Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed

by Judith Arnold

  The girls disappeared to the den to view their new DVD. Alone in the silent kitchen, Ellie let her head drop into her hands. Another shudder passed through her.

  Peter could be dramatic, she reminded herself. And the holiday excitement, the presents, the food and all the rest of it had wound him tightly. He’d overreacted to the news about Santa. It wasn’t Ellie’s fault. It wasn’t.

  Yet guilt rolled over her like a tidal wave with a sharp undertow, dragging her down and pulling her away from shore. She’d betrayed her son. She’d—well, not lied, perhaps, but fudged the truth.

  She was a failure.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat alone in the kitchen, inhaling the lingering scents of good food and hearing the muffled music and dialogue from the movie playing in the den. When she felt two strong hands alighting on her shoulders, she flinched. She’d been so lost in her thoughts, so busy wallowing in guilt, she hadn’t heard Curt enter the room.

  She raised her head and peered over her shoulder at him. He massaged the base of her neck gently, rubbing his thumbs over the sore, knotted spots. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “The hell with me. How’s Peter?”

  “Sulking. He’ll survive. You might even get an apology from him before bedtime.”

  “I should apologize to him,” Ellie said glumly. “He’s right. I lied to him about Santa.”

  Curt released her and circled around to the chair across the table from her. He gazed at her, then reached out and covered her hands in his. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, babe. You don’t have to be perfect.”

  “Maybe not perfect, but I have to be good enough,” she countered. “I’m not.”

  “Oh, Ellie…” He dragged her hands across the table and lifted them to his lips. He kissed one hand, then the other. “You’re good enough.”

  This was why she loved him—because when her confidence slipped, he shored her up. When doubt gripped her, he pried that monster’s claws off her. When she was sure she wasn’t good enough, he insisted she was.

  She wasn’t convinced, of course. Curt was telling her not the truth but what she needed to hear.

  Sometimes, though, being lied to was a good thing. Maybe someday Peter would learn that.

  In the meantime, Ellie treasured Curt’s lie, met his gaze and gave his hands a loving squeeze. The one thing her mother had said today that Ellie could agree with was that she should thank God every day for a husband like him….

  TEN

  STRETCHED OUT ON THE BED, Ellie appeared wistful, lost in a reminiscence. Her eyes glittered, focused on something he couldn’t see. Let me in, he begged silently, then realized she wasn’t thinking about Africa, about the stuff she didn’t want to share with him.

  “What?” he asked.

  She smiled faintly. “I was just remembering the Christmas when Peter smashed the gingerbread house.”

  “Oh, God.” Curt let out a short laugh. “What a horror show.”

  “He could be awfully intense sometimes.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Remember when he got into a fistfight in the middle-school cafeteria because someone said his Little League team cheated?”

  Curt laughed again. “I thought I’d have to represent him in court.”

  “No one got hurt, as I recall. Sixth-graders don’t have big fists.”

  “Yeah, but someone wound up with peanut butter in his hair.”

  Ellie nodded. “And Peter’s shirt got torn. I wasn’t happy about that.”

  “Then there was the time he went to some friend’s house and the two of them drank their way through the kid’s parents’ liquor stash,” Curt reminded her.

  “Oh, God.” Ellie winced. “Peter and Doug Rauss. They always found trouble. That was the summer before they started high school.”

  “Peter was sick as a dog.”

  “A good thing, too. If he hadn’t vomited out all that crap, we might have had to take him to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.”

  “Funny,” Curt said, though it wasn’t that funny at all, “when I think about Peter, I don’t remember the bad stuff, all the gray hair he gave us. My memory just sort of edits it out.”

  Ellie sent him an odd look. Then she relaxed and picked up her glass of port, which sat where she’d left it on the nightstand, an inch of ruby liquid in it. “That’s the way memory works,” she agreed. “Selectively.”

  “Defectively,” he corrected her.

  “Self-protectively,” she corrected him back.

  He studied her from his vantage in the wingback chair. The pillows behind her head had mussed her hair, and he wished he could slide his hands through it. He longed to rejoin her on the bed, to have her next to him, to feel the warmth of her and lean into the dip in the mattress caused by the weight of her body. Maybe the reason he wanted her now was that his memory had edited out all the bad things between them, all the reasons divorce had made so much sense when they’d broached the idea a month ago.

  “Hit the play button,” she said, angling her head toward the TV. “Let’s keep going.”

  He wondered if she’d read his thoughts and decided to use the movie to distract him. He wasn’t so easily distracted—the movie only reminded him of how good things had once been between them—but he wasn’t about to pressure her. That he’d gotten her to trust him enough to return with him to their très romantic room was some kind of miracle.

  He tapped a button on the remote and the movie resumed. The screen went black, and then a written caption appeared in stark white: “They say the greatest tragedy a mother can experience is to outlive her child.”

  The muscles in Curt’s neck tensed. He’d known it was coming—any story of Ellie’s life would have to include this part—and he’d been worried about how she would respond. He’d neglected to consider his own response. But damn, it was going to be hard on him, too. To outlive one’s child was also the greatest tragedy a father could experience.

  A series of photos filled the screen, one fading into the next: Peter at around age four, towheaded and freckled, standing between his two sisters and reaching up to hold their hands. Peter perched on Curt’s shoulders, his grin so big it nearly split his face. Peter in front of the Magic Kingdom castle at Walt Disney World, a Goofy sunhat on his head. Peter in a school portrait, stiff and formal against a blue-gray background. Peter with one of his Little League teams. Peter with one of his basketball teams. Peter with Ellie and Curt at his middle-school graduation ceremony, dressed in pressed khakis and a collared polo shirt, one hand clutching the various certificates and citations he’d received and the other arched around Ellie’s shoulders. That was the year he’d surpassed Ellie in height. He clearly had an inch on her in the photo. Her smile was as bright as his.

  The montage was accompanied by a plaintive Warren Zevon song. Curt recalled how much Peter had loved the old Zevon hit “Werewolves of London.” He’d been too young to know what a werewolf was, but whenever Curt sang that song to Peter, he’d howl along: “Aaa-oooh!” He’d sounded as wild as a mystical beast.

  Peter had probably never heard the song Jessie and Katie had chosen for this part of their movie, though. Zevon had recorded it when he himself was dying of cancer—a wistful ballad imploring his loved ones to remember him once he was gone. “Keep me in your heart for a while,” he crooned in a broken, heartfelt voice.

  The images on the screen blurred as Curt’s vision filled with tears. He closed his eyes but couldn’t shut out his own pictures of Peter, all elbows and knees, all fierce energy. So much love in that boy, so much righteous indignation. Just like Curt, he’d wanted to conquer the world. Just like Ellie, he’d wanted to save it.

  The song washed around Curt and he swallowed, struggling against the sorrow that welled up inside him. The greatest tragedy was for a parent to outlive a child. Christ, what an understatement.

  He hadn’t heard Ellie’s approach, but suddenly, her hand rested on the back of his neck, caressing. She pried the remot
e from his fist and the song stopped. She must have paused the DVD. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he mumbled, ducking his head so she wouldn’t see his tears. Damn it. He wasn’t fine. He was falling apart.

  She walked away—with the movie’s soundtrack no longer playing, he could hear her footsteps—and then returned and dabbed at his face with a tissue. He pulled the tissue away from her. He wasn’t going to have her wiping his tears as if he were a helpless child.

  “I’m fine,” he repeated, opening his eyes and gazing at her.

  She was kneeling on the floor in front of him, gazing up into his face. “This is the first time you’ve cried,” she said quietly.

  She didn’t have to finish the sentence. The first time you’ve cried since we lost Peter. “I’ve cried plenty,” he said.

  “I never saw you cry.”

  “I cry in the shower.” He meant to use the past tense, but the truth slipped out. He still wept for Peter sometimes—in the shower, or when he was jogging on the treadmill at the fitness center near his office and his tears were camouflaged by the sweat dripping down his face. Or sometimes at night, when Ellie was asleep and he lay beside her in their cold, loveless bed, and grief crashed over him.

  Now Ellie knew—not only that he cried, but that he deliberately concealed his tears from her. He’d never wanted to break down in front of her. She’d been such a wreck after Peter’s death—withdrawn, out of touch, teetering on the razor-edge of clinical depression. She’d been emotionally mutilated. One of them had had to remain strong, so Curt had remained strong.

  “You should have told me,” she said.

  He heard a hint of reproach in her tone, and it transformed his embarrassment into anger. “Told you what?” he retorted. “That I was hurting, too? You needed to be told that?”

  “I only meant, you shouldn’t have hidden your feelings from me.”

  “I didn’t.” His tears were gone now, his resentment building. “I was quite clear about how I felt and what I needed. You didn’t want to hear it, Ellie. Every time I reached for you, you shut me out and retreated into yourself. My feelings disgusted you. So I stopped sharing them.”

  His outburst vibrated in the air, hot and bitter. Ellie held his gaze for a second, then turned from him. She pushed herself to stand and moved back to the bed, her head held high but her steps uncertain.

  He’d drawn blood and it felt good. Maybe he was a son of a bitch—Ellie undoubtedly believed he was—but he took satisfaction in making sure she knew she wasn’t the only one who’d been betrayed. She wasn’t the only one with ugly scars etched onto her soul, the remnants of wounds inflicted by the person she’d married.

  He watched as she sat on the edge of the mattress near the night table, her feet planted on the floor and her hands resting on her knees. She still held the remote control. Fine. Let her control the freaking movie. She liked to think she was the injured party in all this, but the fact was, she’d always been in control.

  Curt was passionately in love with her, insanely dependent on her—but she didn’t need him. She had Africa, after all. She’d saved a kid’s hearing. She’d probably saved a few kids’ lives, too. She’d been respected over there, revered. Loved.

  Damn it, he hadn’t sent her to Africa. She’d chosen to go there, eager to put as much distance between herself and him as she could. She’d walked away from him, all the while insisting that he’d walked away from her. If he had, it was only after she’d slammed the door and bolted it.

  She’d been in control all along.

  She startled him by speaking. “I still miss him. Every day. Every minute. Even when I think about him smashing the gingerbread house or chugging booze with his friend.” She glanced toward Curt but didn’t meet his stare. “I don’t cry that much, though.”

  “You cried earlier this evening,” he reminded her, the rage gone from his voice.

  She nodded and lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap, folded around the remote. “I wasn’t crying for Peter then,” she reminded him.

  He frowned, trying to recall what the movie had been dealing with when she’d started sobbing earlier. Them. Their courtship. Their love. She was done crying over Peter, but not over their dying marriage.

  We don’t have to get a divorce. The words hovered on his tongue, so close to slipping out. But her face was shuttered, her thoughts as far away as Ghana. And really, what could he say to change her mind at this point? He’d apologized a thousand times. He’d told her he loved her. She’d told him she could never trust him again. And she hadn’t told him she loved him.

  In those stolen moments when he wept for his son, he acknowledged, he was crying for other losses, too. He was crying for the woman he’d once been convinced was all he would ever want. He was crying for all the promises their love had held. He was crying because, somehow, he’d been exiled from Hope Street.

  ELEVEN

  Three Years Ago

  LATE MARCH WAS STILL roaring in. When would the lamb part replace the lion part? Curt wondered as he steered up Birch Lane. The road was fringed with dirty mounds of snow, and his front lawn, barely visible in the evening gloom, was crisp and brown. But the living-room windows glowed amber and the lights above the garage doors were on, brightening the driveway and making him smile at the knowledge that he’d soon be inside all that warmth, with his family.

  It had taken him several months to get used to Katie’s absence. Ellie had suffered full-blown empty-nest syndrome once they’d lugged the last of Katie’s things up the stairs to her third-floor dorm room at Wesley an and kissed her goodbye. That two more children still lived with them had provided small comfort for Ellie. She’d whined and moped and hovered for long stretches of time in the doorway of Katie’s unnaturally neat, empty bedroom, unable to accept that her first born had truly left home. She’d barraged Katie with e-mails and instant messages. And eventually, she’d adjusted.

  This year, Katie’s second year away at school, had gone better. But now Ellie was gearing up for Jessie’s graduation and her departure for college. Jessie had received an early-decision acceptance to Bates College, up in Maine. Two and a half hours by car. Much too far, according to Ellie. Wesleyan was only an hour and a half away. Why did Jessie need to go so much farther from home than Katie?

  At least they would still have Peter. And frankly, Curt thought as he recalled Peter’s recent booze-bingeing escapade with his moronic friend Doug, once their son was gone Curt and Ellie might just heave sighs of relief.

  He steered into the garage, shut off the engine, grabbed his briefcase and entered the house. The kitchen’s atmosphere was thick with a warm, beefy fragrance that negated the chill of the early-spring night outside. A small pile of mail sat on the table, waiting for him. He riffled through it—all junk—and tossed it into the trash can unopened.

  “Hi,” Ellie said as she swept into the kitchen. Her hair was pulled back in a barrette, and the overhead light caught the streaks of reddish-blond in it. A few years ago, he’d asked her why she was highlighting it that way—he’d always thought it looked great when it was just a rich, pretty brown—and she explained that the highlights helped to cover the gray. Curt hadn’t noticed much gray in her hair, but then he didn’t really see her anymore. She was Ellie, she was beautiful, and if her face had developed a few lines over the years, if her waist had increased by an inch or two, her hair acquired a smattering of gray, the changes didn’t register on him.

  He opened his arms and she moved in for a quick hug, then drew back. “Peter’s in bed,” she said, and he realized she was talking more softly than usual. “When he got home from school, he said he was tired and had a headache. I just tried to give him some chicken broth, but he wasn’t hungry.”

  “Peter not hungry? The world must be coming to an end.” Curt scowled. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine. Just run-down, I think. They’re doing those two-hour practices every day for the freshman baseball team. He r
eally wants to make the team, so he’s knocking himself out.” She shook her head and left Curt’s side to check something in the oven. “Freshmen shouldn’t have two-hour daily practices. It’s not like they’re varsity.”

  “So he’s not having dinner with us?” Curt asked, tugging his tie loose.

  “I left him a bottle of Gatorade. He’ll drink that.”

  “Is that good for him?”

  She gave him a haughty look. “Who’s the medical professional here?” When he held up his hands in mock surrender, she smiled. “Those sports drinks are great, especially if he isn’t eating. They’ll keep him from getting dehydrated, balance his electrolytes and give him some energy.”

  “Whatever you say.” Curt peeked over Ellie’s shoulder at the contents of the oven—all he saw was a casserole dish—and then went upstairs to exchange his suit for some comfortable clothes. Once he was in jeans and a flannel shirt, he walked down the hall, passing Jessie’s closed bedroom door, through which he heard her babbling on the phone, and tapped on Peter’s before he inched it open. “Hey, buddy,” he murmured. Peter was sprawled out under the blanket, his body intermittently illuminated by the swirling colors of his computer’s screen saver, flashing beams of light from his desk.

  “Hey, Dad,” Peter grunted.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Shitty.” Peter laughed. “Sorry. Just tired.”

  “Mom said you’re planning to sleep through dinner.”

  “I’ll eat something later,” Peter promised.

  “Okay, pal. You want me to turn off your computer?”

  “Nah. It’s not bothering me.”

  Curt left, closing the door behind him. Peter’s voice had been dropping in pitch all year, and it now rested somewhere between a tenor and a baritone. Next year he’d probably be shaving, whether or not he needed to. Curt smiled, anticipating that ritual. He remembered his father ushering him into the bathroom and showing him how to whip up a rich lather with a badger brush and a mug of shaving soap, how to stretch his skin to avoid nicking himself, how to trim his sideburns evenly. Not that he’d had sideburns when he was fifteen, or even much of a beard. But he’d felt so close to his father that morning. They’d been two men then, not a father and a little boy.