Jonathan beams. “Wasn’t he?” He climbs the stairs to the deck. “Are you feeling all right? You look awfully tired.”
“I don’t sleep well in hotels,” she says.
“I thought you were a pro at that — traveling with Dad.”
“Yes, I was. Was.” That life, too, is over.
They pass paintings of carnage in exotic places, a case of Asian porcelain vessels, a doorway flanked by a pair of whale ribs six feet long. “We’ll go out for a great lunch after it’s over. Cyril knows this amazing Portuguese place.”
What doesn’t Cyril know?
They ride the elevator in silence. At the bottom, the atrium is more crowded than ever. Approaching them, as if she’d been waiting for their arrival, is a woman with free-flowing auburn hair, a camera in one hand. “I’m sorry,” she says to Jonathan, “but I saw you earlier and I recognized you — from ages ago. From Malachy’s memorial in New York. You’re his brother, aren’t you?”
Vera is her name. She was a junior colleague of Mal’s at the newspaper. “We still talk about him. Still miss his wicked, delicious take on the world.” She turns to Lucinda. “Mrs. Burns, you look great. But what are you guys doing here?”
Lucinda waits for Jonathan to embrace his role as Cyril’s cheerleader. Instead, he says, “You knew Mal?”
“Pretty well. I mean, as office friendships go. We helped start that music scholarship. In his name.”
“Wow, that’s right.” Jonathan is still grasping Vera’s right hand between his. “I miss him all the time. Like, every day.”
Vera nods. “He talked about you.”
Lucinda can see that this is probably not true. Jonathan’s eyes glisten. He hugs Vera tightly and thanks her.
“Well, back to my assignment.” She points toward the atrium, awkward in her attempt to break free.
“Wow,” Jonathan says again, looking after Vera. “My God.”
Why doesn’t Lucinda share Jonathan’s happiness? Is she jealous that others knew Mal in ways she never did? Mal was her most difficult baby; she came to feel, in meeting his demands, that she owned him more than she’d owned Christina, her first child, or, later, Jonathan.
She waits for her surviving son to lead her back to the reading, though they can hear the narrative loud and clear from where they stand. She touches his sleeve. “Jonathan,” she says. “We never speak about him anymore. Sometimes I forget that you lost him, too.”
“I speak about him often,” Jonathan says. “To Cyril.” He walks away from her, just like that.
She lags behind, ashamed. At Jonathan’s wedding — on a grassy hillside with a dizzying view of San Francisco Bay — Lucinda remembers, more than anything else, what she felt when she watched Jonathan and Cyril proceed (radiant with glee, nearly romping) back up the aisle after their vows. Zeke squeezed her arm. She felt the profound relief of a mother seeing her child engulfed by joy, but she understood, too, exactly why she couldn’t quite join in. She wished that it were Malachy’s wedding.
Jonathan has saved her a seat amid the thickening crowd. Once she sits beside him, he puts one arm around Cyril’s back and the other around hers. “Here it comes, the big photo finish,” he whispers.
Lucinda tries to remember the end. The white whale escapes, of course, but does everyone go down with the ship, down into that dark, violent vortex? Are they all doomed? No; how silly of her. Ishmael remains behind on the surface. He’s the one who lives to tell the extraordinary tale. That’s the thing about surviving: You get to tell the story. You might even, Lucinda thinks, live to tell the next one, too. You get to be the keeper of the artifacts, the curator, the museum itself.
Julia Glass won the National Book Award for her first novel, “Three Junes.” Her most recent novel is “The Widower’s Tale.” She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.
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