“I don’t know what happened to Dean,” I said, “and that’s up to the detectives to figure out. We might not ever know. But I’m certain about one thing.”
Gabriel rolled to his side and faced me in the glow of moonlight in the window.
“I used to think he sat on a pedestal,” I confessed. “I admired him for how he overcame difficult circumstances and didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistakes. But he’d had an affair with a client, and he got her pregnant, and whether or not he was responsible for her death, he abandoned her to be with me. What does that say about his ethics? And if he did that and kept it from me, he obviously wasn’t the man I thought he was. Our relationship wasn’t as authentic as I believed it to be. Maybe he did just want me for my money.”
“No,” Gabriel softly said. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
I rolled to face him as well. “If there was ever any doubt in your mind about me still dreaming of Dean or wishing he would come back, you can let go of that. Even if he fell through the ceiling right now, I wouldn’t want to be with him. You’re the only man I’ll ever want, Gabriel. I swear it. Whatever I was hanging on to . . . it’s over now.”
Gabriel pulled me close and held me in his embrace.
An hour later, while he slept soundly, I lay in anguish, rubbing a hand over my belly in small circles. I had told Gabriel that it was over, and I wanted it to be, but I couldn’t get over the fact that Dean had been sleeping with a client when we first met.
I took a deep dive into my memories of our first few weeks together—the walk in Central Park, the cruise up the Hudson River with my family, the trip to Miami. Everything about Dean had felt so real; our connection was soulful. Yet my parents never liked him. My father did everything in his power to stop me from loving Dean. What had they been able to see that I couldn’t?
If only Dean had opened up to me about what happened with Melanie Brown. He should have known I wouldn’t judge him. I would have tried to understand. Why hadn’t he told me? Did he think I was like my father? That I was unforgiving or that I demanded a spotless past? And what else had he hidden from me?
I stared at my closet door, and with every moment that passed, it grew harder to suppress my anger. How could Dean have lied to me about something so important? I wanted to pull that cedar box down from the shelf and take a blowtorch to it. Or watch it go up in flames in the fireplace downstairs. Gabriel would probably help me light the fire if I asked him to.
For a long while, I lay there fantasizing about that, but in the end, I didn’t burn it. I rose from bed the next morning, fixed breakfast for Gabriel, and kissed him goodbye. Then I got dressed, took Rose to school, and dropped Joel off at my mother’s place for a few hours.
When I returned home, I went upstairs, dragged the chair to the closet, and pulled the cedar box down one last time. I didn’t open it because I couldn’t bear to look at Dean’s penmanship on the cards and letters or any photographs of him smiling with his arm around me. Nor could I bear to look at my perfect happiness in those pictures—because it wasn’t real. I had been charmed and duped. And now I was embarrassed by my blindness.
I carried the box down to the damp storage room in the basement and stuck it in the farthest corner behind a cardboard box full of old books that I hadn’t been able to part with years ago. They were musty now, and I never thought of them, so it seemed like a good place to store this evidence of my brief marriage to a man named Dean Robinson. I would keep it only because Rose was a part of this, too, and one day, she might want to know something about her real father.
That was the only reason I kept it. If not for Rose, I would have torched it.
2012
NEW YORK
CHAPTER 29
OLIVIA
It was a warm Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and I was on my knees in the backyard, planting tulip bulbs. Recently, the flower beds had burst into a spectacular rainbow of color for the autumn season, and my perennials were blooming gorgeously. Lavender-blue asters and pink and red sedums lined the southern edge of the yard. This was the spot I had chosen to plant a mix of tulips in anticipation of another color extravaganza next spring.
Sitting back on my heels, I wiped the perspiration from my brow with the back of my wrist and looked up at the clear blue sky. Church bells rang somewhere in the distance, and the faint sound of Gabriel’s saxophone reached me from the basement, though the windows were closed. This morning he was playing “Autumn Leaves,” which seemed appropriate. I sat for a moment in my faded denim jeans, looking around while I listened to the music.
A bumblebee roamed among the chrysanthemums, and the grass was pleasantly cool and slightly damp beneath my knees. The sensation lured me into the past, flooded my thoughts with memories of motherhood: lying on my belly in the grass with Joel and Ethan while we examined the vibrant blades up close and picked the best ones to blow like a horn between our thumbs; Ethan zooming down the little plastic slide that Gabriel had picked up at a yard sale down the street; Rose helping me water the plants in the garden, then setting up the sprinkler to frolic in with Ziggy and her younger brothers.
Today, Ethan—now fourteen—was at a friend’s house, playing video games no doubt, and Joel was with his girlfriend, Angie. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl who played on the badminton team at school, while Joel was involved in soccer. They were together almost all the time and very much in love. Occasionally, Gabriel and I worried that they were getting too serious. They were only seventeen, in their final year of high school, and now they were applying to the same colleges in order to stay together after graduation.
Whenever Gabriel and I discussed it, the conclusion was the same. We liked Angie. She was a lovely girl, and she made Joel happy. Why not let them be? Because it certainly hadn’t turned out well for my father when he tried to control my life. Sometimes I wondered what might have happened if he had expressed his concerns differently or given me the freedom to figure things out on my own. Maybe I wouldn’t have dashed so quickly into Dean’s arms and run off to Miami with him. But that was ancient history now, water under the bridge.
As for Rose, she turned twenty-one earlier this year, and she still struggled with what to do with her life. She had earned a degree in biology and was working in a commercial lab while sharing an apartment with some roommates from school. Each time we saw her, she expressed dissatisfaction with her job because she was a people person and wanted to do something that involved more human interaction. Some days, she wanted to quit her job and go back to school, but she kept changing her mind about what program she wanted to take.
“She’ll work it out in time,” Gabriel said, never seeming to worry about it much.
I hoped so. I just wanted her to be happy and fulfilled, but I knew it was rare to have everything figured out when you were twenty-one. When I looked back at the person I was at that age, I could see I’d had no clue what I might want later in life. If someone had told me that I would lose interest in making films and choose a traditional, domestic lifestyle as a full-time mother, I might not have believed it.
And now here I was at fifty, spending a Sunday morning with my hands in the dirt in my backyard, in the same house that Gabriel and I had purchased together shortly before we were married. It was quieter now, without Rose and Ziggy, who we’d lost in 2001 after a brief illness due to a tumor in his belly. He was fifteen.