Christian’s father had an apartment at Feverview Dwellings, too, and yet he’d never made himself known. It was possible he’d passed her as she and the man she thought was him were talking. But he’d grieved differently, in a way she hadn’t anticipated. His whole life was probably wildly different than what she pictured.
Something else struck her. Did you hear? Sam asked. We have new management. They’re going to landscape and everything.
We have new management. He thought she lived at Feverview Dwellings. She’d been there, after all, and who loiters around a place like that? She glanced down at herself, alarmed. Did she look as though she lived there? Hadn’t he noticed the label on her purse, the kidskin leather of her gloves, the quality of her shoes, her ring? And yet he must not have. He’d only seen her proximity. He had misjudged her just as she had misjudged him. She pressed her hand to her forehead. And then she smiled.
The wedding she and Tabitha were photographing was in Philadelphia on a big clipper-ship restaurant that sat in the Delaware River harbor. When Sylvie climbed aboard she realized she’d once been here with James a long time ago, back when the boys were still in high school. She fought to remember the mood of the dinner, but she couldn’t recall a single thing they’d talked about, a single thing they’d eaten. It was possible James had been seeing the woman back then. It was possible he had already bought that bracelet for her. He could have already been carrying the secret around by then, doing everything he could so that she would never find out.
She loved him, despite all of it. That was real love, she supposed— overlooking even what was ugly. But it made her sad, too, to realize that the ugliness was there. The blinders were off her now, and she couldn’t put them back on no matter how badly she wanted to. Some days, she really wanted to. Some days, she didn’t feel better off. She didn’t feel cleaner, purer, wiser; instead it felt like she was constantly standing naked into a raw, whipping wind. She envied her past self, purposeful, oblivious, and naive. But she also felt a battle-worn trueness that hadn’t been there before. She felt like she could really do things now. Really change things. Even things she’d thought she’d never dare.
One side of the boat was pitched down slightly. The tables on that side were bolted down, the legs cut to uneven lengths so they’d be level. The ceremony was to take place in front of a mural of a bearded Poseidon holding a trident. The same string quartet was setting up shop on the slanty side of the room, and there was Desmond. His face lit up when he saw Sylvie, and she waved. She decided she would tell him about Sam Verona. And about what had happened, and who she thought Sam had been, and even the letter she’d written to him, the letter she’d never given him. It was crazy—she barely knew anything about Desmond except for the broad, sweeping things everyone told strangers about their lives when they first meet—but she knew she’d tell him anyway, and weather whatever response he had.
There was commotion in the lobby; the wedding party began to file in. The groom walked down the aisle to the Poseidon mural. He was older than she was—maybe James’s age, around seventy. As he got closer, she saw there was a small hearing aid in his ear. The groom noticed the camera around her neck and came over. “Thanks for helping us out at such short notice,” he exhaled, grasping her hand. “We thought we were stuck.”
The bride walked alone down the aisle. She had shoulder-length white hair. Her drop-waist dress hit at the knee, and she wore ivory pumps. When she saw the man she was marrying, tears came to her eyes. She waved at him giddily, as if she was a kid on a merry-go-round and had just rounded past her parents. They exchanged rings and kissed, then hugged their respective children, six in all.
Not long ago, Sylvie might’ve thought the ecstatic, hopeful looks on the couple’s faces were impractical. Why go through all that trouble to get married at that age? It’s not as if they were naive teens. But now, she was sympathetic to their exuberance. It was kind of beautiful how regenerative optimism was, how people could hurl themselves headlong into the same situations again and again.
Felicia and Graham, the bride and groom, got up for their first dance. His big, craggy hands clutched her waist, and they both took small, careful steps. They smiled into each other, delighted. It was a look Sylvie had seen on so many other faces this summer—the look that said this day set the tone for their entire marriage and that every day henceforth would be as beautiful as this one. They didn’t bother worrying about the curveballs life would throw at them, the difficult decisions they’d have to make, or even the disappointments. Right now those things didn’t exist.
Sylvie crouched down and took another picture. And she silently said the same thing she always said to all the couples she’d met. Keep holding on to that, she told them. Keep holding on and don’t let go.
Epilogue
H e almost drove by the exit at first. The sign for it was smaller than he remembered. The toll booths were meager and hokey, the lanes separated by staggered orange construction cones. There was a steakhouse on the corner now instead of the old Applebee’s. The sign for the Gray Horse Inn that hosted art shows and served Mother’s Day brunch had gotten larger, now featuring curly, old-timey script. There were leaves on the trees now, not just buds but fat, summery foliage. He had missed the beginning of spring, the floral scents in the air, everyone opening their windows for the first time, the appearance of bees in the garden. He’d missed summer, fall, and winter, too, looping back to late spring. It was an unusually humid day. When he shifted his legs on the seats, there was a thin sheen of sweat on the leather.
When he came to the turnoff to the house, he realized he couldn’t go there. Not yet. So he checked into the motel down the road, a one-story complex he’d driven past countless times. He expected alarm bells to go off as soon as he set foot back here. He expected the motel proprietor to beam broadly and say, “Why, hey there, boy! Where’ve you been?” What would he reply? Would he grin back and answer, sheepishly, “I took a little adventure?” Would he tell him why?
As it turned out, Scott didn’t recognize the guy behind the motel desk. His face wasn’t one he’d passed at the grocery store or nodded at while stopped at a traffic light. He’d never seen the man in the aisles at Pep Boys. The man handed Scott a flat, credit card-shaped room key impersonally and turned back to his baseball game on a little black-and-white TV. There was a Phillies pennant hanging behind the desk, a tribute to their World Series win last year. As Scott walked to his room, he wondered if he was still a Phillies fan. Or were the Diamondbacks now officially his team? Maybe the Diamondbacks had always technically been his team—in Arizona, when people asked him where he was from, he always said, “Here.” It was, he figured, the truest answer.
When he got to the motel room, he slung his bag on the table, took off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. The ceiling was roughly plastered, looking like thick globs of cottage cheese. Outside birds twittered. They sounded different than the Arizona birds, but the same, too. And the wind brushing through the trees was the same, the cars swishing down the roads. Somehow, he’d expected things to be different. He’d expected the world to fall down as soon as he crossed state lines.
It had all started when his apartment got that leak. He’d been staying in his mother’s side of the house for a couple of days when he woke up in his childhood bedroom, drenched with sweat. It happened sometimes. He was never able to fall back to sleep when it did, so he’d gotten up and padded around the upstairs, looking into his brother’s old room, the shared bathroom, and then, finally, his father’s office.
A key had been sitting on the desk. There was only one thing in the room that had a lock. Why he unlocked the drawer, he wasn’t sure. How he’d known what would be inside wasn’t clear to him. There had been one folder, lying flat at the metal bottom. It was unmarked. Scott had picked it up and opened it. Inside were a few documents from the Family Service adoption agency in Tucson, Arizona.
They had never shown him these papers, though he’d searched for them for years. Although he’d asked details about his birth mother, where she was from, what she was like, nothing was ever explained. He’d had a whole two years of his life elsewhere, and it was infuriating that he didn’t remember a single thing about it. His mother told Scott when he was very young that she didn’t really know who he’d come from, only that they had stepped in, they had adopted him. His parents told him that his mommy was white and his daddy was black—which was special—but after Scott brought up that a friend at school had whispered that Scott’s great-grandfather banned black children from Swithin, all talk about his birth parents ceased. His mother veered away from the topic whenever it came up, his father made vague hand motions and told Scott that it wasn’t worth dwelling on things like that.
Scott did dwell. How could he not? How was he supposed to swallow this and just be one of them when he knew he wasn’t? They were doing this on purpose, he figured, hiding it from him for precisely the reasons only Charles had had the balls to suggest, because he was different, and being different wasn’t good. Fine, he’d thought. Let them really see how different he was. He’d show them all.
The adoption papers in the filing cabinet didn’t say much. There were prints of his hands and feet, a record of his birth weight and length and date. Names were blacked out, but there was the adoption agency’s address and phone number. It was in Tucson, Arizona. He had been born at the University Medical Center on Campbell Avenue.
It had been as good a time as any to leave. He barely remembered that drive across the country, a frantic, scattered four days of highways and sad, generic motels, maxing out his credit card, throwing his cell phone, which kept ringing, out the window at one point, watching it disappear in the side mirror. When he got to Tucson, he checked into the cheapest hotel he could find, bought a map, found his way to the adoption agency, and explained who he was. The woman working there, an overweight lady in her thirties who spoke in broken, accented English, said that his adoption file had been closed—there was no way he could find out any more information about the people who had given him up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, giving him a watery smile.
“But I drove across the country for this,” Scott protested. “I’m sorry,” was all she replied, in honeyed tones.
He turned away, stepping out into the impenetrable heat. Tucson, Arizona. Never did he imagine he was from somewhere like here. Detroit, maybe. South Central. Not that Tucson wasn’t tough, but it seemed slow, lazy, stupefied by the sun. He stared at the sun-baked stucco on the outside of the adoption agency building. Across the street, a leathery-skinned man was fiddling with the tire of his car. He tried to picture growing up here, living here, never knowing of his life in that big, spooky house with that greatgrandfather he was in no way related to bearing down on him every time he walked up the stairs.