by Julie Cohen
She looked in his direction, met his gaze, and stopped. He saw her freeze, as he had done. Her tanned face turned suddenly pale. Her eyes widened and her lips parted.
And then he remembered. He remembered what his body had not remembered, in its explosion of joy at seeing her.
Emily flushed violently. She looked down at the floor. The man next to her touched her arm, said her name, and Robbie noticed him for the first time. He was tall and slender, with horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, a khaki jacket the same shade as her trousers. He pushed a cart stacked with luggage. The hand that touched Emily’s arm had a gold wedding band on its fourth finger.
Emily looked up at this man as if he’d woken her from a dream. She shook her head, and then nodded, and she made as if to glance in Robbie’s direction again and instead put her hands on the luggage cart next to the man’s. They veered off to the right, in the opposite direction to where Robbie stood.
Robbie pushed through the crowd to follow her. To intercept her before she could disappear from his life again. He had no idea what to say to her; his mind was a mass of emotion, not words – the need to touch her, to look at her, to hear her voice again. The happy grandparents were in his way and he barged past them, not hearing their protests in vehement Spanish. He could see Emily’s back retreating. The man with her placed his hand in the small of her back as they walked. It was a casual gesture of affection and intimacy.
Robbie was through the crowd, now, could catch up with them easily if he ran, but this gesture made him stop.
‘Emily,’ he said instead, the name in his head that he hadn’t said aloud for ten years. It came out rough and unaccustomed, and the second time he shouted it. ‘Emily!’
She paused. Didn’t look around. For an infinite second and a half he watched the back of her head, the neat ponytail, light hair kissed by the sun. Then she started walking again.
The man with her turned around and looked back. He spotted Robbie, frowned, and spoke to Emily. She shook her head vehemently and he walked off with her, glancing once more over his shoulder.
It wasn’t until they’d gone through the glass doors, outside, that Robbie could move again. He ran to the doors and out into the steaming heat in time to see them getting into a cab. Emily first, and then the man shutting her door for her and going around to the other side, while the driver put their bags into the trunk of the car.
Then the driver got in and drove away. He couldn’t even catch another glimpse of Emily before she was gone.
He stood there staring at the space where the cab had been as other cabs pulled up and drove away, as people walked past, as everyone else’s lives moved forwards without him. Remembering ten years before. The way they had said goodbye.
A sharp tap on his shoulder. ‘What are you doing out here? We’ve been looking for you all over the place.’
Marie stood beside him, holding William’s hand. She was frowning. William was wide-eyed under his shock of dark hair, thumb in his mouth.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He kissed Marie’s cheek and knelt down to hug William. ‘You’ve grown in a week, buddy. You look about ten years old now.’
‘I’m four,’ said William through his thumb.
‘I know.’ He kissed his son’s head. ‘You’re gonna love what I built for you at home.’
‘Gramps gave me ten dollars for saying my prayers right.’
‘Twenty,’ corrected Marie. ‘What are you doing out here, Bob? I thought you were going to meet us at the gate.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, straightening up. ‘I just saw someone I used to know, that’s all. Walked them to their taxi.’
‘Well, you took a long time of it. We waited half an hour at least before we started looking. I was going to try the airport lounge next.’
‘They said your flight was delayed out of Chicago.’ He picked up their suitcase, a big battered grey thing like an elderly elephant, and began to walk towards the parking lot. Marie didn’t move, though.
‘You’ve been drinking?’ she said.
‘A beer with lunch. Hours ago.’
‘Doesn’t smell like beer.’
With his free hand, he pulled the Life Savers out of his jeans and popped one into his mouth. ‘Want one, buddy?’ he asked, passing the roll to William, who took three.
‘I know what beer smells like, Robert.’
‘How are Gloria and Les? You gave them my love, right?’ Out of habit he slipped his arm around Marie’s waist, his hand on her hip to placate her.
‘Oh, Mom’s sciatica is bothering her again, and Dad gives her no sympathy as usual. He says—’
He walked to where he’d parked the car, family unit, nodding and making noises in the right place, carrying the suitcase, watching the dark head of his child as he walked in front of them.
His mind was in the cab that had driven away, carrying Emily.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Christopher waited until they were alone in their room to ask her. Her parents were in bed, and Polly had gone out with some young people she’d met on the beach the day before. Emily came out of the bathroom in her dressing gown, her hair tucked under a towel, her skin still damp and cooling in the air conditioning, and Christopher, stretched on the bed, looked up from the journal he was reading.
‘Darling,’ he said, sounding carefully nonchalant, ‘who was that man who called your name in the airport this afternoon?’
She couldn’t look at him. Instead she went to the dressing table and sat down, unwinding the towel from her hair. ‘I can’t get used to having so much space. And carpets.’
Christopher didn’t reply. She knew him well; she knew he wouldn’t ask again, but she also knew that he wouldn’t stop thinking about it. Christopher hated confrontation. In all their time together, she had only seen him truly angry once. And that had been ten years ago.
She brushed her hair and glanced at him in the mirror. He’d put his journal down, and was looking up at the ceiling where a fan rotated.
‘It’s someone I used to know,’ she said at last. ‘Someone I didn’t want to talk with.’
‘You seemed . . . it really affected you, to see him. I thought you were going to faint.’
‘I haven’t seen him for a long time, that’s all. Or thought about him.’
She felt a pang of guilt at the lie. Christopher didn’t deserve to be lied to; he was a good man, a good husband. He was kind. A skilled, careful surgeon. He helped people; healed them. He had helped to heal her.
Except she had been lying to him for years, by omission at least. And she was not yet healed. The way she felt right now proved that: she was raw, unprotected flesh. The sight of Robbie had driven a barb into her and she had thought of nothing but him since she’d glimpsed him. Seeing his eyes, his dark green shirt, his unshaven chin. The way he stood in the airport – the way he stood anywhere – as if he owned it, comfortable in his own skin.
The utter shock of seeing him, as if ten years had never passed at all.
Earlier, with her family, she’d been preoccupied, hardly able to answer their questions about what her and Christopher’s life had been like in La Paz, only able to summon the faintest of interest at her mother’s gossip about what was going on in Blickley or Polly’s funny stories about the male-dominated advertising agency where she worked. She had been aware of her father watching her.
‘You look pale,’ he’d said to her, quietly, in the kitchen when they were clearing the plates after supper.
‘I’m tanned, Daddy, I can’t be pale.’
He laid his palm on her forehead. ‘You’re not ill, are you?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Or expecting? If you are, you should be seen by a doctor here straight away. You’ve been working amongst a lot of communicable—’
‘I’m not pregnant either,’ she said, swallowing ha
rd, not expecting how difficult it would be to say this. Her father had never asked her before.
‘You’re not my normal Emily.’
‘I’ve seen a lot of difficult things, Daddy,’ she’d said. ‘It’s going to take me a little while to get over them. Right now, I just want to go back there.’
Her father merely opened his arms and she went into them, resting her head on his chest, smelling his familiar odour of pipe tobacco, the comfort from her childhood.
But she had been lying to her father, too.
Now, she put her brush down.
‘It was nothing,’ she said to Christopher’s reflection in the mirror. ‘A chance encounter with someone I didn’t expect to see, and didn’t want to see. It rattled me, that’s all. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’
Christopher didn’t say anything. She got up, hung her dressing gown on the back of the chair, and got into bed beside him, sitting up against the pillows.
‘Daddy asked whether I was pregnant.’
He looked at her with quick understanding. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said no. Mum’s been asking for ages, but this is the first time he has.’
He nodded.
‘I’ll tell them eventually,’ she said. ‘Maybe this holiday would be a good time.’
‘It will be fine.’
‘Daddy will understand. I’m not sure how my mother will react to Polly being her only chance of grandchildren, especially as it doesn’t look as if she’s going to get to it any time soon.’
Christopher took off his glasses and put them on the bedside table. ‘We have other options. We could adopt.’
‘We have other things to think about first: our careers, where we want to settle – whether we’re going back to La Paz.’
Whether it was fair to bring a child into a marriage that could be disturbed by a single glance of a stranger in an airport arrivals hall.
He settled on his side of the bed and turned off his light. ‘You’re still thinking about Consuela, aren’t you?’
She turned out her own light and lay on her side, facing away from him, her eyes open in the darkness.
‘Yes,’ she said.
She hadn’t been thinking about Consuela at all. Not since seeing Robbie.
Robbie awoke to darkness and the thip-thip-thip of the bedroom fan. One of the blades had come loose and it put the whole thing out of synch. He’d meant to fix it yesterday before Marie came back.
Marie slept beside him. She was the soundest sleeper Robbie had ever known. One time, the smoke alarm had gone off at midnight, Robbie staggering out of bed, half hung-over, searching for flames, checking on William, stumbling over a toy truck left on the floor and bashing his hip on William’s chest of drawers, waking up his son, who cried. It had been caused by the battery in the alarm running out. Marie slept through it all.
He got up, pulled on his jeans, and went into William’s room. The little boy was fast asleep with his thumb in his mouth. Robbie gently pulled his thumb out and William’s mouth made soft sucking noises at the air, like a hungry baby’s. He smoothed his son’s dark hair back from his forehead and went to the kitchen.
The whole house was hot. The fans only stirred the hot air around. He opened the refrigerator and stuck his head into it for a few cool seconds. Then he took a beer, opened the back door and stood in the doorway drinking, looking at the low shadow of the house behind theirs, listening to distant thunder and the cicadas declaring love for each other in the trees.
If someone were to walk into his back yard right now and ask him why he was there at one in the morning, in this small rented pink stucco house in Coconut Grove, Florida, barefoot in his jeans and no shirt, drinking a Michelob, he wouldn’t know how to answer. He could tell them the facts but there would be no thread to it, no way for it to make sense. He wouldn’t be able to explain the past few years, the son sleeping inside whom he loved and the wife sleeping inside whom he didn’t.
The only way he could think to describe it was as the path of least resistance. The destiny that seemed to require the least effort. Something he could slide into without thinking, cushioned by a few beers or some bourbon, maybe both . . . usually both. Something that didn’t require him to think too deeply about who he was or what he had done.
He had sleepwalked here. He had been asleep for years, as deeply as Marie was now.
He hadn’t remembered what it was like to be awake until he saw Emily yesterday.
He finished his beer and went to the refrigerator for another, but they were all gone. He’d bought a twelve pack yesterday, or was it the day before? It must have been the day before.
It had been yesterday. He thought of his father suddenly and scowled.
The thirst itched in his throat and he knew what it was. He knew why it was there. It was the destiny that required the least effort.
He knew that the smart thing to do would be to go back to bed and sleep next to Marie and get up sober in the morning and go to work at the marina at Dinner Key. To make the best of what he’d been given, to take his joy in William and his work, to try to be happy. To stop using the booze to anaesthetise himself. He’d seen what it did to his father, and what it did to his mother. Marie deserved better than that, and so did William.
But he’d seen Emily today. Emily Greaves. And she’d walked past him without speaking, without meeting his eye again, as if she wished that he didn’t exist.
He wanted another drink.
Coconut Grove at night was music and lights, small bars spilling out on to the sidewalks, guitars and pot smoke and rum.
In JB’s, he ordered a beer and a chaser, lit a cigarette, and gazed around the crowded room to see if there was anyone he recognised. He saw a couple of familiar faces, but none of his usual drinking buddies. A few tourists had made their way here, judging from the clothes and the sunburns. In the corner, two Cuban guitarists improvised a fast, complicated melody.
He’d just have one. Maybe two. And then go home. Marie would be none the wiser.
Except she would be. And William didn’t know yet about his father’s drinking, but he would soon. He had to know it, deep inside, in that childish part that picked up on adult complications. William had to know that his mother and father argued, that sometimes his father spoke too loud, laughed too long, had trouble keeping his balance. How old had Robbie been when he’d realised that about his own father? Seven? Eight?
He raised his glass to his lips.
A voice caught his attention over the talk and music, made him swivel his head quickly in its direction. The accent, the tones . . .
‘Emily?’ he said, half off the stool to go to her, his eyes scanning the crowd for the source.
‘But where can we see a crocodile?’ demanded the voice, English and clear, and Robbie saw it came from a young woman in a red and orange sundress. She stood with a group of other young people with several empty pitchers of beer on the high table in front of them. She had dark curly hair and hoop earrings, red lipstick, nose and cheeks stained pink from the sun. As he watched, she tossed her head and grinned in a way that he knew. ‘Or OK, are they alligators? What’s the difference, anyway?’
It was a bad idea. He picked up his bourbon and walked over to her table anyway. ‘Paulina?’ he said.
She was still half-laughing from her conversation, and he saw her take him in. She was drunk enough and he was sober enough so that he could almost read her thoughts: He’s a bit old, but cute . . . why not?
‘Oh, hi,’ she said, moderating her smile to a flirtatious one. ‘Have we met?’
‘Are you Emily’s sister? Emily Greaves?’
‘Yes! Yes, we’re on holiday together in Miami Beach. Do you know my sister? And why did you call me Paulina?’
‘Polly. I’m sorry. You asked me to call you Paulina once.’
‘We’ve met?’ She scru
nched up her nose and eyes in an exaggeration of remembering.
‘A couple of times, though you were much younger. I’m Robert Brandon.’
She frowned, and then she remembered and her eyes got wide and angry. ‘Wait. You’re Robert? You’re that Robert? I thought you looked familiar.’
‘It’s nice to see you again.’
‘It’s not nice to see you. You broke my sister’s heart! You’re a wanker.’ She turned to her friends. ‘This is the bloke who broke my sister’s heart. He got engaged to her and then he left her. Like that.’ She wheeled on him again, to the tune of general disapproving muttering from her friends. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live here, in Coconut Grove. Listen, Polly, I saw Emily in the airport today – yesterday. I only recognised you because I knew she was in Miami. Can I . . . let me buy you a drink and talk to you for a few minutes.’
‘No! You’re a creep.’
‘It was a long time ago. Please, I just want to know how she’s doing. As an old friend.’
She was clearly not happy about it, but she nodded. He bought them each another beer and they went to a corner booth together, still in sight of her friends.
He could see the resemblance to her sister. When she’d been twelve, it hadn’t been so apparent: he remembered her as skinny and a bit wild, all mouth and wide eyes. But she had the same nose and almost the same lips as Emily, and the same shape face. He caught himself staring, trying to trace Emily in her, and looked down at his beer instead.
‘How is she?’ he asked her.
‘She’s fine.’
‘What is she . . . what is she doing? Is she a doctor?’
‘She’s an obstetrician. She’s amazing. She’s been working in South America with poor people, helping them. With her husband, Christopher.’
He’d known she was married. He’d known that man was her husband as soon as he’d seen him. The confirmation was still a stab in the gut.
‘I liked you,’ she said, suddenly and vehemently. ‘I thought you were a really nice bloke. God, I remember telling Em that she should marry you.’
