Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

I go up to her. “I found this,” she says. In one hand she is holding my bat. “Do you still need this? And what about this thing?” In her other hand is my cricket bag, which she has pulled out of the storage room.

I take the bat from her. It’s still marked by New York dirt.

“Are you going to play this year?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, licking my finger and rubbing at the dirt, which continues to stick. I haven’t played since my return to England. It would feel unnatural, is my feeling, to separate myself from my family in order to spend an afternoon with understated teammates and cups of tea and something essentially nostalgic at stake; yet to throw out this odd paddle would also go against nature, even though its wood, faintly striped by a dozen grains, is now swollen with age and cannot have a sweet spot to speak of.

However, once I hold a bat in my hands I have trouble putting it down. I’m still carrying it when I step into my bedroom to check on Jake. He’s underneath our duvet, in the spot where most mornings I wake up to find, pressed against me, the following bundle: boy, bear, blanket. He is watching Jurassic Park for the thousandth time.

We watch half a scene together. Then, with no particular purpose in mind, I ask him a question.

“Do you know what this is?”

He looks up. “A cricket bat.”

I hesitate. I am recalling how I became hooked on the game: alone, with my own eyes. Until the age of nine I was merely a footballer and the summer sport a rumor not worth verifying. Then one day I was walking in the woods by my club and through the trees came the white flashes of boys mysteriously organized in a green space.

It occurs to me that Jake’s situation is different. He has a father, after all. There is no need for him to walk alone in the woods.

I say, “Do you want me to teach you how to play?”

He is drowsily following a rampaging tyrannosaurus. “OK.”

“This year, or next year?” He is only six. When he plays football he is still dreamy in the extreme and only kicks at the ball if woken up by a shout. It is like Ferdinand the Bull and the flowers.

There’s a pause. He turns to look at me. “Next year,” he says.

I feel unexpectedly glad. There’s no rush. It’s only a game, after all. “Fine,” I say.

Rachel’s voice climbs to me from afar. “Tea?”

I actually flinch. It comes to me, this question, as the pure echo of an identical offer she voiced three years ago.

“Tea?” Rachel asked.

This was in London, in her parents’ kitchen. I sat at the dining table with my son and his grandparents. Yes, please, I called back, gratified and a little puzzled by her kindliness.

For during the first week of that summer holiday — this was in early August 2003—Rachel had been in a politic mood. She was considerate and attentive and low-key and, like her parents, powerfully exercised by my preferences. Everybody was making an effort for Hans: and unwarrantedly and (in retrospect) suspiciously so, because, as previously noted, I’d been an absentee for much of that summer.

The tea was poured. I engaged Jake in conversation.

“Who’s your best friend at camp?” I said. “Cato?” I had heard all about Cato. I imagined him grave and severe, like Cato Uticensis.

Jake shook his head. “Martin is my friend.”

“Right,” I said. This was a new name. “Does Martin like Gordon the Express? How about Diesel?”

My son nodded emphatically. “Well that’s good,” I said. “He sounds like a very nice boy.” I looked at Rachel. “Martin?”

She sprang from her chair in tears and ran up the stairs. I had no idea what was happening. “You’d better go up,” Mrs. Bolton told me, exchanging furious glances with her husband.

My wife was lying facedown on her bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you. That was awful. I’m so sorry.”

I fell into a chair. “How long?” I said.

She sniffed. “About six months.”

I came out with, “So it’s serious.”

She gave a small shrug. “It might be.” She quickly went on, “It’s the only reason I introduced him to Jake. I wouldn’t have, otherwise. Darling, I’ve got to move on. You’ve got to move on. We can’t go on like this, waiting for something to happen. Nothing’s going to happen. You know that.”

“I know shit, apparently.” I’d thought myself prepared for this eventuality; more accurately, thought myself no longer in possession of the emotion required truly to care.

Now Rachel was sitting up on her bed and looking down at the quilt. She had been growing her hair steadily since her return to London, and a glossy ponytail flopped down over a shoulder.

When she started to speak, I cut her off. “Let me think,” I said.

I closed my eyes. There was nothing to think except that she was not in the wrong; that another man had her love; that she was at this very moment undoubtedly wishing me very far away; and that my son would soon have another father.

“Who is he?” I said.

She gave me a name. She told me, without my asking, that he was a chef.

“I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said, and Rachel gave a horrible little nod.

I brushed Jake’s teeth with his dinosaur-themed toothbrush. I read him a story — at his insistence, Where the Wild Things Are, even though it frightened him a little, this story of a boy whose bedroom is overtaken by a forest — and calibrated his bedroom’s dimmer switch according to his instructions. “More light,” a voice softly commanded from his bedding, and I gave him more light. Rachel stood at the door, arms folded. Later, as I packed my belongings in the adjoining room, I heard a childish squeal of protest. “What’s going on?” I said. “Nothing,” Rachel said. “He’s just making a fuss.” I saw that she had completely lowered the dimmer. I restored the light in a rage. “I won’t have my son sleeping in the dark,” I said to Rachel in a near shout. “Jake,” I said, “from now you sleep with the light on, if that’s what you want. Daddy says so. OK?” He widened his eyes in assent. “OK,” I said. Trembling, I kissed him. “Good night, my boy,” I said.

He and I spent most of the following morning in the garden. For a while we played hide-and-seek, the ultimate object of which, of course, is not to remain concealed but to be found: “I’m here, Daddy,” my son cried out from behind the tree he always hid behind. Then, in furtherance of his obsession with space, the two of us searched the garden for his plastic planets and his plastic golden sun, balloons I’d blown into being earlier in the week. We found all of them except the runt world, Pluto, which once missing became my son’s favorite. I was craning into a hedge when I was joined by Charles Bolton. He kept me company for a minute or two, filling his pipe with tobacco while I, on my hands and knees, kept my head in the bushes. When I got up, clapping the dirt off my hands, my father-in-law stood there like perspicacity made flesh. He removed the pipe from his mouth.

“Some lunch before you go?” he said.

Rachel insisted on driving me to Heathrow. We sat together in silence. I did not think that it fell to me to talk.

Somewhere near Hounslow, she began to say things. She gave assurances about my place in my son’s life and about my place in her life. She told me of the agony in which she, too, found herself. She said something important about the need to reimagine our lives. (What this meant, I had no idea. How do you reimagine your life?) Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last — as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted. I stepped out at Terminal 3 and leaned my head into the car. “Good-bye,” I said, and it came out more dramatically than I’d intended. But it seemed finally to have ended, our paired adventure unto death, a truth at once undermined and supported by the bewildering ordinariness of what was left to me: an encounter with the woman at the check-in desk; a drink of water in a travelers’ lounge; an airplane seat.