“Where’s Seth?” I asked.
“Upstairs. Asleep, last time I looked.”
I checked my watch. It was seven, early for him to be in bed.
“Does he … is he okay?”
“He has a slight fever. He actually asked to go to bed.”
She stood clumsily, then fell back to the couch, clutching her foot.
“Foot cramp,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“No, I deserve it.”
“Claire—”
Her fingers worked at the knot in her foot, which I knew from long experience could be excruciating. “No, I do.”
I wanted to go to her, put my arms around her, and wait out the cramp like we’d done so many times before, but the image of her in Tim’s arms held me back.
“Will you sit for a minute?” she asked. “You’re making me nervous, standing there like that.”
“How am I standing?”
“Like you’re wondering if you should pack your things.”
I let that hang there as a deep weariness settled over me. I closed my eyes for a beat, two, then Claire was there, at my shoulder, leading me to the couch.
“You shouldn’t walk on that. You’ll make it worse.”
She grimaced and I could see her fighting the instinct to fall to the floor and cradle her foot in her lap until the cramp passed. Sometimes it was fast, but a few times I’d found her in the hall, or the bathroom—wherever she was when the cramp hit—where she’d been stranded for half an hour or more.
She pressed on and we were on the couch, both worn out and gripped by pain.
“Can I talk? Will you listen?” she asked.
I looked her in the face for the first time. Her eyes were the colour they only were when she’d been crying. They always turned this amazing shade when she was particularly upset.
“We don’t have to do this now. We can wait till you feel better.”
“I’m not going to feel better until I put this right. If I can.”
“What did you want to say?”
She blew out a long breath. It reached my face, a sweet smell I always associated with kissing her. And in thinking this I knew—I was going to forgive her.
Probably.
Assuming that’s what she wanted.
“I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I?” she said.
“Do you really want me to say?”
“I guess I meant it more rhetorically, but I wanted to tell you I was sorry. I mean, of course, you know I’m sorry, so desperately sorry. I won’t insult you with the details, unless you want to know—”
“No!”
She started. “No, of course you don’t. And there’s nothing to tell. You saw everything there was to see.”
“Did I, Claire? Did I really?”
Did I see what’s in your heart? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.
“You did. And Tim’s gone.”
“I drove him to the airport.”
“You did?”
“You didn’t know?”
“He packed his stuff and left. Said he wouldn’t be back. Did he … you drove him to the airport?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to hear what he had to say for himself. And punch him in the face, though that was his suggestion.”
“You what? You’re not making sense.”
“No. Nothing is.”
She fell silent, her hand massaging her foot idly. I could tell by the way the muscles in her neck loosened that the worst of the cramp had passed.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“No. I’ve been sitting here, trying to think of a way … trying to make you believe me. I know it’s always been hard for you that Tim and I were together. I know you’ve wondered about him, about us.”
I didn’t deny it. How could I?
“I’m not saying that I don’t understand how you feel. I’ve always known, really, and it’s something I should’ve worked harder to correct.”
“Because I was totally in left field?”
“Not totally, but not in the way you mean.”
“So you haven’t been harbouring some secret wish that he’d come back? Declare his undying love for you? Beg you to take him back?”
She smiled uncertainly. “Of course I have, or a small part of me has, anyway. Just like I bet what’s-her-name—Lily—is wishing that same thing about you sometimes, no matter how happy she is right now.”
“But the difference is, I haven’t turned up.”
“Right, but you have to let me have that, Jeff. That’s the part of girl-Claire that was hurt by the first person … it’s not real, is what I’m trying to say. It’s revenge. And revenge isn’t sweet. And it isn’t the point.”
“What is your point?”
“Do you remember why I told you I came back here? Why I wouldn’t move away with Tim?”
“Because of your dad? That promise you made him?”
“Right. I know it sounds stupid, and part of me was probably just testing Tim, but it was important to me to do what I said I was going to do. But if I’m being perfectly honest, if Tim had shown up in those first few months, I probably would have left. My dad would’ve been hurt, but Beth had already broken his heart. He would’ve gotten over it. Anyway, all this to say that he might be the reason I came home, but he’s not the reason I stayed.”
“What’s the reason, then?”
“Do you really not know?”
“I only know what you tell me.”
“I hope that’s not true, but I will say it. I’ll say it if you promise to believe that I’m telling you the truth.”
I turned away, looking into the gloom beyond the puddle of light from the reading lamp. Little balls of it reflected off the photographs on the wall leading up the stairs where our son was sleeping, oblivious to the chaos in his own house.
“All right. I promise.”
She placed her hand on my arm. “I came back for my dad, but I stayed for you, Jeff. I stayed for you.”
And because I’d promised, I believed her.
And in the end, I stayed too.
CHAPTER 25
Amateur Detective
After Tim Leaves the daycare, I receive a curt email from Connie that I know will be followed by a Chinese water torture of communication until I comply. So I let the staff know I’ll be gone for a couple of hours and walk from Playthings to the conservatory.
On my way, I wonder, as always, what it is about this woman that removes my free will. She’s had my number since the first time I met her (both figuratively and literally), and I’ve never known how to keep her from using either.
“Because you like it,” Jeff would say. “She pushes you. And it feels crappy at first, like the first round of golf after winter, but by the back nine, you’re loving it.”
He was right, of course. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost the ability to push myself, to get outside myself, inside myself. Music was the way I’d always done that in the past, and Connie pushed me hard enough to realize that it still worked after all these years. It was still something I needed in my life to feel whole, happy, connected. It was a fundamental part of me and always had been.
And as I walk down the quiet side streets, empty and abandoned by the parents at work, the children at school, I realize that this too has been missing since all this happened. There hasn’t been any music. None coming from the radio I won’t turn on, the iPod I will not play, and the piano I have not touched. As a result, it’s too quiet up there in my head, and this has let the noise in.
So after I do a few scales and runs to warm up my fingers, and Connie puts a new piece in front of me, something modern and dissonant, I dive into the score. I play it clumsily and loudly, these off-kilter notes, until they work their way inside my brain and the volume’s turned up loud enough that there isn’t room for anything other than the music.
When I get home from the day, there’s glue in
my hair and a tiredness that’s familiar, workable. Beth’s left a note that she’s gone to the gym, but Seth is there, and I make dinner for him for the first time since that Friday. Less than two weeks ago on the calendar, but we’ve been through a time machine since then. And like in the Stephen King novel I was reading shortly before all this happened, the time that’s elapsed since I stepped through the wormhole bears no relationship to real time. Two weeks, two minutes, two years. Any of these is a possibility.
I throw together a mismatch of foods left by our friends and neighbours, who I still have not thanked my mother’s voice reminds me. There’s chicken curry, a chickpea salad, and rosemary potatoes. As Seth picks at his food (the Tupperware crew really didn’t have a twelve-year-old boy in mind in their act of kindness), he tells me that two women he didn’t even know dropped off the latest batch when he wasn’t-watching-TV after school.
“Thought you’d slip that in there, did you?”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Of course not. You’re a good kid, Seth.” He scowls.
“Did I say something wrong? Being a good kid not cool or something?”
“No one says ‘cool’ anymore, Mom. Jeez.”
“What do they say, then?”
“I don’t know? We don’t talk about it.”
“So you’re saying that kids today all get along, and there are no cliques, no geeks, no loners. It’s a real utopia over there?”
“No … I … what does utopia mean?”
“It’s like an ideal place, the perfect place.”
“I don’t think that’s right.”
“That’s what it means.”
“No, I mean that’s not what school’s like.”
I ruffle his hair. “Of course it isn’t. It never has been. But it’s not worse than usual, right? Are people—”
“Everyone’s being fine, Mom. Like I told you. Nicer than usual, even.”
As if to confirm this, the phone rings. Seth skips over the floor to answer it. I can hear the high tones of a teenage girl’s voice coming out of the receiver.
“Hold on a sec.” He lets the phone dangle. “Gonna take this upstairs. Can you hang up?”
“Sure.”
He bounds from the room and I pick up the phone, slammed by the déjà vu of a thousand similar instances from when I was Seth’s age. Back before Twitter and Facebook and IMs and texts, all I had was the phone, pressed against my ear for so long after dinner every night that it took on my body temperature. If I had a fever, the receiver might’ve melted.
“I got it!” Seth bellows from upstairs.
I raise the phone to put it back in its cradle slowly. A few words tumble out, a giggle, a how are you? Seth’s voice a little deeper saying he’s all right, you know? Considering.
“Are you eavesdropping?”
I jump and put the receiver down louder than I meant to. I’m busted now, and Seth’ll probably have something to say about it, as he should.
I turn towards Beth. “A mother’s prerogative.”
Beth smiles through her red face. Her hair’s slicked back, like she’s just had a shower, and she’s wearing a loose pair of sweats. She leans in towards the counter and stretches her legs behind her.
“That did me some good. You should join me at the gym sometime.”
“And run like a rat in a cage? I don’t think so.”
“There are lots of other things you could do. Besides, they say that …”
She bends over quickly, touching her toes, like that was her plan all along.
“That exercise is good for depression?” I ask, more aggressively than I should. But the thought of it, the thought of falling back into that dark place with no joy and no light, and no light even at the end of the tunnel, makes me feel like fighting. I have to fight that, no matter what, with everything I’ve got, and then some.
“I, well …”
“I’m not depressed, okay? I’m sad. I know the difference.” She straightens up. “I only meant, if you were looking for something to do … ah, hell. Forget I said anything, all right?”
“Okay.”
She moves to the fridge and asks me about work. As she assembles some of the same food we just ate, I tell her about how crazy Mandy was being, and about Tim stopping by.
“What did he want?”
“To see the place. He didn’t stay long.”
“I see.”
“What?” I ask, though I know what. I’ve never been able to keep anything from Beth, and she knows all about that rainy day. She barely spoke to me for months after I told her; having been on the receiving end of deception, she had trouble forgiving me. I’m still not sure she has.
She brings her plate to the table and sits. She pulls the newspaper towards her, though that doesn’t mean she’s done talking. That’s my sister, always doing three things at once. “I’m surprised he’s still here.”
“I think he feels like he should be here for his folks. And this has been hard for him too.”
“Losing a brother he’d barely spoken to in twenty years?”
“That’s not fair, or accurate. They’d … they’d been in touch again these last few years.”
Beth gives me a skeptical look, but it’s true. Though I hadn’t spoken to Tim since that day until he came home last week, he had something to do with Jeff forgiving me, with him agreeing to see if we could try to get past it all.
And though I don’t know the details (because part of our tacit agreement for trying to put it behind us was that the only relationship Tim had with our family was on Jeff’s terms), I know they’ve been communicating off and on over the last couple of years. That Tim had reached out, and Jeff had responded. Gifts arrived sporadically for Seth. Always age appropriate and something Seth had been hankering for. And Jeff’s casual references to Tim in conversation, every once in a while, were an acknowledgment that his forgiveness was real, and remained.
“Holy shit!” Beth says.
“What?”
“Have you seen this?” She hands me the paper, her finger stabbing at a small article whose headline reads: Driver in Accident That Killed Local Hospitalized.
“Oh. Yes. Um, what’s his name, Marc Duggard, told me that when he came to give me … Jeff’s effects.”
My eyes track to where the bag’s still sitting on the kitchen counter, half hidden by unanswered mail. A growing pile of things I cannot face yet.
“And you didn’t mention it to me because …?”
“I haven’t thought about it that much.”
“Seriously?”
“What’s the point?”
“If it were me? I’d be insisting they press charges.”
“I’ve never been you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. As Seth would say, jeez.”
She smiles, but she doesn’t let it go. “Okay, but still. Aren’t you bothered by this?”
“Of course I am. I … can you imagine? What it must be like for her? I mean, she killed someone. I’d be on suicide watch too.”
“I don’t give a shit about her, and you shouldn’t either.”
“It was an accident, Beth. It could’ve happened to anyone.”
“But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to you.”
“It happened to Jeff, actually.”
She stands. “That’s my cue to leave.”
“Why?”
“I have some work to do, but mostly because I don’t feel like fighting right now.”
“I’m not trying to fight.”
“That’s why I’m leaving.” She gives me a quick hug, and then I’m left alone in the kitchen. I try to keep busy with little tasks but find myself pulled towards the pile of mail and the bag sitting behind it. I lift it in my hand. Jeff’s wedding band clicks against his cell phone, his watch, the only things he had on him. Where are his keys, I wonder. Did he lose them? Is that why he was walking home?
I reach for what I think will cau
se me the least amount of harm, his cell phone. The ring and the watch are things I gave him, things that are connected with me, with us. His cell phone is all him. Our house has been so silent since he left, and silly as it might sound, this broken cell phone is part of the reason. There are no longer any dings or buzzes or swooshes of texts being sent and received. He spent so much time on his phone that sometimes I felt like he was lost in there. And the mystic part of me wonders if he still is, if that’s where he’s really gone.
I sit at the table, holding the smashed device in my hand. I plug it into the charger and press the power button, not expecting anything to happen, but after a few moments it starts to whir. The screen flashes and then goes dark, flashes again. It feels warm, as if it’s been placed in a microwave, and it’s emitting some kind of current that makes my teeth hurt. Then it vibrates and the screen comes briefly to life. A message pops up. It’s a notification of a text message from Patricia Underhill. I tap the notice with my finger, but the text doesn’t open.
I lean forward, confused, trying to make out what I’m seeing, when the phone vibrates again and a black line begins crawling across the screen, eating up the pixels in its wake like Pac-Man. It eats and eats until the phone goes dark and cool.
It all happens so quickly that when I’m staring at the black screen, moments later, I can’t help wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing.
CHAPTER 26
Imagine Them Naked
He caught me at the right moment.
That’s what I always remember thinking of Jeff in the days after we started speaking, emailing, spending time together in the ways that we could. When I was trying to figure out what I was doing. What it was about him, about me, that was pulling us together and holding us in place. Why I let him in.
He caught me at the right moment. That much was clear.
But what I still wasn’t sure of a year later was what made the moment right in the first place?
The MRI shows what Dr. Coast expected it to, a normal, functioning brain with no mistakes in it. When we get the results on Monday, I can tell that Brian’s both relieved and unsatisfied, but I’m only relieved. When he says she’s going to be fine, my heart feels like a too-full balloon that’s been popped. All my anxiety rushes from me in a few, brief seconds, and I collapse in on myself, a shrunken parody of what I once was. But then I take a deep breath, and I look through the glass of Dr. Coast’s office at my bored daughter slumped in a plastic waiting-room chair, who is going to be okay, she is, and my heart starts to expand again, taking a shape that can withstand being batted about.
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