She shook her head. “No.”
Slowly, he pulled her into his arms. He held her close, knowing he’d carry this image in his heart for as long as he lived. “I guess it’s really over,” he whispered into her sweet-smelling hair. After a long moment, he heard her answer, a quiet, shuddering little “Yes.”
Natalie’s dorm room was cluttered with memorabilia from London. Pictures of new friends dotted her desk, mingled with family photos and piles of homework. The metal-framed twin bed was heaped with expensive Laura Ashley bedding, and at the center was the pink pillow Annie had embroidered a lifetime ago, the one that read: A PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE.
Natalie sat cross-legged on the bed, her long, unbound hair flowing around her shoulders. Already she looked nervous and worried—a normal teenage response to both parents flying up to see you at college.
Annie wished there were some way to break the news of their divorce without words, a way to silently communicate the sad and wrenching truth.
Blake stood in the corner of the room. He looked calm and at ease—his courtroom face—but Annie could see nervousness in the jittery way he kept glancing at his watch.
Annie knew this was up to her; there was no use putting it off any longer. She went to the bed and sat down beside Natalie. Blake took a few hesitant steps toward them and then stopped in the middle of the room.
Natalie looked at Annie. “What is it, Mom?”
“Your dad and I have something to tell you.” She took Natalie’s hand in hers, stared down at the slender fingers, at the tiny red birthstone ring they’d given her on her sixteenth birthday. It took an effort to sit straight-backed and still. She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Your dad and I are getting a divorce.”
Natalie went very still. “I guess I’m not surprised.” Her voice was tender, and in it, Annie heard the echo of both the child Natalie had once been and the woman she was becoming.
Annie stroked her daughter’s hair, untangling it with her fingers like she used to when Natalie was little. “I’m sorry, honey.”
When Natalie looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “Are you okay, Mom?”
Annie felt a warm rush of pride for her daughter. “I’m fine, and I don’t want you to worry about anything. We haven’t worked out all the details yet. We don’t know where we’ll each be living. Things like addresses and vacations and holidays are all up in the air. But I know one thing. We’ll always be a family—just a different kind. I guess now you’ll have two places in the world where you belong, instead of only one.”
Natalie nodded slowly, then turned to her father. Blake moved closer, kneeling in front of Natalie. For once, he didn’t look like a three-hundred-fifty-dollar-an-hour lawyer. He looked like a scared, vulnerable man. “I’ve made some mistakes. . . .” He glanced at Annie and gave her a hesitant smile, then turned back to Natalie. “With your mom and with you. I’m sorry, Sweet Pea.” He touched her cheek.
Tears leaked from Natalie’s eyes. “You haven’t called me that since I fell off the jungle gym in third grade.”
“There are a lot of things I haven’t said—or done—in years. But I want to make up for lost time. I want to do things together—if that’s okay with you.”
“Phantom of the Opera is coming to town in May. Maybe we could go?”
He smiled. “I’d love to.”
“You mean it this time? I should buy two tickets?”
“I mean it,” he said, and the way he said it, Annie believed him. Of course, she always believed him.
Slowly, Blake got to his feet and drew back.
“We’re still going to be a family,” Annie said, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind Natalie’s ear. “We’ll always be a family.” She looked at Blake and smiled.
It was true. Blake would always be a part of her, always be her youth. They’d grown up together, fallen in love and built a family together; nothing would ever erase that connection. A piece of paper and a court of law couldn’t take it all away—it could only take what they were willing to give up, and Annie was going to hold on to all of it, the good, the bad, the in-between. It was part of them. It made them who they were.
She reached out. He took her hand in his, and together they drew around Natalie, enfolding her in their arms. When Natalie was little, they’d called this a “family hug,” and Annie couldn’t help wondering why they’d ever stopped.
She heard the soft, muffled sound of her daughter’s crying and knew it was one of the regrets that would be with her always.
It was like going back in time. Once again, Annie and Blake were strolling through the Stanford campus. Of course, this time Annie was forty years old and as much of her life lay behind her as lay ahead . . . and she was pushing a stroller.
“It’s weird to be back here,” Blake said.
“Yeah,” she said softly.
They’d spent the whole day with Natalie, being more of a family in one afternoon than they’d been in many of the previous years, but now it was time to go their separate ways. Annie had driven the Cadillac up here, and Blake had flown in, renting a car to get to the campus.
At Annie’s car, they stopped. Annie bent down and unstrapped Katie from the stroller.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
Annie paused. It was the same question he’d asked her when Natalie had left home last spring. Then, it had terrified her. Now, these many months later, the same words opened a door, through which Annie glimpsed a world of possibilities. “I don’t know. I still have tons to do at the house. Twenty years has to be sorted and catalogued and packed away. I know I want to sell the house. It’s not . . . me anymore.” She straightened, looking at him. “Unless you want it?”
“Without you? No.”
Annie glanced around, a little uncertain as to what to say. This was the fork in the road of their lives; after all these years, he would go one way and she another. She had no idea when she would see him again. Probably at the lawyer’s office, where they’d become a cliché—a cordial, once-married couple coming in as separate individuals to sign papers. . . .
Blake stared down at her. There was a faraway sadness in his eyes that made her move closer to him. In a soft voice, he asked, “What will you tell Katie about me?”
Annie heard the pain in his voice, and it moved her to touch his cheek. “I don’t know. The old me would have fabricated an elaborate fiction to avoid hurting her feelings.” She laughed. “Maybe I’d have told her you were a spy for the government and contacting us would endanger your life. But now . . . I don’t know. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I won’t lie to her.”
He turned his head and looked away. She wondered what he was thinking, whether it was about lying, and how much it had cost him over the years. Or if it was about the daughter he had lived with for eighteen years and didn’t know, or the daughter he’d hardly lived with at all, and now would never know. Or if it was the future, all the days that lay ahead for a man alone, the quiet of a life that included no child’s laughter. She wondered if he’d realized yet that when he was an old, old man, when his hair had turned white and his eyes had grown coated with cataracts, that he would have no grandchildren to bounce on his knee, no daughter to kneel in the grass beside his wheelchair and reminisce about the time-worn antics of the past. Unless he reached out now, in the days that mattered, he would learn that some roads could not be refound and that true love took time and effort . . . that a life lived in the glare of summer sunlight never produced a rainbow.
“Will you miss me?” he asked, finally looking at her again.
Annie gave him a sad smile. “I’ll miss who we used to be—I already do. And I’ll miss who we could have been.”
His eyes filled slowly with tears. “I love you, Annie.”
“I’ll always love the boy I fell in love with, Blake. Always . . .”
She moved toward him, pressing up on her toes to kiss him. It was the kind of kiss they hadn’t shared in years; slow, and tender, and heartfelt. There was no undercurrent of sexuality in it. It was everything a kiss was supposed to be, an expression of pure emotion—and they had let it go so easily in their life together. She couldn’t remember when kisses had become something perfunctory and meaningless. Maybe if they had kissed this way every day, they wouldn’t be here now, standing together in the middle of the Stanford campus, saying good-bye to a commitment that had been designed to last forever.
When Blake drew back, he looked sad and tired. “I guess I screwed up pretty badly.”
“You’ll get another chance, Blake. Men like you always do. You’re handsome and rich; women will stand in line to give you another chance. What you do with that chance is up to you.”
He ran a hand through his hair and looked away. “Hell, Annie. We both know I’ll screw that up, too.”
She laughed. “Probably.”
They stared at each other for a long minute, and in that time, Annie saw the arc of their love; the bright and shining beginning of it, all those years ago, and the way it had eroded, one lonely night at a time for years.
Finally, Blake checked his watch. “I have to go. My plane leaves at six o’clock.” He bent down to the stroller and gave Katie a last, fleeting kiss. When he drew back up, he gave Annie a weak smile. “This is hard. . . .”
She hugged him, one last time, then slowly she drew back. “Have a safe flight.”
He nodded and turned away from her. He got into his rented car and drove away.
She stood there watching him until the car disappeared. She had expected to feel weighed down by sadness at this moment, but instead she felt almost buoyant. Last week she had done what she’d never thought she could do: she’d traveled alone. Just for fun. She’d given Katie to Terri for the day—complete with two sheets of instructions and a shelf full of expressed milk—and then Annie had just started to drive. Before she’d even realized where she was going, she’d arrived at the Mexican border. A flash of fear had almost stopped her as the rickety red bus pulled up to the curb, but she hadn’t let it own her. She’d boarded the bus with all the other tourists and ridden into Mexico. All by herself.
The day had been wonderful, magical. She’d walked down the dingy, overcrowded streets, eating churros from the stands along the way. At lunchtime, she’d found a seat at a restaurant and eaten unrecognizable food and loved every bite, and as night had begun to fall and the neon sputtered to life, she’d understood why she’d always been afraid of traveling alone. It changed a person somehow— wasn’t that the point, after all? To go to a wildly different place and learn that you could negotiate for a silly trinket in a foreign language, and then to hold that item a little closer to your heart because it represented something of your self. Each peso she’d saved had somehow become an expression of how far she’d come. And when she finally had returned home that night, dragging her tired body up the stairs, snuggling up with her cranky daughter in her big king-size bed, she’d known that finally, at forty years of age, she had begun.
