Authors: Callie Wright
Hugh stopped, looked up. “I don’t know. She’s in recovery, she said.”
“Did you see any alcohol in the house? Empty bottles? Did you smell anything?”
“In
recovery
. We had peppermint tea.”
Now Anne conjured a tin of assorted teas slid across a worn wooden table, the light through the window coating her husband’s hand as he picked through his choices—Lemon Zinger, Earl Grey, orange pekoe—before selecting the green wrapper, the stomach settler, the breath freshener: almost as good as brushing his teeth.
Anne looked up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.
“If she’s compelled to testify—”
“She won’t say anything,” said Hugh.
“Why? Because you asked her not to? What happens when her ex-husband threatens to take back the kid?”
“She doesn’t want to be involved,” said Hugh.
“Too late,” said Anne.
Hugh squeezed his temples, hooding his eyes, and Anne sensed a shade being drawn down between them: Hugh was on the inside and Anne was on the outside, and it was not clear he wanted her back in.
“Hugh,” she said, ashamed of the pleading in her voice.
Now Hugh lowered his hand and looked at her. “What happened at the hospital,” he said carefully, “is irrelevant. She said so herself.”
Anne’s heart flip-flopped in her chest. In the left ventricle, joy—maybe it had been only the one time. In the right ventricle, fear—Hugh, it seemed, was disappointed; evidently, he might’ve been open to more.
“You mean—”
“I mean my only concern is the school.”
Anne waited for him to elaborate, to include his wife and children in this realm of concern. When he didn’t, she laughed once, a single
ha!
that startled Hugh into asking what was so funny, and she shook her head in disbelief, wondering if she’d ever find anything funny again.
“I don’t think you’re really hearing me,” said Anne, anger finally creeping into her voice. “Before you all but had sex with this woman, there was no problem. Now, if she says something, or if the
child
, who saw it
happen
, tells his
father
? That’s the school, Hugh. And almost certainly our marriage.”
“Tell me what to do,” said Hugh.
“Time travel,” said Anne. “Go back. Undo.”
Hugh pinched the bridge of his nose between his dark eyes, his brows draining into a V, and the thought occurred to Anne—a revelation, her “aha” moment—that he could leave. He could leave this house, go outside and find Randolph DeVey and tell him everything, go to the Hawkeye or the Pit or the Doubleday and tell the bartender everything, go to school in the morning and tell every mother who pulled up to the curb everything. Picturing the whole town armed with Hugh’s story, ready to talk, Anne was angry, hurt, confused; also restless, energized, anxious; she was other things, too, things she never would’ve expected: forgiving, regretful, placating; lonely, culpable, tired; she was, shamefully, turned on. And she couldn’t resolve this tumble of feelings into a single purpose—forgiveness brought on anger; hurt gave way to regret. She needed time, Hugh’s patience. But were Hugh and she still on the same team? Did being on Hugh’s side against Richard Pennington mean that she forgave him for what he’d done with Caroline Murphy? Worse yet, did Hugh want to be forgiven?
“Do you think they have a case?” asked Hugh. “About the playground?”
“I don’t know.”
“I should tell you,” he said, “there wasn’t a head teacher on yard duty at the time.” He shrugged helplessly. “Just two assistants.”
“Did you send a copy of the accident report to the licensor?”
“Mrs. Baxter did it.”
“Did you call Charlie Stanwood?”
“No,” said Hugh, shaking his head. “Until yesterday, I didn’t think Graham’s fall was a problem.”
Anne made a note:
Call Charlie.
She checked her watch—9:15; too late now.
“Maybe nothing will come of it,” Hugh offered.
“Maybe.”
The ticking of the wall clock was a third heartbeat in the room. Anne flipped the pages of her legal pad. In the margin of one page, she found that she’d sketched a picture of a house—their house, she supposed, though it could’ve been any house with a front walk and a door centered between two windows with three more upstairs: Hugh and Anne’s bedroom.
“Hugh,” she said, her voice wobbling. “How could you do this?”
He ducked his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t entirely know.”
Anne requested a few minutes alone and Hugh nodded, then crossed the room to the glass-paned doors. He stopped, turned. Anne saw that he was about to speak and she quickly looked away.
When Hugh was gone, Anne stretched across the couch, curling on her side, her back snug against the puffy brown leather, her toes pressed into the dusty tufted buttons. She took a deep breath, then another. On her third breath a sob welled inside her and finally broke.
Cleaning out her parents’ house last week had not been nearly as therapeutic as Anne had hoped. Too much time had passed, maybe, and the rooms had acquired new associations since she was a little girl. Standing in her old bedroom at the top of the stairs, Anne had thought not about lying awake under her polka-dotted bedspread, listening for the sound of her father’s car in the driveway, but about laying her tiny daughter down for a nap in the corner of the sectional sofa. She couldn’t conjure her old bedroom, which had long since been converted into a sitting room, her furniture replaced with a navy velour living-room set. Even the smell was different: her mother had switched laundry detergents, her father had quit smoking, and the carpet on which Anne had spilled her bottle of Jungle Gardenia had been traded in for a sky-blue low-pile that faintly reeked of glue.
While Hugh and the kids were downstairs dismantling the den around her father, Anne had stood in the center of her old bedroom and tried to see herself in it, but the repapered walls wouldn’t turn into her daisy border, and the velour furniture was like a boxy policeman blocking the road back to her single bed, her rolltop desk, her vanity, which had been her mother’s. Finally she’d had to close her eyes in order to see the room she was already standing in, and even then she was not
in
it but floating above it, looking down from the ceiling on her teenage self, as though it had happened to someone else.
And how many times had it really happened? Twice? Ten times? Twenty? Anne was not prone to exaggeration—she liked certainty, precision, exactness—but she honestly didn’t know. The memories had blurred, blended, and rearranged themselves into a temporal impossibility: both that it had and had not happened. Every single night of Anne’s life, her father was home by six and they sat down to dinner at six thirty, except for the nights when he wasn’t home by six, seven, eight, and inside those memories was his untouched plate of food at the head of the table, she and her mother picking at their dinners, stalling, talking sometimes but mostly not, until they had waited as long as they could and her mother stood and cleared the table and placed her father’s plate in the oven, set to one hundred degrees, to be kept warm for whenever he arrived.
Anne could still smell the greasy chicken, dry white rice, buttered carrots slow-cooking through the night; feel her mother’s presence ghosting the house like a force field, unapproachable, unavoidable; hear the unmistakable sounds of housework, undertaken before dawn, so that by the time Anne descended for school at seven o’clock the kitchen had been scrubbed, the burners scoured, the linoleum mopped, the Formica bleached, and her father’s single gleaming plate propped in the rack to dry, its face wiped clean.
And then there was
The Sex Cure
—pressed between her parents’ mattress and box spring—and it was 1962 again, Anne a gangly eighth-grader who’d long substituted books for best friends. In those days, Joanie had left her copy in plain sight, bookmarked on her nightstand or tented over the arm of her reading chair in the tiny library, where Anne had always been welcome to borrow anything, and it was here that Anne began to consume the story. June Dieterle, the babysitter in
The Sex Cure
with a proclivity for administering chloral hydrate to her charges, was one letter removed from Anne’s own childhood babysitter, Mrs. Jane Dieterle, whom Anne remembered as a gracious tea-party guest and great cutter of paper dolls. Art Peevers, henchman to the Potter-like Mr. Stevens in the novel, had the exact same name as Mr. Arthur T. Peevers, her father’s friendly rival in the insurance business.
Anne had desperately wanted to see her parents in Sandy Miles, who ran the thoroughbred riding stables, and his wife, Marge, a lab assistant at the hospital, because, unlike the rest of the characters in
The Sex Cure
, the Mileses were happily faithful and in love. And half the story had tracked: Joanie had been a nurse at Bassett Hospital until Anne was born, but Anne had failed to find her father in Sandy Miles, who had never loved any woman but Marge. Anne could still recall one of the book’s saddest lines:
Why did children persist in thinking the years brought wisdom?
Anne had expected to be able to protect herself from all this when she became an adult—armed with the knowledge of what was possible, she would know how to avoid it. But how stupid she had been! While Anne had smugly believed she was in control, Hugh had been cavorting with a divorcée in the aptly fogged-in Cherry Valley, and it was all so predictable in a way that Anne wondered if she hadn’t invited it. Was there a difference between
being prepared
and
preparing for
? Because here she was, right where her mother had been, with the same problems, the same decisions to make, the same children upstairs.
Anne opened her office doors and found Hugh sitting in the doorjamb between the kitchen and the center hall, waiting for her. He stood, balancing a cup of milky coffee in his right hand. “I made you one, too,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen.
He realized then that she’d been crying and took a careful step toward her, shifting his coffee to his left hand. With the pad of his right thumb, he wiped under her nose, then cleaned his thumb on his shirt. He stepped back and asked her if she was okay.
“No,” said Anne. “Not exactly.”
She ignored the steaming coffee he’d brewed and went instead to the refrigerator, where she retrieved a bottle of white wine, half depleted, and upended it into a stem glass. Four gulps later she shuttled the empty bottle into the recycling bin under the sink, then returned to the fridge for a second bottle.
“I’m going to talk to Teddy,” said Anne, cradling her glass in both hands.
Hugh leaned against the counter, an island between them. His Roman nose was burned from afternoons passed on the playground at school. Just about any other man in the role of nursery school teacher would’ve given Anne the creeps, but Hugh was a grown-up version of the sensitive camp counselor, the one all the kids clung to when it was time to go home.
Now he pinched his chapped lips into a line that neither frowned nor smiled. When was the last time she had kissed those lips? It had been nearly two months since they’d had sex. They kept different schedules, went to bed at different times, and, really, he hadn’t seemed to miss it.
“Maybe I should go with you,” said Hugh.
“No,” said Anne.
“If you go up there alone, Teddy’s going to think we’re not together on this.”
“We’re
not
together on this,” said Anne reasonably.
Hugh pointed to the ceiling: Julia’s room and, across from hers, Anne’s father’s. He held a finger to his lips, then nodded back toward her office. Anne wrung the wine bottle’s neck, toting it along.
They sat next to each other on her chesterfield, with only a narrow space between them. She refilled her wineglass and offered Hugh the first sip. He shook his head.
“I was saying, we”—Hugh paddled the air between them to show that this particular
we
excluded the children—“aren’t really together on this. But we”—here Hugh made a circle, encompassing the entire room and presumably the entire family—“are always going to be together. Right? Because children want to know what’s going to happen to them. Are they safe? Are they secure? Are they loved by both parents?”
Watching her husband pantomime his bullshit child-centered approach, it occurred to Anne that she had married Mister Rogers. Patience, routine, reliability, reassurance. And, of course, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
“He saw you kissing a woman,” Anne pointed out. “If I don’t give him a context for it, he’ll make his own.”
“What are you going to say?” asked Hugh.
“Nothing about the hospital, if that’s your concern.”
“Right,” said Hugh. “That’s good.”
She didn’t want to think about their lives without Seedlings. Eight years of college to pay for, her father to take care of. Anne was still the primary provider in the family, but Hugh was gaining on her; each year, Seedlings was more profitable than the last. Not that Anne’s law firm wasn’t doing well, but it was a rural practice and there was only so much money to be made. Seedlings, on the other hand, could grow—unless the entire town found out that the principal had slept with a student’s mother. Then see how many fathers signed up to pay the tuition.
Anne leaned forward, elbows to knees, and Hugh reached over to rub her neck, work her tendons, find her pressure points. She had always been a sucker for a massage.
“And there’s nothing else to tell,” said Anne. “After the hospital.”
Hugh nodded imperceptibly, giving her neck a good squeeze.
Anne’s eyes darted over to the sabotaged baseball card drying on a tea towel on her coffee table, its corners pinned by back issues of
ABA Journal.
George Obermeyer, twelve years old. Hugh had lost a brother, and this early brokenness was part of what had attracted her in the first place, except that it didn’t usually manifest itself in ways Anne considered attractive. First of all, he didn’t talk about it. He wasn’t hollow or brooding. He didn’t cry out in the night. He was sensitive and boyish, kind and affable, and Anne was irritated to discover that now, when she least recognized her husband, he was even more attractive to her, sloe-eyed, smirkish, distant, new.