The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  Finally Renee heard the rattle of Jonathan’s keys, the soft tap of his shoes, the whine of the door as it opened and closed again. The quiet that descended.

  She emptied the grocery bag and hung it from a knob. She took the flowers from the counter and carefully unwrapped them, snipped the ends, found a vase in the side cupboard, the tall one used for unwieldy things, and filled the vase with water. She slid the flowers in and placed the vase onto the kitchen table, right in the middle. They were lovely flowers, the cups of the tulips just beginning to open. It was spring, and the watery, dank scent of spring—even here, surrounded by concrete—came to her from the open window.

  So much remained uncertain, but Renee felt at ease. This egg, hers but not hers. A baby. After eighteen years with Jonathan Frank, Renee was ready to love someone new.

  Chapter 18

  I sat at the computer in the den reviewing my itinerary for the climate-change conference. Three mornings of presentations and meetings in Seattle, with day excursions possible. A trip to the Olympic Peninsula. A ferry ride to various islands, each one appearing on Google Maps as craggy and green, studded with peaks shrouded in mist. I clicked through this link, then that one. Will was upstairs packing for his own business trip, this one to Chicago, when he heard me cry out.

  “Fiona?” He pounded down the stairs and stood in the doorway. “What is it? Is it Renee?”

  “No,” I said. “Not Renee. She’s still pregnant and big as a house and bloated, but she’s fine. I just talked to her an hour ago.” Caroline and I were on perpetual call for Renee: she’d asked us both to be there for the delivery.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Will said. “What is it, then?”

  “I . . . I found someone,” I said.

  “Who?”

  This of course was the question. I had told Will only the barest information about Luna Hernandez. My brother’s girlfriend, the woman who’d been with him when he fell. A terrible accident. Judgment clouded by alcohol. I had never told him about the ring or our search for Luna, about Mimi Prince, that private investigator, Caroline’s fall into despondency. It had seemed a silly, shameful chain of events.

  But now. On the screen. I pointed to the website. Will leaned over, pulled reading glasses from his front pocket, and squinted at the page. “Ivy and Vine. Farm-to-table restaurant and grocery,” he read. “And?” He removed the glasses and looked at me.

  “That woman,” I said. “I recognize her. I think I know her. I may look her up when I’m in Seattle.”

  “An old friend? College or something?”

  I nodded. “Yes, college. I haven’t seen her in years. Laura Shipka,” I read the name off the website. “Must be her married name.”

  “Sounds Russian.”

  I tilted my head. “Maybe.”

  “Huh,” Will grunted. “Okay, then. I’m going up to finish packing. You sure you’re okay?” He looked at me with his soft gray eyes, his red hair gone white at the crown, the sweet concern of Will, my husband of fourteen years.

  “Yes.” I nodded and smiled. “Totally fine. Just tired.”

  Will left the room. I heard the creak of his feet ascending the stairs to our bedroom. I leaned in closer to the computer, then enlarged the photo until the woman’s face filled the screen. Short black hair, high cheekbones, a mole the size of a dime high on her right cheek. I had only seen that one Polaroid photo of Luna, although I had imagined her countless times. Was this the woman Joe had loved? The picture fractured into colored atoms, pixels fine as dust.

  I picked up my phone and dialed the number on the screen. Luna answered on the first ring. “Ivy and Vine,” she said. “How may I help you?”

  * * *

  I stood at the front door of Luna’s house, but I did not knock. I listened to the sounds within. A child’s request: “Again, please, Mommy. More.” The bark of a good-natured dog. A woman’s laughter. The house stood alone at the end of a very long dirt road, up on a low hill that looked to the basin of Puget Sound. Tall pines rose to the east of the house, and mature gardens surrounded it, settled now into late-winter dormancy.

  I had not told Caroline or Renee about my discovery. Renee was thirty-seven weeks pregnant, progressing exactly as she should, but still—it was a high-risk pregnancy, and she insisted on maintaining her surgery schedule for as long as possible. Caroline was acting as doula, helpmate, labor coach, and anything else Renee needed. My business trip would be short, only two days. “I am a hundred percent reachable,” I told Renee before I boarded the plane. “I’ll have my phone on at all times.”

  Caroline had moved temporarily out of the Hamden house, leaving Raffi with careful instructions as to garden maintenance and care of the chickens, and into Renee’s apartment. In the past weeks, Jonathan had made overtures toward a reconciliation, but Renee had rebuffed him.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “Honestly, I had no idea how easy it would be to do this without you.”

  Luna lived on one of those green, misty islands I’d seen on my computer screen. The ferry ride took only thirty minutes from downtown Seattle, but I disembarked into what felt like a different time: a small, tidy town, a slow-moving police car, a woman and her pointer, all of it charming, quiet, and contained. The month was February, and a chill, damp wind blew off the water. No place, I decided, could be farther from the heat and hustle of Miami.

  The moments at Luna’s door dragged on, but still I didn’t knock. Inside my purse was the ring in its velvet box. I also carried a manuscript, a bound advance copy of The Love Poem, to give Luna. The book would be published later that year. It would change my life, although of course I didn’t know this at the time. I knew only that for fifteen years I had imagined Luna as Joe’s last love and his truest. I had written a book of poems about her, about the two of them together. All this time I’d held an idea of Luna in my head, and now it would collide or collapse with the real person who stood on the other side of this door.

  The sun was setting. The light was almost gone. I felt the encroaching darkness around me. I rapped the iron knocker. The sound of feet, a pause, and the door opened.

  “Fiona, hello,” Luna said. “You found us.” A toddler hovered at Luna’s knee, looking up at me with wide, dark eyes. Luna looked older, of course she did, than in that faded Polaroid, but she still retained the clear skin, arching eyebrows, that mole. I would have picked her out in any crowd.

  “Yes, your directions were perfect,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m late. I missed the first ferry.”

  I sensed a hesitation. Perhaps Luna would not invite me in. Perhaps, after all this time, the visit would consist only of a cautious stare-down on the doorstep.

  The toddler began to fuss. He reached for his mother. Luna bent to pick him up and then stepped back. “Please come in, Fiona,” she said.

  As I entered, a yellow Labrador rushed to greet me, jumping up and pushing its nose against my crotch. I backed away, self-conscious, already off balance. “Doggy, no,” the child said.

  “Come on out back,” said Luna. “I made us some tea.”

  I followed Luna through the house: large woody rooms, floors made of wide scuffed boards, beams visible overhead. A pair of glass-paned doors led onto a large circular room lined with windows through which I saw, dimly in the near dark, a view of the water. Two steaming mugs of tea sat on a square coffee table. Toys lay scattered across the floor, and the toddler scrambled out of Luna’s arms and ran to a set of wooden train tracks.

  “That’s Alfredo,” Luna said. “My son. He’s two. He looks just like my husband, Dima.”

  Alfredo had thick blond curls and a little bow mouth. He pushed the train across the floor with his chubby pink hands, chanting, “Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga.” As with all children, I found him intoxicating but also somehow threatening, like a hard drug I’d tried once and knew I should never do again. Although of course I hadn’t tried it, not even the once.

  “He’s adorable,” I said. “And I say that about very few
babies.”

  “He’s a handful,” Luna replied. “And I just found out I’m pregnant again.” She laughed in a nervous way, though about the pregnancy or something else, I couldn’t say. “We weren’t expecting it. I’m forty-one. It’s a gift, you know? We haven’t told anyone yet, actually.”

  I felt a small thrill at the sharing of this confidence. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Do you have kids?” Luna asked.

  I shook my head. “No, my husband and I decided not to. I’m the editorial director at an environmental NGO. And I’m a writer. I write poetry, I’m working on a lengthy project now. I have a book out next year. Will teaches history.” I told Luna about my work, Will’s research into indigenous populations of the American Southwest, the strange, desolate quiet of our trips to the desert after the tidy chaos of the New York City suburbs. Behind my streaming monologue sat the disquiet that arrived every time I said these words to a mother: no children. First a small flash of shame and then, following swiftly, defensiveness. It was my own instinctual reaction, irrational and unfair to both of us. Even with Caroline sometimes I still felt it, and now with Renee, large and happy as a house. Everyone makes different choices, Caroline had said to me recently as comfort and apology. Everyone’s life is complex.

  “It must be so much easier for you and your husband without any kids,” Luna said. “All your traveling?” Her face was curious, without judgment.

  “Yes,” I said. “The luggage is certainly a lot lighter.”

  Luna smiled and told me in turn about the business she and her husband ran, an organic farm that supplied produce to restaurants in Seattle. “The farm-to-table movement, what a boon to growers like us,” she said. It had taken years to become certified organic, but now they barely kept up with demand. They had five year-round employees and hired dozens of seasonal workers; they delivered produce boxes to homes and ran a store in town.

  An awkward silence descended, punctured only by the click-click of the dog’s claws on the hardwood floor, Alfredo’s singsong whisper as he played with the trains. “In the station here’s the house, Mama, Papa, RoRo. Bye-bye, good-bye.”

  I reached for my purse. I had come here to give her the ring, of course, but now, sitting on this leather sofa, drinking mint tea from the thick ceramic mug, I felt a shyness that registered almost as ambivalence. Finding her had been a deep, interior goal for so long, its significance barely acknowledged even to myself. But maybe this was not the time to introduce Luna into our lives. All the painful memories she would provoke. I wasn’t sure. I wavered between giving her the ring, inviting her to New York, and leaving immediately, throwing the ring away, never again speaking her name.

  Perhaps the idea to fulfill Joe’s last wish now, so many years later, was ridiculous. Perhaps it had always been ridiculous.

  But a deep tremor of the old impetus returned to me. Joe’s last wish. The very last.

  I said, “Luna, I came here to give you something. I found it in Joe’s apartment, but I think it’s yours.” I pulled the ring box from my purse and placed it on the coffee table.

  She looked at it but said nothing.

  “It’s for you,” I said.

  Luna began to shake her head, but then she reached forward and picked up the box, lifted the lid. She closed it immediately and placed the box back onto the table. “This isn’t mine,” she said.

  I thought for a moment that she didn’t understand, and so I explained. “It’s an engagement ring. Joe never had the chance to propose, but he loved you, he wanted to marry you.”

  Luna shook her head. “It’s not mine,” she repeated. “I don’t want it.” She met my eyes. “Joe happened so long ago. I’m married now, I have a family. I only want to forget that time.”

  “Forget my brother?” I felt a sudden crumpling, a collapse, as though a hand had squeezed the internal workings of my chest.

  “No, that’s not—” Luna stopped. “I made a horrible mistake that day. You should keep this for your family. Your sisters’ children. I can’t take it.”

  A disappointment cracked open and grew wider every second that I sat here, Luna across the table from me, the ring between us both. The manuscript of The Love Poem weighed down my purse, but I could not give it to Luna. Not now. I had written a book of poems that imagined the truest love, a lost love, a tragedy. But look at all that Luna had now. She was surrounded by love, she was rich with it.

  Alfredo was staring at me, his wet, pink mouth open, some food or dirt crusting the corners. I offered him a faltering smile. I needed to leave this house with its shedding, barking dog and domestic mess, the thin lines of dirt beneath Luna’s fingernails, the heavy scent of gardenia from the flowers in the hall. My mug of tea was suddenly too hot against my knee, and I set it on the table, where it sloshed messily onto the floor.

  “Oh—I’m so sorry—” I said.

  And then the sound of the front door opening, footsteps, and little Alfredo looked up, a thunderbolt of joy flashing across his face. “Papa?” he said, and scurried out of the room.

  A man’s voice answered, but it was muffled, I couldn’t make out the words. I turned away from the spill, toward the voice, and then the man entered the room with Alfredo in his arms. “Hi,” he said to Luna.

  He was Joe. For a blazing flash, this is what I saw. Joe, his wide shoulders, the imposing height of him, dark hair, tawny golden skin, and those blue eyes. For a moment I believed in true miracles, in magic, perhaps even in God. My breath left me, my heart went still, the moment extended into a wondrous stasis of the absolute impossible. I had always known it was true: Joe, still alive, somewhere. Somewhere, and here he was. At last I had found him.

  Alfredo broke the spell. “Mommy, RoRo home,” he said. “RoRo here.”

  Joe strode across the room to Luna, kissed her on the cheek, and I realized this was a boy, with dirty sneakers on his feet, wearing basketball shorts and a sweaty T-shirt. Knobby knees, knobby elbows.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  “How was practice?” Luna asked, not looking at me. She took Alfredo from his arms and reached out to wipe a crumb off his face. “Did you eat already?”

  “Just some pizza,” the boy replied. “I’m still hungry.” It was then he noticed me standing there, like a fool. I am a fool, I thought. What should I say? What should I do? I calculated in my head. Of course. Fifteen years.

  “This is my old friend Fiona,” said Luna, turning to me. “And, Fiona, this is my son, Rory.”

  I didn’t meet Luna’s gaze, but I held out my hand to the boy. “Nice to meet you, Rory,” I said. The boy’s palm was hard with calluses, like holding a cheese grater, and I gripped it, feeling those rough spots, not wanting to let go.

  I released the boy’s hand. For a fleeting moment, his warmth remained on my palm, the ghost imprint of that grip, and then it was gone.

  I said, “Luna, I’m afraid I have to leave. I need to get home. My sister Renee is pregnant, did I mention? She could go into labor any day now, really. My sister Caroline was early with her firstborn.” I heard myself babble. Every nerve in my body sent raw, urgent messages of escape to my brain and heart.

  Luna was studying me. “Rory, can you take Alfredo into the kitchen? Give him a snack, some cheese and crackers?”

  “Sure,” Rory said, and he left the room, bending to hold Alfredo’s hand. I watched them go. I watched Rory’s back disappear behind a closed door.

  “Fiona,” Luna began, “maybe we should talk more.”

  I lowered myself again onto the couch, but it was more a physical response to Luna’s suggestion than a conscious choice to stay. The dog came to sit at my feet, circling once, twice, and then curling its body beside me.

  “You said your sister is pregnant?” Luna asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. Her first child.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Luna. “A growing family.”

  “You seem very happy here,” I replied.

  “It’s a wonderful p
lace to raise kids. So much time outside and in the water, swimming and boating. Rory has his own sailboat, a little Sun Cat.”

  “I always thought Joe should have been a swimmer. But”—I shrugged—“baseball just took over. And that was that.”

  “We don’t always know at the time the significance of our decisions,” Luna responded.

  “But sometimes we do,” I said.

  Luna was looking at me, her eyes a clear brown, lines beneath and between, the face of a mother who worked hard at loving her children. “You mentioned you have a ferry to catch?” she said.

  I did not answer straightaway. The feel of Rory’s callused palm remained on me. And that moment when I had believed he was Joe. I could not undo that moment. I would think of it for the rest of my life. But I needed to return home to my sisters, to Noni, to Will. Yes, I had a ferry to catch, and then a plane and a cab. A dozen possible futures lay before me, each of them fraught, none of them easy. An upheaval, a release. Joy and sadness, regrets of every size and flavor. Only one of these futures was certain, only one future contained the lives we had already built. It seemed a dangerous thing to risk tearing those down. I thought of the Pause and how the four of us came together and then how close we came to destroying everything after Joe died. I didn’t want to risk losing us again. And I didn’t want to take anything away from Luna, a woman I did not know but whose life had proved for me the greatest inspiration.

  “Would you like to say good-bye to Rory?” she asked, and I could see the effort those words demanded of her.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Will you tell him I enjoyed meeting him?”

  Luna nodded, her jaw held tight, her eyes fixed on mine.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Luna picked up the velvet box and held it out to me.

  “Keep it,” I said. “For Rory. Maybe someday he’ll want it. Maybe he’ll want to hear its story.”

  She nodded and replaced the box on the table.