The Year That Follows (22 page)

“He’s eighteen months old. He can’t reach these knobs, let alone unlock the dead bolts. He’s in the house.”

She went to the drier, the washer, but they were empty. She checked the lower kitchen cupboards, opened the trash can, checked under the couch by the TV.

“Hey,” Tommy whispered. He had a flashlight. “I found him.”

He led her to Connor and Jonathan’s room, had her get down on her hands and knees between the two beds. He shone the light under Jonathan’s bed, and
there was the little boy, curled up and fast asleep, hugging his toy animal.

Cat felt weak. She dropped to her knees, then rolled to her back. “Oh God,” she said. She felt as if everything was draining out of her. She started to cry, but Tommy helped her up and guided her out of the room.

“We can’t just leave him under there,” she said.

“I’ll go back and cover him up.”

“But—”

“He doesn’t want to be alone. That’s the perfect spot for him.”

The next night Tommy moved Ian’s bed into the boys’ room, wedged it against a wall after moving a dresser out, and had all the boys go to bed at the same time. In this way, they’ve all been able to get through the night.

W
e’re going to bring her around now,” says the younger of the brothers. “You can go aft. Get some breeze at your back.” Cat gets the boys to hold on to her, Jonathan grabbing her hand and Connor grabbing his. Tommy takes Phyllis, and they all move to the back of the boat. Cat hands Ian off to Tommy, tells the boys to hold on to the railing, and goes back to fetch the ashes. She struggles with the case, sets it down, and opens it, then opens the thick plastic bag inside the case and grabs a handful of the coarse ashes dotted with white fragments, cups her other hand atop the full hand so that the ashes don’t
immediately blow away. She looks at everyone, then uncups the hand and the ashes take flight, floating over the water, then descending onto it. She and Tommy help the boys toss the ashes, even Ian, then Phyllis, and finally Tommy partakes. Most of the ashes are still in the bag and so Cat lifts it from the case, balances the bag for a moment on the railing, then raises the bag, releasing its contents, the ashes flittering in the wind, almost shining. She lifts the bag higher and shakes, harder now, letting it all go.

D
o you have any secrets?” she asks. “Anything you’re keeping from me? Anything I should know? If there is, tell me now.”

They are lying in her father’s bed. Tomorrow the estate sale people will cart everything away, and there is just this one night left in California. She is nestled against Tommy, her body loose and relaxed from love-making. As far as she knows, she is not pregnant, but they’ve been steadily, enthusiastically trying for months. Never has she enjoyed sex as she enjoys it now. Never has it had this kind of meaning, even done in her father’s bed.

“I have one secret,” he admits. “How ’bout you?”

“I have one, too,” she says.

“You first.”

She argues, but he prevails. The divulging of all secrets is her idea, he says, and she must first walk the walk. So she tells him that her father, the one whose bed they are sleeping in, who raised her, whose ashes today they spread on the waters, was not really her father.

“Not really?” he asks.

No, there was a different man, long dead, unknown and unknowable to her, a man her mother had a fling with, and this is how she, Cat, came into being, a product not of love or planning but of lust and a woman’s desire to have a good time.

“And a man’s,” Tommy says. “That’s how most of us came into being, two people with desire, wanting to have a good time. It’s random, I know, but not necessarily a bad thing. Hopeful, even.”

“Okay,” she says. “Hopeful.” She has told him, only the second person ever. Michael was the first, a poor choice on her part.

“I need to ask you something,” he says.

“So ask?”

“Did your mother kill herself? I figured that would be your secret.”

She explains that she doesn’t know but thinks it unlikely. It wasn’t as if her mother ate all the pills, or drank the whole bottle of gin. But she must have known there was danger, and so it was a reckless act by a woman who was not reckless, which makes Cat wonder if the combination of gin and Valium was indeed calculated,
done so well to hide the true intent, and on and on it goes, the logic turning back onto itself, because it is unknowable, this thing.

“So,” she says. “What’s your secret?’

“It’s about Ian. Ironic, in light of
your
secret.”

Oh God, she thinks. “Tell me.”

“I’m not sure how to say it, Cat.”

“Tell me. Just tell me what it is.”

“He’s not Kyle’s.”

“What do you mean?’

“He’s not Kyle’s child. Your brother isn’t, wasn’t, the boy’s father.”

“I don’t get it,” she says, and she doesn’t. Who else would the father be? Kyle’s name is on the birth certificate—she saw to that—and she and Tommy have adopted the boy, an orphan of the greatest modern attack on American soil.

But Tommy was curious, Tommy the scientist, who knew where Kyle’s DNA was stored, who was the doctor to whom results could be released. And so the first week Ian arrived, he had his friend prepare a sample from Ian under the guise of a throat culture, and he sent it to White Plains. The results were unequivocal, Tommy says. He had them double-check it. There was another man.

“She slept with someone else?” Cat herself felt betrayed.

“She must have.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“On the rebound, she was. Happens all the time.”

“You’ve known for how long?” Cat asks.

“I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“When were you going to?” she asks.

“When I figured out how. And then you asked.”

“You went behind my back.”

“It wasn’t like that, Cat. I wanted to know, and I figured you’d want to know, too. It was supposed to be a gift. I was going to say, ‘Hey, I checked, and this kid is really your brother’s.’ It just didn’t turn out that way.”

She rolls away from him, gets out of bed, throws on her robe.

“Where are you going?” he wants to know.

“I can’t just lie there with you, not right now.”

She heads for the living room. There’s still a bottle of gin there. Tommy shows up as she’s filling a glass to three fingers.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Drinking. I can’t just … just lie in bed with you. It’s like you betrayed me.”

“Betrayed you? I’m helping you. Let’s not forget, you’re asking me to raise this child, too. I have a right to know who he is.”

“You make it sound like I was trying to trick you.”

“I just wanted to know the truth,” he says.

“But don’t you see, now Ian is not really … Here’s the thing: we tricked that poor old woman into giving up her grandson to strangers. Now that we know this,
we should probably give him back. It’s not right to keep him.”

“That’s crazy. We’ve saved him.
You
saved him, Cat, and even Mrs. Boyle knows it. So, we are not going to tell her anything.”

But this, she thinks, is not how it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be raising Kyle’s son.
Kyle’s
. It’s how she thinks of Ian, as Kyle’s. Ian is about love and family and continuity, a Miller—that’s his name now, Ian Miller—a part of a small and unlikely family. She is supposed to be carrying on the family, extending it. Ian is hers, and yet he is the child of strangers. And Kyle? Kyle is gone, completely gone.

Tommy walks to her father’s reading chair and sits. “It makes it all the more miraculous,” he says.

“I don’t follow.”

“This little boy has come to us, almost out of the ashes, if you will. And now he’s ours. It’s totally improbable that you went looking for a child, and you found one.”

“Not the one I was looking for,” she says.

“Perhaps. In any case, this one needed to be found.”

She sips the gin and realizes that she doesn’t want it.

“I got you into this,” she says.

“I volunteered. I’m not complaining.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to get pregnant,” she tells him.

“You don’t know.”

“But what if I can’t?” she asks.

“Then we won’t have a child together.”

“But you want it,” she says.

“Don’t you?”

She turns from the bar. She can just make him out, sitting in the shadows. Of course she wants it. “Yes, yes,” she tells him. “But—”

“So we’ll see. By my age I know I won’t get something just ’cause I want it. And, one way or another, our cup already runneth over. Come back to bed.”

S
he wakes, the dream still fresh in her mind. For the first time in years she has remembered a dream. Kyle came to her. Now she looks around, half expecting him to be in the room. “I know what you did,” he said in the dream. They were in the old backyard, among the McIntosh trees, but adults. It was fall, fragrant with the smell of decaying apples. “See it through,” he said. She opened her mouth to speak, sure that the right words would come out and wanting to know what they would be. Then she woke.
See it through
. That was Kyle all the way. He had endurance; he never gave up on anything. She mentioned this to him once, and he said, “Well, you only fail when you stop.”

She needs the bathroom, and this gets her out of bed, but she goes first to the boys’ room. She kisses Jonathan and Connor on the head, Jonathan cool and Connor hot and sweaty. She turns back to Ian, kneels to the floor, where he’s sleeping in her father’s old blue sleeping bag, his little arm wrapped around his tiger. She
leans in close to his mouth, to hear the steady little puffs of breath, to smell the sweetness of him. “You’re here now,” she finally whispers. “You’re here now, and you’re mine. That’s all there is to it. You will always be mine.”