Those We Love Most (35 page)

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 ambulance 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.

“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.

Christ but this was hard. He could feel beads of sweat pricking his forehead, and he’d only just gotten on the machine. Walking … holy hell. Who could have imagined that was something he would have to learn again. But Roger could feel himself getting stronger in tiny increments. He was still worried about his speech. He could hear how garbled he sounded, how inarticulate at times.

Now that he was living back at home, he didn’t feel quite so much like an invalid. He had hated being in the rehab hospital in Chicago. That was no place to get well, those pushy, zippy nurses always waking him to check vital signs, the goddamned tube in the back of his hand like some marionette. All of that had almost leached the spirit right out of him. He had felt, for a while there, as if he had lost the will to live.

There were periods of acute frustration when he couldn’t accomplish simple tasks, like get the knife and fork to behave the way he wanted, and Margaret would cut his baked potato or slice his meat. In those moments, he had felt shame and anger, hair-trigger rage.

“Come on now, just a few more laps,” the physical therapist called out. “You’re killing it!” Roger’s smile was more of a grimace. Truth was, he felt like he was going to collapse right on the treadmill. But he was not going to show any of what he felt to this young kid with the earring. He was going to make the distance, despite the grating tone. He was going to get better. He had so many things to get better for.

At home, Margaret had set him up in the first-floor bedroom so he didn’t have to tackle the stairs. But he was getting better at stairs. Better, but not great. He loved it when he could sit in his kitchen chair and take meals because he could summon up his previous feelings of being master of his own domain. Despite his herky-jerky movements, he could walk out in the garden, hike to the end of the driveway, and get the paper in the morning. Some of the old routine was returning in thin slices.

This week marked the end of his leave of absence from work, though no one had formally addressed it yet from the firm. He’d known early on that returning to work was a fiction. He was finished. And frankly, he didn’t have the desire to go back to that old life. He knew a call would have to be made, to make it all official, and he supposed Margaret and the partners were being generous by waiting for him to raise the subject.

Friends and even some of his colleagues had visited him, and it had been uncomfortable, even painful. Everyone acted so solicitous, speaking to him slowly and loudly, as if he were the village idiot. He’d take the retirement. He’d been a smart and cautious investor over the years, and they had enough put away, even if his pension wasn’t fully vested.

When he had imagined retiring it had always been with a big party, lots of lunches and a speech or two that reprised his career achievements. But the stroke had robbed him of all of that. It was anticlimactic, no, downright depressing for Roger to think about ending his work life by filling out forms from human resources. It was humiliating.

Roger glanced up at the large numbers on the wall clock. Margaret would be picking him up in another hour. Margaret. He sighed and tried to focus on his breathing. There were times he couldn’t stand the look in her eyes. One minute it was loving and protective, watching him like a hawk, and other times cipher-like—it was hooded and then pitying. Occasionally, when she didn’t know he was looking, he saw naked fear lodged there.

He was shocked at how, when she patronized him, used that pedantic tone, the occasional desire passed through his head to physically reach out and hit her with his fists. In those moments of vengeful rage, he imagined the satisfaction of connecting with her jawbone. Roger could envision the surprised look as she registered the fact that he wanted her to stop hovering, stop being so concerned, so damned good and saintly all of the time. At times her kindly smile resembled the knowing smirk of a jailer. Those feelings would be followed by extreme shame and self-loathing. He had done this to her, he thought bitterly. The desire to lash out was irrational, especially with Margaret waiting on him hand and foot. And then, Roger winced shamefully, what she’d told him about Julia. That she had run her off at the hospital and that, incredibly, his wife had known all this time and never uttered a word. He shook his head, causing his pace to momentarily falter on the treadmill. Another lap subtracted itself from the red numbers on the machine’s digital display, and he looked over at his therapist as he consulted a clipboard in front of a younger patient on the stationary bicycle.

The boredom of the treadmill allowed his thoughts to wander further, and he was momentarily overwhelmed by an image of all the parts of his life colliding. He and Margaret had still not spoken in any detail about the exact circumstances of his stroke. He knew that Julia had called 911 and then driven to the hospital. Of all the times and places for this to happen. He had managed successfully, for all of these years, to keep that part of his life separate. Wasn’t it ironic that this would happen on an overnight to Florida?

It was difficult to think about Julia and Margaret having met. They were such contrasts. He hadn’t contacted Julia himself. He couldn’t easily punch a number in the phone, and even if he did get her on the line, his speech was slurred. He didn’t want her to hear him like this or to effect a false bravado. It was better for them both to remember the way they had been together before the stroke.

Though Roger had contemplated sending Julia an e-mail, he couldn’t determine what to write or where he would begin. Nothing he could put into words seemed adequate. Hell, he couldn’t really work a computer keyboard. He’d have to labor to hit the keys one by one.

His cell phone was on the dresser, and in the first few weeks he was home, he had studied it hopefully, checking for a message or call from her. She had not reached out either, as far as he knew. It was best to let Julia go, neglect her like an atrophying limb that diminished in stature over time. Perhaps somewhere down the line, when his penmanship was better and his speech more crisp, he would contact her, put a final conclusion on it all. For now, they both needed to get on with life.

Rivulets of sweat poured down Roger’s forehead, and his T-shirt was soaked. A few more laps; he could see the red illuminated picture on the console of the treadmill that told him where he was on the imaginary track.