He took his hand away and looked at her thoroughly. “You could stay,” he said.
She turned back to the window and watched the snow settle. “After two days, you are ready for that?”
“You live for fifty-two years so you can know what you want in two days,” he said.
“Twenty years later, don’t we end up where Alex and I’ve ended up? Where you and Clarissa did? Doesn’t it all come to the same thing?”
“In twenty years, I’ll try to save you the trouble and be dead,” he said. “But no — you are wrong about that. I can’t prove it to you because I haven’t lived it — I’ve lived the opposite. But I know.”
She smiled weakly. “I could cook for Wilma,” she said. “She needs the help. We could buy a motel — make it something it should be.”
“Why didn’t you open that café that you wanted?” he said.
She nodded, as if agreeing with something he’d said.
“Won’t you tell me?” he said.
She watched him with pity. “What could be interesting about me, Marion?”
“I look for explanations only if I need explanations,” he said.
She turned back to the window and looked out at the morning. “When I told them I wanted to do it, they looked at me as if I’d said I wanted to take Alex and move back to Ukraine.”
“Which them?”
“My parents-in-law. Eugene — my father-in-law — said: ‘So you mean on the weekends?’ I explained again, but he still thought I meant I wanted to come work with him — he imports food. He thought I wanted to cook the food. ‘But why? It’s cooked already.’ Finally, I got through. So he called a friend with a restaurant, and got me on the line for a day. He said, ‘Why speculate? Educated people make decisions based on facts and experience.’ My father-in-law, the logician.
“I had lead in my legs that day. Bricks in my hands and lead in my legs. I bumped the other cooks. I scattered an entire container of smoked eel on the floor. Smoked eel — it’s burned into my mind. Nervous, I guess. It was different from the kind of food I wanted to make — heavy sauces, all that sugar. Of course, they didn’t ask me back.
“Soon after that, Eugene gave me an ad in the newspaper. An opening in mammography at the hospital down the road. I would be home early enough to get Max from the school bus. I already had a semester of radiology from school, and he knew the department manager because he catered their holidays. He had found a way for me to try out at the restaurant; couldn’t I try this out in turn? So I did. I intended to return the favor, and then go back to my plans. This is how I understood the new situation: I had new people to take into account; I had to try. But, you know, I liked the hospital. Because I was expecting so little? I liked being around all that sickness and death; I was alive by comparison. It was me and six or eight women, all older; Dominican, Italian, Greek, Cuban: I never had to bring lunch from home. I liked all that equipment in my hands: it was solid. I learned how to use it. I became good at it. At the end of the day, I didn’t have to wonder what the day had been worth.
“I thought, maybe Eugene was right, and simply no one had cared about me deeply enough to open my eyes to the truth. Maybe I had been holding my breath for four years — I had come only for college, on a student visa; there are so many things you don’t know about me, Marion. Maybe cooking was just a trance of some kind — because I missed my mother, I missed home. And now that I’d found a new family, it was over, and I had a new direction. Truthfully, I was relieved. A fear went out of me. I thought: So I will not get to do that. It was like saying good-bye to a complicated lover. The love went, but so did the heartache.”
“You keep saying your father-in-law. What about your husband? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. I thought he was trying to respect me by not getting in the way.”
Marion only nodded at something.
“It sounds so bad spoken out loud. I’ve never spoken it out loud before.”
“Why?”
“No one’s asked. But also I didn’t tell anyone. Whom to tell? We have no friends. I have no friends. You’re my first friend in twenty-five years in America.”
“I don’t want to be your friend.”
“What about Max?” she said. “Have you thought of that?”
“He would be here, with you. Where he’s from.”
“He’s not from here anymore,” she said. “Max doesn’t want to be in Montana. He wants to be wild in New Jersey. And I have to be where he is.” She looked out the window again. “I have to protect him from his family.”
“And where do you want to be?” he said.
Maya exhaled. “I can’t stop looking at the mountains. It’s so easy to go your whole life without seeing them. Without seeing anything, really. I wanted to know yesterday: Do they become invisible to you? In a month or a year, would they become ordinary?”
“Now you don’t steer away.”
She looked back at him with love. “I want to be here, Marion.”
“So, we’ll answer every question,” he said. “I wouldn’t say this—” he started and broke off.
“Go ahead. If you thought I loved Alex.” She waited out a pause. “But I do love him. I thought I was marrying someone of ambition, creativity, power. The power to bewitch. He was awkward and tentative — so unlike the boys I had known. But he kept going — he kept after what he wanted even though it wouldn’t come easily. Doesn’t it count so much more that way? It did to me then, at any rate. Even though it wasn’t right, even though I had a boyfriend — he kept going. He could not stop; it was passion. He bewitched me — in the last way I thought I would be bewitched. That felt so right — I thought I knew everything, and he showed me I didn’t.” She thought for a moment. “Is that a story I tell myself? Maybe it was much simpler than that, and I only wanted to sell myself to America. Once you start looking inside yourself in this way, there’s no more hope of a clear answer.”
She rubbed her fingertips on the glass of the window, as if trying to leave a trace of herself. “It was some time before I understood that the things that I loved were an anomaly for him. It wasn’t what he loved about himself. Then I thought he wanted help getting back to them. I was wrong. And then we just. . stayed that way. I wouldn’t let go. Like letting go was another defeat — so young, and already so many defeats. My stubbornness about cooking — maybe I turned it into a stubbornness about us. I would change him — it would get better. And then Max. . But the solution is not to ruin Alex’s life — this family’s. Not yet, at least. Don’t I have to unfail myself before I fail him? I am not asking you to wait. All I can say is I don’t know. And I love you. I do love you.”
They sat with this miserable information.
“When I told you that Max was adopted,” she said finally. “Did you think why?”
He worked at his lip with his teeth. “Was it that you two couldn’t. .?”
“Yes,” she said. “Did you wonder who?”
“No,” he said. “I have children; that’s not what matters to me.”
“Do you want to know who?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Tell me if you want me to know.”
“Alex can’t have children. He has Klinefelter’s — a syndrome. They discovered it when we tried to get pregnant. But his parents think it’s me. They decided that I was infertile and that he was covering up for me, a gentleman. Little by little, that story became fact. A word here, a word there. It bothered me at first, but then you think, Who cares, anyway? If they knew their son was infertile, they would not sleep at night. They would feel as if life had laughed in their face. But I. . they love me. In the way they know how. But I will always be the adopted daughter. So if it’s me, they can go to sleep at night. Though I am sure they worry: Will Max inherit this blemish from Maya? And then they remember Max is not Maya’s. And this helps them sleep. Max wouldn’t exist in our lives without the blemish, but they couldn’t sleep calmly if the opposite was the case, wondering if he would inherit it. The release is built into the flaw.”