Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  “That’s a very rude habit,” he informed her from the edge of the umbrella.

  “What is?” she said without breaking stride.

  “Turning and walking away. You do it a lot.”

  “You’ll get poked if you stay there.” The umbrella was bobbing with each step, its spiked tips perilously close to Noah’s face.

  “Raise the umbrella.”

  “I’ll get wet.”

  “Okay, then stop walking and tell me why you can’t stand still.”

  His saying she couldn’t do it was reason enough for her to prove him wrong. She stopped walking and stood still in the rain. “I walk away because I have places to go and things to do. My life has become complicated in the past two weeks. I’m feeling stressed. Besides, I don’t know how to deal with you. You’re intimidating.”

  “Me?”

  She stared at him.

  “Okay,” he conceded, “so I’m authoritative.”

  “And large and imposing and persistent.”

  “Those are qualities that get things done.”

  She thought of their night on the grass. He had been large and imposing and persistent then, but in incredibly appealing ways. Given her frame of mind, she hadn’t had a chance.

  She started walking again. He was beside her in an instant. She tried to steady the umbrella.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  She humored him. “What am I thinking?”

  “You’re thinking that you were vulnerable that night and that I used those same qualities to accomplish the seduction that I’d had in mind right from the start, but you’re wrong. If I’d had sex on my mind when I was driving over there, I’d have brought a rubber.”

  Paige glanced around nervously. “Can’t we talk about this another time?”

  “I’d like to, but you keep shooting me down. Tell me when, and we’ll talk.”

  But Paige changed her mind. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to forget that anything had happened that night, and God willing, once she got her period she could do that. “Look,” she said with a sigh, stopping again well short of the crowd waiting at the edge of the woods, “there really isn’t any point in talking. What happened the other night was an aberration. It was a weak moment for me. I promise it won’t happen again.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  “Because,” she said deliberately, “there’s no future to it. My life is chock full. I have more than enough to keep me busy without juggling a relationship with you, and besides, you’re here for a year, then you’ll be gone, so what’s the point?” She started walking, quickening her pace when a runner emerged from the woods.

  It wasn’t one of Mount Court’s. Nor was the second runner. Or the third. Sara, who was indeed the first of the Mount Court girls to cross the finish line, was the seventh overall to do it. Annie placed second for Mount Court, eleventh overall, Merry third, fourteenth overall.

  It was a dismal showing for Paige’s team.

  She didn’t say as much to the girls. Nor did Noah, who commended each—with enthusiasm—on a fine run as she crossed the finish line.

  Unable to forget what he had told her—fascinated, actually, the more she thought about it—Paige watched him with Sara. He asked her how the course had been, asked her where she had felt strongest and weakest, and told her no less than three times how well she had run. She answered him in a bare minimum of words, and when he put a hand on her shoulder, she turned away.

  Paige felt for him. She didn’t want to, but she did. It seemed to her one of the great tragedies of life that families couldn’t get along.

  “Dear Lizzie,” she read later that afternoon, as she sat on the floor, rocking Sami in the portable swing:

  I’m not sure when it started, I think way back when I was little and couldn’t seem to do things right. My mom wanted me to be her little helper, but I had too much energy to be cooped up in the house. I wanted to be with my brothers. They were out running around all the time, going back and forth from town. I wanted to be meeting people and seeing how the rest of the world lived, not stuck at the house.

  You were lucky. Your parents were different. You could do what you wanted.

  Paige put down the letter. She was the intruder, the eavesdropper, the Peeping Tom on Mara’s thoughts. She knew it was wrong to read another person’s mail, had deliberately left the packet of letters at Mara’s the night before so that she wouldn’t be tempted, but it hadn’t worked.

  On her way home from Mount Court she had detoured to the house, which the family moving to town had adored. Preliminary papers had been drawn up. They were hoping to move in within the month, which left Paige the unenviable task now, on top of all else, of disposing of its contents. On this day, her sole conscious intent had been to take home the best of Mara’s photographs, but with little more than a fast glance at the photos she had gone to the wicker basket and dug through the balls of yarn until her fingers had hit the packet of letters. When she drew it out, she found that it was a different packet from the other, these letters written on blue stationery, tied with red yarn. On impulse she had upended the wicker basket and found four packets in all, each containing anywhere from six to ten letters. Taking a single photograph to ease her conscience, she had brought the letters home.

  She would send them on, perhaps, one day when she could bear to part with them. For now they seemed the only source of clues to the mystery of Mara.

  “Do you remember the time,” Mara wrote on:

  when I turned eight and wanted to have a birthday party at the rodeo that came to town? My parents said no. They said a rodeo party wasn’t right for a girl, and the more I argued, the angrier they grew, but I wasn’t giving in. I spent my eighth birthday alone in my room, and they let me sit there. I kept thinking that if they loved me, they’d come get me, but they didn’t, and then when I finally came out they told me know how much I had disappointed them.

  I did that a lot, I guess. I still do. Next week is Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday—

  which dated the letter to three years earlier, Paige realized, and read on:

  They’re giving him a party. I wouldn’t have known about it if Chip’s wife, Bonnie, hadn’t called and said that the boys talked with my mother and they all agreed that I ought to be there. When I mentioned a gift, Bonnie said that the best one I could bring my dad was a son-in-law. She said it with a laugh, but I knew she wasn’t kidding. They all keep hoping that I’ll turn up with a husband and a pack of kids, and buy a house right down the street just like Johnny and Chip did, but I won’t. I can’t.

  What’s wrong with being a doctor? Most people think it’s a noble profession, but every time I think of it, really stop and think of it in the overall scheme of life, I feel guilty. Okay, so my dad had an ear infection that was misdiagnosed long enough for him to lose hearing in that ear. So my mom would have had another girl after me if the doctor had gotten to the hospital in time to unwind the umbilical cord from her neck. Does that mean all doctors are bad?

  I wonder what another girl in the family would have been like. Probably just like they wanted me to be. Maybe they’d have stopped harping on me if they’d had her. Then again, maybe not. I could never be the invisible type, though for the longest time, I tried. I steered clear of them all and just went about my own business, but I annoyed them doing that, too.

  Your life is so different from mine. I always envied you that. You make people happy, and that makes you happy. You may not have a fancy degree, but you feel satisfied with your life. Me, I can’t seem to keep things together, not the things that matter most. I do so much, and still I fail.

  Pained, Paige set the letter aside. She didn’t understand how Mara could consider herself a failure, but the thought had been in the first letter, too.

  “How are you doing, sweetie?” she asked Sami, who was a small lump in the formless seat of the swing. Carefully she lifted her out, and in a voice so light that it belied the gist of the words, sai
d, “She wasn’t a failure, but she was coming from a different place from her parents. Like me, I suppose. Only I have Nonny.” She folded her legs and propped Sami in the middle, then squiggled a finger toward the little girl’s tummy, tickled for a minute, withdrew, and squiggled forward again. “I think you’re putting on weight. There’s more here than there was this time last week.” She tickled. “Come on, Sami. I want a smile. Just a little one to let me know I’m doing things right.” She was in the middle of another squiggle when the phone rang. She answered it with Sami propped on her hip.

  “Hello?”

  “You asked what the point was,” Noah said without preamble, “and I say that the point is pure fun. You have too much going on in your life to be involved, and I’ll be outta here at the end of the year, but in the meantime it might be nice to have some fun.”

  She took a steadying breath. Even his voice upped the temperature a notch. “Fun is watching a movie or playing Boggle or discussing a book. What we did wasn’t fun. It was sex.”

  “Sex is fun.”

  “It was an escape. It wasn’t rational. I’m not sure I was aware of what was happening.”

  “And you’re a totally rational creature,” he said on a note of exasperation that didn’t bother her one bit. Let him be exasperated. In the long run, it was better that way.

  She thought of Sara, amazed all over again at the relationship between the two. She wondered how often Noah had seen her over the years, wondered how close they were. If there was caring, Sara had never let on—neither when the other girls had been denigrating Noah nor when he had reached out to her after the race. And then there was Noah’s own declaration that Sara wouldn’t confide in him. Clearly their relationship had problems.

  Paige wondered if he ever felt like a failure where Sara was concerned.

  “Well,” he went on, all business now, Head of School to cross-country coach, “for a totally rational creature, you’re missing something when it comes to your team. They ran terribly.”

  When Sami reached hesitantly for the phone cord, Paige nudged it into her hand. “The conditions weren’t ideal.”

  “They were the same for the other squads, and they ran better than we did. You’re too lax, Paige. That’s the problem. I’ve watched practices where you and the girls sit talking.”

  “When something important comes up, we talk. I believe in doing that, and I don’t care if we lose every race we run, if my talk can help these kids through the nightmare of adolescence. Actually, though,” she thought aloud, “we haven’t done much talking lately. Lately we’ve worked hard.”

  “So why such a lousy showing?”

  Paige sighed. “No great mystery. Our girls don’t see themselves as runners, and they sure don’t see themselves as winners. But that’s what we need, a win. One win. That’s all. It’ll turn the tide.”

  “How do you get the win without changing the self-image first?”

  “That’s what I have to figure out. Any suggestions?”

  Noah had one, but he wasn’t sharing it with Paige. He was annoyed with her because not only had he thoroughly enjoyed making love to her, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. She might have been unaware of what was going on, but he sure hadn’t been. He remembered every detail, from the way her hands had stolen over his body, to the way her nipples had hardened under his tongue, to the tiny sounds that had come from her throat at the moment of climax.

  Her desire to dismiss the whole thing annoyed the hell out of him. So he didn’t say a word about his plan—it was none of her goddamn business—and at that moment he wasn’t sure it would work, anyway. There were permissions to secure and equipment to buy, steal, or borrow, and even then he was taking a chance. Granted, history was in his favor, but he was still going out on a limb for a project that could fail. Given the Mount Court community’s questionable opinion of him, on top of Sara’s decidedly negative one, failure was the last thing he needed.

  eleven

  ANGIE CAME HOME FROM WORK EARLY. SHE had shifted appointments to free up a few extra hours, not quite sure what she would do with them, knowing only that she had to do something. She had been working longer and longer hours, hoping that the demands of her job would blot out painful thoughts, but the thoughts remained. If pushed aside, they crowded back at the first chance. She couldn’t escape them. Her life had become a nightmare of going through the motions of the ordinary, while nothing about it was ordinary at all.

  Dougie, who had always before been free with words and affection, was suddenly miserly with both. During drives to and from school, he sat silently in the car, giving the briefest answers to her questions, volunteering little. It wasn’t much better at home, where he spent the bulk of his time in his room, either studying or on the phone. Clearly he had issues that weighed heavily on his mind, not the least of which, now, was the tension between his parents.

  Ben barely looked at her, rarely spoke to her, certainly never touched her. He was living at home without being there—although even the latter was in doubt now. She had thought he would be working when she got home, but the house was deserted. His studio was dark, pens capped and papers neatened. The television was off. His car was gone.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, not waiting so much as trying to decide what to do next. If Ben had been home, they might have talked. She supposed that had been at the back of her mind when she had left work early. But the house was as silent and empty as her mind. She felt helpless. The paralysis of not knowing what to do was nearly as bad as the not knowing itself.

  The irony of it was that she knew plenty, just not the right things. She knew how the human body worked, had taken course after course on its intricacies, and had become a skilled mechanic. She could take what was there, clean it, patch it, and get it working again, but she couldn’t create. She couldn’t produce something where nothing was before. She couldn’t take emptiness and fill it with meaning.

  With neither her husband nor her son talking to her, she felt as though something vital had been removed, as though her body were continuing to function on the force of momentum alone. But it couldn’t continue for long. The hollow inside was large and growing. Like a black hole, it would swallow her up in time.

  She wondered where Ben was. Wondered if he had gone to the post office. Or the Tavern. Or the library.

  She laced her fingers together on the table, them unlaced them and laid them flat on the inlaid tiles. Her hands were slender, straight, and efficient hands, their fingernails neatly filed and unpainted. After years of being washed umpteen times a day, moisturizing was little more than a placebo. She had a worker’s hands. They showed their forty-two years in every crease, every tiny scar, every vein that hadn’t been as prominent the year before.

  She sighed and looked at the window. Her reflection looked back, midnight black hair that was cut on an angle toward her chin to give a look of practical chic. Her face was pale and slim. She was a petite woman whose knowledge level had always added inches to her height.

  Her knowledge level was zip now, making her feel small, forlorn, and powerless. She laced her fingers together again, unlaced them seconds later, then tucked them in her lap. She thought about the past and how efficiently she had run her life, thought about the trauma of the present, worried about the future. Once Dougie was off to college, it would be just Ben and her in ways that it had never, in the entire course of their marriage, ever been.

  She heard Ben’s car turn into the driveway and, shot through with sudden jitters, rose from the chair. There were things to do, always things to do. Idleness accomplished nothing and only left more to be done down the road. She could start dinner, or put in a load of laundry, or water the plants, or call the bank about the new bankcard that was overdue.

  But she didn’t do any of those things. It was as though the paralysis that was in command of her mind now spread to her knees. She sank limply down on the chair.

  He parked the car. She heard the door slam shut, heard
his footsteps on the walk, then the steps. He opened the kitchen door, came in, and stopped short.

  “Angie. I didn’t know you were home.”

  “I parked in the garage,” she said, wondering what would have happened if she hadn’t, whether he would have driven on past. He wasn’t pleased to see her; she could hear it in his voice. Uneasy, she rubbed her fingers together, steepling the thumbs.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked warily.

  She nearly laughed. Was something wrong? The most basic thing in their lives was wrong. She gaped at him.

  “I meant,” he specified, “are you sick?”

  She shook her head.

  “Dougie isn’t due home for two hours,” he pointed out.

  “I know.”

  He regarded her cautiously, waiting, poised at the door as though he could go either way, in or out, with a word.

  “Why is it I feel like the guilty one?” she asked when she couldn’t stand him staring at her, silent, guarded, subtly accusatory. “You’re the one having the affair, but I’m guilty. It doesn’t make sense.”

  His look said it made sense indeed. She was the one who had deprived him during their marriage and driven him to seek comfort in another woman. If he had been wrong in taking a mistress, she had been wrong long before that.

  She felt a heaviness in her legs, her middle, her arms, and for the first time wondered if there was a positive side to paralysis. It freed its victim from action, from response and responsibility.

  But if she didn’t act, no one would. Ben had always taken his lead from her, and she had never minded before. Right now, she did. She wished that for once he would be the initiator.