Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Today’s her day off. Lately I only come here when she’s off.”

  Angie looked up to find him staring at her. “Is that true?”

  He nodded.

  “She must have a lot of days off. Your car’s never at home.”

  “I drive around,” he said in such a begrudging way that it had to be true. “I can’t bear the quiet, so I get in the car and drive. There are some days when I start as early as ten in the morning.”

  Angie might have found solace in the fact that he was upset, had she known something about the nature of that upset. In the past she might have presumed to know that something, but she’d learned better.

  “What do you think about while you’re driving around?” she asked.

  He snorted. “Us. What else?”

  He was looking out the window now. Angie didn’t feel as much on the hot line herself. “What about us?” she asked.

  “I think about the things we used to do that I liked.”

  Like what things, she wanted to prod, but she held her tongue. She had to stop directing conversations. Ben was a big boy. If he wanted to elaborate, he would.

  Sure enough, after a minute he said, “I liked it when we used to do spontaneous things, like cook on that little hibachi out on the rickety balcony of that first apartment we had, or play backgammon until three in the morning. I liked it when we used to be snowed in, when we slept late and went for a walk. Things like that.”

  “Then I got too busy to be snowbound.”

  “And I let you,” he admitted. “I let it happen. So I’m at fault, too.”

  Yes, thank you, she thought. If the hours he had spent driving around in his car had produced this realization, she forgave him the driving. The infidelity was something else.

  “Are you suing for divorce?” he asked, looking at her now.

  She shook her head. “I’m not ready to give it up, but I need to know what’s happening with her.”

  “Nothing. It’s off between us.”

  He looked earnest, but she had to know more. “Why?”

  “She was a substitute. A way to fill the time.”

  “She’s been that for eight years. What’s changed now?”

  “You know now. And I feel like shit.”

  The angry part of her was glad to hear it, the demoralized part felt a redemption of sorts. She had always thought Ben a man of conscience. Indeed, politically, his cartoons threw a punch for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. Mara had loved that. And Angie had been proud.

  Despite a lapse, conscience had prevailed. It was gratifying to know that she hadn’t been totally wrong.

  “What about us?” she asked quietly. “Can we put something meaningful back together?”

  He straightened his leg and rubbed its thigh. “I don’t know. I’m still angry sometimes.”

  “When I’m at work?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Do you want me to quit?”

  He eyed her cautiously. “Would you?”

  She had asked for that one. But there was no weaseling out. “Would isn’t the issue,” she tried to explain. “It’s could. Could I?” She took a shaky breath. “I don’t know. Being a doctor is part of who I am. I don’t know if I could give it up completely, any more than you could give up drawing.”

  “I’ve been drawing since I was two.”

  “I’ve been wanting to be a doctor nearly as long.”

  “Art is part of the psyche.”

  “So is the need to heal.”

  A silence settled between them, heavily on Angie’s heart. In the back of her mind were Paige’s desperate urgings—Talk to him, Angie, tell him how you feel—and then Mara’s writings—I come and go in people’s lives, just as people come and go in mine.

  At that moment, Angie identified with Mara. But it was the last thing she wanted.

  “There has to be a compromise,” she burst out. Meekness wouldn’t do when one had reached a crossroads in life. “It can’t end like this. We have too much in common, too many things we both like. We have a history together—”

  “And a child who’s coming home for vacation tomorrow,” Ben broke in with an echo of the sarcasm that had been so prevalent of late. “Is that what this is about?”

  A dead leaf fell on the hood of the car, dull and drab, discouraging enough to spur Angie on. She shook her head. “No, Ben. I’ve come to see things I couldn’t see before. You were right about Dougie. I’m not saying that I’m thrilled he’s boarding—I don’t think I’ll ever be thrilled about it, but it’s like the times when he was little and used to climb across the top of the swing set, and I’d close my eyes and let him do it because I knew that he’d never learn unless he did. He’s doing okay as a boarder. It’s what he wants. It may even be what he needs.” She took a breath. “No. This is about us.”

  Which brought them full circle.

  “So,” Ben said to the dashboard of the car. “Where do we go from here?”

  Angie wasn’t touching the question. “You’ll have to tell me that. I’m feeling gunshy where giving direction is concerned.”

  “I can’t do this alone.”

  “But I don’t know what to say. I know what I want. I want us to stay together and try to make things work, but I don’t know if that’s what you want at all.”

  He was still. After a long minute, quietly, he said, “It is.”

  “Then there have to be solutions. Maybe we should think about them for a while, then talk again.” It sounded a little like carrying on long-distance negotiations, but Angie didn’t know what more to say. If there was hope, she could wait.

  “And Nora?” he asked. When she looked at him in alarm, he added, “Can you forget about her?”

  “Can you?” seemed the more appropriate question to Angie. She waited anxiously for an answer.

  “She’s been a good friend. I’m not sure that if I hadn’t had her, I wouldn’t have run away.”

  Angie felt a sarcasm of her own. “I’d thank her for that, except I hope I never see the woman again. She slept with my husband. I don’t know if I can forgive her for that. Besides, maybe if you had run away, I would have learned about the problem sooner. I didn’t know, Ben.” She was bewildered all over again. “Honestly I didn’t.”

  He looked at her for the longest time. Then, with a tenderness worlds away from sarcasm, he said a quiet, “I know,” and let himself out of the car.

  * * *

  Students started leaving campus at the end of Wednesday classes. Vans headed for the airport in shifts through the afternoon. Parents arrived in cars, loaded up kids and suitcases, and left.

  Knowing that Sara had cross-country practice, then a study hall that was part of her punishment for leaving Mount Court without signing out, Noah didn’t expect her at the house until dinnertime. Rather than cooking in, he had made a reservation at Bernie’s Béarnaise, thinking that would be a special way to start the break.

  Five-thirty came and went. He gave her more time, figuring that she would be packing up a few things, but when she hadn’t shown by six, then six-thirty, he set off for the dorm. In the course of the two minutes that it took him to walk there, he imagined that she’d run off, or been abducted, or taken refuge at Paige’s again.

  He wouldn’t have minded the last. He liked having an excuse to see Paige. They had no future, yet still she fascinated him, and not only sexually, though there was that, too. She gave him a run for his money when it came to repartee. If she was down, put off balance by something he said or did, she was never down for long. She could look him in the eye, tell him he was all wrong, and turn him on like there was no tomorrow.

  Besides, she was a good role model for Sara.

  MacKenzie Lounge was deserted. He strode through, swung up the stairs to the third floor, and went down the hall to her room. The door was closed, but there were sounds inside. He knocked, called, “Sara?”

  “Yes?”

  He jiggled the handle, but the door was locked. “
Open up.”

  It was a minute before she did. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, socks but no shoes. A small television provided background chatter.

  “Where ya been?” he asked, trying to keep it light. She couldn’t have forgotten that it was fall break. All her friends had left. The dorm was empty. The dining hall was closed.

  She shrugged. “I was just sitting around.”

  “But I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re staying with me over break.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  He sighed. “Sara, how could you not have known it? I left a note in your mailbox. I said we’d go to Bernie’s Béarnaise. I said we’d go canoeing.”

  “You didn’t say anything about staying with you.”

  He took an impatient breath. “Well, where else would you be staying?”

  “Here. There are other kids around.”

  “Not many, and not in MacKenzie. They’re over in Logan. That’s the only supervised dorm this weekend.” He tried to be level-headed, but he was frustrated and hurt. It was the same hurt he had felt time and again when he had come to visit Sara and been greeted coolly. He felt rejected by the one person he most wanted.

  “Okay,” he said, looking around the room, “just put together a few things and let’s go. We can stop by for more tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather stay here.”

  He flipped off the television. “The backpack will do fine. You don’t need to take much.”

  “I have tons of homework to do.”

  “You’ll need a skirt or dress for tonight. Remember that purple outfit you wore to the play last weekend? You looked gorgeous. Wear that.”

  She turned away. After a minute she crossed to the desk. Keeping her back to him, she said, “You don’t have to do this. I’ll be fine with the other kids.”

  He exploded. “Well, I won’t, damn it. You’re my daughter, and this is my fall break, too. I’ve been good. I’ve left you alone to get acclimated to the school like any other student, but this weekend is for regenerating, and I need it. It’s been a whole lot of long, lonely months. I need my daughter. I need my family, if that’s what you and I can be called.”

  “We aren’t a family,” she argued, but more meekly.

  “We sure as hell are. I’m the father, and you’re the daughter.”

  “We barely know each other.”

  “That’s why I’ve been looking forward to this weekend. It’s about time we got to know each other, don’t you think?”

  She shrugged. “Things weren’t so awful before.”

  “They were terrible. I respected the fact that your mother had her own life, a new life with a new husband, and I tried to give her room to raise you without getting in the way. So what happened? I saw you for a day here and there, and a week once a year with my folks. If I were to do it again, I’d do it differently. I’d fight to see you more. You’d have my name. I wouldn’t be so damned deferential to Liv.”

  He caught himself before he said more on that score. He had sworn not to bad-mouth Liv, though he held her at fault for the breakup of their marriage. Tempering his voice, he said, “Those years are done, Sara. I can’t force you to like me, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.”

  Her shoulders hunched. It was a minute before he realized she was crying. He crossed the floor and took her in his arms. “Ahhhh, baby. Don’t cry. We’ll work things out. I promise.”

  She cried quietly. While she didn’t wrap her arms around him, she didn’t pull away, and suddenly the years disappeared. She was a toddler again, crying over a fall, and he was comforting the little girl he adored. “I know it’s hard. Your life’s been turned upside down in the past few months. It’s natural that you’re feeling unsettled. That’s why it’s so important for us to try with each other.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted me around,” she hiccoughed.

  “This weekend?”

  “All those years.”

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “You saw the pictures I kept on the mantel. I couldn’t pry many out of your mother, but whenever we were together I snapped away. You hated it when I did that—you always tried to turn away, remember?—but I lived through those pictures at times.”

  “You never came.”

  “I thought I was doing you a favor, minimizing the confusion about who your father was, but there’s another side to that, Sara. You never asked me to come. When I’d be leaving you off at Liv’s, you never asked when you’d see me again. I was never told about things like dance recitals, even though your mother had pictures of those all over her mantel, and when you started running—which was my thing, you knew that because you’d seen me running when we stayed with my folks—you never said a word.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

  “Well, I did. I thought about you all the time. I never let a birthday go by without a visit or a call, certainly never without a present. There were cards for every other kind of holiday, and I didn’t just sign them ‘love, Dad,’ I always wrote something that I thought would be meaningful, either about what the card meant or what I was doing with my life or what I thought you might be doing with yours.” He smoothed aside a swath of long hair that was just the color as his. “I cared, Sara. I cared all those years, and I care now.”

  “But you hate it here. You only took the job because you needed somewhere to put me. At the end of the year, you’ll be gone, and I’ll be stuck here alone for two more years.”

  “If you stay, I stay.”

  She grew still. After a minute’s quiet she asked, “You’re not leaving?”

  “I don’t know, but if I leave, you come with me.”

  She was quiet for another minute. “That’s because I get a free ride at whatever school you’re at.”

  “Cutie, I’d pay tens of thousands if you desperately wanted to be at another school that didn’t happen to be mine. It’s not the money. I want you with me. That’s all.”

  She started crying again.

  “This was always the best and the worst about being a parent,” he mumbled against the top of her head. “It was the worst, because crying meant you were unhappy, and the best, because I got to be the one who made it better. I wish I could do that now, the way I could when you were a year old, but the issues are more complex.” He held her until the sobbing slowed, then he said, “I do love you, Sara. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Give me half a chance and I’ll prove it to you.”

  She sniffled. Turning away from him, she pulled a tissue from the box. “I don’t know why you’d love me. I’m not a very lovable person.”

  “Whoever told you that?” he asked, suspecting that Liv had said as much more than once. He held up a hand. “No matter. I don’t want to know. Whoever it was was wrong. Everyone in this world is lovable in some way, shape, or form. It’s sometimes just a question of getting around—getting around—” What the hell: “Getting around the shit to the lovable part.”

  She was standing by the dresser with her back to him.

  “So, let’s start getting around the shit,” he said more gently. “How about it?”

  When she remained silent, he knew it wouldn’t be easy, but then he had never thought it would be. One didn’t wipe out years of misperception in a single conversation, no matter how ardent the speaker was. Whether because of Liv, Liv’s husband, Jeff, or something in Sara herself, she had grown up thinking the worst of him. Changing that would take time.

  “I really did love that purple outfit,” he coaxed. “Come on. Stick a few things in the backpack, give me some clothes on their hangers, and we’ll go over to the house. I have something to show you.”

  The something was a bedroom set for Sara’s room. Noah had shopped around for days, not only for the bed, nightstand, and dresser, but for a thick quilt that matched soft floral sheets, which matched a pale green wall-to-wall carpet. Sara didn’t say anything when she saw it, but h
e could tell that she was pleased. She stood at the door for a long time, just looking with wide eyes and what might have been, with an optimistic stretch of the imagination, the tiniest ghost of a smile.

  Pleased, he hung her clothes in the closet and left her alone to change. Fifteen minutes later, lightheaded with his stunning daughter next to him in the car, he directed the Explorer toward Bernie’s Béarnaise. Passing Tucker General and the medical building beside it, he could have sworn he saw Paige’s car turn in.

  Had he been alone, he would have stopped and shared his little victory with her. He thought about her often, usually in the middle of the night when he awoke in a bed that seemed too large, too cold, and too sterile—which was incredible, since he’d been sleeping in the very same bed for years and had never felt quite those things. Paige was a tickle at the base of his spine that, if left to its own devices, spread to his front and lower. She was unfinished business.

  For a minute, even with Sara, he thought of stopping. Then he decided against it. This was a time for Sara and him. It was important that nothing at all intrude.

  Paige parked and trotted into the building and up the stairs. When she entered the office, Ginny was standing by the phone clutching a brown paper bag.

  Worriedly she whispered, “I bought a quart of milk during lunch and left it here by mistake. When I stopped back to get it, I saw him.”

  Paige patted her arm. “I’m glad you did. Thanks, Ginny. I’ll go see him.”

  Peter was in his office, sitting at the desk, but barely. He looked as though the weakest nudge would send him crashing to the floor.

  “Hey.” Paige smiled as she approached the desk. “What’re you doin’?”

  Peter moved his forearms over something that had been crushed and unfolded. “Jus’ neaten’ up.” His fingertips glanced clumsily across two bottles of Scotch. The nearly empty one fell over. He grabbed for it and missed. Paige set it straight. While he swore under his breath about the waste of good brew, she mopped up what little had spilled.