Those We Love Most

by Lee Woodruff

  “Oh?” said Margaret, feigning interest. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and began blowing on it before slurping loudly. “Hot, hot, oh, Lord, I just burned my tongue.” She abruptly turned off the flame under the pan and breathed in deeply.

  Roger quickly poured a glass of water and offered it to her, but Margaret waved him away as if he were an annoyance. His inability to take any discernable or effective action left him feeling helpless in the Corrigan home. Roger could only bear witness as Maura’s stoic resolve gradually began to crumple with each successive visit, like time-lapse photography. The bonfire of hope that had kept her spine straight and her adrenal glands pumping for that week in the hospital had been cruelly extinguished. In the lengthy stretches he sat, ate, or watched TV with his grandchildren, Maura looked more and more like a wax version of herself, her body limp, her eyes hollow and empty.

  Roger took in his daughter’s kitchen, the warm cherry cabinets and gleaming polished stone counters on the eating island, now under his wife’s command. Soft lights below the cabinets gave the illusion of coziness, and he could see that Margaret had organized and cleaned every surface. Even the chrome appliances sparkled.

  Out past the flagstone patio with the boxwood hedges, weeds sprouted in beds and in the potted geraniums. Roger thought momentarily about helping with the gardening and then dismissed the thought. Margaret always jokingly accused him of not knowing a weed from a flowering perennial; he’d better not disturb the wrong things out there. For the time being, he would have to grow accustomed to his ineffectiveness in his daughter’s household.

  Suddenly Roger remembered a colleague, a man he hadn’t thought of in ages. Ed Schultz. He’d worked with Roger some fifteen years ago. They’d been on a prospective sales call with a burgeoning developer in Denver and had ended up at the bar together after dinner. Ed had been steadily downing one bourbon after the other, and as he’d moved from tipsy to drunk, he’d weepily confided in Roger that his high school–aged daughter had been raped at a rock concert in downtown Chicago. There was alcohol involved and some rowdy boys, strangers who she had ended up with in the parking lot when she’d gotten separated from her friends.

  As the father of two daughters, he found it impossible not to picture every parent’s worst nightmare. The images of the drunken boys holding her down in the back of the car and taking turns had played out in his head. They had been laughing as they raped her, Ed had told him, laughing, slapping one another and making noises like rodeo cowboys. And at that point in the story Ed had begun to sob, erupting over the highly varnished wood bar in the hotel with a strangled, choking sound, almost inhuman, as he struggled to regain control.

  He’d felt helpless, Ed told Roger. He’d been filled with a black fury, and yet he was impotent. He raged, but his rage had no outlet. He wanted to hurt someone, to punch something, to inflict physical damage. The boys had never been identified, but he told Roger that if he ever found them, he dreamed of what he would do to them. Each night, he told Roger, he imagined something different, some new, slow way to torture them, to make them physically pay.

  “The hardest part,” Ed told Roger, “was that I didn’t protect my little girl. I failed her. And I’m her father.” Ed had drained his glass and wiped the snot running from his nose with his sleeve as he moved unsteadily off the stool, his eyes tight and glassy. Roger helped him to his room that night, opening the door with the key and making sure he made it inside. The next morning, in the taxi to the airport, neither one of them acknowledged the previous evening’s raw confession. Ed sat woodenly in the cab, regretting, Roger was sure, that he had spilled such intimate details to a coworker. Within a year, the Schultz family had moved away from Chicago.

  Roger remembered that comingled with the feelings of sadness and outrage on Ed’s behalf that night, he’d had a feeling of relief, of feeling slightly sanctimonious and even superior regarding his own good fortune. Wasn’t that something, Roger thought, practically snorting in disgust. He’d felt superior all those years ago that he had been able to protect his girls. And now look at them. Life was a numbers game, a craps table. Apparently, it was his family’s turn to slam head-on into tragedy.

  As Roger continued to watch his wife flit around the kitchen with purpose, he realized his feelings of helplessness were exacerbated in direct proportion to her extreme competency with their children in the face of crisis. She was a cyclone of ceaseless activity, the centrifugal force that spoked out to sustain and nurture them all.

  Roger was appreciative, even envious of the rote activities women engaged in that moved the family forward: washing dishes, folding clothes, stocking the fridge, and supervising all of the many containers of food that had been dropped off. The organization and sense of purpose required for these mundane activities eluded him. Yet those strengths, Margaret’s capability and industriousness, were the very characteristics that had drawn him to her, he mused, sitting in the Corrigans’ kitchen, holding Sarah and watching his wife ladle the steaming soup into a bowl.

  His daughter’s home was now a place of both stagnation and industry; of meals, laundry, and cleaning amid the reflective tide pools of pure grief. This was the kind of stage on which Margaret shone. She could turn her elbow grease on any problem and buff it up. Margaret’s ability to “do” was a manifestation of grieving, a way of putting what had happened aside, of moving only ahead. Inertia, Roger knew firsthand, created a portal for the horrible thoughts and feelings to seep in.

  “Can you take Sarah up for me so I can change her?” Margaret asked as she placed the soup bowl on a plastic floral tray.

  Roger put Sarah up on his shoulders, which caused more giggling, and then he ducked slightly at the bottom of the stairs, following his wife to the second floor as Sarah reached out to touch the striped wallpaper on the landing. Margaret delivered soup to Maura, lying listlessly in bed in her darkened room, while he veered into Sarah’s room. The cramped spaced smelled vaguely of baby powder, and a cache of stuffed animals was piled next to a wooden dollhouse in the corner. Margaret entered a few minutes later and lifted Sarah from his lap onto the changing table, then efficiently applied the cream and powder from the shelves while steadying his granddaughter with her other hand. Have I ever done that? Roger thought. Had he diapered his own children? He couldn’t recall.

  “You’ve still got it, Mother,” Roger said, forcing a smile, and Margaret swiveled to meet his eyes, modestly pleased. She turned her attention back to Sarah.

  “Oh, I did plenty of this in my day, didn’t I, sweet princess?” Margaret was cooing at Sarah now, who was delighted with the attention from her grandmother and clapped her hands together with a squeal. “You’re almost too big for these now, aren’t you? Almost ready to give up your diapers at night and nap, hmmm?” Margaret lifted her granddaughter off the table and lowered her in the crib. “Do you want bunny with you?” Sarah nodded, her baby-fine sandy curls bobbing, and reached up to grab her favorite stuffed animal, flopping down on the mattress and popping her thumb into her mouth. She poked one chubby hand through the slats to sleepily wave good-bye.

  “I just love babies’ wrists,” said Margaret. “I love the way there is a little fold right here where the arm meets the hand, and dimples by the knuckles and then … all that fat just goes away at some point.” Her cadence slowed as they moved to exit Sarah’s room.

  They looked at each other for a second, each individually thinking about James, how he had been on the cusp of leaving boyhood at nine. “Double digits” he’d called his upcoming birthday. He had already been planning how he would celebrate.

  Being in his granddaughter’s small room, a large closet really, reminded Roger of the time right before Sarah was born. He had arrived unannounced at the Corrigan house one night on the way home from work and come across his very pregnant daughter stripping wallpaper and humming in a pair of ripped sweatpants. This third baby had been unexpected, a “what-a-surprise” baby, as Maura had called her. And yet, after they
’d made the initial mental adjustment to becoming a family of five, Maura had embraced the idea of one more, especially when the sonogram revealed it was a girl.

  “So, are you going to paint the walls a hot pink?” he had chided her.

  “Maybe, Dad.” She laughed, and then grew pensive. “It’s funny, I always thought I’d just have boys.”

  “Aren’t you glad James and Ryan will have a sister, like you do?” Roger had asked her.

  “Of course. I can’t wait to have a daughter. But I think boys are less complex. It’s all right there on the surface. What you see is pretty much what you get. Then again, I get to paint a room pink.” And she had smiled at him and patted her swollen belly with all the bright confidence of someone who was in the prime of giving life.

  Roger reached out now and laid his palm against the blush-colored walls. He closed his eyes and ran his hand against the smooth plaster, ambushed for the moment by the past as tears welled up. Life back then, when the room was covered in wallpaper, had scrolled out before all of them with promise. James had been alive, and his eldest daughter, the one most like him, had been whole.

  His cell phone rang in his shirt pocket. As Roger reached to pull it out, a slightly sour expression roiled over Margaret’s face, and Sarah’s head bolted up from the crib. They stepped into the hallway, and Margaret clicked the door shut. Roger studied the number. Julia. He’d spoken to her briefly a few times since the accident, assuring her he was OK. He had described how they were all consumed with the loss, the funeral arrangements, and taking care of his daughter’s family. She had been understanding. But her contact had ratcheted up lately. She wanted more from him, wanted to see him, and to know when he would be in Florida next. He let out his breath slowly and let the call go into voice mail.

  “Work again,” he explained lamely and chided himself for using such a booming tone. “I’m going to have to get back to Tampa for the refinancing of that mall soon. The deal is dragging out forever.”

  “You’d think there would be other partners at a firm your size to help pick up the slack,” said Margaret disapprovingly. “Younger partners who could fill in on some of these meetings and report back.” They were padding down the hall toward the stairs, speaking in hushed tones. It was so still and quiet now, with Ryan at summer day camp, as if the entire house had been unplugged from its energy source, enervated.

  “You know how clients are,” whispered Roger. “People like to see the principals show their faces. This whole real estate deal should close in a few months, and then we can begin to draw up plans for the expansion and get some bids. Everyone just wants to feel important. Human nature.” His phone beeped to let him know a message had been delivered to his voice mail. He blushed for a moment, surprising himself, and shot Margaret a veiled look. She was adjusting her permed hair with her fingers in the hall mirror, slightly sucking in her cheeks and gazing into the backyard from the second-floor landing. Out beyond the shade of the branches the grass looked slightly parched by the sun’s glare, and Roger made a mental note to locate a sprinkler in the garage.

  “I think I’ll go back to the house and tackle some paperwork,” he muttered to Margaret downstairs. “Should I look in on Maura?”

  “Let’s let her rest now. When I brought the soup in she was trying to sleep.” She set a laundry basket on the mudroom floor and began straightening the family’s shoes, tossing each pair into the assigned milk crates in a system Maura had installed after Ryan began walking.

  “Roger?” Margaret suddenly cried out in a wounded pitch. She had stopped moving, poised in a bent position, and he noticed she was holding a small black Merrell shoe.

  “Roger …” Margaret’s voice cracked, as she stooped over the crate, holding the shoe. James’s shoe. “What … what will we do with his milk crate?”

  “I don’t know …,” said Roger. He hadn’t yet thought about the “things,” all of the physical reminders of James, his possessions. On some level, he imagined that James would simply appear back in the house one day, as if some kind of magic was at work, or as if he had merely been at sleepaway camp.

  “We can deal with that later, I imagine,” Margaret said softly, but her voice was strong, and her face wore an expression of resigned determination. “We can’t do this now.” She tossed the shoe and its mate into the crate with James’s flip-flops and baseball cleats and a good-as-new pair of winter boots.

  “So, I’ll go, then,” Roger said again, leaning in the doorjamb of the mudroom now, suddenly desperate to get outside.

  “OK,” called Margaret, her back to him, bent at her task.

  Roger hesitated for just a second and then turned toward the back screen door. He thought again of Maura. Hopefully she was napping, but more likely she was awake, sitting in the rocking chair, the same one in which she had nursed and comforted all three of her children. He had come upon her rocking yesterday, her body erect and perfectly still, only her feet gliding the rocker back and forth. Sarah was asleep on her chest, legs splayed out. She seemed to have Sarah in her arms all the time now, touching her, singing with her, drawing comfort from her physical nearness. “I want to freeze you, right here at this age,” he had heard his daughter mumble to the child, and he had backed away, the plush hall carpeting absorbing his footfalls.

  Outside Maura’s house Roger let out a huge breath and climbed into the convertible. At the first stop sign, he steered the car off Maura’s street, canopied by elms, and onto the wider avenue that eventually snaked along Lake Michigan. As he accelerated, the suburban Chicago houses in their North Shore town flicked by, growing larger as he headed east toward the water; white wooden columned structures, curving turn-of-the-century shingled edifices, and brick Georgian homes represented an earlier time of industrial affluence in the history of the North Shore. Here and there a flagpole accented a scallion green lawn, and planters bursting with boldly hued annuals graced porches and entryways. The residences became more expansive as he got closer to the water, the landscaping and flowers more magnificent. He loved summertime in Chicago, the large, evenly spaced oaks lining so many streets in their town, the way the merchants on the main street of Greenhaven all sported lush hanging baskets overflowing with orange-red geraniums, ferns, and purple petunias. The bright promise of the season and the cloudless indigo sky were in such stark contrast to everything his family was experiencing now.

  The theme from Mission: Impossible began to play on his phone, something James had rigged on a lark only three weekends ago. He didn’t have the expertise to deal with the technical functions of cell phones, but James had been a whiz at anything electronic. When his secretary had called, Roger realized that somehow James had programmed his phone with this silly personal ringtone, so incongruous with the seriousness of his office. James had gotten such glee out of the fact that Roger could never fix it. And so it had rung like that since, each call from his office now a painful reminder of his eldest grandson. His secretary had been holding calls and canceling meetings since the accident. The team at his commercial real estate firm had been working on pitching a big deal out of the San Francisco office, and things were now simmering in Dallas. Work would give him a purpose, something to focus on, maybe even a sense of measureable accomplishment.

  “Roger Munson.”

  “Roger, it’s Cristina.”

  “How are you? How is everyone at the office?”

  “We’re well, and all wondering how you are, and the family of course. I hope that Maura got the food basket we sent? The one with the ham?”

  “Yes, thank you, that was very thoughtful,” he said, although he had no recollection of such a basket. There had been so much food brought to the house, it was impossible to keep track of it all, though he had no doubt Margaret had already devised an efficient system for sending out thank-yous on her very best stationery. They’d actually had to throw a number of things out. Margaret had gone on about that, with a frustrated resolve. It always bothered her to waste food.

&nbs
p; “We made a nice meal out of it,” he added unnecessarily. “Very thoughtful.”

  “Well, I was just checking,” Cristina said. “Checking to see if you needed anything. I saw your e-mail about Tampa and wanting to go down there in two weeks. Do you have a date in mind?”

  “Let me check the calendar and get back to you. And, Cristina, I’m coming into the office tomorrow,” Roger said, almost too abruptly.

  “Oh. OK.”

  “There isn’t much I can do here,” Roger offered. “Maura … we … well, I guess time will just have to work its magic.”

  “I’m sure—” his secretary’s voice began, and then a call-waiting interruption clicked, cutting off the end of her sentence. Roger removed the phone from his ear and glanced at the number. It was Julia, calling again from Florida.

  “Do you need to get that?” asked Cristina.

  “I’ll call them back,” he said abruptly.

  Before James’s accident, a call from Julia would have hastened him off the other line. He would have felt that slight lift, something hopeful at the sight of her number, and he would have ended his conversation hurriedly in order not to miss her. Now, as he drove past the corner diner in the heart of his town, the sight of her number filled him with competing emotions. It was hard to tease out the strands. It wasn’t a dread, but her call carried a new weight of responsibility and complicity, as if she were somehow tied to what had happened to James.

  Roger sighed and apologized to Cristina, asking her to repeat her question, the interruption of the call-waiting mercifully allowing him to change the topic back to some trivial issue, phone messages and an upcoming client meeting. For the second time that day, feeling vaguely guilty and unsettled, he let Julia’s call go into voice mail.

  6

  Maura had always taken a secret pride that as a homemaker she hadn’t resorted to those salads that came in a bag with the packet of dressing and the separately wrapped croutons. A month after the funeral, as she rummaged through the fridge, gathering ingredients to make dinner, she wondered why she hadn’t saved herself the trouble all of those years. Why hadn’t she done more takeout? Now she was staring into the refrigerator overflowing with casseroles and unfamiliar Tupperware. Her church, friends, the women in the PTA, had organized a schedule of dinners and grocery shopping and even rides to sports practices for Ryan, which made her feel immensely grateful. But this also highlighted her inability to perform these simple functions for her family. Tonight she was determined. It wouldn’t be elaborate, but after weeks of reheating one of the unidentifiable dishes left by neighbors, Maura had decided it was time to cook a real meal for her family. They needed to all sit down together and reach for some semblance of normal. She would even try to get down a few bites herself, though her appetite had largely deserted her weeks ago. She thought of the stubborn ten pounds she had finally managed to lose. The jeans she was wearing now hung loosely on her hips, despite the belt she had dug out of the closet. The grief diet, her sister had called it.