Elam tucked a bookmark between the pages and closed the book, setting it on the nightstand beside the bed. “The girls fall asleep okay?” he asked.
Ruth nodded. They had agreed he would gradually become more and more a part of their lives, but for now, in the beginning, they would behave as if everything were the same as it had always been. But it wasn’t, because Ruth now crossed the room toward the bed. Elam pulled the covers back for her, and she crawled beneath them while wearing one of the Cuddl Duds sets she wore under her clothes when she ran. He exuded warmth and comfort, and Ruth lay against his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall beneath her chin.
“It’s nice being home, isn’t it?” he said.
Ruth nodded, her limbs gradually releasing the tension she didn’t know they’d been holding. Sometimes, when she was standing in the kitchen or brushing one of the girls’ hair, she found she couldn’t breathe, and the only thought that kept her from panicking was that, at the end of the day, she would find herself here—in their little porthole room beneath the eaves—where the love they had for each other could keep the entire world from entering in.
But it did.
Ruth’s cell phone rang in the pocket of her robe, which she’d discarded on the arm of the cane-backed chair. Ruth stiffened. Elam removed his hands from her shoulders.
“You should get . . . that,” he said.
Ruth didn’t say anything. It rang again.
“Could be . . . him.”
“I know,” she said, tone sharp. “That’s why I don’t want to answer it.”
But for Mabel and Elam’s sake, Ruth got out of bed and crossed the room. She didn’t recognize the number, but she didn’t expect she would. She glanced at Elam, their eyes touching briefly, before she pressed the green button and said hello.
“Ruth?”
Ruth nodded at Elam and automatically turned her back. But she did not leave the room. Her chest grew tight. She opened her mouth to speak. No words would come.
“Ruth,” Chandler said. “It’s me.”
“I know,” she replied, and she sensed, once more, that she was conversing with the dead.
“I’m in Paris,” he continued. “On a layover. Are you in Ireland?”
“No. In Wisconsin.” She swallowed. “With your mom.”
“Really?” His voice rose. This was not the conversation you have with your spouse when she realizes you’re alive. “That’s great. Then I’ll change my flight to Wisconsin.”
She knew their meeting was inevitable, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t cruel. “How soon do you think you’ll be here?” she asked, meaning, How much time do we have left?
“I’m not sure,” Chandler said. “Getting flights has been hard. Maybe two days?” He paused, and she could hear his tear-filled smile. “Honey,” he said, “I’m coming home.”
Ruth closed her eyes. For years, she had wanted, and even prayed, that her husband would physically and emotionally return to her, and now that prayer had been answered. Their meeting wasn’t the only thing that was cruel. A God who delayed answering prayers until the supplicant no longer wanted them answered was crueler still.
“I’ll be here,” Ruth said. Which is what she had always said to Chandler. You leave. I’ll be here, waiting. Always waiting. But this time, Chandler didn’t know she had moved on.
Elam, behind her, asked, “Is he . . . coming here?”
Ruth bent to slip the phone in the pocket of her bathrobe and walked back over to the bed. She didn’t get in, as she had before, but sat on the mattress edge. Her eyes burned as she placed a hand on the crisp white sheet. For the second time in the past few days, she felt guilty thinking of Elam as her husband. It angered her that the love they shared should be tainted by someone who, for years, hadn’t offered her the support she needed. “Yes,” Ruth said. “Chandler is coming here.”
Elam couldn’t look at Ruth, another man’s wife who was also his. Regardless of how you viewed it, the situation was impossible. And yet one thing was clear: he wasn’t going to give her up if she didn’t want him to. But he was too scared to ask if she did.
He asked instead, “What do you . . . need me to do?” Because doing something—anything—seemed easier than just waiting here.
Leaning across the bed, Ruth grasped both of his hands. “I need nothing,” she said, “but for you to continue being the man I love.”
Elam looked up, then, into her fevered eyes. “It’s crazy,” he said, “how, a few months ago, I would’ve given my right arm to hear my cousin was alive . . . and now . . .” He shook his head in disgust. They were not only talking about Ruth’s first husband; they were also talking about the father to their children, Sofie and Vi.
They deserved to have Chandler back, even if it meant Elam lost them all.
“Now,” Ruth finished for him, withdrawing her hands, “you dread his return.”
“I can’t live as if I’m your husband while knowing your husband’s alive.”
Ruth folded her arms across her robe. “What are you saying?”
Elam sighed. “‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you’ is pretty clear. If I was Chandler, I wouldn’t want you sleeping in bed with another man.”
“But we’ve not even really been . . . together since we found out he’s alive.”
Elam said, “I know. I thought that would be enough. But I can’t do this either, Ruth. I can’t be here like this, with you.” He looked across the bed at his wife, in her soft pajamas, her hair undone. She saw him swallow. Saw that this was devastating him, but it still revived that seed of rejection that had taken root long before she became Chandler’s wife. It was a seed that had been planted in childhood when Ruth misinterpreted her mother’s reserved, taciturn nature as a sign she was not loved.
“You’re saying you don’t want me.”
Elam looked to that porthole wall. He pushed his thumbs against his closed eyes. “Oh, Ruth. I could never not want you. I could never not love you. The problem is I love God even more, and that love makes it impossible for me to compromise you like this.”
Ruth stood from the bed. She glared down at Elam, and the pain of every time Chandler hadn’t fulfilled a promise came flooding back. “You’re just scared,” she said. “You’re just scared you’re going to lose me, so you’re pushing me away before that happens.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m scared. I’m not just scared I’m going to lose you. I’m . . . I’m terrified. Everything inside of me wants to pull you into this bed and make use of the time we have left. But if I do that, Ruth, it’ll change the beauty of what we have now. I don’t want to make you that kind of woman, and I know you don’t want me to be that kind of man.”
Elam then picked his pillow up and walked out of his bedroom to sleep on the couch.
CHAPTER 14
CHANDLER’S PROP PLANE touched down in La Crosse, and he couldn’t help thinking that coming back from the dead was rather anticlimactic. He had watched enough deployment reunions on YouTube to expect the same level of pomp and circumstance. Nothing fancy, really, perhaps just a few supermarket balloons and a poster that read Welcome Home, Daddy! decorated with prints of his daughters’ precious hands. However, when he disembarked and entered the airport—which was dusty and partitioned off with yellow caution signs due to the construction that was taking the better part of a year—he found that his wife, Ruth, was standing there alone. She watched him approach, her arms crossing her chest as if she were cold.
She wore jeans, boots, and a green parka he hadn’t seen before. The hood was pulled up over her hair, and Chandler could tell she was not smiling. His eyes moved away from her to the few tarp-draped corners of the airport, trying to see if perhaps this was a joke and, at any minute, his mom and daughters would burst from the bathroom, bellowing, “Surprise!”
But nothing happened.
So Chandler approached Ruth. She called from a distance, “Did you have a nice flight?”
Chandler stopped walki
ng and looked more closely at her, for the sentence wasn’t a question as much as it was a warning. He wondered why. “Yeah,” he said. “It was fine.”
She did not extend her arms, but he stepped closer to her. He leaned toward her mouth, for a kiss, and she held her right cheek out toward him. Again, he paused, thinking his wife’s brusqueness had to be a joke. But Ruth, he knew, was not the joking type. He kissed her cheek and noted the familiar scent of her sandalwood perfume. At least that was the same.
“Where’s your luggage?” she asked.
He held up his empty hands. “I travel light.”
“No doubt,” she said.
“The girls didn’t come?”
“No.” Ruth did not meet his eyes. “I wanted the chance to talk to you first.”
When they exited the airport, she led him over to a plain white minivan. Chandler looked at her for an explanation, and she said, “I don’t have a car, so I use the community’s driver.”
“You don’t have a car?”
Ruth said, her voice an abyss, “How could I have afforded one, Chandler?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sensing this was not enough.
Ruth’s back was to him as she strode toward the van. She pulled open the sliding door, and Chandler got in beside her. The driver turned and nodded at him. Chandler had no clue who he was. He was wondering how they could possibly talk when Ruth said, “Are you hungry? I was thinking of stopping for lunch at this little Norwegian diner. It’s on the way home.”
Larsen’s. It startled Chandler to hear his wife speak about the places he’d known since boyhood. And though he was hungry—had, in fact, eaten nothing that wasn’t offered on the flights—more than any necessity in the world, he needed to get back to the farm to see his daughters. But he sensed the necessity of this “lunch” as well and therefore said, “Sounds great.”
Ruth leaned forward and gave the address to the driver. He punched it into his phone and pulled out of the parking lot. A light rain began to fall. Chandler and Ruth sat side by side, but there was enough space between them for both of their children. He glanced at her profile, saw the stoic expression belied by flushed cheeks. Ruth was as striking as the day he left, if not more so, since spouses tend to envision an ill-defined version of the mate they daily see. He didn’t know how to interpret her behavior, but he thought that his wife just needed time. They hadn’t seen each other in ten months, and perhaps she just didn’t remember how they’d been.
Chandler’s own cheeks flushed as a slideshow clicked through his mind: late-night fights that dissolved into early-morning conversations Ruth communicated solely by slamming cupboards as she made their girls breakfast. Perhaps the reason she was sitting so far from him—the reason she hadn’t given him the kind of reception he’d dreamed about during the recent nightmare of his life—wasn’t because she didn’t remember, but because she couldn’t forget.
Ruth sat across from her first husband, an untouched cup of potato soup before each of them, and tried to recall how they began. She knew their relationship started on the roof of Bethel House, when she and Chandler had shared a blanket and listened to a distant rooster crow in the darkness, a satellite blinking overhead and the sky flooded with stars. Or perhaps it was on the mountain, when the two of them discovered Sofie sleeping on a makeshift bed in her biological parents’ ramshackle house, the tarps and sticks so poorly tethered, it seemed that, at any moment, the entire contraption would go sailing over the cliff.
Their eyes had met in the dim light emitted by the fire smoking in the center of the room. Sofie was crying, wailing, and each ragged inhalation revealed how very sick she was. The smell of defecation was rife in the small space, and Ruth could see the pile of soiled cloth diapers on the unmade bed. The parents—impossibly young and scared—looked at Chandler and Ruth.
Ruth took off the yellow clown wig she’d been wearing to help the children not be afraid as Chandler administered the shots. She remembered pulling Chandler aside and looking up at him. The smoke, combined with the face paint, made it difficult to see. And yet, that wasn’t the reason tears streamed from her eyes. She asked, “What can we do?”
Tugging his long sleeve out from beneath his windbreaker, he carefully wiped her face. “We help,” he said. “In whatever way they need.”
That moment, even more than the rooftop dinner and all the moments that came after, was when Ruth and Chandler began. That was the moment she glimpsed the man he was and knew she loved that person, even if she wasn’t sure she loved him in the context of wife and husband, woman and man. And now, here they were. The Midwestern downpour streaked outside the windows of the diner. The booth where they were seated was bright red, the table gray Formica flecked with glitter. A Nordic quote, encapsulated with red and teal swirls, bordered the walls. The diner was crowded, independent dairy farmers and employees from the nearby organic dairy plant crowded into booths and chairs at the counter. A rotating glass display encouraged diners to save room for sugared slices of cherry, apple, or blueberry pie—all made daily from scratch—but neither Chandler nor Ruth noticed much about their environment.
They were each too lost in their own thoughts. They were each somewhat despondent, wondering how they’d hopscotched from those magical, painful moments in Colombia to here: when they knew everything about each other and yet had nothing to say.
Ruth squeezed lemon into her tea and fished out a seed with a spoon.
Chandler looked at her. “Do the girls know I’m . . . back?”
“From the dead?” Ruth’s spoon clinked onto the saucer. “No,” she said. “They do not. I thought about telling them last night, when I was tucking them in, but . . .” Stopping, she gripped the handle of the cup. “A few months ago, I had to tell them their father was dead, Chandler, and now . . . now, I’m just supposed to erase all that emotional trauma by telling them you’re alive.” She swirled the tea. Her knuckles stood out, white, on her chapped hands.
Chandler saw Ruth no longer wore her wedding ring; in its place was another ring, a Claddagh, if he remembered right. It cut him to see that, and yet he supposed, if the roles were reversed and he’d been the one to receive news of Ruth’s passing, he might’ve taken his wedding ring off too. He shook his head, not aware he was doing it.
Ruth said, “What?”
But he didn’t ask her about the ring, or lack thereof. After everything she had gone through, after everything they had and hadn’t shared, he didn’t feel he had the right.
Chandler asked, “How have you been?”
He was so polite, it set her teeth on edge. Ruth took a sip of tea. “It’s been hard.”
“I can’t imagine,” he murmured. “I tried to, after they told me I’d been declared dead. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be separated from you like that, and how I would tell the girls.” He reached across the table with both hands, hers still wrapped tight around the cup. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you had to go through this alone.”
Ruth looked down. A burst of laughter from a nearby booth caused Chandler to look away, and this was when she extricated her hands from beneath his. She folded them in her lap and twirled the ring Elam had given her. Everything about this time together, about this conversation, felt like a betrayal not to Chandler, as she might have thought, but to him, Elam—the husband who had rejected her as well.
“Something happened when you were away,” she began. “I came here without knowing anyone. Even your mom . . . we didn’t really know each other.” She swallowed. “Elam was here too.” Chandler still said nothing, and the silence made her uncomfortable. Ruth zipped her jacket up to her neck, as if it could somehow gird her. “We arrived at the beginning of the cranberry harvest,” she continued. “Elam allowed me to help him out in the fields. It was so good for me. It gave me something to focus on besides my own loss.”
Chandler said, “I’m glad.” He had this new way of looking at her that was disconcerting. She wasn’t accustomed to being stared at
so intently. Most of all, she wasn’t accustomed to being stared at so intently by him.
“Elam and I got to know each other. We became friends. We were living in his farmhouse, with Mabel and him, and he was so good with the girls, so patient and kind . . .” Her voice trailed off. She risked another glance at Chandler and suspected, by the fact he was looking around the diner rather than at her, that he was beginning to understand. “We fell in love,” Ruth said. “Elam and I. It—it happened so quickly. Neither of us expected it.”
Chandler looked at her. “So I take it Elam’s not glad I’m coming home?”
Ruth’s nails cut into the palms of her hands. “It’s hard for him, Chandler,” she said. “He feels guilty, I guess. You have to understand, we all believed you were dead.”
“But I’m not,” Chandler said, with the first hint of annoyance. “I’m right here.”
“It was different then,” Ruth said. “We were . . . I don’t know what we were, but Mabel was all for it too. So, we . . .” She looked away, couldn’t bear to see the look on Chandler’s face when she told him.
“You married him.”
Ruth flinched. Chandler’s voice turned ludicrous every redemptive thing that had happened over the past few months. She despised him, suddenly—or maybe not so suddenly—for doing that to her, for making her embarrassed for the relationship that had changed her life.
“Yes,” she snapped. “We got married. Elam and I got married and were on our honeymoon when we received the call that you were alive.”
Chandler stood so quickly that his plate rattled, but he was still trapped in the booth. He said, “Did you sleep with him?”
“Elam and I married each other,” she repeated. “In every sense of the word.”
“You must’ve been upset,” he said, his voice low, “to discover I was alive.”
Ruth said nothing. A few of the diners were looking their way and to agree with Chandler would only make the conversation worse.
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