Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  “Okay, it will be okay,” Max says.

  “It won’t be okay,” I whisper. “I’m so scared.”

  “Here,” Max says, after a while. Looking down, I watch him pry my hands off the beer bottles I’ve been clutching tightly. He twists the lid off one. “Take a sip.”

  I refuse. My throat is clotted with mucus and terror. “Jeremy could die.”

  Max goes white around the nostrils. “Look. Start over from the beginning. I don’t even know what the hell cystic fibrosis is.”

  “It’s a disease that affects the lungs and the digestion. It’s why Jeremy has had so many colds. Why he hasn’t gained weight.”

  “Okay.” Max chews his cheek as the information sinks in. “There’s medicine for it, right?”

  “There are lots of medicines, to alleviate the various problems. Antibiotics. Enzyme supplements.”

  “Okay. Okay. We can deal with this.”

  “We have to tell Jeremy, but the social worker suggested that first you and I discuss how to do it.”

  “All right.”

  “We don’t need to tell him everything yet.”

  Max’s entire face goes white beneath his tan. “Everything.”

  “Max, the average life expectancy of someone with CF is around thirty. Thirty years ago the average life expectancy was eight years.”

  Light fades from Max’s eyes, drains from his skin. His mouth, his entire jawline, sags. It’s as if he’s aging years in these few minutes. He fights for optimism. “There are medical breakthroughs every day.”

  “Not every day.” The grief rises up in me again, and the terror.

  Max’s forehead furrows. “My God, Lucy. How did this happen?”

  A hearty knock sounds at the door. “Dinner, guys!” Chip calls.

  “Later,” I call back.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Later,” Max yells, an edge to his voice.

  Max and I listen, almost seeing Chip as he hesitates, puzzled and curious. For a moment I feel very strongly how Max and I are a couple, huddled together here. We hear Chip ambling off down the stairs.

  Max says, “Jesus, Lucy, I’m sorry I wasn’t with you today. I had no idea … God, I’m sorry you had to do this alone.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right. It’s unbelievable. It’s terrifying.”

  Another stick catches in my throat, snags my breath. “Max. You have to help me through this.”

  “Of course I’ll help you! Jesus! How can you say that?”

  I pull away from him. We are at the core of it. Jeremy’s illness is making me fold back and fold back the thick obscuring dark leaves of the past to expose the hard pale knot of truth hiding within.

  I fold my arms over my chest. I look down at the old rag rug on the floor, every shade of blue and green blurring at my feet. “You’ve deserted me before.”

  “I’ve never …”

  I look up at him, my husband, this man whom I’ve loved and lived with for fifteen years. Strands of gray curl among the glossy black of his hair. His jaw and mouth are rimmed with a day-old beard that is almost blue and delineated as sharply around his mouth as if drawn with pen and ink. “Emotionally, you’ve deserted me. And physically.”

  He blinks. Then he takes a deep breath and nods. “I know I have.”

  “This is as bad as losing Maxwell.” My voice thickens. I dig my nails into my arms.

  “This is worse.”

  “Lucy, I won’t desert you, not this time. I promise.”

  “There’s something else.” An anesthetizing ice sheets over me, a glacier of dread.

  Max looks at me.

  Through numbed lips I say, “The thing about cystic fibrosis is that it’s caused by a genetic defect. The parents don’t have to have it, but they have to be carriers. A child can have cystic fibrosis only if both parents carry the gene. And if one child has cystic fibrosis, his siblings could also have cystic fibrosis.”

  “But Margaret has been so healthy.”

  “Or the child could simply carry the gene, to be passed on to his children. There’s a good chance that the sibling of a child with cystic fibrosis carries the gene. If someone who carries the gene marries someone else who carries the gene, there’s a one-in-four chance that their child will have cystic fibrosis.”

  “Is there a test for this gene?”

  “There is.”

  “So we need to have Margaret tested, right?”

  “Maybe not.” I look down at my hands, then back up at Max. I look him steadily, squarely, in the eyes. “We need to have you tested. And Chip has to be tested, too.”

  Summer 1991

  The evening of that remarkable Saturday, when Margaret and I were in a shop buying her a pink-and-white-striped dress, we ran into friends from Sussex who were vacationing for a week on the island. I’d always found Jana Myers a little too prissy for me, and her daughter was a year younger than Margaret, but Tiffany was rumored to have an enormous collection of My Little Ponies, and when they invited us over the next day, I accepted with alacrity.

  Sunday morning I woke Margaret early, dressed her, and hustled her outside. We would leave the Volvo for the Cunninghams to use; we rode our bikes into town for a leisurely pancake breakfast. We strolled around, listening to the street musicians, looking in the shops, buying trinkets, and then we went to the Myerses’, where I suffered ten thousand deaths of boredom Sunday afternoon as Jana showed me various swatches of chintz; she was redecorating the guest bedroom. Tiffany did have a huge collection of My Little Ponies, and Margaret enjoyed herself so much she pleaded not to leave, reminding me what it was like to be a child, fully immersed in the moment, reminding me how intensely Margaret went at things, how wholeheartedly she bestowed her heart on each moment’s immediate passion.

  Abby had been her recent passion. And Kate. I wanted to be her immediate passion. So I enticed her with a special treat: Since she was wearing her pink-and-white dress, I would take her to dinner with me in the main dining room of the Jared Coffin House, where she knew the Cunninghams and Max and I often ate, always without children. Shameless, I told her that Matthew wouldn’t be able to eat in this elegant restaurant with its thick white linen tablecloths and hushed atmosphere for years yet; he was just too rowdy and fidgety. Smug at her own refinement, Margaret behaved like a royal child, sitting straight-backed in her chair, watching me to see which fork to use, taking small bites. I let her order a Shirley Temple, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a hot fudge sundae. Not a vegetable in the lot. She made burping noises as we rode our bikes home in the twilight.

  Still, as we pedaled up to the house, my Aunt Grace’s house, home of so many nights and days, I felt a slight sadness. This summer so much had changed. I had lost the feeling that I was coming home. The lights burning in every window did not seem welcoming. They only reminded me that the Cunninghams were in occupancy, all four of them.

  The floors of the house were crusty with sand. Wet towels and Matthew’s wet swimsuit lay in soggy piles on the stairs, a damp T-shirt hung over the newel post. Chip was in the kitchen, cleaning up from what appeared to be a messy spaghetti dinner. From the second floor I heard baby Abby wailing furiously and Kate’s terse voice.

  Margaret ran ahead of me, light and dainty and delicate in her pink and white, holding the pink My Little Pony I’d bought her at Congdon’s. I followed.

  The floor of the bathroom the Cunninghams used was heaped with towels. Abby was propped in her carry seat, red-faced and wailing as Kate knelt on the floor, drying Matthew off. Matthew was wailing, too.

  “That hurts, Mom!” he screamed.

  Blood drizzled down both of Matthew’s legs from large but not deep scrapes on his knees. Kate was spraying Bactine on the wounds while Matthew danced with fury, his tiny penis flopping up and down. Two large round wet spots darkened Kate’s blouse, her milk soaking through.

  For one brief moment both Margaret and I halted, stunned and slightly aghast, like c
haracters who’d been living in a Jane Austen novel now presented with something by Dickens. Then Margaret entered the fray.

  “Can I hold Abby?”

  “Please,” Kate said.

  Margaret handed me her pony for safekeeping, swooped down on the carry seat, unstrapped Abby, and picked her up. But Abby was nearly purple with rage and would not be pacified. She squirmed and arched her back and screamed, and Margaret’s face fell.

  Margaret looked up at me, tears in her own eyes. “She doesn’t like me anymore, Mom.”

  “Of course she likes you. She’s just tired and hungry. Come on, let’s go in your bedroom, where it’s quiet.”

  We went down the hall and around the corner into our wing, which suddenly seemed a haven of peace.

  Margaret gently laid the baby on her bed. Then “Oh, no, Mom!” she cried. Abby had leaked a greasy green diarrhea all over Margaret’s pink-and-white dress. “Oh, gross, gross, ick!”

  “It will come out in the wash, I promise you.” I leaned over the baby, undoing her diaper.

  “Margaret, run and get me a fresh diaper and some baby wipes and baby powder. Poor baby, such a red bum, no wonder you’re angry,” I said.

  Abby twisted on the bed, her entire body crimson with wrath, but as I wiped her tender skin and softly dried her and sprinkled soothing cool talc on her, she began to calm down. Now she made pitiful whimpers.

  “Poor little girl, she’s hungwy,” I cooed. “Hungwy ba.” Why did we speak baby talk to babies? I wondered, and knew why: it works. Abby settled into my arms, her lower lip quivering, her mouth moving, eyes fixed on mine as she tried to communicate her needs and to take comfort from my concern.

  I held her in one arm while I unbuttoned Margaret’s dress with my free hand. Then I stripped off the soiled bedspread and sheets and tossed them with Margaret’s dress in the wicker basket.

  “I want to take a bath,” Margaret was whining. “I’ve got poop smell on my front.”

  “I’ll start the bathwater,” I told her. “You can put this in—” I handed her my best bubble bath and turned on the water, testing it for temperature and ascertaining that it was coming slowly, so that I’d have time to run downstairs before the tub was full. “But don’t get in the bath until I’m here. I’m going to put these things in the washing machine right away. Turn off the water if it gets too high.”

  I raced past Matthew’s room. He was sitting on his mother’s lap, crying like a very tired little boy. I hurried downstairs and into the laundry room only to find both the washer and dryer filled and running. What looked like every towel and beach towel in the house lay in smelly wet heaps.

  “It’s my fault,” Chip said from the doorway. He was still in his swimming trunks, his hair dried into a salt-stiffened mop. He dried a pot as he spoke. “I insisted that we all go to the beach. Kate’s as white as wax. She needed some sun. Abby developed a tummyache, Kate thinks from the heat and the breeze. She’s been throwing up and having diarrhea. All over all of us and everything in the whole house. And poor Matthew got caught by a wave. He swallowed a lot of water and fell and scraped his hands and knees pretty badly.”

  He looked so forlorn and it was such a terrible list of normal disasters that I burst out laughing. “Chip, please don’t bother with the dishes or the laundry. I can deal with them after I get Margaret’s sheets changed and get her tucked into bed.”

  “Do you want me to take Abby?” Chip asked.

  I looked down, surprised, at the baby girl whom I was carrying easily against my hip. Abby stared up at me as if I were some sort of oddity she was trying to figure out.

  “Sure. I’ll work on the laundry.”

  I handed Abby over to her father, and at once she burst into full-blown tears. I saw Chip’s face register disappointment, and as I turned away I felt a corresponding, and irrational jolt of pleasure: Abby liked me.

  I returned to our bathroom and helped Margaret step into the bath. While she murmured to herself among the bubbles, I put fresh sheets on her bed, old sheets I had used as a little girl, pink-and-white sheets. I helped her dry off and slipped a frilly nightie over her, and we sat in bed together while I read stories to her and we listened to the noises the various Cunninghams made crashing around the house.

  After I kissed her good night, I went downstairs, put a clean load of clothes in a basket, transferred towels from the washer to the dryer, and put in a new load of wash. Then I set to work on the kitchen. Chip had done a fairly good job of loading the dishes, but the stove top was spattered with tomato sauce and the floor was littered with bits of uncooked spaghetti and sand. I swept and mopped away, as much from a need to keep away from the noise on the second floor as from a desire to have things sparkling clean.

  Finally I went up. I checked on Margaret, who was sound asleep. In the peace of my bathroom, I took a shower, then pulled on my kimono and headed downstairs to transfer one more load of laundry from the washer to the dryer.

  The back door was still open. The porch light was not on, but as I pulled hot dry clothes from the dryer into the basket I could hear Kate and Chip arguing, her voice shrill, his a bass murmur. I could not make out their words.

  I slammed the door on the dryer and turned the timer, grabbed the basket of clean laundry, and fled up the stairs. I left the laundry in the hall; we’d sort it out later. My thoughts were churning. I shut my door against the turmoil of the rest of the house, plumped up my pillows, and settled into bed with a novel. I forced myself to concentrate.

  Around eleven, I turned off my light and slipped down into the clean silky sheets.

  I awoke with a start. It was late, dark. I looked at my bedside clock. Ten minutes until one. My bedroom door was opening. Margaret, with a nightmare?

  Chip.

  He shut the door behind him and turned the lock.

  I started to sit up, but he crossed the room in a few brief steps, pulled back the sheet, and climbed into bed next to me. Lust surged up inside me. His body was hot and large and smelled like sun.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” I whispered.

  In response, he put his hand on my cheek and studied my face. “Lucy,” he said.

  That was all he said. All he needed to say. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him to me. The sheets whispered around us as we moved on them. We made no sounds at all. It was lovely and urgent and so quick I didn’t come, but that didn’t matter. Just having a man’s body in my arms was sufficient pleasure. Afterward he curled himself around me. We lay there in spoon fashion for a while. I felt his breathing grow slow and steady.

  “Chip,” I whispered. “You can’t sleep here.”

  “I’m not asleep,” he said. “I’ve never been so not asleep.” He stroked my hair with his hand, left his fingers tangled in it for a few moments, and then rose and left the bedroom.

  I lay staring out at the night sky, purple-black, full of stars.

  The next morning I packed up clothes for Margaret and me, and over a cup of coffee I told Kate we were going back to Sussex for a few days.

  Kate had dark circles under her eyes, but Abby was well now, eating ravenously, her diarrhea over. “We should go back,” she said. “This is your house. We’ve overrun it like a horde of barbarians.”

  I looked her right in the eye. What did she know? What did she guess? “No, I need to take Margaret and go back to Sussex and do something about Max. I’m not sure what, but something. He’s got to come here, he’s got to get away from work for a few days, and if he won’t do it unless I drag him bodily, then I guess I’ll drag him back bodily.”

  “Do you think you could bring Matthew’s ball and bat and glove when you come? He forgot it and then so did Chip.”

  “Sure,” I said, and then kissed Kate on the top of her head and Abby on the top of her head and picked up my bags and called my daughter and we headed out the door.

  Does the body click on and off, like a machine, like a clock, like a lock? Sometimes it seems it does. How else to explain the
total absence of sexual confidence I felt before I slept with Chip, and the total assurance I felt afterward? My body had seemed like such a failure that in my heart I had not blamed Max for not loving me, for blaming me, for disdaining me. How did it happen that after I slept with Chip, I knew with a powerful certainty that I loved Max, that I could make Max love me, that I could make Max give me another child, a child I would carry and deliver alive and full of health? I didn’t know where the power came from, but it came, and that was enough.

  Margaret and I arrived back in Sussex in the early evening. We stopped at the house to unpack and make a grocery list, then headed for the Stop & Shop. Driving home, we went past the newspaper offices, and Margaret cried, “Mommy, there’s Dad’s van!”

  And there it was, alone in the parking lot with one other car, a small red convertible. I looked at my watch. It just was after eight. The paper came out on Thursdays; everyone would be busy today, but not insane. They would not have had to work late.

  “Let’s go see Dad!” Margaret suggested.

  “Good idea.” I turned into the lot and parked next to my husband’s van.

  The door was unlocked. We went in. The newsroom was empty, all computers quiet and dark. The light was on in Max’s office, but we could see through the glass wall that the room was empty.

  “I know where he is!” Margaret whispered to me. “Let’s surprise him!” And she raced away from me, zigzagging around the desks toward the room at the back that had been turned into a staff lounge. Before I could think to stop her, she pulled open the door and called, “Hi, Daddy!”

  Max was standing with his arms around a young blond woman.

  “Daddy Daddy Daddy!” Margaret cried, launching herself at his legs.

  The blond woman turned and smiled at Margaret. She was breathtakingly beautiful. Max looked startled, disoriented, like a drunk suddenly sobered.