The Year That Follows (19 page)

Cat finds Tommy’s number in her cell phone and calls. There are five rings before he answers. It’s Friday night, after one in the morning where he is, and she wakes him, apologizes. “No,” he says. “I wanted to hear from you.” He coughs, clears his throat. “How was it?” he asks.

What can she say? That it was fine, that they stood and sat among the old Jewish people in California, paying reverence to an unknown God, often in a language they could not understand, but that when she heard her brother’s name, she felt something inside, something rip, which was, she supposed, the feeling of loss? It was also the feeling of sorrow, of anger, an acknowledgment
that nothing could be done, that nothing could be made right, that it simply was what it was, is what it is, that justice and fair play and the sense that things will work out in the end because we want them to are not how the world works, that waiting for such outcomes, really for any outcome at all, is like waiting to win the Lotto. “And maybe,” she adds, “that’s all right.”

“It has to be,” Tommy says.

“I realized I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” she says.

“You’re making a living.”

“Barely.”

“You’re raising your son.”

“I could do better.”

“Then do better. Nothing is stopping you.”

“I should spend more time with the people who are important to me.”

He says nothing.

“You’re one of those people,” she says.

“Are you asking me on another date?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Then I accept,” he says.

“Well, then. There it is.”

“When are you coming home?” he asks.

“Tomorrow. We get in kinda late.”

“And Sunday?”

“What about Sunday?” she asks.

“How’s brunch sound? If you were serious about that date.”

“Dead serious.”

“Noon, then?” he asks. “I’ll pick you up?” “Perfect.”

“I look forward to it, Cat.”

They say good-bye and Cat snaps shut her phone with something like hope.

S
he decides to go back to the living room to look at the candle—it’s designed to burn for twenty-four hours—and perhaps allow herself a second drink on this special day, when she can watch the flame and think of her brother. The living room is dark but for the flame and the smell of tobacco. She flips on the light on her way to the liquor cabinet and sees her father, hunched in his chair, with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The old man looks up, squinting in the light. “Care to join me?” he asks.

She flips the light off and sits on the couch. Outside the window glow the lights that brighten the path to the beach. Cat looks over at her father, whom she can just make out in the darkness. There is the faint glow of the cigarette.

Slowly at first but with growing momentum, the man leans forward then stands up, shoulders hunched and knees bent but on his feet nonetheless. “I’ll fix you a drink,” he says. Cat watches him shuffle to the cabinet, then turn on the light. She squints but notices the high set of her father’s pants on his hips, so that his torso is made short. She remembers her father’s look from long ago, say,
1970
, when her father was no more cool than he is right now. He was never cool, and, apparently, he
never cared. Which, after a time, is a form of coolness itself.

The drink is one of her father’s martinis, made with gin, crushed ice, a dash of vermouth, and a chunk of lemon peel, the mixture’s aroma heady and strong, a memory from childhood.

With the light back off they are then left with only the candle, its flame flickering, the window to the ocean almost a mirror, but with sight lines through to other lights, distant, the oil rigs on the water. Cat can barely hear the sound of the surf. When her father speaks, it’s as if his voice is everywhere in the room. “Connor is quite a little boy. He’s very bright, I think.”

We all want smart children, Cat thinks.

“You’re doing a fine job with him,” her father says.

It takes a moment in the darkness for Cat to process this, that her father has passed judgment on her mothering, and found it good. She thanks him.

“I promised Connor I would take him for a walk on the beach in the morning,” Sam says. “We’re going to collect shells for his trip back to Michigan.”

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” Cat says. “I mean about Connor. I just try to help him.”

“None of us knows what to do, but we do it. You try to prepare your children for the world you know even as you know everything will change. I might have done better with you, with Kyle, but I had no idea how, till you were grown.”

“You did fine,” Cat says.

Cat hears him try to shift in his chair. “I tried to teach
you things. When you have a child, you don’t know anything. Then a day goes by, and another, and you teach the child things, to walk or talk, how to shake hands or tie a pair of shoes. You get up in the night when the child is sick, stick by them when they are in trouble, deal with the failures that mean everything to them and nothing to you, or just the opposite, and it’s just like that every day, and over time you realize what love is.”

A long silence. Cat thinks of her little failures as a daughter, like the time she took a dollar from the kitchen counter. Her mother had left it there and she asked about it, and Cat said she knew nothing about it. Kyle knew she had it, but didn’t say anything, either.

“I want you to know that I loved you and Kyle the same,” her father says.

It’s as if he knows something of my mind, Cat thinks.

“As I love you now,” the old man goes on. “And you should tell your little boy that you love him. He knows it, but he should hear it from you anyway.”

“I tell him.”

“Tell him more.”

Cat promises that she will. Then, she thinks, I must tell my father that I love him. She breathes deeply, then speaks. “I love you, Dad.” The words don’t come out easily, but once they do they settle well, like truth. This, then, is why I’ve come all this way, Cat thinks: to say these words, this one time. To let it go.

Her father looks as if he might cry.

“I’m going to have another operation,” he says.

“For what?

“A bypass. Things are blocked up again, I guess.”

“Can you tell?” Cat asks.

“I think.”

“When? When is the operation?”

“Monday.”

“Monday? I’ll stay,” she says.

“Don’t be silly. Phyllis will look after me. I think she’s looking forward to it.”

“It’s a serious operation.”

“At my age, all operations are serious,” Sam says. “But I want you to go home and go on with your life. That’s what this has been about, moving on. Kyle is gone, and we’re not. So we go on.”

Cat is relieved. She really doesn’t want to stay. She could fly Connor home to Michael and then come back to sit by the hospital bed, but she’d rather not. Not yet. And she’d like to see Tommy on Sunday. The distance has made this clear.

“This candle,” his father says. “You could light one of these for me, when the time comes.”

“I will, Dad.”

“Promise.”

“Of course.”

“Not of course. The years go by and things slide. I know this. I let it slide with my own parents.”

“I won’t,” Cat says. Okay, she tells herself, once a year I can light a candle, a little thing, but a promise kept. No little thing at all, that.

H
e watches Cat head back to bed, then walks outside to take a look at the water. To the east there is a faint glow, a suggestion of morning. He remembers once during the war looking east at this time of day when a single plane appeared. This was just after the battle for the Leyte Gulf, when kamikazes first appeared. Sam was on the bridge and saw the plane. It was flying very low, so that radar had only just picked it up. The alarms were sounded. In the old calculus, you could shoot a plane down or not, perhaps its bombs would miss you, perhaps there’d be shooting and blood-thumping terror but no death. Not anymore. They had to destroy the plane, or die. The pilot, Sam thought, was very skilled, staying low to the water, maneuvering to offer the gunners little to hit, and this was odd, not at all what they’d been led to believe about these suicide pilots. Then, inexplicably, the plane pulled up and away, till it was reported there was a torpedo in the water. Sam hadn’t seen it fall, but it was coming straight for them. By this time Higginbotham was there. He was yelling, giving orders to start repairing damage that had not yet occurred. Then he stopped and quietly said, “Hold on, boys.”

A second passed, then another, and another, with only the rumble of the engines and the pitch of the
waves, the radar beeping, fainter and fainter at the retreating plane. The seconds kept coming. Sam heard someone breathe, then he took a breath himself. He understood. Somehow the torpedo had missed. It must have gone beneath them, set for a battleship when they were but a destroyer low on fuel, sitting high in the water.

Higginbotham laughed.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said at last. “We get another day.”

S
he lies in bed, half-awake. The idea is to catch an hour or two of sleep before Connor wakes and they start to make arrangements to go home. But sleep won’t come.

She thinks of a winter’s night before the family broke up, when her father took her to play tennis. This was in a tennis bubble, a huge pressurized structure where devotees played during the Michigan winter. She was hardly a devotee, but back then her father believed in tennis—a sport, he said, that you could play all your life, though in the end neither of them did.

They were checking out when Cat found a crumpled-up fifty-dollar bill on the bluish carpet. She showed it to her father. He made her leave her name and number at the counter, instructing her to say that she’d found
something of value by the front desk. If no one called in a month, he said, she could keep it.

A man called the next night, said he’d lost fifty dollars, a crumpled-up bill that must have fallen from his pocket, and he came right to the house to get it. He was an older man, like her dad. She went outside to the dark, frigid driveway to hand him the bill. He took it, thanked her, and drove away.

She found her father in the living room, having a drink and watching the evening news.

“Did he give you a reward?” he asked.

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Why couldn’t I just keep it?” she asked.

“It wasn’t yours.”

“But I found it.”

“A sense of justice is worth more than money,” he said. He nodded at the TV. A peace deal had been reached in Paris. All the American soldiers were coming home from Vietnam. The cease-fire would take place at a predetermined time, a couple of days hence. “Think of the boys who will die between now and then, and for what? Imagine how, if you were a soldier, you’d be trying to make it for just those two days.”

“Shouldn’t he have given me a reward?” Cat asked. “For being honest?”

Her father turned to her, always an elaborate movement, what with his back so stiff. “I would have,” he said, “but doing what you did has to be satisfaction enough.”

“You could give me the reward,” Cat suggested.

“I didn’t lose any money.” He smiled at her. Even then she understood he was making a point. Now she understands it, too. There won’t be a confession, though maybe he’s given her enough.

H
e thinks of Kyle’s little boy, a toddler still. How long, Sam wonders, will I have to live for him to remember me? Five years? Six? I might get that. I might get five or six years and then, when the little boy is a man, fifty, say, in the year
2051
, he can tell his son that he knew his grandfather, a man who fought in the Second World War.

There are two days till the operation, but Sam is considering tonight, after Cat and Connor have gone, when he will spend the night with Phyllis, the whole night in her bed, and the next night, too. It comforts him, this thought: If I don’t survive the operation I’ll never know it—it could be worse, much worse—but I will still have had those two nights, two nights with a woman who loves me.

C
onnor wakes just before seven. The sun is now up, lighting the water. Connor wears pajamas with Indy
500
cars racing across them. He rubs
sleep from one eye, then the other. “Hi, Grampa,” he says.

“It looks like a beautiful day to go find some shells,” Sam tells him. The boy stands on his tiptoes to look out the window. “Breakfast?” Sam asks.

Sam has, over the last few days, picked up on the routine. He sets Connor at the kitchen table, fills a bowl of multicolored cereal Cat has bought, pours in milk, turns on the TV, set now not to CNN but to something called Nickelodeon, where there is a show taking place underwater, the hero apparently a synthetic sponge of the type you would find under your sink. His best friend, his Tonto, is some sort of blob with a deficient IQ. Connor laughs and Sam finds himself moved by this, this laughter of the innocent, the sound of simple human joy.

“You’re hired.” This is Cat, standing at the edge of the kitchen in her jogging clothes, a T-shirt and black tights, as women wear now. She carries her shoes in her hand. She comes in, kisses her son on top of his head, then looks out the window over the sink. “Clear today, huh?”

“Beautiful,” Sam agrees.

“Good morning, big boy,” Cat says to her son, who ignores her. Cat finds the remote and shuts off the television. Connor looks up, almost in shock. “Good morning,” Cat says again.

“Good morning, Mom.”

The TV goes back on. Good for Cat, Sam thinks. She
has demanded courtesy. This is an indulgent age for children. It warms Sam to know Cat has her limits.

The three of them go outside together. Cat breaks off to go on her run down the beach, leaving Sam to stroll with Connor, looking for shells. The receding tide has left a rich bounty, and Connor starts loading his bucket with every shell he finds, sometimes scooping them up by the handful.

“Look,” Sam says. “You can’t take every shell with you. Why not go slow, select only the best?”