“He was so proud of you two,” Elliot said. “He kept pulling out his phone and showing me pictures. Sophie’s high school graduation. You at the beach in a big floppy hat. You and him on your twentieth anniversary at some Italian restaurant.”
“Luigi’s,” I whispered. “He took me to Luigi’s.”
Elliot nodded.
“He was so happy that day. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I have a brother. I can’t believe I have a brother.’ Like a little kid on Christmas morning.” He looked down at the photo on the table. “And then he asked me about our father.”
The piano music stopped. The pianist was taking a break. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the ocean through the window, a low, steady hush against the side of the ship.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
Elliot took a long breath.
“I told him the truth,” he said. “I told him our father died in 2003. In a nursing home in Dayton, Ohio. He was fifty-nine years old.”
He tapped the photograph gently with one finger.
“I told him our father had Huntington’s disease.”
I had heard of it. Barely. Something you heard about on a TV medical show or read about in a waiting-room magazine. Something rare. Something that happened to other people.
“What is that?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
Elliot’s eyes met mine. They were Greg’s eyes. Full of the same sad kindness Greg’s had been full of the night he walked out of our kitchen.
“It’s a disease that slowly destroys your brain,” he said. “Your body stops doing what you tell it to. You start dropping things. Your hands move on their own. You get angry for no reason. You forget things. You lose your balance. Then you lose your ability to walk. To talk. To swallow. To recognize the people you love.”
My hands were shaking so hard now that I had to put them flat on the tablecloth to keep them still.
“And it’s genetic,” he said quietly. “If one of your parents has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it too.”
I stared at him.
Dropped coffee mugs. A spilled glass of wine at our anniversary dinner. Car keys falling out of his hand over and over again.
His knee bouncing at church. His fingers tapping on the table.
Shouting at a waiter over cold eggs, and then sitting in the car with his head on the steering wheel, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“No,” I said.
It came out of me like a breath. Not even a word. Just a sound.
“Claire,” Elliot said.
“No. No, no, no.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s fine. He’s just stressed. He’s fifty-two. Men get forgetful at fifty-two. He’s fine.”
But even while I was saying it, I knew. I knew it the way you know a storm is coming before you see the first cloud. I could feel it in my bones.
“After I told him about our father,” Elliot said, “he asked me if I’d been tested. I told him yes. I got tested when I was thirty, after Dad died. I told him I came back negative. I didn’t get the gene. I got lucky.”
He paused.
“Greg went and got tested in June.”
The personal days, I thought. Denise had said he took a few personal days this summer.
“Genetic counseling first,” Elliot went on. “Then the blood test. Then you wait. A few weeks. I drove up and sat with him in the parking lot of the clinic when he went back for the results. He wouldn’t let me come inside. He said he needed to hear it by himself.”
I knew the answer before he said it. But I still needed to hear it.
“He came out of that building about forty minutes later,” Elliot said. “He got in my car, and he sat there, and he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he just said, ‘Well. Now I know.’”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“He’s positive,” Elliot said. “He has the gene. And the doctor said some of the things he’d been noticing, the clumsiness, the mood swings, the fidgeting… she thinks it’s already started. Early stages. Very early. But started.”
I don’t know when I started crying. I just know that by then, the tears were running down my face and dripping off my chin onto that beautiful blue dress Lynn had made me pack.
A couple at the next table glanced over at us and then quickly looked away.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” I said. My voice was shaking so hard I could barely get the words out. “Why didn’t he come home and tell me? We’ve been married twenty-two years. I’m his wife. Why would he hide this from me?”
Elliot looked down at the photograph of his father for a long time.
“Because of me,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what I meant when I said I’m the reason.” He swallowed hard. “That day at the diner, Greg asked me what it was like. Taking care of our father. And I told him. All of it. I didn’t hold anything back. I didn’t know then that he might have it too. I just thought he wanted to know about the father he never met.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I told him about my mother,” he said. “Her name was Carol. She was a nurse. She was the strongest, funniest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. And she took care of my father for fourteen years.”
His voice cracked.
“She fed him with a spoon. She bathed him. She changed him like a baby. She lifted him out of bed every morning until she wrecked her back so badly she needed surgery. She spent every penny they’d ever saved. She sold our house. She lost every friend she had, because she never had time to see anyone. And at the end, he didn’t even know who she was. He’d scream at her. He’d call her by his first wife’s name. Greg’s mother’s name.”
I closed my eyes.
“My mother died two years after him,” Elliot said. “She was only sixty-one. The doctors said it was her heart. But I’ve always believed she just wore it out. She gave every single bit of it to him, and there was nothing left for her.”
The pianist came back and started playing again. Something slow and sad. I wanted to scream at him to stop.
“I told Greg all of that,” Elliot said quietly. “Every bit of it. And when he got his results in July, he called me that night. He was drunk. I’d never heard him drunk before. And he said to me, ‘Elliot, I won’t do that to Claire. I won’t let her become your mother. I won’t let her spend fifteen years wiping my chin and watching me forget her name.’”
I couldn’t breathe.
“I told him he was being crazy,” Elliot said. “I told him he had to tell you. That you had a right to know. That you might want to make your own choice. He hung up on me.”
“He decided,” I whispered. “He just… decided. For me.”
“He thought if he told you the truth, you’d never leave him. And he was right, wasn’t he?”
“Of course I wouldn’t leave him!”
“That’s exactly why he did it this way.” Elliot leaned forward. “He thought if he told you he’d stopped loving you, you’d be hurt. You’d be angry. But you’d move on. You’d heal. You’re only fifty, Claire. He told me that. He said, ‘She’s only fifty. She’s still got her whole life. She can still find somebody who’ll grow old with her.’”
I don’t think we’re meant to grow old together.
That’s what he’d said. Standing in our kitchen with his coat still on.
He hadn’t been lying.
He’d been telling me the truth in the cruelest, most loving way he knew how.
“And Sophie?” I asked. “What about our daughter?”
Elliot’s face went very still.
“That’s the other reason I’m here,” he said.
I felt like the floor of the ship had dropped out from under me.
Fifty-fifty, I thought. If one of your parents has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance.
“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, God. Sophie.”
“Greg didn’t want to tell her,” Elliot said. “He said she’s twenty years old. She’s got finals. She’s got her whole life. He said he’d tell her someday, when she’s older. When she’s settled. Maybe when she’s thinking about having kids of her own.” He shook his head. “But I grew up watching my father fall apart without knowing why. Nobody told me anything until I was a teenager. I spent years terrified, and I didn’t even know what I was terrified of. I don’t want that for my niece.”
My niece. He said it so naturally. Like he’d been practicing it.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why come find me here? On a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean?”
He almost laughed.
“Greg called me a few weeks ago. He said your sister had booked you a cruise. He sounded so relieved. He said, ‘Good. She needs it. She’ll be okay.’ He told me the name of the ship.” Elliot shrugged. “I live in Tampa. I own a construction company. I booked the last cabin they had left the next morning.”
“Why didn’t you just call me? Or come to the house?”
“Because if I’d shown up at your front door, you’d have called Greg. And Greg would have told you I was a crazy man and to slam the door in my face.” He paused. “And honestly, Claire, I almost didn’t do it at all. I’ve been on this ship for four days. I’ve walked past you three times. I sat two tables away from you at breakfast yesterday. I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking, who am I to blow up this woman’s life? I’m a stranger. I met her husband once in a diner.”
“So what changed?”
He looked at the photograph of his father.
“Tonight I saw you sitting here alone,” he said. “Looking out the window. And I thought about my mother. And I thought, if it had been her, she would have wanted to know. She would have wanted to choose.”
I stood up.
I didn’t mean to. My body just did it. My chair scraped loudly against the floor, and half the dining room turned to look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t know who I was saying it to. Elliot. The people staring. Myself. “I can’t… I need air. I need to…”
I didn’t finish. I grabbed my purse and walked out of the dining room as fast as I could without running.
I didn’t stop until I was outside on the deck.
The wind hit me like a slap. It was warm and salty and so strong it tore my hair out of the little clip I’d put it in. The ocean was enormous and black. The moon was still making its silver road across the water.
I grabbed the railing with both hands and screamed.
I didn’t care who heard me. There wasn’t anybody out there anyway, except for one young couple at the far end who took one look at me and quickly went back inside.
I screamed at Greg. At the stupid, stubborn, wonderful, infuriating man I had married. I screamed at him for deciding my whole life for me without asking. For lying to our daughter. For lying to everybody. For letting me lie awake every night for a month thinking I had done something wrong. For letting me think he didn’t love me anymore.
I screamed at Elliot for telling me. And for not telling me sooner.
I screamed at Raymond Cole, a man I had never met, who had walked out on a two-year-old boy and left him nothing but a broken gene and a cowlick.
I screamed at God.
Then I ran out of breath, and I just held on to that railing and sobbed.
I don’t know how long I stood there. A long time. Long enough that my hands went numb on the cold metal.
Then a warm hand settled on my back.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
It was June. She was wearing a bathrobe from the spa over her dinner clothes, and her silver hair was still damp from the hot tub. Walt was standing a few feet behind her, holding his hat in his hands.
“Arnel told us you ran out of the dining room,” June said. “He said some man upset you. Walt’s ready to throw him overboard. Just say the word.”
“I’m too old to throw anybody overboard,” Walt said. “But I’ll give it my best shot.”
I laughed, and then I cried harder, and then June wrapped both of her arms around me and held me like I was one of her eleven grandchildren.
We sat down on a bench against the wall where the wind wasn’t so strong. And I told them. Everything.
The photograph. The DNA test. Raymond Cole in his wheelchair on the nursing home patio. Carol, the nurse who gave everything she had and wore out her heart. Greg’s results in the clinic parking lot. Sophie.
When I finished, June was quiet for a long time. Walt sat on my other side and held my hand. His was big and rough and warm, like an old baseball glove.
“You want to know something, Claire?” June finally said.
I nodded.
“Six years ago, Walt had a stroke.”
I turned to look at Walt. He shrugged, like it was nothing.
“A bad one,” June said. “He couldn’t talk for four months. Couldn’t walk for almost a year. I had to feed him. Bathe him. Help him in the bathroom. All of it.”
“She was terrible at it,” Walt said. “Got soap in my eyes every single time.”
June swatted his arm. Then she looked back at me.
“Our kids wanted to put him in a home. The doctors told me I should think about it. Everybody said, June, you’re seventy-three years old, you can’t do this. You’ll kill yourself.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
She looked at me like I’d asked her why the sun comes up.
“Because I stood up in a church in 1973 and told God and everybody I’d do it,” she said. “In sickness and in health. I didn’t put any fine print on it. I didn’t say, in sickness and in health, unless it gets real hard and real messy.”
June squeezed my hand.
“Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was easy,” she said. “There were nights I sat in the garage and cried so hard I threw up. There were days I hated him. Days I hated myself. Days I wanted to get in the car and drive to Mexico and never come back.”
“Sounds about right,” Walt said.
“But it was mine, Claire. Do you understand? It was my choice. Nobody took it away from me. And I’d make it again tomorrow.”
She looked out at the dark ocean.
“Your husband loves you. That much is plain. He loves you so much he’d rather break your heart than watch you suffer. But that man didn’t divorce you because he stopped loving you. He divorced you because he’s scared to death. And scared people make terrible decisions.”
“He took the choice away from me,” I whispered.
“Then I suppose,” June said gently, “you’d better go take it back.”
That night, I didn’t sleep at all.
I lay in my cabin with the balcony door open, listening to the ocean, and I thought about twenty-two years.
I thought about the first time I saw Greg. He was twenty-eight, standing in the checkout line at the hardware store behind me with a single lightbulb in his hand. I had a cart full of paint cans and a broken wheel that kept pulling to the left. He laughed and said, “That cart’s got a mind of its own,” and then he walked me all the way out to my car and loaded every can into my trunk.
I thought about our wedding. A little church with a leaky roof, and it rained so hard that day that the whole front row got wet. Greg stood at the altar in a rented tuxedo with his cowlick sticking straight up and tears in his eyes, and when the pastor got to the part about sickness and health, he squeezed my hands so tight it hurt.
I thought about the night Sophie was born. Thirty-one hours of labor. Greg never left my side once. Not to eat. Not to sleep. Not even to go to the bathroom, until the nurse made him.
I thought about my mother’s last year. The cancer. All those nights I spent sleeping in a recliner next to her hospital bed. And every single night, Greg drove forty minutes each way to bring me dinner and a change of clothes, and then he went home and took care of Sophie by himself.
He never once complained. Not once.
“I watched you take care of your mother,” he had said to me once, near the end of that terrible year. “I don’t know how you do it. I don’t think I could ever be that strong.”
Was that what he’d been thinking about, sitting in that clinic parking lot? Was he thinking about me, asleep in a hospital recliner next to my dying mother?
Was he thinking, I won’t make her do that again?
Around four in the morning, I got up, turned on the light, and opened my purse.
The divorce papers were in there.
I’d brought them on the cruise with me. I don’t even know why. Lynn told me to leave them at home, but I’d stuffed them into my purse at the last minute. Maybe I thought I’d find the courage to sign them in the middle of the ocean. Maybe I thought I’d throw them over the side.
They were still in the manila envelope. Greg’s signature was on every page where it was supposed to be. Neat and careful, like he always wrote. But if you looked closely, really closely, the letters were shaky on the last page. The G in Greg wobbled.
I had never noticed it before.
There was a blank line under his name, waiting for mine.
I hadn’t signed them yet. In three weeks, I had never been able to make myself do it.
I put them back in the envelope.
At seven o’clock the next morning, I knocked on Elliot Cole’s cabin door.
He opened the door in a T-shirt and sweatpants. His hair was sticking up in the front.
The same cowlick.
I almost lost it right there in the hallway.
“Claire,” he said. He looked worried. “Are you okay? I wanted to come find you last night, but I thought you probably didn’t want to see me.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I do now.”
He stepped back and let me in. His cabin was much fancier than mine, with a little sitting area and a big window. There was a coffee pot on the counter. He poured me a cup without asking. Cream and sugar. I don’t know how he knew.
“Greg told me how you take your coffee,” he said, when he saw my face. “He told me a lot of things about you.”
I sat down. I wrapped my hands around the mug.
“How is he?” I asked. “Really. Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out.”
Elliot sat down across from me.
“He’s not doing great,” he said. “Physically, it’s still early. His doctor says he could have years before it gets really bad. Maybe a lot of years. Huntington’s moves slowly. But he’s already having trouble at work. He told his boss he wants to retire early. He said he’d rather leave on his own terms than get let go for making mistakes.”
“He loves his job.”
“I know.” Elliot rubbed his eyes. “And he’s alone, Claire. He’s sitting in a one-bedroom apartment above a dry cleaner, eating TV dinners and watching old baseball games. He calls me sometimes at two in the morning because he can’t sleep. Last week he told me he drove past your house three times and just sat at the end of the street with the lights off.”
I put the mug down because my hands were shaking again.
“He’s punishing himself,” Elliot said. “Like he’s already dead. Like he has to get used to being alone before it happens.”
“When’s the next port?”
“Tomorrow morning. Grand Cayman.”
“Can you fly home from Grand Cayman?”
Elliot looked at me for a long moment. Then a slow smile spread across his face. It was Greg’s smile. The exact same one. Lopsided, a little higher on the left side.
“I already checked,” he said. “There’s a flight to Miami at two in the afternoon. Then you can connect home from there.”
“I’ll be on it.”
He nodded.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I thought about it.
“No,” I said finally. “This is between me and my husband. But Elliot?”
“Yeah?”
“Come for Thanksgiving. Greg has a brother. Sophie has an uncle. I’m not letting another member of this family disappear into a phone call at two in the morning.”
His eyes filled up. He looked down at his coffee and nodded hard.
“Okay,” he said. His voice was rough. “Okay. I’d like that.”
I said goodbye to June and Walt that night at dinner. June cried and made me promise to call her. Walt shook my hand and then pulled me in for a hug that lifted me right off my feet.
“You go get your man,” he said into my ear.
“And if he gives you any trouble,” June added, “you tell him a seventy-nine-year-old woman from Oregon is ready to fly out there and box his ears.”
The next morning, I walked down the gangway in Grand Cayman with my suitcase and my purse and the manila envelope.
Elliot stood on the deck and waved until I couldn’t see him anymore.
Lynn picked me up at the airport at eleven o’clock that night.
She took one look at my face as I walked out of the baggage claim and stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.
“What happened?” she said. “Claire, you were supposed to be gone three more days. What happened? Are you sick?”
“I’m not sick,” I said. “Greg is.”
I told her everything in the car. She pulled over on the side of the highway halfway through and cried so hard she had to put her hazard lights on. Lynn has always loved Greg like a brother. She’s the one who introduced us to the family at Thanksgiving twenty-three years ago and announced, “This one’s a keeper, everybody. Don’t scare him off.”
“That idiot,” she kept saying, crying into a wad of fast-food napkins from her glove compartment. “That stupid, sweet, stupid idiot.”
“I know.”
“Where do you want to go? Home?”
I looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was almost midnight.
“No,” I said. “Take me to his apartment.”
Greg’s apartment was on the second floor of an old brick building on Delaney Street. There was a dry cleaner downstairs with a flickering neon sign that said “OPEN 7 DAYS.” The staircase was on the outside of the building, metal and rusty. There was one light on upstairs.
Lynn parked at the curb.
“Do you want me to come up with you?”
“No.”
“I’m going to wait right here.”
“You don’t have to.”