Stefan came running the minute the elevator doors opened.
“Mom! Oh god, you have to help her, something awful is going on. She’s in terrible pain!”
While we waited for the nurses to finish Rebecca’s check, Stefan told me what happened.
The Alice Hodge Safe Home was the last house on his plow list. He promised Rebecca he would check on her. When he finished plowing, he texted Rebecca twice. No answer. The lights were on in the kitchen so he glanced inside. To his horror, he saw Rebecca on all fours on the kitchen floor.
“I’m coming!” he shouted, fumbling for the big blue-collar key ring on his belt. When he got inside, he asked, “Are you doing exercises?”
“Exercises? I’m trying to get my phone out from under the cabinet so I can call an ambulance.”
“You don’t need an ambulance. I’m here.”
“Great. What a relief. Can you help me up?”
Stefan lifted Rebecca to a standing position.
Within minutes, he had her in the truck.
“The pains are just minutes apart,” the nurse told us. “Are you her family?” She nodded to Stefan. “Dad?”
“Yep,” he said. We looked away, so as not to laugh and then were whisked into gowns and caps.
In the labor suite, another nurse was telling red-faced Rebecca, “Okay, my dear. We’re going to have a birthday. What’s his name going to be?”
Becky said, “Jesus.” The nurse didn’t laugh. “Not really! Patrick.” She gathered herself again, her yell guttural and sustained. The nurse whisked a pile of bedding under Becky’s rear.
“Okay, Becky, I’m right here,” I said. “Squeeze my hand as hard as you can.”
She did, and in minutes, literally no more than four minutes, there he was.
“What a pretty baby,” the nurse told Becky, as she cradled him close.
“It’s you and me, fella,” Becky said to her son. He was beautiful, rosy and big with masses of dark hair. We each took turns holding him, Stefan in the stereotypical stiff comic panic, as if Becky had handed him a bundle of burning rags.
Weakly, Stefan said, “I’ll always be grateful for those tires.”
I told Becky that I would be back to give her a ride home in the morning and that I would bring a change of clothes.
“But wait,” she said. “Wouldn’t you two like to be Patrick’s godparents?”
“We’re Greek Orthodox,” I told her. “Wouldn’t we have to be whatever...you are?”
“I’m not anything. I was Catholic as a child. Patrick can be Greek Orthodox. I think that would be colorful. And I have this great baptismal gown I shouldn’t let go to waste. Do you know a priest who’d baptize him? It’s all superstition anyhow. We just need all the luck we can get.”
“Mom, please don’t say true thing that,” Stefan warned me. “It’s becoming a tic.”
“True thing that,” I said.
“As for me, I am a veteran godfather,” Stefan said, referring to my sister Phoebe’s baby Gus. “I would be happy to do it. I’m not sure I can offer guidance but I intend to excel at that one day. I’m very good at presents.”
Stefan also agreed to lean on Father Kanelos, who got so many compliments on the landscaping of the church that he would be helpless to refuse.
“You’re supposed to have family for this,” I reminded Becky.
She said, “Maybe that’s my choice. And maybe I do.”
* * *
That night, just days before the anniversary of Belinda’s death, Jill called out of the blue and asked to meet with Stefan and me, because, after much thought and prayer, she had decided to forgive him, and how could we refuse?
After her call, I stood on my porch in the dark and thought about where life had taken us, which felt something like a circle.
As Iris Murdoch said, human arrangements are nothing but loose ends, and time, like the sea, unties them all.
17
So what did I think would happen, people ask me. I don’t know the answer to that; I only know that, if you had given me ten tries to predict what did happen, not one of them would have come close.
When I talked things over with Julie, two days before we were to meet Jill, she implored me to stop thinking of this event as momentous. It was a formality, putting a frame around feelings already experienced, like marriage put a frame around love. After this meeting, nothing in Stefan’s life or mine would change. For his part, Stefan thought the request was impressive. He remembered, during his first nights out of prison, the strong desire he had to see Jill and talk to her—the desire that had led, in part, to The Healing Project. For Jill to do this, it seemed to him, was exceedingly brave and benevolent.
The date she set was the fourth anniversary of Belinda’s death, a Monday at three in the afternoon at the cemetery. It wouldn’t be dark yet, but, she said, and I agreed, a Monday was best because none of us needed an audience. Don’t share any of this with the press, she cautioned me, and I said that of course, I would not. “I don’t want there to be any perception that I don’t believe in the work of SAY,” she said. “I believe in that work more than ever, and I hope it goes on.”
I said, “I think it will, Jill.”
She said, “I am not so sure.”
I had mixed feelings about meeting at Belinda’s grave. It was not that I didn’t understand or consider the place appropriate. But what could be more upsetting and poignant? I wanted to suggest the cherry tree planted for her in Whitehorse Park; but I was in no position to suggest anything. Only Jep wholly disapproved. He wanted to come with us, only because he thought he might be able to bring the thing to a speedier conclusion. “This can’t go on forever, Thea,” he said.
“It’s going on forever for her,” I told him.
“I know but...”
“This feels like an ending, Jep. She’s trying to take the steps for what they call closure, these days.”
On the way, Stefan and I stopped to buy a dozen pink roses. Unavoidably, we remembered the last time we had come here, so long ago. I was still surprised that Stefan didn’t ever come here privately, on his own, and yet, this was perhaps the most complex of mournings, snagged at every corner with shadows. At the appointed hour, the winter shadows already thickening, Stefan and I parked as close to the grave as we could. We walked up toward that knoll as scarves of mist swirled up off the lake. I was surprised not to see Jill’s car. I saw her, then, though, sitting quietly, wearing the heavy maroon-and-gold varsity coat that Belinda had given us, the one she’d been wearing that day I saw her outside the prison, the day that Stefan was released and Esme tried to terrorize us. I had never asked her why she was there that day, perhaps it was to give Esme the go-ahead. On her lap, Jill held a big leather folder, almost like a small briefcase, and she turned to the sound of our footsteps.
She stood up.
Her face was awful, a bony pale slash, her eyes, untended and reddened, sculpted downward. “Thea,” she said. “Stefan.” It was a greeting that felt foreshortened, without the customary attendant movements, without a handshake, an embrace, or even a wave.
“Hello, Jill,” Stefan said. “I hope we can help.”
She sighed. “If you two would sit there.”
We sat down on the bench. “As you know, I have not really been able to move on successfully from Belinda’s death. I think it’s a combination of things. I don’t have a partner to share this with me and, losing a husband and then my only child, it’s too much.”
“But maybe in time...” I said.
“I don’t have time, Thea. What do I have? Really?” She gestured to Stefan. “You have him, so you have a future.”
“The work you do...” I began.