“Why are you here?” I ask.
“I wanted to talk to you. I caught the first flight out this morning.”
“Give me a minute.” Slowly, I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed because I really need to pee. After I pull on my yoga pants I walk into the bathroom to relieve my close-to-bursting bladder. When I’m washing my hands I look in the mirror.
I do not look good.
My skin is ashen and there are dark circles under my eyes. I brush my teeth and then pull my hair back into a sloppy bun. When I come out of the bathroom Chris is waiting for me.
“Let’s go downstairs.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he echoes, and follows me out of the room.
“Why were you sleeping?” he asks when we sit down on the couch. “You hardly ever nap during the day.”
“I was sleeping because I’m tired. I’m tired of you shutting me out whenever we hit a rough patch. I’m tired of worrying about whether Daniel is okay.”
Chris flinches, as though the very mention of Daniel’s name has caused him a fresh wave of pain.
“I’m tired of everything, Chris.” I can’t look at him. I’m afraid I’ll start crying again, and I’m tired of doing that, too. Swallowing the lump in my throat and looking at the clock on the wall over his shoulder, I wait for him to say whatever it is he flew home early to say so we can clear the air, once and for all.
“I know I didn’t handle things very well the other night, Claire. I just never expected you to tell me something like that.”
“I didn’t have to tell you at all,” I say.
“Yeah, well. I almost wish you hadn’t.”
Neither of us says anything for a minute, but then we both try to talk at once.
“Go ahead,” he says.
“When I got out of the hospital I told Daniel I couldn’t see him anymore. Even though nothing physical ever happened between us, we came close.”
Chris’s jaw clenches and he looks as if he’d rather hear anything other than the words that are coming out of my mouth.
“But I felt like you were finally going to fight for me instead of letting me slip away. And I was slipping away, Chris. A little more every day.”
“Why did you spend so much time with him?”
He looks as though he might not really want to hear the answer, but he asked, so I tell him the truth. “I was lonely, Chris. Lonely and sad and frustrated. I spent time with him because he gave it to me.” I angle my body toward his. “I wanted you to be the one I turned to, but you weren’t there.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Chris says. “For everything.”
“You were doing what you thought you had to do,” I say. “What you thought was best for this family.”
He shrugs and shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair. “At what cost?” he asks.
I think I’ve already given him the answer to that question. “I’m sorry, too,” I say.
Chris stares out the window at the backyard and doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns back around and looks me in the eye. “How close did I come?” he asks. “To losing you.”
“Not as close as you think,” I say, because there are some things that a man never needs to hear.
Chris reaches over and pulls me into his arms. He doesn’t speak, but he strokes my hair and holds me tight, like he’ll never let me go. We stay like that for a long time. And I think to myself that maybe Chris talks to me the loudest when he says nothing at all.
66
claire
We join together at Skip and Elisa’s once again, to celebrate the last day of school. I smile, listening to the kids’ excited voices as they chase each other across the freshly cut grass, reveling in the noise of happy children.
Chris stands beside me, a smile on his face. The golden boy shimmers in the sunshine, the way he once did, and I swear that man’s happiness can light a room.
He turned in his resignation at work this morning. He told me what he wanted to do a few nights ago while we were lying in bed. “I want to form a new company. There’s this guy at work named Seth—he’s a software engineer from the implementation team—and we’ve been talking about it for a while, discussing every possible scenario. We’ve mapped out timelines and gone over the budget a thousand times. I feel like we have a pretty solid business plan.”
“So it would be a partnership?” I asked.
“Yes. Seth’s not very expressive—he’s really more of a head-down programmer—so he would design and create the software and it would be my job to sell it.”
“What about the start-up costs?”
“They’d be fairly low. And we wouldn’t have any overhead, at least at first. We’d work out of our homes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed anything about our bank accounts.”
“I’ve noticed that they seem to have a nice balance in them.” I never stopped economizing. I never changed the money-saving habits I formed when Chris was unemployed. I still shop at discount retailers. I clean the house myself. And I maintain a fairly high volume of freelance assignments. Chris spent next to nothing after he went back to work because his expense account paid for everything when he was on the road. Our financial situation has never been better.
“Enough for us to get by for at least a year, maybe longer,” he said.
“No insurance company is going to cover me individually.”
“We would apply for group health insurance. As long as we have at least two employees, we can do this. In the meantime, we could extend my health insurance benefits like we did when I got laid off. We’d all be covered for eighteen months. It will be expensive, but we’ve included the premiums in the estimation of our operating costs.”
I could hear the excitement in Chris’s voice, but I proceeded cautiously. “A start-up requires a lot of time. Hours upon hours. How do I know we won’t be trading one problem for another? Even if you’re home, you could be too busy.” I thought about the office door being closed all the time. The late nights and weekends spent working.
“I know that. A start-up isn’t easy. And I’m not going to lie. There’s a ton of competition in this market. I’d still have to travel, but not nearly as much. Eventually, we’d hire people to do that. We wouldn’t have to answer to anyone but each other. But I can’t promise you this will work, Claire. It’s a huge gamble. There’s a good chance we’ll fail.”
I gave him my blessing anyway. If Chris didn’t take his career into his own hands, he’d never be free of the possibility of a layoff, or a less than desirable work situation, or a temperamental boss. If we had to economize even further, we would. At least Chris would be working toward something he believed in.
So now we wait and see. Sink or swim. Fingers crossed.
Chris and I find drinks and settle into a couple of empty chairs on the patio. Julia and Justin arrive with their girls. Two months out of rehab, Julia’s sobriety is still tenuous, the thread connecting her to this new, sober life as delicate as gossamer. She relapsed, but just once. She’s thirty-three days sober now, and she fought for every single one of them. I’m praying for thirty-four.
I thought Justin might cut and run, abandon her in her desperate time of need, but he didn’t. After Julia joined AA she told him he was free to go. That if the other woman was who he really wanted, there was no reason for him to stick around. But he did, and I hope that he stays. Her daily affirmations, Justin’s support, and her daughters will help her stay the course, but the decision not to drink will always rest on Julia’s shoulders. I believe she has what it takes.
Bridget can’t be with us tonight because she’s working at the hospital. She does three twelve-hour shifts a week, from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., relying on Sebastian to keep his brothers out of harm’s way. Her child care arrangement isn’t ideal, but her boys don’t seem to mind. They mov
ed into a three-bedroom apartment, and Bridget pays the rent, and all other expenses, by herself. She hasn’t heard from Sam in more than a month. It turned out that gambling was more important to him than Bridget and the boys. He didn’t show up for his initial court date after Bridget initiated divorce proceedings, and she hasn’t been able to reach him since. It’s as if he disappeared.
“Claire,” Elisa says. She sounds a bit frantic. “Can you help me for a second?”
I look up and see that Elisa does indeed have her hands full. She holds eleven-month-old Lauren with one arm and balances a plate of burgers for the grill in the other. Four-year-old Layla, who is so frightened of being alone that she is never far from Elisa, clings to her leg, making it almost impossible for her to walk.
According to a social worker, a neighbor reported Layla and Lauren sitting in their front yard unattended, Lauren dressed in only a dirty diaper despite the fifty-degree temperature. The police found their mother inside the garbage-strewn home smoking a crack pipe. The kitchen cupboards held only a box of stale crackers and a container of formula with enough left in it for a few more feedings. Elisa broke down sobbing when she told me that. She and Skip hope to make the transition from foster parents to adoptive parents, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it works out. Someday, those little girls will realize just how lucky they really are.
I jump out of my chair and walk toward her. “Do you want me to take the burgers or the baby?” I ask.
“The baby, for now,” she says, handing a sleeping Lauren to me. She stirs a bit, but I hold her close and she closes her eyes again.
Elisa grabs Layla’s hand. “Let’s go drop off these burgers, okay?”
Layla nods eagerly, appearing happy to be asked. Happy to be taken care of at all.
Julia sits down beside me and strokes the baby’s head. “She’s precious,” she says.
I look at Julia and smile. “She is. Do you want to hold her?”
She nods, so I hand over the baby. She looks down at Lauren and then out into the yard, to where her own girls are playing. “Children. They’re so helpless,” Julia says. “It’s our responsibility to take care of them.”
I know at this moment that her remorse runs as deep as an ocean. “Yes,” I agree. “But they’re resilient, too.” I reach out and grab Julia’s hand and she squeezes it. I squeeze back.
After dinner, we put on some music. The sun goes down and the candles Elisa lights and places in the lanterns that hang from the trees, and the full moon, create a magical glow. Justin stands and extends his hand to Julia. I swallow the lump in my throat, and it’s all I can do not to burst into tears when he holds her close and sways to the music. Watching them restores my faith in a lot of things. I feel hopeful, not just for Justin and Julia but for Chris and me. Daniel, too. I read in the newspaper that he’s been moved to a rehab center and though he’ll have a long road ahead of him, he’s expected to make a full recovery.
Chris pulls me to my feet. “Dance with me,” he says. He holds me close and I lay my head on his shoulder.
Chris knows me better than anyone ever has or ever will. This is the man I’ll grow old with.
Skips dances with Layla in his arms while Elisa holds Lauren and smiles, and now I do tear up, just a little. The remaining kids join hands and do something that looks a little like ring-around-the-rosy except they laugh, and instead of falling down, they run faster and faster.
Chris and I got lost somewhere, and I don’t think we’ve completely found our way back yet, but we’re close.
Losing him would have been one of the worst things to ever happen to me. And the best thing I can do is put my whole heart back in his hands.
So I do.
At the end of the evening we gather our children and Chris laces his fingers together with mine.
“Let’s go home,” he says, and the word means something different than it did a year ago. It isn’t just the place we live. It’s the life we built together. The one we came very close to tearing down.
I hold his hand tight and say, “Home.”
epilogue
claire
I poke my head into the office. Chris is whistling as he types.
“The kids are over at Elisa’s,” I say. “The boys are playing and Jordan is helping with the girls.”
Jordan loves following Elisa around, assisting in any way she can; Layla worships the ground she walks on. Jordan can’t wait until she’s old enough to babysit them and this is her way of practicing. Elisa graciously indulges her.
“I’m heading out for a bit.”
He looks up from the computer and smiles. “Sounds good. Seth will be here in about fifteen minutes.”
I slide behind the wheel of my car and program the address for the rehabilitation center into my GPS. When I arrive I park and walk through the double front doors to a reception desk.
The woman sitting behind it says, “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Daniel Rush.”
She types his name into the computer. “He’s in room 104. Go down the hall and take a left.”
“Thank you,” I say. He doesn’t know I’m coming, and I debated about calling first. In the end I decided I’d visit and if it was a bad time, I’d come back another day. As I near his room a woman with blonde hair exits and heads down the hallway. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t figure out what it is.
I’m suddenly nervous. I have no doubt that Daniel’s still in pain and maybe he doesn’t want company. I take a deep breath and knock softly. His door is ajar, but he doesn’t answer, so I push it open a little more and peer around it.
His eyes are closed, but they flutter open when the door creaks. He smiles at me and the smile that lights up my face in return rivals any that he has ever given me. My chest feels tight and tears fill my eyes.
“I’m okay. Don’t cry,” he says when I reach his side. His voice sounds raspy.
“I’m not,” I say, although I am clearly in danger of breaking down and bawling any second. Trying hard to get my emotions under control, I sit down in the chair next to the bed and reach for Daniel’s hand. “I’m so happy to see you,” I say. His head has been shaved and there’s a light dressing over his wound. He’s wearing a T-shirt and looks thinner.
He gives my hand a squeeze. “I’m happy to see you, too.”
“I was going to text you, but it seemed so impersonal. I didn’t know if you were taking phone calls. I’ve been so worried.”
“I know. But I was very lucky,” he says.
“How long will you be here?”
“About three more weeks. Then I’ll have outpatient therapy every day. I need help relearning some of my motor skills, and I have quite a bit of weakness on my left side. Recovery is going to be slow.”
“Are you in pain?”
“A little. Some days hurt more than others.”
“I’m so sorry about the reserve officer.”
Daniel nods. “I am, too.”
“Who’s taking care of you?” I can’t bear the thought of him being alone.
“My parents are here every day. Dylan has even stopped by.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Jessie’s here, too,” he says, and I think back to the woman I passed in the hall. The one with blonde hair who looked a little like me. “I still had her listed as my emergency contact and they called her when I was brought in. She was the first person I saw when I finally woke up.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say. I squeeze Daniel’s hand hard, and I don’t even try to stem the tears as they spill out of my eyes. It makes me wonder if Jessie never found someone else after Daniel let her go. Maybe she really didn’t want someone else. Maybe time really does heal all wounds.
“She’ll be back soon,” he says.
Please let her stay by his side.
> “It means a lot that you came, Claire.”
“I had to. I had to see for myself that you were okay.” I lean over and kiss Daniel’s forehead. He looks tired. “I’m going to leave so you can get some rest.”
He gives my hand a final squeeze and says good-bye.
“Take care, Daniel,” I say, and then I head home, confident that all is right in the world.
Chris is standing in the kitchen when I get home. “Hey,” he says. “You’re back. I never did ask you where you were going.”
“I went to visit Daniel at the rehab center.”
Chris stands very still, his face expressionless.
“I don’t know if you can understand this, but I needed to know that he was okay. To let him know that I was concerned, that I’d been thinking about him. I won’t be going back, but I needed the closure.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Yes,” I say, holding back the tears. “He’s going to be just fine.”
Chris doesn’t smile, but he nods. “I’m glad to hear it.”
I walk over to him and bury my face in his shirt. He puts his arms around me, squeezes me tight, and kisses my cheek.
“Thank you,” I say.
• • •
• • •
• • •
Something wakes me up in the middle of the night. I open my eyes and listen, but my senses register nothing but darkness and the absolute stillness of the room. I’ll always love this time of night, before dawn crests on the horizon and brings light and a new day.
Chris sleeps beside me, one arm thrown over my waist, breathing softly. The weight of his arm anchors me to the bed, to him, to this life.
I roll from my back onto my side, toward him, this man that I could not leave. He murmurs in his sleep as I bury my face in his neck, pressing the length of my body against him, the smell of his skin as familiar and comforting as anything I’ve ever known.
I do think we have the capacity to love more than one person at a time, and that the love we feel for someone can be displaced, transferred, shifted. Even shared with another. But not lost. At least not forever.
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