Incidental Echoes of Things Past
by Earl Smith
Hartsfield-Jackson International hummed with the peculiar music of modern misery: the rolling of suitcases, the barely informative pronouncements of unseen entities, the tread of a thousand shoes, and, somewhere beyond the glass, the roar of engines whose scheduled arrivals and departures had been promised and only sporadically delivered upon.
Stuart regarded the departure board as though it had made an improper remark about his mother. DL 418 – New York (LGA) – Delayed. The red letters glowed with a serene indifference that he found personally offensive.
He had taken the corner table of the coffee shop, his jacket folded over the back of a chair with the precision of a man who meticulously folded everything. His tie was loosened exactly enough to announce irritation and not one degree further, for defeat was a condition in which Stuart declined to be seen. His coffee had gone cold. He drank it anyway, grimacing, as one does at the consequences of inattention.
For a man who ran his own hedge fund, who had clawed his way to the summit of a profession built upon predation and precision, the incompetence of an airline was not an inconvenience. It was an impertinence. In his multisyllabic life, it was a four-letter word.
He consulted his smartphone. No message from Ava. There seldom was. Since the divorce, his thirteen-year-old daughter had lived with her mother in San Francisco, which is to say on the farthest side of the continent and the far side of his attention. He wired the child support with punctual devotion and regarded this as a form of participation in her life. Her indifference irritated him. She might at least have acknowledged his virtual birthday card. It had been a remarkably handsome card, and had cost him nothing; though it did not occur to him that this was precisely the insult.
He began drafting an email to his operations team concerning an Asian play that had to be executed before the markets opened in New York. If he were to be imprisoned in a coffee shop, he might at least move money about the globe. After all, he saw it as the privilege of the very rich that they are never stranded, merely inconvenienced.
The bell above the café door chimed. He glanced up without interest, then something stirred in his memory.
She bought a coffee and surveyed the room. Her hair was shorter now and threaded with silver, which suited her better than she probably would admit. She wore a dark coat, sensible shoes, and a scarf at her throat. There were lines about her eyes, but the eyes themselves were unmistakable: watchful, and possessed of wary intelligence.
“Sam?”
She turned at the sound of his voice. Saw him. Paused. Then recognition arrived.
“Stuart?”
He rose too quickly and struck his knee against the table. “I… wow.”
She laughed softly. “Wow is right.”
“What on earth brings you here?”
“My flight to Paris is delayed. Weather. Everything is backed up.”
He exhaled sharply. “Tell me about it.”
They stood in the awkwardness peculiar to people who once knew each other and since then not at all, until he motioned to the empty chair across from him. “Join me?”
She hesitated for half a second. He noticed.
“You look… well,” said Stuart, leaning forward.
“So do you.”
He took that as an ungenerous compliment. He knew he looked expensive rather than well: the tailored suit, the gold watch, the sheen of a man long accustomed to first class.
She, on the other hand, saw it all as merely a varnish that wealth applies to a life of excess. She read the impatience in his face, the irritation in his eyes, the tightness about his mouth.
Her hands folded around her cup. He noticed a silver wedding ring, then noticed himself noticing.
“So,” he said, leaning back. “Thirty years.”
“Since graduation,” she said.
“Since you started ignoring me.”
Her eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Is that how you remember it?”
An old hurt returned and was, with effort, dismissed. He pretended to laugh, but the laugh was thin and unconvincing. “I was kidding.”
Silence settled upon the table.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said at last. “I’ve thought about you occasionally. Wondered how you got on.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Well. You were significant. Once a part of my life, and of my future.”
She looked down into her cup. “And you were my first real boyfriend.”
“Your first crush was that dweeb from band class.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “I was fourteen.”
“I remember how we began. You wrote me a note in English class. Said I made you feel safe.”
The memory startled her. She thought it was a curious thing to have one’s past returned with the creases still in it.
“I was a dramatic teenager,” she said lightly.
He leaned forward. “And what have you done with yourself all this time?”
She considered how to compress three decades into something palatable to a man in a hurry. “I’ve become an author.”
He blinked. “An author?”
“Yes.”
“Like… journalism?”
“Fiction and nonfiction.”
He smiled, recalibrating. “That’s impressive.”
“My first book came out three years ago.”
“What is it about?”
She held his gaze. “Growing up.”
He nodded. “In our town?”
“Yes.”
“And high school?”
“Yes.”
A faint unease crept over him. “Am I in it?”
She did not look away. “You are.”
“How prominently?”
“You were important to the story.”
He studied her as though she were a prospectus he had failed to read thoroughly and now wished he had. “What did you say about me?”
“The truth, as I remembered it.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It’s a memoir, Stuart.”
“And how did you describe me?”
Samantha paused, choosing her words with care. “As a boy who wanted to be rescued.”
The moment the sentence left her, she knew it would land harder than she’d intended.
He gave a short laugh. “Rescued? From what?”
“From your parents. From feeling invisible.”
He stiffened. His voice tightened. “You always thought you knew my family.”
She was surprised by the force of it, as if she had touched an old wound and found it not at all healed. “I knew what I saw,” she replied, a little defensively.
“You saw nothing,” he said, with rising heat.
She held her ground. “I saw a house in which no one spoke at dinner.”
He felt his neck go rigid. “You came over twice.”
“And both times your mother barely looked at you.”
He stared at her. “You’re constructing a narrative.”
“I’m remembering.”
“The two,” said Stuart, “are generally indistinguishable.”
His anger crept in cold. He paused, then waved it away with the hand that wore the watch. “Very well. And what does the narrative say became of me?”
“That you left before I could leave you.”
“That is amateur psychology.”
“It was my life.”
He laughed harshly. A couple at the next table glanced over.
“Well, you’ll be delighted to learn that I did perfectly well without your rescue.”
She waited.
“I run my own hedge fund,” he said. “Wall Street. Enormously successful.”
“I’m glad,” she said, hoping to ease the tension. “And are you married?”
“I have been married.” He paused. “Three times. All ended the same way. No fault. Incompatibility. Now I’m seeing a supermodel. More an accommodation than a relationship. She’s very high-quality arm candy.”
She blinked. “Three times?”
Stuart hesitated. “Shirley was the first.”
The name opened a small door in her memory. “I remember her.”
He watched her face. “We lasted all of five years.”
“And the others?”
“Shorter,” he said with a faint grin.
Three failed marriages, she thought, were a misfortune; to describe them so cheerfully was something worse.
“Do you have children?”
“A daughter from the latest.”
Something shifted in her expression, something soft and painful.
“How old?”
“Thirteen.”
“Does she live in New York?”
“With her mother in San Francisco.”
“And do you see her often?”
“When schedules align. It’s difficult.”
She heard the callousness in it, and did not press.
“That’s wonderful,” she said gently.
He bristled at her tone. “It’s complicated.”
“Of course.”
“And you?” he shot back. “Marriage? Children?”
She folded her hands, as if steadying something within. “I’m married.”
“Too?”
“My editor.”
He snorted. “That sounds like a cliché.”
“It probably is.”
“Is he American?”
“French.”
“Naturally.”
She smiled faintly and let it pass. “His name is David.”
“And he is what, an intellectual?”
“Yes.”
“And you live in Paris.”
“We do.”
“Modestly, I assume.”
She heard the edge in it. “Comfortably.”
“And children?”
She met his eyes. The pain came back, and this time she let it. “No.”
He waited.
“I went through menopause a few years ago. Just after I met David.”
He nodded once, too quickly. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged lightly. “It’s only biology.”
“But you wanted…?”
“Yes.”
The word hung between them.
“You always told me you weren’t sure you wanted children,” he said.
“I was frightened. I didn’t want to get pregnant like some of our classmates. I watched their lives come apart. It terrified me.”
“You were cautious about everything.”
“My parents fought constantly,” she said quietly. “I believed all love was a minefield.”
He remembered it: the slammed doors, the nights she had telephoned him in tears.
“You kept me at arm’s length,” he said.
“I was afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of what happens when people get too close.”
He leaned in. “I needed you, Sam.”
Her jaw tightened.
“I was drowning at home,” he went on. “You were the one place I felt seen. And you held back.”
She stared at him. “I was a child.”
“You were warm with everyone else.”
“I was careful with everyone else.”
“But especially with me,” Stuart grumbled.
She exhaled slowly, her voice growing taut. “You wanted me to mend what your parents had broken. I couldn’t even mend myself.”
“I wanted you to love me.”
“I did. As a child. I loved you as well as a child could, which is to say as well as I was able.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
The words fell like a verdict.
She felt anger stir. “You threw me over for Shirley.”
“That was senior year. You and I were falling apart.”
Her voice hardened. “You cut me off.”
“Because I felt you pulling away!”
“I was terrified,” she shot back. “Every time we got close, I waited for the explosion.”
“I was not your parents!” His voice was rising.
“I didn’t understand that then!”
A man in a security uniform approached.
“Folks,” he said evenly, “I’m going to need you to keep it down.”
“Sorry,” Samantha said quickly.
Stuart nodded curtly.
The guard lingered a moment, then moved on. Silence returned and sat between them.
Stuart stared at the table. Samantha traced the rim of her cup.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“We are adults. Quarrelling like we’re eighteen.”
“Perhaps we never finished.”
He looked at her sharply.
“I’m not blaming you,” she added. “We didn’t understand ourselves.”
“I understood that I loved you.”
She softened. “I know.”
“And you wrote about me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Without asking.”
“It was my story,” said Samantha.
“I was part of it.”
“And you’re angry.”
“I don’t care to be dissected.”
“You prefer to be in control.”
He laughed harshly. “You always did that. Reduced everything to a thesis.”
“It’s how I make sense of things,” she said quietly.
“And how do you make sense of this?” he demanded, then lowered his voice. “Of meeting again after thirty years?”
She considered. “Chance.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes. Or perhaps a chance for closure.”
“No grand design? No destiny?”
She shook her head gently. “Life isn’t a novel, Stuart. But now and then we are given an opportunity. The only question is whether we take it.”
He leaned back, chastened and irritated: the two emotions that most resemble regret in a man of his type.
After a while she said quietly, “Tell me about your daughter.”
He stiffened. “Why?”
“Because you’re her father.”
“Her name is Ava, and I provide for her.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked away. “We’re not close.”
“Why?”
“Her mother has turned her against me.”
“Now that,” she said, smiling faintly, “is definitely a cliché.”
His eyes flashed. “You know nothing about it.”
“Then tell me.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“She thinks I care more about work,” he said finally.
“Do you?”
“My work is who I am.”
“And Ava?”
“She’ll understand someday.”
Samantha felt something ache within her. “Children don’t need to understand. They need to feel chosen. Cherished.”
He stared at her. “You have no children. So, don’t lecture me.”
The cruelty was quick and reflexive, as the cruelty of the unhappy always is.
She absorbed it. “You’re right. I don’t.”
She did not flinch, though it cost her something to hold still. It is easy to forgive a cruelty aimed at one’s pride; it is far harder to forgive the kind that finds, unerringly, the place where one bleeds in private. But she had spent years bestowing her pity upon invented people, and it would have been a poor sort of novelist who withheld it from a real one. What she saw across the table was no titan of finance, but a tired man of forty-eight who had learned to wound first because he had once been wounded without warning.
Silence fell between them again.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment.
She nodded.
“I envy you,” she said suddenly.
He blinked. “You envy me?”
“You have a daughter.”
“That’s hardly…”
“I would have loved a child,” she interrupted. “To pour myself into someone.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “It isn’t all sentiment.”
“I know.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I kept a list of names,” she said, almost to herself. “For years. Long after I had stopped being sensible about it. I kept it in a drawer, the way some people keep the letters of the dead.”
He said nothing, which was, for once, precisely the right thing to say.
“I cross the road to avoid the children’s shops on the rue de Seine. And it isn’t the shops that undo me. It’s a stranger’s pram in the Luxembourg Gardens. A little girl asleep on the Métro with her mouth open.” She turned her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “People assume that sort of grief makes one bitter toward other people’s children. It has only made me tender toward every child I pass, which is a great deal harder to carry.”
He looked at the table, and answered as a man who had been handed something too heavy to hold.
“It’s exhausting. It’s expensive. It complicates everything.”
She smiled faintly. “As does any love worth the name.”
He rubbed his temples. “You say that so easily.”
“It isn’t easy,” she said. “David and I worked for it. We still do.”
“Worked, how?”
“I had to unlearn fear. He had to be patient. He challenged me. And he stayed.”
“You’re implying I wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “We were children then.”
“I would have stayed,” he insisted.
She studied him. “You left.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
He had no answer.
“Do you remember the lake?” she asked.
He looked up, startled. “Senior skip day.”
“You pushed me in.”
“You shouted that you couldn’t swim.”
“I could. I only wanted attention.”
“You clung to me like a life raft.”
She smiled at the memory. “In that moment, I trusted you.”
Something in him softened. They sat with it, as one sits with a very old, very fragile relative.
“Perhaps we ought to remember the good parts,” she said gently.
“Do you remember our first kiss?” she asked.
He looked at her as though she had produced a document he believed destroyed.
“Behind the gymnasium. After the winter concert.”
“It was snowing.”
“It was sleeting. You told everyone it was snowing.”
“In my version it was snowing,” she said, “and it has been snowing ever since.”
He laughed, a real laugh this time, and was visibly annoyed at being surprised into it.
“You missed my mouth.”
“I did not.”
“You got my chin. I had to rearrange the entire proceedings.”
“You were very gallant about it.” She smiled. “You never told anyone, either. I only understood much later that was a kindness.”
The tension left his shoulders by degrees, like a man setting down luggage he had carried so long that he had forgotten it was not part of his arms.
“I had it all arranged, you know,” he said. “I used to lie awake and furnish the future.”
“You were going to be a lawyer, the kind who wins,” she said with a smile. “I was going to be a poet, and then, when poetry proved impractical, a novelist. We were going to take a flat in New York above a bookshop, so small that we would have to take turns crossing the room.”
“And a dog called Dorian,” he added almost playfully.
“Because you thought it sounded distinguished.”
“I was sixteen. I thought it sounded like a man who had never been disappointed.”
She laughed. Then he said, more quietly, “And children.”
She looked up.
“A houseful,” he continued. “You didn’t believe me, but I had it all worked out. One rule. At dinner, everyone speaks.”
The sentence went through her. She remembered the silent table, and understood, thirty years later, that at sixteen he had been designing the exact opposite of his home.
“I told you I wasn’t sure about children,” she said.
“You told me many times.”
“I was sure, Stuart. I was sure that I would lose them. It seemed more prudent to pretend I didn’t want them.” She gave a small, rueful smile. “I was very good at prudence. It’s one talent I regret.”
For a while neither of them spoke. Then she said, “And then we ended. I have never known quite how to describe it.”
“Don’t,” he said. But it had no force.
“It was the parking lot behind the school. You had been silent for a week, and I had been burying myself in exams as though they were a siege, and neither of us would say what was happening. And then you said it was over.”
“I felt you leaving.” His eyes were fixed on the table. “The next night I stood outside your house for a long time. Did you know that? Your light was on. You didn’t come to the window.”
“I didn’t know you were there.”
“No,” said Stuart. “That was rather the point.”
She let the silence do its work. “Do you remember what you said to me? You said I was a coward who mistook fear for virtue. That I would spend my life avoiding love because I was too frightened to live it.”
“And then,” Sam continued, “you got angry and said that no one was ever going to make you feel like nobody ever again. That you would never again wait to be left. That if anyone was going to leave, it would be you, and first.”
“I was seventeen and lashing out.”
“You were,” she agreed. “And you seem to have kept that promise admirably.” She glanced at the gold watch, and thought of three marriages and a daughter on the far side of a continent. “Rather too well, I think.”
It was true, and she said it gently, with such evident sorrow that he could not take offence.
“You were abandoned,” she went on. “I knew it even then, and I was too afraid to say so. I did leave you, Stuart. Not in the way you said, but I left you alone in that doorway, and I am sorry for it.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face that had been shut moved slightly.
“Don’t,” he said again. “You’ll make me forgive you, and I’m not at all sure I can
manage it.”
They both smiled, tired of the tension.
The loudspeaker crackled. “Delta flight 418 to New York LaGuardia is now boarding.”
“That’s me,” he said.
She nodded.
They stood. Faced each other, unsure of how to end it, finding none.
“I’m glad you’re… happy,” he said awkwardly.
“I am,” she replied. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“I’ve already found it.”
She tilted her head slightly. She did not believe him, and he knew it.
He hesitated. “Don’t write about this.”
She almost smiled. “I promise.”
“Samantha.”
It was half warning, half plea.
“Goodbye, Stuart,” she said, and touched his sleeve.
He took up his jacket, then paused. “Take care, Sam.”
He walked away without looking back.
She watched him disappear.
The coffee shop felt suddenly empty, as rooms do when the only interesting person has left them, even if he was not very interesting and she was not very sorry. Outside the windows, rain streaked the tarmac and blurred the lights into trembling halos.
Her throat tightened. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, but the tears slipped through, quiet and contained.
Not for the boy he had been. Not even for the man he had become.
For the waste.
For the daughter whose father gave money in lieu of love.
For the child she would never hold.
For the years it had taken her to learn that love may be untidy and still constant.
She reached into her bag and drew out her notebook.
She wrote of the cold coffee, the security guard, the way Stuart’s anger had flared and receded, the first kiss, the parking lot goodbye. She wrote of David, steady and patient, her harbour in any storm. She wrote of regret: not as bitterness, but as the ache that proves something mattered.
It’s so unfair, she thought. A child unloved by a man who measures love in wealth; a woman who would have measured it in bedtime stories, scraped knees, and quiet evenings together. Fate, as ever, distributes its gifts with the care of a drunken bursar.
She pictured David at home in Paris, reading in bed, his glasses sliding down his nose. A rush of gratitude went through her.
She thought of the girl in San Francisco, thirteen years old, glancing at a telephone for a message that did not come; and she thought of a boy in the dark outside a house, waiting twenty minutes beneath a lit window. They were, she saw, the same child, waiting at different addresses.
In the margin of the page she wrote one more line, for a girl she would never meet: Your father is not a villain. He is a boy who stopped waiting at the door and never came back inside.
She wiped her cheeks and went on writing.