HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE

How remarkable that you and Jadia have ended up together, my mother-in-law says to me. After all those years, who could have predicted it?

She is sitting in a woven plastic lawn chair in our backyard, her bare feet immersed in the little wading pool in which I sit with my youngest daughter, Isabella. Next to her, in an identical chair, sits my mother, who nods in agreement. On the other side of my mother is my father, who has recently had a stroke and doesn’t talk much at all these days. He is silent, immobile in his wheelchair, a blanket covering his legs although there is no chill in the September air and not even much of a breeze.

Through the open kitchen window, I hear the voices of Jadia and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, my sister, younger than me by four years, is preparing sandwiches for lunch while Jadia nurses our newborn son, Jacob, who is to be baptised tomorrow morning. Our families are gathering for the event. My eldest daughter, Hannah, is already in. She has gone to the grocery store to pick up beer and softdrinks and, no doubt, some of the cigarettes that I wish she wouldn’t smoke, but which she insists on, part of her campaign to be independent of her parents and their views and their habits.

My second daughter, Annabeth, has elected not to drive down to Maryland for the baptism. She has remained at home with her mother, in sullen protest of my new family. Although she talks to me regularly, and has even visited twice, she boycotted my wedding to Jadia and makes it a point to skip key events that bring together my first family and my second. When she is angry, she argues that I had no good reason to leave Beth and the girls – as if falling in love were not a reason. She does not accept the rationale that Beth and I had grown apart, that we were little more than friends, that except for our daughters, whom we continue to love and support, we no longer had common goals and dreams. That is not the point, in Annabeth’s view. The point is that I walked out, calmly, without rancor, without bitterness. That does not make sense to a girl whose context is the drama of high school and the sort of movies she digests voraciously on Lifetime. There should have been more violence, more visible trauma.

The truth is that I could have stayed with Beth, grown old with her, and probably would have had I not connected with Jadia. Jadia, the sister of my childhood friend, a girl I had all but forgotten until she became, for a time, a name in the news, her passing celebrity the result of a horrific event – the disappearance and, ultimately, we learned, murder, of her teenaged son. Strange to think that were it not for this horrible tragedy in her life, Jadia, who is now at the center of my life, would have barely merited a footnote in my biography. Yes, she had been in my home, eaten at my family’s table. But she wasn’t even friends with my sisters. She was a background figure, barely in my consciousness.

Jadia’s moment of celebrity had burned out long before her son’s body was found, naked, in a drainage ditch near Melbourne, Florida. He had last been seen at the Daytona Beach airport, where he had been dropped off by his father, Jadia’s ex-husband, after a spring-break visit. The search had been called off several months earlier, and the media had moved on to more pressing events – the celebrity scandals, political intrigues, miracle diets, religious visions that command our national attention. When Ant was discovered, by a prison crew doing highway cleanup, the focus came back briefly, long enough to show the grieving mother meeting the coffin at Logan Airport, long enough to get footage of sobbing neighbors and schoolmates, who included Hannah and Annabeth.

The girls and I went to the viewing at the funeral home, out of respect and, in my case, wistfulness over my long-ago ended friendship with Jadia’s brother, Inigo. Inigo, who had lost his job and his marriage because he refused to give up the search, who insisted that the end could not be declared until Ant’s whereabouts had been determined.

Inigo will arrive tonight. He is driving up from Florida, where he relocated when it was all over. On one of the rare occasions since our separation that we had a serious conversation, Beth told me that she knew I was likely to leave her, that my restlessness had become palpable, that I had withdrawn from her and the girls and would become irritable whenever one of them tried to enter my "bubble." My bubble.

That’s how she put it. As if holding down a job and paying the bills and running kids around town for games and movies and doctor appointments somehow constituted a life of isolation. Maybe that’s what separated us. What I considered a load of responsibility and obligation, Beth considered a bubble.

But I think I’m probably better off describing what happened, rather than trying to analyze why it happened. I’ve never been very good at analysis, I don’t think. Funny thing for an academic to say, I guess. At least, I've never been good at self-analysis.

What I really wanted was for Beth to leave me. I remember daydreaming about coming home and finding the house empty, just a note saying she and the girls had gone to live with her sister in Minneapolis. Although I hate to admit it, I even fantasized about accidents – anything to change the situation without me having to take responsibility for action.

And then I met Jadia – or met her again – and slowly came to realize that it was not only time for me to make a change, but that in doing so, I would regain an aspect of my life -- Passion, maybe? Adventure? -- that I had subconsciously written off as over.

When the girls and I entered the funeral home the night before the service for Ant, I immediately recognized, and was recognized by, Inigo and his parents. It had been thirty years since we had seen one another, but our faces and our demeanor, once so familiar to each other, remained recognizable. The eyes and the mouth don't change much, I think, even as the skin toughens and wrinkles, the nose droops and enlarges, the hairline recedes. Inigo met me halfway as I walked toward the casket, grabbed my hand, and then embraced me, his head barely at the level of my shoulder. He was short and a little stout, the build he had inherited from his father.

Inigo's parents, Paolo and Matilda, joined us in the center of the room -- a big room, full of folding chairs many of which were occupied by high scool-aged children sobbing and talking quietly -- and thanked me for coming. I introduced my daughters to them, and received the usual congratulations on their beauty, the usual disbelief about how much time had passed and how old we kids had grown. As we began to engage in small talk, my eyes circled the room for Jadia, the grieving mother. I spotted her sitting in a chair near the coffin, next to a tall, dark-haired man whose arm rested on her chair back, and whose hand carressed her shoulder. "I'd like to pay my respects to your sister," I said to Inigo.

"She's up front with her ex," Mrs. da Costa answered. "Funny how they haven't had much to do with each other for twelve years, but now this horrible, horrible thing. They share the pain of losing their child, I guess. Go say hi to her. I'm sure she'll be grateful you're here."

Hannah, Annabeth and I stopped briefly at the coffin, which was surrounded by sprays of lilies, white roses and greenery. How unnatural it seems to see a teenaged boy laid out, eyes closed, hands folded, in a suit he probably hated to wear in life, if indeed he had ever worn it. Heavy makeup never seemed so out of place, I thought silently as I turned to look at Jadia and her ex-husband. As soon as she spotted me, Jadia knew who I was as well, and rose to embrace me. "How did you know?" I explained the connection we had -- our children attended the same high school, Hannah and Ant having been in the same grade, and Annabeth three years behind.

That's about all I remember from that night. I noticed that Jadia had become quite a beautiful woman, diminutive like her mother, but more slender and, in my eyes, better proportioned. And I found her soft-spoken manner very attractive. But you just sort of notice things like that, you never think about acting on that sort of vague attraction, if you're a married man and expect that marriage to define the balance of your life.

It wasn't until a few weeks later, when I ran into Jadia at the supermarket, that I realized I wanted to make some sort of move to become closer to her -- although even then I wasn't sure exactly what move or how close.

Had she and I walked past each other in this store before? Maybe. Probably. We both shopped there regularly, we discovered. As we stopped to talk in the produce section, I was reminded of an article I had read recently touting grocery stores as unheralded but effective "pickup" spots -- men always needing help selecting kitchen items and all that, women always eager to show off their expertise in that area.

Impulsively, I asked Jadia if she would like to join me for a cup of coffee in the shop near the front of the store. She looked into her basket, and seeing nothing that would be harmed by a delay in getting home, agreed. We spent nearly an hour talking, during which time I learned that Jadia's ex had returned to Florida a few days after the funeral, that Ant had been her only child, that she and Ant had lived with her parents for the eleven years since she and Ant's father had divorced, that she was a social worker employed by the county child welfare agency, and that she was not dating anyone. I filled her in on my own life -- that I was a professor of English, that Beth and I and the girls lived within walking distance of the university campus. Conversation was easy, and yet cautious, with revelations about our current lives often folding back into reminiscences of the old neighborhood and of our childhoods. Our siblings -- Inigo, Paul, Elizabeth, Katherine -- figured as much in the conversation as we did ourselves. We even talked a little bit about the falling out between our parents, precipitated by my mother's jealousy over an imagined overture from Mrs. da Costa to my father, at a backyard barbecue.

When we got up to leave, after suddenly realizing how much time had passed, Jadia gave me a peck on the cheek, and told me how good it was to reconnect with someone she had lost touch with for so long. We exchanged business cards, and agreed that we should keep in touch. But made no plans. That didn't seem right.

Did I begin pursuing Jadia then? I'm not sure that's the right word -- too strong for my feelings at the time, which were more about interest and intrigue than about intention -- but I do know that I looked for her, hoped for her presence, each time I went to the supermarket. And I wasn't disappointed. We saw each other the next week, and used the excuse to share another cup of coffee and another hour of conversation.

That's how it proceeded. That winter, we met for coffee at the supermarket a half-dozen times, on each occasion spending an hour or so filling in the story of each other's lives, like two people working on different parts of a large jigsaw puzzle, offering each other pieces that appear to fit the color or shape on which the other is focused. Two pictures forming, and coming closer together, eventually to form a single whole.

"What did you do when you left your job at the paper? Was your teaching job already lined up? Was Beth working?"

"But don’t you feel vulerable when you have to visit those violent families? How do you protect yourself?"

"A vacation in South Dakota, really? I’ve never known anyone who went there for vacation. What is there to do?"

Most of us experience infrequently the opportunity to tell another person our life story, to give shape and meaning in restrospect to events that unfolded with much less clarity in real time. The famous get to do this in their memoirs, but for the rest of us it's only when we meet someone new, someone who shows interest in how we got to where we are, that we have the luxury of providing this kind of shape, and color, and context. We mold random, disconnected events into a narrative that declares: This is who I am. We may leave out the pieces that don't fit the context, or move them to a different section of the narrative, where they connect more tightly to a different aspect of the picture.

When did I realize that I was not happy with my narrative? That no matter how I shaped it, I felt I had not achieved what I wanted, not experienced to the fullest the pleasures and challenges that my life could afford. I can't say. There wasn't a specific moment of clarity. I only know that I ended up there.

It took time for me to decide to act, all winter long in fact. Ant’s funeral was in October; it was March before I made my move. When I did, I was determined to be honorable -- and by my definition that meant that I needed to break with Beth before I began truly to pursue Jadia. I sensed that our meetings in the supermarket were becoming uncomfortable for both Jadia and myself. As I look back now, it seems quite obvious that I was sending impossibly mixed signals -- talking about my marriage and family while holding her gaze intently, reaching across the table occasionally to touch her hand. Where was this going? Is this a relationship forming or just an idle flirtation that leads nowhere? She never said those things to me, but I guess that unconsciously I sensed them.

And so I ended my marriage to Beth, over coffee in our kitchen, quietly, in a civilized way that covered the pain of failure with a cloak of understanding and promises to remain friends and loving parents. We cried, we held hands and embraced and looked back at both the happy times and the unhappy moments in our marriage. Beth asked me if I was having affairs, if I had cheated on her. I answered in the negative, mostly honestly, leaving out a one-night stand at a symposium in London and another after a guest lecture in Houston. At this point, what was happening between Jadia and me was not an affair -- we hadn't had sex, hadn't even had a real date, just encounters over coffee in the public space of the supermarket.

When I next met Jadia in the supermarket, I told her that I had moved out of the house, into an apartment a few blocks away, and that Beth and I had decided to divorce. In telling this, I made what I think may have been the boldest statement of my life: I made this decision because I want to be with you. What a load to lay on an unsuspecting person! Jadia burst into tears, and I began to qualify my bold statement with assurances that she was not the cause of my marital breakup, just the catalyst that made me realize the marriage was coming to an end, that I needed to be free of it to pursue happiness and completion.

Fortunately, Jadia was not scared off, or I might not be enjoying today’s tableau, my youngest daughter and myself sitting in the backyard wading pool in the afternoon sun, surrounded by my parents and Jadia’s parents, and now joined by Jadia, rocking our newborn son, and Elizabeth, carrying a tray of sandwiches that she places on the picnic table under the maple tree, where drinks, soft and hard, have already been laid out. Soon my daughter Hannah will return to join us, and later tonight, Inigo.

My God, this reminds me of playing in the pool in our backyard, Elizabeth says. Only thing missing is a half dozen more kids running around and splashing and screaming. Families were bigger when we were growing up, especially Catholic families, although I haven’t done so poorly, fathering four children. Let’s just not mention to the pope that two different wives and a divorce were involved.

My divorce took a year to finalize. During that time, Jadia and I dated and she more or less moved into my apartment, although she kept her parents’ house as her mailing address, giving her an excuse to stop in every afternoon and make sure things were okay and that her parents forgave her for cohabiting with a soon-to-be divorced man.

Fortunately, Paolo and Matilda had always liked me, and they welcomed me, and my daughters as well when I began to introduce them into this new setting. They came reluctantly at first, perhaps feeling a little disloyal to their mother, who had not started dating again. Annabeth, with the wisdom of a fourteen-year-old, told me she wasn’t interested in my mid-life crisis. Is that what it was? Had it been that I was so uncomfortable with the idea that my life was settled, that I couldn’t deal with the fact that this is who I am, that I forced myself back to a state where I was still becoming?

Elizabeth, a large, fluffy towel draped across her hands, reaches for Isabella and takes her from my arms, allowing me to stand and reach for my own towel, which lies folded in an empty lawn chair. I step out of the pool and into my flip-flops, drying myself as I watch Elizabeth do the same to the wriggling, complaining Bella. This is a child who loves the water, who every night stretches out bathtime into a full hour of recreation, splashing and kicking and making soap beards and squirting water out of the bottom of her rubber bath toys. Now she wants to stay in the pool. Elizabeth tells her it’s time for lunch, and promises her that she can swim again this afternoon. Bella looks to me and I nod my head in agreement, then take the toddler from my sister and kiss her forehead. What fun we have in the pool, I whisper with exaggerated enthusiasm. We’ll get in again later. Be a good girl now. Let’s eat some lunch.

Mom takes a couple of sandwiches -- turkey and ham -- and a can of Diet Coke, and places them on the TV tray that she has set up in front of Dad. He picks up a sandwich and without looking at it takes a bite, as silent now as he has been ever since July Fourth weekend, when Mom found him lying on the grass in the backyard, the garden hose he had dropped twisting and spraying wildly in every direction , soaking him as he lay unable to move himself.

Dad’s stroke. Another taste of mortality. I sense these becoming more and more frequent as I grow older. First there had been my sister Kath, whose uterine cancer had spread to her lymph nodes before it was discovered, who had fought off its further encroachment with chemo until the cure proved more damaging than the disease. Ant, of course. Jadia’s dad died while we were dating, nearly a year to the day after Ant’s body had been found.

In August of that year, Jadia and I had taken our first vacation together. She took me to Sintra, the town in Portugal where her grandmother Silveira ran a pensao, a guest house. Sintra had been the summer home of the Portuguese royal family, and it continues to have a holiday atmosphere in the summer, with busloads of tourists from Lisbon strolling around the palace and its environs, and whiling away afternoons in the bars and cafes.

Mama Silveira was a shock -- nothing like her quiet, diminutive, dark-haired daughter and granddaughter. She was nearly six inches taller than Jadia, with steel-gray hair carefully framing her face in a style that would not have been out of place on a fashion model fifty years her junior. Every morning, before she emerged from her bedroom, she put on make-up and dressed in a stylish outfit, generally a silk blouse and close-fitting slacks that showed she had retained the figure of a youthful woman. Photographs on the walls of the pensao showed she had been blonde in her youth -- she was, in fact, Swedish, and had moved to Portugal when she and Jadia’s grandfather had fallen in love, at university in Brussels, before the war.

Running the guest house kept her youthful, I surmised. Its eight suites were popular, and while she graciously hosted us for the two weeks of our visit in the largest and most elaborate of the rooms, she let slip that our trip was costing her more in lost revenue than our plane tickets had cost us. She had two employees, a chambermaid and a cook, but Mama was an active hostess, serving breakfast and dinner on the veranda overlooking the green lawn and swimming pool, offering wine and cocktails in the evening to the guests who lounged poolside through the long evenings, lingering as the sun slowly dropped below the trees that marked the western boundary of the property.

The pensao had once been the mansion of an aristocratic family for whom Jadia’s great-grandfather had worked as a youth. After the monarchy was deposed and the military took control, the house was abandoned. Jadia’s great-grandfather, who had made a fortune working in the casinos of Macao, was able to purchase it for a song when he returned to Sintra in 1929. Jadia’s grandfather, who had been born in Macao and whose mother was half Chinese, had grown up in this house and had brought his bride, Mama Silveira, here to raise their family. Only after Papa’s death, twenty years ago, had Mama turned the mansion into a business.

"You’ve got to keep moving," Mama said one cool night as we chatted over a bottle of wine on the veranda, long after the sun had gone down and most of the guests had retired to their rooms. "I have too many friends who became nothing more than widows and grandmothers. They’re my age, but they seem years older. They hobble around on canes wearing their black dresses and veils. I imagine I’m a scandal to them, but I’ve been able to enjoy all of these years. I meet wonderful people here at the house every summer, I know hundreds of people in the city, I throw wonderful parties at Christmas and New Year’s, I even get asked out on a date, occasionally. It’s not that I don’t miss your grandfather. It’s that I believe life has to go on, that we’re put here for a reason, and to discover that reason we have to be active and alive."

Two nights before we were scheduled to fly home, we got the call about Paolo. Jadia’s father had suffered a heart attack while mowing the lawn on a particularly hot day, and had died that night in the hospital. It was mid-morning in Boston when Matilda had called. Inigo had just arrived from Florida, and had brought his mother home from the hospital, where she had lingered all night after Paolo’s death, not able to drive because she was overcome with grief. An off-duty nurse had sat with her until Inigo’s arrival.

Jadia and I hastily adjusted our flight plans with the help of a travel agent who was a close friend of Mama Silveira’s. We arrived home in time to help Inigo with the funeral arrangements, the second time in a year he had taken charge in the passing of a family member.

And now we find ourselves traveling to another funeral, this time by train. We had been talking and eating in the back yard, cooing over the babies and complimenting Elizabeth and Jadia on the food, so we hadn’t heard the door bell. I noticed the police officer as he walked through the side gate. And of course I knew that something was wrong.

Hannah hadn’t lived long enough for the paramedics to be able to help her. Neither had the driver of the car that hit her as she drove back from the store. The lit cigarette that had flown out of her hand on impact had set fire to the leaking gasoline.

Jacob’s baptism had been transformed from a joyful event to a solemn one. We had decided to go through with it despite the accident -- a baby had to be baptised, and the relatives were here -- but we drove directly to Baltimore and the train station after the ceremony.

We decided to take the train because of Jadia’s feelings about Logan Airport. She'd hated it ever since she met Ant’s casket there, and she didn’t want to repeat that scene with Hannah’s remains. Besides, we could all find seats together on the train and talk ourselves through this latest loss.

For the eight hours of the train ride, through Philadelphia and New York and New Haven and Providence, we sit facing each other, Elizabeth, Jadia and I on a wide seat and Mom and Dad across from us. Dad’s wheelchair sits folded at the back of the car, near our hastily packed suitcases. Elizabeth makes sure we have food and drinks -- the nasty, stale-tasting sandwiches that are the best Amtrak has to offer, washed down with that tea that tastes of the plastic foam cups it’s been steeped in.

Even though she lives in Massachusetts, Jadia’s mom has stayed back at our house with Jacob and Bella. Inigo, who arrived to find the entire household weeping, has stayed back to help her.

Mom, as always, dominates the conversation, alternating between stories of Hannah’s childhood and head-shaking lamentations that no grandmother should have to outlive her grandchildren: It’s bad enough that I lived through your sister Katherine’s illness. Jadia knows what it’s like to lose a child. You don’t think you can bear it, but somehow you do. You go on. I had the rest of you kids to live for. But I never would have believed I would outlive one of my grandchildren. I’d give anything to take her place.

When the train pulls into South Station, we take our time gathering our suitcases and disembarking. Dad requires special help from the conductor, so there was no point in hurrying. Hannah’s body traveled in the luggage compartment, and the conductor confirms for us that a representative from the funeral home was waiting to transport her.

As we enter the terminal, I spot Beth and Annabeth watching for us, their eyes and noses red and puffy. Jadia sees them at the same time and hurries forward. Silently, she takes Beth in her arms and pulls her close, Beth whom she has only met twice and never under happy conditions but with whom she now shares the bond of mothers who have lost their children. They hug and cry quietly. I do the same with Annabeth, who holds onto me, forcefully, for the first time in years. Mom and Dad remain to the side, Mom rubbing Dad’s shoulders as tears stream from their eyes as well.