Epilogue
S
pring break is over and the house is quiet, except for the insistent buzz from the laundry room notifying Anna that Chris’s towels are dry. He’s back at college now, in sunny California, three time zones away. She’s still in Michigan, with rain pattering on the deck and thunder roiling in the distance. She pulls the warm towels from the dryer, folds them, and puts them back in his bathroom. She wants it to be ready for his next trip home.
The fridge is a mess but she doesn’t mind. It’s Chris’s clutter, all that remains, now, of his visit. She wipes away the spilled milk from under the vegetable bin and tosses the olive jar—it contains only juice and four pieces of pimento—into the trash. The last of the cheesecake, cloaked in Saran Wrap, sits on the bottom shelf.
Just a week ago they had shopped for the ingredients for that cake.
“How much sour cream?” Chris had asked, turning his head away from the dairy cooler and toward her. Flashing one of his infectious smiles, he held a pint container toward her and then suddenly flipped it into the air and caught it with his other hand. “This size?”
What a clown, she thought. A healthy, fun-loving wiseacre.
That afternoon the two of them made the cheesecake together, as they used to—Anna dictating the recipe while Chris dumped the ingredients into the food processor.
“Where’s the vanilla?” he asked, rummaging through her spice shelf.
“Isn’t there a bottle up there, somewhere?” She tried to remember the last time she had used vanilla extract. Since he left for college, her cooking had become much less interesting.
“Don’t see it. How about almond extract?” He pulled the little brown bottle from the back of the shelf. “Looks about the same.” He twisted off the cap and passed the open top under his nose. “This’ll work.”
He patted the graham cracker crust mixture into her springform pan, poured in the cheese filling, and shoved it into the oven. While it baked, he cooked blueberry sauce.
That night, Chris served his dessert with a flourish.
“Ta-da. The ultimate,” he said as he set the cheesecake in front of his father. “You, Dr. Campbell, get to cut it.”
Anna brought out the small plates, clean forks, and the silver cake server.
Eddie dropped his first bite in his lap. “Oops,” he signed—his fingers weaving through the air like butterflies—to Anna.
“Klutz,” Chris signed to his brother.
“Asshole,” Eddie signed back.
“Keep it clean,” Jake signed to both of them, nodding toward Anna. “There’s a lady at the table.”
Where did Eddie learn that? she wondered. From Chris? From school? Is that what they teach in classes for the hearing impaired?
While they ate, Chris told them about his new friend, Emmy, at Stanford. He giggled as he spoke. “You’ll love her, Mom. She’s a lot like you.”
“How so?” Anna was curious to hear his answer.
“Well, lively and smart and she reads a lot.”
Anna doesn’t think of herself as lively or smart. She does, however, read a lot. Maybe someday she’ll meet Emmy, who, although unknown to them, is obviously very important to Chris. In a good way. He’ll need a steady companion, someone to share the many ups and, hopefully, few downs of his life. And, Anna won’t choose her. She hopes Emmy is thoughtful and generous, interesting and ambitious. Anna’s job will be to accept her.
Now, standing in front of the open refrigerator door, she cuts a slim wedge from the leftover cheesecake and eats it with her fingers. She misses Chris a lot.
Later that afternoon, rain pelts the back of her jacket as she helps Eddie into her car. She pulls on his sleeve and signs, “Wait.” She needs to clear her students’ papers from the passenger side. He can’t manage both getting himself into the seat and moving whatever may be in the way. He’s a one-maneuver kind of guy, she had decided long ago. She tosses the papers into the rear and stands back while Eddie grabs the door frame, lifts his left foot, sets it on the floor mat and slowly lowers his bottom to the cushion. He’s awkward, his limbs are stiff. His nerves and muscles betray him, don’t follow his ardent commands. Slowly, he pulls his right leg into the car.
“Scoot in a little more,” she signs to him and then pats his thigh. He wiggles, inching his butt about a half inch farther inside. Then he turns his rain-streaked face toward her and grins. He’s amazingly good natured, contented most of the time, and she’s grateful for that. She wants to kiss his cheek, but that would embarrass him.
This is the last day she’ll pick him up from school.
“But what if he falls?” she said last week. Jake thought Eddie should ride the school bus.
“He’s fourteen,” he said.
“Yes, but he’s not like other fourteen-year-olds who rattle around on those buses. He’s . . . unsteady.”
“You’re selling him short. Everyone has challenges and should be given the opportunity to conquer them.”
“He won’t be able to hear the road noise. He might walk in front of a truck that’s barreling down the street.”
Over and over they pleaded their cases. Jake pointed out that Eddie’s friends looked out for him. Anna said his friends weren’t always with him. She reminded him that Eddie was “intellectually a little slow.” Jake said he was certainly sharp enough to ride a school bus.
Finally Jake said, “He needs to walk more, otherwise he’ll have trouble marching down the aisle after his wedding.”
Anna shuddered. Eddie’s wedding? “I’ve thought a lot about Chris’s wedding, especially with all the Emmy talk. Never Eddie’s.” Would he find a woman to love him? At least, as the groom, he wouldn’t have to lurch up the aisle all alone toward the altar. Instead, he’d wait there for his bride, flanked by the minister and his groomsman brother. Later, Eddie and his brand-new wife would stroll together down the aisle. As she recalled, the bride always leaned against the groom during that walk. She knows she did. But there was no reason the groom couldn’t lean against the bride. They needed to be able to lean on each other.
In the end, they agreed. Ed—Jake insisted they call him Ed and she kept forgetting to do that—would ride the bus for three days and then they’d reevaluate.
At home, Anna stabs the power button on the television remote and a soccer game flashes on the screen. She glances at Eddie seated on the couch, stares into his sweet, angelic, not quite yet adolescent face. “What should we make for dinner?” she asks in sign. His smoky blue eyes, the same color and shape as Jake’s, stare back at her. He tilts his head, doesn’t seem to understand.
“Hey, lovey,” she says, louder, even though she knows he can’t understand her, no matter how loud she shouts. Sound is a smear of faint warbles to him. She tries it again, signs, “Hey, lovey,” making her fingers, her arms, her body glide into the words. “What do you want for dinner?”
His eyes narrow with a smile. His fingers, thin and finely tapered like her own, fly through the air. She’s thankful for his fairly nimble fingers.
“Did you say chicken Kiev?” She signs each letter. K. I. E. V.
He nods and utters one of his snorty, burpy sounds—an Eddie chuckle, as Jake calls it. “Chicken, it is,” she tells him. “Tonight it’s just the two of us. Dad has a big case.”
While the chicken simmers in the oven, Anna watches the last of the sun’s rays drop behind the dreary clouds that hang like woolen roving beyond the backyard. A budding branch of the hydrangea bush raps against the kitchen window.
The cribbage board is still on the table, beside the deck of cards. She and Chris had played several times during his visit home. They giggled, joked, teased, and, in the end, she won the majority of the games. Now, she sets the board and cards back in the desk drawer. Why does Chris’s moving away have to be so hard? she wonders. Hard on her. Not hard on him.
During one of the cribbage games, Chris suddenly announced, “I’m taking a course called Deviance,” and then laughed at the look on her face. He explained, his voice growing progressively louder as his enthusiasm ballooned, “It’s a soc. course. The social underpinnings of criminal behavior, how economic inequality feeds criminality and domestic violence. . . stuff like that.”
She was surprised at his newfound maturity. His world was moving further and further away from hers. He described trips with his new friends through the redwoods of Pescadero Creek Park and to the beach at Año Nuevo to watch the elephant seals; their trips to Half Moon Bay and to the top of the Pinnacles.
“It’s best to go up the west slope in the morning, or you fry in the afternoon sun,” he said with confidence and authority. In great detail, he explained the thrill of rounding the last pile of stones and spotting the summit ahead and told of his tumble into a pool of muddy water inside an ink-dark cave. Neither she nor Jake had been to any of those places. They seemed as foreign and far away as a swirling nebula, beyond the far reaches of the universe and rolling onward toward infinity. She couldn’t sleep that night, tossing over and over in her head his continuing, inevitable, heartbreaking, completely appropriate journey away from her.
In the silence of the family room, she takes a sip of her chardonnay. This is her favorite season, with lengthening days that gently fade into silky nights. Lilac blooms. Tulip blossoms. It’s been fourteen years this month but still the fresh spring air ferries back all the memories of that night. “The fork in the road,” as the hospital chaplain had said. She remembers Eddie’s whimper when she found him. Mostly she remembers the dark. As she looks back, everything seems very dark.
She remembers laying Eddie in his crib and begging him not to wake up. And he didn’t. Not through the whole night. Not for a week. He followed her orders and almost died.
The scene scrolls over and over through her mind, as it has a million times. Two million times. It’s fainter, now, bubbles up less frequently. But, she can’t make it go away completely.
Their wedding picture sits on the desk beside the phone. Jake was handsome, with his sculpted nose, strong chin, thick curly hair the color of walnuts, now highlighted with streaks of gray. Unlike his static eyes in the picture, his real eyes are in constant motion, darting around, searching for things. Assessing, measuring, comparing, calculating.
And, he’s successful. Their beautiful home sits on two and a half acres. It’s surrounded by trees and there’s a pond out back. They have a lot. They don’t have all they had hoped for.
She doesn’t think of Jake as handsome or successful or rich. Rather, he’s the man who snores softly when he sleeps on his back, who spills foot powder on the bathroom floor, who eats the core with the apple. He’s Chris’s father. Eddie’s father. Her husband.
It was also fourteen years ago—a week or two after Eddie had come home from the hospital—that he’d confessed his secret. She was furious, hurt, frightened, vengeful. She felt disconnected from everything she knew. He said he’d been terribly wrong about Monica from the start and that “nothing happened” during their meeting in the hotel. For too long she was unsure she could trust him.
The days went by. Then the months and the years. They laughed, disagreed, worried together, and, during the tender times, confided their longings to each other. They found great joy in the boys.
It was about six or seven years ago—she’s lost track of the exact year but it was in the fall, when the evenings were getting cooler—that Jake walked into their bedroom as she was changing the sheets on their bed.
“Here, let me help you with that,” he said, grabbing one corner of the clean bottom sheet and pulling it over the edge of the mattress.
She watched as he tugged the fitted sheet over the other corner on his side. He tucked one end of the top sheet under the foot of the mattress and folded a cuff into the other end, pulled pillow slips over two of the pillows and fluffed them with his fist, smoothed the wrinkles out of first the woolen blanket and then the bedspread. He looked unbelievably earnest as he worked, completely committed to the ritual of neatly putting the linens on their bed. Something stirred in her, something good as if a gear, long out of sync, had finally slipped into place. She started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” he said, sounding mystified, concerned, staring at the bedspread, wondering if he’d put it on wrong.
“Nothing. Actually, everything’s very right.” She wiped her tears and chuckled. “For a surgeon, you’re very good at making a bed.”
The back door slams.
“Anna, I’m home,” Jake calls. The coat closet door squeaks open, and then squeaks closed.
He’s in the kitchen when he yells, “Where is everyone?”
“I’m in the family room,” she says, evenly, quietly.
He bursts through the archway and stops beside her chair. “Ed in bed?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s late.”
He sets his hand on her head and bends to kiss her. His lips are soft. She feels the heat of his breath, smells the antiseptic odor of the operating room.
“You must be tired,” she says. “It was a long case.”