The Might Have Been (16 page)

But she said, “Engaged? Most men would just give a girl a ring; you gave me an engagement roof. The last of the red-hot romantics.” Then they were standing at the edge of the street, kissing, while a Volkswagen Beetle swung out to the middle of the street so as to avoid them, giving them a feeble bleat of its horn.

The next evening, he took her to Pence’s Jewelers in St. Martinsville to pick out a proper ring—a two-thirds-carat diamond in a shape the jeweler called a “marquise,” seven hundred fifteen dollars, and, after he went back to pick it up after it had been sized, she cried when he slipped it onto her finger.

“Billy! Billy!” she called to her son, who was in his room, writing an essay about the Blessed Virgin. When he came out, she showed
him the ring, clapping her hands in delight. “You’re getting a new dad,” she said, hugging him hard. As she let him go, Billy regarded Edward Everett shyly. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can go back and do your homework.” After he was gone, Connie said, “He gets quiet when he gets excited. He will love you. He’ll finally have a dad who isn’t an A-number-one jerk-of-the-century.”

Then she dashed out to the kitchen and began making phone calls. “You’ll never guess what,” she began each of them.

Two days later, when he went by his apartment to pick up his mail and begin packing to move permanently into Connie’s house—what would be his house—he found an envelope addressed to him at his mother’s and forwarded to his apartment. There was no return address, and a Chicago, Illinois, postmark. When he opened it, he found a blank sheet of typing paper folded around a Polaroid snapshot.

It was of a hospital nursery, shot through what was obviously the glass window in the hall that allowed visitors to view the newborn children. At the center of the picture was a crib that held one of the infants. Edward Everett couldn’t make out many of the features: the baby wore a sky blue sleeper, his hands mittened, his head covered in a blue bonnet. Whoever had taken the picture had not thought about the effect the glass would have on the image because of the flash: in the upper left corner of the snapshot, a bright circle of light washed out part of the frame. The glass also captured a reflected ghost of the person taking the photo, a woman in a robe and nightgown, her face almost entirely obscured by the camera she held up to take the picture: Julie. There was no note save for, on the back of the photograph, the smeared word, “Boy,” and the date, April 22, 1977.

It shocked him to realize that he hadn’t thought of Julie in months. When he’d first gotten home from Montreal and was convalescing at his mother’s house, he tried vainly to call her but the number he knew was not in service. One day, he dialed it four times, punching the buttons slowly, wondering if perhaps his fingers had pressed an incorrect number, but all he got was a series of tones and a recorded voice: “The number you have dialed is not a working number. If you feel you have reached this number in error …”

He tried to remember the name of the small town her parents lived in and got out a road atlas, turned to the state of Illinois and ran his eye down the list of cities and towns. Several times, his eye caught a name that he thought was correct, only to spot farther down the column another town he was equally certain was the one she’d told him she was from: Alton. No, Benton; something “-ton.” No, maybe it wasn’t “-ton,” but “-ham”: Chatham.

He thought he recalled she was from the southern half of the state, so he began running his eye across the map itself, but the disorganized array of names dotted along the interstates and county roads only made him all the more confused. He was no longer certain it had two syllables: Carlinville? Effingham? Carbondale?

Holding the photograph in his hand, he tried once more the number that had been hers, knowing it would not abruptly turn into her number once again. In the moment before he heard the series of tones and the recorded voice, he realized he was holding his breath: if it rang and she answered, his life would suddenly become very different than he expected, than he hoped. But it did not ring; he heard the tones, the recorded message.

He hung up and regarded the photograph again. He could not make out any feature of the baby with any clarity: it was someone who belonged to the category “baby” and he realized he should think in some profound way:
My son. I have a son
, but if there was a connection between him and the infant, maybe the geographic distance between them stretched their bond too thin to have any palpable effect on him. He slipped the photo into his wallet, then took it out again: how would he explain it to Connie the next time they were out and he went to pay for a restaurant check and she saw it:

What’s that?

I have something I need to tell you
.

Briefly, he thought about tearing it up or burning it, but it was a picture of his son after all, even though it appeared he might never see the boy or perhaps hear of him again. He slipped it into his pocket and, when he got out to the car, put it into the glove compartment, beneath the highway maps and the folder with the receipts from his oil changes and tire rotations, and drove to Connie’s, where they were
going to meet someone he planned to hire to replace the guttering. Slowly, he was rebuilding her house: next week, carpeting; the week after, a carpenter to replace the rotted boards in the porch. His bank account was dwindling but it did not concern him. Beginning in August, his uncle had told him, he was going to be dividing his territory, giving part to Edward Everett. He would earn close to three thousand a month, his uncle said, adding, “I’ve been wanting to slow down. In a few years, the entire thing will be yours.”

When he reached Connie’s house and she greeted him at the door, he thought for a moment of telling her about the baby. She saw the hesitation on his face.

“What?” she said. “Do you have some other surprise you’re going to spring on me, beyond a new roof and an engagement out of the blue?”

A long while later—the first time he confessed to another soul that he had a son—he would remember that opportunity on her porch as an invitation to one kind of life he might have had, but instead became the moment in which a lie began weaving itself into his life.
I’ll tell her sometime
, he thought,
just not now
.

“I’m just crazy about you, is all,” he said.

O
n the last Sunday of May, Edward Everett, Connie, Billy and Connie’s father, Walter, drove to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the San Diego Padres. It was Billy’s tenth birthday and he had never seen Major League Baseball before. First pitch was one-fifteen and the drive was an hour and a half but they left at eight-thirty because Billy was so anxious.

The morning was beautiful: the sky clear. In the thin strip of the West Virginia panhandle they had to cross between Ohio and Pennsylvania, they saw a half-dozen hot-air balloons drifting over the hills; one, decorated like a round American flag, was so low that they could make out the three people in its gondola, a woman and two men; the men wore tuxedos and top hats and the woman a dress that reminded Edward Everett of
Gone with the Wind
. Almost at the moment their car was alongside the balloon, a gust of wind caught one of the men’s hats and it went sailing, end over end, skittering on the air currents, passing directly over them. Billy rolled down his window and unsnapped his seatbelt. “Hey,” Connie said, thrusting an arm across the seat toward him. He poked his head out of the rear window and waved furiously at the people in the gondola, but they weren’t looking at him and, when the car rounded a bend, the balloons
were lost to their sight, save for the uppermost arc of one painted to promote an insurance agency.

“They were waving back,” Billy said nonetheless, his face flushed as he refastened his seatbelt.

Connie gave Edward Everett a smile and squeezed his knee. “That’s very nice, dear,” she said.

When they reached Pittsburgh, the city was more alive than Edward Everett would have expected for a Sunday morning. Driving across the Monongahela River Bridge to the tip of Point State Park, they saw swarms of people throughout the grounds. Some sort of fair was going on: colorful booths, their fabric awnings flapping in the breeze; red, green and yellow pennants snapping. A Tilt-A-Whirl and a Ferris wheel, lit with blue and green fluorescent tubes, were already full of passengers, lines waiting at the turnstile entrance to each ride.

“This is all for your birthday,” Walter said. “I think I see a banner saying, ‘Happy Birthday, Billy Adams.’ ”

“Where?” Billy said. “Oh, you’re kidding.”

“We have time before the game, don’t we?” Connie asked.

“Oh, only about three hours,” Edward Everett said.

He got off the highway at the exit for the park and they snaked their way through heavy traffic, avoiding streams of pedestrians walking across the streets as if they had no concern about being hit, until they came to a parking lot where a fat teenage boy waved an orange flag indifferently, directing them into the lot.

“Three bucks,” he said in a bored tone. Edward Everett gave him a five-dollar bill and then drove on without waiting for his change.

“Hey,” the boy called, holding up the bill.

“Keep it,” Edward Everett said, although he was certain the boy couldn’t hear him.

“You’re feeling particularly flush these days, aren’t you?” Connie said.

“Maybe he needs new gutters,” Edward Everett said.

When they parked, Billy wanted to run on ahead to the fairgrounds but Connie restrained him. “We’re not going to drive a hundred
miles just to lose you,” she said, taking a firm grip on his hand. Still, he pulled her along, straining to get to the rides and booths. “If he yanks my arm out of the socket …” she said.

“You’ve got a spare,” Walter said.

When they reached the fairgrounds, they learned that the festival was for Memorial Day. At a booth marked with a sign reading, “Ride and Refreshment Tickets,” Edward Everett gave ten dollars to a girl for a long strip of cardboard tickets. Milling throughout the crowd, men in garrison caps and khaki vests decorated with badges and military medals were collecting donations for wounded veterans. Walter stopped to talk to one of them, a fifty-something redheaded man missing his left arm, the sleeve of his shirt pinned to his shoulder. When Walter finished his conversation, he took out his wallet, pulled a twenty-dollar bill from it, stuffed it into the can the man was using to collect donations and walked away, sunk in his thoughts.

“What is it, Dad?” Connie asked, linking her free arm with his, but he merely shook his head, and the three of them walked on a step or two ahead of Edward Everett, daughter and father, mother and son, until Billy caught sight of a waffle stand, and again yanked on his mother’s hand, saying, “I’m hungry.”

“You should have eaten breakfast,” she said. “That’s not exactly healthy.”

“Ah, it’s his birthday,” Edward Everett said, leading them all up to the stand and buying Billy a waffle, which the vendor set onto a paper plate and coated with a cloud of powdered sugar. Billy wolfed it down as they walked on through the crowd toward the rides, his cheeks and chin coated with the sugar.

“Don’t get sick,” Connie warned.

As they reached the gate for the Tilt-A-Whirl, the carny was just closing the latch, ready to start the ride, but when he saw them he called, “Room for two more.”

“Come on, Mom,” Billy said.

“Do you mind us going without you?” Connie asked Edward Everett. When he shook his head, Connie collected two tickets from him, handed them over to the carny, and they boarded the ride. As
the carny secured the safety bar across their laps, Billy bounced in his seat. Then the ride started, the motor rumbling and clanking as if it were about to throw a gear, black exhaust drifting out across the crowd. Edward Everett and Walter stepped back to be free of it and for a moment he lost sight of Connie and Billy, but then he found them, moving in a slow arc as the ride gathered speed, their car spinning on its pivot.

“You’ve been real good to Connie and the boy,” Walter said to him.

“Connie’s …” Edward Everett began but didn’t know what to say.

“At first, I worried you was taking things too fast. She’s been—well, Lloyd …” his voice trailed off and he shrugged. “You knew Lloyd back in school, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Edward Everett said.

“Lloyd ain’t never going to grow up. Billy was—well, none of us expected it when Connie told her mother and me. But he’s been, well, good can come from bad, my dad always used to say, and Billy’s a lot of good.”

They stood watching the ride spin for a while. Edward Everett wondered if Walter was waiting for him to compliment his daughter, praise his grandson, but before he could say anything, Walter went on. “That fellow I was talking to before, with one arm gone, said he lost it in Ardennes. That could’ve been me. Or worse. But I got strep throat just before the offensive and was laid up in a field hospital, an IV stuck in me.” He laughed. “I guess that was my war wound. A little needle stick. Life’s about chance and accident. That, and what you do with it.”

“That makes sense,” Edward Everett said. He thought of Montreal, his trying to catch the fly ball, his spikes caught in the fence. Then it occurred to him: Julie showing up while Estelle was in bed in his hotel room, the pill failing to stop whatever it was supposed to stop and, voilà, there was a baby in a hospital crib, photographed through glass.

“I guess it would, to you,” Walter said. Connie and Billy were spinning past them now, their heads thrown back in laughter.

“How do you mean?”

“Your knee. A year ago, bet you never thought you’d be standing next to an old man talking nonsense the day before Memorial Day.”

The ride was beginning to slow. Billy pushed hard against the side of the car he shared with his mother, trying to make it continue to spin, but he was not strong enough.

“You been good to them. I thought: engaged? How long you been going out?”

“Six—” Edward Everett was going to say
six weeks
. Could it have been so short?