“I forgot.” I always forgot. Sometimes I thought I forgot on purpose. She never remembered my birthday, either. “Is everybody okay?”
“I guess so,” he said. And then nothing, for a few minutes, silence and the swish of passing cars, and then, “But I think something’s wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“Something’s wrong. I don’t know exactly what. I didn’t like to ask.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because. Because when I asked to speak to Tweety, to wish her happy birthday, he said she was out.”
“Is that weird? People go out.”
“But then later, I said when will she be home, so I could call again”—he’s very diligent, my father; he was, after all, in insurance all his life—“and he said, in a very strange way, that he didn’t know. That it was probably easier for her to call me.”
“What’s weird about that, then?”
“There was something peculiar in his voice. It was … gravelly.”
“I don’t know what that implies.”
“Rough. His voice was rough, like he was upset.” As far as I could tell—I was driving—my father hadn’t once turned his head to look at me, but he did so now, and he looked wary, his eyes narrow, and he said, “Besides, has Tweety ever called you?”
“Me? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Not in more than twenty years.”
“That’s my point. She’s never called me, either. Even when your mother was dying, she never called.”
“No, I remember.” I’d complained of it: “What kind of family is this?” I’d asked.
“So either he’s too upset to know what he’s saying; or he’s lying on purpose; or she’s gone through some radical change … I can’t make a story of it where there isn’t something wrong between them.”
This wasn’t like my father. It was more like me. “So what sorts of stories have you got?”
“She’s left him.”
“Of course!” I almost said, “You wish!”
“Or she’s sick.”
“Sick?”
“Any kind is possible—physical, mental, you know.”
“Okay.”
“… or the baby’s sick.”
“The baby’s not sick, Dad. And she’s not really a baby anymore.”
“Or they’ve had a big fight and she’s run off.”
“Wow. You’ve got a whole soap opera going for them. That’s wild.”
“Or they could be worried about money—”
I started to laugh. “Dad, this is whacked. You’re talking insanity here.”
“Am I?”
“You’ve got too much time on your hands. If you’re worried something’s wrong, call Matthew and ask him. He’ll probably laugh at you, but he is your son, and he’ll only laugh at you in a nice way. You’ll feel much better.”
“You’re probably right.” My father cleared his throat and recrossed his ever-veinier hands and looked back to the front again, out the windshield. I could tell from how still he was that this had been bothering him a lot, and that now he was relieved; and of course, later, when he spoke to Matthew and found that Tweety had cracked a tooth that day on an olive pit and had rushed off to the dentist, he would be able frankly to laugh.
During the afternoon in Rockport—a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food; followed by a tortoise’s stroll along the uneven breakwater to watch the fishermen and the furious, swooping gulls and a couple of intrepid surfers in satanic glistening wetsuits as they tackled the briny surf, a surf upon which an unsettling gray scum foamed, toxically; while Aunt Baby limped and leaned, in her powdery malodor, upon my arm; and my father, in his businessman’s solitude and navy cotton cable sweater, ambled glumly behind us—I thought repeatedly about this unlikely conversation in the car, and about my advice to him. It was obvious; if you wanted transparency, you had to find the courage to be honest. This was in itself no guarantee that others would be honest with you; but what choice did you have?
I should have spoken to Sirena about my feelings months before, but I’d been afraid of possibility, and also of its limitations. It had been easier to live in my dream, and now it was impossible to speak to her. I must, I resolved, reach as best I could for what was real; which meant I had to telephone Skandar, and ask him outright what exactly was going on.
Once I’d resolved to do this, I became impatient for it. I caught myself being snappish with Aunt Baby: I wished she’d walk faster, speak more quickly, be more interesting, that the day itself, which seemed—compared to my regular life, in itself hardly thrilling—mired in a failure to progress, would just be over. But it wasn’t until