Just like that. All by itself. Present tense. Not casually folded into the first sentence, “This woman from work, Cressida Wall,” but delivered in the form of an announcement. Except that announcements are meant for the people listening, and when Harris said the girl’s name, his gaze went shuttered and inward; his voice turned private and deliberate. He sat there in our yard, with our southern magnolia and almost-bare sugar maple (the few unraked leaves like red handprints on the grass) and the raised flower beds full of loam (once chocolaty, now chalky) and the rows of hydrangeas (faded to magenta and rust) along the fence, sat there with all those carefully tended pieces of our life—our life and Avery’s life—bearing witness, and he didn’t so much speak the syllables of the girl’s name as light each one like a candle: Cres, Sid, Ah, Wall.
“Dale Pinckney is an idiot,” I said.
Harris looked down at his big square hands, which were pressed together, prayer-fashion, on the tabletop. “He thought we were holding hands across the table.”
When Harris said this, he shifted his hands so that the fingers interlocked.
Oh, Harris, for the love of God.
“But he was wrong,” I prompted.
Harris looked at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“Oh. Well, yes. I mean no. We were holding hands, I guess, but—”
“Momentarily?”
“Yes. Momentarily. At the moment that Dale saw us.”
“Like an encouraging squeeze,” I supplied.
Harris nodded, uncertainly.
“Because she works for you, right? And she’s been doing a good job.”
Harris’s eyes lit up. “Ah, yeah, a hell of a job! Cressida has been doing great work, really exceptional work. She’s gifted in a way that you just don’t see very often, with a real instinct for marketing. Normally, we don’t keep interns on after the summer ends, but she is so remarkable that I took a special interest.”
Really, Harris, did you? Because I never would’ve guessed.
“You mentored her,” I said, encouragingly. “That’s so like you.”
Harris smiled down at his interlocked hands.
It was only then that I realized what he’d said.
“Did you say ‘intern’?” I asked. My heart broke into a gallop. Silently, I told my hands that if they began shaking again, I would have them surgically removed at the first opportunity.
Harris’s smile switched off, and his eyes met mine.
“You’re saying that this Wall person is a college student? Because it seems to me that you just called her a woman.”
Always prone to dry-mouth, particularly in times of stress, Harris swallowed. “Our interns must be at least eighteen,” he said.
“So you called her a woman because, being over eighteen, she is technically an adult?”
“Cressida is an adult!” When he said this, Harris’s voice got louder; his cheeks reddened.
“An adult who is actually a college kid,” I said.
Harris’s face had always been the sort that changes color quickly, like a mood ring. It was one of the many reasons he was a terrible liar and poker player. Now, in an instant, he paled.
“A high school senior,” he said. “But old for her grade.”
I dropped my face into my hands. “Oh, Harris.”
“We usually hire college kids, but we made an exception.”
“Let me guess,” I said, from inside my hands. “Because she was so exceptional.”
“She was.”
I slapped my hands down on the table. “Our daughter is fifteen years old.”
Harris winced, as if I’d hit him instead of the table.
“I know,” he said.
“Oh God, she might even know this girl.”
“Ginny.”
“Please tell me she doesn’t go to Lucretia Mott. Just tell me that.”
“Jesus, of course not. You think I would do that?”
“Do what, Harris? What thing did you do with this girl that you would, of course, never have done were she a student at our daughter’s school?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing with this girl.”
“Could you manage to keep the regret out of your tone when you say that? Could you do me that courtesy?”
“Nothing happened, Ginny.”
“Well, since you were fired, Harris, sacked, kicked to the curb, clearly something happened.”
“You don’t have to be mean, you know,” said Harris.
Because I couldn’t trust my newly untrustworthy hands not to grab him by the throat, I got up from my chair and took a walk around the yard.
It was November. Everything was cut back, tied up, put away, spent. The Adirondack chairs stacked in the storage shed with the hanging pots and their wrought-iron hooks. The gazebo bird feeder we’d bought at an Amish store in Lancaster and the two blue blown-glass teardrop hummingbird feeders, all carefully wrapped and stowed in the basement. Little marble birdbath empty of water. Bushes and trees and planters empty of blooms. But under the limestone-colored sky, there was grace in my sleeping garden. Harmony. Quietude. I tried to let it embrace me the way it sometimes did in the early mornings when I sat out there with my coffee and my dogs and watched the apricot light fill the tree branches. Now, peace didn’t really come, but something else did—or began to—shyly sending out a few delicate tendrils: tenderness, not so much for my husband as for the garden, the unsuspecting burlap-covered rose plants and dormant flower beds, the fence with its hopeful row of shiny copper fence post caps, the whole life we’d made. The twin tornadoes that had earlier begun to rage inside my head and stomach slowed their writhing.
I walked back to the table where Harris sat, his hands fidgeting, his big shoulders bowed, his square jaw shifting in the manner of a child who is trying not to cry. I sat down.
“It wasn’t an affair,” he said, without looking up. “I wouldn’t do that, especially not with a woman of that age.”
“Just tell me,” I said.
“I let it get too personal. I won’t deny that. I got overly invested I guess you could say. And I knew how it could look to other people if they found out. So I tried to keep that from happening. I did some very stupid things.”
“Just,” I said.
I stopped to take a deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth, a cleansing breath I guess it was, although nothing really felt cleaner afterward.
“Tell me.”
We were a full thirty minutes into—which turned out to be approximately two-thirds of the way through—the conversation that followed before I understood that Harris had not gotten fired because of the thing (the nothing) that had happened with Cressida Wall, eighteen years old. Instead, his boss, Paul Jones, had fired him because of the “very stupid things” he had done to try to hide the nothing that had happened with Cressida, to try to keep the meddling and misconstruing Dale Pinckney from reporting the momentary hand-squeeze he had witnessed in the Vedge Table, a chase you’d think Harris might have cut to more quickly, particularly since the “very stupid things” were not only stupid but also, possibly, illegal. But for the first thirty minutes, all I heard about was Cressida.
He said this:
“To be honest, I forget Cressida’s age most of the time, and maybe that’s irresponsible, but, in my own defense, I’m not the only one in the office that happens to. I couldn’t be. Cressida is more mature and self-possessed than women twice her age. And smart, insightful. She would start talking, and you’d just think, ‘Wow, that makes so much sense.’ Not, ‘That makes so much sense for a high school student,’ but for anyone. And her face; it has adult bone structure, undeniably adult. And her eyes. Her eyes, too.”
And this:
“HR read our emails, as part of their investigation. They seemed surprised that I hadn’t deleted them, but why should I have? They’re mine. And, hell, you can read the emails, Ginny. There’s nothing inappropriate, not a single sentence that crosses a line. I’ll grant t
hat the sheer number looks bad. We sent each other a lot of emails, sometimes in the middle of the night, as Paul pointed out. But they were completely innocent. And it wasn’t like I was flooding her inbox. She answered all of them. Every single one. You can check.”
And also, this:
“Paul tried to paint it as if I’d pursued her, but I didn’t. If anything, she chose me.”
Half an hour of this: my trying to ignore the impossible-to-ignore notes of pride in his voice, Harris’s enthusiasm for the girl leaking out from the tight container I tried to make hold our conversation. Whenever I saw an opening, I mentally jumped in with edits to his story, replacing words, adding modifiers or dependent clauses, the grammar of ambiguity: “innocent” became “professional,” “investigation” became “routine inquiry,” “wrote each other a lot of emails” became “corresponded fairly frequently,” “in the middle of the night” became “after typical business hours.”
I couldn’t do a thing with the part about her bone structure and her eyes, except to cut him off before he went below the neck.
“So the HR department did its due diligence by Dale’s ridiculous accusation and found nothing, since there was obviously nothing to find,” I said. “And still Paul fired you to—what? Nip rumors in the bud? That sounds sketchy to me. I think we should consult a lawyer.”
Harris flushed and shook his head.
“When Dale approached me and threatened to go to Paul, I panicked.”
“Rattled,” I said. “You got rattled, as anyone might. Because his take on the matter was so far off the mark.”
“Yes, that’s right. And on an impulse, just completely off the cuff, I offered to give him a bit of information.”
My mouth took a page from Harris’s book and went dry.
“Nothing really earth-shattering, but something that was still, at that time, insider information. About a new chemotherapy drug.”
I flinched first at the word chemotherapy and then, retroactively, insider.
“Unreleased,” I said. “As yet unreleased information.”
As if the information were an extra track on a Beyoncé record, as if my husband hadn’t been prepared to silence his accuser with the offer of making money off the suffering of cancer patients.
Then, I said, “Oh, Harris.”
When his eyes met mine, they were full of tears. “I’m sorry, Ginny. Not for my relationship with Cressida because that was—”
“Professional. Aboveboard. As HR’s inquiry bore out.”
“But I was worried how it would look. There are so many people who are ready to believe the worst. I was concerned that Paul would force this productive relationship we’d built, this beneficial mentor-mentee type of relationship, to end just because of the way it might look to suspicious minds. He might even have fired Cressida.”
Yes, I wanted to manage this mischief with a vengeance, to piece together a narrative, with a shiny pieced-together Harris at its center, that would bring my daughter the least amount of pain. And I needed Harris to believe in that narrative. But, oh my Lord, there are limits, and when Harris said what he’d just said, I snapped. I jumped up, knocking my beautiful café chair onto our beautiful Bermuda grass lawn.
“Do you hear yourself, Harris?”
If I live to be a hundred, I might be able to forgive Harris the look of utter blankness that followed my outburst, the look that said, “I do hear myself, and I have no idea what you’re upset about,” but probably not. Almost definitely not.
“You did this thing that got you fired, that could even get you thrown in jail, that could send the rosebushes and the plates from your mother and your cherished green egg all catapulting into a giant black screaming hole, all to protect that girl? To keep her with you?”
Harris was an intelligent man. He had never been stupid, but he’d also never been quick. Now, I watched my words work their way first through Harris’s usual slow, steady collection of cogs and wheels (no doubt slowed down further by my gratuitous plummeting plates, et cetera imagery) and then crack through the mantle of his breathless fixation on Cressida before hitting his consciousness. His eyes woke up. His jaw dropped a centimeter. Fever pink flooded his cheeks.
“I just meant—”
I reached out and gripped his jacket sleeve.
“Listen to me. Let. Go. Of. Cressida.”
“But I never—”
I yanked at his sleeve.
“Okay. Fine. You never. We’ll go with that. But what did or didn’t happen doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter. And by that I mean, the girl, what you did, all of it just stopped being material. Just stopped being. Do you understand that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean Avery.”
“What? You know I would never hurt Avery.”
Suddenly, I felt tired, weary to my bone marrow and the tiny veins in my eyes. My hair felt tired. I let go of Harris’s sleeve, righted my chair, sat, and leaned my tired cheek against my tired palm.
“Maybe you wouldn’t. But you did.” I turned my free hand in a weary circle in the air. “This world. We made it for her and let her be safe inside it.”
“She’s still safe. This has nothing to do with her.”
I wanted to wind myself up in burlap and sleep alongside the rosebushes.
“She’s a teenager in the age of social media, in a town where everyone knows everything,” I said.
I watched Harris absorb this. His eyes filled with tears, again; the tears spilled over. This man who had spent a lifetime keeping his emotions stowed away, hidden from almost everyone, especially himself, had suddenly experienced every one of them in the course of a day that wasn’t even over yet. Harris crying. Harris crying knocked the meanness right out of me. Still, I had to finish explaining, to make him understand what was at stake.
“But even if she didn’t know what other people thought,” I said, gently, “or even if she were the single fifteen-year-old in the history of the universe who didn’t care what people thought, she would still have to reckon with you.”
“Me.” It wasn’t a question. Harris wiped his face with the backs of both hands. I waited. “Because I did something dishonest, offering Dale the unreleased information. And I’m not who she thought I was.”
Oh, my friend. The dishonesty is the least of it. For Avery, compared to the eighteen-year-old girl, the dishonesty will weigh exactly nothing.
Harris stared out into the yard, through which twilight had wound like a cat, smudging its edges, turning everything to shades of gray: blue smoke and dove and charcoal and ash. I looked, too, and Harris and I sat there together, our faces turned in the same direction and egg-pale in the dim light. If only we could turn back the clock, I thought and shivered. I tugged my jacket sleeves over my hands and tried to will late summer into the yard, fireflies like glitter in the hydrangeas, fragrance of rose and honeysuckle tingeing the evening air with the sweetest kind of ache.
“Maybe I’ll put in a pond,” said Harris, quietly. “A little one. Back in that blank spot between the two biggest trees. Put some of those big goldfish in it. And some underwater ferns or whatever they eat.”
I searched for the word and found it, clear and pretty, a single syllable, amber like a drop of honey.
“Koi,” I said.
I imagined that Harris was imagining it, too: the impossible brightness, the ribbony swimming, the whole pond shining like a newly minted penny dropped into our yard.
As if there were forgiveness in sunlight glancing off the backs of fish, hope in the color orange, magic in a pretty word. As if the addition of one more beautiful thing to our beautiful lives could save us.
Chapter Three
March 20, 1997
This is how I’ll tell this story to our children, mine and Gray’s: “Your mother fell in love with your father on the first day of spring.”
Beautiful. Beautiful, right?
Although, I have to say I also like the phrase “vernal eq
uinox,” since it seems to connect our love with the orbit of the Earth, which strikes me as totally accurate. Picture the exact center of the sun directly above where we sat on that stone wall that runs like a seam through Brandywine Creek State Park, stitching wild meadow to green grass field. Picture that sun’s clean spring light catching in our eyelashes and hair and goldening all our edges. If I just invented the word “goldening,” it’s because I needed it. Maybe that’s how all words are invented: something new to the universe happens, and you have to christen it.
I fell in love in broad daylight. I fell in love in a crowd of people, with kites adorning the sky over our heads. One kite was shaped like a monarch butterfly, black and pumpkin-orange winging through the blue. One kite had rainbow streamers. One was diamond shaped and yellow with a crisscross and little red ponytail bows all down the tail, exactly like a kite in a picture book. I’ll tell our kids that, how the sky was full of pretty things held there by wind, how the sky was blue-iris blue.
CJ sat on the other side of Gray. Kirsten sat on the other side of me. Gray and I were in the middle, where we belonged.
I remember everything. I remember the exact moment.
In one hand, I held a thermos lid of hot chocolate. In my other hand, I held my long hair, twisted, to keep it from blowing into my face while I drank. My hands were cold.
“My hands are getting frostbite,” I said.
“Hardly,” said CJ. “It’s forty-eight degrees out.”
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