by Belva Plain
“Don’t. Get out!”
Laura started for the door, but some last hope of making this better or easier stopped her. She turned back to Iris, and took a deep breath, then she said quietly, “I just wanted you to know what is going to happen. Robby is flying in this weekend from Cincinnati. And I’m going to tell him.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Under most circumstances the TV anchorman for the six o’clock news had a calm demeanor that nothing seemed to touch. But even he seemed shaken when he looked at the cameras and delivered the breaking news of the evening: Dr. Lester Peterson was an excellent private pilot with many hours in the air, he informed Americans across the country. His Cessna 172 was only two years old and it was beautifully maintained. No one knows why the doctor was trying to make an emergency landing at the Cincinnati airport when Midwestern Airlines flight 5533 was lifting off. The commercial plane was bound for LaGuardia Airport in New York, and a full federal investigation of the incident will begin immediately. At this time, all that is known is that air traffic controllers tried to warn the pilot of flight 5533 that the Cessna was in his path, but the pilot, a twenty-year veteran with Midwestern Airlines with an impeccable record, was either unable to maneuver his aircraft out of the way fast enough, or he thought the smaller plane had veered off and managed to clear his. Either way, the collision that followed was one of the worst seen in that part of the country in years. Tragically, there were no survivors from either the Cessna or the commercial plane.
As the visibly rattled anchorman was delivering this news, Laura was on her way to LaGuardia Airport to pick up Robby, who had boarded Midwestern Airlines flight 5533 an hour and a half earlier in Cincinnati.
–—
When Laura tried to look back on that evening in April, one thought was clear in all the horror: Thank God, I didn’t bring Katie to the airport with me to get her father. The rest was a nightmarish blur.
She’d left the house to drive to LaGuardia with time to spare. She’d been trying to gather her thoughts because she knew she’d be asking Robby for a divorce, so she hadn’t turned on the car radio. She hadn’t heard the news coming out of Cincinnati.
At the airport she checked the Arrivals board and saw that Robby’s flight was delayed. That was what it said, at first. Then the listing was withdrawn and there was an announcement on the loudspeaker asking that anyone who was meeting a passenger traveling on flight 5533 from Cincinnati to report to the Midwestern Airlines ticket counter.
After that, the blur began. The soothing tones of airline officials melded with the shrill voices of loved ones demanding information. The loved ones were then rounded up and ushered into a room that was away from the rest of the airport, and—Laura realized later—away from the airport televisions, which were now reporting the accident. There were fluorescent lights and folding chairs in the room, as well as a phalanx of clergymen, policemen, a doctor, a nurse and other professionals whose job it was to help in a crisis. The white-faced families and friends stared with big panicked eyes at a man from Midwestern Airline’s customer relations department as he stood in front of them and delivered the message they had already figured out but had not yet comprehended; that Flight 5533 had crashed. Cries and screams filled the room, but no one left it. The customer relations man didn’t yet have any information about fatalities. So they all waited, each one hoping that somehow, some way, there had been one survivor after all. Or that one passenger on the list hadn’t made it to the airport on time and had missed the flight, or that they themselves had gotten the time and date and flight number wrong. They rocked back and forth in grief, they cursed and wept and prayed, but no one left—at least not right away. Because to leave was to accept the horror; to admit that there was no mistake, no miracle and no hope.
Laura would never remember when she finally accepted it. She didn’t remember calling Phil and telling him she couldn’t drive home, but she must have, because he came for her. She didn’t remember the trip back to her house, walking in the door, or telling Katie what had happened. She knew she’d done all of these things but she didn’t remember them. She never knew how Phil got her car back from the airport. Jimmy and Janet came to spend the night, and Iris was there in the morning. But she didn’t remember calling any of them. All she knew was, there were no survivors, and Robby was gone. And she thanked God that she hadn’t taken Katie to the airport.
Chapter Thirty-two
After Robby’s death, it was as if everything went black. The blackness was deep and it crashed over Laura in waves. She felt as if she might drown in it.
I wanted to be rid of Robby. I wanted to be free. And even though she knew she hadn’t wanted this or willed it, another wave would crash over her.
Mother McAllister wanted to bury Robby in Ohio, and the minister of the church he’d been attending had called Laura to ask if she would give her consent. I didn’t even know Robby had started going to church again, she thought. I didn’t know. But she had agreed to the Ohio burial. That was where Robby had been happy. And besides, she realized with a shock, in the whole time he’d lived in New York, he hadn’t made one real friend. Nor had he felt close to anyone in her family but her mother.
All those years with no one but Katie and Mom and me. Robby, who loved a crowd and a party. He must have been so lonely. Why didn’t I see that? But I know why. I was where I wanted to be and I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to know if he was lonely.
She flew to Ohio with her mother and Katie, who cried together—but she stayed dry-eyed.
I can’t seem to cry. But that’s as it should be. I wanted to be free of him. It would be hypocritical if I cried.
Her mother-in-law had already started making the funeral arrangements when Laura arrived.
“How can she do that?” Christina demanded. Laura’s brothers and their wives had driven out to Ohio for the funeral. “You should be the one planning this. You were his wife!”
But she wasn’t planning to walk away from him and I was.
So the funeral was held in the church Robby had recently rejoined. Hymns Laura didn’t know were sung. Words she didn’t recognize were said for the soul of the man who had slept at her side for more than a decade. And after the ceremony was over, strangers who were friends of her mother-in-law provided salads made of mayonnaise and Jell-O and casseroles made with cream of chicken soup. And Laura sat in a chair in her mother-in-law’s house like a guest.
“How could she treat you like that?” Janet fumed when they were driving back to the motel.
Because I didn’t love him. I cared about him, but I didn’t love him. And she did.
–—
After she was back home in New York, she waited for the reality of what had happened to sink in. Somehow she had to comprehend that Robby’s life was over, but she didn’t seem to be able to do it. She remembered how he had loved Paris and couldn’t make herself understand that he would not go back to see it again someday. He would not see Katie graduate and he would not walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. He’d never live in that new house he’d loved so much. And he would never know that Laura had decided that she wouldn’t be living in it with him. The boy who had married her under the pear trees in her grandmother’s garden when the phlox filled the air with the scents of cinnamon and vanilla would not know that she was going to desert him.
For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, she had promised him, but then she had wanted to be free. And now she was. The black wave crashed over her.
–—
“I can’t, Nick. I can’t see you anymore.” She was in the doorway of his loft. She wouldn’t go inside. She would not stay.
“You’re upset, give yourself some time.”
“No!” Laura was shouting. But she wasn’t crying. She seemed to have lost the ability to do that. “Don’t you see? It would be like dancing on his grave.”
“It feels that way now, but in a few months—”
“You want me to
benefit from his death? Is that what I’m supposed to do?”
“Of course not!”
“He wasn’t even forty years old!”
“I know. But for God’s sake, the accident wasn’t your fault.”
“I cheated on him. I was going to tell him I wanted a divorce.”
“It wasn’t a good marriage. Stop punishing yourself.”
“Guess what, Nick? Sometimes punishment is what we deserve.”
“I don’t think I deserve it. So stop punishing me.”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll get the hell out of here.”
And she left him.
He called her over and over, until she changed her phone number. He must have accepted the fact that she was serious, because he didn’t try to find out what her new one was.
One morning when the dry brown leaves were swirling in the wind outside her kitchen window, she called her mother on the phone.
“You’ll be happy to hear that I ended it with Nick,” she said, and hung up. And then, at last, she cried for a long time.
–—
There was plenty to do, thank God. Katie was the first concern. She was grieving for her father, and while sometimes she needed to talk, most of the time she just seemed to need Laura’s company. They went to movies and out for pizza. They watched television together and walked around their property with old Molly. And Laura went back to work. She started writing her second book with Lillian, who, thankfully, didn’t ask any questions when Laura said they would have to find a different photographer. Laura signed the contract to do the homemaking segment of the morning television show. Everyone was very kind to her—she was a widow after all. Accepting their sympathy made her feel like a fraud. She felt she should confess that she had not been the loving wife they thought her to be. She should say that she was sorry for Robby because he had died much too soon, but she should admit that she had wanted to be free. And there was another man she was mourning. That was the real loss.
There was only one person who knew about that loss—her mother. And Iris would never understand it. So Laura read the warm little notes that came in the mail and she listened to the offers of sympathy and help that were left on her answering machine, and if she wished she could talk to Iris, she pushed the wish away. She couldn’t afford to think about it. And she couldn’t afford to think about green-blue eyes, or the man who had laughed at her jokes. And smiled at her … for a while.
BEGINNINGS
The past is but the beginning of
a beginning and all that is and has been
is but the twilight of the dawn.
H. G. WELLS
1866–1946
Chapter Thirty-three
There is a saying that time heals everything. It doesn’t. After a loss, the passing of time allows you to absorb the pain, and make it a part of yourself. But after that, you can never expect to go back to being what you were before. You’ll find new ways to laugh, and even to enjoy life, but you’ll never do it the same way you did when you were a wife, and not a widow. As a widow you are a new person. All of this, Iris had learned; she had been a widow for a little more than a year.
It had been a year full of loss; her son-in-law’s death in a random accident had been shocking and tragic. Iris had grieved and still did grieve for a life ended much too quickly. But it was the loss of Theo that had changed her into a new person, that was what had made her a widow instead of a wife. And a year after the fact she was still waiting to find out who the new Iris Stern was going to be. And how she was going to live.
Which was not to say that she was sitting in her home with the blinds drawn. She was functioning quite well. She prepared three meals a day for herself, and since she’d learned about cholesterol and salt content during the last three years of Theo’s life, she was actually eating more healthily than she had when she was younger. She slept the requisite eight hours a night, and taught her classes at the college with the same focus and dedication she’d shown before she became Iris Stern the widow. She had even gone to the opera twice with Janet and Jimmy. Once they’d seen a modern thing she couldn’t remember ten minutes after they left Lincoln Center, and the other time it had been La Bohème, which she had liked as a girl. Janet, she knew, had been worried about that choice, fearing that a tragic love story might be too painful for the recently bereaved Iris.
Don’t be ridiculous! Iris had wanted to say to her daughter-in-law and, indeed, to all of her sons, who were still tiptoeing around her. If I try to avoid everything that reminds me of Theo, I’ll have to kill myself. And after the first moments of searing pain following his death, she’d known that she would never even think about doing that. It would be an insult to Theo, and a betrayal of the love they had shared. No, she was more than willing to go on living; she just needed to know how to do it. And who she was now. Those were the big questions. She wasn’t sure where the answers would come from, she just knew that she couldn’t get on with her life until she had them.
The problem with this waiting period was, her senses seemed to have shut down. She didn’t see colors anymore, she couldn’t really hear music—La Bohème to the contrary—and the sensible food she was eating didn’t have any taste. It was only at night in her dreams that her senses came to life—a kaleidoscope of brightly colored images tumbled through her brain, vivid reds following vibrant blues and greens and yellows. And Theo was there, pain free, and smiling tenderly at her. She knew he was talking to her, although she couldn’t make out the words, but she understood, as one does in dreams, what the message was. Make it up with Laura. And she couldn’t.
She and Laura were cordial enough, mostly for Katie’s sake, although they’d made sure that Laura’s brothers didn’t know about the breach either. But they hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in a year. Iris didn’t know how her daughter was coping with the cruel joke that had been Robby’s death. She didn’t know how much Laura was hurting over the man she’d given up. And she wasn’t going to ask.
The last—and only—time any of that had been mentioned had been on the phone. Laura had said, “I know you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve ended it with Nick,” and she’d hung up. And the truth was, Iris had been happy to hear it. And in the months since, she had been glad that Laura hadn’t changed her mind. Perhaps a better mother would have said, My darling, Robby is gone and your life must go on. If you have found someone to love, you have my blessing. Well, she couldn’t do that. The man—Nick—had been Laura’s lover. She had cheated on her husband because of him. If poor Robby hadn’t died so tragically, she would have broken up her marriage for him.
I know Laura is mourning for Robby—for the boy she married and for the father of her child. She’s not a heartless witch running from Robby’s graveside to her lover’s arms. But I still don’t want her to go to that man—not ever.
I’m not a judgmental woman. Theo always said I was too willing to see the other person’s side in a fight. When the kids were young, I was the soft one. So what is it that makes me so harsh about this one human failing? Infidelity. Cheating. Having a fling. Or the uglier words people throw around these days. Why can’t I understand this as I understand so much else? It’s been going on since the beginning of human history, good people have succumbed to the power of sex, and it doesn’t make them monsters.
I know all of this intellectually. But I don’t feel it. In my gut and in my heart—and, yes, damn it, in my soul—I feel that committing adultery is vile. It causes pain, destroys trust and breaks up homes. It damages children unless they are unbelievably strong.
It damages adults too. It can turn a woman who prides herself on her open mind and gift for compassion into a woman who cannot forgive. God help me, has it done that to me?
Laura said I couldn’t hear what she was trying to say about her marriage because I was afraid she’s like her father. She said I still hadn’t forgiven him. I tried to. And I thought I had. But maybe I haven’t. Maybe that’s what I’m waiting for. To forg
ive.
Chapter Thirty-four
The date on the train ticket stub was a year old. Iris sat at her kitchen table, studying the stub, trying to understand what it meant. She’d found it in the jacket Theo had been wearing on the day he died. Normally Laura would have been with her when she started emptying the pockets, but since she and Laura weren’t talking about things that mattered, Iris hadn’t told her daughter that she had finally decided that it was time to go through Theo’s clothes.
She had resisted doing it for a year and she still hadn’t touched his dress shirts with the monogrammed cuffs, or the good English blazers he had worn when he was working at the hospital every day. They were still in the bedroom, because Theo had arranged them in his drawers and in his closet himself, and she couldn’t make herself disturb his handiwork. But her sons had started insisting that she must disturb it—and sift and sort and discard and donate. Steve had threatened to send Christina to help her if she didn’t.
So she had started small, not with the bedroom closet or the bureau drawers, but with the old jacket Theo had been wearing when she’d found him unconscious at the head of the stairs leading to the cellar. The paramedics had taken the jacket off him and given it to her, and she had stuffed it in the back of the coat closet. It had stayed there, until today when she had taken it out. She had laid it on the kitchen table, and smoothed it out carefully. Then she had gone through the pockets. She’d been hoping for a stray coin, or a glove, anything he might have left. Maybe something with a lingering scent. What she had found was the train ticket stub. When she pulled it out, her first impulse had been to phone Laura. But she didn’t do that anymore.
