Heart of the Matter (12 page)

“The first time, yes. I did completely. The second time, I went through the motions, but never felt the same about him. I never really trusted him again. I always had a sick feeling in my stomach as I searched for lipstick on his collar or looked for phone numbers in his wallet. I felt cheapened because of it. Because of him . . . I think I always knew he would do it again . . .” Her voice trails off, a faraway look in her eye.

I feel the urge to reach out and hug her, but instead ask another hard question. “Do you think it’s made you . . . distrust all men?”

“Maybe,” she says, glancing nervously toward the stairs as if worried that Nick or Dex will catch her bad-mouthing their gender. She drops her voice to a whisper. “And maybe that’s also why I was so upset with your brother . . . when he broke his first engagement.”

It is another first, as I had no idea my mother suspected any infidelity—or that she was ever upset with Dex about
anything.
“At least he wasn’t married,” I say.

“Right. That’s what I told myself. And I couldn’t stand that Darcy,” she says, referring to Dex’s old girlfriend. “So the result was good.”

I start to say something else, but then stop myself.

“Go ahead,” my mother says.

I hesitate again and then say, “Do you trust Nick?”

“Do
you
trust Nick?” she shoots back. “That is the more important question.”

“I do, Mom,” I say, putting my fist over my heart. “I know he’s not perfect.”

“Nobody is,” she says, the way gospel preachers say
amen.

“And I know our marriage isn’t perfect,” I say, thinking of our rocky start last night.

“No marriage is,” she says, shaking her head.

Amen.

“But he would
never
cheat on me.”

My mother gives me a look, one that I would ordinarily construe as overbearing, but in the gauzy, golden light of dawn, I take only as maternal concern.

She reaches out and covers my hand with hers. “Nick’s a good man,” she says. “He really is ... But the one thing I’ve learned in life is that you can never say never.”

I wait for her to say more as I hear Frank call my name from the top of the stairs, breaking our intimate spell.

“And in the end,” she says, ignoring her grandson’s escalating calls, sitting so peacefully that it is as if she doesn’t hear him, “all you really have is yourself.”

10

Valerie

Just
after dark on Saturday, Jason shows up at the hospital with microwave popcorn, two boxes of Jujubes, and several PG-rated movies.

“I
love
Jujubes!” Valerie says, a preemptive strike against what her brother has been threatening for days.

Jason shakes his head and says, “It’s boys’ night.”

Valerie grips the arms of her rocker, reminded of the frantic way she used to feel playing musical chairs. “You always say I’m one of the boys,” she says.

“Not tonight. Charlie and I are having a sleepover. No girls allowed. Right, Charlie?”

“Right,” Charlie says, grinning at his uncle as they touch fists, a left-handed, knuckle-bump handshake.

Valerie, who was stir-crazy just moments before, wondering what she and Charlie would do all evening, now feels a rising panic at the prospect of their separating. She has left the hospital for a few hours here and there, to pick up takeout or run a quick errand. One afternoon, she even returned home to do a few loads of laundry and sort through her mail. But she has not yet left Charlie at night, and certainly not overnight. He might be ready;
she
is not.

“Go ahead. Eat your candy and watch your movies,” she says as casually as she can so as not to give away her panic and further entrench Jason’s position. She glances at her watch and mumbles that she’ll be back in a couple of hours.

“Nope,” Jason says. “You’ll be back
tomorrow.
Now go.”

Valerie gives her brother a blank stare, prompting him to literally push her off the chair. “Skedaddle. Scoot. Begone, woman.”

“Okay, okay,” Valerie finally says, slowly gathering her purse and BlackBerry, charging in the corner of the room. She knows her feelings are not rational—that she should be relieved to have a good night’s sleep in her own bed and a little privacy. More important, she knows Charlie’s in good hands with Jason. He is safe and stable, and for the most part, perfectly comfortable—at least until his surgery on Monday. But there it is anyway—a feeling of deep reluctance in her gut. She takes a breath and slowly exhales, wishing she had a Xanax left in her prescription, something to smooth out her ragged, worried edges.

“C’mon, now,” Jason whispers to her as he helps her with her coat. “Call a friend. Go get a few drinks. Have a little fun.”

She nods, pretending to ponder her brother’s advice, full well knowing she will do nothing of the kind. Saturday-night
fun,
at least the kind Jason means, was a rarity before this—and is certainly out of the question now.

She goes to Charlie and gives him a hug, followed by a light kiss on his cheek, alongside his scar. “I love you, sweetie,” she says.

“I love you, too, Mommy,” he says, quickly returning his attention to the selection of DVDs Jason has fanned out on the foot of the bed.

“Okay then. I’m off. . .” Valerie says, stalling as she glances around the room, pretending to look for something. When this charade is exhausted, she kisses Charlie once more, walks out the door, and makes her way down to the cold, dark parking garage. For a few moments, as she hunts for her dusty teal Volkswagen with its political bumper sticker now two elections old, she becomes convinced that it was stolen, somehow chosen over the trio of BMWs parked on the same level—and she feels one part relief that she’ll have no choice but to go back inside. But then she remembers squeezing into a narrow space designated for compact cars after a burrito run a few days before, and finds it just where she left it. She peers into the backseat before unlocking the door, something she has done for years, since a teenager from her hometown was kidnapped in a shopping-mall parking lot days before Christmas—the chilling moment captured on a surveillance camera.

Tonight, though, Valerie’s backseat search is not hair-raising, but perfunctory and halfhearted. It is a silver lining, she thinks—when a greater fear is realized, lesser ones fall away. Hence, she is no longer petrified of parking-garage rapists. She shivers as she slides into her car and starts the engine. The radio, left on high from her last trip, blares R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” a song that vaguely depresses her, even under the best of circumstances. She exhales into her hands to warm them, then turns the dial, hoping for something more uplifting. She stops at “Sara Smile,” figuring that if Hall & Gates can’t help her, nobody can. Then she drives slowly toward home, humming an occasional refrain and doing her best to forget the last time she left her son for a boys-only sleepover.

***

Only she doesn’t go home. Not right away. She fully intends to, even planning to return a few phone calls—to her friends at work and a few girls from home, even Laurel, who had heard through the grapevine, aka Jason, of Charlie’s accident. But at the last second, she bypasses her exit and heads straight for the address she looked up on the computer, then MapQuested and memorized last night, just after Charlie fell asleep. She wants to believe her detour is a lark, a flight of fancy, but nothing can truly be called a lark or flight of fancy given the current state of things. It can’t be boredom, either, as she is never bored; she enjoys solitude too much for that. She convinces herself that it must be a simple matter of curiosity, like the time in the mid-nineties when she and Jason went to L.A. for a cousin’s wedding and drove by South Bundy, the site of the double homicide in the OJ. Simpson trial. Only tonight her curiosity is of the idle, not morbid, variety.

As she makes her way toward the heart of Wellesley, a light rain begins to fall. She puts her windshield wipers on the slowest setting, the mist on her window giving her the veiled feeling of protection. She is undercover, gathering clues—about what she is not quite sure. She makes a left turn, then two rights onto the street—which is elegantly called a “boulevard.” It is broad and tree-lined with neat sidewalks and classic, older homes. They are more modest than she expected, but the lots are deep and generous. She drives more slowly, watching the odd numbers on the right side of the road diminish until she finds the house she is looking for—a storybook Tudor. Her heart races as she takes in the details. The twin chimneys flanking the slate roof. The huge birch tree with low, climbable branches just off center in the front yard. The pink tricycle and old-school red rubber ball, both abandoned in the driveway. The warm yellow light in one upstairs bedroom. She wonders if it is his—
theirs
—or one of the children’s, and imagines them all tucked neatly inside. She hopes that they are happy as she does a three-point turn and drives home.

Sometime later, she is taking a bath, her favorite Saturday-night pastime. Normally, she reads a magazine or paperback book in the tub, but tonight she closes her eyes, keeping her mind as blank as possible. She stays submerged, the soapy water up to her chin, until she feels herself nod off and it occurs to her that she might be tired enough to fall asleep and actually drown. Charlie would be an orphan, forced to forever speculate whether her death was a suicide —and if it were somehow his fault. She shakes the morbid thought from her head as she stands and steps out of the tub, wrapping herself in her coziest, largest bath towel — a bath
sheet,
to be precise. She remembers the day she ordered the set of fine, Egyptian-cotton towels, the most luxurious ones she could find, even opting for a French-blue monogram with her initials for an extra five dollars per towel. It was the day she received her first bonus check at her law firm, a reward for billing two thousand hours — a small fortune she had planned to spend on everyday creature comforts. After the towels, she ordered Austrian goose-down pillows, sateen sheets, cashmere cable-knit throws, heavy cast-iron cookware, and fine china for twelve — quality domestic goods that most women acquire when they marry,
before
they buy a house or have a baby. She was doing it backward, maybe, but she was doing it all by herself.
Who needs a man?
she thought with every item she added to her cart.

It became her mantra. As she worked long hours at her firm, saving more money until she and Charlie could finally move out of their depressing basement apartment — with its stark white walls the landlord wouldn’t let her paint and the perpetual smell of curry and marijuana from the neighbors across the hall — into the cozy Cape Cod they still live in now. As she shoveled the driveway in the winter, watered grass seed in the spring, pressure-washed their front porch in the summer, raked leaves in the fall. As she did all the things to make a home and a life for Charlie. She was self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-contained. She was every empowered lyric that she
heard on the radio: I am woman, hear me roar, . . I will survive. . .
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Yet tonight, after she eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the kitchen sink and tucks herself neatly into bed, wearing her favorite white flannel nightgown with eyelet trim, she feels a sharp lonesome pang, an undeniable sense that something is missing. At first she believes the void is Charlie, who, for the first time ever, is not sleeping in the room next to hers. But then she thinks of that upstairs glow in the stone Tudor, and realizes that it is something different altogether.

She stares into the darkness and tries to imagine what it would be like to have someone in bed next to her, tries to remember the feel of being entangled in another, sweaty, breathless, satisfied.

That’s when she closes her eyes and sees his face, and her heart starts to race again, just as it did in the hospital cafeteria over coffee and in front of his house.

She knows it’s wrong, having these thoughts about a married man, but she lets herself drift there anyway, rolling onto her side and pressing her face into her pillow.
Who needs a man?
she tries to tell herself. But as she falls asleep, she is thinking,
I
do.
And more important,
Charlie does, too.

11

Tessa

How’s
the school search coming along?” Rachel asks me on Sunday morning as she sits cross-legged on the floor of our guest room and packs for their return trip to New York, It is the first we’ve been alone all weekend, and are now only because my mother had an early morning flight home and Dex and Nick are taking the kids out for a walk—or as Rachel called it after she peeled her girls off the couch, “a forced march outdoors.”

“Ugh,” I say, making a face, “What a pain in the ass the whole thing is.”

“So you’ve definitely ruled out the public elementary school?” she asks, pulling her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail with the everpresent elastic band she wears on her left wrist, seemingly in lieu of a watch.

“I think so. Nick’s in favor of it—probably because he went to public schools. . . But obviously Dex and I didn’t... I think it’s all what you’re used to,” I say, hoping that this is the actual reason for Nick’s public leanings—and not that he simply wants to get out of school tours and applications and conversations on the topic.

“Yeah. I was squarely in Nick’s camp—public school girl all the way—but didn’t think we could go that route in the city,” she says as she lays one of Sarah’s little floral blouses facedown on the floor, then neatly smooths out the wrinkles, tucks in the arms, and folds the whole thing into a neat square with the skill of a departmentstore clerk. I memorize her technique, but know I will never recall it—just as I can never quite remember how to fold our dinner napkins into the origami-like shapes Nick mastered while working as a waiter at a country club during college.

“I vowed not to let it stress me out,” I say, “but now that it’s upon me, I’m right there in the frenzy with everyone else.”