Wife, Mother...Lover?

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  “Leanne,” he began, “with this threat, it’s more important than ever that you remain here.”

  “I told you I would, and I will.”

  To be fair, Mitch felt he had to add, “I’ll pay you for your time.”

  “No, you won’t. I won’t let you,” she shot back, offended that he’d even offered. “Mitch, I’m family. Why is it that you always want to treat me as if I’m not?”

  “Do I do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” Mitch said, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past...”

  “Differences?” She stared him right in the eye. Clearly, she could think of other explanations that fit much better than his.

  “Okay, more than differences,” he allowed, backtracking, wondering why it was so very easy for him to argue with her. “I hated seeing how upset and how hurt Kelly was every time she talked about you. Every time you made one of those duty visits of yours.”

  “Duty visits?”

  She uttered the words with great precision, appearing even more remote than before, and he decided she must have been either desperately angry or desperately hurt.

  “What would you call them?” he asked. “You always looked as if you could hardly stand to be here.”

  She recoiled as if he’d slapped her, and Mitch felt like a heel. He honestly hadn’t meant to hurt her. But he’d managed to cut through the facade. This awful expression of pain spread across her face.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be here,” she whispered.

  “Then what was it?”

  “I didn’t feel comfortable here. I didn’t feel I belonged.”

  Her voice broke on the last word. What could he say to that? He was one of the people who’d helped her to feel that way. He hadn’t wanted her in his house or anywhere near his wife.

  Honestly, he hadn’t given any thought to Leanne’s feelings. He’d preferred to pretend she didn’t have any. Of course, he couldn’t do that anymore, not after what he’d seen from her in the past forty-eight hours.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Mitch began, “except that I’m sorry. Obviously, I made it even more difficult for you to be here. And the only excuse I have is that I didn’t want to see Kelly hurt.”

  “I never wanted to hurt her,” Leanne said shakily.

  “I know that now.” Mitch thought about reaching for her, then remembered the trouble he’d gotten himself into the night before last, trying to comfort her. He couldn’t do that again.

  She blinked back tears and looked away. “I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  “Leanne, how did your whole family end up in this shape? Do you want to tell me your side of the story?”

  “It was Rena. Everything started with her. Do you think I wanted to leave my sisters and my brother like that? Do you think I honestly had a choice?”

  “Everyone has choices,” he insisted.

  “I was eighteen years old, Mitch. Eighteen. And she didn’t want me around anymore. My father could have stood up for me if he’d wanted to, but he was more concerned with Rena’s happiness than mine.”

  “Why would she want you gone?”

  “Because she saw me as a threat to her. She wanted Alex more than anyone else—I think because he was so young and she had a better chance of truly becoming a mother to him. But I believe she wanted Amy and Kelly, too.

  “But not you.”

  “Rena wanted my place in Alex’s, Amy’s and Kelly’s lives. With me gone, they had no choice but to turn to her. Don’t you see? Rena always gets what she wants. I couldn’t compete with her, not when I was eighteen. And I shouldn’t have been put in a position to have to compete for my own place in my family.

  “They were my family, Mitch. They were everything I had, and she took them all away from me.”

  “What do you mean—she took them from you?”

  “She told me Alex, Amy and Kelly didn’t need me anymore, that they had her. And then she said that because I was almost eighteen, I couldn’t expect my father to continue to support me much longer.” Leanne was crying now. “Mitch, she told me there was no place for me any longer in my own house.”

  Mitch didn’t say anything at first. He honestly didn’t know what to say. Kelly’s version of events had been quite different, although over the years she’d had her own conflicts with her stepmother.

  Rena was no saint; all of them could agree on that. Kelly had trouble getting out from under her thumb, so Mitch agreed with Leanne that Rena had a tendency to want to control everyone and everything around her.

  Kelly had said Rena was a serious, sometimes stern parent, that she made rules and expected her children to follow them, that she always had an opinion and never held back on expressing it.

  But she’d taken on the responsibility of raising three children when she’d married Kelly’s father, and Kelly had always believed Rena had done the best she could for them.

  Of course, there was a fourth child—Leanne.

  Mitch had never given Leanne a chance, never really gotten to know her as a grown woman. He’d known her before, from high school. If he tried very hard, he could almost remember seeing her in the hallways one day and noticing her watching him. He’d asked one of the guys he’d hung out with who she was and found out her name. And later someone told him about what had happened to her mom—a quick downward spiral with cancer. Someone else must have told Mitch Leanne had a younger brother and two sisters, that she didn’t get out of the house much because she had to help take care of them.

  He’d found it hard to believe that anyone his age had such responsibilities. It was one of the reasons that, when he got to know Kelly and she told him about her strained relationship with her elder sister, Mitch was so ready to believe Leanne had left because she’d wanted to.

  Looking at her now, as she sat there seemingly brokenhearted and so lonely it made him ache for her, Mitch wasn’t so sure.

  “Kelly thought you wanted to leave,” he said softly. “She thought you wanted to finally have a life of your own.”

  “That’s what Rena told them,” Leanne argued. “She couldn’t very well say she was practically kicking me out of the house, especially not if she wanted to win them over.”

  “Leanne, I don’t want to fight with you.” He let himself put his hand over hers again, hoping to soften the words. “And I want to understand. Honestly, I do. Explain it to me so I can understand. Kelly said you always wanted to study photography, that getting into college was a dream come true.”

  “It was. I did want to go to school. I did want to have a life of my own. But I didn’t want to give up my family. Rena didn’t give me a choice. I could have gone to college here in Chicago and lived at home. But she didn’t want me here.”

  “Kelly always felt that you’d abandoned her.”

  “I know.” Leanne nodded. “I tried to come back at first. Strangest thing, there was money to pay some of my expenses and my dorm fees, but never enough to fly me home to visit. If I earned my own money for the ticket, it just wasn’t the right time for a visit. Rena made me a stranger in my own home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mitch said. “We’ve had our differences with Rena, but I never thought she was evil.”

  “What she did to me was evil. And I think what she did today to you and the boys was evil. You need to understand that if you’re going to be prepared to fight her.”

  “Fight her?”

  “For the boys,” she said. “Mitch, she wants them. And Rena gets what she wants.”

  He watched his sister-in-law, saw her fear, her sincerity. However outlandish this sounded, Leanne believed it with all her heart.

  “She can’t take them from me,” Mitch insisted.

  “I hope not,” she said.

  Leanne tried to stay calm the next morning, and when that didn’t work she settled for staying busy. While the boys watched a movie on the VCR, she phoned her agent in New York to tell him she would definitely be taking the next fou
r to five weeks off.

  “Five weeks?” Marty roared. “Are you nuts?”

  Leanne laughed, because he bellowed at everyone. “I’m not sure, Marty. Maybe you should send someone over to check on me.”

  “You never take time off,” he reminded her.

  “I know.” Maybe that was why she needed it so desperately right now. “And I guess I should prepare you now, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  Closing her eyes, Leanne braced herself to say the words. “I’m not sure if I can go back to it.”

  “Back to what?”

  “My life.”

  “Leanne, you’re scaring me now.”

  She must have been, because Marty had stopped yelling. And she found herself pouring out her heart to him. “The idea of getting on a plane and taking off for some place I’ve never been, where I don’t know anybody, staying there a couple of weeks and then heading out again...I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Look,” he said, ready to indulge her now. “You’re tired. That’s all. You said it yourself—you never take any time off. So you just...rest. Put your feet up. Relax—”

  The boys charged into the kitchen then, stomping their feet and chattering in the foreign language that was all their own. They were tugging at her jeans and demanding something.

  “What was that?” Marty asked.

  “My nephews,” Leanne said, practically yelling at him now to be heard over the noise. “This is their idea of relaxing.”

  Marty swore. “They sound like a pack of wolves.”

  Leanne laughed again. “I know, but I love them. And they need me, Marty.”

  No one had needed her in a long time, and she found she missed that.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything for certain,” she said, then hung up before he could argue with her more.

  She bent down on one knee so that she was at eye level with the boys, calmed them down, figured out that their movie had ended, that they wanted to go outside and they wanted something to eat. After putting them off on the trip outside to play, she fed them, instead, then made one more phone call. She would need clothes, now that she was staying a month or so, but she could buy those here. Her cameras were another matter altogether. Leanne called her friend Betsy in New York, who wasn’t home. Betsy had a key to Leanne’s apartment, and when she called back, Leanne would ask Betsy to pack her favorite cameras and ship them to Chicago.

  Just because Leanne wasn’t going to accept any assignments didn’t mean she would stop taking pictures. It soothed her in a way nothing else did to view the world through a lens and calculate factors on light and film speed rather than face reality. It was her insulation from the real world, her way of looking at life instead of living it.

  But that wasn’t the issue now. She was simply itching to photograph the boys.

  She wouldn’t let herself think of taking their pictures because there would come a time when she wouldn’t see them every day, when she had to remember them by the shots she took.

  She couldn’t imagine having to say goodbye to them, knowing she wouldn’t see them again for months, couldn’t imagine being content with the life she’d once led after having this time with the boys.

  Two weeks later, if she had any doubts about her feelings for the boys, they were gone. She was hopelessly in love with Teddy and Timmy. Each day they did something new and totally endearing. She grew used to this demanding, hectic, wondrous life, and she didn’t want to give it up.

  Mitch was more relaxed than she’d ever seen him. And he was a wonderful father. The boys couldn’t get enough of him. They climbed all over him from the minute he walked in the door at night until he put them down to bed.

  Evenings were brief, but peaceful once the boys were asleep. Leanne usually managed to get out for a run then. She tried to have something on the stove and ready before she left. Mitch would bathe the boys and put them to bed, then the two of them would have a quiet dinner together.

  They’d found a half-dozen or so noncontroversial topics of conversation, which usually carried them straight through dinner. And then Leanne would hide in her room and read. Or she could curl up on the sofa and listen to some music or rediscover American television, which she was never home to see.

  They’d heard nothing from social services, and Mitch was starting to believe nothing would come of it. But Leanne was still uneasy.

  She continued to worry about her family. She wanted to see her father, but couldn’t seem to make the first move. Secretly, she hoped he might come see her, but so far, that hadn’t happened.

  She knew Amy had talked to Mitch on the phone, but she hadn’t tried to talk to Leanne since that first call after Timmy’s accident. Leanne was going to have to do something soon. She’d promised herself and Kelly that she would try.

  Rena had been to the house once, thankfully while Leanne had been out shopping for some clothes to supplement the meager supply she’d brought with her. Mitch said she’d denied saying anything to Social Services, but he knew she was lying. She’d simply run through her usual arguments about why the boys should be with her. But Mitch had stood firm. He had no intention of giving them up now.

  He was advertising for a full-time nanny, and Leanne felt sure he would find someone. Her agent called once a week and couldn’t believe she was so happy living in suburbia, impersonating a housewife and mother. But she was.

  She had to keep reminding herself that this wasn’t her life. It was her sister’s. From time to time, Leanne thought that maybe she might find a man, settle down and have children with him—as farfetched as that seemed, given the life she’d led.

  More often than not, she simply fantasized about being able to go on living her sister’s life. With her sister’s husband and children.

  Leanne couldn’t have been more surprised when the doorbell rang one day and she found her baby brother on the doorstep.

  “Alex.” She froze, hanging on to the door as though it were her anchor. Then she wished she’d pulled him close for a big hug right away, because that’s what she’d really wanted to do, and now it was too late for that impulsive gesture.

  “Leanne,” he said.

  He looked as if he felt as surprised and every bit as awkward as she did. She just stared at him, trying to convince herself that this giant truly was her baby brother. He was well over six feet tall now. For years, he’d been all arms and legs, as awkward as a newborn colt, but at twenty-two he had finally filled out in all the right places. With his dark hair, dark eyes and beautiful smile, he was a very handsome young man.

  Of course, she still saw him as he had been as a baby, or at the boys’ age. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but he had been only a few months older than the boys when their mother had died.

  Because he’d been so little and so lost, because he’d needed so much at that age, taking care of Alex had been the hardest thing Leanne had ever had to do. Because for years Leanne had been everything to him, leaving Alex had been the hardest of all.

  She wondered now exactly what he remembered of her. After all, he’d been only eight years old when Leanne had left. She wanted to ask, wondered what in the world she might say to explain things to him.

  Finally, Alex broke the silence between them. Tentatively, he inquired, “Can I come in?”

  “Oh.” She laughed nervously, then stepped back to let him pass. “Of course. I was just so surprised to see you.”

  “I had a long weekend off from school.” At twenty-two, he was close to finishing his Ph.D. in Chemistry. “And I thought I might see Mitch and the boys.”

  “Of course,” she said, turning away—she hoped in time that he didn’t see the hurt on her face.

  He hadn’t come here to see her, even though she was certain Amy would have told him Leanne was in town.

  “Mitch is at work,” she told him. “And the boys are napping, but they should be up soon. Can you wait?”

  He hesitated just a moment, then said, �
�Sure.”

  Leanne relaxed just a little. It was a start. “Have a seat. I just made some coffee. Would you like some?”

  “Sure.”

  When she came back from the kitchen, carrying two steaming mugs, Alex was sitting in the chair in the corner. Leanne handed him a mug, then took a seat on the sofa.

  “How’s school?” she asked, thinking she’d stick to safe topics for a while.

  “Almost over,” he answered with a boyish smile.

  And that topic of conversation seemed to have been exhausted. Leanne sipped her coffee and found her emotions were threatening to choke her. If she explained herself to him, would he listen? Did he care about her at all anymore? Had he missed her when she was gone?

  “How’s Timmy?” he inquired. “Rena said he took a nasty spill.”

  “He bumped his head two weeks ago. Four stitches and a black eye, but he’s fine now.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m sure Rena made it sound much worse.”

  Alex paused in the midst of taking a sip. Quietly, he put down his mug. A dull flush crept into his cheeks—anger, she suspected. Then he got to his feet.

  “You know, I think it would be best if I came back tonight to see the boys,” he said.

  Leanne got to her feet, as well. Wondering how she’d totally destroyed this chance inside of two minutes, wondering how she’d lost so many opportunities like this over the years, she grabbed him by the arm and said, “Alex, please don’t go. It’s been so long since I’ve even talked to you.”

  “And whose fault is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Does it matter? Do we really have to lay blame here? Or can we forget about that and try to talk about what’s important?”

  He stiffened, standing even taller and more imposing than before. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “What do you think’s important, Leanne? Why are you even here?”

  “Amy called me. She said Mitch needed help.”

  “Mitch needed help months ago. He’s needed help ever since Kelly died.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said defensively.