Читать книгу Marriage in Jeopardy - Anna Adams - Страница 8

“MR. QUINCY, if you’ll bring your car to the front entrance, we’ll take Lydia down.” Patty, Lydia’s nurse, took her bag of belongings and passed it, along with the cup of flowers, to Josh. “We’ll meet you at the doors.”

Josh looked at Lydia, longing in his eyes. They’d finished a wary morning. He’d gathered her things, talked about dinner tonight, assumed they were going home together.

“Are you all right?” he asked, but she knew he was asking if she’d rather call a cab.

She hesitated. She couldn’t turn back again. This time, it was give up or give in. “I’m fine.”

After he turned the corner, Patty put on her reading glasses and peered through several sheets of paper. “Let me see.” She ran her index finger down the print. “Watch for a rise in temperature and extra sensitivity in your abdominal region that might indicate internal bleeding. No sexual relations for six weeks.”

“No—” She’d almost said “no problem,” but stopped just in time to avoid flinging her dirty laundry at Patty’s feet.

“These are the numbers for the nurse’s desk and for Dr. Sprague. Call if you have any questions.” Patty took off her specs. “I’m working Monday, Wednesday and Friday from eight until eight.”

Unexpectedly warmed by an almost-stranger’s concern, Lydia smiled.

“I’d like to hear how you’re getting along.”

“I’ll call.”

“Okay.” Patty looked up as an orderly pushed a squeaking wheelchair into the room. “Shall we?”

Lydia sat and folded her hands to hide their shaking. The town house hadn’t felt like home since she’d first begun to think about leaving Josh, but if she was starting over she had to go home.

The trip in the small blue-gray elevator went too quickly. As the doors opened, a cool gust of air blew in. Lydia breathed deep. The orderly pushed her past a long row of wide windows and delivered her to the sidewalk as Josh pulled up in their car.

“Thanks,” Lydia said to the man behind her, though she avoided his helping hands as she stood.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Best of luck.” He nodded to Josh and went back inside.

“Are you in pain?” Josh opened the passenger’s door.

She shook her head and let her hair blow across her face. She assumed his tenderness, as he eased her into the seat, was for the baby they weren’t taking home. He pulled her seat belt out, but she fastened it herself. “Thanks,” she said.

“I’ll take it easy.”

The bumps in the road didn’t matter. Neither did the stab of pain in her belly when Josh had to slam on the brakes for a VW bug whose driver sped through a red light.

“Damn it!” His ferocity had nothing to do with the bug’s driver.

“Can we stop?” She risked her first look at him since they’d left. “I don’t want to go home. I thought I could do it, but…”

He was clenching his jaw so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear his teeth shatter. He glanced into the rearview mirror and then checked over his shoulder and pulled to the curb. “Where do you want me to take you?”

She glanced into the backseat. She didn’t even have a sweater. “Nowhere’s practical.”

“Then come home and think about what you’re doing.”

“I was trying to, but it doesn’t feel like home.”

He nodded, a brief jab of his chin in the air. She didn’t blame him.

“I’m not trying to hurt you on purpose. I just don’t know how to pretend anymore.”

“And you can’t make up your mind?”

She looked out at the passing traffic, at the sun that seemed too bright for a day like this, and at a couple strolling by with their young daughter holding their hands.

“I’m panicking.” She wiped sweat from beneath her bangs. “But I want to be with you. I mean that.”

“Trust me.”

“If it were that easy, we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.” She folded her hands in her lap and glanced over her shoulder. “Let’s go. I’m all right. I won’t do this again.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t promise that.”

She searched his face for sarcasm but found only compassion. It made a huge difference because fear was driving her, and he had a right to be angry. A chip fell out of her massive store of resentment.

Still, she clung to the sides of her seat when he parked in front of the town house. “I’m glad none of the neighbors are out.”

He nodded and pulled the keys from the ignition. “They mean well, but I don’t know what to say when they tell me they’re sorry.”

They both got out of the car. Lydia planted her fists in the small of her back and stared at the wreath on their door, the open drapes she hadn’t been home to close. The baby’s nursery was on the second floor. She walked up the sidewalk as fast as her aching body would let her to avoid looking at that window.

EVELYN STARED at the white phone that hung on her white kitchen wall.

“I should call him.”

“He won’t feel better if you do.”

She jumped. “Bart, I didn’t know you were home.” Turning, she crossed the kitchen to take her husband’s coat and hang it on one of the pegs in the mudroom.

He took off his boots and stared at them. “I forgot to change when I got off the boat.”

“Put them in the bench. If we can’t stand the smell of our own lobster and fish and ocean water by now…” She didn’t know how to end that sentence. “It doesn’t matter. You really think Josh wouldn’t want me to call? Isn’t this different?”

“To us. Not to him.”

“We were supposed to have a grandchild.” A grandchild that might have brought Josh back to them.

Bart pulled her close and kissed her forehead. Usually that made her feel better. “For all we know, it’s brought back memories of Clara and he hates us more than ever.”

“You can’t blame him.” She wiped her mouth. Eighteen years since she’d had her last drink, but the thirst could still bring her to her knees. She stepped away from Bart and went to the sink, grateful for dirty lunch dishes. She started running the water and slid her hands beneath its warmth.

“If you want to call him that badly, maybe you should.” Bart gripped her upper arms for a minute and then let go. “I just hate that you have to prepare yourself to be hurt.”

“He might understand. He’s lost a child, too.” She thought of Clara. Rather, a memory of Clara stole into her mind. Her baby, in pink shorts that bagged almost to her knees, brown hair blowing across her eyes and a spade almost as tall as she was for digging in the sand.

Evelyn clenched her eyes shut and willed that wisp of memory to leave. She didn’t deserve to remember the good times, and the worst day was just a nightmare feeling she could call to mind. She’d been so drunk she only knew what had happened after her daughter had died.

“Josh didn’t lose his child the way we did.” Bart started toward the hallway. “I’ll wash up. You do what you have to, Evelyn.”

“Bart—”

He stopped. She wrapped her wet arms around him, finding his sea scents comfortingly familiar. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m tired of him pushing us away. But how can we complain? He raised himself. He was more father and mother to Clara than we were.”

“Not just because of you.” He looked backward in time. “The catches were so sparse. I was afraid I couldn’t feed you all. I’ve asked myself the same question since the day Clara… Why didn’t I work harder, instead of drinking harder?”

“And why couldn’t I want to be a mom?” Evelyn made herself say the words, each one like hammering a nail in her own coffin. Josh had been a total surprise to her and Bart. She’d wanted to be a teacher, but pregnant at nineteen, she’d dropped out of college. As a mom, she was a total misfit, never feeling the instincts that came naturally to other women.

She’d thought something was wrong with her colicky son, but no matter how many times she’d dragged Josh to the doctor, they just kept telling her he was fine—healthy—and she’d get used to motherhood. She’d tried some of Bart’s vodka one night, just after she’d put her baby to bed. The vodka had eased her pain.

Finally, it had numbed her.

She pulled Bart even closer. “I might have been better with their baby.”

“It wouldn’t matter. You think Josh would have let us see him?”

“He’s not cruel. He’s sad. We have to stick it out—if only because Josh feels as guilty about Clara as we do.” It was only after the state had put her and Bart in jail for eighteen months for negligence that she’d learned not to give up trying to be a good mother.

“He has no reason to feel guilty.”

“If he could believe that, maybe he’d learn to forgive us and be our son again. And I wonder if something’s wrong between him and Lydia. Even when they’re together, they— I feel distance between them.”

“What are you talking about, Evelyn?” He let her go and turned off the water just before it reached the top of the sink.

“If you disagreed with me, you’d say so. You’ve been worried, too.” She dunked the dishes into the sink, taking comfort from the clash of glass and stoneware. “It’s time we stopped just waiting for things to get better,” she said. “I’m going to ask them to come up here.”

Bart took the first plate she handed him. Even filthy from working on the boat, he started drying. It was habit. She washed. He dried. People with addictive, alcoholic personalities found strength in habits.

“Lydia might come. Josh won’t.” He set the plate down and then stared at his dirty jeans. “I’m stinking up the place. Let me shower and I’ll help you.”

“I’m fine. Go ahead.” She set a plate in the other half of the sink, her mind on her spiel to Josh. How could she convince him to come home and get over his sadness?

So aware of her thoughts after thirty-three years together, Bart stopped and said, “Listen to me, Evelyn.” His anxiety came through.

“He may turn me down, but how do you think Lydia feels in that house, with the nursery down the hall? Josh will come if he thinks it’ll help her.”

“Lydia loves us, but her loyalty belongs to him. She won’t come up here, knowing Josh can’t stand to be in this house.”

Evelyn turned. She put her hands on her hips, not caring when a marshmallow cloud of dishwashing suds dropped to the floor. “You forget—you can slide along, think you’re doing all right—but when you lose a child, nothing is ever the same. Lydia loves Josh, but she’ll be hating that room.”

They had a room of their own, hardly opened in the past eighteen years, still filled with Clara’s things. If she could have cut that room out of her house, she would have dropped it over the cliffs on the headland. And yet—it was all she had left of her daughter.

“You’d use Lydia?” Bart didn’t like that.

She struggled with a surge of guilt. “Use her, yes.” She couldn’t pretend to be better than she was. “But I love her as if she were ours. She needs a mother and father as much as Josh does, and I want my son back. This family has lost enough, and I’m through waiting for him to come home.”

“You worry me, Evelyn.”

“We’ve tried to give him time to make up his mind.” She went back to the sink. “We’ve done enough penance. He’ll either cut us off or we’ll convince him at last that he can depend on us.”

“I don’t want him to cut us off,” Bart said.

“This half life of having him come around once or twice a year is good enough for you?”

“It’s what we have.” Bart opened the fridge. He studied the bottles of water and juice and then slammed the door shut. “It’s what we made.”

She started washing again. Bart, loving her, even after what they’d done, had saved her life. Was she about to risk losing him, too? “We can make something better.”

WRAPPED IN A pale yellow chenille blanket, Lydia stared at the evening paper, oblivious to the words. Josh came into the family room and set a cup of coffee beside her.

“Thanks.” She’d craved it. He’d brewed it.

He tucked the blanket around her feet. She tried not to move away from his hands.

Somehow, he knew. He looked at her with the knowledge of her instinctive rejection in his eyes. “Should you go to bed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. They just told me to call if I felt bad.” She hunched her shoulders and cupped her mug in both hands. The coffee should have been too hot, but it warmed her against a cold that came from deep inside.

“If you’re staying down here, I’ll start a fire.”

She glanced toward the fireplace. Gray ash and small black chunks crowded the hearth. The familiar scent of apple and wood smoke usually comforted her. “Okay, but then sit for a while. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”

Surprise made him look at her. “You want to talk?”

“I’d just like knowing you’re near.” She had to believe he wasn’t thinking up ways to get back to the office.

Nodding, he began to scoop the ashes into an old-fashioned coal scuttle they’d found in a shop in his hometown in Maine. No polished copper affair, this was a dusty, dented black metal working scuttle. Like their marriage, it had taken a beating. “Something’s on your mind,” he said.

She glanced at the phone, resting beside a stack of her library books on a table beneath the bay window. “I promised your mother I’d call when we got home.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it.

She’d seen his parents through his eyes at first. Alcoholics, who’d thrown his childhood down the neck of a vodka bottle. But he’d never given them credit for cleaning up after Clara’s death.

“They love us,” she said. “Both of us.” He didn’t seem to need his parents’ love.

“I don’t want to talk to them.”

“Okay. Josh?”

He stopped, midway across the room. A vein stood out on his forearm as his knuckles whitened around the bucket’s handle.

“Sometimes I wonder what I’d have to do to make you as angry with me.”

“As angry?”

“As you are with your parents.”

“Are you looking for an argument?”

“No.” But she was tired of trying to keep the peace. “I don’t know.”

“I get that you don’t want to be here.”

She couldn’t control a shiver as she thought of the nursery and their bedroom. She hadn’t forced herself to climb the stairs yet. Too many memories waited up there. “Listen.” She willed him to understand how the nothingness pressed in on her. “Don’t you hear the silence? I know you mean well, but all the fires and blankets and warm drinks in the world won’t help. I’m afraid to say anything because I’m hurt. And I’m afraid your mind is at the office.”

“What do you want?” Long and lean and unreachable, he went to the door. “I’m trying. I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t quit my job and sell this house today.” He glanced at the ceiling. “I feel that room, too, but this is our home. I want to learn to live with the empty nursery and your anger and my—” He paused, shaking his head. “My fear,” he said. “That you’re going to leave me because it’s my fault our baby died.”

“Let’s do something,” Lydia said. “Let’s get out of here, spend some time somewhere else, just the two of us.”

“And then come back to the problems you say we’ve ignored for years?”

The phone rang. A frown crossed his face. He picked up the receiver and scanned the caller ID. Then he crossed the room and handed it to her. “I don’t want to talk to them,” he said.

His parents. She clicked the talk button as Josh took the bucket out. “Evelyn?”

“How are you? Is Josh all right?”

“I’m fine. He’s quiet.”

“How quiet? You have to make him talk.”

Or he’d retreat from her as he had from Evelyn and Bart? “We’re settling back in.”

“Come up here instead.”

Lydia knew she should say no. Josh couldn’t talk to his mother and father. He’d refuse to see them. “I’m tired. Staying here might be—”

“Come tomorrow, then. You don’t want to be in that house right now. Let me pamper you and make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Let me have a daughter for a week or two.”

Her voice broke on the final plea. Lydia’s tears, never far away, thickened in her throat. “I want to, but you know how things are, Evelyn.”

“Josh will come if you do. Don’t give him a choice for once.”

Lydia laughed, as convincingly as she was able. “You wouldn’t take advantage of me to soften Josh?”

“I guess I would.” Evelyn was always truthful. “But I only left the hospital because I knew he didn’t want me there. I’ve worried about you. Come let me look after you.”

“Josh is taking great care of me.” Lydia jumped to his defense.

“I’m saying Josh may not tuck you in, or make sure you have nice clean sheets warm from the dryer.”

“I’m not taking to my bed.” But such loving concern tempted her.

“And Josh won’t bring you lobster fresh out of the trap. Bart will bring enough for both of you. Come, Lydia. And bring our son. Families should be together when they’re hurting.”

Lydia licked her lips. It was not a perfect answer, but she couldn’t stand this house. She dreaded sleeping in her own bed, seeing the baby clothes stacked on the end of her dresser, the copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting on her nightstand. “I can’t do that to Josh.”

“Ask him.”

“It’s not right.” And if she asked and he said no, she’d resent him for not seeing how much she needed to be away.

“I understand, but when do you think our family should try to love each other?”

Lydia splayed her fingers across her belly. All her hopes had died, and raising them was proving difficult. “I’m sorry, Evelyn. I can’t answer you.”

JOSH EMPTIED the ashes into the garbage can behind the door to their walkout basement. He gathered a couple logs from the pile beside the fence. But then he couldn’t make himself go inside. As long as he stayed out here, he had an excuse to avoid talking to his parents.

Ridiculous. Childish.

He didn’t care. His guilt over losing his unborn son hurt enough, but it had also opened the lid on his guilt about Clara. He should have found a way to keep her safe when he couldn’t be home. It hadn’t been normal for a high school freshman to take all responsibility for his five-year-old sister, but he hadn’t had a choice.

He turned his attention to the dead plants in the small yard. He put down the logs. Halloween was in two days, and the cool weather was upon them. Usually, he and Lydia had cleared out her summer garden by now, but purple and blue flowers had spread as far as the gray-brown plants the frost had already killed.

“Josh?”

He turned, a couple of withered begonias in his grasp. She stood in the doorway, her hands braced on the frame.

“You should stay away from those stairs. They’re too narrow and you’re not steady on your feet.”

“I’m all right.” She’d never accepted help or advice with enthusiasm. “What are you doing?”

“Yard work.” He yanked another brown, crumbling shrub out of the ground.

“You can come in now. Your mother hung up.”

“Did she ask you to go to Maine?”

Lydia widened her eyes. “How did you know?”

“Know my mother?”

Lydia let that question lie. “She asked us both, but I told her you wouldn’t want to.”

Another plant gave up its grip on the ground. “You were right.”

“So we stay here.”

“Where you don’t want to be.”

She started to turn away, but hesitated, distraction on her face. She loved his parents. If not for him, she’d have jumped at the chance to visit Maine.

He reached blindly for a shrub, breathing in as he got a handful of sharp holly leaves.

Lydia went to him and opened his palm. “Are you all right?”

Not with her scent wafting off the top of her head as she peered at the drops of blood on his hand.

“What were you thinking?” She blotted his palm with the hem of her sweatshirt. Grateful for her tenderness, he didn’t have the strength to stop her.

“I’m realizing my parents will come between us some day.”

She froze. “Come inside and let’s clean that with something sterile.”

“They will, won’t they, Lydia? You’d rather be with my mother than with me right now. And my father’s always ready to ply you with lobster.”

“I was an only child. My parents are dead. Your mother and father have showered me with all the love you won’t let them give you.”

“Because of what they did to Clara.”

“And what you think you did?” The moment the words left her mouth, she stepped back.

He paused. “How long have you been thinking that?”

“Forever. I never had the courage to suggest you’re wasting your life and your parents’ love because you’re afraid you caused Clara’s death.” She wrapped her arms around her waist. Her sweatshirt billowed beneath them. Her unhappiness was easy to feel. “You did everything you could for Clara and your parents have paid their dues—in prison and in trying to win you back. Why throw away the kind of affection you wanted for yourself and your sister?”

“Because it’s too late.” He turned her, concentrating on keeping his hands light on her shoulders. “And I have no right if Clara can’t feel it, too.”

“That’s nuts, Josh.”

He urged her through the doorway, picked up the logs and shut the cold behind them. “I know. I can’t help it.”

TWO TRUCE-FILLED DAYS brought them to Halloween. Josh finished decorating the yard about noon and then found Lydia, dusting the little breakable things in her mother’s china cabinet. They’d hardly ever used the formal dining room. It must have felt safe to her, free of memories.

“What’s up?” He eased a plate out of her hands. “Did the doctor have cleaning in mind when they told you to take it easy?”

“I can’t sit still any more than you can.”

Understanding, he handed the plate back. “I’d better pick up some candy. You want anything from the grocery store?”

“I already bought some.” She shot an uneasy glance at the ceiling. “It’s in the nursery.”

Which neither of them had entered since she’d come home. “Okay.” If not for Lydia as a witness, he’d leave the candy in those bags and buy new. “I’ll get it.”

She braced herself, a heroine facing execution in one of those old movies she liked so much. “I’ll come with you.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll do it. One of us has to tackle that room, and I can’t face another shrine.”

She nodded, empathy in her eyes. “I finally understand why no one goes in Clara’s room.”

Josh climbed the stairs. He was starting to hate his own home. He stood in front of the door he’d closed that first night when the town house had bounced emptiness from every wall.

Treat it like a Band-Aid. Yank it off. He grabbed the doorknob and walked inside. Like a man gasping his last breath, he went to the changing table. Two shopping bags, each filled with diapers and two huge sacks of candy, sat on the plastic surface that smelled new. Unused. They wouldn’t even have memories of their child.

Josh snatched at the candy and turned. Only to face the crib. Where his son would have slept in a few more months. Where his child would never sleep now.

He stumbled. The candy slipped from his fingers, a bag at a time. He reached the crib on his knees.

He could barely see through his tears. He clutched the rails and pressed his face between two of them, crying so loudly the neighbors could hear him.

Lydia could hear him. He had to shut up.

“Josh.” She was at his back, dropping to her knees with her arms around him.

He yanked her close, and for once, she didn’t pull away. Choking into her hair, he fought for control.

“We can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve been hiding from everything that mattered to me here, and I can’t stand seeing you like this. Let’s go.”

Telling himself to be a man, Josh climbed to his feet and helped Lydia up. Pressing his arm to his eyes, he leaned down for the bags he’d dropped and then followed Lydia.

“I won’t go to my parents’,” he said. “Forget it.”

Stopping in the hall, she nodded. She closed the door, and he swore the pressure on his chest eased.

“I’m going,” Lydia said, robbing him of the ability to breathe at all. “You can come. I want you to come, but I’m going.”