That silenced him. She hadn’t been planning on saying it, hadn’t been planning on mentioning it ever because it was none of her business and made her uncomfortable, but he’d backed her against a wall and it had slipped out. It seemed as if minutes passed with neither of them saying anything, and for once in her life, Jane actually felt close to her brother as she listened to his harsh breathing.
When he finally spoke, his voice was weary. “Why is it that I never call you with these kinds of crises?”
Thank God he was giving in. “Wait until you have a child,” she said. But the relief passed as suddenly as it had come over her and was replaced by the realization that giving in was an admission that something had, in fact, happened between him and Desmond. “You’ll see,” she stammered. “You’ll see that . . . things come up you can’t elicit.”
“Elicit?”
“Predict. Things you can’t predict.”
“I can predict right now that this will never come up with me. I will never call you in the middle of the afternoon, completely out of the blue . . .”
She could see the traffic ahead starting to move, a little break in the line of cars. “I’m more grateful than I can say. Please . . . if you could leave right this minute . . .”
3.
When she arrived at the school, Gerald was sitting on the steps leading to the street with his arms folded over his music books, and the corners of his mouth turned down. Daylight Saving Time had ended last weekend and it was nearly dark. The rooms of the school were lit in warm, golden light, and even through the closed windows of her car she could hear pianos and the rasp of cellos. Gerald was wearing a baggy, orange sweatshirt, not the blue jacket she’d described to the security guard. Why hadn’t she noticed it this morning? The whole afternoon might have gone differently if she’d given the guard the right description. Brian was pacing on the sidewalk, wrapped up in his dapper tweed sports coat and a long, dark scarf. She’d always thought there was something suspiciously vain about him, although she’d been too absorbed in their rivalry to pinpoint exactly what his vanity made her suspect. How had she missed what now struck her as so obvious it was almost embarrassing? It was a little before five, and now that she was here and Gerald was fine and within thirty minutes they’d be at home and Gerald would be standing at the kitchen counter cooking, the panic of the past hour dissolved. All things considered, she’d handled it rather well.
Gerald opened the door, tossed himself into the passenger seat and slipped on his seat belt, all without looking at her.
“Hi, honey,” she said, and gave him a kiss. She wasn’t going to make a big deal of this and alarm him retrospectively. “How did the lesson go?”
Silence, and then he said, “Have you been drinking?”
“Excuse me?”
“It smells like wine in here.”
Brian rapped lightly on her window, his fingers tightly encased in brown leather. He motioned for her to roll down her window. “Mission accomplished?” he asked.
She nodded toward Gerald and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to make a big production of this, but I hope you know how much I appreciate it.”
“As I was walking over here, I realized it’s the kind of thing you’d do for me. Not that I’d ask.”
The gloves were definitely a bit too much for this time of year. Thomas usually didn’t get around to wearing gloves until midwinter. She turned back to Gerald. “Did you thank your uncle for coming to meet you?”
Gerald said nothing.
“Gerald? I asked you a question: Did you thank your uncle Brian?”
“Thank you,” Gerald said to his chest. “Now could we please get going?”
“All I can do is thank you again,” Jane said. The scarf, too, seemed an affectation. The temperature was probably in the fifties.
“You could also give me a ride back to my office.”
She moved some papers around on the back seat and he climbed in. “Take a right at the end of the street and then another right,” he said. “What’s that smell in here?”
“It’s wine,” Gerald said.
4.
Gerald was banging his legs against the seat, obviously trying to get a rise out of her. Maybe it was best to simply let him blow off some steam in this harmless way. He hadn’t said a word since they dropped off Brian, not that he’d been talkative when Brian was in the car, and now they were almost home. She decided to make one last stab at civility. “Was your teacher happy with all the practicing you’ve been doing, sweetie?”
Bang bang bang, and then he slid a little lower in his seat and actually kicked the dashboard.
“I asked you a question, Gerald.” Carefully enunciating each word, she said, “Did the teacher notice how much practicing you’ve been doing?”
Bang bang bang, kick kick kick.
“Gerald! Enough!”
He fluttered his legs rapidly, like a swimmer racing to the finish line, and then exploded: “Where were you, Jane?”
She wished then that she hadn’t been so quick to allow him to use her first name. It had sounded cute when he was two, a tiny boy calling his mother Jane, so incongruously grown-up in that incongruously grown-up voice of his. But now it seemed to put them on an equal footing, as if they were peers, as if she had no authority over him. Saddest of all, there was no turning back; it was unlikely now that he would ever call her something as tender as mom. “I told you, sweetheart, I was stuck in traffic. There was a terrible accident and I was stuck on the bridge. There was nothing I could do.”
“Doubtful.”
“You’re being very rude, young man.” Bang bang bang. “And please stop that annoying thing you’re doing with your legs.”
He gave the dashboard one last kick. “Grandma said you’d probably forgotten me.”
“Grandma? You called Sarah?”
“I called her when you didn’t show up. What was I supposed to do, sit around and wait to be kidnapped?”
“The security guard was looking for you. You didn’t hear him?”
“He was looking for someone named Jerry and since that isn’t my name, I paid no attention.”
“Exactly what did your grandmother say to you?”
“She said she hadn’t heard from you and didn’t know what you did with yourself half the time. Then she asked me if you and Dale had spent a lot of time together when we were up in New Hampshire, and then I saw Uncle Brian come in and realized he was looking for me.”
She pulled into their driveway. It was bad enough that Sarah was continually trying to drive a wedge between her and Thomas, but trying to turn her own son against her was purely sadistic. Sarah had answered that one call from Dale, months ago now, and desperate to have something to use against Jane, had come to all kinds of conclusions. At least she could have the decency to keep them to herself.
As she got out of the car, Helen, poor, fading beast, came up from the backyard, making a noble effort at wagging her tail. She’d lost weight in the time she’d been with them, despite Jane’s attempts at fattening her up, bringing home special packages of hamburger and ground chicken. Helen went over to Gerald, but he ignored her completely and made straight for the front steps. From this angle, he looked tall, erect, and adult, and she didn’t want to let him go.
“I want you to come back here right this minute,” she said. “I want you to come back here and pet Helen, right on the head.” He spun around and made a great show of marching back and running his hand across Helen’s head as if he were wiping crumbs off a counter. “No, I don’t mean like that, I mean with a little bit of genuine feeling. She’s going to be gone very soon, and I want you to look back at the time that she was with us and remember that you did something nice and kind and decent for her. Do you understand?”
He touched her head, a little more gently this time, and immediately withdrew his hand. “She smells funny,” he said.
“She smells like a dog, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because that’s what she is.�
�
“May I go now, Jane?”
“Yes, you may.” But when his key was in the lock, she said, “And from now on, I’d like you to call me mom or, if you can’t manage that, mother would be acceptable.”
She strode across the damp, leafy lawn, nearly tripped on a stone in the middle of the dark path, and knocked on the door of the barn. No, not the barn, the carriage house, the very nicely, expensively appointed carriage house. She looked down with dismay at her wine-stained stockings, but she had to take care of this now, before the whole situation got out of hand. Eventually, she heard Sarah shuffling across the floor, and when she’d finished rattling the locks, she opened the door wrapped in a blue and red and yellow blanket. Undoubtedly, it had taken her this long to answer the door because she was searching for this attention-getting prop, a not-so-subtle reminder to Jane that she was freezing to death in the overheated “barn.”
“May I come in?” Jane asked.
Sarah opened the door wider. “It’s your house.”
“Thomas and I own it, if that’s what you mean, but I’ve never once come in unless I was invited.”
“No. In fact, I can’t remember the last time you were in here, Jane.”
So the gloves were off!
The washing machine was running in the room off the kitchen and the whole house smelled of bleach. Jane couldn’t remember the last time she was here either, but she remembered the smell; Sarah seemed to have a bleach fetish. She washed everything in bleach, she cleaned every surface with it, for all Jane knew, she bathed in it. As soon as Jane left, she’d probably disinfect the air with it. Jane sat on the sofa and Sarah, very carefully and slowly, lowered herself onto a Bentwood rocker piled high with worn cushions and pillows. It was one of the few pieces of furniture Sarah had supplied herself and, judging from the looks of it, the only piece of furniture Sarah used. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and forced an unconvincing shiver to run through her body. It was so unattractive, a robust woman like Sarah playing the infirm old lady. Jane wasn’t going to play nice-nice, not today. They’d gone past that.
“If you’re cold, you can turn up the heat,” Jane said. “We installed the most efficient and reliable heating system we could find, so there’s no need to sit here shivering, wrapped in blankets.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Jane.” Sarah reached up and touched her big white wig. What was the point, Jane wondered, of going to the trouble, expense, and discomfort of wearing a wig if it only served to make you look worse than you did without it? “I won’t be here much longer, so I’m not going to be running up your heating bills.”
“You know where the thermostats are and you know how to use them and I know for a fact no one has ever mentioned heating bills. The rest is up to you.” Jane adjusted a pillow behind her back to make herself more comfortable for what was coming, and found it was pushing her off the cushion. She reached behind her and tossed it to the far end of the sofa. Sarah watched, stone-faced. “Listen, Sarah,” she said. “I think you know why I’m here.”
“Not really. Unless I forgot to pay the rent this month.”
All $100 of it, always paid in fives and tens to make it look like they were gouging her. Don’t Engage. “I just brought Gerald home, safe and sound. There was a traffic jam getting into Cambridge. When I realized how bad it was and how late I was going to be, I called my brother and had him rush down to the school from his office and wait with Gerald. He wasn’t alone for more than a few minutes. Ten at the most.”
Sarah stared at Jane for a very long time, then said, “I’m glad to hear it.” She put her feet up on a crocheted stool, another piece of furniture that belonged to her. Perhaps she spent her days trying to figure out how best to avoid touching anything that Jane had come in contact with. She folded her hands on her lap, and in a flash of panic, Jane saw a busty version of her husband and her shrink sitting opposite her. “All I know,” Sarah went on, “is that when he called here, he was so terrified, I thought something terrible had happened to him. I thought he was hurt or lost. I tried to calm him down, but I didn’t know what to tell the poor thing.”
“You may not have known what to tell him, but apparently what you did tell him was that I’d forgotten about him. You tried to ‘calm him down’ by telling him that I’d abandoned him like some abusive mother who leaves her kids stranded in a shopping mall.”
Sarah said nothing to this, merely stared at Jane with self-righteous contempt. She pursed her mouth and made a soft, sucking sound.
“There was a change in our usual schedule,” Jane said, “and, I admit, I forgot where I was supposed to be and when. And then, on my way to pick him up, I was stuck in a traffic jam. That is what happened.”
“Oh, yes, Jane, I’m sure it is. I am sure that’s exactly what happened.”
Jane leapt to her feet. “Well it doesn’t matter if you’re sure or not, Sarah, does it? What matters is that I fucked up and when I realized I’d fucked up, I dealt with it as quickly as I could, and Gerald is safely at home and everyone is fine and I’d like to put the entire unfortunate incident behind me.”
Sarah’s mouth was actually twitching, and when she spoke, her lips were drawn so tightly, they were white. “Don’t you dare use that filthy language around me! Who do you think you’re talking to, Miss Cody? Why don’t you go take a look at yourself, all dirty and disheveled! You disgust me!”
Everything that Sarah had said to her over the past seven years had slid off the surface of Jane’s defenses. She’d chalked all of it up to a sick rivalry for Thomas’s affection. But these words knocked the wind out of her. She felt unsteady on her feet and was afraid she was going to cry. “You’ve never liked me,” she said softly, a reminder to herself, as much as to Sarah, that this wasn’t about whatever she imagined had happened this afternoon. It wasn’t about Dale because she couldn’t know anything about that, whatever she suspected.
“I’m the mother-in-law in the barn. I’m not allowed to have an opinion. But I told my daughter the first time I met you, I called her right up on the phone and I said, ‘That woman is never going to make my Thomas happy.’”
Jane could feel tears rolling down her face, but she wasn’t about to reach up and brush them away. Now Sarah looked like Gerald, like Gerald and Thomas. Sarah and Gerald and Thomas, a trinity. And she was the outsider. She’d always been the outsider and maybe that was why she’d started up this ridiculous affair with Dale, because she wanted to feel like she belonged somewhere. “Thomas has been happy,” she said. Her voice was weak, as if she were the old woman. “He’s been happy with me, and he’s been happy with Gerald, and he loves this house. That might be hard for you to accept, but it’s true.”
It was true. It was undeniably true. She had made Thomas happy. She’d made him forget the woman who’d left him, and she’d given him a son whom he adored. She had made a home for him. She’d even taken in Sarah, made room for her nemesis in her own household. What more did she want, blood?
“You’re a fine one to go talking about what’s true,” Sarah said. “You with all your lies and your lists. You want to hear truth, I’ll tell you some truth. I got the results back from those tests of mine the doctor took last month, and I’m about six months from dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My whole body’s full of cancer. Every damn inch of it.”
Jane sat back down on the sofa and wiped her eyes, not sure what to make of this. “Thomas said the doctor gave you a clean bill of health.”
“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. You’re the first person I mentioned it to. And I don’t plan to tell anyone else, so please don’t go spreading it around.”
Jane found that she was taking in short, shallow breaths. Sarah had made the announcement of the cancer as a big “Gotcha! Score one for me!” Still, Jane was struck dumb by the news. And moved, in some unexpected way, by the fact that she’d chosen to tell her at all. She wanted to cross the room and take Sar
ah’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. What did they say . . .”
Sarah waved one of her big hands. “I’m not going into detail. And don’t be sorry for me. Just know one thing, Jane, I plan to make sure everything’s right before I crawl into the grave. For Thomas and for Gerald, and even for you. So let’s not dance around each other anymore.”
5.
Back in her own bedroom, Jane sat on her bed and stared at the phone. Now she saw clearly that the whole desperate day had been headed toward this. Be like Chloe, she told herself, learn from your mistakes. It would be a relief, a huge sigh of relief once she’d done it. She called his private voice mail. No personal message from him, so at least she didn’t have to hear the sound of his voice.
“It’s me,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. Let’s pretend it never happened. No hard feelings, all right? And please, don’t call me back. Let’s just leave it at this.”
Like all heels and rakes and cads, Dale was a man of honor; he’d respect her wishes and she wouldn’t hear from him. In six months or more, they’d bump into each somewhere and act as if nothing had happened. She took off her clothes and stuffed them all into the bag for the dry cleaner. But no, she didn’t want any reminders of her last afternoon with him, so she stuffed them into a plastic bag, tied it closed, and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Eighteen
The Other Widows
1.
Eight months later, I returned to the cabin where he died. It was mid-June and the sun was warm. Yellow irises were blooming on the shore at the far end of the pond. I sat for hours on the dock until the light began to fade and I knew it was time to move on.
Desmond closed the book. Luckily, he’d decided to read the final pages of Dead Husband here, in the privacy of his shrinking room, instead of at his office at school, or worse still, in a coffee shop or some other public place where someone might have witnessed him shedding real tears—twice in the past hour.
True Enough Page 28