The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  I followed her along the dark hall, to the front door. “Good-bye, Fiona,” she said.

  Behind me the door closed with a solid twisting of the lock even before I was down the steps, down the walkway. The wind was blowing strongly now, the trees dancing wildly with its force, so bitterly cold on my face and neck that I was relieved to the point of tears when at last I reached the shelter and quiet of the car.

  As I started the engine, a truck was coming up the long driveway; it passed close enough for me to glimpse the interior. A handsome man, with sharp lines to his face, but I saw only his profile in those brief seconds of passing. Then I was beyond the truck, turning onto the main road, heading back to the ferry terminal.

  * * *

  “It’s happening,” Caroline told me over the phone. “Renee’s in labor.”

  “How is she?” I was back in New York, in a cab driving home from the airport.

  “It’s not going that well. I think they’ll probably have to do a C-section.”

  “I’ll come straight there,” I said. “I won’t go home first.”

  “No, that’s silly—” Caroline replied quickly, and then stopped. “Yes,” she said. “That’s probably best.”

  “Did you call Noni?”

  “She’s taking the train from Bexley. The kids are on their way, too.”

  I leaned forward to tell my cabbie the new destination and held on as he pulled abruptly to the side of the road.

  “I’m glad you made it back in time,” Caroline said, her voice in my ear as the cab swung into a U-turn. “How was the trip?”

  “Fine,” I replied without hesitation, and was hit by a wave of motion sickness from the car’s abrupt change in direction. “I’m glad I made it back in time, too.”

  The drive to the hospital took ages, the traffic heavy, a battalion of honking New Yorkers inching along the Cross Island Parkway. Thirty minutes in, my phone battery died, and I sat back against the seat and closed my eyes. I tried to doze, but my heart thudded against my chest. An image of the boy Rory kept rising before me like a vision, a ghost.

  When finally I arrived at the hospital, it was past 9:00 p.m. A bored receptionist tapped Renee’s name into her computer.

  “Looks like she’s in the maternity ward,” she said. “Out of surgery.”

  “Surgery?”

  “C-section.” Tap-tap-tap. “I don’t see a room number. You’ll have to ask on the ward.”

  But on the maternity ward, I couldn’t find an on-duty nurse, and so I wandered, peeking into rooms, pulling my suitcase behind me, with an increasing sense of worry. Where was my family? Had I missed them all?

  And then at last I found her.

  My sister was asleep, propped up with pillows, her face pale and calm. Caroline sat beside the bed, her two hands holding Renee’s right, her head bowed as though dozing or praying. Noni, Lily, Beatrix, and Louis sat in chairs scattered around the room. They were all asleep, breathing lightly, legs stretched before them. And there, within arm’s reach of Renee, was a small cot and inside it the compact bundle of a baby. The sight of the small, delicate head, the shock of black hair, even darker than Renee’s, delivered to me a hot shiver that moved from my center and extended out to the tips of my fingers and toes. I loved him, immediately and completely. Almost, I imagined, like a mother.

  “Caroline?” I said quietly, and she lifted her head.

  “Fiona,” she said. “You made it!”

  I bent down to hug my sister. Since her split from Nathan, Caroline had taken to rubbing lilac-scented oil into her skin—on the pulse points, as she called them—and it gave her a lovely fragrance, as though a summer garden hung around her neck. I lingered now in the hug to enjoy it. I realized I was trembling.

  “Fi, are you okay?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Lots of traffic. Long drive.”

  “Your conference?”

  “Yes, it was fine, all fine,” I answered, looking to the floor.

  Our voices had awakened Renee, who began to stir. She opened her eyes and said with a sense of urgency, “Where is he?”

  I felt an immediate disorientation. How did Renee know? Had I mumbled it on the phone to Caroline? Was the information so dangerously compelling that it appeared on my face? In that brief moment of Renee’s waking, I accepted that already my sisters knew about Rory, and I felt only relief. Here in this hospital room, filled with everyone who had loved Joe, we would discuss what to do about his son. This was not a secret I would carry alone into the future. I began to formulate the words, to start the answer: Yes, I know where he is.

  But Caroline spoke first. “He’s right here, Renee. Here’s Jonah.”

  The cot was beside the bed. Of course, I realized. The baby.

  And the room shook and swirled around me, the floor dropped, and into that empty space I threw Luna, her son, the house on the island. I threw it all down, away from my sisters, my nieces and nephews. Away from my mother. I threw it all into the bottomless dark, and the linoleum tiles closed up again, shielding Joe’s son from view, protecting him from us and us from him. It was a burial of sorts. A final good-bye.

  Renee looked into the cot and inhaled sharply. “Oh, isn’t he gorgeous?” she said, her voice sleepy but full. She gently stroked his small head.

  I leaned forward to hug Renee. “He takes after his mother,” I said.

  Beatrix and Lily began to stir, each opened her eyes and issued tired half smiles. These girls. These young women. They were twenty-four years old, the age at which I began The Last Romantic. When I thought about it, which was rarely now, the blog seemed almost quaint, idealistic, innocent. What would Lily and Beatrix do with those experiences? Did they ask the same questions now that I asked then? I suspected the answer was no. They were young, fearless women. Intoxicating. Sometimes I wondered what they thought of us. Did they look at Noni, at Caroline and Renee and me and wonder about the dilemmas that had plagued us? Did they wonder why we’d worried so much about children and work and relationships? My nieces assumed that the world was designed for them, the way they wished it to be. They took, they didn’t ask. And they made it look so simple. I wondered why we had never done the same.

  I was watching Beatrix: her long hair streaked with pink, a pierced nose, her cheeks high and freckled, and suddenly she locked her hazel eyes with mine. She issued a wide yawn and then winked.

  And beside her was Louis—still asleep, it appeared. His mouth open, a gentle rhythm to his breath. Maybe he was faking it, but I didn’t think so. I knew what fake looked like. Someone should wake him up, I thought. Wake him up so he doesn’t miss anything. Wake him up so he knows how much we need him here.

  “Hello, Skinners!” It was Nathan, holding two coffee cups, a candy bar stuck in the front pocket of his shirt. Louis startled with his father’s entry, blinked and yawned with a wide, luxuriant stretch. Nathan placed one of the cups on the table next to Caroline, and she looked up at him with gratitude.

  “Noni, it’s good to see you,” Nathan said, crossing the room to hug our mother. She and Nathan had a better relationship now, after the divorce, than during his long relationship with Caroline. Now Noni could appreciate him as a scientist, a teacher, a father, rather than as the man who took from Caroline the possibilities that her life might have otherwise contained were it not for children, home, his career, the goddamn frogs. Now Nathan was simply Professor Duffy, an intelligent, middle-aged white man with a poochy belly and silvery gray hair streaking his temples. Almost like a son.

  I was considering all this—Nathan and my fearless nieces and mothers and sons—when Jonathan walked through the door. None of us had seen or spoken to him during Renee’s pregnancy. He’d been traveling throughout the winter, Renee said, and would send the occasional e-mail but these contained only the barest details about his life and cursory questions about hers. He never mentioned the baby, she’d told me, or his impending fatherhood.

  Standing in the open doorway, Jonathan loo
ked sheepish, wiry and old. Older than I remembered him, his hair thinning on top so that the pale skin of his scalp reflected the yellow light.

  “Renee,” he said, and it was a small hiccup of a sound.

  Renee blinked once, twice. None of us said a word.

  “Is that . . . ?” He approached the cot. “Can I . . . ?” He looked to Noni for a response, as though the family matriarch controlled the babies here.

  But it was Renee who answered. “Yes, you can pick him up. I named him Jonah.”

  Gingerly Jonathan picked up the sleeping baby and held him awkwardly, like a football or a loaf of bread. Jonah squirmed and screwed up his face, caught somewhere between sleep and wailing.

  “Closer to your chest,” Renee instructed. “Put his head into your inner elbow.”

  Jonathan followed these directions. He then began to bounce up and down slightly in a soothing, repetitive motion, and in that moment he looked just like any other new father. The baby quieted, settled against him, and gave a soft little sound of contentment.

  “You got it,” said Renee.

  I knew there would be no grand emotional speeches here, not with all of us in the room. Jonathan and Renee were both too private and formal for that sort of thing. But I could tell. She was watching him. He did not look at her, only at the face of sleeping Jonah. The drooly, mashable face of his infant son, Jonah Ellis Avery Skinner.

  * * *

  I never told my sisters or Noni about the boy Rory. Perhaps this was my greatest betrayal. An unforgivable omission. I wonder now, as you do in old age, how events might have unfolded if I had brought Rory back to New York. If my sisters had seen his young face stamped with the same chin, same nose, same shining eyes as Joe’s young face.

  What did I give away that night with Luna Hernandez? But what, too, would have been lost?

  We would have lost Joe again in a way. He would have become his son, a different boy living in a different time. We would have fought and struggled over that boy with the same ferocity we should have fought over Joe against Ace and Kyle and all the forces that surrounded him. We let Joe slip away, and so we would have held firm to Rory; we would have swallowed him whole. We Skinners are not very good at compromise. We are all or nothing.

  There can be no other Joe. There is only one, and he remains as bright and vivid for me as that first day we visited the pond. He pulled me up from the mossy depths, his own head dripping, blinking away the cold, murky water, shaking me back into myself. That feeling endures even today, all these years later. Joe, you saved me.

  Renee will always remember our brother in that moment after she ran from the man in the car, when she heard Joe’s voice calling her name and then the man’s weight lifting off her, releasing her lungs so she could breathe again. Her face was sticky with tears, her body shaking with the effort as she pushed herself up from the ground. Somehow Joe had known—how had he known?—where to find her. Joe, solid as a tree, said, Are you okay? and he’d taken her hand. He’d looked at her with such concentration, such concern, that Renee felt her fear depart, the knitting back together of the ends of herself that in the past hour of running and hiding and fighting had come loose and flown apart. Are you okay? Joe repeated, and Renee had answered, Yes.

  Renee will see this same tenderness in her own son, first with his friends when he is young, then with his wife and his own children, Renee’s grandchildren. Sometimes she will see it, too, in her colleagues and in the families of her patients. A care, a watchfulness, a willingness to accept the burden of another’s fear. As a surgeon she will attempt this same degree of humanity with her patients, but to do it absolutely, as Joe did that day, will prove impossible, and she will feel herself over the course of her career falling short. Even as her professional accolades accumulate around her, she will lament her emotional failures.

  At age sixty-one—still young in body and mind, still able to perform a nineteen-hour surgery without complaint—Renee will retire from full-time medicine to teach and spend time with her son. Jonah will be nine years old then, and, Renee will say, she’s missed enough. Jonah is curious and kind, a violin player, a rugby devotee (though too skinny to play), a lover of the sea and the animals found there, who leaves for his marine-biology program at the University of Washington with a suitcase full of seashells and a framed photo he’s kept on his dresser since childhood of his Uncle Joe, his namesake, a man Jonah never met but feels he knows due to the stories his mother tells of baseball and pond swimming and New York and a cake made with almonds and cinnamon.

  Jonathan’s reentry into Renee’s life proceeds slowly after that first day in the hospital. For months Renee will refuse him, not trusting this change of heart or his promises to cut down on travel, to parent alongside her. But then, after nearly a year, she relents. Jonathan returns to their home in New York. He has always loved Renee, Jonathan will tell us that Christmas, all of us gathered around Noni’s dining-room table, giddy on champagne and pecan pie. Baby Jonah is asleep in Renee’s lap, sucking a pink thumb. “I’ve loved only her since that day in the ER,” Jonathan says, and he holds up his hand, the scar having faded years ago to a thin white line cross-hatched with the ghost of stitches that Renee herself had sewn. Twenty-six years after that Christmas, on the day Jonathan Frank dies of a quick, painless stroke, his eyes will rest on the scar and it will appear suddenly to glow and pulse, a wavering, white-hot mark across his palm that opens again to reveal an image of Renee in her white doctor’s coat, Renee gently, seriously holding his hand and healing this small, wounded part of himself.

  Renee will outlive Jonathan by twenty years, and her dying image, the last picture she will hold in her head, is an improbable one. It is not of Jonathan, or Jonah, or one of us, her sisters, or Noni or Joe. It is of our father, the long-gone Ellis Avery, and the day he took her fishing on Long Island Sound, just the two of them on a boat long enough for twenty, and how the late-afternoon sun made the water glimmer and glint like a thousand tiny diamonds.

  Caroline will always believe that Luna has something to tell us. She will always look for Luna, and it is with Caroline that I will feel the greatest guilt and regret. She is a mother; she would know better than I what it meant for me to walk away from our brother’s child.

  There are moments, weeks, years when I forget about the boy Rory, but then, after a dinner that Caroline has cooked for us, we sit in her garden with its view of Joe’s tree, and she will say the name: Luna. She will ask me, “Why did we never find her? Should we try again?”

  “No,” I say. Year after year. Decade after decade. “No, we should give it up. Luna is gone.”

  And so over the course of our life together, I dissuade Caroline from looking for Luna Hernandez. On this question at last I side with Renee. And finally Caroline surrenders.

  “What good would’ve come of it?” she will say one afternoon when we are in our eighties, vacationing in cool, blustery Maine. She grasps my hand. “I’m so glad we never found her. We didn’t need another sister.”

  Caroline and Nathan will not live together again, though they will remain friends, wonderful friends, speaking nearly every night on the phone in the years before Nathan’s death. His is a slow-moving cancer, so slow that at first the doctors advise him against treatment—old age will get him first—but then suddenly the disease accelerates as though it has awakened from a long sleep, as though it is reminded of its reason for being. When he dies, Nathan will be single, a beloved father and grandfather, known in perpetuity for a subspecies of the Panamanian golden frog that he discovers while on a research trip in the Cordilleran cloud forest. The Atelopus duffyi. This small, glistening amphibian—really more yellow than gold, he’s noted in several books, and smaller than its cousin Atelopus zeteki—is the last thing Nathan will see when, alone in a hospital room at 1:00 a.m. in the year 2049, he finds himself miraculously walking along a twisting stream on the eastern side of the Tabasará mountain range. The small, brilliant body of the frog hops before him, and
he follows it farther and farther into the wet, hot trees.

  Caroline will continue with her acting, gaining local acclaim, appearing in all the best regional theaters, Williamstown and Amherst, and then, the year after she marries Raffi, she appears in an Off-Broadway production of A Doll’s House, a run that lasts ten years and brings her the kind of independent satisfaction and artistic fulfillment that sewing Halloween costumes and directing school productions never could. After Raffi’s death she will meet Leo, fifteen years her junior, an esteemed set decorator, and will believe that at last she has found her soul mate, the love of her life.

  Caroline and Leo have six years together. It is a simple picture that comes to her one morning in the shower: an image of Joe on the baseball field, a high-school game she had attended only reluctantly and then watched from way up in the bleachers, far from Noni, Renee, and me. She remembers clear as a bell Joe at the plate in his purple-and-green uniform, and he is like that lilac tree she planted so long ago in her backyard: strong, tall, branching limbs, and beautiful, so beautiful, with the perfect arc of his swing. As ball meets bat, the crack of it explodes into light, and Caroline closes her eyes as she, too, falls into light.

  Will, my darling Will, follows Caroline one week later. The single-engine plane he is piloting alone crashes over Hopi lands in northeastern Arizona, an accident that is never fully explained. He’d lived a rich and healthy eighty-eight years and his funeral is a celebration, a party, of all that he was and all that we experienced together. But these two absences, Caroline and Will in such quick succession, will topple me like nothing else since Joe. For years I will find myself sitting with eyes closed, one hand around a book, a pencil, an old T-shirt, and the other on my heart. I sit like that old medium Mimi Prince, and I wait for the enduring vibrations to reach me.

  I meet Henry when I believe I’m finished with new experiences. I want only to retreat, to hide away and write in peace. To never hear another siren. Everything, I think, has already happened to me, but then there he is. Henry, fly-fishing in those big rubber boots and a floppy green hat in the river on my new land. He’s a neighbor who becomes a friend, then lover. My house in the mountains becomes our house and we fill it with books, the barn with horses, the river with trout. Our extended families come when they need respite from their lives in cities—Henry’s children and their children, my nieces and nephews, their children and theirs. My sisters never meet Henry, they’re gone by then, but I know they would have approved.