to call them back to clean their mess. Drawings on the floor, pencils on the pillows. Or, he thought, he could straighten the scattered pages for them, but then he let the moment pass.
They were just toddlers when he had first made them toast and beans, but he was already a dab hand at the Maine way, with a healthy dollop of maple syrup whisked into the pot, sweet as candy. At the meal’s end, their faces had been slick with brown sauce and their fingers were glued together. He wet the corner of a napkin with warm water from the sink and scrubbed them clean. Nick was pliant, giggling, his mouth pressed against the cloth in stern resistance. Washing Jip, by contrast, was like dealing with a stiff doll. Clenched against his father’s touch, he offered no fight, no assistance, no squeals of joy in the simple act. The difference between the two toddlers had saddened him, and he could not smell the sweetness of baked beans in maple syrup without a faint echo in memory.
Older now, and slightly more hygienic, the boys did not need his help in cleaning up after the meal. Like two lobstermen come in off the North Atlantic, they gulped down their food and wiped their plates with triangles of toast. He sat with them, modeling fastidiousness to no avail, and they ate in silence, content for the company and satisfied without conversation. Every speck gone, they waited for him to finish before asking to be excused, and between bites, he watched them watching him. He noticed for the thousandth time just how much Nick favored his mother’s looks, but the point of view made it seem a fresh observation, like seeing one of Jip’s distorted drawings, the long-familiar suddenly made new.
The face of the mother in the face of the child. She was on some Caribbean beach, port of call, looking out over the same ocean, basking in sunshine, and he remembered the smell of her summer skin. Outside his window, the snow poured like feathers torn from the gray sky. He pictured Nell in her swimsuit on the beach in the summertime and wondered how different his life would have been with her, with Nick as their son. One moment changes everything. He could have gone back to school, made something different of himself. Had a fine house like the Rothmans’ place. Had a fine wife, a fine son. But the images were as fleeting as the snowfall. He pictured Holly looking through her office window at the storm, wondering if she should come home.
He stacked the dishes in the sink and made a sea of foam from the soapsuds, and as he scrubbed, he kept an eye on the blizzard outside, half expecting Holly to come through the door at any minute. When he was finished with the bean pot and the cutlery, he went to the phone on the wall and dialed her cell phone, but heard it ring on her desk in the living room. She was so forgetful these days, so preoccupied.