All Dressed Up (31 page)

“I’m
old-fashioned, I guess,” he said.

“No, it’s
cute. It’s good.”

“I worry about
her a lot,” he confessed abruptly.

“You do?
Still?” Emma asked. She saw the vulnerability etched into his face
and it shocked her. Not your role, Dad.

“Not as much
as I used to.” He paused. Cleared his throat. “Mom says you’ve been
talking a bit about Billy.” Okay, so he’d received one of the
memos.

“A little,”
Sarah said. She sat poised on the edge of the wooden bench
seat.

“In a good
way,” Emma added. They both waited, sensing he was working up to
something.

He tinked his
knife on the side of his coffee cup, put it down, picked it up
again. “It was my idea in the first place for Mom to take him,
Emma, you probably don’t know that, either of you.”

He was right.
They hadn’t. Emma held her breath. Tink, tink, tink, went Dad on
the cup.

“And I’m not
sure if she remembers that. She probably thinks it was hers.” Emma
knew if she yelled at him to stop the tinking, or even if she just
gently took the knife out of his hand, they might never get to hear
what he had to say. “And you probably don’t know the real reason
why she was in the hospital that time in London.”

But as soon as
he said the words, Emma did know, and from her face so did Sarah,
who was also holding her breath and ignoring the tinking. Dad
skated over the surface of the story. Alcohol and Tylenol, a cry
for help. Discovering her in the bathroom, just in time. Mom
extravagantly losing it, Dad there to catch her when she fell. The
hospital, the stomach pump. Mom hadn’t wanted the real story to be
told. Her parents would have considered a suicide attempt to be so
undisciplined.

“And for your
sakes, too,” Dad said. “You didn’t need to know. To have that
hanging over you. That fear. But I had it. Every day, calling her
from work, not knowing how I’d find her in the evening, when I
walked in the door.”

And then
during the London autumn, when Emma was secretly pregnant and Sarah
publicly growing boobs and shoulders, Mom had started talking to
Dad about having one last try for another baby…

He stopped and
put down the knife and pressed his lips together. The Tuppers’ big
silver SUV drove down the track and past the house. A fly
discovered the remnants of the herring. “I couldn’t stand that she
was so up about it,” he finally said. “Making plans for how she’d
take care of herself, plans for how she’d deal with another loss.
I’m strong enough, Eric, I know I am” Another pause. “But even if
that was true, I didn’t think I was. She only had the loss, each
time. I had the loss and the fear.”

“Oh, Dad!”
Emma said. She and Sarah both put their arms around him and they
all had a fishy-breathed hug. “Oh, Dad…”

“And I blame
myself, Emma. Badly. For using your life… your problems… for using
Billy so I wouldn’t have to deal with the fear.”

“Dad…”

There was an
emotional silence.

“Don’t blame
yourself,” Sarah said. “Don’t.”

“Oh, let him
blame himself, Sar, for God’s sake!” Emma burst out, and it was a
relief to let fly. “I think we’re all to blame, okay? Can we
embrace it, at this point? I don’t think any of us gets a free
pass. And why are we talking about blame as if something terrible
happened? Mom didn’t die. We have this kid. We have Billy. And he
belongs to all of us, and he’s great and we love him.” Her voice
cracked. She’d never said it before. Love him. “Let’s… I want to…
I’m not saying I have the answers… start celebrating this instead
of thinking it’s some black hole that we’ve all disappeared
into?”

“Is that
really how you feel, Emma?” Dad asked.

“Starting to.
Working on it. I do know I’m the one who’s most treated it like a
black hole all these years.”

“No, me, too,”
Sarah said.

“Well,
that’s…” He spread his hands. “That’s good, then.”

For Dad and
Sarah and Emma herself, this seemed to be enough of an epiphany for
the moment. They sat for a little, but didn’t say much more.

Sarah
eventually went grocery shopping, Dad took a homemade lunch to Mom.
Emma cleared up the breakfast, then went to the beach for a swim
and walked the long way back to the house, around the vehicle track
instead of up the grassy path.

She had
reached the stoniest section of track when she saw Charlie’s blue
car flash through the pine trees and crunch to a halt in his usual
parking space. He hadn’t sent a text or called. She had no idea he
was back up here, or when and why he’d come. Her feet were bare and
wet after her swim. They were tender on the stones. She was still
fifty yards away when he climbed out of the vehicle, and she
couldn’t hurry to him because of the sharp gravel.

She tottered
forward, calling out, “Over here, there’s no one in the house,” and
he changed direction and walked toward her. Wearing running shoes,
he moved a lot more smoothly than she did, and there was something
painfully appropriate about the clumsiness and snail’s pace forced
on her by the stones, while he could stride freely.

As he reached
her, she hobbled over to the verge of mud and wet leaves where the
mosquitoes hovered more thickly. She had no idea what he was going
to say, and his face looked shuttered, not wearing the expression
belonging to someone who’s about to declaim, I love you Emma, we
can get through this.

And indeed he
didn’t say it. Brooke had been right. He wouldn’t claim to have
forgiven her until he really had. Emma swallowed this, took it on
board, tried not to let it defeat her.

“I just came
to see if we could manage to talk, Emma,” he said.

“Came?”

“Came up. From
the city. Just now.”

He didn’t
touch her or say, Oh God I’ve missed you, or give out heat the way
he had when he’d come to the hospital on Wednesday. “Do you want to
walk back down to the beach, or something? If you don’t mind, let’s
not go in the house.”

“No, not the
house. But let’s walk back past it and go down the path to get to
the beach. I don’t know why I came by the track, the stones are
killing my feet.” The mud and wet leaves on the verge were cool and
soothing on her soles, but her ankles had already begun to itch
from new bites. She sucked back a complaint about it. The moss and
grass on the path felt much better, and the sun shafted through the
air and kept the mosquitoes away.

“How’s Billy?”
Charlie asked.

“Back on
NBM.”

“What are they
thinking?”

“They’re
hearing bowel sounds. I guess basically what you said – they’re
thinking his gut just needs more rest than most people’s after
appendicitis, because of the mistake. The emergency incision looks
rough, you know? I hate to imagine how fast they sliced into him,
how much blood sloshed around in his abdominal cavity and how much
their hands messed about around his bowel.”

He cut in
almost before she'd finished speaking. “What is this like for you,
Emma? I mean, for example, why are you here and not there with him
right now?”

“Because Mom’s
the one he wants, that’s why. He’s so clear on that. It’s so
obvious. And he said it one day. I don’t want Emma.” The words
knifed into her again and she went on quickly, “And plus we don’t
want to scare him by all of us hovering around too much. He makes
these little hand movements to everyone apart from Mom after ten or
twenty minutes. Flick, flick, go away, leave me alone with Mom.
Eyes shut, holding Mom’s hand, flicking his fingers to send us out
the door. How could I be selfish enough to push my own timetable on
this? God, I’ve been selfish in the past but not that selfish! I
think he would probably want Sarah, too, if I wasn’t around, but
he’s scared that if he says Sarah’s okay, then he’ll have to take
his turn at having the other sister sometimes, too, and me he
really doesn’t want! He – he just doesn’t know me well enough, and
I want to change that, but I know I have to take it in baby steps.
I do know that. People think I don’t. But I do.”

Silence from
Charlie. Emma wondered how many more questions he still had, and
how much processing to do. A lot, probably.

They reached
the lake frontage of the Dean property, where their own private
sundeck and boat dock jutted out. They rarely used either, because
Billy preferred the sand of the community beach, and the canoe was
easier to store and launch from that point, also. Charlie wandered
out to the end of the dock and Emma followed. For foot comfort, the
sunny wooden dock planks fell somewhere in between track gravel and
path moss.

Her awareness
had been doing this since the canceled wedding – fixating on
different physical details at random, like the hot shower that
first morning, and the icy lemonade at Reverend Mac’s. Today for
some reason the soles of her feet had taken center stage.

“When’s
Billy’s birthday?” Charlie asked, turning to come back along the
dock.

“February
twenty-second.”

“Is that why
we went on the windjammer cruise in February?” At the end of the
dock, he turned right toward the beach. “And is that why your
February med school assignments always seemed particularly serious
and tough?”

“Oh…
probably.”

“How can it be
probably? It either is or it isn’t.”

“It was just
an extra piece of insurance, that’s all. I know you’ll think this
is worse than if I admitted to an obsession, but some years I
forgot it was his birthday until days afterward. Mostly I wasn’t
pretending to be distant from him, Charlie, and to have a whole
other life which meant I hardly thought about him. I really didn’t
think about him, or feel a whole lot. The birth felt so alien…”
Could she possibly tell him about those dark brown, blind-eye
nipples, the slug-like mucus plug, the pain that had felt more like
dying than labor, her inability to pee afterward, and Billy – aka
Nathan – not breathing, getting taken away, staying on in the
hospital for a week? Maybe sometime, but not now. “…and then we
disappeared from each other’s lives. I went to Massachusetts to
boarding school and didn’t see him again – at all – until he was
over a year old.”

“So how did it
start? The revisionism?”

“Boy, that’s a
loaded word!” The soles of her feet hit sand as they came over the
little wooden bridge onto the beach. The sand felt completely
different to how it had felt right after her swim, much rougher, as
tingly as an electric shock. She found the plastic flip-flops she’d
left on the beach half an hour ago and wriggled grittily into
them.

Still painful.
She walked into the water and rinsed off the sand. As soon as her
soles got comfortable, her ankles drove her mad with itching. “We
can walk on the road now,” she told Charlie.

He started
along it toward the creek. “What changed?”

“It wasn’t
revisionism. I got older. I lived under the same roof with him for
the first time, this past year. I realized I’d reached the age Mom
was when she already had Sarah and me and had had her first
miscarriage. I started thinking about having a baby with you. I
went nuts over the wedding. Maybe not in order to sabotage it or
push myself over the edge, but that was the end result. I still
needed to be perfect, you see, to prove that giving Billy to Mom
and Dad had been the right thing to do because it cleared the way
for my very important perfect life, perfect wedding included. I’m
not in control of any of this, Charlie. I’m trying to get some
control. Or some clarity. About what’s possible.” Okay, ask him.
“What do you think is going to be possible, Charlie? From your
end?”

“I’m not going
to jump into all sorts of promises.”

“No. Okay.”
This was exactly what Brooke had said about him. Emma had made
Brooke’s courtesy bridesmaid status so clear to her from the
beginning, and now Brooke was being great, wonderful. She did not
deserve Brooke at all.

“It’s not that
I’m condemning you. But this turns you into a different person and
I have to work out…” He paused and sighed. “Yeah. How I feel. About
the whole new Emma.”

“A different
person. Someone who’s also not going to be a doctor any more. Is
that important, too?”

He took her by
surprise, stopping her and anchoring his hands on her shoulders.
“Listen, you can do whatever you want. If we’d gotten married and
you’d said to me a few years down the track I want to drop out of
medicine and paint, we would have made it possible. Not telling me
about Billy isn’t… like… there must be a legal term… an issue of
false advertising or breach of contract.”

“So what is
it?”

“I’m not sure.
I’m still thinking.”

On Sunday
morning, Lainie went to church again. She sat at the back and
almost had to sit on her hands to stop herself from waving at Mac
and going, “Yoo hoo, I’m here!”

He smiled when
he saw her, then went about conducting the service with his usual
dignity and warmth. She waited for him outside afterward at a
discreet distance, not wanting to get him in any trouble with his
parishioners. So far they’d only kissed, but…

Well, for a
start let’s just cut the word only because he kissed like, oh,
melted butter and honey on hot toast so there was no only about it.
Still, the point was, they hadn’t gone to bed.

He didn’t come
up to her until almost everyone had left. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

They smiled
honey-on-toast smiles at each other. But eventually that had to
stop because it wasn’t getting them anywhere, they were just
standing here like crumbs of the toast, crumb islands in a pool of
the butter and honey, floating on a bliss of sweetness.

He began to
walk her to his house across the lane. “How did you find the
service?”

“As church
services go, I liked it. I like the whole atmosphere at St
James.”