The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves Page 36

Robert didn't move out right away, and neither did I--in fact, I had no intention of uprooting my mother and children or leaving the house I'd dreamed about and come to love and that my mother had helped us buy. After I broke that vase, Robert collected his pile of letters, put them in one of his pockets, and went out without getting so much as a toothbrush or a change of clothes. I might have felt better about him even then if he'd gone upstairs and prudently packed a suitcase.

I didn't see Robert for several days, and I didn't know where he was. I told my mother only that we'd had a bad quarrel and needed some time off, and she was concerned but also neutral--I saw that she thought it would blow over. I tried to convince myself that he was staying with Mary, wherever she lived, but I couldn't shake the feeling I'd had that he'd been telling the truth when he'd said so bitterly, "She's dead." He didn't seem capable of real mourning. That was almost the worst of it. The fact that the affair had ended with her death didn't ease my hurt. In fact, it added a sense of haunting to my days, of eeriness, that I couldn't shake.

One afternoon that week when I was reading--not very attentively--on the front steps and my mother was doing our mending in the chair on the terrace and we were both watching the children overwater the garden, Robert drove up without any fanfare and got out of his car. I could see that he had some things stowed in the back of it--easels and portfolios and boxes. My heart knotted in my throat. He came up the front walk and made a detour to kiss my mother and ask how she was. I knew she was telling him that she felt fine, although I'd had to take her to the doctor for another dizzy spell the day before. And although she now knew he'd all but moved out.

Then Robert came slowly up the walk toward me, and for a moment I saw the sum total of his presence, his big body that was not lean and not heavy, the broad movements of muscle under his shirt and pants. His clothes seemed grubbier than ever, and he had been more than usually careless with paint, so that his rolled sleeves bore flecks of red and his khakis were smudged with white and gray. I could see the skin of his face and neck beginning to age, the lines under his eyes, the deep brown-green of his gaze, his thick hair, the angelic curls threaded with silver, his largeness, his distance, his self-sufficiency, his loneliness. I wanted to jump up and throw myself at him, but that was what he should have been doing for me. Instead, I sat where I was, feeling smaller than ever, framed, in a frame--a little, straight-haired, too-clean person he had forgotten to look after in his big quest for art, an essential nobody. He had forgotten even to tell me what his quest was for.

He paused at the steps. "I'm just going to get a few things."

"Fine," I said.

"Do you want me to come back? I miss you and I miss the kids."

"If you came back," I said in a low voice that I tried to keep from trembling, "would you really come back, or would you still be living with a ghost?"

I thought Robert would get angry again, but after a moment he said simply, "Leave it alone, Kate. You can't understand."

And I knew that if I shouted something like "I can't understand? I can't understand?" I would never stop shouting at him, even in front of the children and my mother. Instead I closed my fingers in my book so that they hurt, and I let him go on up the steps and come back down after a while with the proverbial suitcase, actually an old duffel bag from one of our closets.

"I'll be gone a few weeks. I'll call you," he said. He went and kissed the kids and threw Oscar up in the air, letting their wet clothes dampen his shirt. He lingered. I hated him even for his pain. Finally he got into the car and drove away. Only then did I wonder how he could leave his job for weeks at a time. It hadn't occurred to me yet that he might stop teaching, too.

As it turned out, that was one of the last days my mother felt like herself. Her doctor called us into his office to tell us she had leukemia, far gone. She could have chemo, but that would probably cause her more discomfort than anything else. She opted instead to accept a brochure for hospice care, and pressed my arm as we left, to save me from my own grief.