We can keep on trying, I said.
I’d like to, he said, his ears flushing red. He swigged down his coffee, stood, and leaned over and pecked my cheek.
I’m late, baby. Have a great day.
You, too, I said. I’m okay, baby. Don’t worry. This thing about being watched, just my dumb imagination.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” I said, like I always did. There was more truth in it than I knew, Dear One.
I am three weeks pregnant, as confirmed by the drugstore test. Of course, I already know that!
I stopped by St. Mary’s Church and went in, and knelt down before the pew and prayed. But I prayed with one hand in my lap and the other upon my womb, feeling for you, Dear One, feeling for you. And I prayed for Raymond to make love to me, soon.
David sat on the bed as I told him. At first, he disbelieved, then, slowly, it all sank in. I told him I had decided to have you, Dear One, for Raymond, as Raymond’s. I told him that for a while — a long while, probably — he and I should not see each other. It was simply too dangerous, and too difficult for me. He listened to me, then he came over and put his arms around me and let me cry on his shoulder. I still can’t tell you whether they were tears of sadness or tears of joy — maybe both. Then he pulled away and looked at me and said that he would help me in any way he could. Love me, I said. Let me count you as a friend.
I do, he said. You can.
He went to the window and stood with his back to me, looking out to the sea as if it were a future that he hadn’t planned, developed, built, created for himself. A future imposed on him, instead of his imposed on everyone else. Truly, it was. He looked so helpless.
I assured him that your future, Dear One, was in my hands, and mine alone. That you and I had a family to start, that we would orbit away from him to form a little galaxy of our own, that we were really a family of four and that I would be tied to him by love and by you, Dear One, until the day I died. And as I looked at him, I could see the trenches of disappointment in his face, the etchings of defeat.
I understand men. I understand that greatness is a louder call than decency, that ambition is a stronger desire than love. I understand that to be a great shortstop you must love a white leather-covered ball of twine more than anything in life. That to be a great general you must love the risk of war more than peace. And that to be a land developer you must love buildings and land and money more than you could ever love a near middle-aged waitress you knocked up in high school and knocked up again twenty-five years later in a motel that smelled like mildew.
So I understand what he said next, but I will never forget how small it made him seem, how small and shrunken it showed him to be.
“You won’t ever talk about the Duty Free, will you?”
The Duty Free. She was a cute little Chris-Craft that belonged to Dale, a Newport cop. Mom rode along with him on the Toxic Waste patrol, to find out who was dumping in the harbor. I went along, too, twice with Mom. One time, we saw the dumpers’ boat, but I could hardly see it at all in the fog. Only Dale really saw it, or said he did. Another time, I tried to go out, because I was home alone on a night I couldn’t see David and I was out of my mind with nerves. So I went to where they kept Duty Free, where Mom and I had gone to meet these men — Cheverton Sewer & Septic — and I watched Dale and Louis Braga fill the bait tank with canisters of something from Blake-Hollis Chemical, and load on a bunch of fifty-five gallon drums, too. Their jaws dropped as I walked up and asked them if I could go along. But I played dumb. I acted like I hadn’t seen them fill the tank or load the drums on board and cover them with a tarp. And when they told me it wasn’t a good night for me to go, I humbly accepted and apologized and gladly left. Of course, I knew who owned Blake-Hollis. So one night later, being more frivolous than anything, I told David I knew his secret: I knew the Toxic Waste patrol was dumping more into the ocean than they ever prevented, and if he had a heart as big as I thought he did, he’d stop it. Since he owns Blake-Hollis, that is.
You would not believe, Dear One, the look on your father’s face when I said that.
He was furious. I thought I knew by then when he was innocent and when he only wished he was. He asked me for everything I knew about Duty Free, over and over again. What I’d seen and who had been there. He even wrote something down. While he paced the room, he gave me the most hateful glances.
Then later, so very casually, he asked me if I’d said anything to Mom about loading the stuff onto Duty Free.
I told him no. And I wouldn’t. I don’t mix politics and love, Dear One, and I hope you never do. As far as I was concerned, David could just as easily get his henchmen to dump somewhere else. I told him I was doing him a favor, because deep inside, I knew that Mom or someone like her would catch him sooner or later.
He said again he knew nothing about any dumping by one of his companies, and that he would look into it.
I doubted then that he was telling me the truth, but never since that day have I had a solid reason to doubt him. David is too thorough to have something so obvious land in the lap of someone so disinterested as me. It wasn’t like there were fish dying everywhere, or birds dropping from the sky. The drums might have been full of water for all I really knew. Plus, with all the money he gives away to charity and hospitals and the college — millions every year, I’ve read — I figured maybe he really didn’t know what Dale was doing with the Blake-Hollis Chemical waste.
But I was surprised to have hit such a sore spot. I decided to leave it alone. I was not put on earth to rectify David Cantrell’s soul, I thought. There are more capable agencies around — in heaven and on earth — to deal with that.
But there it came again, on the day I told him about You, that fantastic fear he had of what I had seen. Dear One, I was shamed for us both.