Free Wolf Point by Edward Falco Page A

Island, and raising his six-year-old daughter, Maura, alone, with the help of his mother, who was only too glad to get involved since her husband, T’s father, had died suddenly a few years earlier. By opening night, T and Alicia were spending a couple of evenings a week together alone in his apartment, and most weekends together with the kids, eight-month-old Evan and six-year old Maura. By the time the play closed six months later, a qualified Off-Broadway success, they were married.
    And thus. That was the way his life flowed.
    Alicia, Evan, Maura, and T. For many, many years.
    Maura grew up and married and moved away.
    Evan grew up and went off to college.
    T worked hard. T made money. T grew more and more isolated in his work. He worked, and he worked, and he worked more. The money grew and grew.
    Alicia grew up too, and somewhere along the line, without T noticing, stopped loving him. In time she fell in love with someone else. Another actor. Several years younger. Theymust have fallen deeply in love. T had no clue. Not until long after his exile to Salem. Not until the papers were all signed and the documents certified and Alicia owned most of what they had previously both owned. Then he found out.
    Looking out the window at the Saint Lawrence, T’s thoughts skittered away from the day Alicia had driven down to Virginia to explain to him, furious and through tears, why he was responsible for all that had transpired, and then lingered on the early years, when her son, Evan, loved him as a father and his daughter, Maura, loved Alicia, if not completely as a mother, since Brooke was still in the picture, then at least as someone terribly important to her, someone she trusted and depended upon. He recalled those many years when the kids were still kids. He remembered the vacations they had taken together, to Greece and Italy, to the Scandinavian countries; he thought of the fjords and the Alps and the Mediterranean. He remembered, in particular, a summery night on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, during an August two-week family vacation, walking along the beach at night barefoot and hand in hand with Alicia while Evan ran in and out of the waves and Maura stuck close to Evan, looking after him; and for some reason he remembered the bicycles. Bicycling along the beach was one of the principal vacation activities there, and a bicycle or a group of bicycles would appear regularly in the moonlight, preceded by the sticky sound of tires spinning up sand. It was not a walk during which anything dramatic happened. It was not the night the four of them came across an alligator in the surf and called the Forest Service, and then watched as the creature was capturedand hauled away in the back of an SUV. It was an uneventful night: just the four of them on a moonlight walk along a white-sand beach with bicyclists. He held Alicia’s hand. Both the children called him “Daddy.” Evan running back to him with a shell or some sea dreck saying, “Daddy? What’s this?” Maura complaining, “Daddy. Evan’s going in up to his knees!” How small they were then. How different the world.
    Behind him, Jenny made a soft, whimpering sound. She was wrapped up in a little ball, so near to the dead fire she was in danger of going up in flames should the quilt get pushed any closer to the embers. He picked her up easily, a hand under her shoulder and the other under her knees, placed her down gently on the bed, and then covered her with two thick green blankets, which he found on a shelf in the room’s only closet. From the wood carrier he took the last two split logs and placed them over the embers on the andiron. He used more of his
New Yorker
to get the fire going, then backed away from the hearth toward the middle of the room and took a second to look over the scene: Jenny asleep in a sleigh bed under a pile of blankets in the flickering firelight; the constant hum of the wind around the house and through the trees and over the