The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “You’re kind of quiet,” Corbin observed. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” She turned back to him, willing it to be true.

  “I’m looking forward to trying this place,” Corbin said. “The reviews have been great.”

  “So you haven’t been there?”

  “Not yet. I was just waiting for the right occasion.” His eyes were still on the road, but he inclined his head in her direction slightly. “And then you came along.”

  “Flatterer.” But she laughed. He was easy, that’s what he was. And God knew, she needed easy right now.

  The restaurant, Abundance, was housed in what had once been a barn. The tiny white lights clustered in the bushes and strung around the perimeter of the door allowed Susannah to see the weathered gray boards that made up the structure and the peeling red roof that topped it. Kind of like the barn Corbin had brought her to see. As soon as they walked in, they were greeted by a long farm table covered with artfully arranged bushels of fresh fruits and vegetables: apples were balanced on fluted green-and-gold winter squash; brussels sprouts poured in giddy profusion from a wicker cornucopia. Corbin checked their coats and let Susannah walk ahead as they were led to their table.

  It wasn’t until they were seated with a basket of fresh bread and crock of herbed butter that she remembered the question she’d wanted to ask. But he might want to know why. Did she want to tell him? She wasn’t sure. The appearance of the waiter proffering a wine list gave her a reprieve.

  “Can I get you a drink to start?” the waiter asked.

  “Ginger ale for me.” Corbin slid the wine list over in Susannah’s direction.

  “And for you?” The pen was poised above his pad.

  “I’ll start with a glass of the Cabernet,” said Susannah. She thought of what Alice had said about his past; was it true? The waiter went to get their drinks, and when he returned, he stood there until she had tasted the wine and nodded her approval.

  “Good?” Corbin asked.

  “Very.” She’d skipped lunch and the wine was going to her head rather quickly. But it gave her the courage to ask that question that had been goading her. “Do you remember that summer when we all went on a camping trip?”

  “I do.” He sipped the ginger ale.

  “Do you happen to remember the date?” The wine was very good; she needed to slow down until she ordered dinner.

  He thought for a moment. “It was in August. Late August, I think.”

  “But you don’t know the exact date?”

  “No.” She must have looked disappointed, because he added, “Why? Is it really important to know?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  He didn’t ask why and she did not volunteer. What he did say was, “I think I know how I can help you.”

  “You do?”

  “I had a Polaroid back then. Remember those? And I brought it with me. If I can find the pictures I took, they would be dated. That would give you the information you need.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It would.”

  Just knowing she might have her answer relaxed her, and she began to have a very good time. The food, when it arrived, was delicious. They had ordered seared scallops, filet of beef, salad with slices of caramelized grapefruit, chocolate mousse, mocha cake—and shared it all. Susannah ate everything eagerly, and drank a second glass of wine. She wasn’t drunk; she was just feeling good, as if something that had been tightly wound for weeks had loosened in her. Corbin told her about a promising meeting he’d had with the Wingate executives, and asked about her kids and her work. When she showed him the pictures of the moose on her phone, he looked momentarily stern. “You didn’t get up close to him, did you?”

  “Not very,” she said. “Why?”

  “They can be really aggressive. Dangerous even. You did the right thing in backing off.”

  “Jack was sorry he didn’t get to see him.”

  “Jack can see him from inside the house. In fact, I sell motion-sensitive cameras at the store. They’re used for security at a lot of places, but birders love them too. I’ll set one up at your place if you want.”

  “That would be great.” She took another sip of the wine; oh, but she was feeling good. Very good.

  After paying the check, Corbin guided her back to his car just as the first snowflakes were beginning to drift down. “I want to get you home before it really starts snowing,” he said as she slid into the seat beside him.

  Susannah was quiet. The wine had mellowed her and she was not quite ready to have the evening end. “What about those Polaroids?” she asked. “Do you think you could find them?”

  “Tonight?” he asked. The question seemed charged.

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Not too much trouble at all,” he said. “But maybe it’s not the best idea. The snow and all . . .”

  “Let’s see if you can find them quickly. If not, we can leave it for another time.”

  He nodded and they got into the car. The sky was dark now, and the tiny flakes were not registering as white but only as the merest sparkles as they were fleetingly captured by the headlights. She realized she had no idea where Corbin lived, but it was too dark for her to make out any of the few landmarks she had come to know. After a while, he drove up to a neat colonial with a Wedgwood blue door.

  “Come on in.” He turned on a light and the room bloomed into view: wide-plank pine floors, braided oval rug, a comfortably worn leather sofa and two even more worn armchairs in a floral pattern, a large flat-screen television over the fireplace. Susannah took off her coat, which Corbin hung in a closet by the door. Her excitement at being here was tamped only slightly by her awareness of those photographs. Would he be able to find them tonight? She really hoped so.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Corbin said. She sank into the sofa. “I’ll go and see if I can find those photos.” He turned to leave the room, but before going he said, “I’d offer you a nightcap, but since I’ve been sober, I never keep the stuff around.”

  “That’s all right.” Well, that certainly was direct. In his absence, she took in a few more details of the room. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on one side and sliding glass doors on another; the walls, which had been painted a shade of blue lighter than the door, held a couple of concert and sports posters but not a single thing that could be called art. She walked over to inspect the books. History, politics, a whole slew of biographies. No novels or short stories and certainly no poetry.

  She went back to the sofa to sit down. A stack of magazines sat on the coffee table and she leafed through current issues of Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and The Home Handyman. Not a single one held a shred of interest for her. All right, so they wouldn’t discuss reading material. They had other things in common.

  She checked her phone to see if her kids had texted her and, to her relief, learned that Alice had decided against the movie; the two of them were safe at her house. Then Susannah got up to look outside. A light over the doors illuminated the flurry of flakes and nothing more; beyond that, all was black.

  “Found them.”

  She turned to see Corbin holding a small brown paper shopping bag. “Here you go.”

  She took the bag. What if the dates corresponded with the dates on the tickets stubs? Then she would have confirmed what until now she could only surmise. God, she was so nervous. She sat down on the sofa and he sat down next to her. But before she could reach into the bag, he put his hand on her wrist. “Look, I’m guessing that what’s in there is a potentially huge deal for you. You haven’t said what it is and I don’t want to pry. But before you look, I want to say something. I really shouldn’t have tossed off that last comment so nonchalantly.”

  “The one about being sober?”

  “I should have explained—that is, if you haven�
��t heard already. Eastwood’s a small town and things get around, but I’d still rather you hear the story from me.”

  “Did you have a drinking problem?”

  He nodded. “It started after I had to leave law school after my first year. I was disappointed. Angry too. But I was also ashamed. How could I be angry with my dad when he’d sacrificed so much for us? He needed me and it was my turn to be there for him. So I drank to help myself get through all that. I was quiet about it, though. No frat boy stuff for me—I never did Jell-O shots or got so wasted that I woke up the next morning lying in a puddle of puke, my pants gone missing. No, I was a discreet, keep-it-to-yourself kind of drunk. Until I wasn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “My dad had already died, and my mom was actually doing okay. She decided to go visit Trevor, in Florida, and so I was alone in the house. This house, actually—I never moved out. At first I thought I’d just be relieved to be on my own. But I started getting angry all over again, and sorry for myself too. Because of what I told you before—and because of something else.”

  “Something else?”

  “Well, not something. Someone.”

  Susannah waited, and when he didn’t say anything, she prompted, “Who was she?”

  “The woman I loved.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t like the idea of him loving someone else; she didn’t like it one bit and she had to force herself to focus on the rest of what he was saying.

  “. . . we’d been together for a few years. I wanted to marry her. She was beautiful, smart, ambitious . . . the whole package.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Eastwood, that’s what. She wanted to leave town, leave the state, leave the country even. She had this idea about traveling to South America; she thought there would be a lot of business opportunities there.”

  “And you didn’t want to do that.”

  He looked at his hands, and then at her. “No, I didn’t. We fought about it, broke up a couple of times, and got back together a couple of times. My drinking always notched up when we split; it would slow down when she was back. But it was always there, a kind of secret friend. Then she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City—and just like that, she was gone.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “Hurt doesn’t describe it. How about ambushed, gob-smacked, and devastated? I cursed her for leaving me, for not loving me enough, for breaking my heart. Then I cursed myself for not going with her. Or for not going anywhere. I could have picked up where I left off, gone back to law school, and gotten on track again. Only, with her gone, it all seemed too hard, like that train had pulled out of the station for good and I was stuck behind. So I went on a serious bender and landed in the ER, where I got my stomach pumped. Alcohol poisoning. I was damn lucky one of my mom’s friends came around that night to bring me a casserole—she found me passed out and called nine-one-one. If she hadn’t, well, I wouldn’t be here telling you all this.”

  Susannah sat quietly, trying to absorb it all. “What did you do after you got out of the hospital?”

  “I manned up, found myself a twelve-step program in Concord, and made sure I got myself to a meeting at least once a week. That was fifteen years ago and I’ve been sober ever since.”

  “Do you still go to meetings?”

  “I do, though not every week. And I’ve been a sponsor to a few people over the years. It feels really good to give back that way.” He smiled. “Okay. That’s out of the way and we don’t have to discuss it again. Unless you want to, of course. But right now I’m sure you’re itching to get at those photos.”

  “I am.” But she was torn: his confession, coupled with his nearness, was pulling her in one direction, the contents of the bag in another. “There’s one more question, though . . .”

  “Shoot.”

  “After that woman left you . . . were there any others? Women, I mean.”

  “A few. But no one who touched me in the way she had. There was one I almost married. Picked out the ring and everything. But in my gut I knew I was settling. It wouldn’t have been fair to her—or to me.” She didn’t know what to say to that. After a beat he added, “Go on and look at the pictures,” he said. “You need to do that.”

  She put a hand on his cheek. How dear he was to say that, even without understanding. How kind. Then she withdrew her hand, reached into the bag, and pulled out several of the photographs. Small, square, and somewhat faded, the photos showed images of her younger self and some of her friends from that summer: Trevor with his arm around her, a grouping of birch trees, the tents they had pitched in the woods. But it was the numbers, tiny, black, and indelible, that leapt out at her: all the pictures she held were dated between August 17 and August 21, 1994—exactly the time her mother was in Quebec with her mystery companion.

  “Are you okay?” asked Corbin.

  Susannah nodded, not quite ready to speak. So she had been right—while she had been on the trip, hiking through the woods during the day, smoking pot around a campfire and fending off mosquitoes by a campfire at night, her mother had gone to Quebec with her lover. Where had her father been? Had he known what she was doing or had Claire deceived him too? “Can I hold on to these?” she finally asked. “I’ll give them back, but I just need them for a little while.”

  “Sure.” He leaned over to brush away the hair that had fallen in her face. That gesture replicated so perfectly the long-ago summer night in which he’d done the exact same thing, the night when she’d wished—how she’d wished!—that she had been his girlfriend, not Trevor’s. Without thinking any more, she turned and kissed him. The photos, Quebec, and her mother receded as she felt first his surprise and then his eagerness; he kissed her back, pulling her closer so that she fit snugly against his chest.

  When they moved apart, he said, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you?”

  “I’ve been wanting to do that all night. I figured that coming back here would give me a chance, but then whatever you found in those pictures seemed to derail things.”

  “No.” She put the photos back in the bag. “It didn’t. I’ll tell you all about them,” she said. “Only not now.” And she lifted her arms to reach for him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  They kissed for several minutes, pausing only when Susannah heard a text come in from Jack. She moved out of the embrace so she could read it. Snowing really hard! So cool! Will text u tomorrow before I come home.

  “Everything all right?” Corbin still had an arm around her.

  “Everything’s all right.” She glanced out the window. The snow was coming down harder now; the flakes, whipped by the wind, skittered and danced. “My son is sleeping elsewhere tonight. So is my daughter.”

  “So maybe you’re not in such a hurry to get home.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

  He kissed her again, but this time his hands traveled to the front of her dress, and when he reached under the jacket for her breasts, gently kneading them through the cloth, she gasped, from surprise as much as pleasure. Yes, she wanted him, and yes, she welcomed the caress. But she could not easily separate the now from the then—for so many years, Charlie had been the only one to touch her; Charlie had been the only one she had wanted. If Charlie had lived, she would have never seen Corbin Bailey again and he would have been relegated to some distant region of her memory. It was because Charlie had been killed, had let himself get killed, that she was here at all.

  Corbin’s hands were still on her breasts, gentle but purposeful, and she felt her desire unspooling to meet his. “Do you want to go in the other room?” he said softly into her ear. She said nothing, but stood and let herself be led into the bedroom.

  “Sit.” Corbin patted the bed, covered in a cinnamon-colored quilt and punctuated with several pillows. Folded at the foot of the bed was a crocheted afghan of multicolored squares; s
he wondered if his mother had made it. Corbin was busily lighting candles and then turned off the lamp as he sank down on the bed beside her. His sweater came off easily and then he started to unbutton his shirt, revealing a torso more compact and muscled than Charlie’s; Charlie had been reedy and thin. She sat very still, wanting to remove her dress, yet unable to do it.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. He was down to his underwear now, white, snugly fitting jockey shorts that were nothing like Charlie’s whimsically printed boxers.

  “That would be nice.” She let him slip the jacket off and unzip the dress. She stood to step out of it, and worried about the panty hose; getting out of them was always awkward. But he seemed riveted by her breasts, partially revealed by the low-cut lace-trimmed bra, a bra she’d bought before Charlie was killed and one he’d never had the chance to see her wear. After he’d died, she had stuffed it away in the drawer for months. Tonight was the first time she had put it on; somewhere in her mind was the possibility that Corbin would see it.

  Only when his fingers began to undo the bra’s front-closing clasp did everything shut off abruptly; she stood and walked to the window. Snow was still falling and the wind was even stronger now; she could hear it whistling as it whipped through the trees.