“We heard about the accident,” he says. “Is she going to be all right?”
He doesn’t add that he heard the news at the police station, where he had gone to pick up Ursula, who was found late this afternoon pedaling her bicycle down the highway five miles outside of town.
“Is there anything I can do?” Tim asks.
Later she will change this view, but what Claire feels at that moment is that there is nothing any of them can do, there is simply no way anything will be all right ever again. Looking into the face of this man who would give her anything he had, only he has nothing to give her, Claire can only say, “Please go home. I need you to leave me alone.”
Because he’s in traction they have set up a television on the ceiling for Travis. He’s watching a snowboarding video at the moment. At least that’s what’s on. Hard to say whether he’s actually watching.
Flat on his back with his hair fanned out against the sheet, Travis looks like an angel to Claire. His hair forms a halo around his face, which is extremely pale. His cheeks have the soft blond fuzz of somebody who has not yet shaved long enough or often enough that the hair has turned to stubble. He wears a white tunic onto which somebody has pinned a button that reads SHIT HAPPENS. A troll holding a skateboard is propped on the table next to his bed, along with a ceramic jack-o’-lantern full of jelly beans and several vases full of lowers and a Mylar helium balloon that reads “When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” The balloon must have been here awhile. It has begun to droop.
When Claire suggested that they go visit Travis, Sally said she couldn’t handle it. Travis’s mother, Eleanor, has called every day since Sally got home from the hospital a week ago asking her to please come. Her son is so depressed, maybe Sally could lift his spirits. After ten hours of surgery, the orthopedic surgeon was able to piece together Travis’s kneecap and femur with the aid of a considerable amount of hardware, but it’s doubtful whether he’ll ever walk without a cane. No more skateboarding, that’s for sure.
Hearing this, Claire called Nancy, who used to be a physical therapist. “Let me put it this way,” Nancy told her. “The femur is one big bastard of a bone to break. Only thing worse would be to mess up your kneecap.”
“But he’s so young and strong,” Claire said. “And he’s in such good shape.”
“That’ll help, all right,” she said. “But I can tell you the kid isn’t going to win any dance contests. It’s Tiny Tim Time.”
So here they are finally: Sally in her cast and Claire carrying a plate of the peanut-butter-chip cookies Travis always liked so much. She wanted to get him a tape, too, but when she asked Sally for a suggestion, Sally said, “Give it up, would you, Mom?”
“Hey, Travis,” Claire says to him. She figures it would make him uncomfortable if she kissed him, so she just pats his shoulder. “We’ve missed you. Pete wanted me to say hi.”
“Hi to him, too,” says Travis, who is making an effort, Claire realizes, to cover a bedpan that lies beside him on the bed. “Hey, Sally.”
“Hi, Travis,” she says. “You look better than I expected.”
“Yeah, well, you must have expected something pretty disgusting, then,” he says.
“No, really,” she says. “I like your hair like that.” They must have shampooed it for him here. The dreadlocks have been replaced by fluffy curls, like baby hair almost.
“You still going to be able to get your license?” Travis asks her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sally tells him. “I don’t care about that.”
“I guess you know the deal, huh?” Travis says to her. “They had to put me back together with a bunch of steel rods and screws. I’m a cripple. Not to mention I’ll never pass through another metal detector without setting off alarms, huh?”
“It’s amazing the things they come up with in medical science now,” says Claire. “Synthetic hips, artificial joints … I remember when you’d hear a person had something like leukemia and you’d know they were dead for sure. Now they’ve got a fantastic cure rate. Not that you’ve got some terminal illness or anything. And you’re so young.…” Her voice fades out.
“Right,” he says.
Over by the window, in a spot Travis can’t see because he’s unable to turn his head, Sally has covered her face with her hands.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” she tells him. He lies there like a fallen soldier. More like an arrow actually, shot into space, that misfired and landed in the dirt. That straight.
“It wasn’t your fault really,” Travis says. “I was being an asshole. That’ll show me, huh? Now I’m screwed. Next thing you know I’ll take up knitting and start listening to Tori Amos.”
This is where Claire walks out of the room. If he says anything else she doesn’t hear it.
Tim calls. “I know you have enough on your mind,” he says, “but I thought you should know. Joan wants to take Ursula back to New Zealand with her. Ursula says she wants to go.”
In the old days Claire would have had a hundred opinions to offer about this. She would tell him not to be such a victim. She would tell him you don’t let a nine-year-old decide what’s best for her life any more than you consult a toddler on whether or not she feels like wearing her seat belt. Time was Claire would have typed up a list of phone numbers for Tim. Told him the names of lawyers and guardians ad litem to avoid (hers, for instance). She would have told him to have Galen write a letter about the laundry room incident. She would have slid her hands under his shirt and down the front of his jeans and then she would have begun to stroke his cock, which would already have been hard by the time her hands got there.
Now all Claire can say is “I hope things will work out for her there. I hope they work out for all of you.”
• • •
The morning before Ursula leaves for Christchurch Claire takes her out for a bagel. Ordering for the two of them, she says, “Two toasted sesame. Cream cheese on both.” They sit by the window.
“My team gave me a soccer ball with everybody’s name on it,” Ursula says.
“They’re going to miss you,” says Claire. “Luckily the season was almost over, though.”
“My mom says we’re going to get me a bunk bed in New Zealand,” Ursula says. Also a puppy.
Claire says that’s good. Once she might have said something about having friends for sleepovers, once Ursula has the bunk bed, but now she leaves it. Not her problem.
“Guess what?” says Ursula. “When we were packing up my stuff, we found my black shoes. The ones with the rhinestones.”
“That’s good,” says Claire. “So you’ll have them for your new school.”
“My dad’s going to pack up all my Barbies and mail them to me,” she says. “But not my bike. It’s too big. So I get a new one. With streamers.”
“You can bring your helmet, though,” Claire says. “I always thought it was great the way you wore your helmet without your dad having to get after you about it.”
“A person can get brain damage,” Ursula says. That wise, sensible, matronly side of her. Claire pictures her as a mother suddenly, and thinks she will probably be a very tender one.
“Keith is going to miss me a lot,” Ursula says.
“No kidding. That baby could be howling, and the minute he’d see you he stopped. How do you do that, anyway?”
“I’m magic,” says Ursula.
They chew on their bagels. Claire takes a sip of her coffee. “I know you and I had some difficult times,” she says to Ursula. “It must be very hard to be a kid when their parents are divorced. Seeing them having some boyfriend or girlfriend.”
“It’s okay,” says Ursula.
“I want you to know I think you’re a good person. I never met anybody like you.” Claire chooses her words carefully with Ursula, because she has come to believe that it’s true what Ursula says. She may not be magic, but she knows what a person is thinking. She can tell when you lie. If Claire said, “I loved being with you” or “
I wish you were staying,” Ursula would never believe it.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Claire says. No further explanation necessary.
“They’re making this new kind of Barbie,” Ursula says. “She has a little tape recorder inside and she says all these dumb things like ‘I hate math’ and ‘I hope Ken asks me to the dance.’ ”
“I wouldn’t want one of those, would you?” Claire says. “The best part of Barbie is getting to make her say anything you want.”
Ursula nods.
Claire has brought Ursula two of the dolls from her dollhouse that Ursula particularly liked. The baby and the grandfather. She has wrapped them in a hankie.
“It’s good Grampa’s going to New Zealand,” Ursula says. “He was really getting on Grandma’s nerves, you know. He just refused to hold in his farts.”
Claire needs to see Tim one more time. But the day after Ursula leaves, a personal injury lawyer calls her to say he’s representing Eleanor and Dave Goforth in a suit charging negligent entrustment resulting in grievous injury. Because of the age of their son and the extent of his injuries, the Goforths are seeking half a million dollars in damage.
So she has to attend a meeting with the lawyer provided by her insurance company, who informs her that because her daughter was not operating the car with a valid driver’s license, Claire may not be covered. She and Sally also have to appear before the juvenile officer of the Blue Hills police force, which has charged Sally with unlawful operation of a motor vehicle. There’s a call from her divorce attorney, who has chosen this moment to remind Claire that she still owes him eight thousand dollars, and if she doesn’t begin making regular payments, he’ll have to exercise his lien on her property. And she has to get some kind of car to get around.
Sometime in the middle of it all, Claire pulls up to a stoplight and sees that the person at the wheel of the car next to hers is Tim. His Subaru is piled high with boxes—Ursula’s stuff, probably, that he’s sending to New Zealand.
It startles Claire how old Tim looks, hunched over the steering wheel waiting for the light to change. Probably because she’s driving an unfamiliar vehicle, he doesn’t notice Claire for almost a minute—longer maybe—and then he does, and for a split second his face brightens as if he’s forgotten everything that’s happened to them and all he’s experiencing is this pure, visceral memory of her. But as swiftly as his face is overtaken with pleasure, it falls, and a terrible look of weariness and defeat comes over him. The light changes to green. He lifts his hands in a gesture that says, “What now? Empty. Nothing here.” They both drive away, opposite directions.
The next week things are quieter. The insurance companies are meeting. Sally’s getting more X rays. Pete continues to be scarily good; there is simply no room for him to be anything else. Claire and Nancy actually do yoga one night, but all she can think as she twists herself into the eagle posture is, What if I had smashed my kneecap? What if Pete or Sally did?
Out of nowhere comes word that a retired dairy farmer who died earlier this year has left a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the children’s museum to create an exhibit about cows. They’re going to have to build a whole new wing onto the museum just to accommodate the milking machines. “You never told me you had this up your sleeve,” Vivian says to Claire. “I’ve got to hand it to you.”
Every morning Claire thinks, I’ll call Tim today, but she doesn’t. He doesn’t call her, either. Except for communications from the insurance company lawyer, the fax phone on her third floor is silent.
The morning of her fortieth birthday—a Sunday—Claire wakes very early and goes for a walk. She ends up on his street.
Tim will know it’s her birthday of course. There was a time when they had talked about how they would mark it—a night in a motel maybe, a trip to Bar Harbor. He never told her, but back in the summer when he was doing fieldwork, he had actually written to the U.S. Botanical Society to register a particular variety of lichen he found up north that he believed had never been identified before. He wanted to give it Claire’s name. It was going to be a birthday surprise.
The sun is still low against the horizon when Claire rounds the corner to the spot where his apartment house comes into view. Same trip she made so often all fall, but in the opposite direction. Amazingly, though it is not yet seven, and cold enough that a person can see his breath, Tim is sitting on the front step with a coffee cup and a pad of paper. He sets down his pen as she approaches.
“Happy birthday,” he says. His own was just a few days ago. “So now I guess we can say we’re poking fifty with a long stick.”
“How’s Ursula doing?” she says.
“Okay, I guess,” he tells her. “Joan won’t put her on when I call. She says Ursula needs space. I got a letter last week, though. She’s changing her name to Ariel. How’s Sally?”
“Fine,” Claire tells him. Why start in?
“Guess what?” he says. “My grant finally came through. Not the Estuarial Institute, but this other foundation I applied to almost a year ago. I got enough to hire a research assistant and everything. Wouldn’t you know, just when I’ve thrown in the towel.” He has given notice on his apartment. He’s leaving town as soon as the semester ends next month.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. “Last night when I went to get your ring out of my drawer to give back to you, I couldn’t find it. I don’t know what happened to it. I don’t want to start suspecting one of Pete’s or Sally’s friends, but I’m positive I left it there. I turned my whole room upside down looking.”
He pictures her bedroom. Roses and scarves everywhere. Antique gloves flung in all directions. Dresses in a heap on the floor. Raspberries.
“Never mind,” he says. “I have no use for it.”
“If I find it, I’ll send it to you. Just be sure you let me know where you end up.”
“I have to figure that out myself first,” he says. He actually smiles.
She puts a hand on his cheek. “You were the best man I’ve known,” she says. “You loved me the best.”
“I know,” he says. “That’s not always enough, is it?”
“Sometimes it’s possible to try too hard,” she says. “Like when you overbeat whipped cream and it turns to butter.”
“The whipped cream stage was great, anyway,” he says. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
He rips a sheet of paper from the top of the pad he has set down beside him on the steps. He folds it slowly and places it inside an envelope that he has also laid on the steps. He licks the envelope and seals it. Then he hands it to her.
“I wanted to say good-bye,” he says. “I was going to leave this in your mailbox. It didn’t seem right to fax it.”
She puts the envelope in her pocket. “I have to go,” she says. “My kids will be getting up. You know the routine.”
From inside the house they can hear a baby’s cry. His downstairs neighbors’ son probably. He wraps his arms around Claire and holds her for a long time. Then she walks home.
Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire, Claire,” he has written. Her name covers the top of the page. Fifteen, maybe twenty times, he has written it.
I recognized the night I met you that I could be scorched by my love for you. And I am. There’s not much left of me but ash.
Even now, though, my heart expands when I think of you. I love you so much that life without you seems like no life at all. I guess I loved you so much that somewhere along the way I lost sight of my own self. Somehow I will have to get that person back.
It’s almost funny: Each of our marriages taught us the awful loneliness that comes from an insufficiency of love. Who would have believed an equal devastation might result from too much? I will love again one day, though at the moment it’s still impossible to imagine. But I will never give myself over to love this way again.
I can’t regret our strange, sad, impossible time together. However great and glaring my flaws, in the harsh light of your endless and unf
orgiving scrutiny, I wouldn’t want you to ever suppose a lack of passion for you was among them. I will love you and want you forever, and I have to say you were the absolute best woman I have ever known.
You know, for as long as I can remember, I’ve wept every time I have heard Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the Yankees. This morning watching the sun rise, in the clutch of so much loss and hurt, I know what it meant when a dying Gehrig said he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Because even as this love I have for you is just about killing me, that’s how I feel about having had you in my life. You brought forth a capacity for love in me I never knew I had. For seven months you were with me with my every breath. You are with me still.
To hurt you is to hurt me. To lose you is to lose a part of myself. It’s going to take a long time figuring out how to live my life without you.
WINTER
The counselor she takes Sally to after the accident has warned Claire that her daughter will most likely feel the need to punish herself, and she’s right. For weeks after she comes home from the hospital, Sally barely eats. When her friends call, she tells her mother and Pete to say she can’t come to the phone. After a while hardly anybody calls anymore except Travis, and his calls are the hardest of all.
“When are you going to get it?” she hears Sally saying to him into the phone one night. Her voice is scarily cold, almost withering. “I’m a jerk, okay? I wish it was me that got their legs wrecked, but it wasn’t. Every time I hear your voice I just feel like an even bigger asshole. So I don’t want to hear from you anymore, understand?”
He does understand evidently. He hasn’t called since. In the end, after Claire’s insurance company absolved itself of liability in the Goforths’ lawsuit on the grounds of an exclusion of unauthorized use of a vehicle by a minor, the Goforths were successful in recovering damages in the amount of two hundred thousand dollars from their own insurance company—on top of medical costs. “You’re incredibly lucky,” several people have told Claire. They’re right, naturally. Claire knows she’s also lucky that the children’s museum board voted to renew her contract for another year. Above all, of course, she is just so incredibly lucky that her own child is all right. Physically, anyway.
Where Love Goes Page 33
