by Anita Shreve
“Harriet, I feel sick about this. You can’t know how bad I feel about this. . . .”
“For God’s sake, spit it out,” she screams. “We’ve lost the house, haven’t we?”
He walks around to her side of the bed, extends his arms to embrace her. For a moment, she lets him, leans into him.
“How could you . . . ?” she asks. “How long have you known this was coming?”
“I’ve known for a while,” he says. “But I just found out for certain this morning. I was at the bank.”
She sits down abruptly upon the bed, as if she has fallen.
“I’ll take care of you, Harriet,” he says. “I’ll always take care of you and the children. And they’ve got to give us at least sixty days before they foreclose. Perhaps . . .”
“I’m going downstairs,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I’m going to sit down there until you’re gone. Don’t be long, because I’m very, very tired.”
She stands, walks slowly to the other side of the bed, bends to the floor, and retrieves her robe. She slips her arms through the sleeves, wraps the robe tightly across her chest, securing it with the sash, as though she realized she was exposed, does not want him to see her skin.
Charles watches Harriet leave their bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
He stands for a time in the center of the room, staring at the shut door. Numbly, he turns, puts on his shoes and socks. He takes a jacket from a hanger in the closet. From the drawers of his bureau, he makes a pile of socks and underwear and ties and shirts. He is barely aware of what he is collecting; he simply wants to make a pile. He slips another suit jacket from a hanger, wraps the untidy bundle in the jacket, knots the bundle with the sleeves of the jacket, puts the bundle under his arm. He does not look again at the bed, or at the bedroom that he has shared with his wife for sixteen years. He opens the door, listens intently for sounds in the hallway. He passes the rooms where his children are sleeping, knows he cannot bear to look at Jack in his bed, instead opens the door to Hadley’s room. He sees her head on her pillow, her brown hair spread out behind her. Her eyes are open—watchful brown eyes, so like his own.
“Where are you going?” she asks from the bed. He thinks he hears a tremor in her voice. He does not know what she has heard.
“I’m not going far,” he says.
He walks to the bed, sits at its edge. He smooths her hair with his hand.
“What’s wrong, Daddy? You look so sad.”
She sleeps on a pillow with a white lace ruffle; she cradles in her arm a worn and threadbare pink giraffe, a relic of her childhood.
He cannot tell his daughter he is leaving her. His throat feels swollen, suffused with its ache.
“I’m not sad,” he tells his daughter. “You’d better try and get some sleep. Morning will be here before you know it.”
Hadley dutifully closes her eyes. His daughter, unlike his wife, will not ask to hear what she knows she cannot yet absorb. His daughter will wish away the voices behind the closed door, may come to believe by morning that they were only voices in a bad dream.
He kisses his daughter at the side of her face.
Holding his bundle, he descends the stairs, walks through the silent house. He finds his overcoat on the clothes tree, his car keys on the counter. Through the door of the family room, he sees his wife—a small, huddled shape on a couch. She is looking at her palms, which are resting on her knees, as if she were trying to read there what has happened to her, what will happen to her.
He says, “I’ll be back before the kids are up.”
She does not acknowledge this promise. He opens the door, leaves his house and family behind him.
And what can you say about a soiled shirt, a shirt that does not belong to your husband, hiding in your drawer?
He held it in his hands like evidence.
I said, my voice no more than a whisper, that I had taken the shirt from my father’s laundry basket the last time I was visiting, that I had planned to knit a sweater for him for Christmas.
Stephen might have said, The size is wrong.
And I’d have had to lie again.
But he didn’t. What was the point?
I remember that he sat down at the place where he had been, at his place within the family, near the fire. His eyes were inward, closed to me. My hands shook. I couldn’t stop them. I hadn’t meant for this to happen. But if I hadn’t meant for this to happen, why had I kept the shirt?
I remember, too, that I was afraid. It was a kind of fear I had never felt before: a sense that glass would shatter, cutting each of us.
I had to go upstairs to get the gift for Lily. Stephen had forgotten to bring it down.
Lily felt the tension in the air. Looked at me and then her father.
The relatives came for the meal. They seemed, with their broad smiles and appetites, bright cartoon figures entering suddenly a darkened film—characters misplaced or lost. Or was it we who were misplaced, had lost our place?
I served the food that I had made. I smiled, said pleasant things. I could do this, had to do this for Lily, had to serve as a foil for Stephen, who could barely eat. From time to time I looked at his face, and it was white, preternaturally colorless. I thought to myself: How can I have done this to any man? And then I thought: Why, in choosing you, did it have to be something I had done to Stephen? What was the contract that Stephen and I had made? Where did it begin or end?
After the meal, the children dispersed to reinspect their toys. We were invited to go to Stephen’s brother’s house for dessert, as was the custom. I said yes too quickly. I wanted to be out of my house, away from the fear. I had set something in motion, and I did not yet know how it would play out. I wanted, too, to be away from the phone hanging quietly upon the wall. I thought that you might call, was more afraid that I would.
I bundled Lily up in her coat. I put my scarf on, then my boots. I looked at Stephen, who was not dressed for the cold.
You go on with the rest, he said, not looking at me. I think I’m getting another migraine. I’ll just lie down, come along in an hour or so.
I did not believe him about the migraine, but I understood that he needed to be alone. I thought briefly that he might go looking for other evidence, the letters and the package that he now must be wondering about. I thought that now I should stay—but there was Stephen’s brother waiting for us by the door, waiting to take Lily and me to his house so that Stephen could follow in our car later.
I hesitated, put my hand on Stephen’s sleeve. You rest, I said. Come if you can. When I get home, we’ll talk.
He turned away, said nothing. I looked quickly at Stephen’s brother, who had heard.
The phone rang. I was paralyzed. Stephen glanced at the phone, looked at me. I walked to the phone. When I picked it up, my hand shook so badly I was afraid I might drop the receiver. I said, tentatively, Hello, praying it wasn’t you. It was my father, wishing us all a merry Christmas. My relief was sharp, and I began to cry. I turned my back to the kitchen so the others wouldn’t see.
In Stephen’s brother’s house, I saw blurred shapes and scenes, rushes from a film that was playing on furniture and faces, strange distorted limbs, bodies wrapped around an armchair, moving soundlessly against the shiny metal of a toaster or a teapot.
I hoped that Stephen was sleeping, knew that he was not. I did not know if he was opening drawers in his office, or pacing in the bedroom.
An hour passed and then another. I went to the telephone, called my house. There was no answer. I sat back down at the table.
I knew then. It was a feeling that came on like a chill, first along the hairs of my arm, then along my spine, and settling finally at the back of my neck.
I stood up, reached for my coat.
Keep Lily here, I said to Stephen’s brother.
HE SLOWS THE CADILLAC where the tarmac meets the wood, wary of ice that may have formed on the bridge during the earlier storm. The night is still and dark, the visibility poor, no moon
yet to delineate the bridge’s span above the water. Beside him on the seat is the bundle of clothes. He is now, in all senses of the word, homeless—an alien and yet oddly comforting sensation, a state of being that seemed heightened during his solitary drive down High Street, his the only vehicle on the road, the windows of the houses he passed shuttered and closed to him.
He knows exactly where she is right now, exactly what she must be doing: lying in a bed next to her husband, waiting for her daughter to wake up. He knows he tortures himself with images of Siân with her husband, like a masochist poking a sore tooth, but he hopes that somehow if he looks at the images enough, forces himself over and over to examine them, he might finally be able to absorb them, defuse their power. On his way to the bridge, he passed half a dozen phone booths he knows well, slowed the car at each, thinking momentarily that he might impulsively call her despite the idiocy of the hour, had to will himself not to stop the car. He wants, needs, to hear her voice—to make the connection of now-familiar sound waves across a wire. He wants to call her to tell her what he has done, to tell her simply that he is not sleeping in a bed with someone else, will never do so again.
He parks in the middle of the bridge, halfway along its length. He emerges from the car, walks to the railing. Underfoot he feels a splintered board, a sliver missing. In good weather, walking across the bridge, one can see through the slats the water below, the shallow green water where the bridge meets the beach, the deep navy of the channel. When he takes that walk, and even when he drives the bridge’s span, he often thinks of the pilings beneath the bay, of the force of the tides against the thick round wooden columns. He wonders how the engineers who maintain the bridge know when the pilings need replacing, how it is that their concrete anchors never seem to shift in the sand, causing a sudden give in the planking.
He feels rather than sees the rough surface of the railing. He remembers the first day that he touched Siân, on the bench, bringing his lips to her nipple, not knowing as he did so what was happening, what he was making happen. He had wanted a return to innocence. He remembers, too, the last time he lay with Siân, the last time they made love, how they both fell into a deep, seamless sleep, even though it was morning, how when he awoke he still had his finger inside her, and how he realized that for that to have occurred, neither one of them must have stirred even a fraction while they slept. Was there, or could there ever be, he wondered then, and wonders now, a reconciliation between innocence and sexuality?
A breeze drifts along the length of the bridge; below him he can hear the slap of waves. He cannot see much: a hint of land where there are lights at the shoreline. He looks over toward the east, where the sun will rise soon, where the dunes and the spit meet the other end of the bridge. In Portugal it’s already Christmas morning, has been for some time. He knows little about how the Portuguese celebrate this holiday, other than that they must. He doesn’t know much about Portugal at all actually, except for its food, or at least those dishes that have made their way across the Atlantic. He wonders when exactly he will ever get to Portugal: He cannot imagine traveling there alone now.
He raises his collar, leans on his elbows. He bends his head, shuts his eyes. He knows he should ask for forgiveness, that what he has done to Harriet and his children is reprehensible, that his wife is still probably sitting on the couch trying to comprehend the scope of this betrayal.
He turns around, rests his back against the railing. His coat falls open; he lifts his head to the sky, searching for a star. He wants to reach across a lifetime, to reclaim what once was forfeited.
In the overcast sky, he cannot find a star. He pulls his coat to, knows he needs a room now, if only for a few hours. He tries to think where there might be a motel open this time of year, winces as he imagines the thoughts of the night manager booking in a man alone on Christmas.
He walks to the car. He hears the clock tower ring three bells.
He remembers when there were prayers for different dilemmas.
The light was blinding on the surface of the snow, a painful light you wanted to ward off with your hands. I turned too quickly into the drive, skidded on the ice. The car thudded softly into the snowbank that Stephen’s brother had made when he’d plowed the drive before the meal was served. I left the car door open, ran up the stairs to the kitchen. I called his name—once, twice, three times—and heard no answer. I thought he might be in the barn, did not want to think of what I might find there. I turned then and saw through the window that the barn door was open.
I left the house and walked quickly to the barn. The building was old, with wide plank siding, and sometimes in the winter, if the air was dry, the boards contracted, pulled away from each other, leaving thin seams of air and light from without or within. I hesitated at the barn’s entrance, looked through a crack in the wall. I saw the ocher flannel shirt, a dark red stain.
I ran to where Stephen was sitting on an old wooden chair he had thought years ago to refinish and had brought to the barn, where it had remained all that time. There was a shotgun at his feet. The wound was to his shoulder; he was holding his arm limply in his lap. One sleeve was soaked with blood—a drenching, rusty spill.
He was barely conscious. His hand was already gray beneath a blotting of the rust.
I said, Stephen.
He looked at me, tilted his head. The pain was visible on his face.
I touched his hand.
I’m so sorry, I said to him.
I watched the paramedics wrap my husband in warm quilts, tie him to a stretcher, and carry him out into the overbright sunshine of the yard. Later, the surgeon who stitched him said that he would lose the use of his arm. I wondered how it had happened: Had his hand shaken so badly that he had missed?
I understood that this was not for the shirt, nor for the onion sets that had been washed away, but for a life, a way of life, that might have to go with the onion sets.
I understood that it was for having had the farm at all. To release him from the farm.
And I understood, too, that it was for the missed connection—for an emptiness I had failed to fill.
When the paramedics had gone and I had said that I would follow, I went back into the barn. I scrubbed the chair and the floorboards. I think it strange now that I did not cry. I washed the chair clean, but I could not remove the stain from the wooden floor, from the tiny cracks where the color had settled in.
HE HAS WAITED long enough. Yesterday, Christmas Day, with its excruciating pain and elaborate pretense, was, he thinks, the longest day of his life. After his drive to the beach, he found a motel room at the edge of town, slept until sunlight blurred the edges of the shades, then drove back to his house for the charade of Christmas morning. He found Harriet, ashen-faced, an automaton, a smile frozen on her lips, sitting in a straight-backed chair, as the children, having demolished their stockings, were opening their presents. Only Hadley of his three children, on the floor with an unopened present on her lap, seemed to sense catastrophe in the air. He took off his coat in the kitchen, sat on the couch, and was immediately inundated with the squeals and queries of Anna and Jack, who pushed presents onto his lap, demanding his attention and scrutiny and, more than once his aid in assembling toys. Normally that was a task he accepted grudgingly as a necessary fact of fatherhood, but yesterday he welcomed the work: It provided a focus, a distraction from the frozen smile.
When the presents had been opened, assembled, and marginally played with, he went into the kitchen and made pancakes—a ritual of Christmas morning that felt hollow this time. At the dining table, Harriet sat unmoving, a fork stabbed into a pancake, as if she were unable to cut it for herself. Even Jack and Anna began to feel the calamity, turning their gaze from mother to father to mother, then over to Hadley, who seemed, as the eldest, the repository of secrets. Catching Harriet’s eye, Charles thought to take the ball from her, ease her task, by beginning the talk himself. (How, he had no idea; he had not prepared for this, could not even imag
ine the vocabulary with which one told a child this terrible thing.) But Harriet, seeing his intent, shook her head quickly. He didn’t know if her gesture meant not now, or not today, or not at all, but it wasn’t his place to question her, not his decision.
Awkwardly, after the meal, Charles stood in the middle of the family room, dispossessed, unsure of whether or not he had the right even to go upstairs to the bathroom to fetch his toilet kit, which, in his haste the night before, he had left. He had tended the fire, cleaned up the wrappings from the presents, finished the breakfast dishes, and was now unemployed. Normally they’d have gone visiting—to his parents, to her parents, for more food, to see the trees. He supposed that Harriet still planned to make these trips, was unclear if he should accompany her. Ought they to make a clean sweep, telling first the children, then each family—in the way they had once announced the impending birth of Anna?
But Harriet made the decision for him. She said simply, at his side, “Go now.”
He turned to her, thinking he would ask her if she didn’t want him to stay, to help her tell the children, but her face was impenetrable. She answered for him the unspoken query.
“I’m going to tell them when you’re gone,” she said.
He left then, said no goodbyes. The children occupied, he slipped out the kitchen door, feeling small and mean. It was the worst crime, he thought, stealing away from one’s children.
He’d driven to the motel, locked himself in his room. He’d wanted desperately to call Siân, knew that he could not. They’d made an agreement: They wouldn’t call each other on Christmas Day. But what agreements were binding now?
He’d tried to sleep, a futile and restless effort. He’d gotten up from the bed, driven to the Qwik Stop for a six-pack, gone back to the room, drunk the six beers, one after the other. Still he couldn’t sleep. There was nowhere to go, no one to call. It was Christmas Day, the one day of the year when everyone was occupied, everyone nestled into a family. And whom would he call if he could? Was there anyone to whom he would tell this story, anyone who could understand what he had done? He did not feel sorry for himself, did not want the companionship or understanding of other men. He wanted only to talk to the one person, hear the one woman’s voice. He thought that if he could talk to her, he would be able to sleep. Everything would be all right.
