When he and I were alone, I waited for the stories he never told. About his wife or his time as a soldier or his two years in the concentration camps, just like your father. I also wanted to know, from his own lips, about that incident on the island that kept everyone away from him except me and you. He would have told me all these things, I think, had I only asked.
One day you pointed at his right ear and asked him what had happened to it. The top tip of it was missing, an old injury perhaps. In bed, I sometimes stared at the scar while he slept and imagined some animal biting him and him crying afterward.
I hurt it a long time ago, he replied. Nothing you need to know.
Why not? you said.
He fixed you with his eyes and called you by your name for the very first time. From now on, he said, if you ask me something and I say no, you don’t ask me again.
You looked startled and embarrassed and did not say another word. For the rest of that day, you stole searching glances at him as though you were invisible and waiting desperately to reappear. I knew then that a future with him was possible.
For weeks, we hardly saw or spoke to anyone. The four of us were like a conspiracy. People started talking, watching us every day as we walked off to our secret place. Who knows what aroused their judgment more, that I was a young mother taking up with a new man or that the new man was an outcast. What kind of woman forgets her husband so quickly, replaces him so easily? What kind of woman falls for a man who hacked off another man’s fingers? They must have imagined me a happy woman.
Every Sunday morning I awoke on my pallet like a lost traveler, unfamiliar with where I had arrived, unaware of how I had gotten there. The church bell would toll a dozen times, each slow dong a reminder of what I was doing, and I would try to sleep through them despite the looks from our housemates who now walked to Mass without us, and despite you nudging my shoulder to remind me it was Sunday and then rolling back to sleep once I shook my head or simply ignored you.
Around Son, I tried to appear content, and soon I found that his presence actually calmed me, filled me with purpose, made me forget sometimes that I had no idea what the future held. I was more quiet around him than I’d been around anyone in my life. I spoke only when I needed to, and with a confidence that disarmed him yet aroused something fierce inside him too.
He would take me the second we were alone. He would not ask. He would not say a word. At first it frightened me, how he’d grab my wrists and hold them down and cast all his weight upon me, dive into me, never looking into my eyes until he had finished and come up for air. His smell, the ferocity in his breath, the pain I felt afterward. It frightened me because I enjoyed it, thrilled in it, because I would often hurry you and the boy away and would forget you both entirely as soon as his hands were upon me. I felt possessed and yet also in possession of myself for the first time ever, though only months before, even as I knew your father was dying, I was still the young girl who could not imagine being with any other man, who prayed every night for miracles she knew could not come to pass. When I was with Son, I was mourning that girl, and I suppose that was what frightened me the most.
In America, I spent years trying to retrace how he and I came to need each other on that island, and it’s only in finding him again that I understand that people need each other not for reasons they can measure or explain in detail. It happens in an instant, when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too.
Those were happy days for you. You were eating and talking more and the swimming had tanned you and made you stronger. Sometimes I watched you in your happiness and saw someone else’s child. I would see the three of you walking together down that path, you holding the boy’s hand and talking up at Son, asking or telling him things in your loudest voice as if to measure up to him through sheer volume, be deserving of him, and he would listen to you and correct you and respond in his long-winded way, and you would all look like a family that I was not a part of, which filled me first with contentment and then inevitably with despair.
You awoke me one night, your fingers grasping my arm. You had heard your father’s voice calling us, and when you peeked outside our hut, you saw him by the palm trees. He’s just standing there, you said, but I can’t see his face.
Don’t say such things, I told you. That’s impossible. You were dreaming.
In truth, I believed you. I had not yet forgotten that woman on the beach. Some nights her voice still startled me awake, though I never knew if it echoed from my dreams or from the world outside. It terrified me now to imagine your father out there roaming the night alongside her.
You tried to pull me up by the arm. Your eyes were tearing up. For weeks, ever since Son entered our lives, you had not mentioned your father or showed any confusion that we were around this new man all the time, that I was cooking for him and spending time alone with him, talking to him as I had only talked with your father. To my relief, you finally seemed willing to let someone else in.
But that night I realized that your father still shadowed your every thought. You looked both frightened and hopeful that he was out there.
I should have told you then of his death. I should not have waited as long as I did. In your eyes I could see my own sadness, that pang of recognition I still feel to this day when I think of him.
To save our housemates from waking, I let you lead me outside. We stood near the doorway, beneath a full moon, and watched the palm trees and their broad arms swaying in the breeze.
You must have seen a shadow, I told you.
You shook your head and said, It was him, Mother. He stands that way.
When we returned to our pallets, you hugged my arm and laid your cheek against it. You had not slept this close to me since our nights on the boat. A small part of me wanted you to remain this way forever.
Our very first night in America, it happened again. We had moved into a two-bedroom apartment with your father’s uncle, who I had only met briefly one other time, and his wife and three teenage children, who I had never met at all. We were sleeping in the living room, you on the couch and me below you on the carpet. I remember waking with a start and finding you beside me, your eyes blinking in the darkness.
You whispered that your father had just wandered through the living room and into the kitchen. You had said his name out loud, but he did not hear you. When you followed him into the kitchen, no one was there.
I think it was a ghost, you declared as though you had just decided to believe in such things. When you rolled over to face me, I realized you were not lying beside me because you were afraid. You had come close to ask a question.
Does that mean that Father is gone? you said.
I did not let my thoughts give me hesitation. Yes, I said, and let that linger for a moment. The rest came out like a slow exhalation. A few months ago, I told you, your father went to sleep and did not wake up. He was very sick. There was nothing that anyone could do to help him. But he’s with God now, and he’s watching over you. He visited you tonight to let you know that.