Those We Love Most (10 page)

At the preschool, Maura handed Sarah over to Mrs. Fleet in the “Twos” room, and she wriggled her chubby legs excitedly to get down. Arms outstretched, her daughter ran back to the dress-up area in the corner where the small cribs of baby dolls and stuffed animals were already strewn around the linoleum floor. Two of the other little girls and one of the boys were chattering away by the miniature kitchen set. Clearly, Sarah had already made the transition to her new surroundings.

Pulling her keys out of her purse as she headed to the van, Maura felt the weight of free time pressing down on her. She thought about her carefree days before the accident, humming with engagements and to-dos. The old Maura would be in a hurry to attack a long list of errands, but now the chasm of an empty, unstructured morning yawned ahead. Erin was at work. Her mother was no doubt weary of seeing her in this state, dejected and quiet. She had become a sort of project for her extended family.

Although the refrigerator was empty, the thought of going to the grocery store exhausted her. Stepping off the isolated promontory of her own grief could have unexpected and unpleasant consequences. There was always the chance she’d run into people she knew and have to stammer out replies that she was well, moving through, feeling better, whatever platitudes were required of her for decorum’s sake. Maura felt a sudden, spontaneous urge to go to the lake. Ten miles north of her commuter town, Gull’s Bay was rockier and less frequented than some of the other beaches. The woods hugged the shore on stretches of the bay, giving the beach a protective, hushed feel. This had been the place where she’d go to center herself, reach for a few moments of calm and serenity as she focused on the infinite vastness of Lake Michigan. But that was before. Now with all of the complicated and trailing memories associated with that beach, she wondered if it would have the same restorative powers. Was she ready to face that part of the past? Despite her ambiguity, she felt herself turning left on Forrest Avenue and heading in that direction as if the car were on autopilot.

The flag furled in front of the post office on the corner, and a sandwich board sign in front of the local boutique, Wits End, advertised a sale. Maura tried to imagine the person she had been in June, strolling purposefully along the sidewalks of her North Shore town before all of this had happened. Her cares then had been so different, her outlook full of optimism and possibility. The bakery sported a new green-and-white-striped awning, and she noticed that the leaves at the tips of the oak trees near the butcher were already showing the first yellow streaks of fall, although the daytime temperatures were still warm. Tent caterpillars had spun giant webbed cocoons in some of the branches, and she recalled how James had once asked her if they were clumps of cotton candy.

Maura maneuvered the car off the main street and down toward the water. She slowed to bump over the train tracks beside the brick station that led into downtown Chicago. She thought of her father, who had paid for a parking spot here for more than thirty years. There were many gifts that came with settling down in the familiar surroundings of your childhood, and yet today, the confines of her hometown felt limiting and constrictive. As she drove toward the water, the closely spaced quaint houses near town began to give way to more expansive lots and bigger residences, a few with stone pillar entrances. A large bird, a hawk perhaps, was soaring in an air current high above the shore. She turned north, continuing to follow the road along Lake Michigan, past the stone water tower and then the lighthouse that lay beyond the rock shoal marking the end of the public beach.

Outside the town limits the bends in the road became more frequent and dramatic, and she realized she’d been gripping the steering wheel with a sense of determination. She uncurled her fingers and sat back in a more relaxed position. She was absorbed in her memories, so the sign for Gull’s Bay rose up suddenly, partially obscured by a pine bough. She braked hard and set the blinker, her tires making a sharp noise as they rolled off the asphalt and hit gravel. Maura cut the engine and sat still in the parking area, fenced by mature fir, beech, and scrubbier brush. To her right, beside a stand of birches, was the sandy path leading to the shore. A break in the bank of foliage gave her an unobstructed view of the lake, and she sat mesmerized by the whitecapped waves, rolling forward at regular, angry intervals.

The deciduous trees ringing the lake, with their large paintbrush splashes of primary colors, had begun to make the internal shift toward fall more quickly than the inland ones. With school back in session, the September beach was sparsely occupied. A few hundred yards down past the rock jetty, a couple perched on a blanket, and a lone figure walking a German shepherd bent into the wind. Here and there the sand and rocks were littered with an occasional empty plastic bottle or food wrapper. The warmth of the day, the bright sunlight, and the constant breeze offered a reminder of what she had missed this past summer, largely confining her grief to the four walls of their house. That one pivotal afternoon she had spent here in June had been a warmer, more hopeful echo of this one. Maura experienced a momentary sensation of time buckling and then, unsettled, she focused her attention on a rusty container ship at the lip of the horizon.

She sat down on the sand and pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. Maura untied the black fleece at her waist and guided it over her head, where it snagged momentarily on her ponytail before she pulled it down and adjusted the zipper at her neck. The waves lapped rhythmically against the shore, and she drew a deep breath of freshwater air into her lungs, so distinct a smell and yet so much harder to articulate than the crisp salty scent of the ocean. A lake was more complicated and individual. The Great Lakes to her had always smelled mineral clean, a combination of pine and loam as impossible to replicate as the smell of rain.

Maura closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it had felt like to sit here at a much simpler time in her life. The sharp contrast of those memories brought a flush to her face and neck. She could recall, with the shame of hindsight, her most recent visits here, so full of the reckless surety that all of the pieces of her life were neatly curated, held together in a fine balance. In that stretch of time she had believed that she had everything she wanted. That Maura had been an entirely different person from the one who sat here now, she thought. How was it she had crossed such a giant dividing line? How had she and Pete drifted to this point? They had let apathy and atrophy and a hundred little things grind them down into a couple simply going through the motions. Long before James’s death they had begun to lose their language of intimacy, to adopt the varnished politeness one associated with acquaintances. Somewhere along the line, she wasn’t sure where, they had simply stopped trying to make each other better. This morning’s fight about Alex Hulburd was a perfect example, each of them clutching their intractable positions like pugilists in the corners of the kitchen.

Maura thought back to their fight this morning. Why wasn’t Pete more angry? Their reactions about the Hulburd boy seemed to be equally opposite. The more outrage she unleashed, the more equanimity he displayed, and that infuriated her. Maura sighed. The thought suddenly occurred to her that it had probably been at least seven months since she and Pete had made love. Maybe more. At one point in time that would have been inconceivable. Back when they were dating they could hardly keep their hands off each other. And then kids, and duties, and work, and … it was all such a cliché. She let out a disgusted snort and shook her head as if to physically banish her thoughts.

Pete got a lot of “me” time as she called it, and Maura let her resentment at this inequality and his selfishness smolder. Throughout their marriage Pete had golfed, met the boys at the bar, and enjoyed lunchtime client meetings at some of the nicer Chicago restaurants. He knew how to take care of himself, but then again, he was the breadwinner, she’d always reasoned. That rationale had grown old. It was easier right now to catalog his faults, as that mitigated her guilt, her tremendous, suffocating guilt.

Fastening her eyes back out at the container ship on the lake’s bleached horizon, she smiled at the memory of a cruise she and Pete had taken to Hawaii three years before Sarah was born. After a few frozen margaritas they had stumbled back to their cabin and captured some of the unfettered passion that conjures itself up when a married couple cuts ties to responsibility. The delicious alcoholic haze, the humidity in the air, and the gentle rocking of the boat worked like a balm. The cruise had been a little reminder of how and why she and Pete had fallen in love—their shared history, similar senses of humor—and what his attentiveness to her had felt like. They had danced to the ship’s band and played cards, talked about topics other than children while gazing at the night sky on deck. That time together with Pete had made Maura hopeful. But that had been vacation. Sarah was born, and life had become even more full, Pete’s parenting increasingly splintered at times. His drinking remained a constant, never to complete excess or total impairment, but more than she would have liked. The few times she had raised it, his defensiveness had immediately backed her down.

On a girls’ weekend last fall, after too much wine, she had admitted to her college roommate that she’d married a simple man, an uncomplicated person. She had been looking for dependability, she’d confided, but instead had found a boy, the kind of person who would have a predictably complacent approach to life. He had proposed to the girl from the next town, stepped into his father’s insurance business, and met his high school friends weekly at the same bar. In the early days of their marriage Maura had fit into Pete’s life with ease, conforming herself to his lifestyle. But routine, complacency, and the lack of spontaneity had begun to chafe over the years. It was like wanting something more or somehow different but having no real idea quite what, she had told her college roommate.

Maura had regretted spilling this confidence to her friend the next morning, blushing at the thought of such naked honesty. But they had not discussed it again, and she told herself that the alcohol had probably blunted the memory of the conversation.

She lay back in the sand, turning her face toward the weak warmth of the sun. A few larger pebbles dug into her back, and she raised her eyes up to the cloudless sky. Even before Maura had completely put a finger on her growing restlessness, felt the daily routine sanding down and blurring her edges, she had understood how easily attentions could be diverted. In her early marriage, there had been a couple of temptations. Well, flirtations really, that had stayed with her all of these years later. When she was newly engaged to Pete, she and her girlfriend Beth Stevens had gone to a Sox game together. The first welcome tendrils of a spring breeze had begun to stir over the plains and off the Great Lakes, lending a recklessness to the premature warmth of the afternoon. Emboldened by the beers in the stands, they’d been stealing glances and giggling at the three boisterous guys seated next to them. Very quickly it had bloomed into playful flirting.

Tim was the name of the young man next to her, and he’d been more serious than his buddies, more animated and eager to talk. She’d let him rest his hand on her knee as they conversed, a small, harmless thing, she had told herself later, because she was, after all, only engaged and not married. They’d discussed music and politics and family. While they stole sidelong glances at the field, she had the feeling that the space around them on the bleachers had shrink-wrapped them both in, so that the sounds surrounding them, the cheering and the whooping it up, had begun to recede.

Beth poked her thigh at one point and gave her a strange, almost imploring look, which, she realized through her slightly beery haze, was meant to pull her back to earth. And it was only after both of them were back on the commuter train and headed out to the suburbs that she thought about how quickly she had attached herself to this person and had spoken so readily and intimately. It had struck her, later that night, that her conversations with Pete, even in the early days of their courtship, had a different feeling, not as earnest or intense.

During those two and a half hours at the baseball game a total stranger had lit her up and provoked an examination of the conventions and beliefs with which she’d been raised. He was Jewish, she recalled, and he had probed her feelings about her Catholicism as a woman and challenged her very orthodox decision to simply vote Republican because her parents did. Tim’s sense of intellectual engagement in life had seemed electric, and that, in turn, had kindled a palpable mutual attraction, as if they’d both been illuminated from within.

And although she had never seen Tim again or even learned his last name, this one, vivid encounter had popped into her head at odd times over her yearlong engagement and very occasionally in the years to follow, on the heels of a fight with Pete or some small disappointment, like a forgotten anniversary.

There was another time a few years after she’d gotten married, on a train from Chicago to Indianapolis for her tenth college reunion. She’d been seated next to a tall, slim, serious man with piercing eyes, who was part Cherokee, which she had found inexplicably sexy. They had plunged into a deep and serious discussion in that anonymous way that strangers can adopt, secure in the knowledge that they would never see each other again. It was the first time since she had been married that she’d had the impulse to cover her left hand, obscuring her ring finger so that she could be just Maura and not somebody’s wife.

She learned her seatmate was an underwater explosives expert for the navy, and he spoke briefly about depth charges and diving in a factual, not boastful, way that was authoritative and appealing. In this second memorable encounter with an attractive stranger, it had been less about what they said and more about something crackling in the air between them. Traveling solo to her college reunion to inhabit briefly that long-ago carefree attitude, she felt his sloe-eyed gaze as it ignited her feeling of abandon.