Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“Are you in love?” her mother asked. She didn’t actually think that Holly was in love, even though she exhibited all the classic signs: distraction and dewiness, a loss of appetite. Holly had cut her dark hair close to her head. Her face was scrubbed, and for the first time in years Teresa could see that a smattering of freckles still remained. Teresa was afraid her oldest daughter had been kidnapped even though they were sitting together at the kitchen table drinking coffee, that her brain had been taken over by a cult that had allowed her body to come home long enough to sort out her possessions, throwing everyone off the trail. But asking Holly if she’d been taken over by a cult was a harder question.

“Not in love,” Holly said, picking up her mother’s hand and squeezing it. “Not exactly.”

It used to be that Holly came home from time to time, first once a year, then every two or three. Teresa suspected that Bert bought the tickets but she never asked. After a while the small trickle of occasional visits dried up. Holly said she didn’t want to come back to the States anymore, making it sound like it was her country she was letting go of rather than her family. She said she was happier in Switzerland.

While Teresa ardently wished for her children’s happiness, she didn’t understand why they couldn’t have found it closer to Torrance. With one of them gone, the other three might have chosen to circle the wagons, but it seemed just the opposite had happened, that Cal’s death had flung each of them to their own far corner. She missed them all but mostly she missed Holly. Holly was the least mysterious of her children, the only one who on occasion would crawl into her bed at night, saying she wanted to talk.

You could always come see me, Holly would write whenever her mother complained, first in slow Aérogramme letters and then, blessedly, in e-mails once the Zen center, called Zen-Dojo Tozan, got its own computer. Teresa never could remember the actual name of the place so it helped to see it printed out.

What would I do in Switzerland? her mother wrote back.

Sit with me, Holly wrote.

It wasn’t so much to ask. Certainly she’d sat with Jeanette and Fodé and the boys in Brooklyn. She’d sat with Albie in any number of places including her own living room. Over the long years, Teresa had gotten past her suspicion of Buddhism and meditation. Holly, the times she’d seen her, had still been Holly. And while there had been plenty of good reasons not to go when she was working, without work all she could tell herself was that she was too old, the trip too long, the tickets too expensive, and the connections too intimidating. None of those were reason enough to miss seeing her own daughter.

The flight from Los Angeles to Paris was twelve hours. Teresa accepted the free wine whenever the cart rolled down the narrow aisle, slept fitfully against the window, and tried to read The English Patient . By the time the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle she had aged twenty years. Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchange for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room. Off the plane, stiff and slow, she shuffled into the river of life: the roll-aboard suitcases trailing behind the cell-phone-talkers like obedient dogs, everyone walking with such assurance that it never occurred to her not to follow them. She was too muddled to think for herself, yet when she finally did, snapped back to reality by the sight of an information desk, she was told that her departure gate was in another terminal that could be accessed by shuttle bus, and that the flight to Lucerne was three hours delayed.

Teresa accepted a highlighted map of the airport from the startlingly handsome informational Frenchman and started making her way back in the direction from whence she came. Her feet had swollen on the flight and were now a full size larger than the shoes she was wearing. It wasn’t that she expected someone was going to show up and escort her to her gate, but she couldn’t help but remember the way things had gone the last time she was in this airport fifty years ago: she was a different person under considerably different circumstances.

Bert had taken Teresa to Paris for their honeymoon. It was all a surprise. He made the hotel reservations, ordered francs from the bank, asked Teresa’s mother to pack her daughter’s suitcase. His parents drove them to Dulles the morning after the wedding to catch their flight and she still didn’t know where they were going. She had majored in French literature at the University of Virginia and had never left the country. She had never spoken French outside of class.

She stopped at a little café on the concourse, collapsed into the white molded-plastic chair, and ordered a café au lait and a croissant, that was easy enough. She had nothing but time. She eased her heels out of the backs of her shoes even though she knew it was a mistake. Her feet would expand like bread dough and she would never be able to cram them back in. For the first time since she was in her twenties she thought about what a beautiful boy Bert Cousins had been, tall and sandy blond, with such dark blue eyes they startled her every morning when he opened them. His family was rich as Croesus, her grandmother liked to say. His parents had given him a little green Fiat when he graduated from college.

When they met he was in his second year of law school at UVA, the top of his class, and she was in her senior year of college. She slipped on a patch of ice one snowy January morning hurrying to class and had gone down hard, books and papers fanning out around her, the icy air knocked from her lungs. She was lying on her back, too stunned for the moment to do anything but watch the flakes of snow wafting towards her, when Bert Cousins leaned into her view and asked if she would allow him to help her. Yes, she would. He picked her up, a stranger, picked her up in his arms and carried her all the way to the infirmary, missing his next class to wait while they wrapped her ankle. A year later, when he asked her to marry him, he told her that he wanted them to move to California after he finished law school. He would take the California bar and they would start a whole new life together where nobody knew them. He wasn’t going to spend his days drawing up contracts for real estate sales, he was going to practice real law. And he wanted children, he said, lots and lots of children. As an only child he had wished for nothing but brothers and sisters. Teresa looked back and forth between Bert and the pretty ring on her hand and thought she must be emitting light from her entire body she loved him so much. It was unnerving to remember that now, at seventy-two, spreading strawberry jam on the tip of her croissant, how much she had loved him. She could barely hold the thought in her mind. She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the Charles de Gaulle airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him. They held hands on the way to baggage claim, and while they waited beside the shining silver luggage chute he kissed her, full and deep, not giving a thought to who might be watching, because they were married, they were in Paris.

Teresa looked at all the people walking past her table at the airport coffee shop and wondered how many of them were starting their honeymoons and how many of them were in love and how many of them would not be in love later on. The truth was she had more or less forgotten about Bert. It took a long time but it was a fact that now entire years would pass when she failed to ask the children how their father was because she simply didn’t think of him. She had lived long enough that Bert and all the love and rage he had engendered were gone. Cal was still with her, Jim Chen was there, but Bert, alive and well in Virginia, was gone.