One day in 1995, Elizabeth turned right instead of left. She literally ran into someone she'd known at Oxford, apologized profusely. Edith made her laugh. The sky became a different shade of gray. Edith looked her in the eye and said, "I am going to a meeting. I feel like it might be good for you, too." Edith couldn't say how she knew.
Over bad coffee afterwards, while Edith smoked, Elizabeth said, "I think I will come back."
One year later, Elizabeth Bishop had a one year chip. She had a psychiatrist appointment once a week, she had two prescriptions, she had an administrative job at a hospital. She never told her sponsor or her psychiatrist or her son her real loss. She went to St. Claire's once, debated with Walter about telling Peter. Walter didn't have much to contribute.
In one moment of lucidity, he said, "We will never be forgiven. We should not be."
xxx
Peter said, "What do you want for your birthday?"
She said, "I want you to come home and try college, just for a year. Or, I suppose, I wouldn't mind a nice blanket."
He was in Central Peru when he called. He decided to give her both.
She sat on the couch with her blanket over her feet, he sat on the floor flipping through a thick textbook. He bartered with his gift. "If I actually make sure to pass this class -"
"As opposed to?"
"I could pass this in my sleep, they should have let me test out of it," Peter said. "But I will make the effort and do the work if you come with me this summer for a week and we go somewhere you want to go."
That one was easy to say yes to. But the trap of Peter in her home was her secret. She used to have so much static in her head it was all she could manage to keep him safe, clothed, loved. Now she was thinking clearly, and almost told him every single day. How would she do traveling for a week?
She tried to speak to William, but got Nina instead. Nina said, "It's a bad idea. What will he think of you?"
It was a lousy, venal argument. Elizabeth worried about the feeling she got from Nina and pretended to agree. She pretended she was persuaded.
Elizabeth worried what Nina and William would do to Peter if they thought he knew. They'd had no compunction about experimenting on children. When Walter was the one you could count on for being kind, sometimes, you were in bad company. She allowed herself to change her mind.
Peter took her home to England. She had an amazing time.
Peter got his degree from MIT in two and a half years and then went away. He ran away, again. He let her keep the diploma.
xxx
She thought about her baby every day. She thought about Peter and wondered what possible amends was possible for what she'd done to him. She wrote out her thoughts as a letter to her dead son and burned it. Somehow the secret had become stifling. She would look up from her computer at work into bright fluorescents and feel something pressed down on her chest.
Elizabeth booked a vacation to Texas. "What's in Texas? Mom, I've been, there's nothing there," Peter said. He called constantly. This time was from Baghdad. He was working construction, and she suspected, some other things that he wouldn't mention to her. She and Walter had made him that way. They taught him to lie to himself and to never trust completely.
"Sometimes I like to be random," Elizabeth said to him.
She chose Houston because she knew absolutely no one who lived there. Her second night there she went to the church where the support meeting she wanted to attend was held. It looked like a thousand AA meetings she had sat in, but the faces had different lines on them. Elizabeth wondered if she had them, as well. She held her picture of her son, her child that had died, and waited for her turn to come around to talk. She started by noting that her husband was in prison (close enough to the truth) and they had made a decision not to talk to their second child about their loss. What a stupid pair they'd been.
She cried because she hadn't been able to say it for so many years. "My child died," she said.
She cried along with the other parents, in the worst club to ever exist. On her way out, a man her age stopped her and said he'd love to see the picture. "Well, not love. But you know." He probably wasn't working for Massive Dynamic or any of Walter's enemies. She showed him the picture and he smiled. "Handsome boy," the man said.
"He was," Elizabeth said.
She drove back to the hotel and parked in the parking lot. "You drive on the parkway and park in the driveway," she said for no reason. She smoked the second cigarette from the pack she'd bought at the airport. The air was humid. She said, "I loved you, Peter, so much."
She woke up and all she tasted was sick ash. She felt less of the weight.
She cancelled the rest of her stay in Houston and flew home. The next day she went to Peter's grave and sat on the grass growing on top of him. She sat for hours, barely thinking. She had watched him die, seen him in that coffin. Her child had died.
What she wanted when she stood up was a nice stiff drink. Possibly three. She could think of a million reasons why she was perfectly justified and how after nearly 10 years of sobriety she would be fine. She thought of Peter, both of them, and went to a meeting. She was too close to home to tell the truth, but she shared a version of it, censored enough but still true in her heart.
Then she went home and called Peter. She said, "I want you to come home. Before you ask, I don't have cancer and I don't think there's any reason I would die in the next few months."
"Okay," he said slowly. "But I should come home."
She sighed. "It's one of those dorky AA things, as you like to call them. Please."
"Of course," he said. Peter called them dorky but she had told him once going there had kept her alive and he'd said, "I know," very seriously.
Somewhere there was another Elizabeth and Walter whose son had been taken, she thought. She had collaborated in that loss. Some other wheres there were two Elizabeths who had both mourned their son. And somewhere else Peter had lived. She hoped it was many somewheres.
Peter came home and sat down across from her. He said, "You made tea, this is serious." He was nervous, she could tell. So was she.
Elizabeth said, "Peter, I hope you can forgive me for what I did." He started to protest, but she held up her hand. "You haven't heard it yet, sweetheart."
So she told him everything.
He stared at her and as she had expected, left. She wondered if he would even call when he came up for air.
Elizabeth brought into work a picture of her Peter when he was two, before he was ever sick. She put it next to the picture from Peter's graduation at MIT. Both her boys. Would her Peter have been as tall if he'd lived? What kind of man would he have been? How would her son have turned out if Walter had taken him back after he was cured?
She waited and hoped. But she felt better than she had in years. It was awful to think, given how badly Peter had to feel.
17 days after she had told Peter, Elizabeth came home from a meeting after work and saw Peter, miserable and haggard, sitting in front of her door. She sat down next to him and hugged him. He'd been drinking and she tried not to tense at the smell. She said, "I love you," probably more than once. Since he was right in front of her and safe, she could admit she had been terribly worried.
Peter said, "Mom." Then he said, "I realized I should have said I'm sorry you lost your son."
She said, "Thank you." The she stood up and said, "I'm glad you're home."