The Daylight Marriage (10 page)

Chapter 17

K
aren Mekenner called Lovell soon after the arm bone was found to tell him that she and some other moms wanted to plan a vigil for Hannah. “When we heard the news, we thought that someone in town had to do something. I already got permission from a guy I know at Parks and Rec to use the town green. And I'm talking to Pastor McGrew over at Saint Patrick's later this afternoon about saying a few prayers. I mean, I know you guys didn't go there, right?”

“We don't go to church,” he said. “I—well, Hannah was raised Catholic.”

“Perfect then!” Karen said. “It'd be nice for you to say a few things too, Lovell.”

Despite how it may have sounded, the discovery of that arm bone was not in fact news about Hannah. There would be no match for a good long while. How many bodies had turned up in South Boston over the years, men and women both? The detective, Lovell himself, all these people outside the house—no one knew anything at all. This was how he presented the nonnews to the kids, and even Janine seemed stunned enough to want to believe him. This was how he defined it to his parents and Hannah's and to her sister.

The thought of Karen's gathering made Lovell want to crawl into his bed and refuse all contact with the world at large, but he knew he had to attend.

ON THE EVENING
of the vigil, he and the kids moved toward the front of a group of fifty or so others—Hannah's coworkers and friends in town, a few regular customers from the shop, her dentist, their car mechanic, dozens of people he did not recognize. A small, makeshift platform had been set up with a microphone for those who wanted to say something. It was a bitterly cold November night, and Lovell wished he had thought to wear a scarf and hat. He had agreed to read a Dickinson poem and took the xeroxed copy from his pocket. He did not have the heart to read one of her favorites, those plucky, morbid poems that danced with questions of illness and death. He had been glad to come upon a more hopeful verse, and with a lump in his throat, he read:

Our share of night to bear,

Our share of morning,

Our blank in bliss to fill,

Our blank in scorning.

Here a star, and there a star,

Some lose their way.

Here a mist, and there a mist,

Afterwards—day!

It sounded almost ironic now. When he had read it aloud at home, he had found it poignant but hopeful, and right for the occasion. Somewhat embarrassed, he moved back from the microphone and wrapped his arms around the kids' shoulders. He watched a line of women sing “Amazing Grace.” Karen Mekenner stood next to the head of the PTO at Ethan's school. As they sang, the women cupped their hands around white taper candles that they held, trying to shield the flames. Here they stood, these pleasant, “athletic stay-at-home moms” who had scraped against Hannah's sense of herself, who had not mirrored what she had wanted them to; here they stood, their faces on the ground, already grieving her, this woman whom they hardly knew. They were innocuous and lovely, nearly heartbreaking in all their naïveté and kindness.

Sophie and her husband appeared at the back of the group with their eyes trained on the ground. She wore a long trench coat and, from what he could see, a colorful silk scarf. Her short black hair had grown out somewhat. She was petite and stood only to her husband's shoulders. Lovell imagined her watching him up front on the platform, the kids on either side of him. From where she stood, it would appear that he was the one leading the vigil tonight.

A priest stepped forward and began to recite a prayer. Everyone bowed their heads as they took in his words. Hannah's attachment to Catholicism had grown tenuous, but it remained fundamental to her. They had married, against his initial wishes, at Saint Margaret on Martha's Vineyard, where she had gotten confirmed so many years ago. “I like the sense that someone else is responsible for us as a couple—that we're not totally alone in this thing that so many people have failed at.”

“But remember, you're marrying a nonbeliever.”

She replied, “We're not going to Vegas or some random justice of the peace.”

“I didn't say we should do that.”

“You got to decide about the proposal. You up and asked me right there on my parents' boat. We'd never even talked about it.”

“What an awful thing to do, propose.”

She only rolled her eyes. “I just want to have a say. I want to make some of the decisions.”

“Do you even—” he began. “Do you want to marry me?”

“I don't want to
not
marry you,” she said. “Hey—I don't want you to walk away from me. I don't want to leave.” She shook her head. “My parents have already booked the church. Forget I said anything. I want to get married. I do.”

He had thought that he would never meet anyone else like her. He loved her. He wanted her to be his wife, and he wanted to no longer worry about whether she would leave him.

JANINE CONTINUED TO
spend afternoons next door with the neighbors, when she did not have viola lessons or orchestra practice. She began to adopt what he assumed were Stephen's mannerisms and sayings. She complained about her “butch but hetty” art teacher. She complained about Lovell's cooking, his clothing, the fact that he needed “mad grooming.” Her comment about Jeff and Stephen's wanting to have a baby began to gnaw at him again.

He made himself just come out and ask her one evening: “How is it that you plan to help Stephen and Jeff with their baby?”

She reached for a pear in the bowl on the kitchen table. “You are shitting yourself right now, aren't you?”

“Well?”

“It's my body. I get to make my own choices.”

His own body went cold. “You already proved that when you cut off all your hair. Listen, you just turned fifteen. You are a kid. And you live in my house and I am the adult here.”

She licked her front teeth. “It's just sad that not everyone in our country gets to make their own choices.”

“Have you talked to them about it yet?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“When?”

“When I feel like it.”

“Will you at least think seriously about it?” Lovell said.

“I am doing that. I'm not an idiot.”

“Well, frankly, this would be an idiotic decision.”

“Just because they're gay doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to have kids.”

He felt himself grow warm. “Can't they adopt? Why the hell is this your responsibility?”

“Because they're my friends. They're more than friends—I love them.”

“You love them?” He rolled his eyes. “You love them. Come on.”

“Yes, I love them, and they really want a baby. And no, they don't want to adopt. They want the baby to have at least some of their genes.”

Maybe this was a fantasy for her, one that they would hopefully never entertain. She'd had plenty of fantasies before. After 9/11, she had threatened to run away because he and Hannah refused to drive her down to New York to help search through the World Trade Center wreckage for bodies. A year earlier, she had begged him and Hannah to let a new kid at her school move into their house, a kid who lived with his family at a homeless shelter in the next town. She was always trying to fight some cause or injustice in some completely absurd, if touching, way.

He said, “Jeff and Stephen also might not want the baby to have a teenage mother who lives next door. Would you—” he began. “Would you mind if I had a talk with them?”

“Shit. Yes, I would. You barely even know them. I don't want my
daddy
marching over there.”

He sighed. He looked over at her.

“Don't even think about going over there without telling me, bitch,” she said.

“You did not just call me that. I'm not your bitch.”

“Oh, please,” she groaned.

“I am not gay—and I don't think you are either, you know.” He couldn't help himself.

Chapter 18

I
f you wouldn't mind, the building is just around that bend.” Jamie gestured toward an adjacent parking lot.

“Now where?” Hannah asked. She waited for his reply. “Hey, I'm already going to be late for work.”

She finally pulled into a spot facing the harbor and shifted into park. “You're going to be late too,” she said. “Right?”

He leaned his head back against the seat and inhaled through his nose. “It's Mingus,” he said. “Young Duke. He asked his shrink to write the liner notes for this record.” The song ended and another came on, a discordant piece that made Hannah edgy as she always was with this sort of music, the unpredictable beat, those sudden stops and starts. He went on: “My folks sent me to a shrink a couple times when I was a kid, but the man was kind of boring. I felt bad for him, really.”

She half turned toward him.

“I'm sorry. Why would you care about that? I guess I must not want to work today. I must be trying to stall, going on and on as if someone like you would have any interest.”

“Someone like me?”

“You don't exactly project instability.”

“Really? I've been in therapy. The last time was a few years ago, once my kids were old enough and I had the time,” she said. “It didn't take. The doctor was a lot younger. I think she found
me
boring.”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I wasn't abused or anything. I wasn't anorexic or bulimic or schizophrenic.”

“What were you?”

She thought a moment. “Me.”

“That woman wasn't bored. She was jealous,” he said. He turned to her. His eyes moved from one side of her face to the other. “Why do you sell flowers?”

No one had ever asked her this, not even Lovell. “I don't know. I've done it since college. I used to deliver them.”

“Because it made people happy when they opened their doors and saw
you
holding all those flowers?”

“Could be.”

His fingers fiddled beneath his sleeves, and his feet tapped as if an explosive were hidden just beneath his surface. “Do you like me?”

“I don't know—I don't know you.” Her hands grew cold against the steering wheel. She gradually lowered them along the smooth circle until they rested at either end of its diameter.

“People know these things within seconds. They know who they like and who they don't and who they trust.” At last he looked away. “I like you.”

“Well, I guess I don't
dislike
you,” she said.

“I'm making you uncomfortable.”

She half shrugged. She did not want to agree with him, nor did she want to disagree.

“I still have a few more minutes before class starts. Let's take a quick walk down by the water. You can't beat the view here.” He unlatched his seat belt. “You want to call your work and tell them you'll be a few minutes late?”

“I guess I should,” she said. She reached for her cell phone in the glove compartment.

“Hannah!” Marcy said. “We were wondering where you were.” Her young, high voice was a surprise. Hannah's life was a world away.

“Janine is home sick,” Hannah said. She heard Mozart in the background,
Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
played on loop there from morning to closing time. “But I'll come in soon, in about half an hour or so. She'll just stay home and sleep today. Sorry about this.”

“It's OK,” Marcy said.

Jamie looked at Hannah as she apologized again before saying good-bye.

“Why didn't you tell her the truth?” he asked.

“What am I supposed to do, tell her I'm sitting in my car in Boston with some guy I just met?”

“I never lie,” he said with surprising earnestness. “Ask me anything.”

“Do you really work here?” She only realized that this had been a question for her after the words had left her mouth.

“I really do. Professor Trobec or Professor T., they call me. Today's lecture is ‘Conflicting Ideologies in the Analysis of Jazz,'” he said.

She paused and said, “Sounds conflicting in another way, jazz and ideology.”

“Yes. Hence the conflict.” He stepped out of the car and walked around the back to open her door for her. “Come on now, Hannah, let's go for that walk.” He offered his left hand, and she took it for a second, then let it go.

They made their way over a hillside that sloped toward a sidewalk and then the water. They passed a few college kids smoking, one a girl in black army pants and a yellow T-shirt, and then a young father with a baby in a stroller. Hannah thought of Janine and Ethan and his big green backpack tight around his shoulders that morning. She would leave soon. This strange moment and this person, this man, would become a memory. “I don't come into the city too often,” she admitted, as if to explain something about her behavior.

“Why not?”

“Well, the kids, and my job. Our lives aren't here.”

“
Our lives?
What do you and your husband like to do?”

“The usual stuff, I guess.”

“Oh, that.”

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Don't believe in it.”

“Why not? You're the noncommittal type?”

“I'm committed to not marrying,” he said. Speaking to him was a little like looking into a fun-house mirror.

She took in the panorama before her, the marbled sky and the opaque water, the buoys along the horizon. She tried to remember what this water and sky had looked like so many years ago with Doug, the moment before he suggested they get married and the moment after.

“I'll admit that I can't stand the thought of walking into that big gray lecture hall and seeing all those bored faces.”

She nodded. “I can imagine.”

“Because how often do I get to see a face like yours?” He suddenly shook his head back and forth like a wet dog. “Wait. What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“Ha! What do you know?” he said. “This whole time I've been thinking today was Wednesday. Lucky you. I don't have that class today after all.”