The Husband Hour

by Jamie Brenner

  “Matt, open up. Henny told me you’re in there.”

  He stood from his desk chair and walked slowly to the door. The external door, an add-on to the original house, didn’t have a peephole.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “Okay, calm down.” He swung open the door to find a sweaty and disheveled Lauren Kincaid. She wore a Nora’s Café T-shirt, running shorts, and sneakers. Her hair was loose, damp tendrils clinging to the side of her face. Her cheeks were flushed.

  She marched into the room and closed the door behind her.

  “Can you turn a light on?” she said.

  He was already reaching for the switch. When he turned back, he found her standing with her arms crossed peering at his computer screen.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked. The screen was paused on a shot of the beach. Ethan wasn’t in the frame.

  “You have some nerve. I tell you I don’t want to do your movie and so you start harassing my family?”

  “In my defense, I didn’t harass your sister. I ran into her by chance at a bar and when I told her what I was doing in town, she was game for an interview.”

  Lauren leaned back against the desk, facing him. “I don’t know how people like you sleep at night.”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong, that’s how. Honestly, Lauren, I’ve gone into this project with the best of intentions. I admired your late husband. I want to pay tribute to him.”

  “Mm-hmm. And who does that benefit? Not Rory. You. It benefits you.”

  “This film will benefit a hell of a lot more people than it will me.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “Of course you do. Because that justifies you stonewalling me.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “And, what, you think my sister has some pearls of wisdom for the greater social good?”

  “Hey, she wasn’t my first choice. But you said no. I’m doing the best I can here.”

  Lauren seemed to consider this. He waited for her to take the bait. It was difficult not to smile when she finally asked, “What did Stephanie say?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lauren instantly hated herself for asking the question. She wanted to know what her sister had said on camera, and at the same time, she didn’t.

  She hugged herself, watching over Matt’s shoulder as he clicked through still images just slightly larger than thumbnail size, all of them numbered.

  Wait, was that her living room?

  “You were in my house?” she said.

  Stephanie filled the screen. She wore white jeans and a turquoise tunic; her hair was loose and gold under the light, her deep blue eyes arresting and steady as she gazed at someone off camera. Then, Matt’s prompt: “So Lauren met Rory through you?”

  “She was writing some article for the stupid paper,” Stephanie said. “The school paper. And she was like, Oh, I need to interview Rory. Can you give me his number? Like, she had zero interest in sports and suddenly she’s Bob Costas.”

  Lauren tensed, waiting for Stephanie to make it all about herself, as she always did. As she certainly could have when Matt asked, “How well did you know Rory prior to him dating your sister?”

  Lauren felt Matt watching her, and she struggled to maintain a poker face. Had he noticed Stephanie’s split second of hesitation before answering the question? Because Lauren saw it. She followed it with a sharp intake of her own breath, not exhaling until Stephanie spoke. “I mean, we hung out. Went to the same parties. I went out with some of his friends.”

  So she did have some sense of decency. It wasn’t that Lauren wanted Stephanie to lie, but why make something insignificant into a tawdry sound bite? For once, her sister had showed some class and restraint.

  Really, it wasn’t a big deal. Lauren hadn’t thought about the night of the party for years now.

  It had been early fall in her sophomore year of high school, a few weeks after Lauren first spotted Rory at practice. After the day at track, she’d seen him only one more time. Her second sighting happened during sixth period, when the halls were empty. She’d left the newspaper classroom to pick up a USB drive from the science room and passed him. They were the only two people in the hallway, and it was as if there were a magnetic field around him. Her heart pounded so hard she was afraid she would faint. Again, they made intense eye contact. But neither said a word.

  She felt a high that lasted for hours.

  Two weeks before Thanksgiving break, her parents went to New York for a wedding. They warned Stephanie: “No parties.”

  “I know!” Stephanie said.

  By seven that night, a Friday, their house was wall-to-wall people. It was surreal for Lauren to see upperclassmen she recognized from the hallways suddenly in her living room, sitting paired off on the stairs, drinking from a keg in her dining room. She drifted among the crowd, practically invisible, a stranger in her own house.

  When she got tired of trying to find someone to talk to, when she lost track even of Stephanie, she retreated upstairs. At the second-floor landing, she heard Stephanie’s bedroom door click open.

  “Steph?” she called out. But it wasn’t Stephanie.

  It was the hockey player.

  Seeing those dark eyes flash at her just feet from her own bedroom was the shock of her life. The only thing saving her from a complete freak-out was the realization that he was surprised to see her too.

  “I’m looking for my sister,” she said.

  “Stephanie?”

  Lauren nodded.

  “She’s in there.”

  With that, he brushed past her, went down the stairs. It took a minute for her to breathe normally again. It also took that time to process the fact that the boy she had been obsessing over for a month had just walked out of her sister’s bedroom. Maybe they’re just friends, she told herself, inching toward Steph’s room.

  She knocked softly on the door.

  “Party’s downstairs,” Stephanie called out.

  “It’s me.”

  Silence. The door opened a crack. Stephanie was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a tank top. She was braless, her breasts barely concealed by the thin fabric. Barefoot, she smoked a cigarette.

  “What’s going on?” Stephanie asked. Her eyeliner was smudged.

  “I’m going to bed,” Lauren said.

  “With who?” A wicked little smile.

  “Ha-ha. Very funny,” Lauren said.

  “Yeah. Okay, whatever. See you in the morning.”

  “Wait—Steph?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Who was that guy I just saw leaving here?”

  “Oh. That’s Rory Kincaid. Hottie, right?”

  Lauren nodded. “Are you…dating him?”

  “Dating him? It’s not 1985. Go to sleep, Laur.”

  The next time Lauren spotted Rory Kincaid in the hallway, she averted her eyes. Stephanie didn’t mention him again the rest of the year. But then came the article.

  Every week, the fledgling reporters for the school paper submitted their pieces. Some were assigned, some were spec. Senior editors put the paper together on Thursday evenings, and the writers didn’t know until Friday if their articles made the final cut. But the kids who’d been around long enough knew that their chances for getting published were higher if they wrote something for the favored pages.

  The editor in chief of the Merionite was a lanky, pale-faced guy named Aaron Rettger. His personal pet was the op-ed page, and he also paid close attention to the front page, the news section. The bastard stepchild of the paper was the sports section. According to Aaron, it was a waste of ink: “Anyone who gives a shit about sports goes to the games. They don’t even read the Merionite.” Lauren suspected his stance on the sports articles was based less on his instincts about their readership and more on his own bitterness over never having made a sports team in his life. In issues when they were tight on space, the sports articles were the first to be cut.

  This made Lauren’s assignment to profile the LM
hockey team, currently first in the division and headed to the state finals, a challenge. The dreaded sports assignment had little chance of being published. Still, Lauren was determined.

  She strategized the piece; hopefully, there would be a game that week that she could go to. And she would schedule interviews with the coach and a few key players. She started with the facts: The Lower Merion Aces were in the western division of the Inter County Scholastic Hockey League, the ICSHL. That year, the highest scorer in the entire ICSHL was Lower Merion’s team captain, Rory Kincaid.

  The first challenge of her journalism education would be getting up the nerve to talk to him. And then she remembered the Katharine Graham memoir and some advice Graham’s mother had given her: “Be a newspaperwoman, Kay, if only for the excuse it gives you to seek out at once the object of any sudden passion.”

  In Matt’s room, Lauren refocused on the computer screen. His interview with Stephanie concluded with a few innocuous questions.

  “What do you think?” he said to Lauren.

  “I think that you’re wasting your time here. I mean, aside from Stephanie’s stunning revelations about the social strata of Lower Merion High School.”

  He smiled. “Maybe you’d have something to say about other interviews. You could look at them and correct any misinformation. I’m interested in your perspective on what other people have said. Despite your cynicism, I do want to get this right.”

  “You think this is about me being cynical? This was my life, Matt! I’ve worked really hard to find some sort of peace.”

  “I get that. And if it’s any consolation, I’m hearing only good things about Rory. It’s all positive. Even the stuff about him hiding his concussions is totally understandable—”

  Lauren froze. “He never had concussions. Okay, he had one and he sat out a month. Everyone knows about that.”

  “That’s not how his former teammate Dean Wade remembers it.”

  Lauren’s hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palm. “Well, it seems you’ve got some unreliable sources.” How could Dean Wade have talked to him? And how could Dean’s wife, Ashley, not have told her about it? Ashley was her friend; she was on the board of directors for the Polaris Foundation!

  “So help me get it right,” Matt said.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “You were a journalist. You must believe in the truth. At least, you must have at one time in your life.”

  Lauren couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that. All she could do was leave.

  Beth lifted a box and felt a twinge in her lower back. She dropped the box and heard glass break.

  “Darn it!” She stretched for a few seconds, making sure she hadn’t done any real damage, then cut through the tape. Inside, she found shattered dishes. At least it wasn’t good china.

  “You okay up there?” Howard called from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Fine,” she said.

  She heard the clop of his footsteps climbing up. The last thing she needed was him bothering her.

  “Did you break something?” he asked from the top of the stairs.

  “No,” she said.

  “Beth, don’t make yourself crazy going through all of this junk. Just hire someone to take it to Goodwill. If no one’s missed it in all these years, no one’s ever going to miss it.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “I can’t just toss this stuff away sight unseen. What if there’s something important in here?”

  He threw up his hands in irritation, and she realized the conversation over the boxes was similar to the one they were having about the girls. Whatever was inside the boxes hadn’t been worth her attention in years and therefore never would be. Likewise, whatever was broken between the girls—between all of them as a family—had been broken for years and would stay broken. But Beth didn’t agree on either count.

  “Howard, it’s fine. It gives me something constructive to do.”

  The argument between the girls at dinner was terribly upsetting. And where had Lauren run off to?

  Howard sighed with disapproval and trekked back down the stairs.

  She was so relieved to see him go, felt such a remarkable lifting of stress in his absence, that she realized it was a good thing he was taking a trip to Florida. He would go, and she would stay, and the time apart would do them both good. She could deal with the girls without his judgment, and he could figure out their next move without the weight of her resentment about losing the house. Both houses.

  Reenergized, she turned back to the rows of bags and boxes, the front half of them loosely organized into three sections: boxes that were clearly hers, boxes and knickknacks that had belonged to her parents, and unmarked boxes or random things she couldn’t place. She stepped over a stack of full garment bags and made her way deeper into the room. In the space between boxes, she noticed a trail of tiny pellets. She groaned. Mice.

  She moved on to another section, packing boxes labeled in Lauren’s handwriting. Oh, good Lord. She kept things from her LA house up there? When Beth told her to put them in storage, this wasn’t what she’d meant. She bent down, reading the Sharpie scrawl: Rory/LM and Rory/LA/Press Clips.

  Beth would have to take care of these boxes. She didn’t even want to remind Lauren they were there. No need to reopen the wounds, although they already had been by that filmmaker hounding her. How dare he? What were people thinking? And Stephanie, going behind Lauren’s back to talk to him. Nothing Stephanie did should have surprised Beth at that point, but she still had hope that Stephanie would turn things around—for herself, and for the rest of the family.

  “Mom? What are you doing up here?”

  Lauren! Why did she feel like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar? “Oh, honey. I’m glad you’re home. Where did you go?”

  Lauren, her face red and her hairline wet with perspiration, walked closer to her. Why hadn’t she just taken the car? This obsessive running everywhere had to stop.

  “Why are you going through these boxes?” Lauren said.

  “Because I have to clear out the house, hon.”

  Lauren looked panicked. “There must be some other way—”

  Beth hated to cause her any more distress. It had been difficult to let her hide out at the beach for the past four years. But it was what Lauren wanted, and if Beth couldn’t change what had been lost, at least she could give her the sanctuary of the Green Gable. And now she had to take that away too. She felt a fresh wave of fury toward Howard. Why hadn’t her husband talked to her? How could he have gambled with the house behind her back? It was a betrayal—almost as much a betrayal as a sexual infidelity.

  “I’m sorry, hon. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “I have personal things up here,” Lauren said, her face reddening even more with emotion. She wasn’t going to cry—Lauren rarely cried. But she was close.

  Beth nodded. “I just saw the boxes. If you want, I can put them in—”

  “No!” Lauren said. “Don’t touch them. I’ll deal with it.”

  Beth sighed as her daughter retreated back down the stairs.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Matt unpacked his new running sneakers. At a quarter to five in the morning, it was still dark outside.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures, he thought grimly. And then: This is going to hurt. He got winded walking up the stairs to the editing suite back in Brooklyn. He hadn’t slept last night. How was he going to jog miles on the boardwalk in hopes of “casually” bumping into Lauren?

  It was a far cry from the days when he was running around tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asia, armed with only a camera. Back then, he didn’t need sleep, didn’t need food. Those weeks and months following his brother’s death, he was fueled by pure adrenaline and a youthful, reckless fury.

  The tsunami hit the day after his brother’s death. Matt, reeling from his grief, felt the pull of something larger than his personal tragedy. He had to do something. So he got on a plane to S
ri Lanka.

  Thailand had been a landscape of utter devastation. His photos captured as much as the camera could capture, and ultimately that was never enough. Across the region, two hundred thousand people had been killed. So many dead—almost enough to make him forget his own loss. Almost.

  Those photos started his career in journalism.

  Surely he could run a few miles to convince a widow to talk to him. Her reticence was nothing compared to his resolve.

  Sunrise caught Lauren by surprise; her precious darkness was slipping away faster day by day. She would have to start getting up earlier. Today, she dragged herself through the run, first sluggish, now fighting light-headedness.

  Ride it like a wave, she told herself. If it got really bad, she had a protein bar in her pocket. But it always felt like a defeat to stop. No, she wouldn’t be sidelined by her body’s weakness. It was bad enough that she constantly had to fight her mind.

  In her dreams last night, it was that sophomore-year party all over again. Except instead of looking upstairs for Stephanie, she was searching room to room for Rory, her panic mounting with each closed door. She woke up, heart pounding, at three in the morning and never fell back asleep.

  Push through! She moved faster, her chest heavy with each intake of oxygen. A low-flying seagull swooshed past her. She loved the birds, envied the birds. Her legs were slow, but her thoughts raced with the questions from Matt’s interview with Stephanie.

  Lauren remembered the days when she had been the one asking questions. God, she hadn’t thought about that Merionite article in so long. She’d spent so much time trying to forget the ending that she never let herself remember the beginning.

  She’d enlisted Stephanie’s help.

  “I don’t get it. You’re writing an article about him?” Stephanie, sitting cross-legged on her bed, barely glanced up from her phone. Just a few months earlier, Lauren had met Rory in the dark hallway outside that very bedroom. She shook the thought away.

  “No! Not about him. It’s about the hockey team. But he’s the highest scorer. I have to get a quote from him.”