by Kelly Rimmer
I know what is best for me and for my family. I am proud of myself for finding the strength to do this—to do what’s right for me, and for the children I already have.
I will be brave—I must be brave. And when I come home, all of my mind will come home, not just the parts that aren’t consumed with despair and grief and fear.
I hate having to do this but there simply is no alternative. It’s the pregnancy or me, and so I’ll do what needs to be done to be a good mother to my children.
TWENTY
Maryanne
1959
I couldn’t even say when my relationship with Patrick began to change. We worked side by side as colleagues over the year that followed, engaging only around family life, each of us playing the role we needed to play. I’d gradually developed a healthy admiration for Patrick—a man who bounced back from the depths of grief, a man who was clearly willing to do whatever it took to keep his family together and to raise his children well. He worked harder than anyone I’d ever known—and he’d clawed his way back out of a financial pit that, once upon a time, had seemed insurmountable.
We had our squabbles. Patrick could be hotheaded and proud, and so could I. Every now and again, we’d clash over some issue big or small—how to discipline the children, which school to send them to, how the repairs to the house should be done, whether it was time to move out of public housing and into our own place. I knew in theory that all these things were Patrick’s domain and that I should let him make his own decisions, but I couldn’t help express my thoughts whenever he came to a crossroads. We’d shout at one another, I’d storm off into my bedroom and then we’d both sulk around the house for a few days, refusing to be the first to speak.
But eventually, he always took my opinions on board. And over weeks and months, we started wearing one another down, because the ferocity of our arguments faded. Instead, we started coming to each other for advice...and a sense of true partnership began to form.
Once upon a time, I would hand off responsibility to Patrick the minute he walked in the door—even if I was halfway through a story with the children. But gradually, I started to linger in the family life each night, and this naturally lent itself to me and Patrick sharing dinner once the children were in bed. He told me about his day, about supplies that came late and laborers that frustrated him. He told me how embarrassed he was by his own work ethic over the first few years of his professional life.
“I hate to say it now, but I always felt like I’d been dealt a bad hand, being an orphan from such a young age,” Patrick said one night as he reflected on the behavior of one young apprentice. “Aunt Nina is an odd sort. She was so much older than any of my friend’s mothers, and she had some funny ideas about how men and women should be. I’m not blaming her, of course, but when I look back at my life with Grace, I really took your sister for granted. I grew up in a house where I was the only man, even long before I was a man. And being the ‘man of the house’ didn’t mean that I had more responsibility. It meant that I had less. Aunt Nina built her whole world around me and I expected that Grace would do the same. Even at work, when my boss would get on me for doing something wrong, I’d feel this—” he gestured toward his chest in frustration, fingers stretched out “—this burning indignation. This entitlement. Of course, now life has beaten some sense into me, and I realize no one owes me anything. I see that same behavior from the young guys at work, expecting that things are just going to be made to happen for them. It’s frustrating as hell to manage, and I don’t know how Grace or Ewan ever put up with me for so long.”
“She’d be so proud of you,” I remarked. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mary.” He smiled. “I think we’re doing okay.”
It had become an incontrovertible truth that the more time I shared with Patrick, the fonder I felt toward him, and instead of resisting those quiet dinners once the children were asleep, I began to eagerly anticipate them.
Patrick and I didn’t do anything by the book. We started out with a forced partnership, then married and then became friends. I think that’s why, at first, I didn’t recognize the urge to spend time with him as affection. I thought it was the natural combination of proximity and a sense of me being out of place and a little lost there in Yesler Terrace, away from the life I thought I’d live. The fiercely arrogant young version of me had died a painful death after the loss of my sister. I was not the same girl I once was, but I had yet to figure out who I now was. And as I wandered around learning the landscape of my new life, I did so with a now treasured partner and friend in Patrick.
* * *
The first anniversary of Grace’s death came and went, and we celebrated a birthday for each of the children without her. I mastered the art of keeping the house clean, and I set up a system for the laundry that I adhered to religiously. I even learned to cook—a little. The children still ate an awful lot of dishes that involved toast and eggs, but rarely complained. We really were doing just fine.
When I walked Tim through the gate for his first day of kindergarten, he was adorable in his little outfit, startlingly young, ready to face the world. I crouched right at his eye level and said, “You’re a kid now, got it? School is about learning, and learning is fun. You don’t have to look after anyone while you’re here.”
He kissed my cheek and ran off to play, and as I walked the other children back to the car, I bawled like a bewildered baby, and when he settled in without so much as a hiccup, I was proud as if he were my own.
By the winter of 1959, Patrick and I had a well-established habit of sitting by the fire each evening for a drink and what was often a hearty conversation. Patrick was becoming well versed in early feminist ideology, and as much as I knew he still struggled with the idea that traditional gender roles might actually be limiting for women, he was open to discussion. He had revealed a surprising potential for intellectual depth. I loved debating him, and he seemed to love it, too. He’d offer me his thoughts, always prefacing his ideas with, “Well, Maryanne, you know I’m hardly an expert, but...”
I came to look forward to those nights. I came to long for them. Even so, I refused to let myself dwell on how good it felt to spend time with Patrick. I tried to convince myself that all I felt for him was admiration.
“Do you wish that you could have gone to college, Patrick?” I asked him one night, and he gave me a startled look.
“A fool like me? What would I have done at a college?”
“You are no fool, Patrick Walsh,” I laughed softly. “I have a feeling you could have done anything you set your mind to.”
“I barely scraped by in school,” he said. “College wasn’t in the cards for me. Aunt Nina wasn’t big on education. My mother worked in a factory during the war, and my father was a mechanic. I suppose, if I’d had the option, I might’ve liked to study science. But I’m happy working with my hands. These hands earn me an honest living, and there’s no shame in that.”
He held his hands up as he spoke, palms toward the sky, fingers outstretched. That’s when I saw the splinter in the pad of his right forefinger.
“That looks awful,” I remarked, motioning toward his finger with my drink. Patrick rubbed at it ruefully.
“Occupational hazard. I thought my hands would get banged up less now that I’m in management, but I still seem to be wielding the tools a lot. It’ll come out on its own.”
But I could see that the splinter was starting to fester, and so insisted that he allow me to help him pull it out. We shifted into the dining room and Patrick sat at the table while I fetched the tweezers from my sewing kit. I cupped his big hand in mine to hold it steady, extracted the piece of wood without too much trouble and then dropped the tweezers onto the table.
We were supposed to part then, to go back to a conversing side by side. But neither one of us made any attempt to move. We were sitting at the table where we’d shared so
many meals together, in the room where so many hours together had caused our partnership to turn to friendship and now...something deeper. Something more.
We were friends and companions and as far as the law was concerned, spouses. But for everything that we shared over the year and a half that had passed, we’d rarely had physical contact. A hug here, a consoling pat there, but never like this. We were still sitting at the table with my hand cupping his. And then, in a rush, he exhaled unsteadily, and turned his hand over and linked his fingers with mine.
My heart started to race, an incessant pounding against the wall of my chest—warning me of dangers untold. Someone had sucked all the air from the room, and when I raised my gaze to Patrick’s, he was staring at me as if he couldn’t bring himself to look away.
“Patrick,” I started to say, but he snatched his hand back as panic flared in his eyes.
“We shouldn’t,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
He left me sitting at the table alone, heart pounding against my chest, feeling strangely stung that he’d walked away.
* * *
I barely slept that night. I turned the odd moment with Patrick over in my mind a thousand times—thinking about what it might mean, thinking about what it might cost. When Beth climbed into my bed at 3 a.m., I was still wide awake. She cuddled into me, sucking her thumb and mumbling something about monsters in the hallway, and her presence became another reminder of all I had to lose.
I tried to convince myself that Patrick and I simply would continue on as we had been. I told myself that it was nothing more than a moment of madness, one that he would want to avoid talking about, and so would I. To name something is to give it power, and I only wanted to starve whatever had happened between us of oxygen.
When my alarm jarred me awake the next morning, I did as I always did—clamored over Beth’s sleeping form and stumbled to the kitchen. I was startled to find Patrick was waiting for me. He’d already prepared a cup of coffee for me, something he did most Sunday mornings. But this was a Wednesday, and it was already past six.
“What are you doing? You should be at work,” I mumbled, and Patrick motioned towards my chair, indicating that I should sit.
“Take a seat, Maryanne,” he said quietly.
Butterflies in my stomach sprang to life as I took the seat opposite him. I wanted to run back to my room, to pull the covers over my head and to pretend that none of this was happening. But cowardice was not my style, so I braced myself, picked the coffee cup up and gulped half of it down without pausing for breath.
“I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said. I nearly choked on the coffee, and he rose hastily, thumping me on the back. “Sorry. Shit. I should have... I just thought it was better to come right out and say it.”
“That’s okay,” I managed, still spluttering coffee as I tried to wrap my head around his declaration. Love. It made sense, in some bizarre way. Our family had been born in Patrick and Grace’s love, but for well over a year, we’d been operating as a unit without her—Grace was gone, and the family survived because of the love that Patrick and I shared. Our love persisted when we were apart, it intensified when we were alone and it linked the six of us in a way I’d never thought possible.
If I were just in that house for the children, I wouldn’t have been finding excuses to spend every spare minute with their father. The sight of him coming down the path wouldn’t fill my heart with an incredible lightness. His gentle gestures, like making me coffee on Sunday mornings and including me on his outings with the children, wouldn’t have meant so much. The way he complimented me as I cared for his children wouldn’t have buoyed my very soul. The way he smiled at me for no reason at all wouldn’t be enough to make my stomach flip.
“She’s only been gone for eighteen months,” he whispered now, dropping his hands from my cheeks. The words dripped with misery and guilt. “Whatever would she say if she knew? I’m letting her down again, even in her death.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment and pictured my sister’s beautiful face. I could only see her smiling, perhaps even smirking knowingly to discover that she’d been right all along. I thought I knew love, and I thought it was a creature I could tame and control. But it had snuck up behind me and pulled the rug from under me, just as she’d told me it would.
Even more miraculous, I felt in my bones that my sister had, inadvertently, given her blessing to this astounding twist in our fates.
I wish you would fall in love. I wish you’d love a man the way I love Patrick. I know you only see his flaws, but I still see his potential... If you could see each other the way I see you, I just know you’d love each other.
I rose from my chair and turned towards Patrick. I leaned in slowly toward him, until our foreheads were touching. I paused, waiting for guilt, but none came. I was somehow certain that if my sister could see everything Patrick and I had been through since her death, she’d feel only joy that he and I might find happiness in each other.
“You’re wrong, Patrick,” I whispered, heart racing. “If she knew that we took the mess that was left after she was gone and turned it into something beautiful, Grace would have been delighted.”
He pulled away slightly. I opened my eyes and found him staring at me in wonder. It was magical and marvelous and somehow miraculous that we had taken a relationship so fraught with resentment and pain and turned it into something even deeper than affection.
“You feel it, too?” he asked me.
“I think I do.”
And we stood like that in the kitchen, looking at one another like we might have on any other day, only this time we really were seeing each other for the first time.
* * *
Patrick and I found ourselves in the exceedingly odd position of being married and sharing the care of four children while courting one another.
In reality, the months of our courtship looked a lot like the months that had preceded it. We juggled daily life with the children together—arranging for the twins to start school in the spring, helping Tim with his homework, managing the house. When the children were in bed, we spent time alone, learning one another as individuals instead of parents. Life in those months was like a wonderful gift, and while Patrick openly talked with me about his guilt at finding love so soon after Grace’s death, I only felt blissfully freed by this new phase of our relationship. We talked for hours each night, learning the depths to one another and exploring the connection between us. I even told him about that conversation Grace and I had in the car the very last time I saw her.
“She wanted me to fall in love,” I told him. “I told her that I was never going to marry, and she told me that she wanted me to know how wonderful it felt to fall in love with someone. She thought that would change my opinion of marriage. To be honest, I think Grace felt a little sorry for me that I saw the world in a black-and-white way.”
“And now?” he asked me quietly.
“Well, I still think inequality is a problem and I still think that marriage is an anchor around the neck of my fellow women sometimes, and I still think society should change...that society will change.” I shrugged, but then I shot him a cheeky smile. “But I also think that the way you and I are together only makes me stronger. So maybe, things aren’t as clear-cut as I always assumed they were.”
“It surprises me that Grace would say such warm things about marriage,” Patrick mused, frowning. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d have had a positive opinion of it...after being married to me.”
“She loved you,” I said simply. He gave me a sad smile.
“Even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Everyone deserves love, Patrick.”
“I made so many mistakes,” he sighed. “You were in California so you didn’t have to see it. But I was a child with a man’s responsibilities. I don’t really know what it was about Grace, but every time she had
a baby, she’d change. With Tim, neither one of us had any clue what we were doing and I really just thought maybe she didn’t like being a mom. But with the twins, I could see it was more than that...some kind of mental problem she couldn’t control. And it was worse than ever with Beth. And wouldn’t you think her husband would see her struggling and step up to help? But I didn’t. I didn’t know how to, and after I took her to the doctor one time and he just told her she had to tough it out, I guess I panicked. It was easier to stay out with the boys from work than it was to come home and face the reality that I kept getting her pregnant and those pregnancies damaged her so much.”
“I didn’t know how bad it was for her, either,” I admitted, throat tightening. “Not until...”
“Not until?”
I cleared my throat. Patrick and I had shared hundreds of hours of conversation by then, but rarely about Grace. It wasn’t that we’d forgotten her; rather, we quickly realized that life would just keep marching on, and we had to look forward, not back.
“She told me about how depressed she had been,” I said softly. “Just before she died.”
“I don’t know the full story and I probably never will, but there was one morning... I woke up and Grace looked as though she’d been hit by a bus. She had bruises all over her, and scratches even on her face, and somehow between me going to bed and waking up, she’d used all of the gas in my car. I think... I really think she tried to hurt herself that night. I tried after that to be around more. The thing is, she always perked up once the babies were a bit older, even if she was already pregnant again by then. It was something about that first year after she gave birth that messed her up.” He glanced at me, his gaze intense. “You’re sure you don’t want kids, aren’t you?”
