“You’re not my dad. I mean you might be my father. But you’re not my dad. You know what I mean?”
Myron had managed to nod.
“But... but maybe you can still be around.”
“Around?”
“Yeah.” That winning smile. “Around. You know.”
Age thirteen. So damn wise already.
In the present day, Jeremy said, “Myron?”
“What?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Huh?”
“Giving me those googly eyes.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“I get it. You can’t help it. It’s sweet, really. Except we need to make this fast.” He took the seat across from Myron and leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, just like...
“You look good,” Myron managed to say.
“So do you,” he said. “How’s Terese?”
“She’s good. Busy.”
Jeremy nodded. Then, as was his wont, he took over. “Tell me everything.”
Myron did. Jeremy had been a sickly kid. He’d been diagnosed with Fanconi anemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. That was the reason Emily had eventually been forced to confess the truth about Jeremy’s paternity — she’d been searching for a donor. For the first thirteen years of the boy’s life, Emily had kept Jeremy’s paternity a secret, neither telling Myron he had a son nor telling Greg the boy he was raising was biologically not. That wasn’t so much a secret as a lie, but the big shock was that Greg knew the truth:
“You remember my father?” Greg had asked Myron. “Screaming on the sidelines like a lunatic?”
“Yes.”
“I ended up looking just like him. Spitting image of my old man. He was my blood. And he was the cruelest son of a bitch I ever knew. Blood never meant much to me.”
It was a shocking moment for Myron — and maybe the beginning of the strange bond between the two men. Greg’s marriage unraveled; his role as Jeremy’s father did not.
But while the illness was purportedly gone, Fanconi anemia never fully leaves. There was still some paleness to Jeremy’s skin. He had to frequently screen for new cancers, and part of the kid’s wisdom and insight, Myron didn’t doubt, came with living his entire life under this mortality umbrella. So far, the bone marrow transplant had held. It might hold forever. But no one knew for sure.
When Myron finished filling him in, Jeremy had follow-up questions, drilling deeper into some of the crazier details. When he was done with that, Jeremy asked, “So what’s our next step?”
“There is no next step. Greg doesn’t want to see me.”
“Forget that. He’ll see us.” Then he called up. “Mom?”
Emily appeared at the top of the stairs. “Everything okay?”
“Can Myron stay tonight in the guest room?”
“I guess so, sure.”
“Great. You can borrow some of my clothes. We’ll head in to see Dad in the morning.”
Emily had a guest wing more than a guest room. Right now it was too dark to see the ocean out the window, the moon barely a slit, but Myron could hear the waves crashing. He lay on his back and closed his eyes. A few minutes later, he heard the light knock on the door and before he could say, “Come in,” Emily opened it. The hall light was still behind her, so she stood in the doorway in perfect silhouette.
“Hey,” she whispered.
“Hey.”
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Tired.”
Emily stepped into the room and sat on the bed. “It’s lonely out here,” she said. “This big house.”
“I imagine you have a lot of guests.”
“Oh, I have my friends. And sure, I go on a lot of dates. But it’s been a long time since I felt a connection.”
She still wore the very-white nightgown. She looked down at him.
Myron said, “Emily.”
“I know.” She smiled. “It wouldn’t be cheating, you know.”
“Yeah, it would.”
“It would just be something between you and me.”
“I’m not sure Terese would see it that way.”
“She might. We have something. Apart from her. You know this.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I hurt you.”
“A long time ago.”
“I loved you. I don’t think I ever loved anyone as much as you.”
“We were in college. It was a long time ago.”
“Does it feel that long ago to you?”
Myron said nothing.
“That’s the funny thing, isn’t it? I read a line once: ‘You are always seventeen waiting for your life to begin.’ It’s true, don’t you think?”
“In some ways.”
“You were just...” Emily looked up, blinked away the wetness in her eyes. “Back then, you were so sure of what you wanted. Like you had it all figured out. I was your first real girlfriend. We’d get married. We’d buy a house in the suburbs and have two-point-six kids and a barbecue in the yard and a basketball hoop in the driveway. Just like your family. You had it all planned out, but to me, it felt...”
“Claustrophobic,” Myron said, knowing there was truth in her words. “Suffocating.”
“In part, I suppose. But it was more like I’d won the audition to play this part in your life.”
Myron shook his head.
“You don’t agree,” she said.
“I loved you, Em. I may have been young. I may have been romantically immature. But I loved you.”
She swallowed, looked off. “Do you remember the last time we had sex?”
The night before her wedding. The night they conceived Jeremy. “It would be hard to forget.”
“It changed everything, didn’t it? Do you feel shame?”
“I feel a lot of things.”
“I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had said yes when you proposed. I would have been too much drama for you, but you’d never have left me. That’s not how you’re built. Do you want to hear something?”
“Can I say no?”
She smiled and lay down on the bed next to Myron. Her back was to him so he couldn’t see her face. She curled her knees up.
“If I could go back in time to the moment you asked me, I’d still say no.”
Myron stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling. He could feel the heat coming from her body.
“Because if I had said yes, we wouldn’t have slept together the night before my wedding. And we wouldn’t have had Jeremy. Oh, I’m sure we would have great kids. Wonderful adults now. We’d be proud as all hell of them. But there’d be no Jeremy. Think about that.”
Myron closed his eyes. Emily rolled over and put her hand on his chest. Myron didn’t move. She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek. Then she rolled away so that her back was to him again.
“Is it okay if I just stay here and sleep? I won’t—”
“Yeah,” Myron said, his voice thick. “You can stay.”
Chapter Eighteen
Early the next morning Myron and Jeremy headed back to New York City in Emily’s car. Myron drove.
“So,” Jeremy said. “About last night...”
Myron’s grip on the wheel tightened.
“Mom probably thought she was being quiet when she tiptoed back from the guest wing. She forgets I’m military.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She just fell asleep.”
“If you think I’m upset by it—”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. She slept next to me. That’s all.”
“Okay.”
“We will always be connected,” Myron said.
“Let me guess. Because of me?”
“It’s a good reason to be connected.”