If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (19 page)

Even before hating the answer he had to give, he hated the tone in which she asked. A reluctant, eggshell-walking tone. As though she knew she was in danger of learning something about him she wouldn’t like. Her voice, always low, both deep and quiet, seemed to emanate from somewhere close to the ground. Her hand tightened its grip on his—as though defiant against the impulse to unclasp it.

He told her the whole story. But what did it amount to? He had let his daughter go. Like a kite that requires too much attention, too much sensitivity to its ways. Too much care.

Rose listened, quietly, and her grip on him never loosened, but she didn’t pretend it was a matter of indifference to her. In the end, though, Jeremy didn’t write to his daughter because he was ashamed of himself or wanted Rose to think better of him but because something about loving Rose, about Rose loving him, made him believe that it might not be too late.

T
he reality of his reunion with Zoe isn’t a bit as he’s imagined it. For one thing, he wouldn’t have recognized her if he’d passed her on the street. Ever since the year in London—or
since London
, as he thinks of it—she stayed a collection of jagged surfaces, bones poking out at her collar, on her wrists, her knees, her ribs. Her shoulder blades, jutting straight out from her back, had seemed like vestigial wings, reminders of her flight. But now she’s grown plump, round and soft, as though nature reversed a sculptor’s work, encasing her true form in this obscuring one. Her hair is back to its honey tones. The heavy Goth makeup is gone. She looks like the woman he pictured her becoming when she was a child, not like the woman he believed she had become.

He’d also thought there might be a moment, a few words spoken by them both, something to mark this as a new beginning. But the tentative hug they exchange in the drive and his first impressions of her become tiny details in what is quickly a bustling, comic scene that includes their reunion and also an errant cow wandering over as though she too wants to catch up; a large dog jumping onto Jeremy, leaving prints and long muddy streaks on his pants; an ancient man on a small tractor waving, calling something unintelligible as he passes; the husband, Colin, appearing from a barn, smiling and ginger-headed, shaking Jeremy’s hand, taking his suitcase; a tabby cat circling them all; a sense of rush and hurry in the air, something about the vet having been there, about dinner being close to ready, all of it conspiring to carry them through those first few minutes and through the front door of the house with a lightness that doesn’t allow for anything as potentially heavy as an acknowledged fresh start.

“Y
ou must be very respectful with Jeremy,” Cathleen says as they sit at the round oak kitchen table—so large Jeremy has images of the house being built around it. “He’s become quite famous, you know.”

“Not really.” He hasn’t come to be admired. He has come to be forgiven. “Not outside the field.”

“Well, I’m certainly outside the field,” Colin says, with a smile. His face reminds Jeremy of a well-disposed marionette, the jutting chin, the cheekbones like hills, a seemingly simple good nature beaming through it all. “Most of the time, I’m outside
in
the field. But I’m very impressed, from what I’ve heard.” Jeremy tries not to think about what this young man has heard about him. More bad than good, no doubt. “It must be rewarding to do work that helps people.”

“Your work helps people,” Cathleen says. “You’re feeding the world.”

“Oh, yes. Indeed we are. One head of designer lettuce at a time. We’re not quite up to the cancer-research standard.”

“We’re not there yet.” Zoe is peeling a potato—with a knife—so rapidly Jeremy is fearful for her hands. “But we’ll get there. We do have bills to pay, and designer veggies are like gold.”

“I’m looking forward to hearing all about it,” Jeremy says. His gaze is fixed on the course of her blade, on the flying strips of skin. “I’m looking forward to seeing it all.”

“I’ll give you a tour,” Colin says. “The whole operation.”

“Not today, though.” Zoe’s potato falls into a ceramic bowl; another takes its place in her hands. “Dinner’s in just a little while. I hope everyone’s hungry.”

“I am,” Jeremy says right away, though he isn’t. Prodigal father and obliging guest—the roles overlap. “The whole house smells incredible,” he says. “How could anyone not be hungry sitting here?”

After a few more such innocuous exchanges—the weather, a pregnant cow—Colin excuses himself to make quick rounds in the barns, calling back
No rest for the wicked
with all the good humor of a man who knows himself to be anything but; and for a time, no one speaks. It’s as though a gust of tension passed him in the doorway. Zoe has grown more intent on her potatoes. Cathleen is staring off into space, the corners of her lips drawn down, as though she’s gone somewhere troubling, as though a bomb could explode without her noticing.

The last time the three of them were alone together in a kitchen, a kind of bomb had gone off. It was the final morning of that awful year. Sitting there now, Jeremy feels a churning of shame, like nausea, as he remembers the profound ambivalence of his goodbye to Zoe that day. How insincere he must have sounded. How insincere he was as he asked her one last time if she was sure she didn’t want to go back home with him. What relief he felt at her sullen certainty.

The only sound in the room is the rhythmic rasp of Zoe’s knife. This is one of those moments, Jeremy knows, at which he can pierce the social membrane and acknowledge what they’re all thinking about anyway. This is an opportunity to be direct.

“Are those your potatoes?” he asks instead. “From here, I mean.”

It’s too soon, he tells himself. He’s just arrived.

“They are.” She doesn’t look up. For all he’s seen of her face, she could be wearing a veil. This was a point of contention way back when. She seemed eternally to be avoiding meeting his eye. “I’m making potato salad for tomorrow,” she says. “We thought we’d try a cookout if the rain holds off. Grilled chicken.”

“It’s their own chickens, you know.” Cathleen is back in the conversation, woken from her trance.

“I’m very impressed.”

“You don’t know the half of it. She slaughters them herself. Killed two yesterday. Does it without batting an eye.”

“You make it sound like I do it for pleasure, Mum.” He has noticed her unmistakably British intonations, but the syllable startles him. Who is
Mum?
The characters have new names. “It’s just that Colin can’t bear to. He’s quite soft about such things.”

Apparently she isn’t soft about such things. Of course not.

“They have an abattoir and everything. She goes in there and does murder most… well, fowl. F-o-w-l fowl. It’s a little hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” he says—though in truth it isn’t. Not at all. In truth, this is the first information he’s received since arriving that makes sense to him, that connects this quiet, seemingly diffident woman to the razor-sharp girl he knew.
Why don’t you just go fuck yourself, Dad? Why do I even make these fucking trips?
“I imagine it’s all in a day’s work, at some point,” he says.

“It has to be done.” She brushes her hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. “So I do it. I don’t enjoy it.”

“I’ve always felt that way about the lab animals. People assume you have to be callous, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s not callousness. It’s a kind of acceptance. I’m truly sorry about what we put them through.”

“Like father, like daughter,” Cathleen says. “I think I’m in the Colin camp.”

“Someone has to do it,” Zoe says. “If people want to eat.” She drops another potato into the bowl. “Or cure diseases,” she adds.

He feels as though she’s handed him a bouquet. “I’m amazed by how you’ve taken to this life, Zee. I really am.”

She puts down her knife and stands, gathering the big crockery bowl of stripped potatoes in her arms. Her hands, flat against the pale brown glaze, are red and chapped, he sees. Her nails, clipped down to the nubs. “Dinner’s probably twenty minutes off,” she says. “If you want to wash up or anything.”

C
athleen has told Jeremy that there isn’t much hope for a cell signal, though occasionally one decided to roll through. “Like a beneficent mist,” she said. She told him there is Internet, wireless, inside the house; but his computer is still packed up and he can’t quite bring himself to ask if he can use theirs. Better to roam the fields in search of the beneficent mist.

The day has cooled, a chill leaching into the mild air. It reminds Jeremy of New England—and the farm smells, too, take him there. Weekend escapes up to Vermont in the early fall. Apple picking, leaf peeping. And then, later in the season, the ever-earnest selection ritual in a pumpkin patch. They had been big on that sort of thing, he and Cathleen, when Zoe was small. They didn’t want her to be one of those city girls who seemed to be made of plastic, to exist outside the natural world. It’s a little jolting to him now to see Zoe so connected to nature, over her head, as she is, in crops and livestock. It’s disorienting in a way. He’s unused to the possibility that any aspects of his parenting, even minor ones, may have stood her in good stead.

As Jeremy kicks his way over the tangle of grass and weeds and brambles that run along the drive, past a barn and then around another, he checks his phone, then checks it again and again, but to no avail. When he passes a square little structure, white plaster, flat roof, strikingly unadorned, he has no doubt it’s the abattoir. Its function is evident from the deliberate lack of evidence about what its function might be. He thinks he may see a glimmer of a bar on his phone right around there and begins taking one step at a time, forward, to the side, back again, as though chasing a shifting shadow; but it’s gone.

He so wanted to hear Rose’s voice. Now, he knows, it’s too close on dinner to fuss with the computer, so he begins a text.
Here with Z
, he writes. He decides against mentioning Cathleen. It’s too complex a circumstance for the form. He’ll tell Rose when they speak.
Who knows
, he writes.
All polite chat so far. All very civil. Not awful except no cell. I love you more and more
.

He knows it can’t go right away, but sends it even so, hoping that if the mist does roll in it will find the message waiting there and carry it to her. It’s an act of faith of a kind.

As Jeremy walks back toward the house, he remembers for the first time in years and years that when Zoe was missing, even though he didn’t believe in God, he would pray.

“S
he doesn’t slaughter the cows,” Colin says, as he passes around the plate of steak. “We send them off for that. Though I’ve seen her in moods when she might.”

“He’s joking.” Cathleen has a frown of mock disapproval on her face. She’s pulled her hair back for the meal and a line of silver shines at the roots. Jeremy wonders what similar details of decline she sees on him. “Not everyone here knows you’re joking, Colin.”

“Oh, I’m definitely joking. She’s a little lamb herself.”

“Well, it’s delicious, whatever the process,” Jeremy says. “Perfectly cooked, too.”

“I always eat my best meals here,” Cathleen says.

She might as well have planted a flag, he thinks as Colin launches into a long story about a supposedly famous chef of whom Jeremy has never heard—though he tries to look impressed—and how the man came to the farm armed with a list of bizarre requests. Colin turns out to be one of those people who take on the heavy lifting when the conversation sags.

“He didn’t quite ask that we hold séances over the cabbage, but it wasn’t far off. There was certainly some mention of only harvesting with a full moon.”

“What did you tell him?” Cathleen asks. “Did you tell him to piss off?”

“We lied,” Zoe says. “We lie to him every time he’s here.”

“Right through our teeth.” Colin taps his front tooth with his finger. “We describe the rituals to him in detail,” he says.

“Oh God! That must be hilarious. And they look so trustworthy, don’t they, Jeremy?”

“They do indeed,” he says, a little shocked, despite his own spotty record, about the apparent ease of it for them. “I would never have guessed.”

As the conversation moves on from there to other local matters, Jeremy has the growing sense of being an outsider, almost as though he is literally being pushed from the table. It’s unpleasant, but also inevitable—unless, of course, they’re going to discuss what lies behind his visit, which they clearly are not. Not at the first meal. There are so many people the three of them all know, Colin’s family, the neighbors, Cathleen’s London set. As the cast of characters swells, so too does the effort it takes to catch him up.
She’s Colin’s aunt on his mother’s side and the first time I met her, she was about to get married but then just a year later…
It’s Cathleen, mostly, who tries, and occasionally Colin, who seems particularly bothered when Jeremy can’t appreciate a good joke. Zoe, more animated than he’s seen her yet—as though his exclusion has energized her—makes no effort at all. She doesn’t even look his way, and as the minutes pass, he finds himself sinking into the conviction that at best what’s possible between them at this point is a kind of truce, superficial and civil. That they’ll stay in touch—though now that he’s met Colin, his guess is that it will be he who keeps up any regular contact. But Jeremy and Zoe will at least be over the worst of it. At least and at most.

He is preoccupied enough with the demise of his hope that a three-day visit might do any more than that, that he almost misses it when Cathleen brings up the subject of his personal life.

“She’s a university librarian, isn’t that right, Jeremy?”

He tells her it is. “In the rare books library.”

“How did you meet?”

One bedroom, lots of charm
. She had seen it on Craigslist. “The usual. A cocktail party. That kind of thing.”

“What’s her name?” Cathleen asks.

“Rose.”

“That’s very English,” Colin says. “I have at least two aunts named Rose.”