Because the truth is, an apology is rarely a private exchange between two people: When you harm one person, you harm many. When I abandoned my wife, I also abandoned my community of friends, who were furious with me. I hurt others, who heard her story and were scared that their lovers could also leave them in a time of need.
Could this ripple effect work the other direction, too? An intimate relationship can scatter scars. I hope that an intimate apology, made public, can heal them.
Track practice. An hour and a half. A metal picnic table. Cold enough for hats and gloves, hot enough for shorts and flip-flops. Other parents talking about football and summer camps and the new high school.
Tennis practice. Second-story bleachers. Other parents scattered around, looking at phones or their children, who are learning to serve, to rush the net, to move their feet. Every now and then an intake of breath and a ball bounces into this upper deck. I save my document often.
Lunch break. The cafeteria-style section of Wegman’s grocery store, the overpriced pub in the hotel down the street from my office, the burrito place, the burger place, the salad place, the pho place. Me and my laptop and an hour to eat and write, 40 minutes if you count the drive, a chance to move this story along, just get words down, word count, produce content that may eventually be improved enough to be part of a novel. Maybe.
There is a children's book celebrated among literary types that stands quite apart from anything else. I first heard about Duck, Death, And The Tulip at a book event where author Mac Barnett called it out as the pinnacle of what a children's book can be. Unlike other kids' books, it has an endorsement from Meg Rosoff on the cover. There is a certain weight to its heavy stock pages. Written by German author Wolf Elbruch, the story begins the day Duck notices Death is following her. At first she is scared, but Death — who, by the way, is a skeleton in a dress — explains that he has always been there. They play. Death begrudgingly swims in the pond Duck loves, painted a brilliant, opaque turquoise that swallows their bodies, and Duck comes to feel a kind of comfort in Death's company. When he is chilly, she offers to warm him.
Cancer. A scary word, right? One you never imagine might be applied to your life. I knew even before the results came back from the biopsy, that the lump that had mysteriously developed was cancer. But for my doctor to say the words out in the open was a shock. Like stepping from my everyday world that I took for granted into an unknown world, one I would never have chosen to visit.
It's an unusual novel, is what I'm saying. Disconcerting in the strangest of ways. As a spy story, it is right in the sweet spot—moles and traitors, double-agents, lots of acronyms, trenchcoats and a war that needs settling. You can feel the London chill, almost hear the paper peeling off the walls of abandoned safehouses deep in enemy territory. But the addition of the supernatural vaults it into a whole different universe of odd, laying the spy stuff on a narrative armature that almost can't support it. Because when death is no longer the end, where do your stakes come from? And how do you know who wins and who loses?