The Color of a Silver Lining

by Julianne MacLean

  When I met him that afternoon, I parked on the street, not in the driveway where I could peer into the backyard. A light spring rain was falling.

  I got out of my car and walked up the front steps, pausing for a few seconds at the door because I wasn’t sure if I should ring the doorbell or just walk in. This used to be my home, after all—for five happy years. Well…four of them were happy. But it was Carter’s home now. I lived elsewhere.

  I decided to ring the doorbell.

  He took his time answering, which irked me because he knew I was coming. I’d even dressed up for the occasion, in my belted three-quarter length trench coat and slacks with heeled boots. I wanted to look confident and well put together.

  At last, the door opened and Carter stood there on the threshold, regarding me with that cranky, displeased expression on his face, as if he already found this whole experience inconvenient and tedious. He didn’t say hello, and that started things off on the wrong foot, because his crankiness was contagious. My back went up and I steeled myself for a battle.

  All of this was unfortunate because I’d hoped we could be civil and start fresh that day. I wanted to move on to this next phase of our lives on friendly terms. But Carter didn’t seem to want that. Clearly, he wasn’t finished punishing me. I wondered if he ever would be.

  I held up the envelope. “I have the papers.”

  With a wide sweep of his arm, he stepped back and gestured for me to enter.

  I walked in and halted in the foyer, because it still smelled exactly the same, and so very familiar. A single whiff sent a wave of homesickness into my core, which I fought to suppress because the last thing I wanted was to feel wistful. There was no point in that, because neither of us could ever go back. This house would never be what it once was to us. It would always stand under a dark cloud.

  Suddenly, I wondered why I had agreed to meet here. I should have suggested a coffee shop or something.

  “Where do you want to do this?” I asked. “The kitchen table?”

  “Sure.” Carter led me into the kitchen without offering to take my coat.

  I glanced into the living room as we passed by. It was tidy and neat, which was unexpected because Carter had always been terrible about leaving old newspapers lying around on the floor after he’d read them, or dirty dishes on the coffee table.

  We reached the kitchen and I noticed the counter was clean as well, the sink and dish rack empty.

  Maybe, like me, he’d wanted to appear “well put together.” Or maybe he truly was in a better place, now that I was gone.

  Sliding the papers out of the envelope, I wasted no time setting them on the tabletop. I turned to grab a pen from the jar on the desk where Carter kept his laptop. He practically ran his whole business from there—a landscaping and home maintenance company—though he had office space in the basement.

  I returned to the papers, flipped through to the page that required our signatures, and signed my name. Dated it. Then I leaned back and held the pen out to him. “Your turn.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “So that’s it. It’s that easy for you? You can just sign away the past ten years of your life without the slightest hesitation?”

  Were we really going to do this? Was he truly going to seize this last opportunity to put me down, to make me feel guilty?

  “It’s not as if I’m blindsiding you with this,” I told him. “We’ve been separated for two years. And you were the one who asked me to leave, remember? You said, ‘I think you should move out.’ Those were your exact words, and clearly you still think I’m devoid of feeling and you still hate me. So here we are. Getting divorced. As it should be. Please sign these papers so we can move on.”

  It all came barreling toward me then—the passionate love we’d felt for each other when we were young and thought it would last forever. Our wedding day. Our honeymoon in the Poconos. Finding out I was pregnant. And then that horrible, tragic day three years ago…

  The way Carter looked at me now—with disdain and disappointment—brought it all back and nearly knocked me off my feet. I resented him for it because I’d been doing so well lately. When I came here this afternoon, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t think about any of those things. But somehow, I couldn’t help it. Setting foot in this house and seeing that look in Carter’s eye made me want to crawl back into that dark hole.

  See? I wanted to say. This is why we need to sign these papers. Because I don’t want to feel like this anymore.

  * * *

  It’s the day after Samuel was pronounced dead at the hospital. I’m sitting at our kitchen table, staring out the window at the blue plastic backyard swimming pool, which no one has thought to remove. My body feels cold and numb and I don’t want to get up from my chair. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, but eventually my mother convinces me to go and lie down in the bedroom because she and Carter are making phone calls, taking care of funeral arrangements. I can’t help them because I can’t bear to look at tiny coffins today.

  Carter hasn’t spoken to me since he shouted at me and shook me in the hospital—so hard he almost gave me whiplash. His father had to restrain him before someone called security.

  People have been dropping by the house all day with casseroles and pies. They’re genuinely sympathetic, but they offer awkward condolences to me because they know it was all my fault and they don’t know the right thing to say.

  That’s because there is no right thing. There are no words to console me. I just want everyone to leave me alone so I can curl up and die. Time moves slow as mud.

  * * *

  “I don’t hate you,” Carter said to me. “I never hated you.”

  I held the pen out to him again, willing him to take it. “I don’t think that’s true, but I don’t want to debate it. All you need to do is sign on the dotted line so that we can get on with our lives.”

  He stared at me with those intense blue eyes. It was difficult to believe they’d ever looked at me with desire, or laughter. Those eyes had always disarmed me, usually in a good way. Half the time we ended up in bed, even when I was trying to stay angry with him about something silly, like forgetting to take out the garbage for the hundredth time. But today, I saw only angst and disapproval in those eyes, and it had the opposite effect on me. Up went my armor.

  I kept my gaze fixed on his, holding the pen out. There was no way I was going to be the first one to look away.

  “What’s the hurry anyway?” Carter asked.

  I wished he would go to the fridge and get a beer or something. Anything to get him to take a step back.

  “If you really want to know…” I held out my hand to show him my ring. “I just got engaged.”

  Carter let out a breath as if I’d punched him in the stomach. Then his steely eyes lifted and he spoke with that tone I hated—as if I were an idiot. “You’re joking. Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “No, I’m not joking, and why should you be so surprised? You’ve been with Melissa for four months. Clearly, you’ve moved on. Am I not allowed to move on, too? Am I not allowed to be happy?”

  He shook his head with condescension and turned away from me. He moved to stand at the window with his arms folded at his chest, staring at the falling rain.

  While he looked out at the backyard, I looked down at my shoes and squeezed the pen in my fist.

  Finally, he turned. “Who is the guy?”

  To my surprise, Carter didn’t ask the question in a threatening way—as if he wanted to get in his truck, speed away from the curb and warn Luke to stay away from me—which is exactly what he would have done in high school, because Carter had always been the jealous type. But we weren’t in high school anymore. Today, in this moment, he was behaving more like a big brother who wanted to make sure I was with someone who would treat me right.

  I let out a breath and felt some of the tension release from my shoulders. “His name is Luke Hawkins,” I replied. “He works in corporate finance and
he’s a really good guy.”

  Carter frowned and shook his head as if to clear it. “Wait a second. Is this the same Luke you went home with after Lori’s birthday party? The guy you met in the bar?”

  I squeezed the pen again. “How do you know about that?”

  “Because Lori has a big mouth,” he replied. “She always has. You know that.”

  Yes, I did know that about my cousin.

  I clenched my teeth and exhaled sharply. “Fine. Whatever. Lori shouldn’t have told you that, but it doesn’t matter, because as you can see, it wasn’t just a one-night stand. Luke called me afterward and we got together and we’ve been together ever since.”

  Carter raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like a real gentleman.”

  I shot him a look with daggers in it. “He is. So let’s just leave it alone, okay? It’s my life, and I have no doubts about him. None whatsoever. He’s an amazing person.”

  Carter frowned. “Amazing? It’s been what…five months? Six, tops? Emma. Seriously. How well can you possibly know him? Isn’t it a bit soon to be making decisions about spending the rest of your life with him?”

  I was so tired of this. Why wouldn’t he just sign the papers and let me go?

  “It might seem that way to you,” I replied, “but we’re not kids anymore. We’re grownups, and when you know, you know. Luke and I are meant to be together. I know we are. And life’s short. I can’t just sit around torturing myself about things I’ll never be able to change. And you know what I’m talking about. I want to have a life, Carter. A family. It’s what I always wanted.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then strode to the fridge. He opened it up, withdrew a beer and twisted off the cap. “I see. So, you’ve met your soul mate and he’s going to help you move on and forget everything.”

  I felt a muscle twitch at my jaw. “I hate it when you do that. You know I’ll never forget. You should know that better than anyone. Which makes me wonder if you would actually prefer to see me continue to hate myself until the day I die. Because you don’t think I deserve to be happy.”

  He gave me that look again, as if I were an idiot. I wanted to pound my fists on his chest.

  “Will you please just sign the papers?” I asked.

  He kept his eyes fixed on mine while he tipped the bottle of beer up and sipped it. Then he set it down on the counter behind him and kept me in suspense.

  “If that’s what you really want.” At last, he pushed away from the counter, but he stared at me long and hard. “Is it?”

  I wasn’t going to waver. Not now. Not ever. “Yes, it’s what I want.” I held out the pen again.

  Carter took it from my hand, bent forward over the table, and finally signed his name.

  * * *

  Everyone kept telling me it would get easier in time, that there would come a day when Carter and I would feel ready to have another child. That day never came. How could it, when my husband blamed me for what happened? He’d said unthinkable things to me in the hospital, after the doctor came out of the trauma room and spoke the words no parent ever wants to hear: “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”

  Somehow, Carter and I had made it through the funeral, but when it was all over and our relatives went home, we barely spoke to each other. We walked around the house like a couple of zombies, and I knew he was doing everything possible to keep from strangling me. That’s how angry he was with me.

  But Carter had it easy. And still, to this day, he’s never realized how lucky he was not to see what I saw: our darling four-year-old son face down in the blue plastic paddling pool.

  I still don’t know how or why it happened. I’d gone inside, just for a few seconds, to use the washroom. Everything after that is a blur.

  For a whole year afterwards, I was grief-stricken and depressed, and Carter had no sympathy. He looked at me only with contempt. It was a vicious cycle. The more he looked at me that way, the more self-loathing I felt. I must have spent six months in sweatpants. I took a leave of absence from work at the head office of a grocery store chain where I worked in the payroll department. I remember getting in the shower only when my hair was so greasy, I couldn’t bear to look at myself.

  But even then, my clean, blow-dried hair didn’t help with that. I still couldn’t look in the mirror.

  In the end, the straw that broke the camel’s back came in the form of Carter’s arrival home drunk one night, a year after Samuel’s death, stinking of whisky and cigars, which had become more and more common as the months passed. He wanted to get frisky, but there was nothing playful or romantic about it. It was as if he were challenging me to say no. I sensed that he wanted to hurt me, emotionally.

  I shoved him away, ran out of the room and slammed the door in his face. He followed and said horrible things I’ll never forget—because they were all true.

  When morning came, I thought he might have forgotten what happened because he’d been drunk, but then he walked into the kitchen and made himself an omelet without speaking a single word to me.

  When he finished eating, he suggested I move out.

  It was probably a good thing, because heaven only knew what we might have done to each other if we’d stayed together. I understood how he felt about me, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him. I felt that way about myself. I don’t know if I could have forgiven him if he had been the one responsible for Samuel’s death. It would have been very difficult to get over that.

  * * *

  With the signed divorced papers in the back seat of my car, I turned into Luke’s driveway and made my way to his beautiful home, which was set deep in the property, making it extremely private. The house itself overlooked the Strait of Juan De Fuca and the Olympic Mountains on the opposite side. It had mature gardens, rolling lawns and wide flagstone patios, as well as an ocean’s edge infinity pool and hot tub.

  I hadn’t mentioned to Carter that Luke was wealthy. Before we met, Luke had been a stock broker in Toronto for ten years. Then he retired at the age of thirty-three with a few million dollars in his back pocket. He chose beautiful Oak Bay to retire to because he’d grown up in Victoria, but he continued to do consulting work which paid extremely well.

  He was handsome with dark features—brown eyes and thick, wavy hair—and an athletic build, not because he went to the gym constantly. He was simply the outdoorsy type and spent a lot of hours kayaking, hiking and running.

  I didn’t tell Carter any of that because he would think I’d been wooed by Luke’s money, which was not true. For the longest time, I’d had no idea he was rich, because on the night we met, we went home to my place—a small one-bedroom apartment in Victoria, not far from the bar where Lori had held her party.

  Luke wasn’t actually a guest. He was there after a business dinner, to loosen his tie and have a drink. We started talking when we wound up sitting next to each other at the bar, fighting to get served.

  I’ll admit, I’d had too much to drink that night, so I was less inhibited than I would normally be, and I was tired of sitting home in my sweatpants, feeling ugly. I’d come out that night with renewed purpose, fiercely determined to have a good time. So, when this incredibly classy, good-looking guy asked me to dance, I didn’t say no, and we hit it off.

  The next thing I knew, I was dragging him back by his silk tie to my place. The following morning, he took me to breakfast in his modest Honda Civic. We went to a cheap neighborhood diner that served the most incredible hash browns.

  Luke called me a few days later, took me out to dinner and a movie, then out to dinner a few more times. He didn’t invite me back to his place until our fifth date. By that time, I was already head over heels in love—or maybe it was just infatuation at that point, because we’d only known each other briefly. But he was, hands down, not just the best-looking man I’d ever dated, but the nicest man I’d met since I left Carter, and I felt comfortable enough to tell him what had happened to my son. I let it all come spilling out on the morning Luke took me to
breakfast after our “one night stand,” which turned out to be so much more. Luke showed exactly the kind of compassion I needed and never received from Carter. Luke didn’t judge me or make me feel like a terrible person. Nor did he blame me. It created an intimacy between us, from the very start.

  Later, when I saw his house for the first time, I nearly swallowed my gum.

  * * *

  “Hey,” Luke said, rising from the sofa in the family room as I walked through the door. Toby and Max, his two rescue dogs from the local shelter, trotted to greet me. I gave each of them a pat and said hello.

  Luke met me in the front hall and kissed me on the cheek. “How did it go?”

  I handed him the large manila envelope. “He signed them.”

  While I removed my trench coat and hung it on the coat tree, Luke set the envelope on the hall table. The dogs continued to wag their tails.

  I turned to Luke, felt something inside me come apart, and stepped into his arms.

  “Oh,” he said in a tender voice, gathering me into his embrace and kissing the top of my head, “I’m sorry, babe. I know how hard that was. But everything will be better now.”

  His calm, loving nature was exactly what I needed. Somehow, he understood that I couldn’t jump for joy, nor did I want to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne—because a life I’d once cherished was over now. The marriage I’d believed in with all my young, innocent heart had failed spectacularly. It had gone up in flames the day Sammy died, and it was now a charred wreckage. There was nothing left in its place but hard feelings and resentment.