Riggs Park Part 22

Then a rea.s.suring hand plopped itself onto my shoulder. "Don't feel abandoned. Uncle Stevie's here to see you through your time of need."

"Thanks, Uncle Stevie."

"This is going to turn out to be okay," he said.

"Is it?"

He eased his arm around me, pulled me close. "Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not the way you think. But yes. Sure."

Something in me shifted then. The shelf of the world readjusting itself. A seismic correction. I wasn't sure what it meant, didn't much care. It was Steve who sheltered me like an oak tree, Steve I leaned on while Jon got to know the daughter who in a better world might have been from another union entirely. Steve who turned me away from the sight of them and escorted me across the room. "Let's go say goodbye to Marcellus," he said.

Shaking hands with people heading out the door, Marcellus seemed to be having a good time. "Well, how they doing?" he asked, gesturing in the direction of Jon and Vera.

"They seem to be doing fine," I said without looking.

"Well, I thought they would. Good."

"I would never have expected this," I told him.

"You weren't supposed to."

"I mean, your following through on Essie's idea of a father-daughter reunion-I wouldn't have expected it-under the circ.u.mstances."

"What'd you think, that after all this I would disrespect Essie? She was more a mother to me than my own mother was."

"I know she was. I saw how you tried to protect her. And how much she cared about you."

"She liked you, too."

"Not really." I tried to sound flip, but it was as if someone were squeezing my heart. As a child I'd resented Essie not making more of a fuss over me, pampering Penny and Steve instead. I'd never quite gotten over it.

"She liked you more than you thought," Marcellus said. "She said your big problem was, you worried about how you looked. You were smart, you had a nice family, everything going for you, and you worried how you looked."

"I did. I still do." Marcellus's words brought my sense of humor back. "Major character flaw, huh?"

"She said you'd always look all right. You had good bone structure."

"She said that?"

Marcellus shrugged.

"She always told me looks were temporary. Not to count on them."

"Yeah, well-Somebody could have hit you upside the head. You could have gone through a windshield. She was probably preparing you for that."

"I wouldn't put it past her."

Marcellus backed up slightly, studied me through narrowed eyes. "Of course now that you're an old broad, looking just like any other old broad-"

I laughed.

Marcellus held out his hand to say goodbye. I meant to take it, but instead I moved forward and gave him a hug. It startled us both. Unpromising as our start had been, somehow here we were, making jokes like old friends. Confusing as this was, I had no intention of a.n.a.lyzing it. Sometimes the best policy-as I had lately learned-was simply to be grateful.

Across the room, Jon was shaking hands with Vera and Ed. Kiss her, I wanted to say. Kiss your daughter.

"Don't rush him," Steve told me. "There'll be time."

"What's this? Are you reading my mind now?"

"I've always been able to read your mind, sweetie. Ever since you came to my house wanting to quit piano lessons." He bent over and softly kissed my cheek.

In the plane on the way home, Jon said, "The baby's due in a couple of weeks. Vera isn't really supposed to travel, but she wanted to meet me."

"Are you flattered?"

"Very much."

"This is going to be good for you, this late-blooming fatherhood. It's fine not to have children, but if you don't, there's a big chunk of your heart you just never get to use. Trust me on this."

"I believe you. But what about her saying the birth certificate lists the father as unknown. Do you think maybe I'm not?"

"Not her father? No. Just look at her-those eyebrows! That voice. Of course you're her father. I think Penny didn't put your name down because she wanted to protect us. If somebody got hold of the birth certificate later, she wanted to be sure you couldn't be traced. Because she thought you were going to marry me."

Jon drew a deep breath. "And will you?" he asked.

CHAPTER 21.

Wrightsville Beach, NC February 2001 On this warm February day, the seascape is all pastels, sand the palest possible beige, sky and ocean identical shades of blue, shot through with wisps of thin clouds. In the surf, something wonderful to eat-the gulls circling, diving, making a racket; the pelicans bobbing on the swells like ducks, reaching down for occasional nibbles.

I took my shoes off, waded into the icy tide for the ritual of exposing my toes to the ocean, then sat down on the soft sand above the tide line.

A month ago, in January, I'd flown to Washington for Marilyn's son Andrew's engagement brunch, and as I scanned the water, my thoughts were dragged back to that now. Robin had come from Los Angeles, partly to meet Andrew's fiancee but mostly to see Marilyn, who was in the middle of her treatments. Jon was in Texas doing interviews, but Marilyn had invited Vera and Ed. "Trying to make them feel like family," she'd said.

The young couple had showed up early, toting their six-week-old son.

"So you named him David." I let the baby's name play on my tongue as I helped Vera arrange her diaper bag and other baby miscellany in the bedroom where she could nurse him and let him nap. "You named him after your mother, Davidina."

"Yes."

"Penny was supposed to be a David herself, but turned out to be a girl. Did Essie tell you that? Essie was the one who gave your mother the nickname, Penny."

Vera shook her head. "I didn't know that."

"I'll tell you the whole story," I said. "Lots of stories. Essie's last request."

With the weary slowness of the sleep-deprived, milk-engorged, garment-stained new mother, Vera lifted the baby to her shoulder. "This will be hard for you, won't it? Essie told me you and Jon had been engaged and out of guilt he ran off. She told me you never knew the whole story until last fall. If I found out Ed had a baby with a friend of mine, I don't think I'd ever forgive him. Or her, either."

"You might surprise yourself," I told her.

"So you don't mind telling me about my mother?"

"There was a time when I would have. Not now." It seemed an age since Jon and I had returned from Essie's funeral and had the long-overdue talk that finally erased my reticence about Penny and so many other things. Would I marry him? Probably. But first we needed to know each other without the burden of secrets hanging between us like a shield. After thirty years, why not take a few more months to be sure? In the end, Jon took an apartment and rented his share of the house to Robin, very cheaply, while she was in Wilmington working on her film. Even after she left, we kept "dating" with a kind of tenderness neither of us had expected. We wouldn't have forever to make up our minds. But we had now.

There in Marilyn's guest room, I ruffled the baby's soft hair as he lay with his head on Vera's shoulder. Little by little, David's eyes drifted shut and his forehead furrowed as if he were deep in thought, bringing together brows already black and sleek as a seal's. "If your mother knew she had a grandchild named after her," I said, "she would have been honored."

"You think so?"

I nodded. "I'm sure of it. I feel honored in her behalf."

I hadn't expected the seesaw of emotions that gripped me that weekend. Talking to Vera brought more pleasure than I'd bargained for, but seeing Marilyn was a painful, ongoing shock. She was frighteningly thin, thinner than during the brutal days of chemo years before. Her clothes hung on her, even the slim jeans she wore the afternoon I arrived. In the two months since Essie's funeral, she must have lost fifteen pounds. How was that possible?

Seeing the look on my face, Bernie cornered me in the kitchen as soon as Marilyn went to get a tablecloth out of the dryer. "It might be nothing," he said. "She has her scans next month and then we'll know. She's always a little peaked in the winter. The treatments were tougher than she thought."

"She did this to spare the hair," I said bitterly.

"She's glad she spared the hair, she's just tired. It takes a little while to make a comeback. Not that anyone was ever optimistic."

"Not optimistic?"

"This was a recurrence. A recurrence is never good news."

"But these new treatments-"

"It's not just the treatments that have her down. It's everything combined. Waiting for the fatigue to go away. Numbness from the face-lift-"

"She hasn't said anything about fatigue or numbness since Thanksgiving!"

Marilyn appeared just then in the doorway, the tablecloth clutched to her scrawny chest. "I didn't want to worry you, that's all."

"I thought we were friends! I thought we were finished having secrets!" I felt on the verge of hysteria.

Making his escape, Bernie fled into the den. Marilyn took my arm.

"Come outside for a minute." She got our coats and gestured toward the screened porch in back. "My current condition is nothing to get excited about. Come on, sit down."

We dropped into chairs and looked out to the frostbitten yard, bleak in the pale afternoon light. A gusty wind growled in the bare trees and rustled the bushes. "Okay, here's how it is," Marilyn said. "Sometimes I feel like I'm on a roller coaster. I keep trying to get off, but I'm never sure if I have. Sometimes I'm up in the air and sometimes the ground feels solid. Listen, don't be upset with me for not telling you before. You can't blame me for not wanting to spill my guts while you and Jon were reorganizing your lives."

"And why not, Marilyn? Why the h.e.l.l not?"

She ignored that. "Anyway, I can't control it. Being tired. Having no appet.i.te. You have no right to be angry with me for something I can't control."

"Sure, put me on a guilt trip," I shot back, but had to pretend it was the wind that was making my eyes water so.

At the back of the yard, two cardinals, a male and a female, sat on the branches of a holly bush, fluffing their feathers. Marilyn hugged herself into her coat. Dwarfed by the high-backed chair, she seemed already insubstantial, as if she'd been whittled away by the pumice stone she used on her nails, rubbed down until soon even the nub would be gone, her features wavering and indistinct through my tears, her flesh so soft that at any moment she might liquefy and drift away.

"Don't think such morbid thoughts," Marilyn said.

"How do you know what I'm thinking?"

"If you could see your face, you wouldn't ask. Keep in mind that it's uncharitable to put me in the grave before I'm actually dead."

"Don't talk like that."

"Why not? You don't really think it's going to happen to you. That you'll get that old or that desperate or that sick. Or be that unlucky. You don't ever really believe it."

"I guess you don't." I swallowed my grief and made myself meet her eyes.

"You know what I always thought I'd do after the kids left?" Marilyn asked. "Promise you won't laugh. Run for office."

"You still might."

"No. I would have hated it. People calling all the time to complain. No privacy. It would have been awful."

As if everything were settled. As if everything were past. Inside the house, beyond the sliding gla.s.s door, someone on the TV was laughing. "Do you feel bad? Are you in pain?" I raised my voice against the wind and the TV and the jumble in my head, and realized I was shouting.

"No pain, just achy. Like I have the flu."

"Maybe you do have the flu."

"Maybe." Marilyn didn't smile. Already something permanent had changed, the relentless cheeriness had gone, she'd dropped the mask she'd been wearing and let me see her raw and genuine self for once, not upbeat, her face tight with fear.

I will love this Marilyn better, I thought. I will love her better if I get the chance.

At the brunch, Marilyn was a perfect mask again. "Wouldn't have a clue my sister sleeps fourteen hours a day, would you?" Steve asked. He had flown in just for a couple of hours.

"Is she as sick as I think she is?" Robin wanted to know. "Tell me the truth, Uncle Steve."

"No way to tell when people are having cancer treatments," Steve told her. "Until they're over, you just hold your breath." He put one arm around me and one around Robin. "Listen, sweetie, if your Aunt Marilyn can be perky today, so can we. Let's go congratulate the bride and groom to be," he instructed, and herded us into the room where Andrew and his fiancee, Dee Dee, were holding court.

Before I left for my evening flight home, Marilyn made me walk with her around the block in the frigid air. Her face was flushed; she was still on an adrenaline high even though the party must have worn her out. "Here," she said, taking off her necklace. It was the pearl on a thin gold chain her mother had given her the day of our Sweet Sixteen. She'd worn it on special occasions, for luck, ever since.

"I can't take that."

"You can. I want you to have it. Who else from our Sweet Sixteen can I foist it on?"

"No!" I insisted. "It's like-a last offering. Give it to me another time. Next trip. I'll be back."

"Just in case," Marilyn said, and folded it into my hand.

We pretended nothing had happened. We walked back. Made the usual small talk. Laughed. But when Bernie opened the car door to let me in, I flung myself into Marilyn's arms and burst into tears and held tight. "When will I see you again? I want to know exactly. Let's make plans right now."

"Why, at Andrew's wedding," Marilyn said without hesitation. "In April." Her tone made me feel that in spite of her pale translucent skin and the fine blue vein that beat beneath the skin of her temple, she might be right.