THE AFFAIR (31 page)

Utter despair weighed heavily on his shoulders, washing over him in waves, sapping away the little remaining strength he had left. He walked slowly up the drive, into the house, first to Erica’s old room that Mick had taken as her own for the past months.

He took the pillows from the bed, and then he walked up the stairs to his bedroom. He stripped away his clothes and climbed naked beneath the covers. He clutched Mick’s pillows to him. Breathing in her scent, he prayed for death.

Chapter Fourteen

I woke feeling slightly disoriented. Then I remembered. I was not in my bed, not in my home. I was alone in a hotel room a few miles from my house. My marriage was over.

I lay there in bed looking around the room. I had what I wanted, what I had at last demanded. I was free to start my life over again. I felt like hell.

I couldn’t resist knowing if Larry was okay. I dialed the number to my home.
It’s not your home any more,
Michelle
. The words came to me on a gentle breeze from somewhere in the room. I shivered and pulled the covers up around my neck.

The revelation filled me with terror. This was no longer my home I was calling. I wondered which of my children would answer the phone, what I would say to them. I waited with bated breath for someone to answer. I heard Larry’s voice and let out the moan I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Leave me alone, Erica, I’m fine.”

He hung up. He was hurting, that I had expected, but he was alone. That came as a shock to me. I’d expected all the kids to be hovering around Larry, trying to insulate him from the pain.

It sounded as if he didn’t want them there. That was strange. It had never happened before. Even when I begged Larry to go on a second honeymoon to Hawaii, he had gone behind my back and changed the plans, telling my mother after I’d had to beg her to keep the kids, that it wouldn’t be necessary, that we were taking them with us.

I thought about how happy he’d been on that trip, how happy the kids were. No one had noticed that I spent half the time alone in the room eating and watching television.

I swallowed, wanting to forget, not wanting to place the blame any longer for my unhappiness on Larry or the children.

I thought about all of them. Erica, my eldest and the hardest for me to get along with. It wasn’t her fault that she was a spoiled, obnoxious brat. We were her parents. It had been our job to teach her. Larry had adored her while I ignored her and her behavior.

I thought about the client calls I needed to make. I didn’t want to but I no longer had the luxury of not going in when I didn’t want to. I needed to get my finances in order. I needed to work.

I forced myself to shower, skipping breakfast, but ordering a strong pot of black coffee. I knew I was going to need the caffeine to get me through the morning. I dumped the nearly melted ice from the ice bucket, placed it in a towel and put it over my swollen eyes.

At two
P.M
. I was parking my car in the Brookfield Zoo parking lot. I had planned on getting there earlier, to be at the gate waiting for Blaine. I didn’t want to have him worrying that I might not show.

Blaine was waiting inside the gate for me. I forced a smile to my lips and marched toward him. He deserved one day not to worry about other people and their problems.

I stopped for a moment, taken aback by the unaccustomed shyness from Blaine. He was definitely uncomfortable. The light-hearted banter that generally existed between us was missing.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he smiled at me, “but I know what’s wrong. You left your husband.” He cast his eyes downward. “Listen, I know how hard this has to be for you. We can leave, do this another time.”

“Please believe me, Blaine. There is nowhere in the world I would rather be than here with you.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I want this day to be for you. I want to do whatever it is that you dreamed of doing when you were a little boy and wishing for a mother.”

“You do so much worrying about other people you have no idea of how to just relax and not try to take care of people. Believe me, Blaine, you can’t fix my problems. I know. My husband tried to do it. Only I can take care of them.”

We were heading toward the monkey cage. I stopped without warning, almost causing a group of school children probably there on a field trip to collide with me. Blaine pulled me to the side and over to a bench.

“Blaine, didn’t you hear me? I said I didn’t want to talk about this.”

I huffed and attempted a frown, wanting to make him believe I was annoyed. The problem was that Blaine didn’t annoy me. I realized that there might be some truth in what he’d said.

“Michelle, just a couple of questions and I’ll let it go. Why are you so hesitant to accept the help of a friend?”

I thought about it seriously. “Well,” I said to him. “I’ve always been the person doing the helping. I guess I just don’t know how to do it any other way.”

Blaine was stubborn, I gave him that. “My husband, sometimes too much. Blaine, I want to find out about you, how you became a professional psychic, find out about your life. I don’t want to heap my problems on you.”

“I have an idea. Why don’t we compromise?” Blaine offered. “You ask me a question, then I ask you one.”

I contemplated what Blaine had in mind, not sure how he was going to do it, but sure that he was going to get more information out of me than I wanted him to have.

“Have you ever heard of astral travel?”

I shook my head and got off the bench, heading in the direction of the peanut stand. I glanced back at Blaine. He had a huge smile on his face.

“I thought you were going to ask me something else. Why that question?”

“Michelle, I can see you haven’t played this game very often. I get to ask a question and you have to answer it. You can’t ask me a question until you do.”

He was looking at me in an odd manner. He had me wondering why he had skipped to this particular subject.

“Yes, I’ve heard of it.” I stopped there. I wasn’t giving more information than he asked for. Two could play this game. “Why are you asking?”

“Very good.” He smiled at me. “I’m just curious. I want to know if you believe in it. And this, Michelle, is a two part question. Do you believe you’ve ever done it?”

“Easy,” I retorted, “no to both.”

He stopped walking to look at me. “You’re really good at shoving things to the back of your mind, aren’t you?” He caught himself and put up his hand. “Never mind, don’t answer that. That’s not my question.”

“Then what is your question?”

He tilted his head to the side, giving me an ‘
it’s not your turn look.’

“Has Chance ever told you why he began the search for you?”

I should have known the talk would eventually lead to Chance. I didn’t want to talk about him, not right then. “Blaine, ask me something else.”

“I’m sorry.” Blaine handed the bag back to me. “I didn’t realize there were rules of conduct as to what one should talk about after separating from their spouse.”

He went and stood near the bars, looking in at the baboons. Oh, he was good, he was very good. I walked over to him, tugged on his sleeve and watched as he ignored the sign not to feed the animals and tossed several peanuts into the area, watching the baboons fight over the bounty.

“Okay, lets have this conversation and get it over with. I haven’t seen Chance in months and I’ve talked to him only once.

“In answer to your earlier question, no, he wanted to tell me why he began searching for me, but I didn’t want to hear it.” I stopped.

“Why?” Blaine asked.

“Just having the information that I did was almost more than I could handle. I couldn’t accept any more knowing. I guess Larry has rubbed off on me. I thought I was crazy to accept all of this without proof.”

Blaine was shaking his head and smiling as if he knew something that I didn’t. It was obvious he wasn’t about to volunteer the information. He forced me to ask.

“You know, you sound much more like a matchmaker than a psychic. It also sounds as if the two of you have been discussing me in great detail.”

I watched as Blaine forced himself to turn from the bars to peer at me. “Not as much as you might think. It seems you haven’t shared very much of yourself with either of us. Why?”

I smiled into his eyes, amazed that not long ago all I wanted was to stay as far away from him as possible. Now I found myself wanting to touch him, to remember what I wasn’t supposed to. I ran my hand down the curve of his wrist, feeling the familiar tingle. I stopped. This wasn’t a game.

“You’re stalling,” Blaine said as he captured my hand in his. I could tell he too was amazed at the connection we shared.

“Answer one question for me, and I’ll answer yours.” I took the lift of his brow for a yes, so I began. “All those years when you longed for a mother to take you to the zoo, did you ever imagine it would be to grill her about her love life?”

He started laughing hysterically. Before I knew what was happening, he lifted me from the ground and began twirling me around.

“You’re right. Let’s enjoy the zoo.”

Several hours later Blaine and I were beat. We’d ridden the train three times and walked miles. My God, did we walk, covering every square inch of the zoo at least twice.

For the first time in a long time I enjoyed it. There were no kids fighting, no one wanting to go to the bathroom every ten minutes. It didn’t feel strange at all that I was sharing something I’d done with my children dozens of time with this adult son I’d never had a chance to know. It felt right. We had fun.