“Maybe we should have a snowball fight,” I said, smiling at my knight in sweater, slacks, and overcoat.
He smiled too, a smile I adored, and turned off the engine.
“Miller and I loved few things more than playing in the snow,” he said. “We started hoping for it in October. We made snowmen—or I should say, snow cowboys and Indians—and we built snow forts and had hundreds of rounds of snowball ammunition.”
“I rarely went out in the snow when I was a girl. I watched the spectacle from the windows of our condominium. But my best memory of my mother took place when we were stranded at home during a blizzard. Maybe that’s why I love snow so much.”
I began to shiver. “I should go in,” I said, though that was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Don’t go,” he said, restarting the engine, the heat returning. “You’re right—it’s beautiful, and this is the perfect place to view it.”
“It’s true,” I said, looking around me. “We’re in a snow globe!”
We watched the giant snowflakes dropping daintily now to blanket the hood of Clay’s Tahoe, and then he turned to look at me. He seemed to be studying my face. “You’re like the snow, Kendy.”
“White? Cold? Deep?”
Was I being obtuse? Or coy? Both were unlike me, but isn’t that the problem with similes—they can miss the mark? Or did I simply want him to say what wasn’t vague at all?
“Beautiful,” he said. “You’re absolutely beautiful.”
I was a thirty-eight-year-old woman, aware, like many women I know, that I was attractive enough, but I couldn’t recall the last time I’d heard someone say such a thing. Of course, if it does not occur to your husband to say it, who will? Is it ever appropriate for another man to tell a married woman she is beautiful? And isn’t it pathetic to enjoy hearing it so much?
I turned to inspect the landscape outside the passenger window so intently that Clay might have thought I hadn’t heard him.
Except he knew I had.
Had he intended to fluster me?
When I turned back around, he was leaning against his door, still looking at me as though he hadn’t said something that both embarrassed and ridiculously pleased me. I’m sure I surprised him then; I know I surprised myself. I leaned against my door and looked at him as studiously as he was looking at me, with as much interest, with as much desire. I had never been so audacious, eschewing propriety, forgetting completely the virtue of restraint.
The engine was still running, but he had turned off the windshield wipers, and we could see nothing but snow and each other. For a few brief moments we could imagine we were alone in our snow-globe world. That was the first time I kissed Clay Laswell—gently, and then with a fierceness that comes from months of curiosity and pent-up longing.
Why the fascination with what we cannot have, should not have? And why do the doubly blessed so often want more? I really don’t understand it, this problem as ancient as Eden. Even now, all these years later, it is a mystery to me.
I finally went into the house that day, thinking, There, that’s done, I’m free.
But of course I was not free. There were other kisses, other times he held me, other times he did not want me to go. I can hardly bear to think of these generalities, much less the specifics.
Most of that particular brand of madness was confined to a frantic two-month period. The following February in a Wal-Mart bathroom, Maisey by my side, I discovered I was going to have a baby. How could that be? Why would such a miracle be bestowed on me now?
I knew the exact night Luke and I had conceived the child. It was New Year’s Eve, when Maisey was celebrating at a church lock-in. Luke decided, of all times, we should celebrate alone rather than with family or friends. But although initially I had wanted to attend a party, had bought a dress at an after-Christmas sale anticipating one, Luke and I ended up having a lovely evening together. We ate in front of the fire, put on our favorite CDs, and actually danced the new year in. He told me he loved me, and I believed him. With a will I thought I no longer possessed, I pushed Clay out of my mind and gave my husband this time, gave him myself like a gift.
But with the morning light, life returned to the normal that had numbed me for so long, except Clay and I didn’t see each other every single chance we got as we had been doing. And after I got the amazing news about the baby, we were alone together only twice: the day in my classroom when I told him I was pregnant, and the day I went to his office in April to give him my resignation. He still could hardly believe I was pregnant. I didn’t look pregnant.
“Are you sure you want to quit?” he asked.
“I have to,” I said. “I was home with Maisey until she started school, and I want to be home with him.”
“Him? You already know it’s a boy?”
“I haven’t had an ultrasound yet. I just think this baby’s a he.”
“That would be nice.”
I looked at my hands folded in my lap. “I have to quit for other reasons too, Clay. You know that.”
“This is crazy, Kendy,” he said. “Just crazy.”
The “this” was vague, which was appropriate, for it could mean so many things. I realized, for instance, that for this meeting I had chosen to wear a cotton sweater the shade of blue he loved me to wear.
“We are crazy,” I said.
He laughed.
I smiled only faintly, shaking my head slowly back and forth. “You know it’s not funny.”
“I wouldn’t have laughed, except I’m crazy.”
“You will regain your senses.”
“Do you know how much I love you?” he said.
Words so thrilling to hear. And so awful.
I sat there trying to fathom what he had said, while at the same time recalling the sweet, pure excitement I had felt sitting in this exact spot sixteen years earlier, talking with this charming man about the possibility of being a fourth-grade teacher in his elementary school.
“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it out again, “I’m sorry to say I love you too.”
I stood up and walked to the door. With my hand on the doorknob, I turned and looked at him, still sitting at his desk, my resignation in his hand. “You do realize,” I said, “that we will have to get over that.”
“No other option?”
“None at all. At least, none either one of us would really want to consider.”
We didn’t see each other again until the July morning he stopped by with tomatoes from his garden. “For Maisey,” he said when I let him in the back door. He and Maisey had been cultivating tomatoes together for at least ten summers. I told him she had just left for camp, but we’d take them anyway.
Except for the Fourth-of-July family gathering, I hadn’t seen Clay since school had let out. I couldn’t believe he was sitting at my kitchen table, looking so healthy with his summer tan. I had thought of him every day. I hadn’t stopped loving him yet.
“You look good,” he said.
“I feel good.”
I asked him if he had hired someone to take my place, and he said he didn’t want to talk about that. I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes. He shouldn’t have gotten up, he shouldn’t have put his arms around me, he shouldn’t have kissed me one last time, and I shouldn’t have kissed him back.
Then Maisey wouldn’t have tiptoed into the kitchen and found us that way. Then she wouldn’t have walked quietly away from a mother capable of such unfaithfulness.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Maisey
“Was she a good mother?” Marcus asks when we aren’t far from home.
“Well, yes,” I say, “I guess I’d have to say she was overall.”
Then I put in my earphones and stare out the window again. I don’t feel like proving my assertion with details, though Mother taught me to do that when I was a mere child.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I’d say.
“What’s beautiful about it?” she’d ask, wanti
ng me to observe the day’s specific glory, wanting, she said, to benefit from my perspective.
The trip to Indy has done a number on my nice clean car. Marcus is getting quarters out of the change machine to wash it again. He doesn’t believe in drive-through car washes, and if he can find a do-it-yourself car wash with unlimited time, or at least a ridiculous amount of time, he is in heaven. Today I’m glad he has found this bliss. I’d like to have a few minutes to myself. The inside of the car is still spotless, so I have the luxury of just sitting here, staring through a windshield slathered with soap and drenched with water.
I’ve been thinking about my culinary ability—rather unusual, I think, for one my age. Jackie’s specialties are frozen pizza and instant pudding. I can make a coconut crème pie with a flaky crust. I can make lots of cookies, including our favorites—chocolate chip and peanut butter. I can make at least six kinds of soup from scratch. I can make stuffed peppers and cashew chicken. I got on a cooking kick when I was in the fifth grade, and Mother taught me how to make these things and more. By the time I was in the seventh grade I could make everything but the cashew chicken by myself. Our apartment has a great kitchen, and I am stocking it with everything I need to make Marcus happy he’s married a chef.
Mother taught me to cook. That was good.
It is also good that my parents were very nearly omnipresent. When I looked into a crowd at a ball game or a concert, I would find them there, clapping wildly at a concert, hollering with the best of them at a ball game. That wasn’t true for all of my friends. Some parents weren’t interested enough. Some were too busy. Even Jackie’s parents couldn’t always be there, since they were trying to keep track of five children.
My parents’ commitment is just one more reason Jackie quite lovingly calls me Spoiley Girl. Besides orchestra and basketball, I held an office in the Honor Society, wrote for the school newspaper, and attended church activities without end. Dad called me well-rounded; Mother called me busy. But they came to games and concerts, inductions and award ceremonies. Mother cut out my newspaper articles and hung them on the refrigerator.
“I’m not in first grade,” I’d say.
“No first grader could write like this,” Mom would say, securing each new article with a daisy magnet.
I became Activities Queen, with a full schedule of games and concerts when I started eighth grade, a month or two after my mother lost the baby and temporarily dropped out of life. That hiatus changed everything. In my opinion she might as well have been in Outer Mongolia. She was that absent from our lives.
That was the first Halloween the girls didn’t sleep over since the four of us were in third grade, something we’d done even when Halloween was on a school night. “Your poor mom” was their take on it. I just stuffed my things into my duffle bag and huffed out the door to spend the night with Jackie. It was the end of October, for goodness’ sake!
That Thanksgiving Dad and I showed up at my grandparents’ without Mom. She had actually planned on going, but at the last minute said she just couldn’t do it. Not yet.
That ticked me off. “Do what?” I asked Dad in the car on the way to Indy. “Can’t eat Thanksgiving dinner? She didn’t even have to bring anything.”
Dad said she wasn’t ready to attend a social function. I said dinner at the grandparents’ didn’t exactly qualify as a social function. When he sighed, I let it go. But I distinctly recall looking out the window and thinking, Who the heck cares?
Dad explained more than once that Mother was depressed, something about an “episode.” Only the episode was lasting longer than even he expected. “She’s just so sad, Maisey. Just keep praying, and your mom will be okay one of these days.”
Dad didn’t know I wasn’t talking to God about Mom.
I felt sorry for him when the Christmas season arrived, Mother’s favorite, and she still wasn’t okay. She went to the Christmas Eve service with us, sitting there like a zombie, but Dad and I put up the tree and did the Christmas shopping and wrapped the gifts. She watched us open our gifts Christmas morning, pleased with everything I opened, which had been purchased, I found out later, by either Dad or Paula.
On Christmas Eve, when we open one gift, Mother handed me a tiny box that she brought from her bedroom. This one, apparently, she had bought before catastrophe struck. “I hope you like this, honey,” she said, tears brimming in her eyes. “I should have given it to you for your thirteenth birthday,” she said. “But you know how I love Christmas, so I saved it for your thirteenth Christmas.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the package and finding a pinky ring, a band full of tiny diamonds. I gasped, slipped it on my finger, and without thinking, walked over to Mother’s chair and held out my hand to show it to her. She smiled. “It’s beautiful,” I added before I remembered seeing her in Clay’s arms on that disgusting day in July. Instantly, pleasure was replaced with irritation. I began helping Dad gather wrapping paper and followed him into the kitchen to load the dishwasher. She came in, kissed Dad and me, and told us good-night before she headed back to her dark room.
That spring things were finally fairly normal, and one evening the following summer while we were eating dinner on the patio, she looked across the table at me and said, “I’m sorry I missed so much of your life last year, Maisey.”
I stood up and said, “No problem,” before I rushed into the house to get more ice. I like my drinks to have plenty of ice.
From the eighth grade on, my friends seemed to live at our house, especially Jackie. Mother continued taking me to Indy to shop three or four times a year, only now Jackie went too, and sometimes Heidi and Caitlin. They were always asking when we were going again. She was the mother who took us to concerts during the winter and amusement parks each summer. During those years, Mother always had to have a five-passenger vehicle—at least.
In the summer when the girls came over to swim, everyone took a turn sitting on a lounger by Mother, telling her a good story or asking her advice about something or other. She listened to them, and they listened to her. She was forever their teacher and friend. Sometimes I felt like telling them to go home, she was my mom—but then I’d remember what she had done, and I was glad someone was there to divert her attention from her only child.
My friends, my dad, and my activities were a buffer between my mother and me, and when I graduated from high school, a university two states away took over where they left off. But today, watching the water pour in sheets over the windshield, this thought has occurred to me: If I were dying and my life flashed before my eyes, the first thing I would see, and the last, is my mother.
Kendy
I do hope that’s the last pit stop before I get to the hospital. I’m making good time, despite two stops, and I should be at the hospital by three. I haven’t even turned on the radio or listened to CDs. I’ve hardly been aware of time passing, of miles covered.
I am aware, however, of the time travel I’ve been doing since I pulled onto the interstate. Now I’ve landed in my dark bedroom, where much of a year was lost to me.
I have looked at it another way as well: During those many months, I was lost. I wandered in “a far country,” not really wanting to find my way back home. Home was too painful. Home was where I had betrayed my husband; home was where I had lost our baby boy.
I lost him on a Friday morning, the week Maisey was at camp. Luke had not yet left for work when the cramping and bleeding started. I was doing nothing more strenuous than making our bed. It didn’t matter that the chances of my becoming pregnant were so slim I never bothered with any type of birth control, and it didn’t matter that my doctor had said the chances of carrying the baby to term were minimal. I had seen my son’s heart beating on the ultrasound monitor, I had felt him moving inside of me, and I had already imagined Miller Luke’s chubby arms encircling my neck.
“Luke!” I called that morning, holding my stomach with both hands, as if that could keep our son safely in my womb.
We we
re at the hospital in less than an hour, but though I’ve heard of incredibly premature babies surviving, our son did not. He lived only long enough for Luke and me to see him, to hold for the briefest minutes his tiny form wrapped in a warm blanket, to say, “We love you, sweet boy.” To say good-bye.
If only I could have kept him safe inside of me a little longer. If only I had been restricted to my bed sooner. I must have repeated those if only’s ten times on the way home that afternoon, each time Luke nodding as though he had just heard it. I barely remember standing in the cemetery that Monday morning with Luke, Maisey, Miller, and Anne—all five of us crying, Maisey standing beside her dad, squeezing his hand. I stood between Luke and Miller, already beginning my journey to a place where I hoped no one could find me.
I hardly got out of bed the first month. Luke asked Miller and Anne to let Maisey stay with them until school started, not wanting her to see me so devastated. He told Maisey that I wasn’t myself, that I needed time to get over losing her baby brother. Luke had never seen me in such a state or anything remotely close to it. Most evenings he would come in and lie beside me and try to engage me in simple conversation about his day or Maisey’s. I’d lie there with my arm crooked over my eyes and try to listen, and then I’d turn toward him and listen to the sound of his voice with my eyes closed. I remember his hand on my shoulder, his kiss on my forehead.
I got up, of course. I had to go to the bathroom. I also showered some days but quickly and without fooling with my hair or applying makeup. When Luke came in from work, he’d check on me, ask if I’d eaten anything, insist I have something for dinner. I knew I had to cooperate to an extent or he would snatch me out of my hiding place and take me to a doctor or the hospital. I began to eat some of whatever he brought: soup, a sandwich, a salad, even a piece of fruit, if he would just let me be. “Thank you,” I’d say.
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