If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This Part 10

"Way to go, Al!"

"You rule, Lyssie!!"

She shrugs them off and jogs to her position. The girl discussing my love life in our kitchen is invisible on the field. She is all on and no downtime, here. She isn't playing to the crowd. Not playing to me. Not really playing at all. She is at work. Joe coached her all through grade school, every fall and spring weekend, kicked endless pa.s.ses back and forth with her in the evenings, when he got home. The season after he died, she was twelve and talked about quitting her team. "It just makes me feel too unhappy to play," she said. But I talked her out of it, arguing how sad it would have made her father for her to give up, how nothing would make him happier than knowing she still loves doing what they had done together. Now she plays every game as though she believes he can see. I watch her dribbling the ball deftly down the field and think of how aware of him she is here; how unaware she seemed earlier, when talking to me about Kevin.

"She's really very good, you know," Heidi says.

"Her father was very athletic." As the words come out, I spot Kevin across the field, waving both arms over his head. "Excuse me. That's a friend of mine."

Pushing myself up from my low perch, I find Heidi's feet there beside me on the ground, and I notice for the first time that one foot is much larger than the other. Yet they are clad in identical shoes. As I straighten up and smile a bit at her-another goodbye, another time I am hastening to leave her-I realize she must have to buy two pairs of shoes, just to get one set she can wear.

Waving across to Kevin, motioning him to stay on that side of the field, I think about that other mismatched set, the pair that is left over. The wrong one too big. The other wrong one too small. And I wonder whether Heidi throws away that useless pair.

"She's pretty d.a.m.ned good, your girl," Kevin calls out as I approach. "I can see that sports scholarship beckoning her."

I hug him. "That's all Joe in her," I say. "No credit here. It's all Joe's genes." And for a moment I want to add: Remember? Remember? Because I know that Kevin does. He remembers Joe, in sweats heading out for a run. Joe playing tennis. Joe just walking through a room. He remembers that Joe's was a distinctly physical presence, that he had a body that demanded to be noticed as that, as muscle, bone, power. I want to say, Because I know that Kevin does. He remembers Joe, in sweats heading out for a run. Joe playing tennis. Joe just walking through a room. He remembers that Joe's was a distinctly physical presence, that he had a body that demanded to be noticed as that, as muscle, bone, power. I want to say, Remember? Remember? and have the conversation; but I stop myself. and have the conversation; but I stop myself.

"So which one is she?" He nudges me with his shoulder. "Which one is old Long John Silver?"

I wave across the field at Heidi, who waves back to me. "That's her," I say. "But please don't be a jerk."

"A jerk? Me? What are the odds?" he asks, and looking at him I think: Not very high Not very high. "I'm disappointed," he says. "You can't tell anything from here."

"I think maybe the idea of the leg is a bigger deal than the leg itself. You joining us for dinner tonight?" But to my surprise, he shakes his head.

"Date," he answers, and cups his hands, bull horn-style. "Go, Alyssa! You go! Go! Go! Actually, I may have to cut out a little early."

"Anyone real?"

"Real? You mean as opposed to prosthetic? She's okay," he says. "Better looking than interesting, if you know what I mean."

"s.e.x?" I ask, because this is what we do. We pretend that this is simple. We pretend that we don't mind.

"Female."

"Ha. Ha. Ha."

The action of the game is close to us now. A crowd of red-cheeked girls jog by. Kevin and I stand side by side, silent, as though we have lost track of which of us should speak. A whistle blows and Alyssa is pulled from the game, rotated out. She waves from the other side of the field. We both wave back.

"I haven't slept with her, if that's what you're asking," Kevin picks up. "I might, though. It isn't completely out of the question. If I were ten years younger, we'd have done it by now. I just don't know. That conversation afterward looms larger and larger with every pa.s.sing year." He shoves his hands down into his pockets, and I touch him on the arm.

"Look. They aren't letting her stay out."

My daughter has taken her warrior stance again, poised to spring, her power covering an entire cosmos of conflict with the impossibility of loss. "I love how much this means to her," I say.

"She's lucky. To care so much about something."

"Oh, I can't stand the thought that she'll be gone so soon," I say, surprising myself with sudden, spilling tears. "s.h.i.t." Kevin reaches over, stretches his arm around my shoulders, squeezes me close as I smudge my hand on my cheeks. "Maybe in the end that's just what it comes down to," I say. "Oh, f.u.c.k. I miss her already. I'll probably miss you tonight. Jesus, look at me. I'm a mess."

"You don't have to miss her yet, Claire. She's still right here. Don't borrow trouble."

"I know." I burrow myself within his arm. "I know, Kev."

"Between the past and the future..." I hear him sigh. "You know, you're not leaving yourself very much."

I lean into the comfort of his chest. "Don't scold. Let me have my little cry, okay?"

And I feel him sigh again, his chest rising and falling against my back. "I'm just saying maybe you should try enjoying what you have," he says. "That's all. Maybe it's time for a little Buddhism or something. Try being in the moment."

Alyssa is pounding down the field now, her body a wall of force, her feet nimble as they move the ball along. Held by Kevin's arm, I glance across the way and find Heidi there. She motions toward the game and gives me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. I send one back to her. Her husband, Roger, has borrowed my chair, I see. He sits there beside her mismatched feet, and watching them I think to myself that I will tell Kevin about the different-size shoes. I think about making some joke to him about how what Heidi really needs is to meet a woman exactly her size who is missing the opposite leg; but as I open my mouth to speak, I see Roger across the field place his hand on Heidi's knee. It is a casual, marital gesture, except that it's her senseless, artificial leg he touches. He rests his palm on her as though she can feel him. Or as though that bloodless leg cannot disrupt any aspect of their bond. And Heidi sees the caress she cannot feel. She turns a little, smiles at him, and lays her hand over his. I look away and say nothing to Kevin. I make no jokes, no smart comments about Heidi and her feet.

"I almost envy Heidi," I say instead.

"What?" he asks. "Why?"

I only shake my head. The halftime whistle blows. My lips sealed against more tears, I see Heidi rise. She moves slowly toward the girls who have gathered for water and snacks.

The first time we met, I just happened to pull my beach chair up next to hers. There was an empty stretch of lawn beside her. We introduced ourselves. It was the second or third game of the season, and Alyssa was already the team superstar. I pointed her out to Heidi as mine, and she was impressed. She pointed her daughter out to me, and I said something nice about her as well. Something like Oh, she's been great Oh, she's been great. Soccer-mom etiquette. We watched our girls play, cheered when we should, made asides about the ref, the other team, the weather, the practice schedule. At half-time, as both of us stood and began to walk toward the girls, I noticed Heidi's clumsy gait, the drag of that second step of hers.

"I lost my leg to cancer, when I was sixteen," she said, catching me stare.

I lost my husband to cancer when I was thirty-six.

"I'm very sorry," I replied without a pause.

"I'm lucky to be alive, I know."

I just nodded my head. Yes. Yes, you are Yes. Yes, you are.

"Listen, Claire," Kevin now begins, his breath grazing me with his words, the warmth of him all around me. This soccer field is ringed, I know, with couples who care about each other less.

"Uh-huh," I say.

"There's no good way to put this..."

"What?"

His arm tightens, squeezing me.

"Honey, I don't think I can do this anymore."

"Can't do what?" But I already know what he means. I know right away. I try to move from him, but he pulls me in. "Can't do what?" I ask again.

"Come on." I feel him turning me away from the field. "Let's take a walk." His hand on my shoulder is pressing more powerfully now. Everyone around us has started moving the other way. "Come with me, Claire," he says. "Just for a minute."

"I don't know..." I begin. "I should go talk to Alyssa."

"Don't. This is important." He stops and draws his arm away. We're facing one another, far enough from the others that their voices are muted and seemingly abstract. "We need to talk," he says. On each of his cheeks is a patch of red. His nose is runny. He wipes it on his sleeve. "Maybe it's just me that needs to talk," he says. "Sometimes I think you could just go on like this forever. You could, couldn't you? Just you and me, bobbing along like this, on the surface?" Stepping back, he looks up to the sky, and all I want is for him to stop talking. "G.o.d knows," he says, still looking up, "G.o.d knows, I have tried to be patient. I have tried to be the perfect friend. But I just can't be this... I can't be your person like this." His eyes move straight to mine. "Your guy. But not really your guy. Your pal. Who used to be your guy. Or, at any rate, a a guy." He wipes his nose again. "You know, sometimes I think I've made this way too easy for you." guy." He wipes his nose again. "You know, sometimes I think I've made this way too easy for you."

"Easy?" There's an anger in my voice, that I hear before I feel it. "Just what's been easy for me, Kev? Widowhood? Grief? Being alone? Single parenthood? None of it feels easy to me."

"Easy may be the wrong word," he says. "I just wonder if I haven't held you back somehow. Given you a way to skip over having feelings..." may be the wrong word," he says. "I just wonder if I haven't held you back somehow. Given you a way to skip over having feelings..."

"Oh come on, Kevin-all I do is have feelings."

"New feelings, Claire. For once, I'm actually not talking about what happened three years ago. Believe it or not, this isn't about Joe. That's yesterday's news, Claire. It's three f.u.c.king years!" His voice is suddenly loud, our postures shifting into those of people in a fight. I look to the field to see if we're being watched, but the small crowd is distant and unconcerned. Kevin's face is only inches from my own. "You tell me, Claire. When do I get to stop being your husband's eunuch subst.i.tute? Is there an end plan for that? Or do we just keep on like this for the rest of our lives? Because I don't think I can do it anymore."

"G.o.d." I take a step back, but he moves with me.

"I can't just be his stand-in anymore. I can't pretend that I've died too. If it's not me, Claire, if I'm not the guy for you, if I'm not it, then let me get out of the way-and you go find him. Go have a life with someone. Honestly, don't you ever think it's time to put the widow's weeds away? Stop raising that girl in a mausoleum?"

"Jesus, Kevin." The tears that were threatening disappear. "Isn't that a little harsh? I never asked you to-"

"Three years, Claire. It's more than three years. When are you planning to come back from the dead?" He takes a step toward me and reaches for my shoulders-like a parent about to shake a child. His fingers press into me, hard. His teeth are clenched so hard his chin is trembling. Then suddenly he lets me go. "You know what?" He shakes his head. "I think it's time for me to find people who want to be happy. A woman who wants to be happy. I need..."

I look up into those soft, gentle eyes of his. Anything, anything, anything at all Anything, anything, anything at all. It's all still there, I'm sure. It has to be. That love I was so afraid was inside him, when he was inside of me. I only have to give the smallest sign. Just tell him I can try.

"Oh f.u.c.k," I say, and watch his face fall, slack.

"That's all I needed, Claire." He shoves his hands back into his coat pockets. "I'm gonna head home now." He glances back toward the field. "Tell Alyssa I said, Good game."

"Kevin, this isn't like you. Please don't be angry."

"Angry? Why not, Claire?" He isn't looking at me as he speaks. "Think about it. Really. Think about it. Think about everything you and I have been through." He squints a little and then faces me again. "You don't owe Joe being miserable. And neither do I."

A hand comes out from his coat pocket; and I think he's going to reach for me. I think he's going to touch my cheek. But he just shakes his head one more time instead. I see his car keys glistening in his fist. And I watch then as my yes-man walks away. First one step and then another. I watch and I wait, as though at any moment he might come to me again, retracting his withdrawal. But first his light brown jacket fades from view. Then a minute or so later I hear the distant sound of a starting car. And I realize that I've been fired.

"Just be grateful it isn't Alyssa," Joe would say, forcing me to nod, to look into his deep brown eyes and agree to see some future hope. "We're so lucky it isn't either of you. Just be grateful that it isn't one of you. I can handle dying; I couldn't handle it if it were you or her."

But I can't handle this, I'd thought, helpless as the man I loved dissolved before my eyes. I can't handle you leaving me I can't handle you leaving me.

Kevin had resisted at first. "It's not even a year. I don't think you're ready to start something new."

"Nothing in the world can hurt our friendship," I said. "And this is only s.e.x."

I find a clump of trees, a little apart from the playing field, away from Alyssa and away from Heidi, away from the other parents that I know. Away from having to talk to anyone or look anyone in the eyes. A few times I see Alyssa glance my way, questioning, as though she knows that something's wrong, but the whistle blows and the game resumes with its hustle and bustle, my daughter streaking up and down the field.

There are cheers and exclamations in the air, but a quiet hovers where I stand. It seems to have its roots deep inside of me, as though I am immersed again in the same unnatural silence I remember from the six weeks between Joe's diagnosis and his death. The minutes pa.s.s through me and the branches above lose their colors in the swarming dusk, darkening into black silhouettes against the sky. Under them, I struggle to stay here, in the present, as Kevin said. To resist those terrible, tempting days that have somehow become my refuge now. Only weeks for Joe to live and not a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing to do except stay by his bedside and watch him disappear. And disappear myself.

Across the way, Heidi is alone again, but Roger is close by, standing near the snack boxes, talking to another of the fathers. Before she ever introduced me to him, I saw them together coming across this same stretch of field, and I knew then that he had to be her husband. Just from watching how they moved, how they walked at the identical halting and gradual pace-as though that pause between her steps had become his pause too, as though the absent leg was gone equally, eternally from them both. A perfect, imperfect, made-for-each-other gait.

Kevin would do that for me, I know. Kevin would walk with a hitch in his own step, with a step-clump-step to match my own.

The end whistle blows-too soon, I think-startling me, and I see all the girls on Alyssa's team run together, hear them holler a whooping yell. The two teams line up to shake each other's hands. Muttering, Good game, good game, good game Good game, good game, good game, their voices are flat and indistinguishable, but the undeniable facts of victory and loss are spread across each face.

"Congratulations," I say when Alyssa comes running to me. "Good job."

"Thanks, Mom. It was a good game." She frowns. "Where'd Kevin go? Did he get bored?"

"No, not bored at all. Just busy. Hurry up and get your stuff. I'll buy you a burger."

I reach to brush a wisp of hair off her damp forehead. Her lips are slack, open from breathing hard, and her cheeks are flushed red-except where the mascara she painted around her father's eyes stains her skin in gray, sweaty circles. There's a question lingering on her face, an unanswered question still about the man who walked away. She is only wondering how to ask me, I know, wondering if she has the right, wondering if I will tell her the truth. I touch one of the streaky patches on her cheek.

"I was right, wasn't I?" she asks. "About Kevin? How he feels?"

"Yes," I say, looking into her eyes, so like the ones I lost. "You were right."

"What happened, Mom?"

It's a good question. I look away from her. From him.

Around us, the families are all saying goodbye. The playing field itself is empty, silent, still. Soon there will be only hints that we were here at all; a couple of forgotten water bottles lying on the ground, somebody's jacket crumpled beneath a tree. No traces of the cheers or the names called out loud. No lingering tension over who will win or lose.

"What happened, Mom?" she asks again.

"Come on," I say, my hand on her back. "It's time to go home."

As we walk together, neither of us speaks. I cannot find the right words. She is asking for answers and I am as filled with questions as she could ever be, as filled with a sense of standing on an edge as my daughter whose childhood is loosing its hold, whose life is daily widening its embrace. At the curb, before we cross to the car, I turn around, toward the field, half expecting to see Heidi sitting there, as though she alone might still be waiting for me. But she has gone, and so has her canvas throne. Only my old yellow beach chair remains beside that empty s.p.a.ce, out of season and left behind, improbably vivid, improbably bright, against the autumn hues, against the failing day.

A.

Country Where You Once Lived

IT ISN'T EVEN a two-hour train ride out from London to the village where Jeremy's daughter and her husband-a man Jeremy has never met-have lived for the past three years, but it's one of those trips that seems to carry you much farther than the time might imply. By around the halfway point the scenery has shaken off all evidence of the city, all evidence, really, of the past century or two. Or so it seems to Jeremy as long as he blurs his eyes to the occasional black line of motorway snaking through it all, to the dots of color speeding along the line. Otherwise, it's pretty much all mild shades of green and milling cows, sheep cl.u.s.tered at copses, church steeples appearing at regular intervals in a gentle, rea.s.suring rhythm. It's a fantasy landscape, he thinks. The kind that encourages belief in the myth of uncomplicated lives. a two-hour train ride out from London to the village where Jeremy's daughter and her husband-a man Jeremy has never met-have lived for the past three years, but it's one of those trips that seems to carry you much farther than the time might imply. By around the halfway point the scenery has shaken off all evidence of the city, all evidence, really, of the past century or two. Or so it seems to Jeremy as long as he blurs his eyes to the occasional black line of motorway snaking through it all, to the dots of color speeding along the line. Otherwise, it's pretty much all mild shades of green and milling cows, sheep cl.u.s.tered at copses, church steeples appearing at regular intervals in a gentle, rea.s.suring rhythm. It's a fantasy landscape, he thinks. The kind that encourages belief in the myth of uncomplicated lives.

Jeremy is riding backward so is watching it all recede, and the sensation is oddly saddening. Or maybe not so oddly saddening. A scientist, a cancer researcher, he pa.s.ses his days in the flux and flow between the minute facts of molecular composition and our comparatively clunky selves. He knows well that for all the brain's cellular elegance, it has too this kind of simple, simplistic aspect to it. Leaving is sad. Even just the illusion of leaving is sad. As each view recedes, his eyes are tricked and in turn trick his brain: he is leaving... leaving... leaving... leaving... leaving... leaving... Of course he feels sad. Of course he feels sad.

That's what he tells himself anyway as he rides along, that his settling melancholy is at least in part the mechanical product of a cause-and-effect process of sensory input and reflexive response.

Maybe it will wear off as the day goes on, he tells himself.

The reason Jeremy Piper has never met his son-in-law is that he hasn't seen his daughter, Zoe, in just over four years. The reason he hasn't seen his daughter in all that time is a bit harder to determine, some lethal blend of ancient angers and the seductive ease of separation three thousand miles granted them thirteen years earlier. In the early days, back in Boston by himself, Jeremy was capable of working himself into a strangely personal anger at the Atlantic Ocean, as though it were some kind of bully standing between him and his family, as though he were overmatched. But increasingly he's aware of how much blame belongs to him.

The fulcrum of his life, the fateful before-and-after line, was the year they all spent in London, starting June 1996. "Our very own annus horribilis," his wife called it at the time.

They went to England, he, Cathleen, and Zoe, so he could begin the work for which he has since garnered much acclaim, a study of the potential cancer-fighting properties of an enzyme found in a particularly deadly mushroom growing only in Britain-or, as Cathleen began saying some months in: on the potential cancer-fighting properties of an enzyme found in blah, blah, blah on the potential cancer-fighting properties of an enzyme found in blah, blah, blah. Neither Cathleen nor Zoe, sixteen at the time, wanted to make the move, until Jeremy won Cathleen over with the argument that taking Zoe away from her thoroughly dislikable, probably criminal friends could only be a good idea. But then just about one month into the stay, Zoe ran away from home with a Boston boy, a school friend backpacking the Lake District over his summer break. And she didn't just run away; she left no word about where she had gone, no sign that she had gone under her own steam.

Jeremy could only ever remember bits and moments from those two weeks, the ones when she was gone. Merciful amnesia, a friend once called it-except it wasn't very merciful, because only the worst of it stuck with him. Or so he a.s.sumed. Like the first shock at her absence, as too many hours pa.s.sed for it to be benign teenage tardiness; like walking the streets of London, night after night, as though she might have become a nocturnal creature waiting to reveal herself in the dark; like the dawning nightmarish realization that he himself was a suspect in her disappearance. "We're not making any accusations. You wouldn't want us to leave any stone unturned." He imagined himself on trial, wrongly convicted, locked away, the headlines, clever if obvious plays on his name: Tried Piper Lured Own Daughter... Tried Piper Lured Own Daughter... That was a uniquely vivid memory. But still, there were long stretches from those days during which, for all he could ever remember, he might as well have been dead. That was a uniquely vivid memory. But still, there were long stretches from those days during which, for all he could ever remember, he might as well have been dead.

That wasn't true of what followed her return. The difficulty was never remembering that period but letting it go. Particularly his own trouble accepting that she hadn't been abducted, she had left of her own free will. And that she hadn't been unable to contact them, she had chosen not to. His own disbelief at the disappearance of the villain he had conjured and blamed for it all, the man who had been the target of his rage while she was gone, the object of revenge fantasies so violent and so vile Jeremy had barely admitted them to himself. The man who had doubtless killed his daughter, doubtless done G.o.d knew what else to her and in the process-minor collateral damage, Jeremy understood-destroyed her father.

Except there was no man. There was only his Zoe, sixteen years old and sorry, really, really sorry, for what she had done.