Wild Game

by Adrienne Brodeur

  “Books will change your life, Rennie,” Margot told me, handing me a copy of A Room of One’s Own. (I would later learn that Virginia Woolf held a special place in Margot’s heart; she owned a notable collection of the author’s first editions as well as other scholarly materials.) “You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life,” Margot said.

  I smiled at her, not fully understanding what she was saying but feeling a small ping of comprehension, an olive pit smacking the wall of my consciousness.

  “You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself,” Margot promised.

  * * *

  During one of my regular phone conversations with Kyra, with whom I had remained close since that first summer, I told my friend that I’d finally put a healthy distance between myself and Malabar.

  “Three thousand miles is no small thing,” I boasted.

  Kyra laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  She stopped laughing. “Come on. You’re joking.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “You have to tell me,” I insisted.

  “Look around you, Rennie. Look at who you’re living with.”

  The cat was curled on the sofa beside Jack, who was watching the news.

  Oh, that. I felt my face redden. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “The two are completely unrelated.”

  My mother’s romance with Ben, going strong for eight years, was the alternate reality I’d grown up in. I was so used to it that it didn’t seem remotely strange to me. I’d been their sidekick and chief collaborator all along, weathering close calls, suspicious spouses, a blackmail threat. By now my mother’s friends knew about the affair and my role in it, and none of them had ever questioned the propriety of my involvement. I didn’t understand Kyra’s fixation on the coincidence. But she wouldn’t let it go; so many people knew, but Jack did not. Didn’t that concern me?

  It did, and it didn’t. The thought roiled in my mind constantly, like a pebble caught in the ocean’s swash. I let myself believe that I was protecting Jack by not telling him and found comfort in the fact that he was not particularly interested in his family. He was not in touch with his sister, with whom he felt he had nothing in common. He was not particularly close to his parents. And he definitely had no interest in finding out about his biological roots. None. Here, his lack of curiosity fascinated me. How could someone not want to know where he came from? I didn’t understand it at all.

  “Have you ever thought about whether you have biological brothers or sisters?” I asked Jack. We were taking an early-evening stroll on the boardwalk of Pacific Beach, one of Jack’s favorite places. Surely he must be curious about how the genes that made him might express themselves differently in someone else.

  I stared out at the long expanse of gray—the boardwalk, the drab wedge of sand, the dark ocean—and couldn’t help but compare it unfavorably to Nauset Beach. I missed the dunes and plovers and the nooks of inlets where egrets balanced on one leg in the shallows. Unlike Orleans, here, color came from two sources: the city’s orange lifeguard vehicles that methodically cruised the beaches and the neon swimwear of the people who shot past us on Rollerblades. It was the middle of the summer and I longed for Cape Cod. Luckily, we’d be headed east soon. My mother had recently offered Peter and me the use of the guesthouse for a full two weeks each during the summer. Malabar wanted her children home, and I planned to take full advantage of the gift, now and forever.

  “Why would I want to find out about people I don’t know?” Jack said.

  His response was incomprehensible to me. How could you not want to know? I was endlessly fascinated by all the characters in my family I didn’t know—my grandmother’s sister who’d died from scarlet fever as a toddler; my parents’ secret half siblings (each of them had one and had made the discovery at an early age; I’d met my mother’s half brother, but my father’s half brother, with whom he shared a name, would remain a mystery). And Christopher, of course. Always Christopher. Who might he have become had he lived, and how would that have altered all of our lives? Wasn’t curiosity a simple fact of human nature?

  I tried another tack. “Let’s say your biological parents were young and had no choice but to give you up. Maybe your mom was sick? Wouldn’t you want to know that, at least?”

  “My mom did have cancer, as you know,” Jack said, reminding me that he had only one mother, Lily, and she had survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “What she went through in treatment is why she has no voice today. It’s why she couldn’t get pregnant.” He took a breath to summon his patience. “Look, Rennie, I’ve turned out okay. My parents and I might not be close the way you are with your mom, but I have no complaints. They’re good parents. They do their best. Why would I want to hunt around for something that has the potential to hurt me? I don’t see the point.”

  Jack’s instinct to protect himself might have been the most alien thing I’d ever encountered. I’d never had a wound—emotional or physical—that I didn’t probe repeatedly. In that very moment, I probably wondered for the thousandth time whether my mother, if given the choice, would have traded me for Christopher.

  Jack was my opposite. He was measured, calm in every crisis. That’s what he got paid for. He’d recently been promoted and now ran the San Diego lifeguard department, one of three emergency-services agencies in the city. In any given week, he might have to dive into dangerous surf to pull out a panicked swimmer, give orders to teams of rescuers in all manner of chaotic situations from law enforcement incidents to natural disasters, or deliver bad news to a victim’s family members in a voice so soothing that it reassured even as the words devastated. I’d seen him perform CPR on a fellow diner at a restaurant and five minutes later pick up the conversation exactly where we’d left off before he’d bolted to save that person’s life.

  Jack was not a guy who looked for emotional drama. He had never lived with a woman before. Ours was, he let me know, the most serious relationship he’d ever entered. But once I’d settled in San Diego and we no longer had to trek epic distances to be together, I missed his outsize professions of love. Now that we were a committed couple, Jack was pulling back emotionally, eager to return to his routine. His daily habits—reading the paper, performing calisthenics, going for soft-sand beach runs—were what anchored him to himself. The man was a doer of sit-ups and pushups, a guy who, twice weekly—no matter what—shut himself in the back room and wrestled an enormous barbell, groaning and swearing in pain throughout his short anaerobic workout, emerging fifteen minutes later covered in sweat, vessels swollen and pulsating. In San Diego, Jack ate only one meal a day: dinner.

  Jealous of his devotion to his routine, I tried to disrupt it, constantly and unsuccessfully attempting to entice him in other directions. I craved grand gestures from him just as my mother had from Ben and wanted to be able to ignite Jack’s passion and cause him to do spontaneous things. Did he want to sleep in on Sunday morning and linger in bed for a long while? He did not. How about breakfast just this once, a bagel and cream cheese while we read the paper? Nope. Or maybe a morning hike together in lieu of his run? Jack would not budge.

  But as we were strolling on the very beach where he took his daily runs, it occurred to me that Jack’s inclination to avoid life’s emotional potholes provided me with an opportunity. Maybe he wouldn’t want to know about our parents’ love affair. I decided to test my theory.

  “I have something I need to tell you,” I said in a tone serious enough that he stopped walking. “It’s a secret. I’ve been keeping it for a long time.”

  We sat down on the sand beside each other, looking out to sea, studying the waves silently for a while. The sun was lowering over the water, a sight I’d found disorienting since moving to the West Coast. On Cape Cod, of course, the sun emerged from the ocean, and its daily morning trajectory over the Atlantic was, in fact, how I got my bearings. North was to the left
. The whole world felt backward here, like I was always headed in the wrong direction.

  “Does your secret have to do with us?” Jack asked. I could hear a hint of dread in his voice.

  “Yes and no,” I hedged. “It has to do with our parents more than us. Still, it could have repercussions. Tangentially.” I let that sink in for a bit. “It’s pretty big, Jack.”

  He stared out at the ocean, examining something I couldn’t see—a rip current or undertow.

  “Do you want to know?” I asked.

  Jack looked at me. His blue eyes were clear with certainty. He shook his head no. “I love you, Ren. You love me. That’s all that matters.”

  I felt awash in relief. “You sure?”

  He nodded.

  Jack didn’t want to know.

  It’s worth mentioning that Jack does not recall having this conversation. Perhaps because it took place close to three decades ago, or maybe because the secret was mine and its gravity didn’t register with him at the time. Why would it? Only I knew that I was talking about our parents’ affair, the centerpiece of my life. For all Jack knew, I was just lobbing another overly emotional pitch his way—I had done a good deal of that during our short time together—and he did his best not to swing at those. Jack was in his early thirties and steered clear of drama; at twenty-two, I drove headlong toward it.

  Either way, before I became involved with Jack, my mother’s secret was, at its core, about her, and that changed when I made the first move on Jack. I set something different into motion and Malabar’s secret became my secret too, even if I didn’t want to admit it. That memory aches. I wish that I’d had the courage to insist on telling Jack the truth that evening on Pacific Beach. If only I’d hauled that secret out of the darkness and shone a floodlight on it, maybe we’d have had the chance to begin our relationship authentically or, perhaps, to end things on the spot. Instead, I allowed the secret to fester and grow.

  Sixteen

  These were uneasy years for Malabar. With Charles gone, my mother’s relationship with Ben lacked its former balance. He was still married; she was widowed. He needed to conceal their love; she wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Patience was not one of her virtues. She had grown even more obsessed with Lily and her health and could see that although Ben’s wife was frail, she showed no signs of looming demise. My mother begged Ben to figure something out, to find a way for them to spend more time together, but their agreement had always been that they’d wait until their spouses died to do anything permanent. That was the deal.

  “I wonder what would happen if Lily actually found out and had to face facts,” my mother ventured during one of our weekly phone calls.

  “I’m pretty sure Lily already knows on some subconscious level,” I said, unable to imagine that she did not. My mother and Ben were not exactly subtle.

  I was on the downstairs phone, standing in our galley kitchen, and I could hear Jack bumping around overhead. The coast was clear.

  “Oh, Lily knows, all right. I’m sure she does, deep down,” my mother said. “But I’m wondering what she would do if she was forced to confront it head-on. If the whole thing was out in the open.”

  According to my mother, Ben had said on countless occasions that if he were forced to make a decision between Lily and her, he would choose my mother absolutely. His constant refrain: “I’d sooner die than live without you.”

  I leaned back against the counter. “Mom, exactly what are you proposing here?”

  Jack trotted down the stairs, newspaper tucked under his arm. He smiled at me as he passed on his way to the back room where his barbell awaited. Everything okay? he mouthed. I nodded. Although Jack’s weight workout would take at least fifteen minutes and the door was always shut, I wanted to get off the phone.

  “I’m not proposing anything,” she said, irritated. “I’m thinking aloud is all. I’m wondering, if Lily knew with certainty that her husband was in love with me, would it force something? Change the situation somehow?”

  “Sounds dangerous,” I said quietly.

  “Well, Rennie, perhaps you need to consider things from Lily’s perspective for a change,” my mother said without a trace of irony. “For all you know, the news that he would stay with her even though he was in love with someone else might come as a huge relief to her. Maybe with Charles gone and me single, she lives in terror that Ben will up and leave her one of these days. Perhaps Lily would feel reassured if the truth were openly acknowledged. Then she could feel safe in her marriage and I could . . .”

  “You could what, Mom? What would you do differently?”

  “Well, for starters, I could have some more time with the man.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. I heard the clank of metal against metal, the barbell being lifted off its frame. “I really can’t have this conversation right now.”

  “Okay, honey.” My mother sighed. “But fair warning—sometime soon, I just might need to pull the trigger.”

  * * *

  Within a year, Jack succumbed to my cat’s charms. Most mornings when I padded downstairs, I would find her purring, nestled beside him on the sofa as he read the newspaper. Jack spoke to the cat as if she were human and dutifully attended to her needs—scratches behind the ears, kibble in a stainless-steel bowl. He would even spread a line of the fishy-smelling ointment that helped her digestion on his index finger and let her lick it off. My cat was more effective at coming between Jack and his routine than I was.

  Already old, our cat became enfeebled the summer of 1989; she slept constantly and had a hard time keeping food down. When we brought her to the veterinarian’s office for the final time, she could hardly raise her head. Jack and I each laid a hand on her soft fur as the doctor injected her with pentobarbital. She fell asleep purring and died in a matter of minutes. We both sobbed on the way home, throughout that day, and for several days following. If I’d had doubts about Jack’s emotional capacity, they were extinguished. Jack did much more than comfort me; his loss felt as substantial as my own.

  Later that same week, while we were sitting on a slope of grassy meadow in Kate Sessions Park, leaning against each other, Jack reached into his pocket, turned, knelt before me, and presented me with an engagement ring.

  “I love you, Rennie, and want to spend my life with you,” he said and then choked up. I began to cry too. “Will you marry me?”

  The proposal did not come as a complete surprise. Jack and I had looked at engagement rings together, learned about carats and clarity, and discussed styles. But none of that had seemed real. Until now.

  Over Jack’s shoulder, the view was expansive: the bay and the ocean, the downtown buildings, and the Coronado Bridge beyond. The Hotel del Coronado with its red-tiled roof looked like a fairy-tale castle in the distance.

  I was twenty-three and not someone who’d fantasized much about weddings. I could not point to a single marriage I’d witnessed up close that I admired for having triumphed lastingly over life’s hurdles. My parents, in their late fifties, had each been married twice and were now eyeing spouse number three. As far as I could tell, marriage did not seem to be a sustainable or ideal institution. And yet, when Jack proposed, I did not hesitate to say yes, the ring sliding effortlessly onto my finger.

  * * *

  I called my mother to tell her the news as soon as I got home.

  “Oh, darling,” she said. “That’s so wonderful. I couldn’t be happier.”

  I told her that we hoped to have the wedding on Cape Cod the following July, at her home, if possible.

  “Of course,” she said. “We’ll have it on the front lawn. Keep it simple. Nauset Bay is more splendid than any chapel.” Then Malabar was silent for a moment. I assumed she was composing the menu in her head or imagining a dance with the groom’s father. “Guess what?” she said. I heard a hitch in her breathing and waited.

  “I’ve made a decision.”

  My mother liked dramatic moments, and she stretched this one ou
t.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “I’m going to give you the family necklace. I always said you would wear it on your wedding day. And now you will.” Her voice cracked with emotion.

  “Oh, Mom,” I said, stunned. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. My gift to my girl on her wedding day. Your grandmother would have loved that.”

  I’d waited my whole life for my mother to offer me the necklace. “Describe it to me again,” I said. I hadn’t seen it in years.

  “You could actually forget?” Then Malabar recited her favorite quote about ingratitude: “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’”

  “Of course I remember it, Mom,” I said, chagrined to have already bungled this moment. And truthfully, I could picture it, all those chunky rubies and diamonds and emeralds, each set into its own panel, each rectangle framed by dozens of delicate pear-shaped diamonds and fringed with clusters of freshwater pearls. “I just want to hear you describe it again.”

  Since I was a child, Malabar had always insisted that the necklace’s worth was incalculable. As a teenager, I offended her by asking why she hadn’t gotten it appraised.

  “Because it’s priceless,” she’d said, her voice flat. “Un-appraisable.” End of discussion.

  But the stories Malabar used to tell me about the mythic piece of jewelry captured my imagination as a girl.

  “A Sikh maharaja bestowed it upon his bride during a wedding spectacle,” my mother would whisper, lingering over the foreignness of the word maharaja. “There were elephants in gold headdresses, camels festooned with intricately embroidered cloth . . .”

  Her descriptions were so vivid that I almost believed she’d attended this thousand-year-old extravaganza.