She remembered the trip to the Upper Peninsula for Jennifer’s wedding, the rest stop at the foot of the Mackinac Bridge, the acorn that Jake tossed toward Lake Huron. It had missed the water and landed on the rocks beside the root of a tree. What had happened to that acorn? Had it sprouted? Had the sprout survived? Surely it couldn’t grow to be a majestic oak. At best it would be stunted. But maybe it would be a bonsai oak, small and different from other oaks, but lovely. Like Eddie, different from other children, but lovely.
She didn’t know how long she stood there at the sink. But, at some point, she tested the bath water. Now warm, it gushed from the faucet and splashed against her hand. She plugged the drain and slid her toes into the growing pool in the bottom of the tub.
By midafternoon, she was ready to try the trip to the grocery store again. She folded three flannel blankets into rolls to cradle Eddie in the car seat.
“Chris,” she called, “take these to the garage while I carry Eddie.”
Eventually both boys were strapped in.
The shops lining the road flashed past, familiar as the back of her hand and yet oddly different from what she remembered. There was the dry cleaner where she took her woolen sweaters each spring and Jake’s suit before every family wedding; the KFC where she used to stop, on the sly, to satisfy a craving for fried chicken and coleslaw; the liquor store that sold the Wild Turkey she sometimes bought as a treat for Jake; the hardware store where Chris had rearranged handfuls of screws from one open bin to three others. The stores seemed to be organized differently, set at different angles, lined up in a different order. That didn’t make sense, but something was new about them.
The traffic light ahead turned yellow. She braked, slowing the car so it came to a stop at the crosswalk just as the light blinked to red. It felt strange to be driving. Her reflexes seemed dull, her instincts rusty. Gripping the steering wheel reminded her of that drive to the emergency room three weeks ago. It seemed like three years ago. From now on, every event in her life would be dated as “
before
Eddie got sick” or “
after
Eddie got sick.” Her promotion at work was
before
, Jennifer’s wedding was
before
. What would be
after
?
While her car idled at the red light, a cement truck stopped beside her on the left, and a UPS van stopped on her right, squeezing her as if walls along the road were moving relentlessly toward each other, with her in the middle. She looked into the rearview mirror, leaned toward it to see her own face. The woman who looked back was not the same person as
before
. She couldn’t remember exactly what the
before
lady had looked like, but probably she had bright eyes, cheeks flushed with excitement, a look of satisfaction on her face. The
after
was a sad-eyed, thin-faced, pale lady who was going through the motions of being Anna. The person in the mirror was the mother of a damaged child whose
afters
she could only guess. She longed for the return of the
before
Anna.
As the light turned green and she let the car creep forward, Chris called from the back seat. “Mommy, play the Christmas tree song.”
She looked into the rearview mirror again, at Chris’s flyaway, sand-colored hair, at his glistening eyes focused on the scenery as it moved past the car window. “Honey, it’s almost summer. We’ll play the Christmas tree song next winter.”
“Now. Play it now.”
She looked at him once more in the mirror. His eyes now stared into the back of her head.
“Okay. I’ll get it out the next time we stop.”
At the next red light, she fingered through her CDs, pulled out the Mannheim Steamroller
Christmas Extraordinaire
disc, and inserted it into the slit on the dashboard.
By the time the light turned green again, “O Tannenbaum” was playing and Chris was singing.
“O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree . . .” His voice sounded like a golden bell.
Jake had taught Chris a silly, bathroom-humor version of that song, which they had yelled at the top of their lungs last winter, their craggy voices out-shouting Johnny Mathis and the chorus on the recording. Now, Chris sang that newer version of the carol, his head thrown back, his eyes clamped shut, his mouth wide open.
“O Christmas tree, oh, woe is me, before we eat, I’ve got to pee.”
Christmas songs continued to bubble through the spring air. When they were a block from the grocery store, she heard the notes of “The First Noel”—a hymn of epiphany, the celebration of a beginning, the initiation of a new start. She looked yet again in the rearview mirror, this time at Eddie. He was nestled in his carrier among the rolled flannel blankets. And he was breathing.
She glanced over her shoulder to be sure the mirror wasn’t fooling her. Yes, he was breathing. From the CD player, the haunting tones of an oboe rose like smoke upward where they were joined by the notes of a violin, sweet as syrup, clear as ice, perfect as a human voice. The sounds of the two instruments intertwined, weaving in, swaying out, twisting together, their overtones ascending, ever, ever upward.
She turned the car into the parking lot of the grocery store and pulled into a space marked with a handicapped sign. She shut off the car motor, slid the keys into her purse, and glanced at Chris, then at Eddie. With a sigh, she opened the door, stood on the pavement, and brushed the wrinkles out of the lap of her slacks.
“Okay, guys,” she said to her sons, to herself, to no one. “We made it.”
Chapter 36
Jake
O
n his way home, driving past playgrounds and preschools, Jake marveled at his son’s progress. Eddie had been discharged from the hospital almost two weeks ago and, as far as Jake could tell, had been doing well. No seizures. No aspirating. Anna had given up trying to nurse him again but he was beginning to drink thickened formula from a bottle, although they had to bore open the holes in the nipples so the formula could flow more easily. He figured they’d be able to stop the tube feedings by the end of the month. Eddie—all the Campbells, in fact—were definitely planted on firm earth after the horror of his illness.
He parked the car in their driveway. Once inside the house, he called, “Howdy. I’m home.” He heard singing from the direction of the family room.
Chris, surrounded by LEGOs, sat on the floor and sang about a dinosaur while Eddie snuggled in Anna’s lap. Jake leaned to kiss her cheek. She pulled away.
What now? In the morning when he left, she was sunny as a goldfinch, looking forward to taking the boys to the petting zoo. This evening she was sullen.
“Someone called for you about an hour ago.” Her voice was ice.
“Who?” Jake sank into the couch. From the look on her face—the wrath in her eyes, the sag of her forehead, the tight pucker of her lips—he knew who had called. What on earth had she said to Anna?
“Dr. Daley. Mona or Monica—something like that—Daley.”
Jake bit his lip, took a deep breath, wiped his sweaty palms against his pant legs.
“Isn’t that the name of the woman from your medical school that you used to date?”
“Monica Daley? Why’d she call? I guess she eventually graduated if she calls herself ‘Doctor’ Daley.”
Anna was wordless. She stroked Eddie’s hair, kissed the top of his head.
Jake took another deep breath and wished he were doing anything else other than having this conversation. Sprawled in her chair with her damaged baby in her arms, she was a fragile china figurine about to fall off the edge of a high shelf. He couldn’t bear for her to be hurt any further.
Why had Monica called, anyway? She was crazy—now he knew how truly disturbed she was—and she must have said something that upset Anna. “What did Monica want?”
She shook her head slowly, tipped her chin down. She refused to look at him. “She asked how Eddie was doing.”
He heard the fan from the refrigerator in the kitchen, heard a blue jay call from the backyard.
“How’d she know Eddie was sick, Jake?” Her words were slow, deliberate.
He watched her fingers twist a corner of the blanket that covered Eddie. Her beautiful, purposeful hands. Her wedding rings, the diamond turned against her left pinkie. Her fingers—they were stiff, as if they belonged to an old lady—pinched the flannel fabric. If only he could hide. He was trapped, had no answer other than the truth.
“It was all a mistake, Anna.”
“What was a mistake? Marrying me?”
“No, no. Of course not.” Oh God, this was worse than he imagined. “I was desperate, Anna. Desperate for an anchor. That’s the best way I can describe it to you. Desperate to connect with . . . well, now I know it was a fantasy.” His words felt hollow. What was she hearing in them? He was light-headed, teary, as out of control as an airplane without a pilot. He didn’t want Anna to see him that way.
He told her about his call to Monica. “After I heard her voice again, the old stuff seemed to pour over my head. All those questions about what happened to her—why she disappeared—opened up like a gaping wound.”
He blew his nose. “Then she called from the airport. She’d flown to Michigan.”
Anna seemed to grab every word he said, her face blank, her lips pale.
“I . . . I stupidly drove to her hotel to see her. I needed answers to those old questions.”
He wasn’t sure Anna was breathing. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.
He explained everything about the visit to Monica’s hotel room. The wine, the invitation to bed, his declination of the invitation, his eagerness to leave. He described what she was like now. “She’s nuts, Anna. Probably she was always nuts, but I couldn’t see it before.”
“Why did you call her in the first place?”
He tried to explain, had trouble finding the words. How could he explain the inexplicable? Anna seemed to be slipping away from him.
“All I know is that Eddie’s illness took a toll on me, too. You probably don’t realize that. In the crush of the circumstances, I needed . . . well, I needed something. I didn’t know what, but seeing Monica seemed like it might offer a break in the storm. It didn’t. It was dumb . . . foolish.”
He sat on the floor beside her chair and touched her cheek. She pulled her face away.
Chris was quiet, had made a LEGO tower. The family room looked as it always had and yet it was very different, cold, dim, tense. A black force had floated over him, was strangling him.
“I hope you can forgive me. Nothing happened between Monica and me, but I sincerely wish I hadn’t called her, hadn’t gone to see her.”
Anna looked like granite.
“After talking to her for just a few minutes, there in the hotel, I realized what a mistake I’d made. Then I left.”
Anna remained still. Was she listening at all?
“Obviously, that visit with her didn’t fix anything for me. I really wish you didn’t have to know about this. Most of all I don’t want to hurt you. Please forgive me.”
“Forgive you? I can’t think like that now, Jake. I’m going to bed.”
She gathered Eddie and his blanket, slowly stood up, and trudged toward the stairs. Should he follow her? Call to her?
“Daddy, look at my tower,” Chris said, waving the stack of LEGOs like a wand. Jake kneeled beside his son and, one LEGO piece at a time, began building a tower of his own.
Chapter 37
Anna
H
e’d broken down, something she’d never seen him do before. He’d wept as he told her about meeting Monica. She didn’t want to be in his presence, didn’t want to hear the words that trickled from his mouth. She wished he would go away, wished it all would go far, far away.
He insisted they had only talked, that he quickly realized how unstable Monica was, even back when they were dating. For some reason—probably the myopia of youth, he’d said—he hadn’t been able to see that side of her before.
Could she believe him? Had they had sex? Did she want to know, if they had? Maybe he’d seen her at other times. Maybe during the orthopedic meeting last fall in Boston. Had Monica come to Michigan earlier and spent time with Jake? Perhaps she’d been in his call room bed those evenings he called to say good night to Chris. Was she with him the night Eddie got sick? Maybe that was why he didn’t know how sick Eddie really was.
While Jake spoke, she glanced at Chris who, unexpectedly quiet, was connecting LEGOs. He must have felt the bad aura in the room, known enough to keep from bothering them, but not enough to be scared. He’d spent the past month in a constant state of upheaval. Maybe he thought this was just the next chapter in the same terrible tale.
Suddenly, she was tired, more tired than she had ever been. Her bones were weary, her muscles ached, her head throbbed, her chest felt as if it were crushed under a boulder. “I’m going to bed,” she told him.
From the dark of her bedroom, she heard Jake usher Chris up the stairs and into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. They walked into Chris’s room, were talking but she couldn’t hear the words. She supposed Jake was helping Chris into his pajamas, hoped he was being gentle. She couldn’t do anything about Chris, now. He and Jake were on their own.
She didn’t know how long it was before she heard Jake’s footsteps on the bedroom floor. Had she slept? She couldn’t imagine she’d been able to fall asleep. She felt the stir of the mattress as he sat beside her, felt his hand on her shoulder.
“Anna . . .” His voice was quiet, hoarse.
“I can’t listen to any more of it. I need to be alone with this right now.” Why did he call Monica? Why did he go to see her? So many questions; they rattled through her head like a runaway train.
She really didn’t want to know the answers. If she knew they had had sex, she’d spend the rest of her life picturing Jake and Monica together, naked, arousing each other. Every time they were intimate, she’d feel Monica’s presence, like a giant skunk, in their bedroom. If she had failed to meet Jake’s needs, how would she fix that? Could she? Ever? Would he tell her what she hadn’t been able to supply? She wasn’t sure she could believe him.
“I love you, Anna. Please know that.”
She didn’t know it tonight. Would she tomorrow? Next week? Next year?