Those We Love Most (14 page)

Maura opened the front door and pulled her cardigan around her, bracing against the breezy October afternoon. She reached inside the front porch mailbox to grasp the day’s delivery and a cardboard coffee cup flipped out with the magazines and fell onto the porch floor. Maura’s heartbeat surged as she bent to inspect it. This time there was nothing written on the outside, but the meaning was clear.

Back at the kitchen computer, she found it sandwiched between some junk e-mails in her in-box. The subject heading read “Vet Appt Confirmation.” Maura hesitated a moment before opening it and then clicked on it. She was surprised to see that this one was longer, an actual letter, the message no longer in ambiguous code. Her heart constricted as she began reading.

M—

I’m taking a huge chance writing this but I don’t know what else to do. I figured you’d get the cup and check your e-mail right away and if you’re reading this, I was right. It’s been almost four months, and I’m going crazy. I gave you some big space at first because I assumed that I was probably the last person you needed to see or hear from. But then you didn’t answer any of my calls or texts. I even called the house twice but didn’t leave a message. I can only try to imagine what you are going through. It’s an incomprehensible loss
.

I was in the back of the church for the service, and then I left before you could see me. I had to steal in and just get a look at you. You turned around once and it was all I could do not to run to the front where you were sitting. I realized then, that I had never seen you sad, only happy. That’s the way I want to picture you now, although I know that’s not the case
.

When I think back to how we happened, how simply it began over that appointment with Rascal and my growling stomach, it amazes me what followed. Our whole short history together makes me feel both foolish and still, oddly hopeful. Despite all of my promises to myself NOT to become involved with someone when I moved here, I ended up falling for a married woman at the practice. Great planning! (Joke)

Thankfully, you’ve spared me many of the insights into your relationship and it was certainly easier for us both to live in the present. But when I left Madison, I resolved never to make anyone else feel as miserable as I had by the slow crumbling of my relationship and my ex-wife’s betrayal
.

Your initial friendship while I was still very much a newcomer here was invaluable. But then I started to fall for you. Those walks on the beach, the sandwiches and coffee at the diner. I’m not sure either one of us could have predicted what that first lunch would lead to. I knew we were getting into dangerous territory and I know you did too. And yet when I think back to that day in the diner last spring, when I tried to break this off, you practically pleaded with me not to end it. You told me you thought this was what you wanted and that you felt we had a chance. And now I can’t help but think that our decision only damaged you and damaged us
.

After the funeral, I returned to our spot on the beach a few times at lunch, hoping to catch you there. All I wanted to do was see you and hold you. I wanted to look in your eyes and try to determine if there was anything there left for us
.

I still hold on to those memories and when I want to really torture myself I sit back and think about how your skin smells, or your laugh, or the dozens of little things that made me fall for you against my better judgment
.

I realize it’s all complicated now, and that you are going through many things that I can’t relate to. The only basis I have for comparison is losing my parents when I was in my twenties. But people say that still doesn’t touch what it feels like to lose a child, and that must be true. All I know is that I have lost you. And with that the friendship, laughter, excitement, and so much more you brought to my life
.

I’ve been biking a lot, and yes, in those tight, silly shorts with my bright orange helmet. Every time I start kicking around the apartment thinking about us and getting frustrated at the situation, I hop on my bike and go for a twenty-mile ride. Once or twice I’ve passed your house. Biking is the only way I can get you out of my head
.

Maura, I understand where this is going. Or maybe I should say, where it’s not. You’ve made your intent pretty clear with your total silence. I won’t e-mail you again. I know I took a chance in writing this, but I didn’t have any other alternatives. I’d love to be able to talk to you. You know where to find me
.

Maura leaned back against her chair and let out her breath. She had been frozen, statue-like, as she read, her hands clenched in tight balls. She was incredulous and appalled at the giant risk he had taken. Her heart was beating now as if she had shoplifted a piece of jewelry or been pulled over for speeding. Pete might imagine someone had put an old coffee cup in the mailbox once as a prank, but not twice. Maura felt competing emotions swirl inside of her—confusion, guilt, anger at his calculated gamble to send such an intimate e-mail. Then another feeling unexpectedly joined the tumble … desire. Maura closed her eyes and sighed. This self-control was far more difficult than she had imagined, but she would not respond to his letter. She could not respond.

Maura focused on a photograph of their family pinned to the bulletin board over her desk. It had been taken more than two years ago at Six Flags amusement park and Sarah had been an infant. The boys wore the satisfied expressions of a day of excess sun, sugar, and excitement. She blinked back tears as she studied the snapshot. James’s wide, freckled smile was directed right at the camera, his bangs askew, and there were scarlet bands of sunburn under his eyes where she’d neglected to apply sunscreen that day. Maura pushed her chair back from the kitchen desk and rested her head in her hands. No, she would not hit reply. It was the least she could do for her marriage, the least she could do for James.

“So, what are your plans today?” Roger breezed into the kitchen, leather briefcase in hand. His suit was pressed and he had chosen a solid deep burgundy tie. Margaret always felt a sense of satisfaction at how his shirts started the day so crisp and white.

“Oh, some bridge at the club this morning. Then maybe over to Maura’s later to play with Sarah.” Roger kissed her cheek absentmindedly and reached around her to pour a mug of coffee from the machine.

“I’m off again this week. I have to leave Thursday, probably just an overnight,” he said casually, pouring the milk into his coffee and moving to sit at the table while she served him a bowl of hot oatmeal and bananas.

“Where to? Tampa?” Margaret drew the word out longer than necessary.

“Not this time. That may be inevitable next week, but this week it’s Cincinnati. Something easy, I think.” She relaxed her stance, slightly relieved it wasn’t Florida.

“Oh?”

“We’re looking at some new LEED commercial developments with Dan Hurwitz and his gang. Remember him? We need to beef up our expertise in that area.”

She nodded. After he left the house, grabbing the newspaper for the train and whistling out the door, Margaret stood at the kitchen sink, thinking about how casually he had answered her when she had raised the subject of Tampa. Perhaps whatever transgressions he had committed there were long over. She could only hope so.

Yet she knew with absolute certainty that Roger had been unfaithful, she had proof. It was a boarding pass from an airline that she’d found three years ago. A moment of carelessness on Roger’s part, emboldened, no doubt, by the foolish preening narcissism of a rooster in love.

She’d been searching for a smaller suitcase, needing to pack for a visit to Stu and Jen right after their engagement. As an assistant professor of technology at Milwaukee’s city community college, Jen’s teaching schedule permitted little time to plan a wedding, and Margaret had eagerly volunteered to help. She had located one of Roger’s carry-on bags in the closet, and when she yanked it off the top shelf it had fallen open. A boarding pass stub from a flight to Tampa slipped out of the unzipped front pocket and onto the carpet. She had picked it up to throw it out until she noticed something scribbled on the back.

“Come back soon. Miss you already.” It was signed “Love, J” with all the familiarity of a childhood sweetheart, and she studied the flight time and date to Florida, trying to imagine the hand that had written so breezily. Something thick had welled up and then clogged in Margaret’s throat. A weak cry escaped, almost animal-like, which she’d suppressed with her fist despite being alone in the house.

On some level, she supposed, she had been bracing for this. It had been an unspoken thing, an intuition. Roger was a handsome man, patrician and charismatic. He traveled frequently, was exposed to all kinds of people in his business. Margaret had certainly been to enough of the annual meetings and some of the resort conventions to see the temptations, the eager supplicants and hussies who clustered in bars and at dinners, advertising their availability. She imagined them to be calculating and cunning about their conquests. But she’d always hoped, however blindly, that Roger was above that.

She thought about what she’d read somewhere, that the human heart can only sustain that kind of crazy, googly-eyed love for roughly a year. Twelve months. And then it became something else, something more familiar and at the same time more critical. It separated out those couples that were going to break apart from those that were going to go on ahead, to make the commitment and stand by each other. So what happened after thirty years? And then forty?

Margaret could still recall that moment of discovery with absolute clarity. She had let the sobs rise up in her throat and overtake her. There was no one to hear. She had sat pathetically on the carpet, legs splayed, as if she’d fallen, crying in great snuffling sounds. Oh what a sight she would make, she’d thought, if someone chanced to walk in and see her hoary, twisted face, the open suitcase and the note in her hand. How had she gotten to this place in her marriage?

Her mind shuttled back to their first blind date; it was odd that Roger had recently recalled it. It was uncharacteristic of him to be so nostalgic, but she had been touched. Sitting across from him in the ice cream parlor that first night, all those years ago, she was struck by his self-confidence.
Rakish
was the word one of her sorority sisters had used to describe him, but it didn’t quite fit. He was too principled to be a rake, too full of regret when he inadvertently injured someone with a barbed or humorous comment. Tall, with chestnut-colored hair and a wide toothsome smile, Roger’s most striking feature was the openness of his slate blue eyes. They held a kind of expectant promise, as if he assumed the world wouldn’t dare let him down. It was as if he anticipated only good things. He’d come from a family of modest means in a small farming town in central Illinois, and he’d adopted the careful bearing and outward appearance of a man attempting to escape a penurious past while teaching himself to be invincible.

Margaret had wanted to be a teacher when she had met Roger. She had hoped to go on and get her degree after college so that she could teach high school English, but they had fallen in love and married. She had gotten pregnant with Maura soon after that, and Roger’s first job had transferred him to Cleveland for a training program.

She and Roger had been born into the era of quiet decorum. They were raised by strict Catholic parents who had lived through the Depression. Her path to marriage and a family was clearly defined. Theirs had been a quick courtship, like many other couples in the mid-1960s, in the post-Kennedy years of gathering tumult. Margaret would understand, in retrospect, that their generation had stood on the cusp of great social overhaul set in motion by the war in Vietnam and the sexual revolution in the next decade. Insulated from the burgeoning unrest by their small-town and traditional midwestern roots, they had simply flowed from dating to their engagement and then the wedding. Roger was the only man Margaret had ever slept with.

He’d hungered for her early on in their marriage, locked eyes with her when they’d made love, spooned her at night in their sleep. But that desire seemed to thin after each child. Her fatigue, the predictability and routine of being a mother and homemaker, seemed increasingly in sharp contrast to his wheeler-dealer life on the road. It was the birth of their third child, Stu, which felt in some ways as if a string had snapped on a wonderfully rich old instrument. Juggling the demands of all three children, Margaret succumbed to the vortex of need, duty, and some days, exhaustion. Somehow she and Roger simply fell out of tune, and at some unknown point in time he had begun to share a bed with someone else. The naked betrayal of that fact hit her like the slap of an open palm as she’d sat helplessly on the rug that day three years ago.

Crying and keening in a ball had felt surprisingly good. A kind of wary, spent calm settled in afterward, and she’d swiped at her wet eyes with the backs of her hands, feeling an exhausted relief as she crawled to the side of her bed and tilted her head back against the mattress. Spying her rosary beads on the bedside table, she brought them to her lap, beginning to mumble the prayers with her eyes closed, the sanctuary of words centering her through the innate hardwiring of her faith. When Margaret was finished, she leaned her head back again and gazed upward, observing a single strand of a cobweb waving gently from the ceiling fan. It was that small detail that finally refocused and repurposed her.

She sighed heavily and struggled up to her feet. Bending over at the waist, she slammed the suitcase closed and lifted it onto the bed, sticking the note in the pocket of her slacks. Margaret hadn’t consciously decided to keep it, she just didn’t want it polluting her bedroom, didn’t want it anywhere near them. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. She had stuffed it into the bottom drawer of the old rolltop desk in the living room, which housed an archive of kids’ report cards and family medical records.