He looked at me a long time without speaking. Then slowly he removed his shoes. He leaned over and put his head next to mine on the pillows. I turned to him. Our faces rested inches apart.
“I choose you,” he whispered and stroked my cheek. “I do. I choose you. You’ve given me back some hope I lost along the way. Will you still have me?”
I nodded. I didn’t have a doubt from my end of things.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Don’t say this kind of thing anymore if you don’t mean it. We can’t have this conversation again.”
“We’ll go to Italy first, then Paris. We have time, and I want to see one last thing from the journal. Then I’m going to Paris with you, then to New York. I don’t know everything yet, but I know I want to be with you. I’m sorry if I’ve been difficult. I don’t mean to be. I was scared, Heather. Maybe I told myself not to have too many hopes, and then you came into the picture.”
“You’ve changed me, too, Jack. You made me question some of my assumptions, and you made me slow down. I’ve learned from you. I’m thinking of getting rid of my Smythson.”
“I’m not sure the world is ready for a Heather Mulgrew without her Smythson.”
“I’m the new, freer Heather. Wait and see.”
“We’ll meet in the middle.”
“Yes, that’s the plan.”
His eyes crinkled. He kissed me lightly, his lips barely resting on mine.
“You must be starving,” he said. “You didn’t eat anything at all in the restaurant.”
“I am starving.”
“What if I told you I had Ben and Jerry’s in my backpack?”
“You’d be lying.”
He nodded, and he kissed me again, and a little later we fell asleep. The sand cranes did not trouble my sleep, and the storm passed away to the east. But what had happened, what it all meant, still wasn’t clear to me.
30
“His name is Jack Quiller-Couch, and I met him on a train going into Amsterdam … yes, no, you will like him, Mom. So will Daddy.”
I spoke to her on the train on our way to Italy. Jack had gone off to the bar car. The train, for once, was fairly empty. We had the luxury of a pair of facing benches entirely to ourselves.
“So what does it mean? That he’s coming back with you?”
If I didn’t miss my guess, she had a cup of tea. I knew she sat in the solarium, her favorite place in the summer, the room filled with houseplants and geraniums. She loved geraniums.
I heard her being deliberately even. I heard the mistrust of Jack in her voice—of everything Jack represented—but I knew she was trying to be motherly and calm, and that only made it worse.
This was the conversation I had dreaded. If Jack was coming with me, then it meant Jack was going to stay at our house, at least briefly, and I wanted to clear that with my mother.
“In what sense?” I asked, mostly to give myself time to think.
“Well, I don’t know, Heather. I really don’t. I mean, are you two engaged somehow?”
“No, Mom. It’s not like that.”
“But he’s coming with you?”
“That’s the plan.”
She didn’t say anything. She was the absolute master of not saying anything. She never made it easy. She paused long enough to make it awkward, and then I usually vomited something out to kill the silence.
I tried to wait her out, but I couldn’t.
“We’ve been traveling together,” I explained. “In Germany and Poland and Switzerland, Mom. We’re going to Italy now—I told you that. Obviously, we care for each other. We’re deciding what that means.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do see,” I said, flashing a little. “He’s a terrific guy. He’s very handsome. He’s a Vermonter. He grew up on a farm, at least mostly.”
Again, the Mom-a-saurus, master of silence.
“And I think I’m in love with him, Mom. Do you understand? I think I love him. I think we might be right for each other in a big way, in the way you and Daddy are right for each other.”
I felt close to tears.
The train continued to knock along. The mountains and pines outside the window sometimes held pale ghosts of snow and ice.
“So when you come home, he will be with you?” Mom asked.
“Yes. Jack. Jack will be with me.”
“Are you planning to live together?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed things fully.”
“But if he’s coming home with you—”
“I get it, Mom. I get what you’re asking. There are some practical matters we need to iron out. I understand. We’ll do all that. We’ll come up with a little more of a plan. I’m sorry to drop this on you this way. It’s new to me, too, so I don’t have all the answers. But I wanted you to know what was going on.”
“I’m glad you did. You know, you could just bring back a souvenir. You don’t have to go to Europe and bring a man home with you.”
I took a deep breath. It was a joke. I think she meant it as a joke.
“I want you to be happy for me, Mom.”
“I am, honey.”
“Really happy. Not reservedly happy. Not standing-in-judgment happy. I don’t know if what we are doing is the right thing, but it feels that way. I’m not being rash, believe me. I’m not losing my head. Jack is real and solid—as solid as anything. And he sees the world in such a beautiful way. It’s different from the way I see the world, but we complement each other in that regard. I don’t know. I’m tired of trying to fit everything into convenient boxes, Mom. I feel I’ve been doing that all my life. Jack doesn’t fit neatly into any sort of box, and I love that about him. The world feels more open with him beside me. It does. I’ve thought about all the sensible objections. We’re too young, we’re not established … there are a thousand valid cautions, but there are always a thousand cautions, right, Mom? You taught me that. Sometimes you have to accept what is given to you and hold it close. Please tell me you understand, Mom.”
“Of course I do, honey,” she said, and it was the good mom, the warm mom, the perfect mom who caught a picture of my friends and me at commencement oozing all that hope and the one who maybe, maybe, maybe, understood me better than anyone else on earth.
And I could imagine her conversation with my dad later that night.
Heather has met someone.
Someone?
A boy. Well, I guess he’s not a boy technically. A young man.
And…?
My father sitting in his chair, maybe watching a Yankees game, maybe sipping a dark, single-malt scotch out in the solarium with her.
And she’s going to bring him home.
The Dad look. The slow study. The quizzical lift of his eyebrows.
She’s starting the job, he would say.
Mom might nod.
Hmmmm.
Then he would look back at the TV, or peer out at the setting sun, lift his glass, sip.
He would think the pieces don’t quite fit. He would think I was being hasty and lacked seriousness. He would wonder what I was possibly thinking.
*
“How did that go?” Jack asked, sliding back into the seat across from me. He handed me a hot chocolate. He looked handsome and rested. It occurred to me I now knew how he slept, what he felt like each day.
“As well as it could, I suppose. It’s a lot to spring on them.”
“Good. Give me your feet, and I’ll rub them. That’s the least I can do.”
“My feet are filthy.”