Acts of Contrition

by Handford, Jennifer

“Landon, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Come on, MM, just open it.”

  I slid my finger under the tape on both sides, unraveled the paper and opened the box, revealing a little porcelain statue of St. Francis of Assisi. I had seen it once in a store window and commented on it to Landon.

  “Thank you,” I said uneasily.

  “Do you remember that day? We were out taking a walk and you saw it in the store window.”

  “Yes, Landon. I remember.”

  “Do you remember what I said?”

  I thought back but didn’t remember him saying anything. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” he said. “That’s why you don’t remember. I never said anything that mattered. I wanted to. I wanted to tell you that he was my favorite saint. That when I was a kid I prayed to St. Francis every night because my grandmother told me to. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is doubt, faith. ‘He’s your namesake,’ my grandmother would say. You know, Landon Francis. She said he’d look after me. But you didn’t know that because I didn’t tell you. Because I was afraid to tell you. There were all sorts of things I wanted to say to you, but I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of you knowing me too well—anyone knowing me too well. My mom was a wreck. She was chronically depressed because my dad left her—left us—when I was a kid. Abandoned his wife and three boys to fend for themselves. My mother did her best, but the depression would overtake her sometimes. And there would be my grandmother. Always a smile on her face. Always a meal on the table. I’ve told you my father left. That you knew. But did you know that I tracked him down a couple of years ago? Flew all the way to Tucson. Found his address and knocked on his door. Thought maybe he’d want to see his big-shot son: lawyer, politician. Know what he said to me? ‘All politicians are crooks. All lawyers are phonies.’ Then he asked if I could spare a few bucks for the old man. That was my male role model. That’s the DNA pulsing through me. I didn’t want you to know all that. That’s why I never said anything. Because the past is bullshit. The future is the only thing that matters. What I can make of myself despite the old man’s blood running through me.”

  By then I had sat down. “I can’t believe you went to see your dad and never mentioned it to me.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I know you want more from me. At least you wanted more from me. Maybe you’ve already moved on. But I had to come over and beg you for one more shot. I can do better, Mary. I can be the guy you want me to be.”

  “You’re asking to come back?” I wiped my sweaty palms down the length of my pants.

  “I’ve got something else to show you,” Landon said. He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. I saw my loopy nineteen-year-old cursive scrolled across the middle. “You sent me this letter, after the first time we met. Do you remember?”

  I smiled. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago. I was growing old in this relationship. “I remember,” I said. “And I’ve always been hugely embarrassed by it.”

  “Why would you be embarrassed by it?”

  “Because I was just a kid and you were in law school. And mostly because you never wrote me back. Talk about humiliation.”

  “I never wrote you back, but MM, my God, I’ve kept the letter for all these years.”

  “Maybe we can burn it.”

  Landon smiled. “I’m keeping it forever.”

  Our eyes locked on the word forever, a promise we’d never before shared.

  “Can we eat?” Landon asked. “Do you have plans that I’m interrupting?”

  “I just walked in from work,” I said, pointing to my briefcase and purse, which were still unpacked by the door. “My only plans were to change out of this suit and forage for food in my empty refrigerator.”

  “Go change,” Landon said. “I’ll get plates and drinks.”

  A few minutes later, Landon and I sat around the kitchen table, eating takeout from the Italian deli.

  “How’s work?” Landon asked.

  “Great!” I said, and then, “I hate it. Kind of. Well, it’s okay. But I don’t love it. We’ll see.”

  “Being a first-year associate is kind of rough.”

  I thought of Angela, little Shannon and Kelly, their silky waves of hair, their tiny Chiclets teeth, their helium-balloon laughs. I was a twenty-six-year-old woman fighting addiction—not to drugs, not to alcohol, but to peachy little girl skin and kisses as sweet as watermelon. And here I was working sixty hours a week drafting briefs and sharing dinner with my self-admitted commitment-phobic ex-boyfriend.

  “You’d better get going,” I said after dinner, before Landon tried to stay for too long and before I let him.

  “I’m going,” Landon said, “but Mary, I have one more thing to say and then I’ll put the ball in your court. Let you decide whether you want to see me again.”

  My body stiffened as I prepared myself for Landon’s final entreaty. This is when he’ll argue the merits of his case: that there is value in being together just for the sake of it. That not everything needs to lead to something different, bigger. That it’s not always better once you get there. I steeled myself to hear his famous refrain: Can’t we just enjoy each other? Can’t that be enough?

  But Landon didn’t make that argument. Instead he cupped my face with his palms, looked me straight in the eyes, swallowed hard, and said, “I love you, Mary Margaret Russo. I really love you. Always have. Always will. I’m scared because of my father, how he was. But I’m ready to dive in. I’m ready to go for the whole thing: marriage, kids. You know, the things you want. I want them, too.” Then he kissed me and walked out the door. Hollywood style. Leaving me standing there to consider the terms of his deal, an offer so appealing I wouldn’t need to counter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Big Book

  JANUARY, FEBRUARY, AND NOW IT’S March. I’m teaching religious education on Sundays, volunteering at Dom and Danny’s school once a week, and helping out at the girls’ school for various functions: the charity auction, Emily’s next play, Sally’s read-a-thon. I’m also considering taking in some legal work. Basic stuff: wills and trusts, settlements. I’ve talked to Tom about it and he’s already started to help me design a Web site for Mary Morrissey, Attorney at Law. A photo of me in my Trust Me, I’m a Lawyer blue suit, looking stately and serious, like I’ve spent the past decade committing legal precedence to memory, rather than recalling every type of dinosaur and the mnemonic for the order of the planets as well as relearning how to find the least common denominator.

  Just as my life is starting to rebuild, Landon—with his impeccable timing—calls.

  “Mary, hi,” he says, like he’s just a guy, not a US senator. “How are you?”

  I told Tom when Landon called me after the election because I never wanted to lie to him again. Tom nodded, and when he finally spoke, he said, “You told him not to call you, right? He can’t call you again, Mary. You know that, right?” I told him I did, and now here I was, on the phone again with Landon.

  “Mary?” Landon says. “Are you there?”

  “Listen, Landon, you can’t be calling me. When you call me, it hurts my family.”

  “I’ll let you go,” he says. “But I have a request.”

  “You’re a senator,” I say. “Don’t you have an entire staff of people to fulfill your requests?”

  “I was hoping you could send me a photo of Sally. Maybe her school photo? Maybe you could send me one every year?”

  My heart thumps heavily because it’s been almost a year and Landon is still on this. “No way. Forget it.”

  “I just want to see her,” he says. “I just want to be able to look at a photo of her every now and then.”

  “Aren’t you happy?” I say. “Aren’t you where you want to be?”

  “What’s happiness, really?” he asks.

  “Landon, I can only imagine all the beautiful, brilliant women fawning all over you. Why don’t y
ou choose one, get married, and have some kids?”

  “Yeah,” Landon says with a small laugh.

  “I’m serious, Landon. I’m not being smart. I mean it. Why don’t you?”

  “Probably because I’m just as incapable of committing now as when we were together. I’m my father’s son in many regards,” Landon says sadly.

  “Maybe so,” I say, because after ten years of telling him that he’s not, maybe it’s time to believe that he is.

  “Seriously, MM. What do you say? Just one photo?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I say. “We need to think of Sally. What’s best for her. What if a nosy intern finds the photo in your desk drawer? What if we’re all found out?”

  “I’ll keep it at home,” he says. “Will you just think about it?”

  “I’ll talk to Tom,” I say. “I’ve got to go, okay?”

  The final time I broke up with Landon was the tenth year of our relationship. We had been dating for six years; had known each other four more. The first time I met Landon I was nineteen years old. On that last night, I had just turned twenty-nine. I had done four tours with him, if you counted the times I had fallen off the wagon and climbed back on. I had the battle scars to prove it. I had given my blood and was walking away with a wounded heart.

  “This is good-bye,” I said to him on that last Saturday night.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I know you deserve more. I know you’re wasting your time with me when I’m not what you want. I’m sorry I’m not what you want.” He hung his head low, like his inability to love me as I loved him was a defect he wished he could fix but couldn’t.

  “You tried,” I said. Following his plaintive, desperate plea two years earlier—when he’d looked me in the eye and said, “I love you, Mary Margaret Russo. I really love you. Always have. Always will”—his ability to express himself had sprung back to its original elasticity, tight and unyielding. There were times, moments here and there, when Landon would fall hard and dive in with everything he had. “I love you so much,” he’d claim in those moments, but weeks, sometimes months, later he’d pull back again, and I’d be able to detect by the pull of his mouth and the clench of his jaw how hard it was for him. Opening up to me and staying open only caused him more anxiety, made him feel more exposed, and instead of making him more comfortable in my company, it made him less so. I was patient, thought that maybe his emotional growth would shoot up in fits and starts, but the engine that propelled the original spurt stalled along the way and I was left with a car idling. It was on but going nowhere.

  It’s the next week. As the girls sit at the counter with their homework and the boys with their coloring, I cook corned beef with cabbage, a giant pot of mashed potatoes, and a crusty loaf of Irish soda bread. When it’s time for dinner, I call the kids and Tom to the table. I serve Tom a heaping helping, fill his wineglass with a deep cabernet.

  “What a dinner,” Tom says. “I love St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “I know you do,” I say, bending down to kiss the top of his head. “I just thought it would be nice.”

  After dinner I clean the kitchen while Tom helps the boys get ready for bed. I hear him chasing them with their toothbrushes, stomping his monster feet and roaring, “ ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!’ ” The boys squeal and run for cover under blankets and pillows.

  I turn on the dishwasher, start a load of laundry, and fold what’s in the dryer while Sally and Emily finish up their math and spelling homework. One of Emily’s vocabulary words is quandary, which means “a perplexing situation or position; a dilemma.” She needs to use the word in a sentence but is having a hard time. Each of her attempts has to do with being in a quandary and trying to get out. I want to tell her the best quandary to be in is no quandary at all. Jump, kick, swerve, I want to say, but get out of the way of a situation that will roll you into a knot that cannot be undone. Trust me, I want to tell her, I’m the expert when it comes to quandaries.

  By ten o’clock the house is quiet, and Tom and I are sitting on the sofa, sharing a bowl of buttered popcorn.

  “You know how it’s not fair to ‘shoot the messenger’?” I ask.

  Tom chews the popcorn in his mouth, takes a sip of soda, looks at me squarely. “In this scenario, are you the messenger?”

  “In the spirit of being one hundred percent honest and truthful and living in the light and not keeping secrets…”

  “Mare,” Tom says, “what’s going on?”

  “Landon James called today.”

  “And what? You hung up on him, right?”

  “I didn’t,” I say. “Because, as I’ve explained before, I’m wary of his motives with Sally and wanted to see what he was up to. Ever since he saw Sally at the Christmas parade nearly two years ago, he’s had a seed of curiosity planted in his twisted little brain.”

  “He can’t see her again,” Tom says strongly.

  “He knows that,” I say. “And lucky for us, he’s too selfish to jeopardize his career in order to take that risk.”

  “So why was he calling?”

  “He wants a photo of her.”

  “He can go to hell.”

  “I told him that, basically.”

  “What else?”

  “I told him to get a life of his own.”

  “Do you think he’ll back off?”

  “I think Landon has always wanted whatever was out of his reach. The more unattainable, the more desirable. I think now that he has his senate seat—the thing that he wanted more than anything in the world—he has nothing to chase. And his curiosity has turned to Sally. He doesn’t really want her. He doesn’t know that,” I say. “He thinks he does, but the second he actually spent some time with her, it would just be a letdown to him, like everything else he’s built up in his mind.”

  Tom smiles, shakes his head. “Sally could never be a letdown to anyone,” he says. “She’d blow his mind with how smart she is. She’d leave him feeling like a dope.”

  “True,” I say, and smile at the pride I see in Tom’s face. “But he’ll never have that chance.”

  “I think it’s time for the three of us to have a meeting,” Tom says.

  I nod my agreement, but between my ears the sirens are blaring because I’m a lawyer, not a mediator, and in my court of law there are two parties, not three. In the decade that I’ve kept my secret, my terms have been absolute: Tom, you belong here. Landon, you belong there. In my quest to keep my worlds separate, I’ve erected a border and made certain the two sides did not share common ground. That perhaps Tom would claim a piece of Landon’s territory shook my every molecule. Even more disturbing was the thought that Landon might stake a flag in my and Tom’s territory.

  Even so, I know that it’s time to come to the table.

  A week later, I call Landon, tell him Tom wants to meet, and ask him if we could get together. “Somewhere private,” I say.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Lent

  WE DECIDE TO MEET IN a shaded picnic area at Rock Creek Park. I looked on a map and found a secluded location, but now—as Tom and I traverse a rickety rope bridge and walk along a burbling creek—I wonder whether Landon will be able to find us. We locate the picnic area, a set of tables covered by a rain shelter. I lean against the columned structure and wait, try to modulate my breath, steady my speech so that my voice doesn’t sound false; so that Tom doesn’t accuse me later of acting different in front of Landon. A few minutes pass, and then I see Landon coming from the opposite direction. I’m glad to know there is more than one way out.

  “There he is,” I say to Tom, squeezing his hand. We watch Landon walk toward us, pressing his silky red tie to his chest. His wavy hair flops on his forehead. Makes me think of Sally.

  “Landon,” I say. “Tom, Landon. Landon, Tom.” My voice is elevated, my speech quickened. There’s no way of acting normal in this situation.

  Tom and Landon hold out their
hands, shake.

  “Did you find this place okay?” I ask. I detect a note of breathlessness to my voice, like I can’t pull in enough air. There’s not enough air in this park.

  “No problem,” Landon says. “It’s nice to be out of the fishbowl for a few minutes.”

  “I’m sure,” I say, a nervous laugh trickling out of my mouth. I force myself to stand still, to make sure I’m not shifting my hips, as Tom once accused me of doing. Tom and Landon stare at each other, both sizing the other up like dogs in an alley. I feel like I’m interrupting something private.

  “I never meant your family any harm,” Landon blurts, as if he has been holding his breath and can’t take it another second.

  Tom nods. “I believe that,” he says. “Other than the fact that you slept with my wife only weeks before we were married…”

  A miserable laugh tumbles out of me.

  “Other than that,” Tom continues, “I’m quite grateful to you. You made a promise to Mary—to stay out of her life—and you did for a number of years. You gave us Sally’s childhood, and for that I’m thankful. I’m sure that arrangement suited your lifestyle best, but I also believe that there must have been times when you doubted what you had done. I acknowledge that you must have struggled.”

  I stare at Tom, have the urge to reach out and touch him, to test that he is real, because how could he—how could anyone—be so calm at this moment?

  “I did,” Landon agrees, offering Tom a grateful smile, as if finally being validated. “I do.”

  “But now you’re having a difficult time staying out of our lives.” Tom’s face remains unreadable, but his fists clench and open, clench and open. I imagine the unflappable look on his face now is exactly the look he had in the boxing ring.

  “I know I should stay the hell out of your lives,” Landon says. “But as I’m sure Mary’s told you, I just can’t.…Sally’s in my head. I can’t get around it. I wish I could.”

  Tom looks at him, long and hard, as though gauging the threat posed by this man’s admitted obsession with our daughter. And then he comes to a decision. “I think the point of today’s meeting,” Tom says, “is to establish some ground rules we can all live with.”