Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  Dougie made a face she’d never seen before. “I don’t like that schedule. It tells me to get up earlier in the morning and eat dinner later at night. It’s a pain.”

  “It’s new,” Angie soothed. “That’s all. Give it a week, and you’ll forget we ever did anything different.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she chided gently, and sat back in her chair, “you’re upset with the change because you’re upset about Mara. That’s natural, and it’s okay, but you have to give the new schedule a try. With Mara gone, things have been turned upside down at the office. This is the best I can do for now. Be patient—you’ll adjust.”

  “I always adjust,” he complained.

  “Once things quiet down at the office, once we hire another doctor, we can go back to the way things were—”

  “I don’t want to go back to the way things were.”

  Angie didn’t follow. “What do you want?”

  He opened his mouth to talk, then shut it again.

  She sat forward and urged, “It’s all right. You can say what you want. I’ll listen. I always listen. What do you want?”

  “I want to spend more time at school,” he blurted out. “It’s lousy being a day student. Day students miss half the fun.”

  “That’s the point,” Angie said on a note of amusement. “You get to enjoy the other half, and still be with your family.”

  “But I want to be with the kids. I want to live in the dorm.”

  The suggestion was absurd. “Sorry, but that’s out of the question.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not what I want for you. I sent you to Mount Court because I felt that you would be more challenged academically there than at the middle school here in town. Boarding is something else entirely.”

  “Why can’t I try it?”

  “Because you’re only fourteen. I don’t mind if you sleep over in the dorm once in a while—you did that last year—but I don’t think it’s necessary for you to move away from home.”

  “It’s five minutes down the road!”

  She shook her head again. “College is soon enough to board. You don’t need it now.”

  Dougie stared at her for a minute, then turned on his heel and left the room.

  Startled by his persistence, Angie looked at Ben. “Where did that come from?”

  Ben finished chewing a mouthful of steak. “It’s been building.”

  “Building from what? He’s never said he was unhappy living here before.”

  “And he isn’t saying it now. He’s just saying that it would be fun to board at Mount Court.”

  “Do you think it would be fun?”

  “If I were fourteen, with the confidence that kid has, I probably would. Dougie’s feeling his oats. He’s listening to the stories his friends tell about dorm life, stories that are probably greatly embellished, and he thinks it sounds pretty neat.”

  But Angie had created a home that she thought was pretty neat, one the likes of which many children would die for. She couldn’t imagine Dougie wanting to live in a dorm. “It has to do with Mara,” she decided. “We’ve all been down since she died. He’s missing her, wanting to go someplace where he won’t be expecting her to turn up. He feels her presence in this house.”

  Ben tapped his fork to the plate. “He does not. Hell, Angie, don’t go looking for metaphysical explanations. It’s simple. The boy is growing up.”

  “I know he is.”

  “Then stop smothering him.”

  She was taken aback. “I’m not smothering him.”

  “Sure you are. You watch him all the time.”

  “That’s not smothering. That’s mothering.”

  He set down his fork and sent her a look that was almost as foreign as Dougie’s had been. “It was mothering when the boy was four, seven, even ten. But he’s fourteen, and you’re still right there telling him what to do. You lay his clothes out at night, you proofread his homework, you keep track of his phone calls.”

  “Is that wrong?” she asked in astonishment. “Should I just stand back and let him talk on the phone all night to whomever he wants? If he did that, he’d never do any homework. What would happen then?”

  “He might fail a test or two, but at least he’d learn what happens when he doesn’t do his homework. At some point, the initiative has to come from him. At some point, he has to develop his own sense of responsibility. But you won’t let him near that point. You’re smothering him, Angie. Clear as day, you are.”

  I am not, Angie thought. She didn’t understand what was happening. Ben never criticized her. He was always happy with what she did. “Is it Mara?”

  “Is what Mara?”

  “This—” She gestured.

  “For God’s sake, no. Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because I don’t understand what else it could be,” she reasoned. “The death of a friend is so upsetting that you begin to find fault with things that would otherwise be just fine.”

  Ben scowled at the remains of his dinner. In his silence Angie felt a wave of relief. She was right, after all. Mara’s death had set them all on edge. Things would be fine once the ache of the loss eased.

  Then Ben raised his eyes. His gaze was direct, his voice tight. “Mara’s death may be the catalyst, may be the thing that’s made us more sensitive and therefore more apt to speak out, but I meant what I said before. This has been building. It was only a matter of time before it came to a head. The fact is that you’re smothering Doug. He’s fourteen and needs to be meeting his friends at the local video store on a Friday night. Teenagers do things like that.”

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  “Well, Doug wanted to, and given that he stood there with us through Mara’s funeral and that nightmare of a lunch afterward, he could have used the release.”

  “I suggested that he play basketball.”

  “With me, but I’m his father. It’s not the same. He needs to be with his friends more than you’re allowing him to be.”

  There it was, another startling slap on the wrist. “I don’t understand, Ben. Why the sudden criticism? You’ve always agreed with me before.”

  “No,” he said slowly. There was an ominous pause. “I’ve always gone along. That doesn’t necessarily mean I agreed.”

  She felt a flash of anger. “Why didn’t you speak up?”

  He seemed to grapple with the question himself, rising from the table, crossing to the sink, and staring out the window, finally wheeling around. “Because you were always in such control, damn it. From the time Dougie was a baby, you had all the answers.” He threw up a hand. “Hell, it goes back before that. You’ve had all the answers since the day I met you. Right from the start, you knew you wanted to be a wife, a mother, and a doctor. You picked me out at the start of your senior year so that we could be married the minute you graduated—”

  “Whoa,” she protested. “You make it sound like a cold, calculated act, but you were the one who asked me out, not the other way around, and you kept asking me out. I was legitimately in love by the time you asked me to marry you.”

  “And it worked out well, didn’t it? You graduated in time to be married, honeymooned in time to start medical school, finished medical school and your residency in time to have a baby, got him out of diapers and into school in time to move up here and start practicing with Paige. You orchestrated it all, Angie, and the amazing thing is that it worked. You’re a remarkably capable woman. You plot things out, and they’re done, and you rarely allow for help. I’d have been a more active father when Dougie was little if I had felt I was needed, but you had everything done before I could do much more than offer.”

  “I was making things easier for you,” she argued. “You had a career. You had deadlines to meet. You were supporting us at the time. It was my job to take care of Dougie.”

  “Even after you went back to work? Okay, he was in school by then. Still, I might have done something. I’m h
ere during the day. I drive. I love the kid, too. But you arranged your schedule so that you could drop him at school on the way to work and pick him up on the way home, and spend weekends and vacations with him.”

  “We did wonderful things on weekends and vacations,” she reminded him. There had been road trips, and airplane trips, and trips to Boston to visit historic sights and museums.

  “That’s not the point,” Ben insisted. “The point is that you personally planned and executed Dougie’s childhood. You didn’t need my help. After a while, I didn’t bother to offer. The message that I was superfluous came through loud and clear. I just sat back and watched, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for years.”

  Angie swallowed. He kept hitting, kept hitting. She was totally confused. “Was I doing it wrong?”

  “No. You were doing it right. You were always doing it right. Wife, mother, and doctor—you got everything done when it was supposed to be done, even if it meant that you were programmed from morning to night. But things are changing now. Dougie isn’t a baby anymore. You can’t program his life the way you have up until now. He’s growing. He needs space.”

  “I give him space.”

  “Not nearly enough. You tell him what to do, when, and why. You don’t let him make decisions for himself.”

  “I’m helping. Life is difficult.”

  “You emasculate him, Angie.”

  “How can I do that? He isn’t a man yet.”

  “And he’ll never get there, if you keep on the way you’re going. You deny him things that would make him feel good about himself. Sure, he’s self-confident now, but after a while, when he begins to feel that he can’t make decisions on his own because you’ve always made them for him, he’ll be in trouble. You’re taking away his sense of power. You’re making him feel impotent, and that’s devastating. I know. You’ve been doing it to me for years.”

  She sucked in a breath. “Not true.”

  He nodded, slowly and conclusively. “You treat us like children, like we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves. You arrange our lives to suit your needs.”

  “Ben, I don’t!” she protested.

  “You do, and when we dare object, you pat us on the heads and send us off like little kids too young to understand what life is about. It’s insulting, Angie. It’s demeaning. It’s infuriating.”

  She could see that. His hands were white-knuckled on the edge of the counter. But it didn’t make sense. Ben was soft-spoken. He went about his business without hassle, passive in a positive way. This lashing out was totally unlike him. She struggled to understand what was going on in his mind.

  “I know you’re not pleased that I’m working longer hours, but it’s a temporary situation.”

  “It’s not the hours, Angie. It’s the way you go about it. It didn’t once occur to you to sit down with me and discuss how you planned to handle Mara’s death. You decided what you were going to do, based on what was best for you and the office, then you put up a new schedule for us to follow and assumed we’d go along. Well, the scheduling isn’t working anymore. Not for Doug, and not for me.”

  Her stomach twisted. “It’s working,” she insisted, because that had always been one of the givens of her life. She prided herself on having a successful career, a well-adjusted son, and a solid marriage. “You’re perfectly happy.”

  “See? Damn it, you’re doing it now, telling me how I feel! Well, I’m telling you I’m not pefectly happy. I spend hour after hour alone in this house—”

  “You’re working.”

  “Not all the time. I take breaks, and I don’t spend more than five hours at the drawing board. So what do I do when I’m done? I walk through this god-awful quiet house and feel lonely.”

  “That’s absurd, Ben. Up until this week, I rarely worked more than six hours a day myself.”

  “And when you’re home, you’re fixated on Doug.” She shook her head in denial, but he insisted, “It’s true, Angie. Your career comes first, then your son, then me.”

  She was stunned by a thought. “You’re jealous?”

  “If I am, I have every right to be.” He jabbed his chest. “I’m a man, and I’m human. I need companionship.”

  “You chose a solitary occupation.”

  “I chose an occupation I was good at, that just happened to be a solitary one, but it wasn’t even so solitary when we lived in New York,” he went on, seeming unable to stop now that he had started. “I could hand-deliver my stuff and have lunch with the guys at the paper. I could sit around the city room for as long as I wanted. So now I have cable TV for stimulation. There’s no comparison, Angie.”

  It seemed he was finding fault with everything. She was being torn apart. “Now it’s Vermont that you hate? But you went right along with the move. You didn’t once say boo.”

  “Because the move made sense! You were looking to join a practice that wouldn’t be cutthroat; we were looking to buy a house, which we couldn’t do in New York; my work was portable; the quality of life here seemed right. I figured the positives outweighed the negatives, and if you were happy, that was half the battle. So we moved and you were happy.”

  “So were you,” she insisted, because she remembered too many smiles and good times for it not to be so.

  “On some levels I was. You were working, which you wanted. I was working. We had our house and the freedom to drive down Main Street without experiencing gridlock.”

  “It’s been good,” she said, trying for points, only to be knocked down again.

  “It’s been lonely. At first I kept in touch with the guys, but after a few years, even with trips back once in a while, it wasn’t the same. There’s a high turnover rate in the newspaper business. Before long, I didn’t know who to call, and you were at work all day and then preoccupied with Dougie the minute you walked in the house. But I have needs, too, damn it.”

  “You should have said something.”

  He tipped up his chin. “I have, only you never hear. When I ask if you can take an hour off from work to go to lunch, you say you have patients booked straight through. When I suggest taking off for a weekend, you cite something or other that Dougie has doing here. When he goes to bed, so do you. Where does that leave me?”

  “But I do things with you,” she argued. She didn’t understand his attack. “We go out to dinner. We have friends over.”

  “You decide, you invite, you plan.”

  “And we do go away. That’s what the awards ceremony next month in New York is all about.”

  “That awards ceremony is about recognition and prestige. It isn’t about me. I could care less about getting an award. You’re the one who wants it.”

  “For you.”

  “But it isn’t what I want,” he repeated, and raced on. “But you don’t know what I want, do you. You formed an idea of who I am and what I do, and you’ve woven that idea into your life. You may listen to my words, but you don’t hear my thoughts. You don’t hear my needs. You don’t see me. You haven’t seen me in years!”

  She came out of her seat to face him. “That’s not true. You’re my husband. I may not be here all the time, but I’m aware of what you do.”

  He shook his head. “You’re so wrapped up in your own life that you haven’t got a clue.”

  “You’re dead wrong.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, leveling her a stare. “If you were aware of any of what I’ve been feeling, if you heard the things I asked you and looked at me, really looked at me, you’d know that there’s something going on in my life. But you’re so blind to anything but what’s on your own schedule that you have no idea, no idea.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “For Christ’s sake, Angie, I’ve had a relationship with another woman for nearly eight years now, and you haven’t the foggiest.”

  Angie felt as though her insides had slipped to another part of her body. She put a hand to her chest to try to anchor her heart. “What?” she asked in a shaky voice.

 
“You heard,” he grumbled.

  I’ve had a relationship with another woman for nearly eight years, he had said, but that couldn’t be. She knew her husband. He was loyal and devoted. He loved her.

  “Are you saying that just to hurt me?” she asked, because it was the only thing she could think of, and even then it didn’t make much sense. Ben wasn’t a hurter. He was a kind, introspective, innocuous sort.

  He looked away. “I’m saying it because it’s the truth, and because I don’t know how else to get through to you.”

  “Who is she?” Angie heard herself ask. It seemed important, the acquiring of as much information as possible.

  He turned to the window and put his hands on his hips, and for a minute she thought he wouldn’t answer. Finally, in a low voice, he said, “Nora Eaton.”

  Angie conjured up the image of a pleasant-looking woman, average in nearly every respect except for a headful of long, incredibly vibrant salt-and-pepper curls. She was Tucker’s librarian and terrifyingly real.

  “She’s older than we are,” was all Angie could think to say.

  Ben shrugged. “I never really thought about it.”

  Her legs were shaking. She eased herself down onto the chair. “How often do you see her?”

  “I don’t know—once, twice a week sometimes. Look, Angie”—he turned back—“it’s not some kind of sexual perversion. There are times when all we do is talk, like you and I used to do before we were married. I miss that. I miss having you around.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I did. You just chose not to hear.”

  “But if you have her now, you’re not missing anything,” Angie said, feeling empty inside and alone.

  “Not true. I’m still missing you. She’s a stopgap measure, not a cure. She can’t hold a candle to you, but, damn it,” he said with a renewal of the anger that had spewed earlier, “I can’t spend the rest of my life competing for your attention and coming in last.” That said, he pushed away from the counter, went out the back door, and disappeared into the night, leaving Angie with the scattered shreds of her life.