The Tell (17 page)

A shadow shifted. Owen scanned the yard's impenetrable corners. The pea gravel mumbled underfoot, the dried leaves eddied around his ankles. Mira and Wilton had moved away from the kitchen window, and the surrounding houses were turned inward. This disregarded outside, shelter to smash-and-grabbers, raccoons, and coyotes, was the wild territory of city life. Cold breath hesitated at Owen's mouth and tensed. A branch snapped, the leafless lilac bushes screeched against the carriage house, where something inside was swinging behind the glass. Owen's heart hammered. He held the tongs like a club. At the back of the carriage house, overgrown bushes and hissing thorns hooked his pants. One of the glass panes in the door was smashed, and the in-rushing air had set things swinging and shifting: there was no one inside doing it. Still, someone had tried to break into the carriage house. But who knew when? Yesterday? A month ago? At the same time the house had been broken into? He already knew he wasn't going to tell Mira.

When he heard footsteps on the gravel and came out from behind the bushes, he saw Anya stopped at the top of the driveway. She was wrapped in a long coat with a scarf over her head like some kind of doomed countess. Wilton rushed out the back door, throwing the apron behind him. His arms were a riot of motion. He slowed to smooth his wheezy breath, his shirt, touch his hair, lift his shoulders and let them drop again, shake his wrists out. The man was running through his entire repertoire of misgivings. A sob bubbled up out of him like the sound of a ball bouncing down an abandoned hallway. He could have been trudging through sand, begging for water, for how hungrily he moved, and his daughter just a mirage. Wilton put his hands on her shoulders, kissed one cheek and then the other, and pressed his face against hers. He bent at the knees, cried, and dropped even lower. Owen glimpsed Anya's heartbreak at this man falling at her feet while her arms were limp. She looked stunned.

Owen was sure he would never see another meeting like this, but it was too much, and he went inside where Mira was slicing cucumbers. She was pretending this was like any other night, when it must have taken everything for her not to watch the meeting of father and daughter. He didn't know what to say or what to explain—about the break-in and how besieged it made him feel or how the reunion in the driveway filled him with envy. To regain what you thought you'd lost. She would understand what that meant, but she didn't look up at him and he didn't speak. He watched her knife make careful cuts.

“May we come in?” Wilton asked, appearing in the doorway with Anya behind him.

Mira put the knife down and grinned. Her ability to be so instantly bright and enthusiastic was striking. Had she learned the poses from Wilton? “We've been looking forward to meeting you for a very long time,” she said, and didn't so much shake Anya's hand as hold it. “And you've already met Owen.”

“Nice to see you,” he said. Anya looked as though she'd been blindsided.

Wilton's grin was stiff and he couldn't still his hands. “They've heard me tell a million stories about you.”

“There can't be that many stories,” Anya said.

“Okay, so I repeat myself sometimes.” Wilton tapped his temple. “I'm almost an old man. You haven't seen me in a long time.”

“And you haven't seen me in a long time either.” She smiled coolly.

“That's very true. But here we are now.”

When Wilton moved to lift her coat off her shoulders, she stiffened. Wilton waited, poised with a pinch of wool in each hand. It was an instant of humiliation that Wilton, for all his great acting ability, could not pretend his way through. Anya finally let her coat slide off and then held it draped over one arm as if she wasn't planning on staying long. A thick black turtleneck sweater and black pants made an anonymous and mournful outfit. Her hair was pulled back severely with a silver clip. It was too much, too harsh. She tried to ignore her father's voracious gaze. For Wilton, the memory and the reality might take longer to merge, and in an awkward burst, he pointed out the apple pie on the counter that Owen had made that morning. His voice was clattery. It was like watching a blind animal bump around in a cage. When Owen picked up the platter of steaks to take outside, it tipped and spilled a long line of blood on the floor.

“I'll get that.” Wilton grabbed a towel and kneeled.

“My family has a dog.” Anya looked down at her father on all fours not far from her pointy-toed boots. “He's always around to lick up stuff like that, cereal, crumbs, blood.”

“Arf, arf.” Wilton wagged his ass as if he had a tail.

Owen had an urge to kick him.

“My four little brothers can make a pretty good mess. The dog comes in handy.”

“Ah, brothers,” Wilton said, as if this was something remarkable about her he'd just learned. He put one knee up and heaved his body on to it. He lacked his usual fluid grace, and it took him a moment to stand.

At dinner, Anya's cheeks quickly grew red from the wine, and she circled a finger around the neck of her sweater to loosen it. Wilton refilled her glass. Neither daughter nor father ate much, while Owen and Mira packed in their food as if they could devour all the awkwardness in the room. Mira tried to draw out Anya, and soon Anya was describing family vacations, brothers, dogs, noise, and a bounty of happy details.

“Where I grew up, the driveways are lined up like this,” Anya said, and chopped the air into even plots of blacktop. She turned to Wilton. “My dad's a lawn freak, works on the grass every weekend.”

Owen suspected that she knew exactly what she was doing by throwing her sunny history at her father, calling that other man “Dad.” She was showing Wilton every way his absence hadn't mattered. He looked like he was biting into glass.

“I just hire people to do that for me,” Wilton said. “Does that count?”

Anya looked at Owen, a private look, he thought, one that asked for ballast. Mira noticed and shifted in her chair.

“Four little brothers,” Mira said. “They must adore you, the sophisticated big sister.”

“Actually it's only three. One died two years ago. He had a brain tumor. Sometimes I still say four.”

Wilton's mouth dropped open. “I didn't know. I'm sorry. How awful. And your poor mother.” He shook his head. “My god, poor Linda.”

The mention of Anya's mother, the woman who was their connection, and whom Wilton had known in a way that would always be a mystery to their child, was a reminder that there could be no benign conversation here, not really.

“She's okay,” Anya said.

Mira got up to refill the pitcher at the sink and let the water overflow. “What I want to know,” Owen said, forcing himself to look away from his frozen wife, “is what it was like watching your father on television.”

Anya tore at a piece of bread and rolled the crumbs into tiny pellets. “I wasn't allowed to watch a whole lot of TV. My parents thought there was too much junk on.”

“Definitely true.” Wilton raised his glass. “Good for them.”

“But I watched at friends' houses,” Anya said. “Up until I was eight, I used to think Bruno—the character of Bruno—was my real father. It was confusing.”

It was a sweet and painful confession. Wilton made a cap out of his cloth napkin and put it on. The red corners stuck up like ears. The silence screeched. Embarrassed, he pulled the napkin off and put it on his lap. “I'm the real one, by the way. The real father.”

“The other day, I was remembering when you used to—”

Wilton leaned urgently toward his daughter. “When I used to what, sweetheart?”

“Swim in your pool. I'd jump off the edge.”

“You'd do that over and over, for hours. I'd stand there and catch you.”

“And you had some toys in the pool, beach balls, rings, things like that.”

“Lots of them.” Wilton smiled. “I tried to get something new every time you came over.”

For the first time since she'd arrived, Anya looked directly at Wilton. “You used to take me to parties,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn't know where it was and I was too embarrassed to ask. I peed in my pants once.”

Wilton lowered his head for the next blow. “Why didn't you come find me?”

“I was five years old.” She moved her fork across her plate. “A baby.”

“Yes, you were. You were a lovely child,” he said dolefully. “I wanted to show you off.”

“I had to hide my underwear under someone's cushions.” Anya's resurrected shame flamed her face. “I thought they'd be hidden forever and no one would ever know.”

Wilton's hair touched his plate. Tears slid onto the tomatoes. “I'm sorry for all I've done wrong, Anya. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

She was disarmed by his crying, and she looked again at Owen for help, but what could he do? Her confidence had unraveled, and her hair had come loose from its clip and hung around her face. Wilton made the only sound in the room.

“I should go,” Anya said, up already, thanking them for dinner, and peering around for her coat.

“You don't have to leave so soon,” Mira said, her head at a plaintive angle.

“So this is fine. Our getting to know each other again like this. Fine that we take it slowly.” Wilton threw his daughter his last good try. She looked like she was considering a kiss or a hug for him but chose neither, putting on her coat instead when Owen gave it to her. She stuffed her hands in her pockets.

“I can't tell you what it's meant for me to see you tonight,” Wilton added. “And whenever you're ready to do it again—if you are, that is, if you are—then please call me. I'm always available, anytime. I won't push you. We'll do this at your speed.” He spoke to the back of her head as she left through the kitchen door and went down the driveway. “I won't push, Anya,” he called. “Good-bye, good-bye. I love you.”

In the morning, the forks Mira and Wilton had used to dismantle the pie after Anya left were laid down like weapons. Neat piles of crumbs were evidence of the talk that had gone on long after Owen had retreated to his study. He'd taken his work and his squid pen over to the couch with him, but had done nothing but listen to the unintelligible murmurings of their conversation, the tones of their consolation. When he opened his eyes, it was just before six o'clock, and he couldn't remember having fallen asleep on the too-short couch, his legs thrown over one arm and now cramped up. Mira must have come in and covered him with the blanket on this, the first night they hadn't slept in the same bed.

He made coffee and went outside. The morning was cold and brilliant with the last turning leaves. Everything was in the sharpest relief. The night's dampness had eaten through the paper of the lantern and left it lacy with holes, wire ribs holding fast. In the yard over the back fence, a stubby dog barked until a woman in a bathrobe appeared in a doorway to call him back. In five years, this was the only time Owen had ever seen her, though her raspy voice was familiar, some smoky sound he'd been hearing forever in the shallows of his sleep. Her bathrobe was open at the chest, and one breast revealed itself as she whistled for the dog. She saw him watching her, clutched her robe shut, and went back inside.

He went to the back of the carriage house, reached through the hole in the glass, and opened the door. Pieces of broken glass crushed underfoot. The air smelled of chilled wood. Stuffing exploded from old cushions, home to mice. There were dressers, tables, a couple of wicker chairs like the one Mira had in her office at Brindle, and everywhere, dust, dead leaves rolled like cigars, mouse droppings. More than anything or anywhere else—the house, its contents, Mira even—time had stopped in here when her parents had died. Whoever had tried to break in had lost the nerve, spooked by the nighttime theatrics of the chaise cushion thrown over the rafter like a carcass. Bicycle tires gone flat drooped like slack intestines. He maneuvered through the junk to feel under the dead weight of a rolled-up carpet for the gun his father had given him. It was still there. His forefinger touched the metal through terrycloth and he drew back his hand as if he'd been stung. He didn't know why he'd kept it—an absurdity like having a pet cobra. Mira assumed the thing was buried deep in a hole in the Cape Cod woods.

He sat down on the rolled carpet and drank his coffee. The dust swirled inside, the trees swirled outside, and wind breathed in and out of the open door. He felt the same nervous thrill he'd had as a boy when he took
The Noble Front
, a book of war photographs by his father's friend, into a hidden spot among the locust trees. He knew that the tingling in his skull and stomach and bowels was not about the gruesome pictures of the dying, dead, and wounded, but about being alive. He didn't think he'd ever felt it as much as he had then, shaded by the ropy trees and their lozenge-shaped leaves. Eventually, he'd burst out from between the trees, breathless, as if he'd just dodged death himself. It was inevitable now that he would picture Caroline in her distressed posture on the restaurant floor, her gray skirt at her waist, one shoe off. Were her toenails painted? And when he saw himself kneeling next to her, he had that same gasping sensation of being alive and of being very close to death. It could still come. He waited for it. He tasted the sea. Brine bubbled in his skull. Something crashed behind him. The coffee cup fell and shattered. Something was breaking branches, whisking against the clapboards, scattering the pea gravel. He knew the gun was there. The sides of his vision narrowed to a point: a man in the open doorway, dark and featureless, but unmistakably Wilton.