One True Theory of Love

by Laura Fitzgerald

  When they arrived at Amy’s the next day for brunch, Clarabelle was already there, accompanied by Andy. Both chatted with David as he grilled chicken and corn. As Henry ran off to find his cousins, Meg waved a greeting and then tracked down Amy, who was in the kitchen and smiling for a change.

  “Come on,” Meg complained to Amy, gesturing to Andy and Clarabelle out the window. “Bringing her boy toy to brunch?”

  Amy laughed. “I think they’re cute. And they’re not being lovey-dovey or gross about anything.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that she’s seeing someone your age?” Meg asked.

  Amy shrugged. “Live and let live. They’re two consenting adults.” She finished sprinkling pine nuts on the salad and took the bowl to the table. “I think the only thing we need to be careful of is that no one takes advantage of her. Takes her money or anything. Not him, necessarily, but I’m sure there’ll be others.”

  “This is surreal, thinking about our parents dating,” Meg said, shaking her head. She paused and then added casually, “How upset would you be if Dad dated someone?”

  “When will you stop blinding yourself to the obvious?” Amy gave her an exasperated look. “He is dating someone. He’s dating Sandi.”

  Meg gasped. “How’d you find out?”

  “Mom’s known for years,” Amy said. “And she hasn’t exactly been quiet about it.”

  “She’s suspected,” Meg said, “but that didn’t mean it was true. Although it is, by the way. And why am I always the last to know these things?”

  “Because you’re Meg,” Amy said. “You see what you want to see. You want everyone happy and Leave It to Beaver all the time. Come here. I’ve got something to show you.”

  She led Meg to the laundry room, flung open the door, and swept her arm out. “Voilà! My new poetry room. What do you think?”

  Meg looked around the room in wonder. What had been a boring, functional room now had soft yellow walls with Magic-Markered poetry scribbled all over them.

  “I love it!” Meg said. “Good for you.”

  “David painted it for me,” Amy said. “And he’s also going to come home early from work one day a week so I can take a poetry class at the Poetry Center on campus.”

  “That’s awesome,” Meg said.

  “He’s cooler than I’ve been giving him credit for,” Amy said.

  Meg felt sudden nostalgia for their nonspa, dessert-at-AJ’s outing as she looked at the laundry room walls. “Was it really just two days ago that we had this discussion? Life was so much easier back then.”

  “You’ve been having a rough weekend?” Amy asked.

  Meg leaned against the washer, crossed her arms and updated Amy about everything: how she’d seen their father with Sandi. How he’d lied. Finally, how she’d gone back home and Ahmed had found the card and check—now that Ahmed knew about them, there was no point keeping them a secret from Amy anymore.

  Amy hugged her. “He’ll come to his senses. He’d be a fool to let you go.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” Meg said. “But every minute I don’t hear from him, it’s harder to believe.” She approached a wall and examined the writing on it. “Can I read one?”

  “Read this one,” Amy said. “I’m calling it ‘Sailboat.’ It starts here. I haven’t written the ‘Appropriate Naughtiness’ one yet.” Each line of “Sailboat” was written in a different color, not in straight poem form, but rather like graffiti on a bathroom stall door. Meg read it out loud.

  From a distance the sailboat is enviable.

  Not lonely.

  From a distance you can’t tell it’s bloated, taking on water,

  slowly drowning from the weight of itself.

  You can’t tell it’s already failed, its conclusion inevitable but

  unknown to all but the captain

  Who curses himself

  For not knowing how

  To ask

  For help.

  Meg turned to her sister. “Are you really this sad?”

  “I’m not sad at all,” Amy said. “I’m just honoring my dark side. You should try it sometime.”

  I had a dream last night that the sun didn’t come up,” Henry said the next morning at breakfast. He was slouched over his cereal bowl and they were officially into day three without having heard from Ahmed. Meg, too, had been having ugly dreams. She’d had the same nightmare two nights in a row and no matter how many times she forced herself awake, she kept going back to it.

  “I don’t think you have to worry,” Meg said. “The sun’s too stubborn to stop rising.”

  “The sun doesn’t rise,” Henry said. “We rotate. Can’t you get anything right?”

  “Hey,” Meg said. “Unnecessary roughness.”

  “I want to drive by Ahmed’s on the way to school,” Henry said. “There’s something I need to tell him.”

  “We’re giving him time, remember?” She said it wearily, as she’d said it numerous times already. They’d left messages, both of them, and she’d finally turned off her phone’s ringer the previous afternoon because its lack of ringing was starting to seriously piss her off. “You can tell him at soccer practice tomorrow.”

  “He might not go to soccer practice tomorrow.” Henry glared at her like it would be her fault if Ahmed didn’t show up.

  Meg pretty much just went through the motions at school that day. She picked Green Eggs and Ham for the story of the week and had her students work on painting place mats during Messy Monday art period.

  At lunchtime, Lucas fell off the monkey bars and broke his left arm. He’d been hanging upside down, knees tucked under the bar, twisting and talking to Marita, who was watching him from below, when he slipped. Meg saw it happen and couldn’t get to him fast enough to ease his fall. His parents picked him up to take to the hospital for an X-ray and then to set his arm. The incident left Meg shaken. He might have broken his neck if he’d fallen the wrong way. Had he subconsciously known there was a right way to fall or did he just get lucky? Because it was Lucas, the boy who danced to Mozart, she suspected it was the former. Lucas was a boy who made his own luck.

  At the end of the day, Marita lingered at the doorway after the other students left. “Miss Meg?” she asked. “Will Lucas be okay?”

  Meg trailed her fingers down Marita’s long black hair. She exempted herself from the not-touching rules where Marita was concerned. The girl had lost her mother and needed comforting, so damn the rules. “He’s going to be just fine,” she said. “He’ll be back at school in a few days and we’ll all get to write on his cast.”

  “Will you see him before he comes back?” Marita asked.

  “I think so,” Meg said. “I’ll probably stop by his house for a visit tomorrow.”

  Marita took Meg’s hand and pressed something cool and smooth and round into it. It was her don’t-run stone. “Will you give this to him?”

  Meg’s eyes brimmed. “You’re sure? Don’t you need it yourself?”

  Marita shook her head no.

  “I’m okay now,” she said. “Lucas needs it more.”

  When Henry asked if he could go to Violet’s after school that day, Meg was glad to let him go. She straightened up the apartment and then rewarded herself with a bubble bath, complete with lit candles, a Norah Jones CD and an extra helping of raspberry bubbles. The only thing missing was a chilled glass of white wine, which she would have had if it had only been after five o’clock. Instead, she sipped cold water from a wineglass and tried with great determination not to think about Ahmed, realizing only after she was in the tub that Norah Jones was probably a pretty bad choice of music. She needed something more like Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.”

  Really, how dared he not call them back?

  She stayed in the tub until she was good and pruned, and then slipped into the fancy yoga outfit her mom had given her for her birthday the previous year, thinking as she put it on, as she did every time she put it on, that she should give yoga an
other chance. She’d taken a yoga-for-pregnant-moms class while pregnant with Henry, but she’d dropped out after crying her way through the first two classes because the instructor wouldn’t shut up about the importance of a peaceful womb when she was in midst of her post-Jonathan breakdown.

  Just as Meg slipped her hair into a ponytail, she heard a tap at the door and opened it to find Violet outside. “Can Henry come out?”

  “He’s already out.” Meg’s confusion staved off panic. “He’s playing with you.”

  “No, he’s not,” Violet said. “I just got home. I was at musical theater.”

  Meg’s heart rat-a-tat-tatted and her mind raced. How long had he been gone . . . had he come back in while she was in the tub . . . where else could he be . . . ?

  “Hold on,” Meg said. “Let me check his room.” She turned. “Henry? Henry!” She was at his door within seconds. Not there. Damn it. Meg grabbed her cell phone on the way out the door. “I’m sure he’s with Harley, helping him do something or other. Have you seen Harley since you’ve been home? Come on, hurry. Help me look for him.”

  Meg scanned the pool area and laundry room and clubhouse, but Henry wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the office, either. No one was. Harley had left a note taped to the door, Gone Fishing, which was code for off-site. Nor was Henry on anyone’s patio or balcony. And he wasn’t allowed in anyone’s apartment without her explicit permission, and all the residents knew it.

  “Where would he be?” Meg asked Violet. “Do you guys have any hiding places or anything?”

  “Not really,” Violet said reluctantly.

  “What do you mean, not really? You either do or you don’t. Come on, Violet. This is important.”

  “Well, we sort of have one place.”

  “Have you checked there yet?” Violent shook her head. “Okay, take me there. Fast!”

  Meg scrambled along with Violet to an unsightly stand of evergreen bushes behind the manager’s office and followed her into them. Meg looked around in wonder. It wasn’t a sort-of hangout, as Violet had implied. It was a well-stocked fort. An old tablecloth of Meg’s was spread on the ground. There were a cooler and flashlights and a suitcase, which Meg flipped open. Inside, she recognized, among other things, the black journal she’d given Henry for his last birthday. When she lifted it out, a picture of Jonathan fell from it into the dirt.

  Meg picked it up, amazed. It was from when he was in college and had flown back from New York to take Amy to her junior prom. He’d been a good guy. Meg had taken the picture and then stayed home and watched a movie with her dad while Jonathan and Amy had gone to the prom and the postprom parties. “Where’d Henry get this? His aunt’s house?”

  “I think so,” Violet said.

  “You don’t know where he is, do you?” Meg asked Violet in a stern voice. “This is very serious.”

  Violet shook her head and looked as worried as Meg felt.

  “I’ve got to call the police.” When Meg flipped her phone open to call, she saw she had a voice mail from Ahmed—Ahmed! He’d help, no matter how mad he was at her. She speed-dialed his number.

  “Henry’s missing,” she said as soon as he answered. “I think he might have run away.” The alternative—that he’d been taken—was too horrible to say out loud. “I know you’re mad at me,” she said, “but I need you to help me find him.”

  “He’s right here, Meg.” Ahmed’s voice was cool. “I left a message telling you that about two minutes ago. I found him waiting on my front steps when I got home from work.”

  “Oh, thank God. I’m going to kill him.” Meg sank to the ground in relief. What sort of mother took a bubble bath while her son went missing? “Was he running away?”

  “He says he wants to talk to me, man-to-man,” Ahmed said.

  “If you had called him back, he wouldn’t have ventured out by himself to find you,” Meg said accusatorily. “He could have gotten hit by a car. Or stolen! Horrible things could have happened. Child molesters roam these streets—you know that! There’s danger everywhere! When he calls you, you need to call him back. You’re mad at me, not him. You still need to look out for him, no matter how you feel about me.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll do better in the future.”

  “Why didn’t you call him back?”

  “I figured you’d answer.”

  His reply was annoyingly matter-of-fact.

  “Nice,” Meg said. “Real nice. I never would have thought you had a mean streak.”

  “And I never would have thought you’d lie,” he countered. “Do you want me to drop him off after we talk?”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Meg said. “I’m coming over.”

  She hung up the phone. “He’s okay,” she told Violet.

  Violet obviously knew it, since she’d been privy to Meg’s side of the conversation, but Meg wanted to say it out loud, to scream it from the mountaintops—Henry’s fine, just fine!

  Now that the danger had passed, Meg lingered, curious to check out the fort more thoroughly. They had a wind-up emergency radio, a book on insects, and a magnifying glass. Inside the cooler were juice boxes, candy bars and a bag of pretzels. “How long have you had this place?”

  “I don’t know.” Violet shrugged. “A long time.”

  “I’m taking a candy bar.” Meg took out a Twix, Henry’s favorite, feeling entitled after what he’d just put her through. “Who bought this food for you guys?”

  “Harley.”

  “Harley knows about your fort?”

  Violet nodded. “That’s why he doesn’t have anyone trim the bushes.”

  “Another secret,” Meg said. “The number of secrets being kept around this place is really remarkable.”

  She slipped the picture of Jonathan and Amy back into Henry’s journal, and put the journal back in the suitcase, resisting the temptation to read it. Had Violet not been there, she might have. It was obvious Henry had more on his mind regarding Jonathan than he’d ever let on to her.

  “Does Henry talk about his dad a lot?” she asked Violet.

  “You mean his real dad or Ahmed?”

  Meg gritted her teeth. “His real dad.”

  “Sometimes,” Violet said. “But he talks about Ahmed a whole lot more.”

  On the four-minute drive to Ahmed’s house, Meg ate the O Twix candy bar and sent up a prayer of thanks that Henry was okay. She also asked for guidance on how to reach Ahmed’s heart in a way that would open it to her again, but unfortunately no insights had arrived by the time she pulled up to his property.

  She sprang up the walkway, eager to set her eyes on Henry and see for herself that he was safe, but when she landed at the front door, which was open, she stopped herself because she saw Henry and Ahmed deep in conversation and was taken back again to that very first day they’d met, and to so many days since then, remembering their heads tilted toward each other, the man and her man-to-be, keeping good counsel. Today, they had mugs of tea set out before them on the coffee table with a little tray of sugar cubes between them.

  On the couch, Henry’s back was to her. Ahmed, in his work clothes but with his tie loosened, leaned forward in the armchair as he listened intently to Henry. Ahmed saw and didn’t acknowledge Meg, but neither did he alert Henry to her presence. His expression was one of affectionate absorption, and as he allowed Meg to eavesdrop, she understood why.

  “And so you should be mad at me, not her,” Henry said. “She was supermad—screaming mad—when she found out I called him. She almost drove off and left me at the park! I know I shouldn’t’ve done it, but it was the only way I could think of to get her to marry you.”

  Ahmed raised an eyebrow. “If and when people marry needs to be up to them only. You can’t meddle in your mom’s life like that. It’s not fair to her.”

  Thank you, Ahmed.

  “But she thought she was bad at being married, and she was wrong,” Henry said. “Now she knows she’s not. If I hadn’t’ve called him, she still w
ouldn’t know that.”

  Ahmed sipped his tea, slowing down the momentum of the conversation. Henry, too, sipped his tea after popping a sugar cube into his mouth to suck on while he drank it—the Persian way of taking tea.

  “What was it like, talking to your dad?” Ahmed asked.

  Henry shrugged. “It wasn’t like anything.” He reached to the plate of sugar cubes, took several and began tossing them in the air. Meg rolled her eyes. Ahmed watched him for a few moments and then asked him to stop.

  “This is important.” Ahmed spoke in a low, conversational tone. “He’s your father. Were you nervous? Angry? You know that my dad wasn’t around for me when I was growing up, either. I used to get real mad about that sometimes. Sad sometimes, too.”

  Henry shrugged again. “I wasn’t mad or sad.”

  But from behind, Meg saw Henry sniffle and wipe his nose.

  “I just felt bad, because he didn’t ask me anything about myself,” he said. “Not one single, stupid thing, like what my favorite food was or did I have a best friend. That sort of thing. I think, you know, he should have asked.”

  “He was probably very surprised to hear from you,” Ahmed said. “He was probably so surprised he could hardly think straight.”

  “Yeah,” Henry agreed. “My mom said he asked a ton of questions about me when she saw him.”

  “How did you feel about her seeing him like that?” Ahmed asked. “Did you know she was going to?”

  Nosy, Meg thought. None of your business.

  Henry shook his head. “I didn’t even know he was here until yesterday.”

  “How do you feel about your mom not telling you?” Ahmed eyed Meg in the doorway. She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “I didn’t care,” Henry said.

  “It didn’t bother you that she kept such a big secret from you?” Ahmed said. “Because it bothered me a lot that she kept it from me.”