He tasted tears on her cheeks and knew he was almost sobbing himself.
At midnight, lying in Libby’s arms after they’d both been still and silent for a while, Brady said to her, “Tell me about Glenn.” His hand explored the curve of her hip, then came to rest there, soft and heavy. She was in no hurry for it to move.
“What about him?” she asked.
“Well, you know, anything. The important things. The basic stuff.”
“He was a regional finance manager for a national restaurant chain. He liked golf and fishing.”
“No, Libby.” He eased away from her a little, and slid his hand down to her thigh. “I put it badly. I meant your marriage, I guess.”
“That’s different. That’s not Glenn. It’s something else. An entity of its own.”
“Okay, then, your marriage. Were you happy? Was he—you know, does this exist? People say it, but I’m not so sure—the love of your life?”
Libby was almost grateful for his clumsy phrases. He didn’t always express himself easily and well in words. It gave her a convenient license to answer his question obliquely.
“I was in raptures on our wedding day,” she said. “Nine years later, I nursed him through a terminal illness. I was holding his hand when he died. There was love. Care,” she said, revising her original word choice. “No one doubts the existence of care, do they? You must have cared for Stacey. You struggled through all those years of infertility together. You were confident enough to adopt a child.”
“Or desperate enough,” he said bluntly. “You know, I don’t—my parents didn’t bring me up to—like—fall off the horse at the first piece of rough riding. I stayed the distance. Stacey had her moments. We were managing. I thought.”
“But you don’t think so now?”
“She was with another man when she died.”
“Oh, Brady, I’m so sorry!”
“Yeah. It’s the kind of thing I’m hoping I never have a reason to tell Scarlett. Never look for a reason to tell anyone things like that. Only now I’m telling you.”
And it was hard for him. Even to find the words. Libby felt the effort he was making, communicated through his body, still wrapped around hers. She ached for him, listened to him with her whole heart as he tried to say a little more. And yet there remained a detached space inside her, and she was in the middle of that space, thinking, “Don’t. Don’t put us through this. It isn’t necessary. It’s safer when you keep it to yourself.”
She hadn’t betrayed nearly as much to him about Glenn, about the destructive patterns in their marriage, and she didn’t intend to.
Because you haven’t escaped those patterns, yet.
Was that the reason? Why had she let those patterns build so strongly in the first place?
“Thank you for telling me,” she said, as if he’d given her a gift that wasn’t quite what she wanted, a gift that fell into the category of “It’s the thought that counts.”
Then she kissed him with a deliberate, teasing heat that made quite sure this conversation wouldn’t go any further.
“I’m letting you do this,” Brady muttered against her mouth. “Probably shouldn’t.” He said something else, that she didn’t catch because it was lost between their lips. Sounded like “wallpapering.” Couldn’t have been that.
“As we thought, you have some significant fibroids in your uterus, and I’d recommend surgery,” Dr. Peel said. “Both to deal with the discomfort and heaviness of your periods, and in the event that you might want children.”
“But it’s not cancer?”
“I never talked about cancer, Mrs. McGraw.”
“No, but—” Sudden tears came, like rain clattering onto a roof. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Thank God it’s not!”
The specialist surveyed her coolly, with a degree of surprise. “I’m sure you’re relieved. I didn’t realize that you’d been so concerned in the first place.”
“My husband—my first husband—died of testicular cancer four and a half years ago. He was only thirty-eight.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yes, it was hard.” Since Dr. Peel’s statement had been formulaic, Libby’s answer was, too.
“Will you go ahead with surgery?” he asked. “Or do you need more time to think? Do you want to talk it over with your husband?”
She’d mentioned a first husband, so it was logical for him to assume there was now a second. It wasn’t accurate, though. Not yet. It would be in a few weeks.
“I’m not—” she began, intending to correct him, but then decided it was irrelevant. “Well, I’ll go ahead, of course,” she said instead. “Unless there are reasons against it which you haven’t given me yet.”
“There are the usual extremely rare risks associated with any surgery,” Dr. Peel said. “But this isn’t a major operation. At your age—” he glanced down at her file “—I’d imagine those risks would be outweighed in your mind by the positive effect on your fertility.”
He waited for her response, so she said, “Mm.”
“I should tell you, there are no guarantees that you’ll be able to conceive easily after the surgery, but it will certainly improve your odds to a considerable degree.” He looked at her file again. “There are no notes here about any previous research into your fertility. Have you ever attempted to conceive?”
“Just for a few months, several years ago. We weren’t trying long enough to suspect a problem when it didn’t happen. Would the fibroids have been present then? Would they have been a factor?”
“That’s impossible to say, I’m sorry. Were you having symptoms?”
“Not until a few months ago. They came on gradually. It’s hard for me to pinpoint the timing.”
“Mm. If you do decide to go ahead, you can schedule the procedure with my staff today, or over the phone.”
Dr. Peel gave one of his carefully rationed smiles and prepared to leave the room. Libby let him go, since she couldn’t think of anything more she wanted to say. His manner didn’t encourage casual conversation.
Still in a daze of relief at his diagnosis, she went out to the spacious waiting area and told one of the women behind the desk, “I need to schedule a procedure.”
She saw her file already resting near the computer. With the appointment clerk’s help, she picked a date in December, a week and a half after the wedding date she and Brady had decided on, and a week before Christmas.
Next, she went to the mall and bought a bridal gown.
Libby looked different, Brady realized as soon as she came in through the kitchen door.
Could be her pink cheeks. It was cold outside.
Or it could be the enormous white bag she carried, emblazoned with the name of a bridal store, in silver script, and the grin that appeared on her face when she saw him looking at it. Colleen’s hand gripped the top of the bag with a toddler’s possessiveness and determination, as if she knew it was important, too.
Brady transferred the sizzling-hot supermarket pizzas from the oven to the top of the stove. “You got it?”
She’d called him at work this morning to say she’d arranged to work a split shift at the day-care center today, starting at six and finishing at seven, so she could take a few hours off in the middle of the day to shop for a dress and handle a couple of other errands.
They both felt impatient to push their plans for the wedding forward as quickly as possible. To Brady, the prospect of a legally sanctioned and clear-cut arrangement between them was like the scaffolding he erected on his construction sites. It offered strength and safety, at a point when the final structure—a building, or in this case, their relationship—wasn’t far enough advanced to do so.
It would help. It would guide them. He had to believe that.
Since Friday night, they’d already fixed a date, booked his church, found a restaurant and started calling people. “You’ll get a written invitation as well,” they were telling family and friends, “but with such short n
otice, we wanted to call first.”
Through all the weekend activity, Libby had seemed so tense and distant, however, that he’d been holding his breath, waiting for her to say that she’d changed her mind.
He’d responded cautiously to her mood. His instincts had been split, as usual. On the one hand, he’d wanted to yell at her, “If it terrifies you that much, we won’t do it. It was my idea, but you said yes right away. I didn’t exactly have to twist your arm. You had tears in your eyes. You acted as if it was the best suggestion you’d ever heard. If you want to change your mind, tell me!”
On the other hand, he’d felt a little jumpy himself, so he hadn’t pushed. He’d held back, and had come up with a couple of convenient reasons for doing so. Space was good. Men weren’t the only ones who didn’t like to be smothered in questions and emotions. Women could feel that way, too.
Now it seemed as if the space decision had been the right one.
She looked a lot better.
Purchasing the dress had done something for her. Crystallized something, maybe. Was that it?
Still holding the bag in one hand, she came up to him and cupped a cool palm against his face. “Thanks for riding out my stress levels on the weekend. I’m much better now.”
“I can see that. It’s okay, Lib. We’ve been tying ourselves in knots since the first day I called you, out of the blue, two months ago.”
“Mm.”
She looked up into his face as if there was a string of code written across his forehead that she wanted to decipher. He put his hands on her waist and drew her close. The thick paper of the bridal-store bag crackled, and the nest of silver tissue inside it hissed.
He kissed her face with soft, slow prints of warmth, and she blurted out, “When you’re touching me, I never want to talk. Talking…saying something wrong…can ruin things. Forever. And I never want to risk ruining this.”
“This” being the magic they’d discovered in each other’s bodies, he understood, which existed outside of all the other areas in which they were still searching for answers.
“Good. Don’t ruin anything,” he answered, just happy that they were standing close, that she’d bought a dress, that dinner was hot and ready, that he was interviewing for Gretchen’s replacement tomorrow, and that things were slowly working out.
“Thanks for cooking,” she said.
“You mean thanks for slinging a couple of pizzas in the oven?”
“Yeah, that.” She smiled. “It’s hot and it’s food and it smells good!”
“At what point did I kid myself that I was going to tell him about the surgery tonight?” Libby wondered much later, lying awake beside Brady in his bed, staring at the red numbers on the clock radio alarm. “Am I kidding myself now, when I tell myself it’s okay if I don’t tell him at all? It’s not cancer. It’s a routine operation. Female stuff. It’s not a betrayal if I decide to deal with it on my own.”
She would put the surgery off until January, when her friends were due to end their tenancy of her house in St. Paul, and she’d fly up there and deal with the house. Put it on the market? Or strip it of the rest of its furnishings and rent it out, long-term, through a Realtor? She hadn’t made the decision yet.
She would have the surgery done at the same time, but she’d have to ask Mom if she’d be able to come to Chicago to look after Colleen. She knew Mom would respond better to a concrete request for help than to a more abstract, emotional plea from Libby that she get to know her adoptive granddaughter. In that sense, the surgery might have a side-benefit.
In every other way, Libby told herself, it just wasn’t a big issue.
Except, if it was such a little thing, why did she have this powerful instinct urging her to keep it to herself?
Silence is a form of lying.
She’d already glossed over a couple of facts today. Yes, the choosing of the bridal gown had taken a lot longer than the doctor’s appointment, but the doctor’s appointment was the original reason she’d arranged for the split shift.
She could easily have said, “And I had a medical appointment, as well. Turns out I have to have some surgery.”
What was she afraid of?
Think, Libby. Work it out.
She thought it had to be because of what the doctor had said about the fibroid removal improving her odds of conceiving. She and Brady were both coming to this expedient marriage with complex and very different histories in that area. She didn’t want to open up a can of worms.
The marriage they were planning had such an unusual foundation. It wasn’t about love, it was for the girls. She’d tried marrying for the sake of something she’d labelled “love,” and after the stifling nature of most of those years with Glenn, she’d found a real form of care for him in the end. But it had been such hard work.
She wasn’t looking for love anymore. Not that kind, for sure, and she wasn’t convinced that any other kind was real. Brady seemed doubtful about it, too. She had a bleak dread that telling him about the surgery might blow their whole relationship into a million pieces.
As usual, she was swerving in a panic to avoid talking about flammable emotions, the way Brady had swerved to avoid the speeding pickup on Friday night. She could see herself doing it, but couldn’t find a way to change. She was too afraid.
“There has to be some key to unlock all this,” she thought, “but I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know how to find out.”
Chapter Ten
Columbus had a December snowstorm the day before Libby and Brady’s wedding. It left the streets, sidewalks, yards and rooftops wedding cake-white and Christmas-card pretty.
Libby’s mother came from Chicago for the event.
After her negative reaction to the move back in September, Libby had been reluctant to tell her about the wedding. She’d had that familiar, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as she led up to the subject with small talk, over the phone, but Val had faked her out again.
Even without having met Brady, she was immediately thrilled.
She had arrived the afternoon before the wedding, just as the weather had cleared, and she was ready to help. Val had been simultaneously impressed by Brady and anxious to get rid of him, being very firm on the tradition that he shouldn’t see his bride on their wedding day until the ceremony was about to start.
This surely meant, didn’t it, Mom suggested, that it would be much more practical if he and Scarlett had dinner and spent the night at his mother’s, while she snatched some time alone with her daughter?
Mom hadn’t seemed very interested in Scarlett, and was cautious about Colleen as well.
“You know I think she’s beautiful,” she’d said, almost apologetically, when she and Libby had greeted each other at the airport. “I knew that from the photos. I love her, I really do. Would you give Grandma a hug, honey? No? Not yet? See, it’ll take both of us a while to get used to each other. I’m just not the kind of person who takes children to heart right away, Lisa-Belle.”
Mom was this way about a lot of things. Slow to adjust.
By the time Colleen was all dressed up for the wedding, Val had warmed to her. “She is adorable in that dress!”
So close to Christmas, Brady and Libby had chosen dark Christmas-green and -red as their colors, and for once they were dressing the girls alike. Scarlett would be wearing the exact same dress of dark green velvet with swirling underskirts and white lace trim. There were to be no bridesmaids or grooms-men, just the two little girls walking ahead of Libby down the aisle of the church, each carrying a mini bouquet of red roses.
The eleven o’clock ceremony would be followed by a restaurant lunch. Val was flying back late that same afternoon, “to give you some privacy.” They hadn’t planned a honeymoon, however, and were staying at home.
“Time to go, honey,” Mom told Libby, hugging her. “The car’s waiting outside. Oh, and your hands are like ice!”
“That’s part of the job description, isn’t it?” Libby joked
nervously. “Bride must have icy and/or clammy hands well in advance of ceremony.”
“You weren’t this nervous when you married Glenn.”
“I wasn’t mature enough for nerves back then.”
Mom didn’t seem to understand how this could be true, but Libby knew that it was.
The church wasn’t full. Brady had two families of aunts and uncles and cousins who’d driven up from Cincinnati, his mother, a handful of old college friends and several valued clients and work associates. His ex-office manager, Gretchen, was here; but Nate had declined his invitation. There would be no romantic reconciliation between the two of them today.
Libby’s side of the aisle was even more sparsely populated. There were her mom’s younger brother and his wife and their two college-age kids from Chicago, as well as Libby’s godmother, who was in frail health and shouldn’t really have made the trip, although Libby was touched that she had, and two friends from St. Paul with their husbands and young children.
Brady’s mom was waiting in the church entrance with Scarlett. Colleen’s twin was almost hysterical with excitement about an event she didn’t remotely understand, and Colleen caught the mood from her with the virulence of a serious case of chicken pox. Brady himself, Libby knew, must be standing at the altar.
Her nerves were like steel-guitar strings, stretched to snapping point, but she managed smiles for Delia and the girls.
“They’re not going to go in the right direction, and they’re not going to be quiet!” Delia warned, with a twinkle in her eye.
“We’ll handle it,” Libby said, her teeth chattering. They looked so cute and gorgeous. Her twin daughters. It would be a legal reality, soon, as she and Brady had begun the process of formally adopting each other’s daughters.
Libby’s mom peeled off Colleen’s coat. Val hadn’t let Libby wear anything over her dress, in case it got creased, and the bride was freezing. The church was warm, however. Libby nudged the girls ahead of her gently, and whispered, “Can you walk down to the front now, guys?”
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