Page 78 of So Close

You speak up at the ceiling. “We found his name and passport information on a flight manifest to South America around the time he disappeared.”

I prop my head in my hand to look down at you. The sun is setting. The gloaming has swathed the room in a lush blend of warm color and cool darkness. Your gorgeous face is half-lit and half bathed in shadow. I embrace the dusk and the cover it affords me.

“Cartagena, wasn’t it?” I ask. “You didn’t send someone down to Colombia to look for him?”

As I did moments ago, you stiffen abruptly, and your head whips toward me. A heat I can feel begins to radiate from your skin. “How do you know where he went?”

I leave the bed and move to the window. The Sound has a dark sheen, like a lake of oil. I’m cold now, separated from your body heat and intimately wet. The darkening sky silhouettes me, and that will affect you, which might give me an advantage. I’m well aware that despite how recently we’ve made love, we haven’t been this emotionally distant from each other since we arrived at the beach house.

I raise my voice, so you’ll have no trouble hearing, but keep the tone purposely casual. The information is dreadful enough on its own without dramatizing it. “I was there when my mother met with a man to remove her name from a flight manifest to Colombia. She’d been designated a no-show but wanted her name deleted, and her traveling companion changed from a no-show to a passenger who’d boarded. I remember thinking Cartagena is such an interesting sounding word, that combination of hard and soft. You know how I love words. And Paul Tierney – that name stuck. I don’t even remember what alias my mother used at the time, but your father’s name never left me.”

You’ve since abandoned your father and stepfather’s surnames and adopted one of your choosing: Black. Then you gave it to me. You’re creating a legacy with no taint from the past, but the past follows. We can never really be free of it.

There is the sound of the mattress shifting behind me. “Our parents knew each other?”

The house is still and expectant, holding the evening and our love intertwined like a captured breath.

“She paid the man in cash,” I press on. “It was a huge stack of bills. I couldn’t stop staring at it, sitting like a green brick on the table between us. We’d been poor for so long. It was shocking that she’d have that much cash, let alone give it away. I remember her hand shaking when she set the money down, but that was her only tell.”

I pause, digging in my mind for more of the memory, but it’s like a projection against roiling fog. There are only fragments of images and impressions. I can’t even be sure I haven’t embellished the recollection to fill in gaps. It was so long ago, and I was a child more devoted to my mother than to anyone else.

You’re quiet. Savvy enough to know you can’t pull the past from me and are unable to doubt me. It’s a terrible gift to be seen so completely, to know that you’re aware of the darkness that shrouds me like a lover. Perhaps you even embrace it. Maybe that’s the only way we work – if I’m the tarnished side of Lily’s gilded coin. Similar enough to preserve the fantasy but different enough to keep her memory inviolate.

Although she wasn’t so lily-white after all, was she?

You rise from the bed. There’s enough light emanating from the skylight in the bathroom to outline your tall, powerful frame in the window’s reflection. We’re two shadows, appearing as if we’re standing beside one another while, in actuality, the entire room and a lifetime of secrets separate us.

“She’d packed her bags the week before.” The pad of my thumb worries the band of my ring. “Since she didn’t pack mine or tell me to do it, I knew she was going without me. It wasn’t unusual for her to leave me alone. When I was old enough to turn the television on and use the microwave, she’d sometimes be gone all night. When I started middle school, she started staying away longer. She’d give me some money, leave food in the refrigerator and tell me to go to school every day so the attendance office wouldn’t call about me when she wasn’t there to answer. Thinking about it now, I don’t know if she meant to return from the trip to Colombia. You know how much your father embezzled. She might have thought her ship had finally come in. Certainly, your dad had to know he couldn’t come home without facing jail time.”

Movement on the beach draws my gaze downward. I find my neighbor, Ben’s grandson Robert, staring up at me from the shoreline. I don’t move, knowing I’m just a dark shape in the shadows. I remember his assertion that he’s seen me here over the past six years. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu swamps me, and I sway with sudden dizziness.

I sense your move toward me more than hear it and thrust out my hand to stay you. “No, I’m fine. Let me finish.”

I couldn’t stand it if you touched me now. I’m trapped in the space between the child I was and the woman I am now, not quite one or the other, which leaves me unbearably and frighteningly vulnerable.

“You think they were lovers.” You’ve moved closer.

“Love had nothing to do with it, at least not for my mother. She was incapable of loving anyone. I think she saw your father as a bank balance, and your father saw an irresistible woman. Men stumbled over themselves for her, Kane. She could drive a man beyond his limits with so little effort.”

“I believe it.”

I watch as Robert turns away and continues down the beach. “You can’t imagine what she was like.”

You embrace me from behind, nuzzling your temple against mine. “Can’t I?”

“I’m a pale imitation.”

“You’re radiant when I touch you. Your eyes glow when you look at me.”

You said I was safe with you. Your patience in waiting for the answer to your question is irrefutable proof. Outlining how our lives began to intersect feels like peeling off layers of my flesh. I feel a phantom kiss of air across my skin, which is nearly enough stimulus to drive me mad.

Your words are a whisper of warmth. “If she was incapable of love, she could never be as beautiful as you are.”

Your acceptance is the emotional security I was taught not to believe in. In a distant corner of my mind, I can hear my mother mocking my hopeless sentimentality, my unquenchable yearning for you. Her laughter’s musicality echoes through me. In my mind’s eye, I see that heartless glint in irises as brightly green as my own, the look that says everything is unfolding the way she’d predicted it would. She foresaw everything and had her hand in everything. No one escaped her. Nothing surprised her, especially me.

Despite her merciless tutelage, love caught me unawares. It bears your face and speaks with your voice. I feel it as your skin brushing against mine. You’ve undone me. Another lesson learned. And every life lesson I’ve survived has only brought me closer to becoming the very epitome of my mother.

“There are a million answers I want from you.” You lean your head against mine. “What happened to my father wasn’t one of them.”

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