The Choice

Joe trailed Sally along the hall. The door to Julie’s room stood ajar, and a night light outlined the contour of her body, in a near fetal position beneath a lightweight blanket. Her blond tresses matted her left cheek as she lay on her right side, her bosom rising and falling ever so slightly in rhythm with her breathing.

At the threshold Sally whispered, “She’s so exhausted she should sleep through the night. I hope so, because sleep, as you know, is usually the only remedy.”

They had been contemplating that lovely girl for a minute or so, when Joe, with an intensity of feeling that he found himself powerless to resist, tiptoed to her bed. As gently as he could, he caressed Julie’s forehead with warm fingers, then leaned over and affectionately kissed her forehead; as his lips lingered—no more than a second or two—Julie’s left hand, as if with a soporific will of its own, reached out and clasped Joe’s. He straightened in place, holding her hand, feeling the life that pulsed in it, and after a few moments he went down on one knee so as not to elevate it and thereby disturb her, and he kissed it, feeling his lips mold to her knuckles. Before he released Julie’s hand, before he set it at her side, tears welled up in his eyes.

What he didn’t know, what he didn’t see because his back was turned to her, was that Sally, beholding that tender mercy, also had tears in her eyes. What Joe did see in his mind’s eye was a head the same age as Julie’s, but with lustrous, glistening brown hair, the aqueous brown he used to see when, as a boy, he would husk by the hundreds the spiky-shelled nuts of the buckeye trees that grew on the acreage owned by his grandparents. And although the color stirred memories, he couldn’t delineate features, couldn’t create a composite of eyes and cheeks and nose and mouth. And for the thousandth time in his life Joe asked himself not what he had missed, but what he had lost.

Coming out of his reverie, he pressed the crook of his elbow to his eyes, willing his shirt sleeve to absorb the tears.

After closing the door to Julie’s bedroom, Sally surprised Joe with a hug.

“That was a sweet gesture. Your kiss. Both kisses, I mean. Isn’t it something, asleep as she is, that she reached for your hand as you caressed her forehead? It goes to show that in the repose of sleep, like in the subconscious, we respond to touch, a loving touch.”

“And I do love her. You know that.”

“And I hope you know that the feeling is very mutual,” said Sally as she preceded him back into the kitchen.

And I love her mother too, Joe wanted to say, and not in a whisper. It would be so easy to grasp her by the shoulders, turn her, gaze at her, not speak a word, gather her in his arms, and kiss her, and then say it, say it with electric intensity, I love you too, Sal. I’ve loved you for years. Loved you when I had no right to love you, love you to the point of distraction, love you knowing I must mask a love that I cannot shout to you and to the world for fear of rejection . . . rejection by you. To hell with the world. And I’d better steer us to a different topic before I do something worse than foolish now that we’re alone.