by Lee Woodruff
Pete sighed, and his chair made a scraping noise as he stood. He moved wordlessly to the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of beer, and twisted the top off, skittering it over the counter. He stood in front of the door for a moment after it closed, studying the magnet decals and family photos. A laminated, typed list of useful phone numbers was taped in the center of the door, containing the numbers for family members, the babysitter, the doctor’s offices, and poison control.
“You still haven’t found your phone yet, huh?” Pete asked over his shoulder.
“No.”
“We should get you a new cell phone this week.” Maura was relieved by the change of subject, although they were still on slightly dangerous territory.
“I don’t know, Pete. It’s not at the top of my list. It’s not like I’m out and about all day. I’m mostly here, and there’s a machine. I don’t really want to talk to anyone outside my family.”
“What about me? Maybe I want to reach you sometimes, Maura. What if something is wrong with the kids? You can’t be without a phone forever. It’s not practical.”
Maybe, thought Maura. But it was more comfortable this way. There were no surprises. Communication could happen on her terms.
“Let me look for it one more time,” said Maura. “Maybe it’s still around and it’s just dead.” Though it wasn’t, she knew. She had made sure of that.
“Did you have it that morning?” Pete was glancing down at the morning paper now, still on the counter from breakfast. He was scrolling randomly through the sports page. She could see the bald patch beginning on the top of his head, the places where his newly shampooed scalp shone through.
“What?” Her heartbeat kicked up and she worked to keep her voice nonchalant.
“Your phone. You haven’t had it since the accident. Were you talking on it that morning?” He was studying her now, his voice more steely, or was she just imagining it?
“A cell phone is the last thing on my mind right now, Pete. Honestly, there was so much confusion … when … when it all happened …” Maura stopped what she was saying, stared out the window over the sink, chewing on her bottom lip, and then turned back to observe him. The sky outside was ink black and moonless. Pete looked up at her quizzically for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of surrender before he took another swig of beer and left the room.
During other periods of their marriage, they had gone through rough patches, little fights, things that had gotten blown out of proportion, starting from some slight or transgression. They had lived for an entire day, once, barely speaking to each other. She could remember the first time they had ever gone to bed mad at each other, despite their newlywed pledge never to do so. It had started over something stupid, her telling him not to drag the porch chairs or blowing up at the condition in which he’d left the kitchen.
But this was different. This was a kind of corrosive apathy, a gentle disinterest in the bonds that had once held them together. And what made it scarier was that she suspected he felt this way too. They were two people adrift, had been for a few years now, and James’s death had cleaved them further. It would take at least one of them to right the course, and she simply lacked the energy at present.
For a moment, Maura allowed herself to picture how she had broken her cell phone into pieces and slid it down the grate in the street on the corner, hearing the splash in the sewer water below. The records of the texts would be obliterated. There was so much about that day and the things that had happened leading up to it that she still couldn’t bear to revisit. Maura slammed the window down on those thoughts as she removed Pete’s empty beer bottle from the table, rinsed it, and dumped it in the kitchen recycling bin.
The next night, onions and bell peppers were simmering in butter on top of the stove, permeating the house with their distinctive odor. Maura heard the garage door begin to rattle open and was pleased to see that Pete was home early. He’d make another family dinner with the kids this evening, two in a row. He walked into the kitchen holding a plastic bag, pecked her on the cheek, and plunked a box on the counter.
“I got you a new phone … a nice one,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a better version of the one you had before.”
“Thanks.” Maura gave the contents of the frying pan a stir and punched the button on the stovetop hood fan up to a higher level before turning to observe Pete assembling the cell phone and its various accessories. It would feel strange to be available to anyone at any time again, she thought. There had been something wonderful about reentry on her own terms, with the safety of an answering machine to buffer her from the outside world. A mobile phone suddenly felt so immediate, so urgent.
“Now we can all reach you,” joked Pete. “Even if you don’t want to be found.” She looked at him and made an expression that was both mocking and serious. Pete smiled, his eyes crinkling, and for a moment she glimpsed in his face the outlines of the boy-man she had fallen in love with.
“You’re welcome,” he said in a joking voice. “Dinner smells great,” and he headed upstairs to change out of his suit.
12
Maura was relieved that the well-intentioned visits from friends had tapered off. More than three months after the accident she had grown tired of people hoping to “see how she was.” They had begun to lose interest after her full-blown retreat. Everything had a life cycle.
She loved her friends and knew they meant well, yet each time they walked in the front door, she experienced a sudden, desperate urge to trade places with them. They could breeze into the wreckage of her household, trailing their visions of cheer or normalcy to comfort her. But then they would leave. And this was the part Maura resented. They would hug her and head out into the bright sunshine, off to the grocery store, to bring lemonade to the sidelines of a soccer game or pick up the family dry cleaning. They would walk off her front porch relieved, drawing fresh air into their lungs as they headed toward their cars, shedding the weight of her grief as effortlessly as a silk scarf.
The most persistent person had been Celia Murphy, the mother of James’s best friend, Henry. Her dramatic kindness and overblown compassion often stuck in Maura’s craw. Their friendship had largely been constructed around the kids, and they’d logged many hours together at playgrounds and sporting events. Celia was one of those striking faux-Scandinavian suburban wives who lorded their organizational superiority over less perfect mothers, the ones who didn’t have the baseball schedule taped to the fridge or forgot the upcoming bake sale. She wore foundation and lip gloss when she exercised. And although Maura believed she meant well, Celia was a crisis rubbernecker, a kind of emotional tick, swelling with empathy as she feasted on calamities, inserting herself to extract the details. At the start of the school year, Celia had called the house on an afternoon when Erin was over, and Maura had seen the number on the caller ID. “Pick it up,” urged Maura. “Please? If you talk to her maybe I won’t have to call her back. She doesn’t give up,” Maura had pleaded, handing the cupped phone to her sister.
“Maura?” She could hear Celia’s jaunty voice through the receiver up against Erin’s ear.
“This is her sister, Erin.”
“Oh, Erin, I’m so glad I got you. I haven’t really had a chance to connect with Maura. I’d love to come over there and drag her out but I’m trying to be, you know, sensitive.”
“She appreciates everyone being so respectful right now,” said Erin evenly. “It’s still very hard, as I’m sure you can imagine.” Erin rolled her eyes at Maura, vamping.
“Absolutely. Well, actually I wanted to run something by the family, if that’s OK.”
“Sure,” said Erin in a forced chipper voice, putting Celia on speakerphone so that Maura could listen in.
“Well, Henry had this idea. And I think it’s a really good one, actually. I’ve shared it with some of the other families at the elementary school. It would be a way to honor James but also do some good too. You know how kids are so into tha
t today, the community service thing and giving back.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“We wanted to hold a fund-raiser in James’s name this fall. A car wash and bake sale for our sister elementary school in downtown Chicago,” Celia explained. “It’s in one of the ‘less fortunate’ areas,” she added with emphasis. Erin made a motion of sticking her finger down her throat, and Maura smiled in response.
“That’s a really lovely idea, Celia. I’m happy to run it by Maura and Pete. I’m sure they will be touched.”
“We were hoping all the Corrigans could come and be involved. The tentative date will be early November and we’ve already gotten approval to hold it at the elementary school.” She had barely taken a breath between sentences, Maura noted.
“Well that’s a … nice way to honor James, Celia,” began Erin cheerily, “but I’m not sure the family will be up for that so soon. Maybe you should plan on holding the one this year without us, and we can see how everyone is doing when it gets closer.” Maura nodded, her expression suddenly solemn.
“I’d love to bring some muffins over to the house, maybe just sit with Maura for a little bit?” Undeterred, Celia tried a different tack.
“You know, Celia, I have to say that right now, my sister is just kind of going one day at a time. I know you understand,” Erin said firmly. “It’s still a very difficult period. I think everyone takes this part of grieving at their own pace.” An edge had crept into her voice. She took her job as guardian of the gate seriously.
“Oh, I sooooo understand.” Celia’s unctuous voice was now abrasive to Maura and she rose with a livid industriousness to move into the living room, plumping the red plaid cushions on the couch and folding the throw blanket in an effort to keep herself occupied. Erin added some pleasantries and assured her that she’d pass the message on to Maura. “Maybe next year we can all be there.”
“She’s already working on her kid’s résumé for college,” Erin had joked later that afternoon to Margaret, who had arrived to play with Sarah. Erin had been reprising the conversation with her mother, mimicking Celia’s voice in an exaggerated southern twang. “Oh, now that’s cynical,” Margaret had chided them both sternly. “Ease up on Celia. Her heart’s in the right place. You’re going to need friends like her for the long haul.” Maura and Erin had traded conspiratorial looks.
Maura hated the notion that she was now one of those people that others pitied, the ones for whom they held fund-raisers. Maura’s family was now included in prayers at church or the subject of a cautionary example at the dinner table, about looking both ways or being careful. At least she had her family, Maura would think, when she needed to reach for some goodness in her life. Thank God she had Erin, her brother, Stu, and his wife, Jen, who was like a sister. Her parents and siblings were grieving as well, she acknowledged, although she had largely taken that for granted. But they had formed the webbing that had held her together. Although she hadn’t spent much time alone with him since the funeral, her father had been a rock. His solid presence in the house was a form of protection, and of all three children, she was closest to him. Maura shared his same ski-sloped nose, the strong jawline with a slight underbite, and she could be forceful and stubborn like Roger as well, planting her feet like a mule at times. She and her father had always preferred being in the company of others to being alone, that is, until James’s accident.
Through the years, she and Erin had spent hours dissecting inexhaustible topics, and they had never lost their ability to retrieve threads of conversations exactly where they’d stopped ten minutes earlier. As kids, they would rehash their worries and crushes or use their collective wisdom to try to solve some perceived slight with classmates or boyfriends. Tireless investigators of their parents’ marriage, they’d had many a whispered bedtime conversation attempting to plumb the depths of what was said and decided behind the closed doors in their childhood home. As adults, they had grown even closer, confessing the weaker walls and broken places in their friendships and marriages, venting frustrations about husbands and the things they’d love to change if it were ever possible, which they’d agreed it wasn’t.
Since James’s death she and Erin hadn’t had one of their customary heart-to-hearts. It was almost as if their natural sibling pecking order had reversed. Rather than being the oldest, Maura felt, at times, like the baby, with Stu and Erin watching over her and speaking in cheerful, patronizing tones. Still, she felt closer to and more grateful for her siblings than ever, united with them by this loss. So why didn’t she have these same feelings of coming together with her own husband? If only she could experience this sense of joining seams with Pete, the restoration of tenderness to its natural axis.
She was sure of it this time. In fact she’d been waiting for him, on the lookout now in the evenings. It was Pete’s regular Thursday out with his buddies, and it had occurred to Maura that the trespasser had been watching the house. He knew when Pete was gone, when the car was out of the driveway, and those were the nights he chose. She had spotted him two other times.
There was a sliver of moon and the stars looked embroidered on a black velvet sky. Her eyes adjusted to focus on the outdoors. The neighborhood was quiet, broken only by the occasional whisper of a car passing on the street. There it was, the outline of a figure. She would be more careful than the first time, she wouldn’t open the door but would study him from the house. A sight line through the crotch of the tree allowed her a view of the lawn where he was lying, so still he resembled a corpse. A cold snap had turned the fall nights crisp, and Maura imagined the wet chill of the ground permeating his thin sweatshirt.
A spark flared, a lighter probably. He was flicking it randomly back and forth, toying with the striking mechanism until it caught. A thin blue flame suddenly jumped, and she could see his hooded head rise, almost vertically to his body, and he brought what looked like a cigarette, or possibly a joint, to his lips.
Maura shifted her weight onto her other leg and carefully pulled the shade back a few more inches. She didn’t want to startle him before she had a chance to check out her hunch. She wanted to see his face, and she realized that the light spilling from the interior of her house on the first floor would afford her a better look at his features. She padded downstairs in the dark, entering the family room and stubbing her toe on the coffee table leg. Maura stifled an outburst and moved to the glass. He was younger and more vulnerable-looking than she imagined he’d be. In her mind she had pictured someone rougher perhaps, more hulking and imposing.
Alex Hulburd. She recognized him from Pete’s description; who else could it possibly be? But what was he doing? Had he turned their house into a kind of shrine? His presence out on the lawn felt like a combination of both sentry and spy. There should have been something fundamentally creepy about him occupying their lawn at night, but in fact Maura found it oddly comforting, although she couldn’t quite articulate why.
Her eyes fully adjusted now, she watched the boy as he lay back down on the grass and stretched out, releasing a lungful of smoke in a thin stream. He laced his hands behind his head, elbows jutting out as he studied the night sky. Observing him, Maura was surprised to recognize something spontaneous, almost combustible and singularly maternal loosen inside of her heart. She stayed glued to the window, perched on the arm of the sofa, as if studying a hummingbird that might startle at the slightest movement. When he had finished smoking, he rose, his storklike limbs curling into a cross-legged position before standing. He was thin and tall. Pete had told her Alex was a swimmer and he had a swimmer’s body, lean and muscular, deceptively strong. He stretched his arms up to the sky for a moment, arching his back, and then turned fully toward the house, staring directly at the plate glass window behind which she stood perfectly still. Maura held her breath.
It appeared as if he were staring directly at her, and she shrank back slightly, although she was confident that the curtain obscured most of her. Now she could see his face more clearly, his deep-
set eyes and lighter longish hair, and the fullness in his cheeks gave him a more boyish, vulnerable appearance. All at once Alex bent to retrieve something from the grass, perhaps the cigarette butt, she thought, and then he began to jog, at first a loping gait off the lawn and then gaining speed as he hit the pavement and zigzagged under a streetlamp before cutting off a side street toward the direction of his house. For a few minutes after he had disappeared from sight, Maura stood with a vacant distraction by the curtain, transfixed by the spot where the boy had lain and the moon’s soft glow. Then she turned and went back upstairs to adjust her children’s blankets before climbing into bed.
13
Sunlight filtered through the brocade cabbage rose drapes in their bedroom. It took Roger a few seconds to remember what city he was in. Chicago, not Florida. But it was Julia he’d been dreaming of and her town. He faltered at the recall for a moment. Tampa. There it was, he’d retrieved it. It still startled him when the rustiness happened in his head, at the oddest times, like an ambush. Of course he knew the name of that city. God knows he’d been there enough times for real estate deals.
Sometimes lately, especially when he was tired, conjuring up the exact name or word could be trying, almost as if there was a gumminess to his mental circuitry. “Cobwebs” he called it. He had been able to joke about it with Julia, and when it occasionally happened she would touch the back of his hand and smoothly insert the word. He’d been more reluctant to reveal the depths of this weakness with Margaret.
“Just old age,” he’d explain it away to his wife. Except that at times it felt different. Words would swim in front of him like a stutter, eluding capture until he grasped them. But more than that, what scared Roger sometimes was the flat-out forgetting. And in those moments he would ask himself if it were real, the advance of something serious, or just the unreliability of short-term memory as people aged.