“I still don’t know why you didn’t tell us any of this before now,” Bess said.
Allison hesitated. She knew this bit of the story would not go down well. “Because Chris swore me to secrecy,” she explained. “He said he didn’t want to be the object of pity. He didn’t want people scrutinizing his pain. Look, don’t ever tell him I told you about any of this. Please.”
“Your secrets are safe with us, but what right did he have to demand you keep silent?” Marta cried, half rising out of her chair. “That’s absolutely outrageous!”
“Why did you agree, Allison?” Bess asked. “Marta is right. It’s outrageous.”
“Because I felt so terribly guilty, as if I owed Chris penance. I still feel that way. Mostly. And I miss him. Not like I did when he first moved out, or even before that, after the miscarriage when we were living side by side but a million miles away from each other. That was awful. But I do miss him.”
“Of course, you do,” Bess said softly. “After so many years together. . .”
“Don’t tell me Chris wanted to name the baby after his brother?” Marta asked.
Allison nodded. “He did. Robert or Roberta.”
“You had no choice about it?” Bess asked. “The mother should have a choice in her baby’s name.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I could have insisted on a say in the matter, but I didn’t. I wanted to give him that gift. It made him happy to think of a little namesake growing up under his protection.” Allison shook her head.
“You’ve got to be so angry with Chris!” Marta said.
“I wasn’t angry at first,” Allison admitted. “Hurt, confused, bewildered, but not angry. But now, yeah, I am angry with Chris for walking away. He ignored my pain; he ignored me. But I still struggle with the idea that I might have no right to complain. I know Chris filed for divorce in order to save his own emotional sanity. I’m not saying that I understand his obsession with his brother, but I do acknowledge it. It’s real to Chris. I can’t change that. And if you love someone, doesn’t that mean you accept him for who he is, good and bad?”
Marta shook her head. “There are limits. And love can die. It can be killed.”
“Oh, don’t say that. Please.” Bess put her hands over her face.
“Why not?” Marta snapped. “It’s true. If you don’t know that by now you’re in big trouble.”
Allison went on. “On Robby’s birthday Chris visits the cemetery where he’s buried. At first, Chris didn’t want me to go with him. Then, after three or four years, he changed his mind and asked me to join him. I was glad Chris wanted me by his side.”
“What was it like being at the cemetery with him?” Bess asked.
“The first time was decidedly uncomfortable,” Allison admitted.
“There were no histrionics. Chris just stood there looking down at the headstone, his hands clasped in front of him. I had no idea what to say so I said nothing. I’m still not sure why he asked me along, but every year after that I was witness to the little ritual. Maybe he prays. Maybe he talks to his brother. I don’t know.”
“It’s so sad. Did you ever ask his mother what exactly happened all those years ago?” Bess asked.
“Once. Agnes was pretty forthcoming about the troubles Chris had at the time of Robby’s passing. She told me how Chris—he was nine at the time—thought his parents should have been able to prevent his brother’s death. He went through a period of depression but somehow managed to fool—that was the word Agnes used—his therapist into thinking he was well on his way to recovery.” Allison shook her head. “After that, Agnes said, her attempts at talking to Chris about Robby, about the grief they all were feeling as a family, failed outright.”
“Chris can’t still be angry with his parents, not if he’s living with them again,” Bess noted.
“No, he’s not angry,” Allison said. “He finally came to understand his parents’ decision to reject a controversial treatment for Robby. It held enormous risks and they felt their son had suffered too much already. Still, Chris feels Robby’s loss acutely.”
Marta made a noise very close to a snort. “I’m not claiming to be the perfect parent but come on, these people fell down on the job with Chris!”
“We weren’t there, Marta,” Bess pointed out. “If Chris seemed to be functioning normally, what could his parents have done?”
“They meant well.” Allison put up a hand to forestall whatever protest was about to pour from Marta’s mouth. “The Montagues are good people. After Chris filed for divorce, and before Agnes and Jonathan cut ties with me in a gesture of loyalty to their son, Agnes wrote me a very sincere letter apologizing for what she called ‘the state of things’ in the family. It’s clear Agnes feels she and her husband failed Chris all those years ago, and in failing him, they failed me in turn.”
Marta frowned. “You’re a better woman than I am even to consider forgiving those two. At the very least they should have warned you before the wedding that Chris was mentally unbalanced.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Allison cried. “Chris isn’t dangerous. Anyway, there was nothing they could have said or done at the time to make me change my mind about marrying Chris. I was in love. And what would Chris have thought if he knew his parents had warned me against him? Loving him the way I did I would have told him everything.”
“Allison is right,” Bess noted. “There was nothing Mr. and Mrs. Montague could have said to warn Allison without totally alienating their only remaining child.”
Marta frowned and stuffed a piece of cheddar in her mouth. Bess took a long drink of red wine. Allison poured herself another glass of the white.
“It’s ironic,” she went on, softly. “Just before we were scheduled to begin what was to be the last round of IVF treatment, I realized just how emotionally and physically wiped out I was. I told Chris I wanted to stop what seemed like an endless round of building our hopes up only to have them knocked down.”
“And how did he take that?” Marta asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Not well,” Allison admitted. “He said he knew that this time things would be different. He said he’d been having a recurring dream in which he saw himself pushing a stroller, playing with a child at the beach, singing a baby to sleep.”
“Nothing more specific than that?” Marta asked. “Sounds like a fib to me.”
“Whatever,” Allison said. “The point is he begged me to go through with the program and I agreed. Not the first time I backed down when maybe I shouldn’t have. Anyway, Chris was right. Not long after that I was pregnant.”
Bess sighed and stared into her glass.
“There’s one other thing . . .” Allison shook her head. “On second thought, I’d better not.”
“Why?” Marta demanded. “No one here is forcing you to keep silent, or judging you for that matter.”
“It’s just that you might think I’m a bit looney.”
“We most certainly will not,” Bess replied hotly.
“All right. During the pregnancy—what little there was of it—I began to believe more than ever that Chris cared less for me and our unborn child than he did for the memory of his brother. There were times when he looked at me and I could have sworn he saw not me, his wife, but Robby, and it gave me a chill.” Allison waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t listen to me. I’m making it sound way scarier than it was, a freakish plot from a Gothic novel. It was only at moments that I felt strange and I might have been imagining the whole thing. You know,” she said with a weak laugh, “hormones playing tricks on my mind.”
“Don’t apologize for what you felt or sensed,” Marta said firmly. “I’m one of the most grounded-in-reality people you’ll ever want to meet, but I firmly believe that when we feel that something is wrong, it is. Call it ESP, intuition, or downright common sense.”
Bess nodded. “I’m with Marta. The heart knows what it knows.”
Allison felt a tear spring to her eye. What good friends she had. Sh
e should have spoken to them sooner.
“Would you really have come to the wedding if Chris had accepted the invitation?” Bess asked.
“I don’t know,” Allison admitted. “I know I said that I was okay with your inviting him, but I think I might have been lying. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing for which to be sorry, not on my account,” Bess assured her.
“Nor mine.” Marta stood and stretched. “It’s late. I’m going to check on Thomas and then help clear away our little feast. Then it’s bed for me.”
“Don’t worry about clearing up,” Bess told her. “I’m just grateful you’re here to be in charge of the baby.”
“Thank you for sharing everything with us,” Marta said. She went over to Allison, bent down, and gave her a quick hug. Then, she was gone.
“Can I help you?” Allison asked Bess, rising from the love seat.
“You know the answer to that. Now, go to bed. This has been a big night for you.”
Allison did as she was told.
Chapter 31
Bess sat hunched in the high-backed armchair in the room she was sharing with Nathan as wave upon wave of sadness engulfed her. She felt as if something essential had been stripped from her. Hope. Her grief threatened to choke her and yet the tears wouldn’t come.
With something very like a moan Bess got up from the chair and began to pace. If Chris had really loved Allison he should have been able to forgive. After all, Allison hadn’t caused the car accident. She hadn’t been careless as much as she had been hopeful that her pregnancy would be successful. Why should she be punished so severely for one bad mistake that might not even be considered a mistake? It was terribly sad that Chris’s brother had died so young, but that wasn’t Allison’s fault, either. Robby’s death had been no one’s fault, just Fate playing one of its cruel tricks, yet another reason for those who didn’t believe in a benevolent God not to believe.
Bess heard the front door open and the four men enter as quietly as four grown men could enter a house in the middle of the night. Which wasn’t very quietly.
A few moments later, Nathan opened the door to the bedroom. “What is it?” he asked immediately, closing the door behind him and striding over to Bess.
She took his hands in hers and told him. She could feel Nathan’s body tense as she did.
“Can you imagine how deeply unfair it would be to burden a child with all that emotional pain and psychic baggage?” she said when the tale was complete. “How could the child ever grow to be his own person if he was intended merely as a replacement for someone long lost?”
Nathan frowned. “Still, better the child had lived than . . . Hell, I don’t know what to think about any of it. Look, it’s late. Let’s try to get some sleep.”
Lights off, Nathan at her side, Bess stared into the dark for a long, long time. Her heart felt broken, but her eyes remained dry.
Chapter 32
Marta had checked on Thomas before going to her room. She had felt a huge surge of tenderness as she looked down on his sleeping form. She wondered about his birth mother, who she was and why she had given him up for adoption. She thought of how very lucky he was, having been brought into such a stable and loving home. She thought then of little Robert or Roberta Montague and of what sort of home that child would have been born into. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Now Marta found herself wandering her bedroom. The baby monitor was on her bedside table. She was angry.
She believed that Allison had the right to live her own life, to make her own decisions, and yes, she had the responsibility to accept the consequences of those decisions, both good and bad. Not that Allison deserved to have her marriage fall apart, or to lose her baby. And certainly, nothing excused Chris’s supremely selfish, misogynistic behavior. But part of being an independent adult was acknowledging that to every action there was a reaction and sometimes that reaction was deeply unpleasant.
Miscarriage was far more common than many people realized. Every pregnant woman, even the healthiest, was aware of the possibility. Well, Marta thought, maybe not the women who were without proper medical care. In that case ignorance was certainly not bliss.
And speaking of ignorance . . . Could Chris really be one of those ridiculous throwbacks to the times when men blamed their wives for giving birth to girls instead of boys, ignorant of the fact that it was their own Y chromosome that determined a child’s sex? When men punished women for getting pregnant; for not getting pregnant; for getting pregnant at an inconvenient time; for getting pregnant by a man other than themselves? When men punished women for not being men?
Marta quickened her pace around the bedroom. What really pissed her off about the whole mess was Chris’s attempt—and a successful one at that—to silence Allison at the moment when she most needed to be heard. From time immemorial, men had been attempting to silence women. History—art—literature—folklore—religion—every bit of cultured life was full of examples of men wanting women to shut up and give up. Silence and shame went hand in hand; men knew that and they had used the knowledge to their advantage. They continued to use it, and they continued to successfully recruit enough women to buy into the patriarchal culture they had created to keep their power base unmolested.
Feeling slightly sweaty from her exertions, Marta sank onto the edge of the bed. The clues about Chris’s sexism had been there in college, if only Allison—and Marta herself for that matter—had been astute enough to take them seriously. All that swathing Allison in cotton wool wasn’t about protecting her at all, it was about immobilizing her. There was, of course, that memorable time when Chris tried to prevent Allison from attending a memorial rally for the gay student who had been horribly killed by haters from his own school. An incident that would forever be associated in Marta’s mind with her one act of infidelity. But she would think about that later. If she had to.
Even insisting Allison wear gloves under her mittens when the weather threatened to fall below freezing! To suggest such a strategy was fine, even smart. But to insist upon it, to bring along a pair of wool gloves just in case Allison had forgotten (or chosen not to?) wear them under the big fuzzy faux fur mittens Chris had bought her, that was going a bit far. At least, Marta had always thought as much. Allison and Allison alone had the information—and the right!—to decide how many layers of clothing to wear. She was not a child, but Chris so often treated her as one. A beloved child, to be sure, but a minor nonetheless.
The opening of a door, followed by a burst of male laughter, urgently hushed, alerted Marta to the return of the men. She waited. Butterflies suddenly swarmed in her stomach. Why should she be nervous?
Carefully, the door to the bedroom opened and Mike stepped inside.
“She told us everything,” Marta blurted.
Mike’s face drained of color and he sank into the armchair. “Tell me,” he said.
Chapter 33
The room was very dark. Allison liked it that way. She felt safe and that was good because she also felt uncomfortable. She ever so slightly regretted having told Bess and Marta the whole story, but the emotions stirred up by Bess’s upcoming wedding, being alone with her dear friends for the first time since the breakdown of her marriage, the presence of baby Thomas—all had forced her tongue. And she was lonely, she reminded herself. She needed her friends’ support and had a right to claim it. There was nothing for which to feel regret. And, she was so very tired.
Bess and Marta had taken the news much as Allison had expected they would. She wondered what to expect from the men—unadulterated sympathy or a more complex reaction. Everyone brought his own experiences, prejudices, and opinions to a situation. Mike would feel differently than Marta did, no matter how tight-knit their relationship. Nathan, on the eve of his wedding, couldn’t be expected to react to the news in the same way that Chuck, married for two years and a father, would react. And Dean, who hardly knew Chris at all, would have his own thoughts, though he might be hesitant to s
hare them.
Allison pulled the covers up to her chin. There were a few things she hadn’t told Bess and Marta. Like how most of her women friends in Chicago, without concrete facts to go on because of Allison’s promise of silence, were left to believe that Chris was being a typical male asshole, discovering he was bored with his comfortable marriage and wanting to sow some wild oats before he had no more oats to sow. No doubt, they pronounced, he would soon marry again, choosing a younger version of Allison, and in two or three years find himself right back where he had been, bored with the routine of his life, regretting the divorce, and wondering if there was any chance at all that Allison could be persuaded to take him back. Assuming, of course, he could get out of his second marriage with even a dime to his name.
Maybe one day she would set the record straight. Maybe.
On her way upstairs to her bedroom, Allison had stopped to scan the shelves of books provided by the owners of Driftwood House.
Luck was with her; there was a paperback copy of Jane Eyre, arguably her favorite novel. She had taken the book to her room and now reached for it, flipping to the section in which Jane was living with St. John and his sisters. She knew exactly what passage she wanted and found it readily. Jane speaks to the reader about Mr. Rochester.
His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed.
For better or worse, Allison knew this was how it was with her; she could never forget Chris no matter what he had done to hurt her. She might be angry with him, but she could never not love him; though the shape of that love might change, it could never be eradicated. Wiping a tear from her eye, Allison closed the book.
A car pulled onto the graveled drive. The men were back. Allison pulled the pillow against her ears to block out any voices that might wander into her room as Bess told Nathan and Marta told Mike the truth behind the divorce of their dear friends.
A Wedding on the Beach Page 15