Those We Love Most

by Lee Woodruff

  Maura thought back to their fight this morning. Why wasn’t Pete more angry? Their reactions about the Hulburd boy seemed to be equally opposite. The more outrage she unleashed, the more equanimity he displayed, and that infuriated her. Maura sighed. The thought suddenly occurred to her that it had probably been at least seven months since she and Pete had made love. Maybe more. At one point in time that would have been inconceivable. Back when they were dating they could hardly keep their hands off each other. And then kids, and duties, and work, and … it was all such a cliché. She let out a disgusted snort and shook her head as if to physically banish her thoughts.

  Pete got a lot of “me” time as she called it, and Maura let her resentment at this inequality and his selfishness smolder. Throughout their marriage Pete had golfed, met the boys at the bar, and enjoyed lunchtime client meetings at some of the nicer Chicago restaurants. He knew how to take care of himself, but then again, he was the breadwinner, she’d always reasoned. That rationale had grown old. It was easier right now to catalog his faults, as that mitigated her guilt, her tremendous, suffocating guilt.

  Fastening her eyes back out at the container ship on the lake’s bleached horizon, she smiled at the memory of a cruise she and Pete had taken to Hawaii three years before Sarah was born. After a few frozen margaritas they had stumbled back to their cabin and captured some of the unfettered passion that conjures itself up when a married couple cuts ties to responsibility. The delicious alcoholic haze, the humidity in the air, and the gentle rocking of the boat worked like a balm. The cruise had been a little reminder of how and why she and Pete had fallen in love—their shared history, similar senses of humor—and what his attentiveness to her had felt like. They had danced to the ship’s band and played cards, talked about topics other than children while gazing at the night sky on deck. That time together with Pete had made Maura hopeful. But that had been vacation. Sarah was born, and life had become even more full, Pete’s parenting increasingly splintered at times. His drinking remained a constant, never to complete excess or total impairment, but more than she would have liked. The few times she had raised it, his defensiveness had immediately backed her down.

  On a girls’ weekend last fall, after too much wine, she had admitted to her college roommate that she’d married a simple man, an uncomplicated person. She had been looking for dependability, she’d confided, but instead had found a boy, the kind of person who would have a predictably complacent approach to life. He had proposed to the girl from the next town, stepped into his father’s insurance business, and met his high school friends weekly at the same bar. In the early days of their marriage Maura had fit into Pete’s life with ease, conforming herself to his lifestyle. But routine, complacency, and the lack of spontaneity had begun to chafe over the years. It was like wanting something more or somehow different but having no real idea quite what, she had told her college roommate.

  Maura had regretted spilling this confidence to her friend the next morning, blushing at the thought of such naked honesty. But they had not discussed it again, and she told herself that the alcohol had probably blunted the memory of the conversation.

  She lay back in the sand, turning her face toward the weak warmth of the sun. A few larger pebbles dug into her back, and she raised her eyes up to the cloudless sky. Even before Maura had completely put a finger on her growing restlessness, felt the daily routine sanding down and blurring her edges, she had understood how easily attentions could be diverted. In her early marriage, there had been a couple of temptations. Well, flirtations really, that had stayed with her all of these years later. When she was newly engaged to Pete, she and her girlfriend Beth Stevens had gone to a Sox game together. The first welcome tendrils of a spring breeze had begun to stir over the plains and off the Great Lakes, lending a recklessness to the premature warmth of the afternoon. Emboldened by the beers in the stands, they’d been stealing glances and giggling at the three boisterous guys seated next to them. Very quickly it had bloomed into playful flirting.

  Tim was the name of the young man next to her, and he’d been more serious than his buddies, more animated and eager to talk. She’d let him rest his hand on her knee as they conversed, a small, harmless thing, she had told herself later, because she was, after all, only engaged and not married. They’d discussed music and politics and family. While they stole sidelong glances at the field, she had the feeling that the space around them on the bleachers had shrink-wrapped them both in, so that the sounds surrounding them, the cheering and the whooping it up, had begun to recede.

  Beth poked her thigh at one point and gave her a strange, almost imploring look, which, she realized through her slightly beery haze, was meant to pull her back to earth. And it was only after both of them were back on the commuter train and headed out to the suburbs that she thought about how quickly she had attached herself to this person and had spoken so readily and intimately. It had struck her, later that night, that her conversations with Pete, even in the early days of their courtship, had a different feeling, not as earnest or intense.

  During those two and a half hours at the baseball game a total stranger had lit her up and provoked an examination of the conventions and beliefs with which she’d been raised. He was Jewish, she recalled, and he had probed her feelings about her Catholicism as a woman and challenged her very orthodox decision to simply vote Republican because her parents did. Tim’s sense of intellectual engagement in life had seemed electric, and that, in turn, had kindled a palpable mutual attraction, as if they’d both been illuminated from within.

  And although she had never seen Tim again or even learned his last name, this one, vivid encounter had popped into her head at odd times over her yearlong engagement and very occasionally in the years to follow, on the heels of a fight with Pete or some small disappointment, like a forgotten anniversary.

  There was another time a few years after she’d gotten married, on a train from Chicago to Indianapolis for her tenth college reunion. She’d been seated next to a tall, slim, serious man with piercing eyes, who was part Cherokee, which she had found inexplicably sexy. They had plunged into a deep and serious discussion in that anonymous way that strangers can adopt, secure in the knowledge that they would never see each other again. It was the first time since she had been married that she’d had the impulse to cover her left hand, obscuring her ring finger so that she could be just Maura and not somebody’s wife.

  She learned her seatmate was an underwater explosives expert for the navy, and he spoke briefly about depth charges and diving in a factual, not boastful, way that was authoritative and appealing. In this second memorable encounter with an attractive stranger, it had been less about what they said and more about something crackling in the air between them. Traveling solo to her college reunion to inhabit briefly that long-ago carefree attitude, she felt his sloe-eyed gaze as it ignited her feeling of abandon.

  There was a moment when the train slowed, approaching the station, and the ride together seemed to demand some kind of mutual ending. When the train lurched to a sudden halt, she fell toward him and made a joke as she moved awkwardly toward a half embrace, a sort of air kiss, while he simultaneously extended his hand, and they had both laughed. She understood then that so many of life’s outcomes swung on a hinge; in that instant one made a choice. This was the moment she could press forward, get his number, or offer to grab a drink.

  As he helped her with her luggage in the top compartment, she’d impulsively toyed with the thought of asking for his name and address, her heart like a wild creature in her chest. And then, as he turned to help retrieve an older woman’s bags behind them, she lost her nerve and let the moment pass.

  These encounters with strangers had been a sobering lesson about the human capacity to love and the laws of attraction. There was not just one right person out there in the world for you, there were many people, many directions, many couplings that you could make in life and be just as happy or possibly even more so than the rando
m one you had chosen. This thought was at first disorienting and disquieting to her. And when she had returned from her reunion, she’d made love to Pete with a concentrated fierceness, as if to assure herself that she had made the right choice.

  As she rose to her feet and brushed off the sand from her clothing, Maura thought about how she had used that knowledge, the choices she had made since then and the unintended consequences of that path. She would barter almost anything she had to scroll back in time with the clarity and understanding she now possessed.

  Returning from her trip to the beach, Maura pulled the car halfway up the driveway, and as she walked to the front porch, she observed the bushes and perennials that needed pruning and shaping. She’d inherited her love of growing things from her mother, and usually she enjoyed tidying the yard at the change of seasons. Now Maura tried to summon the enthusiasm required for such a task. They’d need to get pumpkins soon too and put out Halloween decorations.

  Maura reached into the mailbox on the front porch and fished out the clump of envelopes, bills, and circulars. Flattened in front of the pile was a blue cardboard coffee cup, with the image of a Greek statue and the words WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU printed on opposing sides in the familiar diner font. Maura studied it with a puzzled expression for just a moment and then her face sagged. The word e-mail was scrawled on the side in pencil, so faint that it would be easy to miss if one didn’t understand the significance of the cup itself.

  Maura slung the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder and dug back into the mailbox with both hands, checking to see if there was anything that she had missed in the recesses of the metal box. Heart pounding, she opened the front door and deposited her purse, keys, and the pile of mail on the front hall table. She walked swiftly into the kitchen to her computer on the small built-in desk and clicked on the symbol for her e-mail, something she’d rarely done since the accident. She groaned softly as the in-box rapidly filled with all the unanswered messages from well-meaning people, mass e-mails from the kids’ schools, and spam. She had let all of this go for so long. Maura saw it there, delivered in the last hour. “Vet Check-Up Appt” the subject said, so innocuous that Pete or anyone else would most likely leave it unopened. She hesitated for a moment and clicked on the e-mail as the words filled the screen.

  “We need to talk about Rascal’s medical condition. Please call the office. Art” was all it said. She read it a second time and closed her eyes, letting her breath out in one thin stream. What an eerie coincidence that she’d just been to Gull’s Bay. Instinctively she reached toward the kitchen cordless phone and then stopped, moving her hand back to the desktop and rooting her feet to the floor. No, she told herself. Six months. She’d given herself at least six months. Although it would take every ounce of her self-command, she owed this to herself and Pete. Maura reread the message one last time, parsing it for clues, before she pressed delete.

  11

  “So I saw the kid today.” Pete said it casually, crumpling his napkin on the empty dinner plate and sliding it toward the center of the table. Outside the kitchen window, darkness had begun to arrive early and a flock of geese, honking in a sloppy V formation, flew by above the trees. “I went to the Hulburds’ house after work.” He took a pull of his beer bottle and set it down on the table too hard, looking directly at Maura with a neutral expression. There was a speck of gravy on the front of his shirt.

  “Yeah? How did it go?” She kept her voice even, relieved that Pete had waited until the kids were finished with dinner and glued to a video in the family room. The dishes and Sarah’s bath could wait.

  “Well, I think he was pretty scared. I gotta say, he seems like a good kid, but it was really awkward at first. Uncomfortable for all of us.”

  “Tell me about him.” Maura realized she had been holding her breath and exhaled.

  “I went over there after work, and they were all kinda sitting there, really stiff, like they’d been waiting for me. They had cheese and crackers, wine, stuff like that. The parents are decent people, nice. Alicia and Ray. Like us, I guess. And get this …” Pete smiled and looked down at his cuticles for a moment. “They have their homeowners’ policy with us, with Corrigan Insurance. Dad wrote their first one years ago, when they bought on Chestnut.” Pete shook his head with incredulity. “Life in a small town, right?”

  “Mmmmm, go on,” Maura urged him.

  “Well, he said the stuff you’d imagine he’d say, how sorry he was, how this was an accident but he can’t get it out of his head. He met my eyes when he spoke, you know? The kid is in a lot of pain, Maura. He looks … I don’t know exactly, haunted, I guess. I mean this all has obviously taken a toll.” Pete stopped to take a sip of his beer, and Maura sat still for a moment, imagining what it had cost Pete to knock on their door.

  “The kid, Alex, is almost eighteen, and he goes to New Trier High School. He’s a swimmer but when he went upstairs after we talked, his parents told me they’re really worried about him. He quit the swim team, and his grades have tanked. He used to hang out with one set of guys who were athletes, and from what his mom can tell, now he’s with more of a pothead crowd, and they’re obviously concerned. I mean I guess he was never an ace student, but he was on some kind of college track before. His mother told me that she keeps trying to get him to fill out his applications to basically anywhere, and he just gives her lip service.”

  Maura lifted her arm on the table and rested her chin in her hand. “I’d give anything to have those problems with James, you know? To worry that his grades are slipping, to get bent out of shape about who he hangs out with …”

  “I know.”

  “He’s seventeen. How can he possibly understand what it means to lose a child? He’ll go to senior prom and graduate and fall in love and …” Maura trailed off. The sound of her own voice was foreign, bitter and spiteful. Thinking about Alex Hulburd, she felt the incomprehensible injustice of their situation as if it were a sharp-toothed bite.

  “Pete, I’m really glad you went over there, I am. But I’m just not there yet, I guess,” said Maura tremulously. “I can’t imagine what I would say to him, how it would feel to be with him and not want to trade everything I own to have James take his place.” She winced and Pete moved toward her in his seat, reaching around to hug her as she covered her eyes with her other hand.

  “Hey, babe”—Pete’s voice softened an octave—“he’s a decent kid, and this has wrecked his life too. That’s just a fact.” Her eyes were fixed on the floor, and she nodded without looking at him. “I think the key is going to be trying to make sure that both of us don’t go down with the ship, right?”

  Maura looked up, surprised by this unexpected declaration. She moved her hand over to the center of the table spontaneously. Pete reached out to grab it, and they sat that way for a few minutes, each lost in their own thoughts while a cartoon laugh track swelled at varying volumes from the family room TV.

  “He’s … he’s hurting, Maura. And he’d love to see you at some point. When you’re ready.” She inclined her head slightly at this remark and began to move the remains of her baked potato around on her plate with her knife. She’d overcooked the pork chop and it was dry and leathery.

  “I know it’s only been a couple of months, but I’m just going to say this even though you’ll probably get mad. I think you … you need to try to show the kids a little more happiness.”

  Maura’s felt a flash of anger at the nerve of his comment, he who was so unyielding with his boys’ nights out, ceremoniously calling from the bar to announce his “one last pop.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked up. “I’m trying my best, Pete. I really am. I can’t wave this away. You don’t see me every minute of the day with them. You aren’t here to witness my parenting, I’m not always walking around weeping, or whatever it is you think I’m doing.”

  “I’m just saying, maybe you ought to see somebody,” Pete continued in a gentle tone. “I don’t know, talk to somebody. Somebody other than your
sister and the priest.”

  Maura sighed and poured Sarah’s leftover milk in with Ryan’s. She pushed her chair back and rose from the table, scraping the dinner plates into the disposal and then stacking them, arranging the silverware in a pile on top. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, as if protecting her heart. The way she held herself now gave the appearance that carrying her grief had become a physical burden.

  “I don’t want to talk, Pete,” she said quietly. “Not really. It won’t change a thing. It doesn’t make me feel any better to talk to Father Durkee. I go and light candles, I kneel and say prayers. All of this is just a temporary relief and Mass mostly feels like window dressing. I sit there and my heart isn’t anywhere in that church. I’m angry. Angry at Alex Hulburd, angry at God and at the fact that no one can tell me why bad things happen. Why did it happen to us? Talking about it to some stranger or some therapist is only going to stir things back up. Father Durkee tells me to try to be grateful for what I have. But that puts a lot on Ryan and Sarah to fill that gap.” She opened the refrigerator and put the leftover glass of milk inside before returning to the sink to load the dishwasher. “And it can’t bring him back.”