Mr. Peanut (42 page)

In their bedroom now, in Cleveland, as Sheppard remembered, the wind of the lake blowing through the trees whose limbs rattled the screens, Marilyn touched his back and said, “What are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about Big Sur,” he said, and smiled.

She smiled back and took his hand.

“Feel,” she said, placing his palm on her stomach, and together they felt the small fillips.

“Boy,” he said.

“Girl.”

That was where it started, Sheppard believed; and that night he was sure was when this child had been conceived. He believed in science, not omens, yet the thought of this child’s conception occurring in such a state of joy also bestowed on him a sense of calm about the success of the pregnancy, both the fetus’s and Marilyn’s health. “It’s almost six,” he said, standing up.

Marilyn grabbed her watch in disbelief. “Oh, God,” she said. “When are we due at the Aherns’?”

“Quarter to seven.”

“How the hell am I going to get dinner ready?”

He shrugged and said, “I’ll help.” And she gave him a look, standing up herself and pulling on her underwear, her shorts, buttoning her bra, her blouse. “I don’t need that kind of help.”

Of course it would be disingenuous to pretend they’d simply sailed on after that moment, he thought as he woke Chip. Too much had happened. There was too much history. Weeks later, after they’d returned from California, sure now that they were in the clear, he’d come home to find Marilyn in the kitchen, smoking and staring out the window onto Lake Road. She didn’t turn when he greeted her, and when he asked where Chip was, she explained she’d sent him off to her father’s house for the evening. On the table before her was the expense report, the amounts circled in red—for the hotel room, the repairs to Michael’s car, the watch—all these pages forwarded from the hospital by Donna, along with a personal letter from Susan that said, he imagined, that everything was over.

“Go ahead,” Marilyn said. “I’m waiting.”

He sighed, then recounted everything that had happened with her in California clinically and dispassionately—how he’d felt about it: “That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before Big Sur,” he said. “Before now.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, watching its last smoke rise, its odor fade, an odd combination of anger and humility pervading the room. “You think,” she said, her voice both choked and furious, “in straight lines.” She lit up again, then wrapped one arm around her waist and propped her elbow against her hand. “Like there’s a beginning and an end.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“This.”
She picked up the papers on the table and shook them. “This is the same thing all over again. We just go round and round.”

“No,” he insisted. “That was before.”

Marilyn took a long drag on her cigarette. “I’m going to my father’s,” she said.

He was in no position to argue. There was, he believed, a beginning and an end. The walls had tumbled down. They were off the loop, but only if she believed.

She stayed at her father’s for a week. They didn’t speak for three full days. After that, she called him once in the morning, once at the hospital every afternoon, and once at night. They didn’t say much to each other, virtually nothing at all. She just wanted to know where he was, she said. He kept the house as clean as he could manage, but when she returned a week later with their boy, her first words were, “What a wreck.” And later, after sending Chip upstairs, she said, “Prove it.”

“Prove what?”

“That it’s going to improve.”

It required nothing miraculous of him. He simply had to be there, for Marilyn and for his son. There, as in inhabiting his life at home. There, as in treating
now
first. On a practical level it was the simplest thing: He took the boy off his wife’s hands when he returned from work. When she asked him for something—a favor, a last-second errand, or help with a household chore—he gave it. When she came to bed they talked. But spiritually and psychologically it was entirely different and required what couldn’t be faked: he was there. Whereas before he’d seen his wife and son as a kind of encroachment on his life, their needs as something that halved and rehalved the distance between him and what he wanted, and he’d therefore at every turn resisted every little thing asked of him, now he did the opposite. And he could feel the small joy it added to everything, and which in turn added accrued interest. It was so simple, really. He was just
there
, which was not only what Marilyn wanted but also what he discovered he did too, and which had the effect of spreading his joy to her, that same joy enfolding their lives as if under a giant set of wings. It was Marilyn who had, a month later and unprompted by Sheppard, announced at dinner with his parents and his brothers and their wives that she was pregnant. It was still a little early, the beginning of June, before she was even through her first trimester, but she wanted to tell them when they were all together. And while her pregnancy with Chip had been fraught with anxiety, haunted by her mother and brother’s death, and came afterward to symbolize
their marriage’s turn for the worse, the beginning of his sustained absence, her own loss of freedom, and the end of their sex, now she seemed eager to embrace this new child. And at the dinner table, while her sisters-in-law gathered round to congratulate her, Sheppard was stabbed with regret and pained for Chip, fearful his son might have inherited some of these doubts he and Marilyn had conjured up, their collective angst passing from their souls to him via the womb.

I have to be a better father, he thought, walking with Chip over to the Aherns’ house. I’ve failed him in so many ways. Was it possible that the boy had registered his absence all along? Was a child’s sense of love and its lack that refined? Were the things Chip took so long to learn, like tie his shoes or cut his food, his attempt to call out to him, confirming with each little assisted task that his father was there? He and Chip looked a great deal alike and both could sleep through an artillery barrage, yet the similarities ended with that. In fact, the boy had the worst of both of them. He lacked Sheppard’s athleticism and the confidence that came with it, but had Marilyn’s emotionalism and sulkiness, her moods, in spades. He was so utterly remote, Sheppard concluded, that it must have been caused by what had transpired. You could be saved, he thought, but never fully. He and Marilyn had been saved, but for Chip there’d been a cost.

He came up behind the boy and lifted him into his arms. “Your father loves you very much,” he whispered.

But Chip squirmed loose without looking at him and ran ahead.

Bless Don Ahern. The man could make a drink. A martini was simple enough, but his just tasted different, and far better. They stood on the back lawn watching the boats gather for the fireworks show, families starting to congregate on the beach. Ahern’s son and daughter had included Chip in a game of Keep Away and Nancy was walking toward Marilyn, meeting her midway between their houses, a whiskey sour for her in hand. “I’ll bet you’ve had a day,” Nancy said.

“A day and a half,” Marilyn answered—and gave Sheppard a look.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ahern muttered. “That lady of yours still has the figure of a girl.”

They watched their wives take each other by the arm and clink glasses, Marilyn catching Sheppard’s eye once more. Was it possible, he wondered, that he could still be aroused? He felt so physically spent right now that no matter what reserves he tried to tap he knew this was going to be a short night. Yet he felt like taking her now, all over again, excusing themselves for the evening, to sound the depths of this joy.

“Work any miracles today, Doc? Save any lives?”

“Actually,” Sheppard said, “I lost a boy.”

He ran through the story again, finally able to talk about it without seeing it all in his mind. It had become a story, encapsulated, having a beginning, middle, and end, and in the version he told Don, the father became a bit player, not the central figure who’d forced Sheppard to flee the hospital in a near panic because earlier he’d felt guilty as charged. He
was
a killer, not of the boy, but the murderer of his and Marilyn’s days together. And even worse, he still needed these angels to come into his life and wake him up to facets of his character at once pathetic and sad, chiefly his own rapacious nature. If that boy hadn’t died and his father hadn’t berated him, Sheppard might have forgotten his sorry actions, might yet be unappreciative of Marilyn, might still be that unknown to himself. My first instinct will never be to put other people before me, he thought.

“Well,” Don said, “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Then Marilyn approached. “The hospital just called,” she said. “A boy broke his leg. They want you to come down and have a look.”

In the x-ray room, Sheppard examined the break the boy had sustained, a clean fracture taken off a brother’s shoulder to his thigh playing in a friendly scrimmage that with a cast, gravity, and musculature would set and finally seal as strong as it was before. Eight weeks and the boy would be fine, he figured, and when he sat at Hunter’s bedside while the attending made the cast, he said something it seemed he repeated all the time at his job: “You’ll be like new.” It was another one of those automatic expressions whose overuse hid its built-in, deep-seated hope, along with the human questions it always begged. Was there progress? Did we actually become better people? His wife had accused him of thinking in straight lines, when in fact nothing was further from the truth. For so many years he’d thought of their lives as a toiling of cycles, and that had been his own self-serving justification, his rationale for license. There was no improvement, only reprieve, and neither of them could really change, so he must gorge himself on every opportunity life presented him. But did he still believe that, even now? If so, did that mean he was destined to slip again? Would this moment of joy be eclipsed by the next phase of sadness? Or could you finally grow beyond certain forms of evil and sin? This place where he and Marilyn now found themselves, wasn’t it somehow possible to make it endure? So he someday could tell his unborn son or the daughter Marilyn thought they were having:
I changed. We changed. We became happy, and from that point on, child, everything was different
. If only, he thought. Please
let me be able to say that and then pass along genuine hope, instead of the hopeless advice to simply wait, to just hang on.

I want to
arrive
, he decided, pulling out of the hospital. I want to be finished. I want to be done with the person I was.

Back at home, Marilyn and Nancy were frantic and he could hear the kids screaming in the background. Don, exasperated, told them to keep it down. “I’m trying to listen to the game!”

Marilyn came out of the kitchen. “We’re really running behind with dinner,” she said.

Sheppard checked his watch: quarter to nine. “What can I do?” he said.

Nancy touched her fingers to her chest in amazement. “Is he offering his assistance?”

“I think so,” Marilyn said.

“Are you feverish, Sam?” Nancy rubbed her hands in her apron, then felt his forehead. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m fine.”

“All right,” she said, and nodded. “You can take the kids off my husband’s hardworking hands before he kills them.”

“I can do that.”

Seizing this chance to be with his boy, Sheppard hustled them all to the basement and turned on the light in the back, where he’d set up the heavy bag. “How about we learn how to throw a punch?” he said. Todd, the Aherns’ oldest, was crazy for the idea, but Jennifer and Chip seemed a little scared.

“Don’t you want to do this, son?”

“I don’t know if I’ll like it,” he said, twining his arms together shyly and stretching the tangle toward the bag.

“Well, let’s give it a try.”

He felt it was important to first set down some rules: never to punch each other once they learned how, and never to punch other children unless, of course, they’d been hit first. Then he threw a couple jabs and right crosses, then some solid body shots, emphasizing the proper form, the importance of always keeping your hands up, your feet planted—“The ground’s where you get your strength,” he said—the kids agog at how far the bag moved when he hit it, the three of them blinking with each blow as if the force of impact blew puffs of air into their eyes. His exertion seemed to get them all riled up, even more than they were before upstairs, and sooner than he’d expected, Chip was whaling away on the bag while Todd held it steady, laughing when he stopped to shake out his hands. When
Sheppard bent toward him to tell him how well he was doing, Chip ran up and gave his leg a bear hug. The top of Chip’s head was sopping wet, and he rubbed it gently while his son looked up at him.

“Dinner in five,” Marilyn called.

He told the children to clean up. Sheppard was sweating himself and went upstairs to wash his hands. The breeze off the lake was stronger and cooler now, and he felt chilled. Trembling, his teeth chattering, he grabbed his corduroy jacket off the back of his bedroom door, then went downstairs. Nancy and Marilyn were at the last stages of setting the patio table, Don already in his chair, the cottage ham and green beans and rye bread set out, the blueberry pie baking in the oven, the aroma annihilating all other thoughts in Sheppard’s mind, the children served already and seated in the kitchen, far enough from earshot for adult conversation but close enough to be heard if need be. Neither Marilyn nor the Aherns had heard him come downstairs, and Don, who installed ventilation systems for hospitals across the state, was in the middle of a story about Hoversten. Sheppard stood by the television for a moment and listened.

“He’d be a liability and a half if Sam took him on. You know how he lost his last job, don’t you? At Grand View Hospital?”

“No,” Marilyn said. “Sam wouldn’t say.”

“I want to hear this,” Nancy said.

“He got frozen out by every single female member of the hospital staff.”