“I’m talking about the fact that you met your birth mom for the first time in God knows how long, and what did you do? You just left her. Hello and goodbye. You walked away after spending a few hours with her. Even after you found out the truth about her and your . . . dad, you left her, like this was some dinner party you’d attended and you didn’t want to overstay your welcome. And now you’re getting ready to go back—to what? A job you seem to dread? A woman whose phone calls you’ve been ducking for two days? What are you going back to, Anton? But most of all, I want to know this: How do you keep up the facade? Why are you not falling apart, man?”
He was vaguely aware that behind the rhetorical question there lay an insult, a damnation of his entire way of being, but he couldn’t muster up the outrage that he knew he ought to be feeling. He felt pinned, speared into place, by Carine’s eyes. And he was rattled by what he saw in those eyes—not insult, not a desire to injure, but concern. And genuine puzzlement. And so the moment dragged on as he tried to constitute a response, a flippant comeback, maybe, that would lighten the suddenly serious mood in the room, but his mind felt sluggish. The next second his focus shifted from Carine, and he became aware of a thin cord of pain that wrapped around his heart, his throbbing, breaking, splintered heart. For two days he had fought to cover up the memory of the devastation on his mother’s face as he’d taken his leave, a devastation that he was responsible for. He had scuttled out of her house and into Carine’s home, Carine, who had been blissfully welcoming. He had covered up his own pain at the abrupt rending of his time with his mother by his anger at David, by his stealthy avoidance of Katherine and Brad, by his horseplay with Carine’s boys. The last two days, as furtive as they had been, had been a throwback, as if he were still that innocent Harvard boy in love with his fiery, impetuous girlfriend. But to cling to that privileged innocence now was to crawl back into his pristine white world, back to a time when the forces of betrayal and corruption lay on the outside and not within his own family. His entire life had been called into question by the arrival of Juanita’s fateful letter, and yet here he was, sitting in Carine’s home, pretending otherwise. How could he blame David for taking what didn’t belong to him when he, Anton, didn’t have the sense to hold on to what was his for the taking? Why was it that the two times in his life when he had been offered the love of a black woman, he had spurned them both? What was he running away from? More to the point, what was he running toward? A political office that would make him the most powerful man in the state? Hadn’t he already seen—experienced—what that kind of power did to a man? Wasn’t it high time to really figure out how much of his life was his choosing?