A Small Indiscretion Read online

  BY THE TIME I woke up, the girls had been watching TV since six, and you and your father had taken the dogs and your mountain bikes to Mount Tam. A wig of fog had overtaken the city in the night, and apparently the daisies had not known it was dawn, and remained closed. Your sisters were disappointed, and overtired from waking so early, and now they were arguing over what to watch on TV. I turned the television off and made pancakes, then set the girls up at the counter to make lemonade from lemons a neighbor had brought over the day before. Polly spilled half a bag of sugar on the floor, and I pressed my fingers over my eyelids and sighed.

  “You’re sighing,” Polly cried out. “You said for us to tell you when you were sighing.”

  Clara nodded. “You said you were giving up sighing for Lent.”

  “That was just kind of a joke,” I said. “And anyway, Lent’s over, and I can sigh from time to time if I want to.”

  When the lemonade was made, I poured the girls each a cup and we went outside. The sun battled through the fog, and the girls sat on the swing on the front porch, and I sat on the top step with my coffee and pulled my knees up to my chin. It was an ordinary morning. An ordinary day in the life of an ordinary family. The last of its kind, for us. But I didn’t know that then.

  You and your father pulled up in your truck, your muddy bikes and the dogs in back. It was your father who’d insisted on two dogs, so they could keep each other company. The breed was his idea, too—German shepherds—the same as he’d grown up with. He got out of the truck and took off his cleats and sat down on the step next to me. The dogs waited, their tails wagging wildly, until your father called them. Then they jumped out of the truck and ran toward us. He snapped his fingers and pointed, and they dropped to the ground.

  “If only you could control children as well as you can control dogs,” I said.

  “Who says I can’t?”

  “I say you can’t.”

  He flung his arm over my shoulder.

  “You’re muddy and smelly,” I said.

  He pulled me toward him and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You love it,” he said. “Admit it.”

  You stood in your shorts and cleats, pushing the girls on the swing. You seemed rugged and healthy in your biking gear, your calves caked with mud, your back and shoulders and legs strong like your father’s, but stretched over a six-foot-three-inch frame. We were a family made up not of averages but of absolutes: you and Clara large-boned and tall; Polly so small and slight even Clara could still lift her up. Watching you together—your hair and eyes, your flesh and bone, your three bodies so frank and solid in the world—gave me immeasurable pleasure. It was pleasure derived not from parental pride, but from gratitude. We had been blessed by the existence on this earth of our three particular children, and we had been assigned a blessed task in keeping you all safe in the world.

  Then Polly wanted more lemonade, and I said she’d had enough. She jumped off the swing in protest and began to cry. Your father picked her up and took her inside. You lifted Clara onto your shoulders and trotted into the backyard. I walked down the steps and retrieved the mail. I stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the stack, dropping the junk mail in the garbage and making a pile of the bills. On the very bottom was an oversize white envelope. I slid my finger through the flap. I pulled out a smaller envelope and dropped the outer one in the trash. Inside the smaller envelope was a photograph—the White Cliffs, the chalk down, and a version of myself at roughly the age you are now, staring back. His name came into my head—Patrick Ardghal—and my breath caught in my chest. I fished the outer envelope from the trash, but the postmark was indecipherable.

  Your father walked into the kitchen, and I slid the photograph under the stack of bills. I wanted time to think. I wanted a chance to confront the old longing that had so suddenly overtaken me. What was the nature of that longing? What was it I wanted, exactly? An explanation? An accounting? Perhaps. But also something wholly unbefitting a married woman of forty-one, mother to two young daughters and a nearly grown son: I wanted to see Patrick Ardghal again.

  WHEN I WAS alone, I took the photo and the bills upstairs to the hall closet. I placed the photo in the heavy, round gold-foil hatbox that once held my wedding veil, and where I keep the important artifacts. Nine months later, when I could not reach you to tell you this story and I began to let it bleed from my fingers instead, it was in the hatbox I was to hide this half-decipherable scrawl.

  The longing to see Patrick Ardghal took the shape of obsession as the summer progressed, and my days became haunted with half-formed fantasies. Those fantasies shamed me, but I could not get rid of them. I spent many hours in the weeks after the photo arrived imagining him tracking me down, sending me the photograph, seeking me out. I wondered where he might be living. I searched the Internet, and checked my email many times each day, and wandered the rooms of the past. I ran headlong into memories, not just of Patrick but of Malcolm, too. I did not dwell on the memories of Malcolm—from our time together in London and Paris—because they were painful, and nonnegotiable. It was not Malcolm who appeared in my sleeping dreams last summer, but Patrick. One especially vivid dream was of Patrick stepping out of the fog and knocking on my front door and presenting me with a ring box, in which, instead of a ring, were a dozen old library cards—a symbol for love that could be borrowed, perhaps, but never kept. That dream, and others, came again and again, plaguing me all day after I woke up and flooding me with a useless, unsubstantiated longing—a colored emotional fluorescence with which the plain waking world could not compete.

  At the same time, I was happy with your father. The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love. I loved your father. I loved the new ring—with its old stone and new stones—and I wore it proudly. I loved the laden, harried, unremarkable events that were our days. I loved the whole barely observed construction that was our life. But I also loved the way the idea of Patrick opened an ordinary day to the feeling that something out of the ordinary might happen to me at any moment. Perhaps I inherited that appetite from my father. Perhaps it was not shame at all that kidnapped my father that summer day when I was nineteen and he backed his truck down the driveway and set off for Maine. Perhaps it was not regret, or remorse, my father felt as he looked for the last time at that rock-and-timber house. Perhaps it was the same cocktail of self-indulgence and abandon and want—and an unaccountable wish to be free, if only for a little while—I discovered in myself last summer.

  IT SEEMS ALMOST impossible that less than a year has passed since that June day. I’ve noticed I don’t often sigh anymore, as I did making lemonade with your sisters that morning. There isn’t much room for impatience when real worry has claimed the day. And there isn’t much need for most of what you can find in the bucket of love at a time like this. Somebody said—some poet, I can’t remember which one—that unrequited love is the best kind. But I can tell you with certainty, Robbie, that the other kind of love, the kind I received from your father for more than two decades, is far more necessary.

  Six

  I PULL THE THREAD, and it grows longer. I tug and tug, from this spring of 2012 to the fall of 1989, when I first went to London. Then I tug further, even, until the story makes a stop in a place that is more mine than yours, since I lived there before your beginnings.

  I was nineteen, taking classes at a community college in the San Fernando Valley, majoring in French, of all things. I had been to the travel-studies office at the college and learned I could not afford tuition for a semester in Paris. I also learned I couldn’t work in France unless I was a citizen, but I could apply for a work-exchange program in the United Kingdom, which would get me to Europe, at least. I submitted my application and waited to hear.

  I was living with my mother and father and my brother, Ryan, ten years younger, in Pine Crest, which, in spite of its picturesque name, was a wasted place at the lip of Los Angeles, slung above the valley’s miasmic flats. It was one in a ser
ies of towns strung together in the foothills, bounded by the western edge of the San Gabriel Mountains and linked by an unbroken thoroughfare of biker bars and auto shops and liquor stores. The downtown was a single block without sidewalks, home to the post office and a Pic ’N’ Save and our single dining establishment—a Mexican restaurant where I was working part-time as a waitress.

  Winters were brief and wet. The rain fell in sheets and the creeks bulged and the wash overflowed and the canyon at the base of the mountains became a swift brown river. By April the rain was gone and it was as hot as it would be at the height of summer. Under the baking sun were three-story apartment buildings painted pastel colors, bounded by concrete and chain link, whole communities of children contained within. A handful of single-family dwellings had survived rezoning—flat-roofed ranchers and spec houses and the odd old cabin made of river rock and timber, set on a long, slim, sloping acre of wild poppies and weeds. Out back of such a house, our house, was a curve of driveway and a detached garage abutting an empty field, in winter neat and green as grass, turning in spring to parched yellow weeds beneath an arc of blue sky.

  The front porch had been halfheartedly enclosed by the previous owners to make two children’s bedrooms, rooms whose interior walls were the cement and stone and wood of the outside of the house. The cement had crumbled away here and there and cobwebs grew. Ryan and I lay on my bed in the summers and watched the sun leak through the gaps, making feathery designs on the backs of our hands.

  It was a town that had not yet been connected to the sewer. We had a cesspool that frequently overflowed, flooding the slab of concrete beside the back door. We could not afford to have the cesspool pumped, so for years we had been engaged in a conservation campaign that involved flushing rarely, washing both dishes and vegetables in a bucket in the sink and siphoning the shower water into the yard. We would each take our turn with the plug in the drain, the collective runoff trapped inside the walls of the small, square blue-tiled enclosure that was both shower and tub. Then my father latched the hose to a bib out front and dragged it up the front steps, over the threshold and into the entryway, across the living room carpet, through the back hall and into the shower. I turned on the water outside, and he yelled when the bubbles stopped. He was a great one for yelling. Bellowing, really, not with venom but with authority, a kind of verbal clap on the back for a job well done. These verbal claps grew louder as the day wore on, a phenomenon I did not associate with his drinking until long after he, and then I, had left home. One winter evening, my father whacked a hole in the siding that flanked the front door and ran the hose through, making it a fixed feature of our home, and a more or less permanent excuse for not entertaining.

  My father was often without a regular job. During these spells, my mother worked double shifts as an emergency-room nurse to keep the family afloat, and my father involved Ryan and me in important projects. These projects always began with my father pacing the back patio, talking, while I took notes and made pencil sketches on a white pad, I having been deemed “artistic” by the art teacher at school. The pencil sketches led to formal plans and the purchase of supplies and a burst of activity that might last a week or a month or a season, until the current project was set aside in favor of the next. There was a device that would turn your television off when you clapped your hands. There were two exotic parrots and the construction of an aviary, the idea being that we would train the birds to do tricks and form a traveling bird show. There was a beekeeping period, and a leather-working period, and an organic vegetable garden, the products of which we intended to sell at farmers’ markets around the valley. But we never did.

  Sometimes we drove to a reservoir twenty miles north, off the highway. We sat in the roped-off sandy area and ate tuna sandwiches and swam in the dirty green water while my father drank beer on the beach. I did not understand how paltry a pleasure those days had been until I chased my father to Maine and saw the white clapboard cottages with their window boxes full of flowers, and the bright-green lawns, and the endless blue of Somes Sound.

  The alliance of my father and brother and me seemed to trump normal adolescent activities. I was more often at home than out with my friends, and any entanglements I had with boys, I kept secret. My entanglements never went very far, anyway. I wasn’t afraid of the sin of it, or of getting pregnant; I was afraid the main event—sex—would not be any good, and I would have to pretend it had been. Or I was afraid that when the moment arrived, I would change my mind, but I would move forward anyway, betraying myself. I was afraid the boy would turn out to be inferior to me, or at least inferior to my father’s hopes for me. So I held on to my virginity even as I watched every single one of my friends get rid of theirs. The longer I waited, the more embarrassing a burden it became—one it seemed I might never shed.

  My father brewed exotic beers in the basement—porters and pale ales and red ales—and sometimes cider or barley wine. In the evenings, he drank until he achieved oblivion. Not just his beer but whiskey, too. I remember once, or maybe it was many times, walking into the kitchen at night and finding him standing beneath the open door of the liquor cabinet with a bottle to his lips. While I lived with him, that image was stored inside me not in the place of memories but in the place of lucid dreams, and I was not sure I believed what I saw.

  Taking the garbage out had always been my job. One Sunday when I was nineteen, I collected the bag from the kitchen and tossed it into the aluminum garbage can out back, then crushed the bag down with my hands so the lid would close. Something in the bag sliced through the flesh below my right thumb, and I howled. My father emerged from the house and barked at my brother to get a towel to stop the blood, then he set his beer down and walked toward me to inspect the wound. He was moving the way he moved when he was very drunk—his torso pitched forward, his legs unnaturally stiff, his steps heavy—as if he had suddenly gone blind or grown old.

  He leaned over me. “Looks like this one needs a stitch or two,” he said.

  I could smell the alcohol on his whole body, as if he’d bathed in it. It was whiskey I smelled, not just beer. But I pretended not to notice. I pretended his words weren’t rushing together, and he wasn’t stumbling. I pretended so hard, I failed to protest. I got into the cab of the truck next to my father, and Ryan climbed in after me. My father drove us halfway across Los Angeles to the hospital. I couldn’t drive myself, since my hand was gushing blood through the rags wrapped around it, leaking onto my lap. My mother couldn’t drive me, since she was already at the hospital, beginning her second shift.

  She was standing out in front of the emergency-room entrance when we drove into the parking lot, wearing her white nurse’s dress and her white tights and her white shoes. Lit from behind by the hospital’s lights, she looked like an immaculate ghost. My father pulled up in front of her and opened the driver’s side door, but instead of putting the truck in park, he’d put it in reverse. At first I thought it was the car next to us moving. I watched it, fascinated, until I saw that it was us heading backward, and that my father was half in and half out of the cab of the truck as it lurched in reverse toward a parked car. He hit the brakes. He turned the ignition off and staggered around to open my door. I watched my mother watching him. I watched her turn from a ghost to a person made of flesh and blood and resolve. I saw the change first in her face, then in the clipped motion of her steps as she came toward us. In that moment, I saw her break free of the dogged loyalty—and love—she’d struggled under all those years.

  It would not have occurred to me to wonder what it was in that garbage can that had sliced open my hand. But it occurred to my mother. She looked later that night and found a broken whiskey bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

  THERE WAS AN intervention. A soft-spoken gray-haired woman affiliated with the Betty Ford Center was in charge of it. I had been taken to see her, beforehand, and she’d asked me to write my father a letter. At the intervention, she looked at me kindly and made me want to flee. There were
other people in the room besides that woman and my mother and brother and me, but I don’t remember who they were. I read the letter I’d written, under duress, enumerating the wrongs my father had done me when he was under the influence of alcohol, wrongs I didn’t believe in, even though I knew them to be true. He had dropped a glass and broken it, now and then, and forgotten to clean it up. He had stood in the kitchen, in the dark, late at night, with a bottle to his lips. He had driven my brother and me to the county hospital when he was very, very drunk. I imagined my letter was the hardest blow. I looked up after I read it, and saw in my father’s face a helpless bewilderment I was never able to forget.

  I was not angry with him, though I see I ought to have been. I am not sure I believed he was an alcoholic. I clung to my allegiance to him, even when it was discovered, some time after he’d left home, that the bank account that held my life savings had a balance of zero. It was a custodial account, never switched out of my father’s name. There was a lien on the property in Maine he’d inherited from his mother. The IRS was entitled to property taxes that had not been paid, and the money to pay them was sucked directly from my account. Twenty-six hundred dollars was all it was, but it was all the money I had.

  At the end of the intervention, he solemnly promised to enter rehab the next day. Instead, at dawn, he backed his truck down the driveway and set off for Maine and never returned.

  “There’s a woman there,” my mother told me later. But I don’t think I believed her, and when the summer ended, I announced that I was not going back to community college. Instead, I planned to take a Greyhound bus to Maine, collect the money I was owed and go to Europe. My mother and Ryan took me to the bus station. My mother cried as she slipped two one-hundred-dollar bills into my hand. Ryan stood awkwardly at her side. I had prepared a little speech in my head for him, but at the last minute it seemed there was nothing I could say that he would not learn on his own, one way or another.