“It matters,” Charlie said. His voice sounded a little too devoid of worry, at least over what I would do. I could almost hear him saying, You will always come back. He would mean it as a compliment, a nod to my devotion. Maybe that was why he loved me.
But Charlie just said, as if he’d read my mind, “I love you.”
Without thinking I said, “I love you, too,” then hung up and tossed the phone aside.
I looked down at Sarah, her eyes half closed, long lashes like her dad’s skimming the tops of chubby baby cheeks. How could they, I thought, my brain returning to its primary wound. Charlie and Deirdre (even as I thought it, my heart rebelled against the phrase, placing their names side by side like a couple), sneaking around, having an affair, while I was taking care of this little baby, maybe while I was pregnant, too.
For a moment, a rising and blinding anger blotted out my fear and sadness. I wanted to kill him. I really did.
“Your timing sucks,” I said aloud. Maybe I was talking to Eli as well as Charlie. I’d come to the Moss house so I could figure out what to do next. If not for the imperative of my child, it would have felt wrong to leave Eli there. But I couldn’t exactly unpack a diaper bag to stay with a naked madman. Find a comfortable spot to nurse my baby and wait for Eli to start monologuing about Billy Shears or whatever his latest delusion was. But I did wish I’d managed to take the dog with me. I thought about Eli’s last dog, Manny, who’d been killed trying to follow Eli across Mass Avenue traffic. And then finally, I thought about Eli. All alone with the torturous workings of his mind.
I closed my eyes, trying not to give into thoughts of if only. Once, years before, I’d heard a recording of my father talking and been astonished to learn he had a Brooklyn accent. It wasn’t the way I remembered him. If only my father hadn’t gotten lymphoma, how familiar that voice would have been to me. Maybe he would be somewhere, right now, and I could run to him. If only Eli hadn’t become schizophrenic, he would have graduated med school by now, be deciding on a specialty. Or maybe he would have changed his mind and become a vet instead. Maybe he’d have a family. What a great dad he would be. According to E. M. Forster it was the only tense we could never be sure about: what would have been.
I buckled Sarah back into her seat and climbed behind the wheel. On very dark nights, on deserted country roads, driving can feel like flying. The engine of my car hummed so quietly, the wheels moving imperceptibly over cool, invisible pavement. Leaves, still dark, shimmered through shadows on either side of me. I drove past the long dirt driveway to Daniel Williams’s compound. Ladd wouldn’t be there—he was still in Honduras. And anyway, summer was long over. Daniel himself was probably back in Boston. Still, I found myself making the turn. Off the pavement onto the dirt, so I could feel the earth rumbling beneath the car, feel myself returning and connected to some sort of home. The house came into view sooner than I expected, because lights were on—in most of the downstairs and one upstairs window. A thin line of smoke spiraled up from the chimney. I stopped short of where they’d hear me approaching, wondering if it were just Daniel home or if he had guests.
Sitting there behind the steering wheel, I knew that if I knocked on the door, Daniel wouldn’t treat me as if I were crazy to appear. He might not even ask me the reason. He’d just open the door wider and invite me in. Probably he’d be able to tell I had nowhere else to go and offer me one of his cottages or even a room upstairs.
But the thing was: I did have a place to go. Because whenever his brother needed him, Charlie would go. Immediately. No matter what. When I got back to our apartment, it would be empty because Charlie would already be on his way here. So I backed the whole long way out of Daniel’s driveway, returning to paved roads and the sensation of flight. I arrived at our deserted apartment well past midnight, and instead of sleeping in our bed—too fraught with the scent of Charlie—I collapsed on the sofa. Sarah perched on the floor beside me, still in her car seat, my hand resting on the rise and fall of her little belly. In the morning, I called a locksmith to come and install a deadbolt.
THE NEXT DAY, WE woke to heavy snowfall. Everything was canceled. In the evening, Maddie watched Sarah while I pulled on my boots and trudged over to the Homestead. Next door was the house her brother, Austin, built for his wife—the object of E.D.’s unrequited affection living right next door.
I walked through the snow, toward the Evergreens, thinking that I would never entirely escape Charlie, even if I left him. For the rest of my life, we would share a child, and every time I saw his face—every time I handed her off, or met with a teacher, or went to a school event—my heart would fall, willing victim, the way it always had. He beckoned and the woods started. I would never, ever, get away.
My breath billowed out in front of me, glimmers of illumination moving through the air despite the hour, and I tried to imagine how very dark evenings must have been in the nineteenth century, with no electric lights from houses and no streetlamps. The world Emily Dickinson inhabited did not contain a glare from cities the world over, reflected back in the sky. Nights like this, the Poet would sit at her bedroom window, staring across the snowy lawn, toward Sue’s, trying to believe her beloved pined back.
But her beloved married someone else, I reminded myself. Charlie married me.
My eyes blinked against the falling snow. If it hadn’t been for Sarah, would Charlie have followed me back to our apartment and said that he wanted to be with me? Would I ever be enough, to fend off the revolving door of infatuated women? And how had my thinking already shifted, from determination to leave him—to wishing I could kill him—into the old worry, about how I could keep him?
The world stood dark and quiet. For a moment, I could believe that cars and headlights existed in the distant future. That electricity ran not through wires above my head and under the ground but in the current of possibility between these two modest and imperial plots of land. I lifted my hand and waved—a sad lover’s gesture. Entirely appropriate to feel yearning, and hopeless, looking up through the snow at that west-facing window.
AFTER A DAY OF canceled classes, the roads were cleared and I went back to school. On the way home I drove down Main Street, slowly, trying to see if Deirdre manned her hostess podium, but I couldn’t see through the window because of the glare. I thought about driving into the alley behind the restaurant to see if Charlie’s car—his mother’s old station wagon—was parked there, but didn’t, because I knew it wouldn’t be. He was on Cape Cod, trying to take care of Eli.
That night I made my own dinner for the first time since I could remember. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I’d been on my own—but I had to stay strong for Sarah, had to nourish my body so that it could nourish hers. As I cracked two eggs into the bowl, my phone rang. I knew it was Charlie. I drizzled milk into the eggs and picked up a fork, battling the urge to answer. Would he beg for forgiveness or launch into a report on Eli’s well-being? Let Deirdre worry about your crazy brother. As those words formed in my head—filling me with regret and loss and self-loathing—I finally started to cry. I wept as I scrambled and cooked so that by the time the eggs were done all I could do was scrape them into the garbage. Still crying, I gave up and slept in our bed. With Sarah beside me, I breathed in the scent of Charlie all night long, thinking about what my life would be like if I never let him come home. A single mother, like mine had been, but relinquishing my baby for weekends and vacations. Watching Charlie walk away on a regular basis. The great love of my life—I had been so sure of it—now in the past.
The world is hardest on people who believe in the way it’s supposed to be. My basket holds—just—Firmaments, the Poet wrote. Those—dangle easy—on my arm. But smaller bundles—Cram.
The bundle Charlie had left me with crammed so painfully, it felt impossible to continue. Still. When I got home from school the next afternoon, there was a letter in our mailbox, postmarked Saturday Cove.
I think about staying on the Cape, Charlie wrote, and I thin
k, I’d rather be with Brett. I think about going back to Amherst alone and I think, I’d rather be with Brett. I think about my life and I think, I’d rather be with Brett.
Standing in the exact same spot where I’d read Ladd’s letter, I looked up, across the street, to the Homestead. Charlie was my Sue Dickinson. He was my Maud Gonne. And the thing I kept forgetting about those two: they were unattainable, they weren’t meant to be attained. I should have known that. I should have walked away.
But I couldn’t. Beyond everything I felt, Charlie was the father of my child. We were married. The adult thing to do was tamp down the rising tide of anger and woundedness. It wasn’t weakness, I told myself, to work on my marriage, instead of just letting it go.
The new dead bolt came off, my defenses went down, Charlie came home.
10
Winter continued in earnest, and Eli returned to the hospital in Pocasset. Lightfoot came to live with us. Charlie had already broken things off with Deirdre; now he had to fire her. He told me about the conversation in the office of our marriage counselor, looking at her instead of me.
“She says she won’t go.”
I turned to him, trying to keep my voice steady. “She won’t go? How am I supposed to deal with that? You working with her every day, her still in our life?”
“She says she’ll sue me. For sexual harassment.” He shrugged. Helpless.
Later that day, at home, he told me he was letting his sous-chef take over for a few days while he figured out how to handle Deirdre. “One thing we could do,” Charlie said, “is just close it. The restaurant.”
I sat down next to him on the couch. Sarah was napping in the other room, so we both talked in whispers. It seemed ridiculous, to shut down a business because of a jilted mistress. It also seemed like the only thing to do.
“It’s losing money anyway,” Charlie said, like nothing could matter less. “We’ve been getting four, five tables, even on weekends. The truth is, it’s either close it now or close it in the spring. It’s a failure. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Any sadness I felt over the restaurant’s closing was eclipsed by relief that Deirdre would be ousted, that she couldn’t stay in our lives with a lawsuit—claiming the truth, that we’d shut down the whole enterprise to get rid of her. I examined Charlie’s face closely, for signs of mourning, and saw none. Maybe he felt relieved, too, or maybe this collapse was so closely associated with Deirdre’s exit that he thought it would be tactless to let me see his disappointment. Or maybe it was just Charlie, of the slow smile and easy movements, glad to shelve the ambition that I had foisted upon him.
This way he didn’t have to fire Deirdre face-to-face. He just called a meeting and told the whole staff that the restaurant was closing. I didn’t ask much about it. I didn’t want to talk about Deirdre, or think about her, or remember she existed at all. Because our counseling sessions amounted to one scheduled hour a week to talk about Deirdre, we stopped going. I guess it became our way of coping, to quit everything except each other. At random moments, Charlie would say, “I’m sorry,” and I would reply with a silencing glance, wanting to continue with our plan, of none of this spoken out loud.
The thing about Charlie that I worked on remembering was that family was important to him. I clung to the image of him carrying his mother down to the beach. I thought of how he always came to Eli’s rescue. Now I was his family, too. Whereas Deirdre was just a girl, whom he could abandon as easily as he’d abandoned me back in Colorado. For the first time, that memory gave me comfort.
The name Deirdre became like a ghost, hovering around our interactions, our conversations, but almost never materializing. The person appeared more frequently. I would see her in town, often enough that I learned to avoid the places she might be, the new restaurant where she worked, the coffee shop she liked. She did not take the same approach, and I would see her car, a blue Honda Civic, slowing down as it passed our house, her head turning up toward our window so directly I’d wonder if Charlie ever brought her here. She ran by our house, too, white pony tail whipping behind her, snapping back as she turned her head away from the sight of me on the front porch or as I carried groceries up the sidewalk, parsley spilling out the top of the brown paper bags. As she picked up her pace, I could see her imagining the meal Charlie would be cooking later. Occasionally I would spot her at the university, which was odd because as far as I knew she wasn’t a student. Maybe she had a new boyfriend—a professor or grad student. Whatever the reason, there she would be—spectral as she was in the air between Charlie and me. Hard to believe someone who appeared so insubstantial had managed to do so much harm. Every time I saw her something gathered inside of me, a piece of the anger I fought to subdue, rising and burgeoning, forming a nagging pile of resentment.
“I think we need to get away for a while,” I told Charlie, as the school year spooled to its end. We were both in the tiny bathroom, me perched on the edge of the tub while Charlie showered. He’d gone back to his odd jobs, and his legs and arms were caked with white paint. When he pulled the curtain aside, I could tell from his face that he had also seen the way she watched us. Charlie’s comings and goings were less regular than mine. To find him, she would have had to skulk in produce aisles. I thought about asking if he’d heard from her but worried it would sound too much like an accusation. And anyway, I had stopped counting on him to tell me the truth.
“Maybe we can go to the Cape,” he said. “My father was talking about staying in Florida this summer. We can have the place to ourselves. We can even stay on if we wanted. You can work on your dissertation.”
“What will you do? For work?”
Charlie paused, then pulled the curtain back. The stream of water shut off with a heaving sigh. Sometimes I thought his affair with Deirdre was a way of showing me what would happen if I pushed him in directions he didn’t want to go. For so long, there had been a sacrosanct element to my love for Charlie, and it almost seemed like I was the one who’d muddied it, by trying to turn him into a married worker bee.
Just when I thought he wouldn’t answer he said, “You know. This and that.” From the next room, Sarah began to cry. I went to pick her up, and carried her into the kitchen to make some rice cereal. She was on my hip, hand closed into my hair, when Charlie emerged, wearing nothing but khaki shorts, still dripping. I noticed a splotch of paint he’d missed on his forearm.
“We’d have to give up this apartment,” I said.
He shrugged. “We could always find another one. If we wanted to come back.”
I stared into the filmy white baby food, stirring it unnecessarily. It felt sad to give up this place, where I could stare out the window toward the home of the Poet, where I could walk across the street and stand in her garden. This was the first place I’d lived with Charlie, the first place we’d brought Sarah home. For so many days, she’d retained that newborn scent, of someone who had been living in the most primal, underwater world. Were Charlie and Deirdre having their affair then? Did he leave me that very night we brought Sarah home, on some fake errand, to meet her? It seemed like I would never, ever stop thinking about it. I poured rice cereal into a bowl to cool, holding the pot at a distance so Sarah couldn’t reach out and grab it.
Charlie stepped closer and eased Sarah out of my arms, calmly stating his case. My coursework was finished. I had a little fellowship money. We wouldn’t have to pay rent.
“There’s Eli,” I said.
“He’s okay now,” Charlie said. “He has his own place to live.” Released from Pocasset, Eli had reclaimed Lightfoot and was back in Boston working at Angell.
“For now,” I said.
“Look,” Charlie said. “We won’t live there forever. Just for a little while.”
He sat down at the kitchen table with Sarah on his knee. I sat down across from them, blowing on every spoonful before offering it to my baby, who waved her hands excitedly between each bite, oblivious to everything that went on between Charlie
and me.
AFTER PEOPLE DIE, YOU’RE expected to speak for them. What would your mother do? What would Charlie say? As if I had ever been able to predict the thoughts and actions of those people while they were living. Sometimes I try to imagine my mother coming to Amherst after Sarah was born, to help, which would have given her a front row seat to everything that happened with Deirdre. But it was hard to reconcile this projection with the mother I remembered. Maybe she would have come for a visit, and then gone back to Ireland. I would send her pictures over email, making our life seem perfect. She would check in once or twice a week by phone.
And what about Charlie and me? Would my forgiveness have succeeded? We moved to Cape Cod as Sarah turned one. I worried over when she would take her first step while Charlie shrugged and said she would do it on her own time. In July Tab was killed at the top of the road by a too-fast driver, and Charlie tended me carefully. I tried to be grateful, and then I tried to focus on mundane annoyances—discrepancy in child care, the debt the restaurant had left behind, Charlie’s lack of a job. My car broke down, and we junked it instead of fixing it. “Do you love me?” I asked him too often, and Charlie always said yes. Looking back, I’m not sure I ever said “I love you” to Charlie in the time between finding out about his affair and finding him dead. I only said, “I love you, too.”
What would that period of time have become if Charlie had lived? Would it have led to the end eventually, a failed attempt at holding our family together? Or would it have just been a period of time we needed to get through, to be solid again, for Deirdre to become a little blip in our history. Would Charlie have learned his lesson, or would he have proved himself to be incorrigible, and years later I’d find myself in just the same spot? Emily Dickinson had decades to become disillusioned with Sue, to forgive her and love her again, and finally turn away. How many times would I have needed to repeat the same process until I’d finally settled into permanent anger? Or would it have been different, with Charlie and me?
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