“No. No. I’m doing this alone.”
He said her name as if she were a toddler and he, cowed, afraid of a coming tantrum.
“You stay here and listen to Bach.”
He got up and got the sweater. “Don’t be like that. Let me come. I want to be with you. And not because I want to meet.”
“No.”
She often wondered what formed the foundation of her husband’s reliable cluelessness. He loved her so, and yet could life be that mystifying? Could she? What was she to make of the fact that Oliver had forgotten four of her last ten birthdays or his habit of talking ball scores with the bartender while other men sidled up and offered to buy her a drink? More than once, Benji had assumed the role of his brother-in-law’s apologist. He praised Oliver’s lack of jealousy as a rare and covetable evolutionary step, suggested that addle-mindedness was sometimes nothing more than that, and Claudia took heart. She found it more convenient to let her troops be called back from the battlefront, to let her temper be cooled, even if she never completely lost sight of the red flags that troubled the horizon.
She passed the baton of packing to Oliver, knowing that he could run that leg of the race better than she, and retreated to the other side of the apartment with her laptop. She pulled up the Hertz website, but in that moment rental cars might have been the theory of relativity: they were nowhere on her mind.
Oliver stood over the suitcase, considering its insides like a diagnostician as he shucked a blouse from its hanger and folded it atop the others.
“I’m only staying for a day or two,” Claudia called.
He moved to the dresser for a stack of underwear. “You never know what you’ll need.”
True, she didn’t know what she’d need. But she knew, with arresting clarity, for the first time in a long time, what she wanted. How long had it been since she’d thought his name? She pulled up a new window as her fingers raced ahead of her priorities and typed Nick Amato. Google yielded over three million results, with top honors going to a self-styled tween idol filling up YouTube with covers from the Justin Bieber catalog.
As she clicked from page to page, looking for the ghost of the Nick she knew, guilt snaked around her heart like a thorny vine. Why wasn’t Max her first priority? Shouldn’t he be? At some point, didn’t the boy deserve to win out above all else? It pained her to think how disastrously she’d behaved on the phone. Stricken and speechless, she’d done little more than stretch two minutes to their most torturous length, agreeing to meet him simply to get him off the phone. It wasn’t that atonement and tenderness were beyond her, but the apology she felt she needed to make, like a form stepping darkly out of a mist, had its sights set on Nick, not Max.
Claudia scrolled through several pages of YouTube videos of prepubescent homage to a prepubescent Canadian before coming upon a link to Amato & Sons, Contractors Inc. She clicked it, and up popped a functional, utterly frill-less website for the company that Nick Amato Sr. had started years before Nick Jr. was born. Assuming the attractions of a business dedicated to house painting couldn’t possibly seduce an accomplished lawyer from a well-heeled life in the Pacific Northwest (or so rumor had it), Claudia hoped to find an e-mail address for one of Nick’s loyal but less ambitious brothers, but when she clicked “About Us,” she sat face to face with Nick himself, who’d walked out of her life with the steely promise never to enter it again. “Nicholas Amato Jr., President.” He hadn’t lost that easy, affable handsomeness that still had the power to set her heart pounding, though he’d traded in his lanky frame and shoulder-length locks for a brawny body and a salt-and-pepper burr cut. She e-mailed herself the company’s address and quickly closed the window as Oliver, having carried her zippered bag to the door, came forward for a conciliatory kiss. She shut the window on Nick and pulled up a list of links to Max’s name.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“I can help you go through it.”
But even as Claudia clicked dutifully on Alex Ross’ New Yorker profile, her mind continued to feel its way down darkened but thrilling alleys she’d made herself avoid for the last twenty years. Somewhere, somewhere in the murk of the past, lay the body of the man she’d left broken by her attempt to spare him pain. The year she delivered the baby had been spent in the anonymous thrall of New York City. She hid from her parents, who feared that she, like her brother, had developed a drug problem; she hid from Nick, who returned from Stanford to track her down only to find that she’d changed addresses and effectively disappeared.
“You just gave him away.” Nick wept the night he finally found her, when she finally explained, three months after she’d placed the baby into strangers’ arms. “I didn’t deserve a say in that?”
“You would have wanted to get married. Which means I would have left school and probably you would too.”
“We can still get married. We can get the baby back.”
“No, we can’t. I don’t want to get married, Nick.” She reached out to him and took his hand. “Say we did. Say we got married and had the baby and the three of us moved back to Alluvia tomorrow. How long do you think it would take before I hated you for that? How long before I hated the baby?”
“You’ve got it all figured out. You have that little faith?”
“In us? I did this for us.”
“There is no us!”
At the end of that conversation, he hadn’t slammed the door between them, but shut it with such quiet resolve she felt sure it would never open again. Nick denied her the opportunity for penitence, which she knew she didn’t deserve. He vowed to fight her, to fight for custody of their son, but in the end, he didn’t. He disappeared as decisively as she had. And that, it seemed, was that.
Two decades later, Claudia could still be shaken awake by the sickening feeling that she’d not only turned over her only child but also returned an entire life like a piece of misaddressed mail. She’d set Max and Nick out to sea in separate little boats, but who was to say that if they’d stayed together things would have ended up the way she thought? Maybe she and Nick wouldn’t have quit school or retreated to the soggy solace of their childhood homes. She had no way to tell. All she could say with certainty was that she’d always regretted one decision more than the other: she wanted Nick’s forgiveness most of all.
But what about Max’s forgiveness? Was it not another failure not to ask for that too? On one hand, she’d failed to walk into that abortion clinic and end his troubles before they started. On the other, she’d failed to offer him a mother’s love — even a mother who assumed she had little love to give — and placed him instead in the care of a beleaguered social worker whose guarantee that everything would be as it should be sounded hollow as a drum. She failed to seek out her son. Failed to let him know that even though she seemed like a woman forever moving forward, she sometimes, with doubt and sadness, looked back. Even now that Max had found her, she’d failed to return the balls of easy banter he had rolled so generously to her feet during their quick phone call. Did she like living in New York? How long had she been an architect? If she couldn’t answer this first round of questions, how could she possibly field the next?
She stared at the Leibovitz photo—“Look,” Oliver said with wonder, “I never noticed before how much he looks like you”—and started reading the Ross article from the top: In 2002, at the age of twelve, the son of a violin teacher and a novice inventor from a small city in upstate New York convinced a packed house at Carnegie Hall that they’d just witnessed the second coming of Pablo Casals.
By six forty-five the next morning, just as the tenebrous sky began brightening toward dawn, she sped past the old weatherworn sign that stood at the side of the road: “Welcome to Alluvia.” She slowed the car to a crawl as she passed the tennis courts, slowed even more as the post office and pizza parlor and library receded one after the other in the rearview mirror. A fist battered inside of her, the knocking so furious that by the time she turned onto School Street, she actually thought she was coming apart. Her breath shuddered. Her hands shook. She gripped the wheel in a stranglehold and rolled to a stop at the corner of Palmer and School.