The Darkest Evening of the Year

you think, This is an old soul. ”
    “Come on. What else, Amy?”
    “Nothing. Really. Just a bedroom-slipper thing.”
    She was fingering the cameo locket at her throat. When she saw him take note of it, she lowered her hand.
    “Bedroom-slipper thing? Tell me.”
    “I can’t. Not now. It’s nothing. It couldn’t be anything.”
    “Now I am agitated,” he said.
    Looking toward the hall, she said, “Where are the kids?”
    As she started to turn away from him, he grabbed her by the arm. “Wait. Waking up on top of a freshly made bed isn’t the big thing. I haven’t told you the big thing.”
    “What—did Grandma do your laundry, too?”
    He felt as though his heart were coming loose in his chest and sliding lower by the moment.
    “This is going to be hard. I’m sick to my stomach trying to think how to tell you. It’s a wonderful thing and a terrible thing.”
    A change in her eyes, the steadiness and clarity of her stare, suggested that she knew he needed her as never before and that she was ready.
    He kissed her forehead, and with his lips still against her brow, he said, “I love you.”
    Head bowed, not looking up, as if the words were as solemn as a prayer, she said, “I love you, too.”
    They had gotten this far months ago, but no further. He had assumed that the next step, which seemed excruciatingly overdue, would be consummation, the physical commitment.
    No one before her had ever held him in expectation with such exquisite charm.
    Now he realized that consummation had never been the next step, could not have been, should not have been. The next step must be revelation.
    “Come with me,” he said, and led her to his study.
    All three dogs were waiting there, lying quietly together, as though they knew—or as though one of them knew—that the supreme test of Brian and Amy’s relationship would occur in this room.
    His apartment study had two wheeled office chairs for those occasions when one of his employees came from downstairs to work here with him. He rolled both behind his desk.
    He directed Amy into one chair, and he sat facing her in the other. They were knee to knee.
    In their front-row seats, Fred, Ethel, and Nickie watched with grave interest.
    When Brian held out his hands, palms up, Amy at once put her hands in his, giving him the courage to speak. “There’s something I should’ve told you, Amy. Long ago. But I thought, the way things were, maybe I’d never need to tell you.”
    When he hesitated, she did not press him. Her hands had not gone damp in his, or cold. Her gaze remained steady.
    “When I was younger, much younger, I was an idiot about a lot of things. One of them was sex. I thought it was easy, women were a kind of sport. God, that sounds awful. But it’s the way so many of us came out of college in those days. Life had nothing to teach me. That’s what I thought.”
    “But it never stops teaching,” she said.
    “No. It’s one long lesson. So…there were a number of women, too many. I left all the precautions to them, because they seemed to think it was a sport, too. I knew they wouldn’t risk pregnancy. They didn’t want consequences. They just wanted to get it off. But one of them was…different. Vanessa. We weren’t together long, but she didn’t take precautions. I fathered a child.”
    His mouth had gone dry. His throat felt swollen, a trap to keep in all his words.
    “I think about my daughter every day. I lie awake at night wondering—is she all right, is she ever given a chance to be happy, is she at least safe? With Vanessa…she can’t be safe. I tried to find her. I couldn’t. I’ve failed as a father, as a man, at the fundamental things.”
    Amy said, “No failure is forever.”
    “It feels like forever. I’ve only seen her once, briefly, when she was an infant. How can I love a child so much when I’ve only seen her once?”
    “The important thing is, you can. You’ve got that capacity in you.”
    “She’s a Down’s syndrome girl,” he said. “I thought she looked like an angel, beautiful. I doubt she even knows I exist. I’ve wanted to see her so bad, for ten years I’ve wanted to see her, but I never expected to see her again. And now…everything is changing.”
    Amy squeezed his hands and said, “Not everything. There’s still you and me.”

 
    PART TWO

    “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
    But I have promises to keep”
    —R OBERT F ROST
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

 
    Chapter
33
    T he