“One summer?”
“Four. Four summers.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty, the first year.”
“Around the age I was when I met Betsy,” he says, holding his hand out in an L shape and squinting at me through it. “Was it serious?”
“I don’t know.” I swallow hard. “He promised me that . . . that we would be together.”
“You mean that you’d get married?”
I nod. Is that what he promised? I’m not quite sure.
“Oh, Christina.” Andy sighs. “What happened?”
Something in his manner makes me want to confide things to him I’ve never told anyone. Even painful things, shameful things.
I didn’t know how badly I wanted to share them.
“HONESTLY, CHRISTINA,” ANDY says, shaking his head, when I finish telling him the story. “That man sounds very dull. Very conventional. What in the world did you see in him?”
“I don’t know.” I think, again, of my mother opening her front door to a Swedish sailor, the stuff of fairy tales: Rapunzel letting down her hair, Cinderella sliding her foot into the glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty awaiting a kiss. All were given one chance to step into a happily ever after—or at least it must’ve seemed that way. But was it the prince who attracted them, or merely the opportunity for escape?
How much of my love for, obsession with, Walton was about my fantasy of rescue—a fantasy I didn’t even know I harbored until he came along?
“I suppose I just wanted . . .” To be loved, I almost blurt. But I’m ashamed to say it. “A normal life, I guess.”
Andy sighs. “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but you could never have a normal life, even if that’s what you thought you wanted. You and me, we’re not ‘normal.’ We don’t fit into conventional boxes.” Shaking his head again, he says, “You dodged a bullet, if you ask me. If that man lives to be a hundred, he’ll never know the strength of his convictions.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “He knew he didn’t want me.”
“Pah. He was weak. Easily swayed. Believe me, you avoided a lifetime of misery. That man would’ve chipped away at your heart bit by bit until there was nothing left. It may have been bruised, but at least it’s whole.”
He may be right; my heart might be whole. But I think about the people I’ve kept at arm’s length, even those I love. I think about how I treated Al and Estelle. What I said, and meant, to Gertrude, who had come only to help that morning during my nephew’s birth: I swear I will never speak to you again. Maybe she was right when she told me I had a cold heart. “I feel as if . . . as if it’s been encased in ice.”
“Ever since?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it always was.”
He caps the pen in his hand. “I can see why it might feel that way. But I don’t believe it. You’re guarded, perhaps, but that’s understandable. Jesus, Christina, you’ve been dealt a rough hand. Taking care of your family your whole life. Your goddamn legs that don’t work the way they’re supposed to.” He looks at me intently, and again I have the uncanny sense that he can see straight through me. “It’s obvious to me—it’s always been obvious—that you have a big heart. Just watching you with Betsy, for one thing. The affection between you. And your love for your nephew—there’s no mistaking that. But most of all, you and Al, in this house. Your kindnesses to each other. This guy—this guy Walton,” he says, mocking his name, “has no consequence here. You scared the poor bugger off.” He laughs drily. “What did Al think of him?”
“Not much.”
“Didn’t think so.” Closing the sketchbook, he says, “Al knows what’s what.”
My heart—bruised, battered; who knows, possibly thawing—constricts. Your kindnesses to each other. Andy doesn’t know the whole story.
He’s right about one thing, though: Al does know what’s what. Has always known. And I rewarded his empathy, his loyalty, by taking him for granted, by ruining his relationship with a woman who probably would have been good for him. Who would’ve changed his life. I can picture the small, neat cottage that the two of them might’ve lived in. His pale pink roses on another trellis. Al up before dawn and out on the water in his lobster boat, checking traps, calculating the yield with a tug. Home in mid-afternoon to a cozy kitchen, wingbacks by the fire, a child to play a game with, a wife to ask about his day . . .
In my own grief and panic, I denied him the respect he has always given me. What right did I have to deny him his one chance for love?
“I NEED TO say something, Alvaro,” I tell him in the kitchen at dusk, when we are drinking tea by the range. “Not that it will make any difference now. But . . . I had no right to force you to stay.”
I can barely make out his features, but I see him flinch.
“I am sorry.”
He sighs.
“You could have been happy with her.”
“I’m not unhappy.” His voice is so quiet I can barely hear it.
“You loved her, didn’t you.” I choke out the words. “I kept you here.”
“Christie—”
“Will you ever forgive me?”
Al rocks back and forth in his creaky chair. Reaches into his pocket and pulls out his pipe, tamps down the tobacco, swipes a match against the oven door and lights it. Mumbles something under his breath.
“What?”
He sucks in the smoke and blows it out. “I said, I let myself be kept.”
I think about this for a moment. “You felt sorry for me.”
“It wasn’t that. I made a choice.”
I shake my head. “What choice did you have? I made you feel like you were abandoning me, when you were just trying to live your life.”
“Well.” He swipes at the air with his hand. “How could I leave all this?”
It isn’t until he gives me a wry grin that I realize he’s making a joke.
“Nobody else knows how I like my oatmeal,” he says. “And anyway. You would’ve done the same for me.”
I wouldn’t have, of course. Al is being kind, or maybe it’s easier for him to believe this. Either way, it doesn’t excuse what I did. Here we are, the two of us, not partners but siblings, destined to live out our lives together in the house we grew up in, surrounded by the phantoms of our ancestors, haunted by the phantom lives we might’ve lived. A stack of letters hidden in a closet. A dory in the rafters of the shed. No one will ever know, when we’re gone to dust, the life we’ve shared here, our desires and our doubts, our intimacy and our solitude.