Those We Love Most

by Lee Woodruff

  They all nodded politely, each of them intrinsically understanding that Roger would likely never return to work, never be able to assume the career he’d held before. Margaret only hoped he would be capable of swinging a golf club and hitting the ball again. Without that, she knew, his life would be even more circumscribed.

  36

  Maura had anticipated the arrival of this day with dread. The one-year anniversary of James’s death. Pete had no interest in creating some formality or ceremony that would highlight the loss to Sarah and Ryan all over again. In the end they had chosen to mark the day quietly and in their separate ways. She would visit the gravesite. But Pete hated the cemetery and had been there only twice in the year since James had died. He had told her he planned to go to early Mass at the church near his office and light a candle before work. They would have a family dinner at home, maybe share their memories of James and open some photo albums. One year. It was a minute and it was a vast chasm. Maura could still mostly conjure up her son’s voice in her head. She could imagine his hug. But other things were fading, and that made her panicky. She had walked into his room this morning before anyone else was up and stood, still as stone, as if calling up a spell to bring him back.

  After she dropped Ryan off at school, Maura took Sarah to the classroom and headed straight to the cemetery. At the entrance, wilting horse chestnut blossoms swirled up from the black asphalt like flakes of snow as the car passed. Inside the grounds, the shoots and buds flexed their June muscles in verdant greens, and the whorling pattern of recently cut grass swirled between the headstones.

  When she opened the car door, Rascal jumped out immediately before she could leash him. His foot had only a slight drag now when he was tired, traces of his former disc issue. He stayed fairly close off the leash, sniffing at the clumps of wild onion that had pushed up near the hedges and borders of the grounds. Maura had no idea if dogs were allowed, but Rascal had just as much right as anyone else to be here at the cemetery today. When she reached James’s plot, she placed the small bouquet of backyard lilacs to the side of the stone and dropped to her knees, murmuring a prayer. Rascal sidled up quietly and nosed her hand, as if looking for a treat.

  Closing her eyes, Maura could see the sunlight through her lids, and she concentrated with all of her focus on talking to James, to God, to anyone up there who might be listening in this hushed expanse on the fringe of summer. Her visits here had decreased in the last few months. Early on it was as if she’d been drawn to this plot, tugged by an elemental need. But in the past six months she had come less frequently.

  She cried less easily than she had a year ago. All of the emotion was still present, still palpable, but it had tunneled down deeper inside her to find its own quieter place to reside. That was progress, she thought wryly. She could tap into the pain instantly, but it didn’t reside on the surface as much, didn’t linger in every pore and follicle.

  Maura’s thoughts settled briefly on her parents, the extreme stress and heartache they had been through. But her father’s stroke and subsequent health struggles were at least a part of the natural order of the universe. She had always assumed that her parents’ deaths would be the first difficult milestone of loss in her life. It was so out of sequence to bury a child. Maura knew she would never really come to terms with that.

  Of her two parents, Maura had always been closest to her father. As a teenager she had regularly sought his advice and even selectively confided in him about boyfriends and broken hearts. When she had tried her first cigarette and later, in college, smoked her first joint, Maura had ultimately felt compelled to tell him, despite her fear of his judgment. She couldn’t articulate why. But he had only nodded, listening. When she had finished recounting her experiences or pouring out her heart, Roger would say, “Some things in life you have to find out firsthand. Just as long as you stay true to yourself. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you what you have to do. You know in here.” And he would always thump his heart with his fist.

  Her father had been a rudder, especially after James’s death. To see his life force bifurcated, his speech slurred and his movements still jerky, pained her. Her mother was the lodestar, ceaselessly moving forward, caring for her, caring for them all. Maura understood that her sense of duty and devotion was perhaps the greatest form of love.

  She recalled the afternoon at her father’s bedside, two days after his stroke. He had still been comatose, but the tubes and the monitors, the abject familiarity of her time in the hospital with James, had put her in a kind of anxious dream state, as if she were stepping out of her own body. It was as if her father, lying completely still, eyes closed, were an older effigy of James.

  Up to this point, neither she nor her siblings had spent any time thinking about the inevitable period in midlife when the roles of children and parent begin to slowly reverse. That aspect of the future, which had seemed light-years ahead, had suddenly jumped out and spooked them all. In such a short span, she, Erin, and Stu had gone from nurtured to protectors, from children to advocates. Maura understood now with clarity that was how life worked; the fulcrum of responsibility ultimately tipped.

  She wondered, the way anyone who has ever swallowed loss wonders, if she would again experience pure joy, or if those unadulterated moments of happiness that were so abundant in her younger years would now always carry an echo of sadness and nostalgia. And yet she marveled how with time the absolutely unbearable had slithered into shock and then mellowed in to a commingling of sorrow and even poignancy. They had all been crawling forward somehow.

  Incongruously, the bezeled edge of a whitewashed ghost moon was set in the daytime sky like a hologram. Maura studied it for a few minutes and then closed her eyes, ending her visit to the cemetery as she always did, head bowed, lips mouthing the Lord’s Prayer. She added the Apostle’s Creed for her parents and conjured up an image of Roger, before the stroke, robust and full of life.

  Maura reached her palm out to steady herself against the cool granite of the gravestone before rising to go. The early summer leaves were just shy of their peak. Spring had taken so long to arrive, and she thought about what she had been doing at this exact time last year. This had been the turning point, the day that marked her before and after. One moment she had been walking along a sidewalk, with three beautiful children, and two healthy parents, giddy with the flush of lust. All the Corrigans had been whole, complete. And the next moment everything had crumbled, in an instant.

  A whole year. Maura kissed her fingertips and reached to touch his headstone one last time. They’d marked progress in this past year, all of them. There was laughter in the house again, a sense of family reorganized, reconfigured. And she and Pete were making strides too, she thought warmly. They’d need to keep working the rough parts, but their shared history and longevity had counted for something. There were so many different kinds of love, she thought, so many mutations.

  Headed back toward the car, through a set of iron gates, Rascal followed dutifully behind her, and Maura pulled out the short grocery list in her pocket and studied it, stuffing it away again. Perhaps she would shop later on with Sarah in tow. This time alone right now on such a sacred day would be spent on her terms.

  She had a feeling, as she always did when she pulled out of the cemetery and merged with traffic on the double-lane road, of leaving something important behind. It was an incompletion, the sense of missing a piece of her, of leaving a place that comforted you and broke your heart all at once.

  Maura drove by the supermarket and through the center of town and then, on the spur of the moment, emboldened by the significance of the day, she turned down Hawthorne Street, headed toward the very spot where James had been hit. Over the past year she had done everything possible to avoid the spring-loaded memories on this stretch of the neighborhood, but on the one-year anniversary of his death, it seemed important to face down this last demon.

  There was nothing remarkable about the spot, nothing to distinguish exactly wh
ere it had happened, although of course she remembered. And now here she was, in front of the Carlinos’ house, where everything terrible had unfolded in a split second. Maura slowed and drew in her breath. She pulled the car to the curb and turned off the engine, closing her eyes to let the memories of that day come. She had pushed the exact sequence of events out of her mind for so long and built a berm around the truth. In the wake of all the horrible things that had transpired, she had almost convinced herself of a different and more benign version of what had really happened.

  It had all begun with a picnic. Art had packed the lunch, buying prepared foods from a specialty market near his apartment, and he’d iced a few beers in a small plastic cooler. As Maura began her drive to the beach to meet him, she could taste the elation that accompanies sharp anticipation and the desire to savor it.

  Maura could picture exactly what she had been wearing that day. She had chosen it carefully, a floral sundress and a white cotton cardigan to buffer the winds from the lake. The sun was warm, and they had spread a blanket on the edges of the beach right before the grass ledge precipice hit rocks. She was aware that Art could see the outlines of her body through the thin material of her dress as she lay back. She’d allowed herself two beers, more than she ever had during the day, and she could picture the way the breeze played with the hem of her skirt and the cowlick of hair at the top of Art’s forehead, fanning it up endearingly like a fringe. They lay together talking, their bodies inching closer as the sun peaked in the sky.

  The warmth and the beers had loosened them, and all at once, laughing at something he’d said, she’d curled into his body in a familiar way. And then when Art bent his head and kissed her, fully on the lips, she had momentarily panicked that someone might spy them. But the beach was largely deserted; the spot they had picked was far from the parking area.

  Reliving it now, she recalled how her insides turned over and jellied with his kiss. And although they had been leading up to this for months, had danced around serious physical intimacy, she remembered her sense of surprise as he had pulled her tightly to his chest, the appley sour taste of fermentation on his breath from the beer, which called to mind kissing boys in high school. There was no stab of guilt, no moment of hesitation, Maura remembered, because she deserved this. It was possible to be here as long as she didn’t think about what it stood for. This type of happiness was a part of her that could live independently from her family, in a chamber she had built for herself. In this way she would remain Maura, regardless of the many roles she played for everyone else.

  She and Art had rolled up the blanket, laughing like teenagers on the walk back to the car. The thought now of that giddy, adolescent mirth, in the sobriety of the present, made her flush with shame. His kiss had been the flint spark. And as they stuffed the remains of the picnic into the trunk and climbed into his car, their cheeks pink from the sun, something volatile and combustible had begun that Maura felt incapable of stopping.

  Art pulled her forward, decisively, and kissed the top of her head hard. He had made a joke about being at a drive-in movie and then he was upon her, almost without warning. She couldn’t remember, if ever, a time when she and Pete had contorted their bodies like that in a car. She tasted salt above Art’s upper lip, and all at once her body was a new and unexplored continent where everything became incredibly simple.

  The rest was a tangle: her sundress, up over her hips and the strap ripped loose. They pressed their bones and hips together until they felt like one person, until there was no difference between them. And when he began to spasm and buck beneath her, her hands on the muscles of his lower back, she thought oddly of death throes, the way the body of an animal goes on moving long after its head is gone.

  And in the intense wrinkling of time within the confines of the car, she had no longer been somebody’s mother or wife or daughter or sister, but one giant nerve ending of feelings and pleasure, completely and wholly herself, burning outward from the core.

  That night, home from the beach, she had been unable to sleep. Luckily it had been one of Pete’s regular boys’ nights out. When he had finally crawled under the covers, Maura had feigned sleep so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. In this way, the electrifying moments she’d experienced with Art could remain intact and sacrosanct.

  Rising early that next morning, Maura had been bursting with secrecy and excitement, a part of her terrified at what had been loosed and set in motion. She had the acute feeling that every sense was heightened, her love for her kids, her enjoyment of the day, and the nurturing capabilities inside of her. All of Maura simply felt more alive, tingling. They had planned to see each other that weekend, and she was already cooking up a plausible excuse to get away from the house, however briefly.

  Daydreaming through the routine of making breakfast, packing lunches, and finding the kids’ backpacks that morning, she was in a gauzy mental haze. The last week of school was down to half days, and the high schoolers were already finished with exams. She had worried that with the kids home now, their summer schedules more erratic, it would be trickier to fit Art into the spaces between her mothering. As she lifted Sarah into the stroller for the short walk to the elementary school, Maura had smiled to herself, replaying the private scenes with Art from the day before.

  James kept riding ahead of her and then circling back on his bike, smiling and making faces at Sarah in the stroller as she sucked down her juice cup. He’d put his helmet on, but he’d always been lazy about buckling the straps. She could recall how it was askew that day, tilting at an odd angle off his face, the chin strap dangling at the sides. Maura winced now at the thought that she’d been too preoccupied that morning to remind him to snap it closed. Walking along the sidewalk, she had felt the vibrating buzz of her cell phone through her pants pocket. It was a text message, and she understood intrinsically who it was from. Pete was not a big texter. Her pulse quickened. She pictured Art walking around his apartment, dressed now, most likely, and ready to head out the door to the clinic. She felt the secret thrill of two separate people moving through the same day in tandem, connected by thought and desire. Maura slowed the stroller and fumbled for the cell phone in her pocket. She had giggled as she read it, bringing her fingertips to her mouth like a schoolgirl to mask her delight.

  LUST YOU it said, and a vision of the previous afternoon washed over her, accompanied by a physical ache in her groin. Maura had stopped all forward motion then, consumed by the need to respond, focused on creating something short and yet clever that would let him know she was craving him too.

  And somewhere ahead of her—exactly a year later now, she could barely bring herself to think of it—her son had already biked far beyond her and down the sidewalk toward the school. Maura closed her eyes for a second in the parked car and lowered her head to rest on the steering wheel. She replayed the screech of tires, felt the blade of fear catch in her throat as she had jerked up from her phone that day and understood in a split second what had happened. She had begun to run then, yelling James’s name in a rising pitch, the sick feeling spreading as she rocketed the stroller forward on the uneven concrete sidewalk slabs.

  Maura felt the hot flush of what she had done wash over her now. She had told Pete and everyone else that James had been in her sight-line when the car had struck him. She had described to her family, almost convinced herself, that she had stopped the stroller to give Sarah juice. No one had any reason to disbelieve that. It could happen to anyone, was what her sister and brother, her friends, had all assured her. And she had worked hard to believe all of that, to carefully edit the story of how she had lost James.

  “Kids are impulsive, no child looks both ways, you can’t watch them every second.” She had heard all of the pat phrases intended to assuage her own feelings of parental inadequacy. But in the end her guilt was an iceberg with only the tip showing. The truth of that morning’s events was submerged somewhere beneath the surface.

  As she had climbed into the ambul
ance with James on the way to the hospital, passing Sarah to a virtual stranger, calling her mother, unaware of the blood on her shirt and jeans, she understood the enormous price of her momentary happiness at the beach the previous day.

  No good could come from admitting all of this to Pete or to anyone else. It wouldn’t change the course of events or bring James back. The knowledge of what she and Art had done had been her own private self-flagellation. But it had become increasingly hard, with the passage of time, to carry it all neatly inside. She burned with the occasional, inexplicable need to tell, to unburden herself. There were times she would feel it bubbling up, like a bottomless spring.

  Two days after the accident, back at home between hospital visits, she had smashed her cell phone with a hammer and pushed it through the sewer grate to remove the evidence of Art’s texts. She made the decision then to tell no one. And in the early months, when she had felt an urge to confess, there was a place on the inside of her arm where she applied pressure, physically digging in her nails to stop the desire. She had read about teenagers who cut themselves to feel something, to rise above their numbness, and she wondered if her ritual in the early days after James’s death was akin to that. She had felt absolutely nothing then, hollowed like a gourd, empty of anything other than total self-loathing and the deep yawning chasm of loss. But the dull ache of the truth kneaded and worked on her. Keeping the secret felt increasingly cumbersome, as if she were trying to swim with lead manacles.

  37

  “Good work, Roger,” called the therapist in his cheerleader voice as he punched up the speed of the treadmill. “We’re going to try for another quarter mile. Think you can do that?”

  “Yeeesssss.” Roger gave thumbs-up, taking one hand off the treadmill and then wobbling slightly.