Rawlins felt a knot forming in the pit of his stomach; he was losing control of the conversation. “Max, therewereconsequences for me. The guilt I’ve lived with. The sleep I’ve lost. The…” He shook his head and lowered his voice. “I don’t expect your sympathy, I just need you to know, this has been the most difficult thing in my life.”
“Well, how nice that you can let it go now that I’m out,” Max said. “You’ve unburdened your conscience. You’re free.”
“I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing it foryou,” Rawlins said. “You deserve to know the truth. And I figured it might…help make sense of certain things, at least.”
Max pursed his lips, his gaze burrowing into Rawlins with a cruel gleam as he said, “You know…it does, actually. Because I always looked at my dad and thought: How does someone as awful as me come from someone as nice as him?” Rawlins tensed up, seeing Max building a head of steam and wanting to stop him, but afraid to interrupt. “I knew that my mom was cold, but I figured, alittleof my dad should’ve rubbed off on me. A bit of decency. But now it makes sense. I’m the offspring of an ice queen…and a narcissist.”
“Max…” Rawlins didn’t have a complete thought; he said the boy’s name as a plea, hoping he would stop.
“It makes sense why you’d tell me now,” Max continued. “Because now, you’re realizing you’re actually irrelevant. Your whole rockstar-professor thing isn’t what it used to be. The cult of personality has dimmed. You need someone new to look up to you.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” Rawlins protested. “This isn’t about me. You deserve to know the truth.”
“But I didn’t back then?” Max asked, his anger rising. “When itmight’ve actually been useful? When it might’ve made me understand why you were giving me your time, your attention, your forbidden books. I thought I wasspecial.”
“You were!” Rawlins insisted.
Max shook his head. “You were just trying to spend time with the kid you abandoned. And look how that worked out. Look what your ‘love’ led to.You ruined my life.”
Rawlins swallowed hard; this had gotten away from him. “I would give anything to go back and change it. But I can’t. And you’re right…I should’ve told you.”
“I liked not knowing just fine,” Max said. “I liked having no relationship with you whatsoever. But neither of those are really an option for me now, are they?”
“I’m sorry.” Rawlins fought to keep his gaze locked on Max despite the burning recrimination in the boy’s eyes. “I just…had to tell you.”
Max smirked without a trace of genuine amusement. “You don’t know the meaning of ‘had to.’ You don’t understand what your choices are until they’re taken away. Andthis…” He pointed at the air between them, as though the conversation were a corporeal thing that could be seen. “Thiswas a choice. And I promise you, it’s one you’ll regret.”
Max’s eye twitched with what could’ve been rage, or holding back tears, or both. But before either feeling could escalate enough to reveal itself, he stood up, his dark jacket sweeping behind him, and marched toward the door.
Rawlins wanted to go after him, to try to apologize, to make this right, but he had no idea what to say or where to begin.
And it was not only uncertainty that kept him glued to his seat, watching his son exit the café without looking back. It wasfear.Rooted in the realization that he had barely known his son to begin with, and the intervening years of incarceration had hardened him into someone unrecognizable, perhaps even incomprehensible, to Rawlins.
Max’s last words before he stormed out were not only a prediction (an accurate one, since Rawlins alreadydidregret telling him the news). They were a threat. And Rawlins was afraid.
Ellsbeth
Winter break gave the Newlyn campus the feeling of a dollhouse inverted and shaken empty. Ellsbeth could walk the entire campus and only run into one or two other students, all made anonymous by their scarves pulled up across their faces. The normally bustling cafeteria was reduced to a single sleepy buffet line manned by one employee. Ellsbeth could not recall if there was usually ambient music playing that she never paid attention to beneath the cacophony of hundreds of students eating and talking, but if there was, whoever was responsible for selecting and playing it had gone home for Christmas; Ellsbeth poured and chewed her cereal in the mornings in echoing silence.
Still, she found she settled nicely into the solitude, perfectly at peace to spend the majority of her day without saying a single word to another human being aside from her coffee order to the barista at The Puddle Jumper, where she was able to easily claim her favorite corner table by the window and settle into its plush armchair.
Without making official plans, she and Rawlins had fallen into a comforting domestic routine, spending every evening together. The Puddle Jumper closed at 5 p.m., and she would trek across the South Quad toward his Victorian home to find him in the kitchen cooking for both of them.
Her promise to cook him dinner had fallen by the wayside; she began to let herself in past his unlocked front door and kick off hershoes and be greeted by the smell of coq au vin, or roasted chicken thighs nestled into buttery rice, or sizzling guanciale from the local specialty store that caused Ellsbeth to gasp when she saw the price on its casing in the trash can. Once, Rawlins made something he charmingly called lasagna soup, a warming pot of noodles and cheese that needed to be eaten with a knife and fork.
“Please, let me help!” Ellsbeth protested as Rawlins poured her a glass of wine while keeping an eye on a pan of caramelizing shallots.
“Absolutely not,” he replied. “And do let that wine breathe, it’s a good one.” He seemed to glow with the pleasure of being a host, of cooking for her and insisting on cleaning up afterward.
And so, while Ellsbeth occasionally brought over French bread or focaccia or worse wine than Rawlins would have wanted to drink, just as often she showed up empty-handed, forcing herself to quiet the screaming voice in the back of her head telling her to make herself useful. It was a strange and new experience for a girl who had always prided herself on her ironclad independence: being taken careof.
Rawlins’s records were eclectic and charmingly dorky. Though he often chose jazz records while he cooked, he also played Gilbert and Sullivan and Sondheim. While she was going through his books in his study, she overheard him singing along to theWest Side Storysoundtrack with a voice so shockingly tone-deaf she knew that he must have forgotten the possibility that another person could hear him.
They did not say they loved each other again. But she heard it every time he scooped up her plate to put it in the dishwasher before she could get up, in the way he pulled her legs onto his lap when they were reading together on his overstuffed leather couch, in the expression in his eyes when she straddled him and pulled off her shirt.
The Vermont snow felt like insulation. They almost never left his house together; a playing house made permissible by the liminal quality of winter break, the long stretches without work or class when the campus was only half alive.
Rawlins mentioned his conversation with Max only briefly, and only after Ellsbeth had noticed him staring off into the distance, blinking and withdrawn. “It was a start,” Ellsbeth told him. “It’s a big shock, and a big transition. Give him a minute.” Rawlins had nodded, taking her hand and kissing every one of her fingers.
