“He always loved maps. And books about pirates, and space travel, and India. His head was full of different facts, things I couldn’t hardly keep track of. I’d be in the kitchen working and he’d come in and tell me these stories about all the places he’d read about, and it was amazing, like he’d been there himself.”
Grace couldn’t help reaching across the table to touch her hand. But Joy didn’t meet her eyes, and her hand was cool and inert; she didn’t want to be touched. Flushing, Grace put her hand back in her lap and kept her eyes on the tablecloth. It felt like a prayer circle, like grace before a meal.
“His sister was always different. She was a little Suzy Homemaker, playing with her Easy-Bake Oven. She never wanted to leave home, not even to go to school. Her favorite thing was to help me cook dinner and then set the table. Mind you, Johnny was good around the house too. They both were. I always said I was lucky with my children.” At this point her voice broke slightly, but she swallowed and composed herself. “It’s been hard on Marcie,” she said.
Grace didn’t look up.
“When they lost the baby she was just heartbroken,” Joy said. “Her parents are good people, but they want her to move on and start thinking about the future. She came to stay with us for a little while, until she gets her feet back under her. You know, it’s brought us all together, I think, going through this.”
Grace would never have considered, at any point in her marriage, moving in with her mother-in-law; then again, she had never experienced any of this. For a moment she remembered playing cards and drinking tea with Mitch’s mother, a thought that made her grimace and smile at the same time. And then Joy’s words resounded in her mind. When they lost the baby. Tug hadn’t told her anything about that.
“I know my son wasn’t perfect,” Joy went on, as if to twist the world even further off-kilter. “Marcie says he strayed more than once. But he helped so many people. He was a good person, a truly good person, I know he was.”
Grace sat knitting her fingers together. She had half a stranger inside her.
Joy was still talking, the words coming slowly and evenly, dripping like an IV into Grace’s veins, regular and numbing. She was talking about having seen Tug and Marcie together a month or so ago, when he came to visit and they all had dinner. She knew he wasn’t happy — he had seen so much and worked so hard — but he was talking about switching careers, maybe going to law school.
He was in this room, Grace thought, maybe sitting in this exact chair. Shivering, she reached across the table for the whiskey and poured some into her tea. Tug’s father nodded at her imperceptibly. Under different circumstances, she thought, they would have liked each other. Or maybe his silence just reminded her of Tug’s, and thus felt familiar.
The whiskey warmed her and settled her stomach.
Joy was looking at her, her eyes pale, watery, and unfocused. “Please, tell me about him.”
Grace paused a long while. “He was unhappy,” she finally said. “He couldn’t shake the things he’d seen.”
Tug’s mother nodded, and Grace could see her shifting the blame over to those things and the places where he’d seen them, making compartments for this blame, cabinets in which to store it away. But even as she watched the process unfold, Grace began doubting herself. She didn’t know if Rwanda had anything to do with it. The darkness that had led to his death might have been inside him all along; it could have been what sent him abroad in the first place, along with his restlessness, his sparks of anger, his desire to escape. It seemed as though he had always felt hemmed in.
“Was he planning …,” she said. His parents waited for her to finish, her father’s elbows propped on the white tablecloth. “Was he coming back here?” Back to Marcie, she meant, but wasn’t sure if they understood.
They looked at her, both of them aged, stooped, the skin on their faces wrinkled and loose, as if the events of the past few weeks had weighted them physically, pulled them toward the ground. Tug’s father shrugged. “You know as much as we do.”
It seemed a terrible thought. All three of them knowing so little about him.
Sitting at this table, Grace realized that she had come because she hoped it might help her to decide what to do about the baby. But now she saw that his parents had no answers; they had as many questions as she did.
So many patients wanted her — or somebody, anybody — to make their choices for them, partly to absolve themselves of any blame. She always told them that no one else could live their lives for them, that they had to take ownership, and they were never pleased to hear it. What was worse than having to take responsibility for everything you did or felt or said? For the way your actions radiated out to change not just your own life, but those of the people around you? She understood fully now how hard it was to follow her own advice.
And Marcie. Grace ached for her, and for her sake truly wished she hadn’t come. And to say that she was pregnant — that was impossible, even if she decided to keep the baby. It would cause everyone so much more pain, and introduce endless complications. To keep the secret was terrible, yes, but to share it was even worse. She thought of what Tug had said about life in the “comfortable nations.” This house was a comfortable nation, she thought, or at least it wanted to be, to safeguard its borders and tend to its citizens. She shouldn’t disturb it any further.
“I’m sorry,” she said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m sorry I came here. I didn’t mean to intrude.” Her voice trailed off, as if noting its own insincerity. Obviously intruding had been the entire purpose of her visit, but Tug’s parents were too polite to point this out. Silent Canadians.
Her heart throbbed for them, for the loss they had to bear, so much deeper and harder than her own. “I didn’t know Tug very well, or for very long,” she said, her voice gathering strength as she went on. “We were just friends. I’m a therapist, and he talked to me a little about his problems.”
Joy sat with her head bowed, as though receiving a benediction or a blow.
Grace was determined to make it the former. “He talked so much about you,” she said. “And Marcie. All of you. How much you had given him over the years. He felt terrible that everything he’d been through kept him apart from you.”
His mother sniffled.
“He loved you so much,” Grace went on. “He told me that often.”
Neither of them spoke, and she wondered if they would ever speak again. She stood up, but then Joy did too, throwing her arms around her with surprising speed and force. She was short and frail and it felt like being hugged by a sick child.
Grace spoke through tears into her short gray hair. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help him.”
She put her arms around Joy’s shoulders, a tentative, constrained hug. She had told what comforting lies she could, and she didn’t regret it. If anything, sad as she was, she felt closer than she ever had to Tug, who had told so many lies. The notion that he could go on, survive, find some happiness in the world — this was the biggest lie of all, not because it was outlandish or fake, but because it had been so possible and so close to coming true.
When she left a few minutes later, the rain had stopped and the sky was pearled and gray. She was holding a box of cookies that Joy had insisted she take — a memento she never would’ve imagined bringing home. As she got into the car she looked back at the house, where most of the curtains were drawn. But on the second floor a window was open and a lamp was shining, and she could see Marcie pacing back and forth with her hands in her hair.
Grace felt utterly alone. Having isolated herself within the miniature universe she and Tug had created together, so intent on rescuing him, she had almost forgotten how to live in the actual world. Now that he was gone, to emerge from that experience felt like waking from a drugged sleep.