by Susan Wiggs
“The family welcomed me with open arms. They treated me like their newest daughter.” She still remembered her sense of wonder at the historic mansions in the shady neighborhood where Jack’s family had lived for generations. “You have to understand, this was huge for me. After losing my mother, my dad and brother and I unraveled. It just felt so good to be with a real family once again. Jack grew up in the same place and had friends he’d known from nursery school. So I just...stepped in to this ready-made world. It seemed effortless. I suppose I was in love with him from the beginning and was changing my plans for the future by the third date.”
From where she was now, she could look back and see that, for her, the process of falling in love had been an act of survival. She had lost her mother and was drifting out to sea. Jack—and all he stood for—was a solid object to cling to, something she could grasp with all her might and pull herself to safety.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded, the throaty blast of a fire engine. Sarah’s mouth was dry. She got up and went to the water cooler and poured herself two cups of water. When she turned back to Birdie, she felt momentarily disoriented. She sat back down and sipped the water.
“It’s all right to cry,” Birdie said.
Sarah pictured herself floating out to sea alone again, like Alice in Wonderland drowning in her own uncontrollable tears. “I don’t want to cry.”
“You will.”
Sarah took a deep breath and another sip of water. She didn’t feel like crying, yet her sense of loss was intense. She was coming to realize that she had lost so much more than a husband. Her ready-made community of family and friends. Her house and all her things. Her own identity as Jack’s wife.
“We got married in Chicago,” she reported to Birdie. Their wedding had been lopsided, the friends of the groom outnumbering the friends of the bride by ten to one, but Sarah hadn’t minded. People adored Jack and she was proud of that. She had counted herself lucky to find a ready-made group of friends and a warmhearted family. “No assembly required,” she had told him with a grateful smile. “We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. I never did like Hawaii, but Jack just assumed I did.”
She hadn’t seen the truth then. She barely caught a glimmer of it now, but she was starting to understand. From the moment she met Jack, she was a satellite to his sun, reflecting his light but possessing none of her own. Her wants and needs were eclipsed by his, and it all felt perfectly fine to her. They lived in his world, did the things he wanted and became a couple according to his vision, not hers.
Every once in a while, she would make a suggestion: What about Mackinac Island instead of Hawaii? Or the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City? He would pull her into his arms and say, “Yeah, right. It’s Hawaii, babe. Cowabunga.” And so it went. She found herself listening to country-western music that made her cringe, and learned to stay awake during White Sox and Cubs games.
“And the thing was,” she told Birdie, “I was happy. I loved our life together. Which is probably crazy, because it was nothing like the life I would’ve chosen.”
“It was the life you had,” Birdie reminded her. “The fact that you liked it is a blessing. How many people endure a life they hate, every day?”
Sarah looked at her sharply. She suspected the rhetorical question was more about Birdie than about rhetoric.
“So here’s the big irony about what happened next,” Sarah said. “After our fairy-tale wedding and dream honeymoon, he wanted to start a family right away. For once, I asserted myself. I insisted on waiting a year or two, at least. I planned to focus on my career, so I lobbied hard to keep up the birth control a while longer.”
“This is the twenty-first century,” Birdie reminded her. “I don’t think you’re going to raise any eyebrows with that.”
“Not at the time. I think it was the one decision in our marriage I truly owned. The one choice that belonged to me and me alone.”
“Why do you say it’s ironic?”
“Because that one decision almost killed Jack.”
Five
Forty minutes before the end of Will Bonner’s duty shift, the quick-call went off—“Battalion! Fire and Ambulance Stand By!”—followed by two tones, signaling an alarm. Will acknowledged immediately, summoned Gloria on the loudspeaker, then yanked the ticket from the printer. After years of following routine, he had the exit down to a bare minimum number of moves. He donned gear as he strode from the office, snatching HTs up off the charger. Then he was off, out the door in less than a minute, shifting seamlessly from where he was a moment ago to the place he was headed. That was the life of a firefighter; one minute, watching reruns of Peyton Place on the SOAP channel, the next, checking the area map, putting on his bunker gear, jamming his feet into boots.
The town of Glenmuir boasted a Seagrave rescue pumper, circa 1992, and a crew of captain, engineer and a rotating stable of volunteers. While Gloria Martinez, the engineer, cranked up the engine and the volunteer crew went to their on-board stations, Will and Rick McClure, one of the on-call volunteers, jumped into separate patrol vehicles and sped ahead to find the fire. That was the trouble with nonspecific reports, like the one that had just come in. Someone would call, reporting that smoke was visible. In these parts, the term “yonder” was considered a cardinal direction.
Locals were skittish about fires in these parts. The legendary Mount Vision fire of ’95 still haunted the landscape with skeletal black trees, ruined structures, meadows choked with the nonnative fireweed that took hold after the disaster.
As he headed up a nameless road labeled Branch 74, he scanned the horizon for some sign of the reported glow or header of smoke. Although he stayed focused on the search, his mind flashed on a thought of Aurora. This was going to make him late to dinner. Yesterday, he’d missed career day at her school.
“No big deal,” she’d told him. “It’ll be just like last year.”
“I missed last year.”
“Like I said. It’ll be just like that.”
At thirteen, his stepdaughter had a tongue as sharp as her appetite for teen fashion magazines, which, by Will’s judgment, she spent far too much time reading. When she was little and he had to leave her for a duty cycle, she used to throw a tantrum and beg him not to go. Now thirteen, she was either dismissive or brittle and sarcastic about his absences.
Will preferred the tantrums, if forced to make a choice. At least they were straightforward and over quickly. Being father and daughter used to be pretty effortless even though they were not related by blood. Will loved being her dad, and when Aurora’s mother took off, that didn’t change. If anything, it increased his devotion to her.
For a single parent, the job of fire captain was a mixed blessing. The schedule meant he got to be with her for long stretches of time, yet his absences were equally long. When he was on duty, she stayed with Will’s parents or, occasionally, her aunt Birdie and uncle Ellison. The arrangement had worked for years; it was one of the reasons he stayed in Glenmuir. Without the infrastructure of his family, raising Aurora would be next to impossible. His parents considered it a joy and a privilege to care for her—a sweet-natured, bright and beautiful child who had come into their lives like an early springtime. Now that she was thirteen and at odds with the world, he wondered if she was becoming too difficult for them to handle.
If he dared to suggest such a thing, his family would think he’d lost his mind. His parents, who ran an organic flower farm, believed sincerely in karmic balance and the idea that life never gave a person more than he could handle.
Will spotted the black billows of smoke rising over a familiar ridge just beyond the hamlet of San Julio, then radioed Gloria with the milepost marker and sped to the scene. He wasn’t sure whose property this was, a rolling spread of hay and alfalfa. No dwelling in sight, but a barn was on fire, the entire front a mask of flame. He slammed
the truck into Park, leaving the keys in the ignition in case the vehicle was needed. Rick parked the other vehicle some distance away and ran to join Will, who was already surveying the area. A shadow flirted in his peripheral vision, and he turned in time to spy a stray dog.
He’d seen it around before, a collie mix with matted black-and-white brindled fur. The sight of Will and Rick in their helmet and bunker gear sent it racing away at top speed.
“I hope like hell this barn is used for storage, not livestock,” he called to Rick.
“I hear you.” Rick, a young volunteer just out of training, squinted a little fearfully at the building.
“I’m going to have to do a search of the premises,” Will said, reminding himself that not so long ago, he’d been as green as Rick McClure. By the time the engine arrived, Will had donned his SCBA, though he didn’t hook up the mask. He hoped he wouldn’t need to put himself on air.
He went around the perimeter, radioing a report to his battalion chief. One good sign—he couldn’t hear any sounds of trapped livestock. That kind of thing—it tended to etch itself on a firefighter’s soul. With no rescue involved, saving the building wasn’t the goal here; it was going up like tinder. But they needed to kill the fire to keep it from spreading to the surrounding wildlands.
The plan was to vent the blaze through a large panel door on sideways rollers. Will radioed task assignments to the engine crew. While the helmeted firefighters were pulling hose, he signaled for Rick to open the door and stand ready with the portable extinguisher. The goal was to vent in order to delay flashover—the transition from the fire’s growth stage to the explosive eruption of the entire structure—until the hose line was in place. Then the fire would be pushed out through the front of the building. The blast of heat was always expected, yet always a surprise. When he was a rookie, it used to scare the crap out of him, that pressure pulsing against his face, an invisible force like the hammers of sound at a loud rock concert.
The fire was at the rollover stage, with lightning flashes of flame through the smoke. He heard a hiss and figured his air bottle was blistering in the heat. Cathedral-like, the tall Nordic-style barn was bathed in unholy light, the stacked bales of hay burning like a giant funeral pyre. I’m okay, he said, as he always did in these situations. I’m okay. In his mind, he made a clear picture of Aurora, his best reason to survive.
* * *
Birdie went to the window and lowered it to keep out the noise of a distant siren. Then she sat back down and leaned her forearms on the desk. “Sarah, I don’t understand. Why do you say your decision to delay starting a family almost killed your husband?”
“If I’d agreed to try to get pregnant right away, like Jack wanted, we would have realized sooner there was a problem.” Sarah cleared her throat. “How much detail do you need here?”
Birdie seemed to understand. “Don’t worry about detail for now. Unless you think it’s information I need in order to help you.”
At some point, Sarah knew she would be forced to reveal the most intimate details of her marriage, opening them up like an unhealed wound to expose the raw nerves. She knew enough about divorce to realize this was part of the process. Knowing this didn’t make it easier, though. Exposing her private pain behind the guise of her comic strip was one thing, but discussing it openly was quite another.
“Eventually, I wanted kids as bad as he did. Both of us seemed to be in fine health. So when we didn’t get pregnant for a whole year, we checked things out. For some reason, we expected to find something wrong with me, not him.” Determined to leave the wedding set alone, she picked up a pen and rolled it between the palms of her hands.
“I think it’s a fairly common assumption,” Birdie said. “No idea why, but it is.”
Once it was determined that there were no problems with Sarah’s fertility, Jack agreed to be checked out by his uncle, a urologist. Sarah braced herself for a report of low sperm count or poor motility or impaired delivery. In fact, the tests had revealed something far worse.
“Testicular cancer,” she told Birdie. “It had metastasized to the lymph nodes in the abdomen, and to his lungs.”
The oncologist’s can-do attitude was reassuring. “Statistics and projections aren’t going to turn this around. Fighting with everything we’ve got—that’s what’ll turn it around,” the doctor had said. Jack was also lucky to have supportive friends and family. His parents and siblings had rallied around him the moment the diagnosis was made. People who had known him since nursery school came to see him, to hang out and add their good wishes to the seemingly bottomless pool of support.
“You have to understand,” Sarah told Birdie, “when something like this happens, the whole world stops. You drop everything. It’s like joining the military, and the disease is your drill sergeant. We started treatment right away, aggressive treatment. Thanks to his age and general good health, they went at it hard.”
“Interesting that you say we started treatment. Not Jack started treatment.”
“We were a team,” Sarah explained. “The disease invaded every moment of our lives, waking or sleeping.” She flicked the pen tip in and out, in and out. “Actually, I’m not sure if this is important now or not—we took care of one small detail before we started treatment.”
“And the one small detail?”
“It was the doctors’ suggestion. Jack and I were too panicked and scattered to think of it. Jack was advised to preserve some sperm samples. The treatment carried a risk of infertility so this was a precaution.” She smiled a little. “Jack was always a bit of an overachiever. He preserved enough sperm to populate a small town. And up until last week, this story had a happy ending.” More or less, she thought. Jack’s performance at the sperm bank had been far more productive than his performance had been with her.
“Sorry, I need to clarify. You were his chief support during the treatment?”
“Financially, no. Fortunately, Jack and his family are extremely well-off. I barely had a career.”
“The comic strip you mentioned earlier?”
Agitated, she continued clicking the pen up and down, up and down. “Yes. It’s called Just Breathe.”
Birdie leaned back in her chair. “It sounds terrific, Sarah. Really.”
“It’d be better if I was actually making a living wage. For the time being, I’m self-syndicated, which means a lot more work for me but ultimately, more independence and a bigger share of the earnings. When Jack was sick, I put aside the syndication work and did advertising art and greeting cards. I never stopped drawing my strip, though. In fact, during the worst days of the treatment, I did some of my best work. But I can’t honestly say I contributed financially in any major way.”
“How about moral and emotional support? And in the area of his care?”
“I did things I never thought myself capable of.” She stopped, surprised to feel a wave of emotion as she was swept back to the endless, anguished postchemo nights, when even love and prayers were not enough to comfort him, when she held him while he shook with chills, when she cleaned up his puke and changed his bed as he moaned in agony. “I’ll spare you the details of that. Suffice it to say I was steadfast, and anyone who tries to deny that I supported him is a liar.”
“And the happy ending?”
“Before all this happened, I would’ve told you our happy ending was the day he was found to be cancer free and his treatments were stopped. I guess there’s no such thing as a happy ending. Life is too damned messy for that. Things don’t ever end. They just change.” She looked down to see that she had completely disassembled the pen in her hands.
Birdie folded her arms on the desk and pretended not to notice. “So was there any point when you suspected your marriage was in trouble?”
Shamefaced, Sarah lined up the broken pieces of the pen on the desk—the cartridge, the tiny spri
ng, the tube, the pocket clip. “It was the last thing on my mind. The last thing I was looking for. I was so full of gratitude and sheer elation over Jack’s recovery that I couldn’t see straight. I swore then, to myself and to Jack, that I was ready for a family. More than ready. It’s stupid to postpone something you know you want. Life’s too short. At the time, I had no idea that trying to get pregnant was a sign of desperation. I thought if I could make us look like a happy family by having a baby, then we would magically be a happy family.” She carefully threaded the cartridge through the coil. “We tried both ways.”
“Both ways?”
“Naturally and by artificial insemination. After treatment, Jack had a good chance of regaining fertility, so we both had high hopes. But...we didn’t have much intimacy during or after his illness. He, um, couldn’t perform and eventually quit trying.” Sarah screwed the two parts of the pen tube together. “He still claimed to want a family. In fact, it was his idea to keep up the fertility treatments and the artificial insemination. Our lack of success turned out to be a blessing in disguise, I suppose. Bringing a child into our mess would be a disaster.” The pen’s clicker didn’t work. She would have to take it apart and try again.
Sarah had come to realize that the rift had existed long before it was discovered. It had progressed and spread out of control by the time Mimi Lightfoot came along.
“After the illness,” she said, “I kept reminding myself I was in a posttrauma state. We both were. So while I was going to the fertility clinic every time I ovulated, Jack was dealing with the trauma in his own way. I don’t know when he hooked up with Mimi Lightfoot, but I bet it was a while back.” The name tasted bitter in her mouth.