With my mother’s ring branding a mark in the center of my fist, I reminded myself of what I didn’t want to be. It was a choice I made because of Jonah, to uphold the expectations I’d set for myself as a mother. I stood up, slid the gold band onto my left hand, stacking it beside my own wedding ring, and shook my head woefully at Dean.
“Let me dry my hair,” I told him and stepped away.
He sighed.
I moved toward the sink and watched Dean’s reflection in the mirror, wondering what it would be like to make love with him here as adults, while Jonah slept in the adjoining room.
Dean gulped back his glass of wine and poured another. He called after me, “I’ll keep an ear out for the little guy. Take your time.”
In the mirror I watched as his reflection pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. He eyed it closely and furrowed his brow.
Closing the bathroom door, I leaned up against it and took a deep breath, trying to shed the hope that Dean would follow behind me. I envisioned us there in the dark, Dean’s hands under my clothes, the scruff of his beard against my skin, the weight of him guiding us to the edge of the tub, where he would sit and draw me into his lap. I recalled his body, its topography like an old country road driven a thousand times, knowing full well where I would stop off to spend some time.
Dean was the opposite of whom I had chosen, Miles, the cautious physician and scholar, the only child of a wealthy Iron Belt family of judicious intellectuals. When I met my husband in Mystic, that fluke night with the whole of New England roaring over baseball, I didn’t know what it meant to be both toggled to and overshadowed by someone else’s success, someone who was far brighter and more interesting than I would ever be, and a real scientist, not some fortune-teller of the weather, as I’d come to be. I was spoiled too quickly by the security of my husband’s job, because when I met him, I’d been afraid of how I might make my way in the world alone if my research fell flat, and so I chose the safety he offered.
With Dean, the connection was different, drawn from a history impaled right through the broken center of me.
Granting a wish that would never relieve my despair, Dean had doused Craig Stackpole’s barn with gasoline and set the place on fire after my father’s body was found there. Volunteering for the job when I was too grief-stricken and wild with rage, too impulsive and heartbroken not to be caught burning it down myself, he acted the part of Roman high priest, performing a sacred last rite. In my father’s honor, Dean struck the match for me. It was July 5, 1986, the day after my father’s death and the day following my mother’s marriage to the banker living at 101 Quayside Lane.
• • •
In a ceremony held at the Saybrook Fish House, in a wealthy town just east of our own, my mother and Craig made their nuptials with an officiating judge and four mutual friends, before taking off on a harbor cruise.
Craig had no children, and therefore neither Kara nor I were invited to join the Fourth of July reception, but he promised my mother that after they were wed he would treat us like his own dear daughters.
“It’s a grown-up affair,” Mom said when she broke news of the engagement to me following a track meet my last week of school. She was wearing a fancy shawl and large hoop earrings. She reeked of perfume, something overwhelming and musky, and I longed for the citrus-sweet simplicity of her former Jean Naté.
She went on, “You and Kara can celebrate with us later in the fall when Craig takes us all to Aruba for Thanksgiving. And, really, you’ll want to be home with your dad the night of the wedding.” She looked down at her shoes, then back at me with eyes full of tears. “I have a feeling your father will need his girls.”
When the Fourth of July came, Dad asked Kara and me to pack a cooler, and we picnicked close to Craig’s property on the docks of the Quayside Beach Association. From our vantage point, we looked on as a photographer arrived to snap photos of Mom’s soon-to-be husband, “the Douche Bag,” where he awaited his bride in front of the house in a seersucker suit.
Hitching herself to his arm, Mom appeared in a white sundress, the skirt long and bohemian, just barely spilling onto the sand. She wore no veil and had twisted her hair into a knot ornamented with black-eyed Susans. They strolled away from our perch on the dock and moved down the beach toward the breaking water, their arms hooked, as the wedding photographer chased beside them trying to capture their laughter. In contrast to their joy, my father howled like a wounded animal as he watched, and I knew then it was the sound of something in him dying.
Dad took deep breaths and collected himself, and we drove away from the Quayside. With all the windows down and the radio blaring Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love,” he sped along Route 9, taking Kara and me to Marty’s Clam Shack for the chocolate cones we ate in silence.
Kara chomped the last bite of her dessert and said finally, “Daddy, are you ever gonna feel better?”
Dad smiled for my sister and slapped the table. “Yes, yes. I promise, baby. I’m going to move on and feel better.” He pulled a nip from his pocket and poured it into his plastic cup of soda. “I just need a little time,” he said. “A little time alone.”
As he spoke, I reached out and put my hand on top of his, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe him.
That evening, when we got home, Dad took out his cribbage board in preparation for the night’s card game and told us to hurry down to the beach. The sun had set and the bugs were eating us alive. The three of us scurried to light citronella candles on the back deck. And what I most remember was how my father collected Kara and me, backing the two of us up against his giant belly where he held us tight, spraying our arms and legs with Deep Woods Off.
“I love you,” he said. “Remember, be good and I love you.”
When I peeked at him over my shoulder, tears soaked his face.
“You girls go,” he told us, catching my worried glance. “I need some time before Rex and Uncle G get here to play cards and hustle me out of your inheritance.” He pulled a beer from a bucket of ice, holding it up high as if making a toast. “Tonight, ladies, bed by midnight and don’t wake me when you come in.” He nodded to himself at what I took to be an acknowledgment of a generous curfew.
Kara ran down the beach ahead of me to meet her Brownie troop. She would spend the night at a makeshift table selling fruit punch and baked goods along the boardwalk to folks who came from neighboring towns to watch the fireworks.
I left more reluctantly.
“Daddy, you okay?” I said.
He shooed me off and took a long pull off his beer. “Honey,” he insisted, “go.”
And so I did.
But later, while the late-night news recapped Liberty Weekend in America by showing clips of President Reagan rededicating the Statue of Liberty in a blaze of light, marking its centennial as a beacon of hope in New York Harbor, I tiptoed up the front steps under a waning crescent moon, thirty minutes after our generous holiday curfew had passed.
I trod gingerly so as not to wake him, but I learned later that I could have crashed my way through the house and into every piece of furniture, for all it mattered. My father was inside Craig Stackpole’s barn at 101 Quayside Lane, slumped against a vanilla-colored Mercedes, wearing one of Mom’s old T-shirts, the gold cross that always hung around his neck, and a pair of Hawaiian swim trunks. Blood bubbled from his mouth and down his neck, and the back of his skull was splattered across my mother’s new husband’s luxury car. A Colt .45 handgun lay on the floor beside him. On the workbench a few yards away was the note:
Kat—
You’re never coming home and I just can’t live without you. I’m sorry for all of it. I love you. I love our girls. Promise you’ll do better by them than I can.
K&P Forever.
—Peter
When the police drove up to our house early the following morning with the news, Kara was practici
ng her back handsprings in our front yard. She told me later that Mom rode in the front seat with her face in her hands, while Craig Stackpole sat in the back of the patrol car, directly behind her. I was still in bed when I heard Kara’s scream. It was shrill and I thought she was hurt. I jumped up and ran down the stairs to find her.
Out the screen door, I saw my sister and my mother crumpled together on the lawn. Kara was kicking her feet and screaming while my mother tried to hold her. A foot away, the officer and Craig Stackpole stood watch.
As soon as I saw Kara, I knew he was gone, but I ran up to my father’s room anyway. The bed was made. I felt my tongue swell, my panic snaking from my belly to my throat, as I slipped down the stairs in my stocking feet and bolted for the back deck, where I found several empty bottles and the candles burned down into flat waxy pools. The Boston Red Sox sweatshirt Dad had been wearing was tossed over the back of a chaise lounge.
Paralyzed with grief, Kara and I held each other in my twin bed that evening, my sister wearing Daddy’s sweatshirt to bed, the hood pulled up over her head as she wrapped her arms around my neck. In that moment she seemed more like a toddler, the baby in my father’s lap who requested The Tawny Scrawny Lion five times in a row before Dad pulled up the rails on her twin bed and tucked her in for the night.
Kara and I had shared a room since she turned two, and I knew her bedtime patterns as well as my own—the way she rubbed her feet together to ready herself for sleep, the giant sigh she made before closing her eyes. There was a stretch of time when my sister was three, maybe four, when she woke in the evening and crawled in beside me, dragging her battered bunny across the space between our beds.
But since then, we had not held each other through the night until our father died. The night of his death—and for nearly a month after, while our mother stayed in Dad’s house with us—Kara and I slept entwined until my mother later forced us all to move in with Craig, after which my sister got her own room and I never held her again.
The first night after his death, down the hall from us on Willard Street, my mother slept in our father’s bed, and most of the night I could hear the muffled sound of her weeping. Craig slept downstairs, alone on the couch, after surrendering to a lost battle earlier that evening when they had begged us to go “home,” as Mom called it, to the Quayside, but neither Kara nor I had budged from our room.
And that first night while we lay awake in his house, wondering what we could have done to prevent my father’s death, Dean burned down the barn where my father shot himself because I asked him to.
Hollowed by heartache, I called Dean that night to break the news. “I’m going to burn that fucking place down. I swear I will,” I told him, my voice trembling.
“You don’t have to,” he whispered. “I’ll do it for you.”
“When?” I said.
In the distance a foghorn yowled.
Dean cleared his throat.
“For you, I’ll do it right fucking now.”
• • •
Nearly five years ago, in 2007, before the economy tanked completely and home values plummeted, Dean bought what remained of Craig’s oceanfront property from the banker and my mother. He had started snatching up local waterfront properties, which back then seemed to quadruple in value every couple of years. He thought if he bought the place and held on to it, he would make a killing.
In one of our early Facebook correspondences, when I wrote to him about my sadness over selling our home in Mystic, how we lost everything we had invested in it, and how we had to borrow money to bring to the closing to pay out the buyers when we sold, he responded with the details of the Quayside acquisition:
Claire—
Buying real estate is emotional business. I do it all the time, and it was still hard for me to buy the place from your mom and Craig. I remembered the tragedy there, thought about your old man walking out back of that house, already dying. And because I had those feelings about it, I guess I wondered if I couldn’t honor his death again in some other way once I owned it.
There was a bidding war on every property along the beach in those days, everyone thinking waterfront could never lose. People offering forty or fifty thousand over asking prices. I did the same and overpaid.
But the day we closed on the Quayside, I started building out back. A stone wall from the last bits of foundation where the barn sat, and all I could think about was you.
Eventually, that stone wall fenced in a garden—lilacs, honeysuckle, daisies, mums, all perennial. Same stuff your dad grew on Willard Street. It was for him, you know? And you too.
What I’m saying is real estate isn’t always about the investment.
Yours,
Dean
• • •
I returned from the bathroom, the floorboards of the inn groaning as I stepped across them to the bed where Dean waited. Attempting to maintain some distance between us this time, I sat.
Dean handed me my wine, and I listened to see if sleeping Jonah had stirred. But the adjoining suite remained hushed. The only sound between us was the crackle from the hearth, warming the draft from the room.
I sipped from the glass, pressed my lips together, and nodded, while Dean’s blue eyes seared right through my reservations. We stared at each other, both of us tentative about the complex intersection of our present and the past, and I felt myself surrender.
Dean squeezed my hand.
“Come look at this,” he said, pulling me up from the bed.
He led me across the room and pushed aside the heavy drapes to reveal a window seat.
We sat close and watched the sunset. There, out over the Sound, stratus clouds reflected pink and orange light, stretching across the horizon like saltwater taffy.
Dean put his arm around me. I kept my eyes on the distance, but even so, the measure of our breathing became a slow combustion.
“The Atlantic,” he whispered. “For you.”
Charged, we turned toward each other.
Dean leaned closer, all tenderness.
We kissed.
The first match was lit.
And just like the fires of our youth, the kiss bloomed, our lips parting as we grew fully aflame. Kissing harder, reaching for each other, we lulled and surged, our skin gone sweaty and damp. Dean climbed on top of me, and the kisses reeled us backward through time.
Pressed up against the windowpane, I heard Dean’s voice, a rumble in my ear, say, “All these years.”
He slipped a hand under my sweater and rested it at the small of my waist. Our kisses softened. Delicate pecks on ears and necks. Dean’s mouth explored my collarbone.
I tilted my head back against the window, the glass cool on my cheek, while his palms, uneven with callouses, roamed my shoulders and chest. His fingertips strayed inside the lace trim of my bra, then further—down my ribs, over the fabric of my jeans, and beneath.
I closed my eyes. And remembered.
Dean whispered, “Look at me.”
We stood, our bodies pressed into a single silhouette, undressing.
“We should stop,” I whispered.
“I need you,” Dean said.
And it was done.
• • •
We sat holding each other on the window seat, and Dean’s hand stroked the inside of my thigh. “Being here with you,” he told me, “is so perfect. I was an idiot to ever let you go.”
Chilled by a draft from the window beside us, I pulled my sweater over my shoulders and stared into his eyes, their blue that of an infinite sky.
“But you searched for me,” I told him. “And I needed to be found.”
“We’ve always been there for each other when it really mattered,” Dean asked. “Haven’t we?”
In the last of the twilight, a thick fog rose from water.
“We have,” I sighed, my emo
tions roiling.
He held tight to my hand and bent forward to kiss my forehead.
I closed my eyes, and a wash of disgrace moved over me. I thought about Miles and panicked, comprehending the weight of what I’d done and how I had permitted myself to become my mother, the one person I never wanted to be.
Dean pulled me back. “You know, Claire, that I’m drowning.”
“Drowning?” I said.
“That house,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like it’s killing me. It’s weird. Just like your dad.”
I studied his face and tried to understand exactly what he was telling me.
“Mama!” Jonah screamed, his cry from the adjoining room all alarm, that fear of waking in an unfamiliar place. “Mama!” he shouted again.
Dean rubbed his thumb over my bottom lip. “We need to find a way.”
I moved aside to dress and struggled to collect myself.
“Come, Mama,” Jonah cried. “Come!”
Conflicted by own guilt and desire, I went to my son. And as I hoisted him from his blankets, he tucked his bunny under one arm and rested his head on my shoulder. “My mama,” he said.
We swayed while he roused, a slow dance that soothed his whimpers. And when I laid him down for a diaper change, Jonah pulled off his socks and sighed. He made an immediate request. “Yummies?” he said, then added another. “Dada?” An anxious flutter fanned in my chest.
I snapped his pants and poured his milk, then rummaged through our carry-on for his lunch box. We returned to the connecting room, and I noted how the pillows were rearranged and the wineglasses set away.
Fully dressed, Dean sat in a wingback chair. “Morning, sleepyhead,” he told Jonah. Then he smiled at me. “Little man has got himself one pretty mommy.”
I sat on the bed against a stack of pillows and quietly spooned Jonah his applesauce.
In a veiled hush, all three of us faced the window, heeding the early nightfall. And while Jonah quietly ate his supper, I replayed the warmth of Dean’s breath on my skin, the firm grip of his hand on my waist, the force of his body pulling me back against it, unable to shake the entanglement of my remorse and the desire for more.
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