If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This Read Online Free PDF

as though with every word, he personally, Jack Snyder, was robbing his own child of any hope. Bess’s eyes are so open to him and so kind, he can easily imagine trying to explain it all to her. Trying to defend his decision to leave. To betray. To run away. Going into the petty, the hurtful, the heavy drag down into failure that has brought their marriage to this end. He can feel this desire to confess and then plead his own case swell like a powerful wind gusting somewhere deep inside his chest. But he stops himself. Closes himself tight against the urge, and for a time, Bess gives no response at all. Just looks away a little from his gaze, and gradually it becomes the kind of moment when the sounds that were there all along are audible, anew. Cars passing by on the distant road. Birds calling out to one another; birds calling back. A plane overhead.
    “Actually, Jack,” Bess says finally, looking down, “Lila already told me that too.”
    And with just a quick hand to his shoulder, she stands and walks away.
    T he first few months of Lila’s life, she hollered as if indignant at having been born, maybe as if she saw the injury to come. He so envied Ann back then, the way she could slip her breast into the baby’s mouth, the way Lila would settle, the way Ann could know who she was to her. For all those miraculous months, that was what injustice seemed to be, his wife having that, when he did not.
    Out on the path now, Lila and Wally are walking around and around and around. There’s a moment every time when it looks as though they’re heading toward him, but then they stay with the curve, Lila’s arm straightened by the unaccustomed pull of the lead. It takes Jack a while to realize she must have lost track anyway, that she can’t know where the circle starts or ends, when a full rotation is complete, can’t know whether she’s facing him or facing away.
    He takes his glasses off so that out among the distant blur of green, Lila and Wally are just another distant blur.
    Staring at them, at nothing, he can remember how much it felt like exile those first few months, how he seemed to be invisible to her all that year, how this new, keen, devastating love seemed to bring nothing so much as isolation. And how that changed one night when Lila was crying out, not crying, but yelling for help, for comfort. Maybe it was a tooth, maybe a terrible dream. Ann was either sleeping or pretending to be, so he went in. He found his daughter standing up, just a shape in the nightlight dusk, all her weight thrown against the rail, hollering into the night. He held his arm out, next to hers, and with his other hand he moved her grip so she was latched onto him. He remembers now exactly how she looked as his eyes adjusted to the dark and her little face emerged, curious, trusting, beautiful, as though she were a candle burning through the night. Just hang on, Lila, he told her then, and she smiled at him, she seemed to understand. Just don’t let go.

If I
Loved
You
I.
    I F I LOVED YOU, I would tell you this:
    I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer. And that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that now I understand there is no hope. If I loved you, I would say: you shouldn’t be so hard on us. On me and on Sam.
    Because it may not even be just the cancer.
    For all you know we have a brain-damaged son living in an inadequate institution thirty miles from our house. For all you know, we agonized one long, cold winter night six years ago over whether to send him there. But then, broken, exhausted, we finally stood together in our kitchen, staring hard at each other, both of us the worse for scotch, and just knew, just then, at the exact same moment, that we couldn’t manage him at home any longer. Not with him so big I couldn’t bathe him by myself. Not with him so strong. Not with me just diagnosed and in for my second