I felt embarrassed. “I’m just a kid from Ohio who did well on his SATs. There’s nothing interesting about me at all.”
She paused, gazing into her glass, then said, “I’ve never asked you about your family, Tim, and I don’t mean to pry. All I know is what Jonas has told me. You never mention them, they never call, you spend all your breaks in Cambridge with this woman and her cats.”
I shrugged. “She’s not so bad.”
“I’m sure she isn’t. I’m sure she’s a saint. And I like cats as much as the next person, in the right quantity.”
“There’s not really much to tell.”
“I doubt that very much.”
A silence followed. I discovered that swallowing took a great deal of effort; my windpipe felt as if it had constricted. When at last I spoke, the words seemed to come from another place entirely.
“She died.”
Behind her glasses, Liz’s eyes were intently fixed on my face. “Who died, Tim?”
I swallowed. “My mother. My mother died.”
“When was this?”
It would all come out now; there was simply no stopping it. “Last summer. It was just before I met you. I didn’t even know she was sick. My father wrote me a letter.”
“And where were you?”
“With the woman and her cats.”
Something was happening. Something was coming undammed. I knew that if I didn’t move immediately—stand up, walk around, feel the beating of my heart and the action of air in my lungs—I would fall apart.
“Tim, why didn’t you tell us?”
I shook my head. I felt suddenly ashamed. “I don’t know.”
Liz reached across the table and gently took my hand. Despite my best efforts, I had begun to cry. For my mother, for myself, for my dead friend Lucessi, whom I knew I had failed. Surely I could have done something, said something. It wasn’t the note in his pocket that told me so. It was the fact that I was alive and he was dead, and I of all people should have understood the pain of living in a world that didn’t seem to want him. I did not want to take my hand away—it felt like the only thing anchoring me to the earth. I was in a dream in which I was flying and could not make myself land were it not for this woman who would save me.
“It’s all right,” Liz was saying, “it’s all right, it’s all right…”
Time moved then; we were walking, I didn’t know where. Liz was still holding my hand. I sensed the presence of water, and then the Hudson emerged. Decrepit piers jutted long fingers into the water. Across the river’s broad expanse, the lights of Hoboken made a diorama of the city and its lives. The air tasted of salt and stone. There was a kind of park along the water’s edge, filthy and abandoned-looking; it did not seem safe, so we headed north along Twelfth Avenue, neither of us speaking, before turning east again. I had given no thought at all to what would happen next but now began to. In the last hour, Liz had spoken of things that I felt certain she had told no other person, just as I had done with her. There was Jonas to think of, but we were also a man and a woman who had shared the most intimate truths, things that, once said, could never be unsaid.
We arrived at the apartment. No words of consequence had passed between us for many minutes. The tension was palpable—surely she could feel it, too. I couldn’t say for certain what I wanted, only that I didn’t want to be away from her, not for a minute. I was standing dumbly in the middle of the tiny room, searching my mind for the words to capture how I felt. Something needed to be said. And yet I could say nothing.
It was Liz who broke the silence. “Well, I’m going to turn in. The sofa folds out. There are sheets and blankets in the closet. Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Okay.”
I could not make myself move toward her, though I wanted to, very badly. On the one hand there was Liz, and all we had shared, and the fact that, in every way, I loved her and probably had since the day we’d met; on the other, there was Jonas, the man who’d given me a life.
“Your friend Lucessi. What was his first name?”
I actually had to think. “Frank. But I never called him that.”
“Why do you think he did it?”
“He was in love with somebody. She didn’t love him back.”
Not until that moment had this chain of thought, in all its starkness, come clear to me. Call Fanning, my friend had written. Call Fanning to tell him that love is all there is, and love is pain, and love is taken away.