You’re kidding me, Rebecca said.
I bet it fell out when I was sitting in the theater. I had my feet up on the seat in front. Listen, you stay here, I’ll run back and look.
It’s okay, I don’t need –
No, it’ll just be a minute; and I ran out the door. It’s like the more insane you get, the more instinctively crafty your lies become. At the bookstore, panting, I went through every aisle, and unbelievably, she was still there: head down, behind the curtain of hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the shelves with a William Burroughs novel. She looked up at me.
It wasn’t Molly. Still, strange to think that somewhere in the world there walked a woman who had that sort of power over me.
DEX CAME TO my office promptly an hour later. I escorted him downstairs to the parlor, where Elaine stood waiting by the window, and I shut the door behind me again as the two of them were shaking hands. I went looking for Molly, in the dining room, in the ballroom, in the basement, upstairs in her and Dex’s bedroom. She wasn’t there.
Quietly I unlatched the front door and stood on the lawn, making sure I couldn’t be seen from the parlor windows. I stared up the driveway, and off toward the mountains. Finally I thought to run around to the back entrance to see if their car was still parked there: it was.
So I walked into the orchard, and that’s where I found her, sitting on one of the iron benches. She had cleared a spot to sit, but it was no use, really — spring is here; more white blossoms had already fallen in her hair as she sat there. I try now to imagine seeing her as if for the first time, and I can’t, but still, there’s no getting around the fact that she’s a beautiful woman, more so, actually, than she was as a twenty-year-old. I felt a twinge of the same inappropriate sort of pride I used to feel when I’d be out with her, or even alone with her: that a woman such as this would go out with me. That not unpleasant feeling of being watched, even when it was just the two of us.
I tried to slow my movements.
You might have left word where you were, I said, sitting beside her. Or were you hiding from me?
She shook her head. If we’re going to talk, I thought we might do it somewhere where people aren’t walking through the room every two minutes.
Well, here we are, I said. I brushed some blossoms off my shoulder.
You engineered all this, didn’t you? she said.
All what?
You knew where I was. You brought us down here.
I was taken aback that she might have considered this. Absolutely not, I said. You saw my face when you walked in, right? I’m not that good an actor. The only thing I engineered was inviting you to leave the motel and stay with us. You said yes. Hardly anything sinister about it.
She held her arms crossed tightly in front of her, hands clasping her elbows.
I guess, I said (the edge on my sense of martyrdom dulling already, at the sight of her unhappiness), that I just couldn’t accept that after everything that happened, that you could run into me somewhere … I mean, I know it was a long time ago. But that’s all the more reason. Probably you hoped you’d never see me again. But you did see me. And you acted like you didn’t. You would have turned right around and left again. I can’t understand that.
Had you been hoping to see me? she said.
Sorry?
She looked down. All these years. Did you ever want to see me again?
I’d stopped thinking about it, I said. There was a while there. I mean, I actually flew out to Ulster to look for you. You knew that, right?
Her head sank lower, so that the hair — that reddish-brown hair that I’d once held in my hands; each memory was like a little pinprick now — curtained her face entirely.
I went to your house, I said. I’m amazed that you seem not to know this. I spent the night. I drove to the hospital to bring your father home. He didn’t know who the hell I was. He was waiting there for you.
Stop it.
Why are you scared of me? I said.
What is it you want? Molly said. She turned in her seat so that her leg was folded on the bench between us, and laid her hand against the side of my face, and I’m sure I jumped; I was the one who was scared now. What, an apology? What would be a proper apology, for what I did to you? If I killed myself, maybe? Of course I’m scared of you! You’re my nightmare! In my whole life that was the cruelest, most selfish thing I’ve ever done. Running away from you like that. Do you think I’ve forgotten any of it? And so now it’s all come back. Well, I deserve it. You’re right. It was cowardly to run. I deserve what I get. You must hate me.
Molly, I said, pulling my head back. Molly. Settle down. Keep your voice down.
Her eyes were shining now, but mostly she just looked dull, defeated. She let me put my arm around her. I don’t know what I’d imagined would be the outcome of this little meeting, but by now I had just about lost my taste for it; the stakes seemed too high. I wanted some remorse but I didn’t want her in pain like this. I tried to reassure her, it felt like an instinct to do so; at the same time, I couldn’t help but push on a little bit, gently, because I found there were still a few things I wouldn’t mind knowing.
When you would tell me you were in love with me, I said. Were you lying?
No.
Then I … I don’t get it. I don’t understand what happened. What do you mean by selfish?
She sat up a little straighter, composing herself, and slid out from under my arm. You saw my parents? she said, wiping her eyes.
I did.
She shook her head. I couldn’t watch them, she said. They’re monsters. All those years of living together turned them into monsters. You can’t join yourself to another person like that.
I would have married you then, I said.
I know that! I couldn’t … I might have said yes. I was getting to the point where I’d lost all confidence in my ability not to say yes. I was losing myself to you because your, I don’t know, your talent for intimacy was so great. Think where you and I would be right now. Think what would have happened to us. I was barely twenty years old. It would have destroyed us.
Is that what you thought? I said. You thought I wanted to destroy you? I wanted to save you. You seemed so damaged. I wanted to make the space that would let you just be who you are. The problem isn’t that love would have destroyed you. The problem is that you don’t see yourself as someone worthy of being loved. So you throw yourself away.
She raised her head and blinked away the last remaining tears. She stared into the branches for a long time, as the breeze came along every few seconds and slowly stripped them. Then, without looking at me, she told me the story of our unborn child.
* * *
ALL THOSE YEARS, I’d been wondering what I’d done. She knew what she’d done. She was afraid of me because I was the only one in a position to forgive her. If I didn’t quite understand why she’d done it, well, I don’t suppose it was important that I understood. Of course I forgave her.
I don’t know how long we were in the orchard; but when we came out, I know I felt that there was nothing left unsaid. It was upsetting, but it was purgative, and though I haven’t exactly spent the last ten years pining for closure, still, it was nice to get it so unexpectedly. That was probably the greatest heartbreak of my life, Molly abandoning me like that. But I was twenty-two, she was twenty: it’s the age of heartbreak.
We went into the house the back way, and in the kitchen we hugged for a long time before she went back up to her bedroom to wash her face and I returned to my office to see what calls I’d missed. I walked in and there was Elaine, sitting across from my unoccupied desk, her mouth set in a tight line.
Well, that was a fucking waste of time, she said. Where have you been, anyway?