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“And?”

“And what? We took a little break from the hospital this morning.”

Cora eyed Claire’s museum gift bag. “Now, I understand how difficult this is, dear, and how you might need a break. But you can’t just go off with some man to a museum. Really, Claire, under the circumstances I would think that would be obvious to you.”

“Mother, Richard is a friend. You don’t need to complicate things. Our paths just happened to have crossed.”

“Crossed paths or not, Claire, your only focus right now should be on Nicholas, and trying to repair your marriage. What would Michael think of you spending your morning with this Richard person, after everything that’s happened?”

What would Michael think?
“Mother, have you ever felt like you’ve been bitten by a vampire and are walking among the living dead?”

“Of course not, Claire. What a ghastly thought.” Cora’s lips drew tightly downward.

“Then I’m not going to have this conversation with you right now. But rest assured that I know exactly what my focus is.” She spaced her words out deliberately.

Cora stepped forward and wrapped Claire in a hug. “I’m sorry, I know you do, sweetheart. I know you’re doing all the right things to put your life back in order. And I’m so happy to be here.” As they disengaged, Cora eyed Claire’s hair, then reached both hands to Claire’s head and fluffed it and tucked it behind her ears. “Really, dear, if you’re going out . . .”

Claire flicked Cora’s hands away from her face. “Hear this, Mother: I don’t give a shit about my hair. No one in this place does. My hair is irrelevant.”

“Well, at least you might put on some lipstick, dear. You are hardly irrelevant.”

“Why don’t we go see Nicholas? I was just on my way to his room, and I’d like to show him the posters I got for him.”

Claire could hear Cora mumbling
irrelevant
and
Smitty
as they walked down the corridor. And she wondered how she was going to muster twenty-four hours’ worth of patience.

 

“When will you and Michael be taking Nicholas home?” Cora asked as they watched Nick in his afternoon session with the gait specialist.

“About that.” Claire rose from her folding chair and paced the length of the glass partition separating the observation area from the gym, wondering if she was destined to have only unpleasant conversations in this space. “Things didn’t exactly go well with Michael while he was here.”

“What do you mean,
not exactly well
?”

“He’s flying Nicky home next week.”

“That’s wonderful. And?”

“And Nicky will be doing outpatient therapy at Craig Hospital.”

“Claire, I’m not following—”

“And the living arrangements don’t
exactly
include me at the moment,” she snapped with the filter-free annoyance of a non-divorceable daughter. “He wants me to get an apartment.”

“What? How on earth does Michael expect to—”

“Just hold off on the tirade. Please.” Claire sank into the chair farthest away from Cora, imagining how gratifying it would be to show her that all of her advice about marital repair had been complete crap. But she knew there would be no victory in that kind of
I told you so.
Because a small part of her still wanted to believe. And what do you do when you want to hold on to crap, when the crap is your last handful of hope? She stared up at the ceiling trying to stem the tide of her tears. “Here’s the deal, Mother. Michael said that too much damage has been done, that he can’t face that, or me, night after night. And that it would be damaging to Nicky, too.” As she spoke, all of the emotions she’d shoved behind the
Irises
and Rembrandts found their way out—slowly at first, and then emphatically like an angry case of food poisoning.

Cora scooted next to Claire and hooked an arm around her.

“I thought we’d have a chance at starting over when Nicky went home,” Claire sobbed into her Mother’s restrained bosom. Cora held Claire in her arms and listened quietly as she unleashed months of grief in between scraps of Michael’s hot dog stand salvo and her disbelief that she would soon be
visiting
her child at her own house. “I never thought it would come down to this. Even with . . . what I did.” Curling up on Cora’s lap and the two adjacent chairs like a small girl, she fought the image of Andrew’s face. “But the sad truth is that the tension between us really wouldn’t be good for Nicky, and I guess I just need to remove it—remove myself—until I can make some sense of what I’ve done. And until Michael calms down. I don’t want to risk pushing him away any farther.”

“You know, dear,” Cora weighed in after a contemplative pause, her voice soft but deliberate, “if that’s how he needs things to be right now, a temporary separation really might not be the worst thing. Timing is everything, dear, and it would appear that your husband needs some time. I can understand that.” She handed Claire a handkerchief from the sleeve of her pantsuit and propped her back up to sitting. “Time has a way of diminishing pain and anger. And then you’ll be able to work on reuniting your family after Michael has had a chance to”—she paused again—“maybe recover a little of his pride? He’s wounded and afraid. And putting everything with Nicky aside, I’m sure his self-respect has taken a beating too. This separation may be the only way that he can see coming through this with you. A public penance, as it were.” She raised her eyebrows into a perfectly arched schoolteacher’s directive. “You’ll both get there, honey. The interim may just look a little different than you imagined.”

Claire blew her nose, still terrified about the whole scenario, but willing herself toward cautious agreement with her mother. “Yes, but I’m worried about how Nicky will take this. If I’m in the house, it will be awful, and if I’m not, it could be just as bad for him.” She watched Cora shift into strategy mode, index and middle fingers tapping her lips, her eyes focused on the future.

“You’ll be taking Nicky to his outpatient classes and appointments—it’s not as if you won’t be there with him all the time. Breakfasts, activities, dinners. He’ll hardly have a chance to notice your absence. And as for your husband, a man can’t easily walk away from the comfort and habits of eighteen years, dear. This is only a temporary move. I give it a month at the outside. You’ll see. You just need patience and perseverance.” Cora was smiling now, clearly pleased with her strategy. “I’ll speak to Jackie and ask her to find something for you near the house. There’s that lovely building by the country club. We don’t need Michael’s assistance for that.”

“BUT THE MAN CAN BARELY FUCKING LOOK AT ME.”

Cora sucked in a wide mouthful of air. “Language, dear.”

“The only language I’m interested in now is how to make this manageable for Nicky.”

C
HAPTER
22

A
s the preparations for Nicholas’s departure were winding down, Claire found herself increasingly wound up. The prospect of explaining the new living arrangements to him had filled her with a creeping sense of dread. And while the staff psychologist reassured her that the nuances of the circumstances were less important than preparing him with the general facts, she found it difficult to rally the courage and the explanation.

But amid her apprehension and the chaos of getting Nicholas ready for the transition, there was one bright light: the party. The day arrived with a flourish of window-framed sunshine and a small mountain of parting gifts. Nick had grinned for the entire hour of his cake and high five–filled farewell with his favorite staff members. “I can totally . . . handle this,” he kept telling each of them. “I’ll handle it by . . . myself now,” he’d said, hugging them all tightly, both grateful for and tired of the numerous hands invading his life. There would be more hands at home, more strange adjustments, but for that happy hour at least, there was no need to talk about it. And so Claire celebrated the moment, too, putting off for another day the conversation she dreaded.

Until time caught up with them, and she could no longer wait.

“Nicky, your father and I both love you very much,” Claire began over lunch in his room two days before she was to leave for Denver.

Nicholas raised his sandwich from the plate, ready to take a bite. “I just want to get out here—get out of here,” he said, shoving the sandwich into the corner of his mouth. “I’m over this.”

“I know, honey. And we’re so excited you’re coming home. But I need to talk to you about how things are going to be back in Denver.”

“Amy said I’ll do some outpatient classes at a . . . place near the house. Craig.”

“That’s right. Sometimes I’ll take you there, and some therapists will come to the house too.” She took inventory of the surroundings that had once seemed so frightening and impersonal, and the thought of adjusting to a new equilibrium accelerated her anxiety. “You’ll be back in your old room at home, but”—she wiped the jelly from his chin with a napkin—“but I’m not going to be staying at the house. I’ll be visiting you every day, like I do here.”

“What?” Dark circles underlined the one weepy and one dry eye staring up at her.

“I’ll be very close by.”

“Why?”

Why.
“Well, your dad, um . . . your dad and I think this is best for now. It’s just something we need to work out for a little bit,” she said robotically.

He nodded, to Claire’s surprise, almost as if he had been expecting this announcement. “Because of what . . . happened to me?”

“No, Nicky, no. This has nothing to do with you, honey. We just need some time to, uh, settle some things, and then we’ll—”

“Because of something that . . . that happened before?” His eyes started blinking rapidly, his facial muscles tensed, the shift in his demeanor like quicksilver. “What did you do?” he suddenly shouted, mashing his sandwich into his tray. “What did
Dad
do?” Nicholas grabbed the tray and flung it like a Frisbee. “What . . .
did . . . HE . . . do
?”

Claire dodged the tray, but tripped over her chair and cut her leg. As the nurse rushed in, Claire pushed down on the bleeding flap of skin at her ankle until the gash merely stung. One hour later, after a trip to the art studio with Amy, Nicholas seemed to have no recollection of his outburst.

 

“Richard, I can’t leave him like this,” Claire said as she crumbled crackers into the bowl of soup she had no intention of eating. The cafeteria had emptied out over the course of the hour they’d been sitting together.

“Shouldn’t you be home finishing that packing you’ve been complaining about? You’re getting the hell out of this joint. This is good news.”

“I’m afraid Nick might think I’m abandoning him instead of just flying out early. The short-term stuff doesn’t seem to stick, but I think he’s starting to remember things from . . . before.” She couldn’t stop replaying the questions he’d bellowed at her—so similar in their confused, beseeching quality to his questions about Taylor—and yet so much more fraught and unnerving.

“Look, yesterday was one blowup, Claire. But you just had a productive session with his social worker, and he seems much better with everything, right?”

“I suppose.”

“He knows you would never abandon him. You should be used to all the unpredictability by now.” Richard took her wrist. “The anger evaporates just as quickly as it rears up. Nicholas will adjust, and then there will be questions and confusion and all manner of volatility and things that don’t make any sense. That’s the only thing we can count on in TBI world. But we all have to adjust in life, don’t we? Take things day by day.”

Claire set down her spoon but let her hand remain in Richard’s grip. Her thoughts flashed to Nicholas that night in the library assaying the scene with Andrew, his discomfort apparent but controlled. And she began to well up, feeling the nauseating certainty that there might never be enough flying trays or effective therapy sessions to make all these new adjustments manageable for him. “How do you deal with the guilt?” she asked in a flimsy voice. “How do you talk to Sandy about what happened?”

“Ah. That.” Richard paused for a moment, looking out the window. “Maybe if I’d stopped sooner, that car would have missed Sandy and me. And maybe not. The point is, Claire, accidents happen in life. You made choices, and Nicholas made choices.” Richard pulled his chair around to face her. “Believe me, I know what you’re feeling. But the sooner you get past your guilt, the easier it’ll be for you to deal with the situation if Nick really does start to remember details of that night. But, like they always tell us, he may not.”

“And that terrifies me, too. I struggle with what’s best for him to know.” Claire wished the
getting past
part were as easy for all of them as Richard made it seem. She crinkled the plastic cracker wrapper in her palm. “Then there’s Michael. He just can’t seem to get past
his
anger and move forward. I’m hoping that with some more time he will, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Well,” he paused, pondering Claire, “life does march on. Even if it’s not according to plan.”

“You don’t wrestle with your ghosts?”

Richard tilted his chair back onto two legs. “You’ve been married eighteen years?”

“Why are you changing the subject?”

“Tell me about the happiest time in your marriage.”

“What?”

“Just humor me.”

“Why?”

“Curious minds want to know.”

Claire tried to pull up memories, but everything seemed slightly out of focus and distorted, like the pressed-flower center of a glycerin soap bar. She mentally scrolled backward, until gradually some images grew sharper. There was the King Cole room at the St. Regis in New York, and the afternoon she and Michael had gone for Bloody Marys, and left at midnight with a pair of art deco–style table lamps under their coats—a wink and a nod gift from the waiter they’d befriended. They’d been dating for three months, Michael flying in on business from the Bay Area every other week or so. Life was beautiful then; both of their careers were on the upswing, their love was blossoming. Each date, she recounted, was a three-day affair of important cocktail parties, runs in the park, romantic dinners, closing the Rainbow Room after a night of dancing. On that particular day Claire had taken Michael to the MoMA for an Andy Warhol retrospective. And then on to the St. Regis, where they’d sat in the banquette under the Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole and drank and conspired for seven hours, giddily mapping out their future together. They barely made it to her apartment with their clothes intact, stopping under streetlights to kiss, and groping in shadowed corners. Claire got pregnant that night, she explained, and miscarried two months later just after Michael had proposed. But still, it was a magical time. She told Richard about extraordinary trips they had taken, about the beautiful home and family they had created.

“You know, Smitty, we guys are simple creatures—far less complicated than you of the fairer sex. We get clubbed over the head, we get pissed, we stew for a while. And then sometimes we go have a beer at the game with our clubber and talk about fastballs again.”

She smiled a little. “I don’t know. Those memories seem like a hundred years ago now. I hadn’t realized how much we drifted apart until I—” She looked away. “What if I can’t make him see the value of . . . going back to the game with me? He’s different somehow. Darker. I just can’t figure out what’s going on inside his head.”

“What about marriage counseling?”

“He has an issue with shrinks. It’s
not
how his family operates, letting outsiders into private matters. Besides, all of his decisions are like business decisions, and why would some interloper know better about his marriage than he would?” Claire recited Michael’s words with weary resignation.

“That’s not a totally unusual male perspective, Smitty. But look, I made some bad choices in my marriage, too. And I had to deal with the fallout—”

“I’ll do whatever it takes,” Claire said. “I have to.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I wasn’t prepared to be punished forever. Would you want to stay with someone who can’t forgive you?”

“I don’t know how
not
to stay with him. We’ve been together practically my whole adult life.”

Richard reached out for both of her hands this time, and held them firmly like a parent explaining the importance of looking both ways to a young child. “Is that guilt and habit talking, or love?”

“We made a commitment to each other, in spite of my lapse of reason. And I need to make this right.”

“Sometimes, Claire, there are truths we try hard not to see.”

She grimaced, recalling her sister’s analogous observation.

“Just some food for thought, Smitty,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “And I’m sorry if I’m overstepping here. It’s a tough thing, this separating business. But sometimes good can come of it. Happiness even.”

They sky was darkening to a grapey twilight outside the window, and the garden below had emptied of its last visitors. They pushed their chairs back into place under the table that had, over the week, become their usual spot, and headed toward the cafeteria exit.

“Wait,” Richard said, making a sudden detour to the cash register. A moment later he returned with a large cellophane-wrapped cookie.

“Peanut butter?” Claire asked.

“Specialty of the house.”

Inside the parking garage Richard handed her his business card. “It’s got my cell and e-mail on it. I want updates on Nicky’s progress.”

“Thank you.” She gave him hers, sincerely hoping their paths would cross again. “For everything.”

“I want updates on you, too, Smitty. And I’m great with all crises of the newly separated. Home Depot trips, insomnia, cable issues—although I’m a bit weak in the cuisine for one department, and generally defer to the deli Gods. But I
am
a good listener.”

“Yes, Mr. Elliot, you are.”

“Occasionally I even give decent advice.” They hugged each other like college pals on graduation day, warmly and poignantly, sharers of a unique history. “You’re going to be okay.”