Chương 3
This time Eli went.
He did not go because his father had won. He went because Celia’s hands were shaking around the padded insert, and because the triumph he had expected was nowhere inside him. There was only the sick awareness that a baby had existed, and then had not, and that he had pulled the evidence of its absence into the light.
Mara followed him through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.
The kitchen was too bright. Copper pans hung above the island. A bowl of lemons sat beside a cutting board. Someone had left a grocery receipt beneath the salt cellar, and the air smelled faintly of rosemary and floor wax.
Eli climbed onto a stool.
Mara opened the refrigerator, stared inside, and closed it without taking anything. Then she opened it again.
“Do you want juice?”
“No.”
“Water?”
“No.”
“You should drink something.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“That has never stopped a person from drinking water.”
She filled a glass from the filtered tap and set it in front of him. He did not touch it. She took the stool across from him and folded her hands.
“You should not have pulled her dress,” she said.
“I pulled the tab.”
“You should not have touched anything she was wearing.”
“If I didn’t, no one would believe me.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“Was I right?”
Mara looked toward the pantry door.
“That is not the same question.”
“It is to me.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be.”
“Why?”
“Because you can discover something true by doing something wrong.”
Eli turned the glass in a small circle, leaving a wet ring on the island. “Would you have believed me?”
“I would have listened.”
“You didn’t at the Cape.”
“I wasn’t at the Cape.”
“At dinner, I told you the bump moved.”
“You said it looked crooked. I thought you were being cruel.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I know that now.”
“So you didn’t believe me.”
Mara leaned back. Her auburn hair had fallen across one eye. She pushed it away and gave him a tired look.
“No,” she said. “I did not.”
It was the first honest answer anyone had given him that afternoon.
He drank the water.
Graham entered twenty minutes later. He had removed his blazer and rolled the sleeves of his black turtleneck to his forearms, which he only did when something had gone wrong at work. He stood on the other side of the island.
“Celia is upstairs packing a bag.”
“For how long?” Mara asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where is she going?”
“A hotel.”
“She should not be alone.”
“She does not want company.”
“That doesn’t mean she should be alone.”
Graham looked at her. “You can offer. I won’t force her.”
Mara slid off the stool. “I’ll speak to her.”
After she left, Graham remained standing.
Eli moved the water glass away from the ring it had made.
“Are you angry at me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The answer surprised him, though he had expected it.
Graham pulled out the stool Mara had used and sat. “I’m also angry at myself. And at Celia. Those things can all be true.”
“She said I planned it.”
“Did you?”
“I saw the tab.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Eli looked down at his hands. The nails were bitten short. A small fiber from the fabric tab clung near his thumbnail.
“I thought if I pulled it, something would happen.”
“What did you think?”
“That it would come loose.”
“And then?”
“You would see.”
“So you did plan it.”
“Not before today.”
Graham rubbed his forehead. “Eli, you cannot pull at someone’s clothes to prove a point.”
“I didn’t pull her clothes.”
“You pulled something attached to them.”
“It was attached to the fake stomach.”
“You did not know that for certain.”
“I knew.”
“You suspected.”
Eli hated the difference adults made between those words. They treated certainty as something that belonged to them and suspicion as something children invented.
“I told you,” he said.
Graham’s hand lowered.
“I told you at the Cape. I told you after the museum. I told you when she canceled the doctor. You said I was trying to ruin the wedding.”
“I said you were having trouble with the changes.”
“You said I wanted her gone.”
“Did you?”
Eli’s face became hot.
Graham waited.
The kitchen clock ticked above the pantry door. Outside the windows, a landscaping truck moved slowly along the circular drive. One of the workers lifted a rake from the truck bed. The ordinary sight made the kitchen feel unreal.
“Yes,” Eli said.
Graham’s expression shifted, not much.
“I wanted her gone,” Eli continued. “But that doesn’t mean I made it up.”
“No.”
“You thought it did.”
“I thought your fear was shaping what you saw.”
“It was.”
Graham sat very still.
Eli picked at the fiber beneath his thumbnail. “I still saw it.”
His father looked down at the marble island. “Yes.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Graham had been a good father in the ways that could be scheduled. He attended school conferences, remembered Eli’s cello performances, and knew which cereal he disliked. He never forgot birthdays. He took him skiing in Vermont every February and made hot chocolate too strong. After Eli’s mother died, Graham had learned how to braid hair because Eli had gone through a six-month period of wanting one small braid behind his left ear, though the result usually leaned sideways.
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But Graham did not like emotions that arrived without appointments. Grief made him restless. Anger embarrassed him. When Eli cried, Graham offered solutions. When no solution existed, he offered food.
Celia had understood that quickly. She spoke softly, kept rooms calm, and converted difficult feelings into manageable plans. She had entered their lives as the development director of the museum where Graham funded a new gallery. At first she brought him seating charts and donor reports. Later she brought Eli graphic novels from the museum shop and remembered that he hated orange candy.
