What We Leave Behind (32 page)

This required another sip of alcohol. I was astonished, galled, not that she hadn’t wanted children—
that
I understood, having witnessed friends firsthand many friends in our business, happily married couples who made a conscious decision
not
to spawn when they realized their lifestyles and personalities would be crippling to a child. I couldn’t fault Emily for that. What stunned me was that Jonas, who always wanted children, fell in love with a woman that didn’t want any.

“I can’t believe you don’t have something witty and sarcastic to say.”

This was not the time for sarcasm. My eyes found his, and the exchange passed between us, that momentary glance that said,
I know you so well that I can feel your skin unfurl around me
. We just sat like that, him looking at me, me looking at him, until our food came.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, breaking the silence. “I know you, Jess, better than you know yourself. I messed up. I made a huge mistake. Are you happy?”

Hollow words that once would have changed my life now left me feeling sorry for Jonas. Inside I mourned for his losses, as I know he might have mourned for mine. This was finally his chance to have a baby. That it wasn’t with his wife and was with a girl he had once loved seemed to make sense to him. Was I happy? Of course, I wasn’t happy.

“A little,” I blurted out.

“There’s the girl I used to know.”

I asked, “You’d really do this for Michelle?” It flew off my tongue from somewhere within, a place that hadn’t wanted to see the outcome. I hadn’t thought until that moment that maybe there was some shred of good in this.

He nodded that he would. His eyes were amazingly bright and clear and focused on me.

“What will you tell her?” I asked.

He hadn’t bothered asking whom. She, her, we danced around her name just like when we were kids. I watched as he fingered the fork in his left hand. It amazed me that he could even swallow at a time like this. He was looking at it, and not at me, when he finally answered. “It won’t matter.”

“Yes, it will. You think my husband’s going to accept this without a fight?”

“We’re separated,” he said.

I reached for my glass to steady me.

“We were both in Boston, and I got accepted to a residency program in New York, so I commuted back and forth and it worked for a while; she’d come here, I’d go out there, but then it stopped working. I just signed a lease on an apartment here.”

“You still wear a ring.”

“It’s hard to let it go. I’ve been waiting for the right time.”

I said, “I knew if you were getting everything you wanted from her, there would have never been a need for me. But I see it differently now, more clearly than I could with my sixteen-year-old eyes. Sometimes we have to stay with people we love even when we don’t like them very much. You taught me that lesson. You showed me how to be loyal and committed.”

“Oh yeah, I’m the poster boy for deep, meaningful relationships. If I had really known about loyalty and commitment, I wouldn’t have made so many mistakes. If I had appreciated what you said, really listened and understood, I wouldn’t have had to let you go.”

“We were just kids.”

“We weren’t kids that night.”

The food was still sitting on my plate, but who could eat when you’re naked on a barstool in a packed restaurant? “Look where that got us,” I said.

“It may have been adolescent at the time, but it mattered to me. Even with my dad being sick and dealing with losing him, there was you and your adorable face. I enjoyed every minute of being around you.”

Thank God we weren’t facing each other. Thank God I was staring straight ahead, and it was the bottles of wine lined up that I was looking at and not Jonas, not Jonas Levy saying these things to me. “That’s got to mean something, Jess.”

My hands reached up toward my face, to cover it from view, but he moved them away, forcing me to say something. “You gave me these glimpses into your life,” I said, “and sometimes I felt like I mattered, and sometimes we were miles apart. All I wanted was to be close to you. I think that’s why I let that night happen. It was the only way I knew how to be close to you.”

“You were as close as I could let you.”

“Why’d you let me go?” I asked, turning to him, wanting to see the answer. “Why’d you let me walk away? Where was all the love back then?”

He started to answer, but I saw the ring on my finger, and I was reminded of who I was, whom I belonged to. He was saying something about our age difference and his commitment to Emily, the loyalty he felt toward her and his guilt. The excuses for what he let slip away were starting to disturb me. We were forgetting who we were at that moment and the reason we were having dinner, so I raised my hand and stopped him from confusing me with a sixteen-year-old any further. “We don’t have to do this, Jonas. We don’t have to get into all of this now. Bygones.” I had always wanted to use that word and actually mean it.

“But I need to,” he prodded.

“It’s too late,” I said, finishing off my wine and already thinking about another glass.

“When I saw you in the hospital that afternoon, when I heard your voice,” he began, “time stopped. I honestly thought that somewhere in that astonishing coincidence, you were there to find me. I thought only fate could work in such a remarkable way, bringing you to the hospital where I worked. And when you told me about the baby, I was pissed, really pissed, but not for the reasons you think.

“I wanted to hate you, just like this small part of me has for years, for all you represented, for all I blamed you for. You left me with so many feelings I couldn’t get rid of. What you did, it couldn’t have been easy, but I love that you didn’t want to get rid of that part of me. I love that about you.

“What I was angry at the most was myself, for letting you go, angry because when I saw Michelle and how beautiful and smart and funny she was, I knew if I had just handled some difficult decisions more carefully, we could have somehow prevented this. Maybe we could have loved her so much, she would have grown immune to a disease like cancer.”

He looked sad and silent and lost. “You’re a doctor,” I said. “You know better than that.” It was meant to comfort, nothing more, but my hand slid across the bar and found his, holding onto it tightly, staying there longer than it should have. “We don’t know what would’ve happened, Jonas. Our relationship…” and then I corrected myself. “Our friendship was never entirely real. All the pieces were just bits of stolen opportunities, nothing permanent, nothing truthful, based on ‘what ifs’ and ‘if only.’ Hell, I don’t even think we would have known what to do if reality came knocking at our door.”

“Are you saying that you don’t think it could have worked?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. I just know there were too many obstacles back then. I never had the privilege of seeing beyond the small window you let me peek through.”

“But the things we saw together, Jess. You know how amazing they were.”

He was squeezing my hand tighter. “You can’t do this, Jonas. I can’t do this with you again.” The exterior around me was crumbling. “I’m not that person anymore. I’ve moved on with my life. I’ve grown up. There’s someone in my life now, two someones, and they’re everything in the world to me. Can’t you see that?”

“You know what I see?” he said. “I see you. I see you seeing me just like you did that summer. Your eyes still dance. Your body still shakes when we touch.”

I backed away, taking my hand along with me. “You don’t have that power over me anymore, and you’re wrong to even suggest it.”

“I see it in your eyes, Jess. It’s there. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too.”

“It’s wrong, Jonas,” I said, shaking my head, shaking out the contents of what he was saying.

“We’re just talking, Jess.”

“But it’s wrong,” I said again, hearing myself practically shout.

“Is it?” he asked, “or are you just afraid of what you might find out?”

“I know everything I need to know.”

“Really? Then where’s your husband? Why isn’t he here with you in New York? I bet he doesn’t even know you’re having dinner with me. I bet he doesn’t even know about Michelle.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“But you’re not denying it,” he boasted.

“You don’t know the first thing about my marriage,” I snapped.

“I know you’re here with me. I know you can barely look me in the eye. I know the sacrifices we made for each other…the ones we’re still making.”

“I made all the sacrifices.”

“Do you know what I gave up for you?” he asked. “Do you have any idea how the wrong choices destroyed my marriage?”

“It doesn’t matter now, Jonas,” I said, as if understanding why his marriage fell apart would make us even. “I’m not the same person I was back then. I don’t need all the answers.” I was a little curious;
that
hadn’t changed in the last thirteen years, but if I was going to be a grown woman, I couldn’t return to living in the past. The check was sitting on the bar, and I ignored the bait as he paid cash for the meal I barely touched. I was about to get up when he grabbed my arm.

“I’m not done,” he said. It was more a command than anything, so I stayed rooted to my seat. “You know I gave it all up because of you.”

At first I wasn’t sure what he meant. Did he give up Emily for me? That was a great presumption on his part.

“The pathology residency, the chance to run the entire lab one day. You walked away from me that afternoon. It took me weeks to recover.”

“
Just weeks
?’ I asked. “It took me
years
to get over that day and all the things that preceded and followed it. And just so we’re clear, I didn’t walk away from you, Jonas. You walked away from me. Actually, you ran.”

“You didn’t try to stop me…”

“And what would you have done if I did?”

“That time was the worst for me. I left your house, and I was torn, confused, drifting toward you and feeling the tug from Emily. I didn’t know what I was going to do, not with you, not with her. Then we got the call that my father had died. I couldn’t even tell you.”

“Instead, you blamed me,” I said.

“After the funeral, Emily thought it would help me to focus on other things—the boards, our apartment, our engagement. ‘Our plan,’ she’d say to me, ‘let’s stick to our plan,’ and it was all I could do to get through the day, to go along with ‘our plan.’ Don’t get me wrong, for a while that’s what I wanted.  In time it was easy to pretend I was happy, at least as happy as I thought I could be.”

I stared at him blindly, unsure of who he was, someone who closely resembled Jonas. I had known his backbone had failed him before, but as he was talking, I imagined that the strong, vital man I’d once believed him to be was turning into a weak little rat.

“And then there was you,” he said, reaching across the bar, urging my hand to curl around his fingers again. “I didn’t go looking for you,” he said to me, his eyes penetrating into mine, “I didn’t seek you out. I didn’t even know I was vulnerable enough, capable enough, to be drawn in. You were never part of the plan. Even when I tried to keep you somewhere safe and special, I failed miserably, hurting both of us.

“Back then it wasn’t just about giving her up.
That
would have been the easy part. It was much harder living with letting her down. Emily was never as strong as you. Your father dying made you self-sufficient; Emily’s parents’ absence made her needy. It taught her early on to depend on other people to take care of her, and one of those people she depended on was me. I was responsible for her.”

“You could have bought yourself a puppy,” I said.

He laughed, adding, “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your cruel wit.”

“Yeah, well, fortunately some things remained intact; others are lost forever. What does this have to do with me anyway?”

“When I realized that you were gone, really gone, and I was never going to speak to you again, life just changed. It became dull. You always told me to follow my dreams, to do what would make me happy. If I couldn’t have you, I thought maybe I could fill that hole with something else. Do you understand that?” he asked me. “Do you understand what I was going through at the time?

“I wasn’t thinking about that when my period was three weeks late, Jonas. You stayed with her when you had a choice. What I thought was your loyalty to her sounds a lot like plain old weakness. People like you deserve what they get. Haven’t you ever heard, ‘Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character?’ It serves you right that you never had any children.” I was being hurtful and I didn’t care.

“I should have known I’d receive a rant out of you. Not answering the questions, just jabbing me with your twisted insults.”

“It’s twisted because you don’t understand me.”

“If that’s what makes you feel better, Jessica,” he said, leading us back to formalities, “relish in the idea that you are wiser than I am. You’re right, you’ve changed in a lot of ways, but in some ways you haven’t grown up at all.”

“Maybe it’s too late for this conversation,” I said. “What needed to be said should have been said all those years ago when you were the center of my young universe.”

“And now?”

“What about now?” I asked. “What difference does now make?”

“All the difference in the world, for Michelle, that is.”

He got up and I knew I had to follow him if I wanted to get back to the hotel. We sat in silence, the night air close to freezing, and he didn’t offer me his jacket. When we got off the boat, he walked ahead, expecting me to continue following until his gait doubled mine, and I was left with his coattails in front of me. He walked with purpose and pride, even when I knew he had to be seething inside. What was I supposed to have done? Tell him that just being there eating with him was like being sixteen again?

“Hi, Marty,” I said into the phone.

“Jess.”

I could tell he hadn’t expected to hear my voice. It was almost six on the West Coast. Ari would be eating dinner, throwing rice and macaronis at Elmo on the television.