Sudden laughter erupted in the stacks, and Claire straightened up to see two teenagers—a boy and a girl—sharing an overstuffed chair with a pile of books between them. The boy was writing on the girl’s bare calf in blue pen, tattooing her, Claire imagined, with his adolescent messages of love. The girl giggled louder, then whispered something into his ear, and Claire’s thoughts turned to Nicholas and to how lovely it would be for him to be like them one day again, so joyful and carefree.
“Have a ball, guys,” she said to the teenagers as she made her way to the cash register. They looked up at her with quizzical moon faces. Claire pressed the book to her chest. It wasn’t exactly the magic she’d set out for, or even wanted. But sometimes, she reminded herself, you find that you get what you need.
It was 4:00 when Claire pulled up to the house, just in time to see Michael helping Nicholas out of the front seat of the Range Rover. She watched as the fading sunlight got tangled in his hair. It looked luminous and healthy, not the dull shade she’d remembered from the hospital. He appeared taller too, less impaired. She studied him, noticing that it was his posture that was making the difference. Nick had swayed slightly as he’d gotten his footing in the gravel, but then stood erect and took in his surroundings. Gratitude filled Claire’s heart, and reflexively, she put on some lipstick and girded herself for her no-net leap into this strange new world.
Nick turned toward Claire’s car and waved. She cut the engine and dashed out to him. “Welcome home, Nicky,” she said, wrapping him tightly in her arms.
“Mom!” Nicholas hugged her back and held her extra long, just as she had imagined he would during their hospital days. His body felt soft under his Andover sweatshirt, his muscles only hinting at their pre-accident definition. But he was no longer the frail-looking kid he’d been for so many months. “We’re back,” he repeated several times as she clung to the perfection of the moment.
Michael said hello through her embrace with Nicky, and they locked eyes, yielding to the sudden crush of answered prayers, or even joy. And in that moment, Claire made an unspoken pledge that she would do her best not to let Nicholas feel as if were being hot-potatoed between two angry parents. And in the surprising softness of Michael’s expression, it seemed to Claire that they were on the same page. Maybe they could get through this without too much carnage, she thought, as Nicholas released her.
“Yeah, welcome home, sport,” Michael echoed.
“How long am I gone?” Nicholas asked, looking to Claire.
The social worker and speech therapist had prepared them for the likelihood that Nick would exhibit some increased aphasia and confusion upon his return home, but they’d given them tools to work through this tricky phase. Though Claire had failed to review that particular information at the bookstore as she’d planned, she did recall the basics of focusing on short-term goals, repetition, and above all, patience.
“You’ve been gone almost six months, honey.”
“But now you’re home to finish getting better,” Michael added.
“I am better.”
“Yes, sport, but there are still a lot of things—”
She signaled to Michael to head inside before things escalated, wondering if he would ever learn to modulate, or if she would forever be cuing him. The thought frustrated her, but he was being kinder than she’d expected, so she let it go. Michael retrieved Nick’s bag from the car, and together they walked into the house.
“See how much better I’m doing?” Nick said with elation, moving doggedly between them. They held his hands and encouraged his progress up the steps and through the mudroom. The sheer delight of the moment overshadowed Claire’s dread about returning home to the tattered remains of their old life. But it wasn’t until they stepped into the kitchen and she saw Berna watering her English lavender plant on the center island—which had been completely rearranged—that Claire found herself crashing headlong into a personalized version of The Far Side.
“Oh,” she said, in the perturbed manner that often accompanies the discovery of cracker crumbs in bed.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Montgomery. It’s nice to see you again.” Berna put down the watering can and approached them. “Hello, Nicholas,” she said, reaching out a fleshy hand to him. “My name is Berna, and I’ll be here during the week doing the housekeeping.”
Nicholas stared at her, rocking from left foot to right.
Claire’s protective instincts fired, and she shot Michael an irritated glance. How could he not have considered how this change might affect Nicholas, especially at such an important juncture? Maria should have been there with her bountiful embrace and Nick’s favorite carrot cake.
“Dad told you about me,” Nick said to Berna, interrupting Claire’s silent tirade. “Dad told me about you,” he corrected after a brief stutter. He ran his hand across his chin, where a light shadow of stubble had grown. “He said you moved my room downstairs, but I want . . . to be in my old room, with my things. I can . . . handle the stairs.” Nick looked from Berna to Michael to Claire with pleading eyes.
Claire’s irritation intensified to fury. The image of Nick convulsing on the floor of the downstairs guest bedroom looped through her head, and she was astonished that Michael could be so thoughtless as to move him there—her own guilt and responsibility and lack of any seeming authority in the house be damned. “Nicky,” she said, trying to keep her voice flat, “your dad and I need to discuss some things before—”
“Yes,” Berna said, taking a large container out of the refrigerator. “Why don’t you sit down here, Nicholas, and have some carrot cake. I made it this morning. Your father says it’s your favorite.”
Within seconds Nick and Berna were in pleasant getting-to-know-you conversation mode over the cake, and Claire was marshaling Michael into the foyer, looking over her shoulder at the maddening scene playing out in her own kitchen.
“We can’t have him living in that room, Michael,” she whisper-shouted, unable to contain the tornado of emotion inside her. “What kind of awful flashbacks could that bring up for him? No matter how much you blame me for everything that happened in there, you’ve got to just . . . ugh, I don’t know.” She dug her fists into her temples. “Think things out responsibly. There’s a science to this, every little thing needs to be carefully orchestrated.”
“Are you finished?” he asked, gently taking her wrist and guiding her down the hall. “Of course I wouldn’t put him in there. We’ve set up the space behind the study for him. Amy recommended not tackling the stairs for another month or so. So I had a medical bed brought in, and Berna brought down all the important things from his bedroom.” He looked at her calmly and opened the door to the room. “Okay?”
Inside were Nick’s denim linens on the new bed, his framed Joe Sakic jersey hanging on the wall above it, his CD collection and art supplies, even his computer and photos on the desk. There was the picture of her with Nicky from Parents’ Day on the night table, next to a vase of freshly cut flowers.
“Oh,” she said again, this time annoyed at herself and feeling small for jumping to conclusions, which seemed to be the only exercise she’d been getting recently. She sat down on the bed and buried her face in her palms, trying to reconcile this weird place where happy photos and displaced mothers would coexist. She felt the weight of Michael’s stare and reminded herself of her earlier pledge to remain calm. She would bide her time and try to get a better read on him before rushing into any demands about the future.
“I just don’t know how to do this,” she said, looking up.
“We’ll all get through it. Nicky’s been great these last few days, really tough and determined. He’s been checking his own blood sugar without reminders. And he seems to be dealing well with the new arrangement.” Michael pulled up a chair and sat down opposite the bed.
He smiled, but his eyes, which Claire had once found to be spirited, had no light in them. Even the blue of his shirt failed to bring out their life. And the circles beneath
them were more pronounced than they had been in LA. Clearly he wasn’t sleeping well—the old insomnia gremlin back for a visit, she thought—which gave her a modicum of satisfaction. “Well, you can pretend that’s true all you like. But how could Nick really be okay with all of this?”
“I think he somehow knows he has to be.”
She felt her stomach twist. “God. That’s another couple years on the therapy couch.”
Michael raised his eyebrows at her, conveying better than words the “Whose fault is that?” sentiment that would have been too much, even for him. She was grateful at least for his silence.
“So, how do you see this working?” Claire asked, regaining her focus. “This new arrangement?” A little roadmap into his psyche would be helpful as she lined up her ducks. “You know, this is still my house too. Our house.” Even though moving back in now seemed as untenable as living away from them. The house felt foreign to her, angry and bleak, and not at all like the place she had so desperately missed. The pain in her stomach turned to a kind of nausea, as if she had eaten something bad.
“I know, Claire. Until we arrange something formally, why don’t you plan to be here during the week to take him to Craig or other activities—whatever you guys want. And then I’ll handle evenings and the weekends.” He spoke logically, without disdain, and with the convincing charm that had made him so successful over the years. The charm, she noted, that he had lacked for the last six months. “How does that sound?”
Claire bit down on her lip, still furious that she’d allowed her guilt and naïve hope to back her into this corner. She subtly pressed Michael on other plans, but he eluded any further discussion, insisting their only concern for the present should be Nick’s comfort and routine. She would wait, then, if that’s how he was going to play. “So, you’ve talked to your lawyers about this?” she tried.
He looked at his watch and shifted in his seat. “This is just standard shared custody stuff. Nothing official. In fact, Nicky can stay at your place whenever you want after he gets settled.”
“I only have one bedroom, Michael. I didn’t anticipate any sort of permanence to this arrangement. You know this is not how it’s going to be in perpetuity, right?”
“Look,” Michael said, standing. “I have a dinner in a half hour, and we don’t have the time to get into a discussion about major issues right now. Let’s just see how things go for a while. There’s no hurry. No rush.” He held his palms out as if to say, “I don’t have the final answer here. See, my hands are empty.”
“Right,” she said, maintaining her calm, and wondering what his game was. Clearly, though, the game would require patience and perseverance, too. “Then I guess I’ll just get a few things from upstairs, and we’ll discuss the future . . . sometime in the near future.” She stood, feeling strangely grateful for the reprieve.
“I, uh, forgot to mention that my father is in town and he wants to spend some time with Nicky tomorrow. So it would be best if you came by later in the day.”
“How long will he be here?” she asked, wondering if she’d have to spend the week avoiding a man who used to think she hung the moon.
“I’m having dinner with him tonight,” he said, fumbling with something in his pocket and looking suddenly preoccupied and tense. It was his key chain, which he dropped and then scrambled to pick up. “He flies out tomorrow afternoon.”
“You need to get me a new set of keys, by the way.”
Footsteps echoed in the hall, and Nicholas appeared in the doorway. Claire could hear Berna retreating to the kitchen. She held her breath, still feeling the roiling in her gut.
“So, what do you think, pal?” Michael asked, ushering Nick into the room with a generous smile. “Is there anything else you want in here?”
Nick looked around, checking out every corner and surface. He made his way to the bed and picked up the control and raised and lowered the mattress. With some strain he sat down in front of his computer and stared at the sleeping screen. After what seemed like minutes, his hands shakily skimmed the keyboard, but he didn’t attempt to type anything. “I’m hungry,” he said, turning to them with a frustrated frown, caught, it seemed, in the margins of what he had yet to overcome.
They helped him to stand, each holding an arm.
“Larkburger?” Claire asked.
“Your mom will take you wherever you want tonight.”
Nicholas wriggled free and fumbled to open a CD from the stack on the desk. After a tense wrestling match with the case, he placed the disc in his computer. Wiping his eyes, he returned to where they stood. “Can I just have soup . . . Mom, can you just make me some soup here? I’m tired.”
Claire looked to Michael for something she wasn’t entirely sure of—permission or reassurance, some gesture to rescue her from the somber uncertainty of the moment. He nodded okay.
“Sure, honey,” she said, squeezing Nick’s fingers. “I’ll make you soup tonight, and we can get burgers another time.”
An acoustic harmonica wailed the intro to “Thunder Road,” followed by Springsteen’s gravelly launch into the lyrics they’d so often sung on drives up to Aspen. The three of them stood gazing out the window toward the backyard and the horizon in the distance. And through the lens of those dusky browns and reds, and the beginnings of the moon, Claire imagined Nicholas as the beautiful but weathered lighthouse around which she and Michael would occasionally gather for mooring. As the tempo and intensity of the song ramped up, she could see Michael mouthing the words, his features weary but somehow calmed.
“Who’s Taylor?” Nick blurted at the coda, shifting his gaze to his computer, and then squarely onto his father.
Almost imperceptibly, Michael’s body stiffened. “Taylor? I’m . . . not sure, pal.”
“Really?” Nicholas raked his hair with his hands and rubbed at his temples. “Damn it,” he grunted, brushing past them to lie down on the bed.
Claire studied her husband closely as she related the previous incidents surrounding Nick’s mention of Taylor. She had meant to ask him before, but his moods had always gotten in the way. Michael merely shrugged his shoulders and expressed equal bewilderment, unable to shed any more light on the mystery than she could. They both looked back to Nicholas, who had closed his eyes and was murmuring his way to sleep.
And in that moment Claire remembered why the name had sounded vaguely familiar the first time Nick had asked about Taylor. It was the same name, she was certain, that he had mumbled into his pillow the afternoon she’d returned from the beach—the afternoon he’d recognized her and wondered where his dad was. The name, which he continued to murmur into his pillow here, until the murmuring faded to a light snoring.
CHAPTER 32
“So, what’s your plan for the day, girlfriend? I thought we might do a bit of retail therapy to lift your spirits. Neiman’s is having a Burberry trunk show, and I feel the need for something British.” Gail launched into her speech the moment Claire answered her cell.
“Funny you should mention therapy. I think I could actually use some of the non-retail kind.”
“Sounds serious. Are you okay?”
“Well. Yes and no.” She sunk into her couch with the phone and took a deep breath. “Okay. I was embarrassed to mention this at lunch, but I agreed to a kind of . . . separate living arrangement with Michael after some flare-ups, thinking it would be better to soft-pedal everything for a bit, you know, to see if we could still somehow work things out under separate roofs. But then he had me locked out of the house while he was in LA with Nicky, though he said it was unintentional, and then I got angry and pushed until it sounded like he was about to drop the divorce bomb. And now”—she paused, catching her breath and stepping officially off the hamster wheel—“it looks like I’ll be eating my meals in the company of a novel for the foreseeable future.”
“What’s the new address? I’m coming right over.”
Gail arrived shortly after 10:00 with a bag full of homemade croissants, f
resh-squeezed OJ, and a platter of beautifully prepared tropical fruit.
“My God, this is gorgeous. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”
“No trouble at all, since I had Eric do it. Honey, I couldn’t prepare a pineapple if I tried.” Gail set her things down and scanned the apartment. “This is cozy.”
“Thank you for being kind,” Claire said, giving her the two-minute tour.
“Okay, so, spill. You two are actually talking the d-word?”
Claire spread their picnic out on the Formica table and proceeded to recount Cora’s ludicrous-in-hindsight plan, and just how much she’d been willing to resign herself to out of the desire for reconciliation. Over a second round of juice—newly spiked with vodka—she segued into the catalog of Michael’s increasingly enigmatic behavior and Nicky’s ever-stoic response to the hurdles of coming home.
“Oh, Claire,” Gail said, wiping crumbs from her chin. “For someone so smart, how can you be so obtuse? A scheduled visitor at your own house? You don’t need a therapist, though it certainly wouldn’t hurt. What you need is a lawyer.”
Claire took a measured sip from her glass. “I know the setup sounds hard to swallow. But I stupidly thought it would be temporary, a way for us both to get some perspective. I was blinded by hope, and fear. And it seemed somehow . . . appropriate for the short term.” She grazed on Gail’s croissant remains. “If I hadn’t invited Andrew in, none of this would have—”
“Yeah. And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.” Gail leapt up with dramatic fanfare and began to dance around the table, waving her hands over Claire’s head and shaking her hips and shoulders briskly, like a shaman. The sleeves of her Valentino tunic billowed and her bangles chimed as she chanted nonsensically, and with great fervor.
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