One True Theory of Love

by Laura Fitzgerald

  “She didn’t do it to hurt you,” Henry said. “She did it not to hurt you.”

  Yeah, Meg thought. Take that.

  “But I am hurt,” Ahmed said.

  Get over it, Meg thought irritably.

  “She’s sorry,” Henry said. “She’s really, really sorry. She wants to marry you and for us to live here and for you to be my dad. That’s what she wants, and I do, too. I want you to be my dad. Like we talked about.”

  Ahmed glanced at Meg, then back to Henry.

  “It’s really hard to get marriages right,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Most people don’t, and it’s an awful feeling when a marriage fails, and that feeling doesn’t go away for a really long time. So you’ve got to be a hundred percent sure before you marry someone. You’ve got to have one hundred percent trust, and your mom and I don’t have that anymore.”

  “She didn’t lie,” Henry said. “What she did was not an actual, true lie. She just kept a secret.”

  “There’s this thing called a lie by omission that applies here,” Ahmed said.

  “Please,” Henry pleaded. “I’ll do anything.”

  Meg couldn’t stand by anymore. Henry’s desperation reminded her too much of herself back when Jonathan had left. She’d had no pride, no depth to which she wouldn’t sink to make him stay.

  “Enough, Henry,” she said from the doorway, stepping inside. “You can’t bully someone into loving you.”

  “I love him,” Ahmed snapped at her. “Don’t you dare suggest otherwise.”

  “You be quiet,” Meg said. “I’ve had quite enough of your pity party.”

  “Mom!” Henry ran to her and threw his arms around her waist and squeezed her. He was her desperate little cobra, sobbing profusely. Meg kissed his forehead and tried to comfort him and whispered what felt like lies about how everything would be okay.

  Ahmed joined them near the door. “Don’t ever suggest that I don’t love him.” His voice had lost its snappishness, but Meg’s anger toward him had not abated.

  “One fight,” she said, disgusted. “One stupid fight and you walk? Is that the best you can do?”

  “I didn’t walk because of the fight and you know it,” he said.

  “You’re so afraid of being left that you leave first—is that it?” Meg asked. “Man. Here I thought you were my lion, but you’re just a scaredy-cat. You’ve got that whole fear-of-abandonment thing going on.”

  “No, Meg, you’ve got that whole fear-of-abandonment thing going on,” Ahmed said. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t project your own screwed-up issues onto me. I’ve always survived being left. Sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen, even though it might not be obvious at the time.”

  Such the rationalizer. Such the quitter.

  “But that’s not the case here,” Meg said. “It would be a mistake for you to let this end. You love me, Ahmed! I dare you to say you don’t, and if you do say it, you’re the real liar around here.”

  “Sometimes love’s not enough,” he said. “Didn’t you just say that the other day?”

  “I was wrong!” Meg tried to rein in her emotions. “You were the smart one,” she continued calmly. “You said that yes, love is enough if you decide it is. Remember?”

  “I remember.” His eyes glistened.

  “Maybe my decision to see Jonathan without telling you was a bad one,” she said. “Maybe not. I still don’t really know. But right, wrong or indifferent, it was my decision to make and I stand by it because I made it out of love. That’s the important point: I made it out of love. Do you believe that?”

  Ahmed looked positively miserable. He went back to the living room proper and took a seat in his armchair. “I think you made it out of fear.”

  “There was some fear involved,” Meg admitted. “But it came from a place of love, too.”

  She went to him, knelt before him and put her hand on his knee.

  “Listen,” she said. “It can be very hard to stop being mad at a person after you’ve been mad at them for a long time. I know this. I was mad at Jonathan for ten years. Anger is what killed my parents’ relationship. Let’s not make the same mistake. I know you’re deeply, deeply disappointed in me, but we have something really special here, Ahmed. We have something precious.”

  Ahmed’s eyes were muddy, troubled waters, and Meg wished she could pull him to her and comfort him, but she sensed he wouldn’t let her—yet.

  “I’ll leave you now,” she said gently. “I’ll leave you to think. But you’ve got to know that our relationship was never in danger by my seeing him. Jonathan can’t ruin what you and I have. Only you and I can do that, and I, for my part, am not going to. You’re the best thing that’s come my way in a very long time, and I treasure you, and I will always treasure you.”

  Ahmed, fighting tears, gave Meg the saddest smile she’d ever seen, and she wanted to say the words a million times.

  “I treasure you, Ahmed,” she repeated. “I treasure everything about you. I just hope that even in your anger you can see that you treasure me and Henry, too. Because we’re keepers.”

  Wow,” Henry said as they drove away. “You were awesome back there. You were even better than me.”

  Meg scoffed. “I was way better than you.”

  “Not way better,” Henry said. “Just a little bit.”

  Meg looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know if giving him more time is going to work, Henry. He might not change his mind—but it’s worth a shot, right?”

  “Um, yeah!”

  “Okay,” she said. “So I need to talk to Grandpa now.”

  “Is he mad at you, too?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m mad at him.”

  “Because of Sandi?” he asked.

  I don’t friggin’ believe this, Meg thought. My nine-year-old son figures these things out before I do. She looked at Henry in the rearview mirror. “What do you know about him and Sandi?”

  “They like each other,” Henry said. “It’s totally obvious.”

  “It wasn’t obvious to me,” she said.

  “A lot of things aren’t,” he said. “Grandma says it’s because you insist on seeing the best in people.”

  Well.

  “I don’t think that’s such a bad way to be,” she said.

  “Me neither. I think we’re happier this way.” Henry sang one of his favorite kindergarten songs, with embellishments he’d learned at camp. “ ‘Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, stay on the sunny side of life—yee haw! You’ll feel no pain as we’re driving you insane. Stay on the sunny side of life. Tell a joke!’

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. “Why did Tigger stick his head in the toilet?”

  Meg grinned. “I have no idea.”

  “He was looking for Pooh.”

  She groaned. “That’s disgusting!”

  “It’s supposed to be!” Henry said. “That’s the whole point!”

  When they arrived at Phillip’s office, Sandi was behind her desk, reading a Harlequin romance. She needs a new hairstyle, Meg thought uncharitably. That one’s forty years past its prime.

  “Hi, Sandi,” she said.

  “Hi, you two! Your father’s not expecting you, is he?” Meg could tell Sandi was trying to assess her mood without letting on.

  “Is he here?”

  “He is.” Sandi scanned her phone’s display. Meg was sure she was looking for a way to warn her father.

  “I’ll just surprise him,” Meg said. “We seem to be all about surprises lately.”

  “Go get him, Mom,” Henry said. As Meg headed to her father’s door, she heard Henry say to Sandi, “You should have seen her with Ahmed. She was awesome.”

  When Meg entered her father’s office, he startled back in his chair. “Meg! I was just about to leave here and come see you.”

  Her anger spiked upon seeing him. “About what, Dad? The price of tea in China?”

  Phillip gestured. “Have a seat.”

 
; When she remained standing, he came around his desk and led her to the couch. He gave her a long, intense look. “I have a confession,” he said. “I lied when you asked if I was seeing Sandi. I am, in fact, seeing her, and I’ve been seeing her for a long time.”

  “I know you’re seeing her. Ahmed told me,” Meg said icily. “Plus, I was sitting ten feet behind you at the stadium the other day when you were on the phone assuring me that you weren’t seeing her. It made me sick, Dad, that you’d lie to me like that.”

  Phillip sat back, stunned. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about you’re sorry?”

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  Meg crossed her arms. “I’m disappointed in your lack of respect for Mom. I know you two aren’t right for each other and I believe one hundred percent that you’ll both be happier apart. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about things, and what you did was selfish, and what’s more, you took the coward’s way out by beginning an affair while you were still with Mom. I don’t like that my father’s a coward.”

  Phillip looked devastated. “Do you remember that time I took you fishing at Silverbell Lake when you were about seven?”

  “Vaguely,” Meg said.

  “You cried when you found out we had to put hooks through the worms.” He smiled at the memory. “And then you cried when you saw the hook in the fish’s mouth. You always were a very sensitive soul.”

  Meg shrugged. “The idea of sport fishing still bothers me.”

  “I never fished after that day,” he said.

  “Really?” Meg thought back. “I guess I never knew that.”

  He squinted at her through his glasses. “You make me want to be a better person, Meg. You always have. I’m sorry I let you down.”

  Meg’s heart softened as Ahmed’s words came back to her: I’d take a flawed father who loves me over a nonexistent father any day of the week . . . Wouldn’t you?

  He’d known, when he’d said it.

  He’d already known this moment would come.

  Yes, she’d said. As long as there’s love amidst the flaws.

  The peach-lady’s voice from Whole Foods came back to her, too: Is your father still alive? Then treasure him.

  Meg looked at her flawed father—at the balding, aging man before her in the out-of-date glasses—and she knew without question that he loved her, and that therefore, they could work through anything.

  “Let’s make a deal,” she said. “Let’s hold each other to a very high standard going forward.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s not lack courage, you and me.”

  Meg did something she’d never done before: she took two personal days off from work. She dropped Henry off in the morning and picked him up afterward, and in between, she withdrew into herself.

  The first day, she had coffee alone at LuLu’s and did some journaling. Afterward, she went for a seven-mile hike in Sabino Canyon, and when she was about three miles into it, surrounded by a forest of saguaros, she began to tremble uncontrollably. She’d put up a good front for Henry and Ahmed, but it was strategic bravado. Here in nature, the truth burst through: she was terrified of losing Ahmed.

  Their love had felt fated. She’d asked Ahmed once—pestered him, actually—why he’d gone to LuLu’s that first day. Why that coffee shop on that day at that time? It’s not for us to question, he’d said. Only to appreciate.

  But really. How did a person come into your life seemingly out of nowhere and turn out to be exactly what your soul needed?

  And how could he later be inclined to leave?

  And how—how—could you make him stay?

  Meg trembled three miles into her hike because after poking at the questions from every which way, she realized she already knew the answer to the last one.

  You couldn’t. There was nothing you could do to make a person stay if he was inclined to leave.

  She walked to the top of the canyon road, found a boulder to sit on, took a few deep breaths and called Ahmed. He, good heart that he was, picked right up. “How are you today, Meg?”

  Meg took his friendly tone as a good sign. “I’m doing well,” she said. “I’m playing hooky from school and wanted to know if you’re free for a lunch date.”

  “Ah, I’m not,” he said. “I’ve got a committee meeting over the lunch hour.”

  “How about coffee afterward?” she asked. “Or you could come over to my place for tea, wink, wink. Henry’s not home.”

  “I’m booked, Meg,” he said. “All afternoon. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not going to quit asking,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  Hope fluttered in Meg’s heart. “Just how mad are you?”

  “Not very.” Ahmed’s voice was generous. “I appreciate your persistence quite a bit, actually.”

  “It’s that hokey-pokey thing,” she said. “You just gotta keep putting your whole self in.”

  Meg took in the beautiful fractured canyon, so green, so brown, with the sky so blue in the background. She wondered how a person would have felt to be sitting on this same boulder back when the earthquake struck Mexico those centuries ago and rippled upward, tearing open the earth to create these canyon crevices. Scared, she’d bet. But still. It would have been unforgettable, had you survived it. It would have been a story for the ages.

  Go there, she thought.

  “I heard you bought me a ring,” she said.

  He sighed. “I did, indeed, buy you a ring. I can’t believe Henry told you. He promised he wouldn’t.”

  “For future reference, you can’t count on Henry to keep a secret,” Meg said, “no matter how much he swears he’ll keep it.”

  “Well, so much for the surprise,” Ahmed said cheerfully.

  Go there, go there, go there.

  “I think maybe we should take the ring off the table for the time being,” Meg said.

  “I think maybe we shouldn’t,” Ahmed said.

  Meg swallowed hard. He wasn’t making this easy on her. “I think we should focus on right now instead of on forever.”

  “But I’m a forever kind of guy,” he said. “And I want to have babies with you.”

  Meg smiled at that. “I’m changing by the minute,” she warned. “I’m not the same person I was yesterday, and who I am today won’t be who I am tomorrow.”

  “We’ll change together,” he said. “Love is what you become together, right?”

  Birds chirped. The sun shone. The cactus in front of Meg was hundreds of years old and would live for hundreds more.

  Somewhere in the world, church bells were ringing and the water was pure and men were shaking hands and meaning it.

  In other words, there was hope.

  I keep having nightmares about Henry being swallowed by the ocean. We go every summer, the two of us, to a stretch of beach in front of the Hotel del Coronado, a resort that until recently we couldn’t afford. We buy five-dollar ice-cream cones at the resort’s Moo Time ice-cream joint and feel rich indeed as we make our way to the sand.

  Henry with his saltwater hair leaps, runs and spins his way up and down the shoreline like an excited puppy. The ocean infiltrates his soul. Possesses him. Me, it scares, because while it allows you to play, to swim, to use it for pleasure, it’s unsentimental. No matter how much you love it, it doesn’t love you back.

  Gently rough, roughly gentle, its foamy waves tease and chase your ankles, but when you go deeper, they whip you. Even close to shore, where it should be safe, the ocean floor pulls out from under you, slides you along, moves you away from where you began. You can’t stay in one place no matter how hard you try.

  In my nightmare, I am there, in water up to my knees, inhaling the thick fish-salt air and stretching my arms wide, letting the day embrace me, thinking all’s well. And all is well. Around me, birds squall and children shriek and Henry is right there, shimmering in the sun, loving his life as the waves crack against his back. For Henry, getting knocked ove
r is the fun part. Time and again, he comes up laughing. There’s no place he loves more than the ocean.

  I can see him. He’s right there.

  And then in my nightmare, he’s gone.

  And the unflinching ocean doesn’t miss a beat. It just goes on and on relentlessly.

  It was time to deposit the check.

  That was Meg’s only real goal for her second personal day off from school. She’d put off depositing it for a variety of reasons, mostly psychological, and while she felt she’d addressed those as well as she ever would, one remained: she couldn’t get over the strangeness of actually having money. She couldn’t imagine handing the check to a bank teller who probably made twelve dollars an hour and say, I’d like to deposit this check, please. Would they even take her money, or would they think she was a forger, a fake? What did a person do after they’d deposited a check for a hundred thousand dollars? You had to buy something, didn’t you—something more than a four-dollar Frappuccino or a fifty-dollar pair of flip-flops? The problem, which wasn’t really a problem, was that her needs were few, her pleasures simple.

  As she was dusting the photo of her and Henry at the ocean, Meg hit upon one way she could spend some of the money. She’d have to check with her father, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t owe taxes on child support, so if she deposited the entire check and let the interest accrue, she could fund a week at the Hotel del Coronado every summer on the interest alone. Ha! They could even order room service. And if Henry was willing and things worked out, maybe they’d invite Ahmed to join them, maybe for a few days and maybe for forever.

  That decided, a newly energetic Meg turned up the radio, 92.9 The Mountain, Jennie and Blake in the Morning, finished her cleaning, and jumped in the shower, eager now to get to the bank. When she stepped out, her cell phone was ringing. Worried it might be the school calling about Henry, she ran, wrapped in her towel and still dripping, to the kitchen counter, where she’d left her phone.

  Jonathan’s number stared up at her.

  “Hello?” She clutched the towel around her tightly, as if he could see her.