The Law of Bound Hearts

by Anne Leclaire

  Back in the bedroom, she checked the alarm clock on the nightstand and saw it was after nine, later than she had slept in years. She couldn’t go home—she hadn’t the energy to confront Richard—but she certainly couldn’t stay holed up in a motel for one more day.

  She crossed to the window, drew back the curtains. The sky was the Wedgwood blue she always associated with autumn and was spotted with billowy clouds. “Islands on a dark-blue sea.” Was that Byron? Wordsworth? One of the Romantics, she knew. Shelley, she suddenly remembered. The Romantics had always set her teeth on edge and Shelley with his sanguine sunrises and burning plumes was the worst of the lot.

  In the parking lot her Volvo, identical to Richard’s except that it was a year older, was parked in the slot reserved for her room, one of only a handful of vehicles in the lot. Next to her Volvo was a brown van with bumper stickers that read: “Proud Parent of a Winston Elementary Honor Student” and “Choose Life, Your Mother Did.”

  Actually, Libby thought, her mother had chosen to fly to Colorado instead of driving and so, as it turned out, had unknowingly chosen death, but somehow she didn’t think the parent of a Winston Elementary School honor student would care to hear this story.

  As Libby watched, a family with three young boys came out of the motel and crossed the lot to the van. While the father unlocked the doors and loaded their luggage, the mother fussed with the younger boy’s hair, smoothing down a cowlick that Libby could see even from a distance. After he had taken care of their suitcases, the father buckled the boys into the backseat. Once Libby had been that family, had combed Mercy’s hair and fastened the seat belt around Matt and doled out juice boxes and snack packs of raisins while Richard had settled into the driver’s seat, unfolding the road map to check their route one final time. Those were the best days, Libby thought, she just hadn’t been wise enough to realize it at the time. But wasn’t that the story of her life, appreciating what she had only after it had been taken from her? The van backed out of its parking place and pulled out of the motel lot. It had Ohio plates.

  Her roommate during her freshman year at Oberlin had come from Ohio. Julia had been a voice major, a soprano who knew nearly word-perfect all the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas and a heap of country-and-western songs with lyrics like “Sometimes you’re the windshield/Sometimes you’re the bug.” She spoke with determined authority about everything, and, although she dated a pre-law student at Ohio State, rumors flew that she was a lesbian. She had come from Twinsburg, Ohio, Libby remembered now. Julia’d told her that her town was famous for the number of twins who lived there.

  A twin would be perfect, Carlotta had said.

  The oddest memory surfaced suddenly: she and Sam, legs bound by scarves, playing Siamese twins. She swallowed against the pain, then closed the curtains, as if the past and all the hurt and loss it held could be erased as easily as that.

  It was nearly ten, two hours past her scheduled time for dialysis.

  “You choose,” she’d said to Richard when they were first married and they faced any decision.

  “Making no decision is making a decision,” he’d said, in a maddeningly superior way.

  “Don’t be so fucking condescending,” she’d replied. It had been their first fight, or, rather, her first fight since Richard had walked away, refusing to be drawn in. Arguing with him had been like quarreling with a cloud, even when they had something serious to deal with.

  She had never told anyone about Richard’s affair with the student, certainly not any of her friends in Lake Forest. She recalled how ashamed she had been, as if it were her fault. He had promised her it had only happened that once. He hadn’t begged for her forgiveness or wept—she had done the crying for them both—but he had vowed it would never happen again and she had believed him. Again she thought about the teenage girl who had broken into a boy’s home and super-glued all the zippers on his pants. That girl would have glued shut more than Richard’s fly. How could she have lost that part of herself? When had it happened?

  She switched on the TV to a talk show. The host was talking to five obese women. As each woman talked, her weight flashed on the screen. Three hundred and forty-nine pounds. Four hundred and fifty-five. Two hundred and eighty. Libby couldn’t imagine how they managed the simplest of tasks, like lacing up shoes.

  She listened as they talked about failed diets and binge eating and how they loved their chips and pizza, their bacon and cheese-cakes, and how they hid wrappers of fast food the way an alcoholic hid empty bottles and avoided air travel because they couldn’t fit in the seats. One of the women, confessing that her twelve-year-old daughter already weighed two hundred pounds, began to sob. The few times Libby had seen talk shows, she had felt dismissive—nearly disdainful—of the people who blurted their intensely personal stories of rape and incest and addiction in front of national audiences, but now, watching the obese women, she was moved to tears.

  Be kind to everyone, her father had told her when she went away to college, because everyone is carrying a personal hurt. She thought of Hannah Rose and Gabe. She thought of Jesse and Eleanor.

  She thought of Sam.

  When she was eighteen, Libby hadn’t believed her father, but now it seemed to her that he had been telling a great truth—everyone did carry a personal pain—and this knowledge was suddenly too grim a burden to be borne.

  Sam

  The trip, with a connection in Atlanta, took forever. It never made sense to Sam that, on a flight from Rhode Island to Chicago, the plane would have to go to Georgia. No wonder airlines went bankrupt. It was nearly three when she landed, and by the time she had picked up a rental car and headed north out of the city, it was after four.

  She hadn’t eaten much beyond coffee and an airport bagel earlier that morning in Providence, but she didn’t stop for lunch. She doubted she could keep food down. Just call it the Visit Your Sister diet, she thought. She regretted now that she hadn’t thought about this trip for a day or so instead of acting on impulse. But then, if she had thought about it, she wouldn’t have come.

  Fifty minutes after she left the airport—long before she was ready—she saw the exit sign for Lake Forest. She was tempted to keep driving, just head on up to Milwaukee. At the last moment, she turned off the highway. She passed the hospital and middle school and made the turn onto North Green Bay. She had visited Libby only twice in the past, yet she remembered the way to her sister’s house without one false turn.

  The street was lined with maple trees and expensive homes in a variety of styles. English Tudor cottages and Italian manors, stucco coach houses and pseudo-French estates. She recalled that when Libby moved to Lake Forest, she had told her that it was one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Midwest. Trust Libby to land herself smack in the middle of the honeypot. Sam slowed as she approached Libby’s house, an imposing Queen Anne, white with green shutters and two-car garage. There was a gray Volvo in the driveway. Sam went numb right down to her shins. She drove past. She was not ready for this. A half mile down the road, able to breathe again, she made a U-turn and retraced her path past the house, then circled back to the center of town. Although coffee was the last thing in the world she needed— her nerves were twitchy enough—she found a Starbucks down the block from Marshall Field’s. She backed into a parking space. Even in late afternoon the coffee shop was busy, filled with housewives in expensive shoes. She’d never seen so many twin sweater sets in her life. She thought they had stopped making them sometime back in the fifties, but evidently not. And the hair on these women! What Stacy called helmet hair. Even two young mothers dressed in sweat suits and pushing strollers looked like they’d just had their hair professionally blow-dried. Feeling rumpled and pudgy, Sam took her double latte back to the car. She scalded her tongue on the first sip. A tall, good-looking man walked out of the bank across from the coffee shop and looked in at her, smiled. She remembered then that she had promised Lee that she would call. She dialed him on her cell.

  �
�Well, I’m here,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice turning soft. “How’re you doing?”

  “Okay.” Of course, she wasn’t. She was scared, sad, and nervous. And that was just for starters.

  “Where are you? At O’Hare?”

  “No. I landed around three and got a car. I wanted to get out of the city before the commuter traffic got crazy.” She blew into the coffee, chanced another sip.

  “So where are you now?”

  “Lake Forest. Actually, I’m sitting in my car outside a Starbucks, drinking a latte and trying to . . . I don’t know. Get my courage up, I guess.”

  “Trying to find the groove?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I wish I were there with you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Have you called her yet? Does she know you’re in town?”

  “No.”

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come out? You don’t have to do this alone, you know. I can catch an early evening flight and be there by tonight.”

  “I know. But really, I’m fine.”

  “Are you staying at her house?”

  “I’ll probably get a hotel room somewhere. I’ll let you know when I’m settled.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Call me later, will you? After you’ve seen her.”

  “I will. And Lee, will you give Stacy a call and see if she needs anything? Give her some moral support.”

  “My specialty.”

  “Don’t I know it.” A wave of longing swept her. She set the coffee on the dash and dug through her bag until she found the stone.

  “Guess what I’m holding?” she said.

  “Animal or mineral?” he said.

  She had to laugh. “No hints.” She folded her fist around the rock.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “You’re holding a . . .” He paused and hummed as if concentrating. “You’re holding a good-luck stone.”

  How did he do that? “You cheated,” she said, laughing.

  “No way,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got to run, but call me later, okay? Don’t forget. And Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What you’re doing is a beautiful thing.”

  “Glad you think so because I don’t have a clue what it is I am doing.”

  “Well, I can think of a half-dozen things.”

  “Just tell me one.” Tell me one thing, she thought, that will give me the courage to see this through. She squeezed the stone.

  “You’re giving your sister a chance to make things right,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. She wasn’t so sure. What if some wrongs couldn’t be made right?

  Sam pulled into the drive and parked behind the gray Volvo. She sat for a minute and stared at the house, needing a clue that would tell her how to begin, but all she saw was a well-maintained house where people with no financial worries lived. But a façade never revealed what was going on inside. She knew that for a fact. Each house held its own story, kept its own secrets.

  Finally she got out of the car and climbed the steps to the porch. There was a wreath made of bittersweet vines on the front door. Ten to one, Libby had made it. Sam ran the bell, bracing her knees to keep them from shaking.

  Richard answered. “Samantha?” he said.

  “Hi.”

  He stared at her, not moving. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he said.

  He looked much the same as she remembered. A good-looking man, aging well—skin still taut—except for a slight thickening through the waist. Sam had never really connected with him. He’d always seemed a cipher to her, remote, withholding. An awkward silence stretched on until she broke it.

  “May I come in?”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, stepping back and motioning her in. “Is Libby expecting you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  She could read nothing in this response. “I should have called,” she said. I shouldn’t have come, she thought.

  “No. No, this is fine. I’m just surprised to see you.” He recovered smoothly. Her recollection of Richard was of a man always at the top of his game. Self-assured and self-contained, the way those born to wealth often are. Once, early in their marriage, Libby had confided that all he needed to make him content was his music. Now he looked . . . what? Nervous? He had just shaved. She could smell his aftershave.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked. “Can I get you something?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “How about coffee?”

  “All right.” How about a shot of Johnny Walker? She followed him into the kitchen. Dirty dishes lay on the counter and in the sink. Two days’ newspapers were stacked on the table.

  “Is Libby here?” Sam asked.

  “No.” He spooned grounds into a coffeemaker.

  “How is she? I mean, I know she’s sick, but I don’t know anything about what’s wrong with her.”

  “She has a disease called focal sclerosing glomerulonephritis,” he said. “FSGS, for short.”

  “That sounds serious.”

  “It’s not hereditary,” he said, as if that was her concern, as if that was why she was asking.

  “When Cynthia said something about her kidneys, I thought maybe she had diabetes.”

  “No.”

  The conversation was beginning to feel somewhat surreal. “How long has she been sick?”

  “It was diagnosed a year ago. She started dialysis this fall. She goes three times a week”

  “How’s that going?”

  “To be honest, she’s having a hard time with it.” He got mugs out of the cupboard, then opened the refrigerator and held up a pint of cream, raised his eyebrow in question.

  She shook her head. “Black’s fine.” She listened for the sound of a car pulling into the drive. “Cynthia told me she needs a transplant.”

  “Her doctor recommends it.” He poured coffee into the mugs. “I’d give her one of mine,” he said, as if she had asked, “but our blood types aren’t compatible.”

  She felt faint suddenly. Thinking about blood always did that to her. “The bathroom,” she said. “Down that hall?”

  “First door on the right.”

  Inside the powder room, she snapped to. There were lace-edged hand towels in a delicate moss green on a shelf by the marble vanity, a bouquet of dried roses in a cut-crystal vase, and a small china dish of egg-shaped soaps. Were these soaps meant to be used? What did you do after you used one? Throw it away? Certainly not put it back in with the others. Martha Stewart had a lot to answer for. But then, Sam remembered, Libby arranged things like this long before Martha Stewart was Martha Stewart. She ran cold water and splashed her face.

  “Where is Libby now?” she asked when she returned to the kitchen. “Dialysis?”

  He paused, and for a moment she could have sworn he was going to tell her a lie. Then his shoulders slumped. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know where she is.”

  What did that mean? That she was shopping? Had they had a fight? “You don’t know where she is?” she echoed.

  “No.” He avoided her eyes.

  She sat opposite him. “Richard, what the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She left.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “What did she take with her?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing seems to be gone.”

  “And you don’t have any idea where she is?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you called her friends?”

  He nodded. “I checked with a couple of them. The thing is, she hasn’t been seeing them lately. When she got ill, she didn’t want anyone to know.” He stood up and began pacing.

  “Why would she just take off like that?
” Something about his story wasn’t adding up.

  Again he avoided looking at her. He crossed to the table, picked up his mug, fiddled with the handle. His fingers had always struck Sam as elegant, a word she had never used in regard to any other man’s hands. She thought of Lee’s, calloused and thickened by work, and went weak with missing him.

  “Richard?”

  “You have to understand,” he said. “She’s been upset all fall.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Well, she stopped by the college and saw something, well, something that she completely misunderstood. Before I could stop her she took off.”

  Sam understood perfectly. Had it been another professor, she wondered, or a student that Libby had seen him with? She would have thought this news would bring her grim satisfaction, but instead she felt pierced by sorrow.

  When the phone rang, they both started. Richard picked it up on the second ring. “Yes, hello,” he said, his voice tinged with hope. “Not interested,” he said curtly and hung up. “Telemarketer,” he told Sam.

  “What about the twins?” she said. “Would she have gone to one of them?”

  “That’s another problem,” Richard said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I thought of the twins, of course, and called them. Matt hadn’t heard a word from her.”

  “And Mercedes?”

  “I finally reached her roommate.”

  “And?” she prompted.

  “And it appears that Mercedes is also among the missing.”

  Libby

  It was after five and the bedside lamp cast a milky glow in the room. Earlier, unable to endure one more talk show or afternoon soap— they only magnified her headache—Libby had switched to an FM station on the television and within minutes had drifted off to the sound of Haydn’s London Symphony. Now she woke to Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. A memory stung, banishing the last trace of sleep. The first time she had gone to bed with Richard, Berlioz had been playing on the stereo. Tears flooded her eyes and she brushed them away impatiently. She couldn’t afford to sit on the pity pot. That was a one-way path to self-destruction.