She says, “I don’t wish that anymore. I used to. And I used to wish I had never been born. But all that’s natural, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Right. But with you, I just didn’t understand. I thought this even when I was very young, why you would ever want a child, me or anyone else. You seemed to prefer being alone, in the house you so carefully set up, your yard and your pool. You could have married someone nice, like Mary Burns. You could have had an instant, solid family, in your fine neighborhood, in your fine town. But you didn’t. You just had me. And I always wondered why. I always thought it was you who wished I had never come, that you had never chosen to send for me.”
“I never once thought that,” I tell her, “not for one moment.”
“It doesn’t matter if you did,” she says, with a gentle equanimity. “We’re here, aren’t we? Whatever has happened.”
I let the notion suspend, and even happily, for I’ve long wished to taste the plain and decent flavor of being with someone who is likewise content to be with me. It’s a feeling not necessarily happy or thrilling or joyful but roundly pleasing, one that I am sure most people in the world know well, and others, like Sunny and me, both orphans of a sort, must slowly discover, come to learn for ourselves.
“How is Renny, by the way? Was he awake?”
“He was,” Sunny replies. “We talked for a little while. He was very tired, and I wanted to leave him alone, but he kept asking me questions.”
“About what?”
“Guess.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose Renny was curious about you being my daughter.”
She carefully peels the tops from the cups of tea. She hands me one. “I think he knows you adopted me. But he wasn’t so interested in that. He wanted to know what it was like, having you as a father. Growing up together in the house.”
I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I don’t mind.”
“How are you so sure you don’t want to hear it?” she answers. “You think I would say something bad?”
“No, I don’t,” I say, trying not to sound pleading. “It’s just that I see no reason to put you in a funny position now, when it was probably awkward enough with Renny. I know this will sound terrible, given what’s happened in the last few days, but I’m almost grateful for the way things have gone of late, by which I mean between you and Thomas and me. It’s certainly strange and unexplainable, but I can’t think of another time in my life that I have been as hopeful as I am now, and I am sure it is because you have come back here with your son. I will take that over everything else. So you see how you could have told Renny whatever you wished or felt compelled to, and it would be all right with me. With the misery that has come, there is some fortune. Perhaps even for me.”
Sunny says, “You’re not someone I ever think has had too little fortune in his life.”
I don’t answer, though I glance at her somberly, to try to tell her somehow that she’s both absolutely wrong, and right.
“I think that’s why Renny likes you so much,” she speaks up. “You’re a charm to him. He looks up to you. He’s obviously a nice man, too, and I could never tell him anything bad about you.”
“But you very well could.”
“I could,” she tells me straight, but without any malice in her eyes. “I could. I guess I could have told him a thousand things about you and about me, none of them alone so terrible and damning but taken altogether.”
“But there is that one thing….”
She lowers her eyes.
“I’ve been wishing it never happened.”
“Yes,” she very firmly and quietly says. “But we’ve talked about that already, haven’t we? I don’t want to bring it up again. Please.”
“Okay,” I say to her, though somehow I feel an impulse to lead us to some brink. So I say, “But in fact everything with Dr. Anastasia was all my fault. It was.”
Sunny doesn’t answer. There’s a cross wrinkle in her brow, but she somehow sloughs off my likely ruinous charge and asks instead if the turkey sandwich is all right for me. I can only answer that it is. Before I know it we’re on to something else entirely, namely, her round of interviews in Connecticut, and while she’s telling me how it doesn’t look promising that she’ll get the job or really want it if she does (the store being somewhere in northern Arizona), I see how far past those events and times my daughter is, how (whether psychologically healthful or not) she’s for the present moment put it well away, just a box in a trunk in an upstairs garret closet, this for her sake and Thomas’s and maybe even for mine.
We finish up with lunch and drink our tepid tea. We don’t say much of anything more, except to laugh about Thomas a little bit, as she tells me of his renewed love for all things on dry land. When she leaves I decide to go out of the hospital with her and escort her to her car, which she lets me do without a word. And I think a simple thought, that we can walk like this across wide parking lots, we can have a lunch together in a tiny basement room, and leave off mostly decent and all right.
I’m heartened on my own drive home, and yet I can’t seem to shake what I thought I had put well past me. For it was not in the hospital but in an affiliated clinic that I had arranged for Sunny to take care of her difficulty. She had returned once more to the house, after having been away for nearly a year. She was barely eighteen years old. She had been living with her friend Lincoln in a tenement apartment somewhere in Upper Manhattan. One evening as I was reading in bed the telephone rang and it was Sunny on the line. Her voice was very quiet and shallow, and for a few seconds I thought it was someone else, a prank caller of some kind. But then it was unmistakably Sunny, the reserve of her coming through even the anxiousness in her voice. Of course she would not say a word of how scared she was. But I listened and did not try to interrupt, and by the end of the conversation I told her I was glad that she decided not to go to one of the crowded, dirty clinics where she was living, and that she had nothing to be concerned with anymore. When I awoke I made several discreet contacts and by the afternoon the procedure was arranged and scheduled for the following Monday. Sunny would take the train up to Bedley Run on Sunday and I would meet her at the station and take us to the private clinic for an examination, which the doctor insisted upon before any procedure the next morning.
When I saw her step out onto the platform I was taken aback by the broad, curving shape of her. Her face was full. She hadn’t said how far the pregnancy had gone, and I had assumed it was but a few weeks past her date, perhaps a month or two, no more. Anyone else would have thought that she was too long with the child, that it was much too late, that there was nothing left to do. She was indeed quite near full-term. But when she came out of the train the first thought that came to me was that it was a Sunday and quiet, when there was hardly anyone about, and that I ought to spirit her to the private clinic and to Dr. Anastasia as quickly as possible.
In the car I didn’t speak. What was there to say? If anything, I had only criticisms, and though I chose not to air them I was feeling edgy all the same, driving brusquely, speeding and changing lanes without signaling. Sunny didn’t seem to notice, swaying on each turn, unseatbelted as always, and suddenly I was furious with her. How could she get herself into such a predicament? How long did she believe she could delay? Where now was her “lover,” whom she always talked of being so genuine and serious and gentle? Perhaps he had made a few recordings some time ago, but did he even own his trumpet anymore, or was it pawned for a few weeks’ phantom pleasure and delirium? And glancing over at her I felt my fury redouble, seeing that she had little need to apologize or excuse or otherwise explain, and I thought — darkly, for a bare millisecond — that I could unbuckle myself now, too, and let the car’s momentum carry us straight through the approaching sharp turn, into the stone farmer’s wall that bounded the old suburban roadway. I wanted an end to us, inglorious and swift, just another unfortunate accident on Route 9, to leave a few lines hardly noticed in the local paper concerning a longtime Bedley Run resident and his daughter, with no survivors.