Those We Love Most (23 page)

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I am too, Maura,” he said between gritted teeth. “I wanted this. This one nice moment by the tree tonight. I wanted it to be like it used to be.”

“So did I,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. They lay there for a while, enervated, Pete’s eyes closed, listening to the snaps and pops of the fire, the sudden collapse of a burned log with a shower of embers. She observed the neat row of the stockings on the mantel, the pinpricks of lights on the Christmas tree, throwing off the illusion of order and harmony.

“So where are we going with all of this?” Pete said suddenly, surprising her with how sober he sounded. She had thought him asleep and she paused to collect her thoughts.

“Pete. It hasn’t even been a year. It’s our first Christmas without him. The very first.”

“But then will there be a second and a third? When does the black hole of James’s death begin to fill in for us?” His voice was rising with anger, but there was an anguished edge that was almost pleading.

Maura was silent, and she fought the urge to get up and walk away, just crawl under the covers, but that would be too easy. “I don’t know, Pete,” she answered carefully. “Maybe we still need more time. It all feels brand-new some days, you know?” And she began to cry again softly, and Pete made no move to comfort her.

“You don’t want to really talk, you don’t want to try to move on, you don’t want me in your bed. There’s been something off for a while. You think I didn’t see that? Even before we lost James, I was losing you.” Pete rolled over and the back of his arm hit a wrapped present, which he fiercely shoved out of the way as it skittered on the rug.

“I don’t know, Pete. I do want you. I want James back. I want that day back. I want to do it all over and change it, to make it right. And I want us to work too. I do. I want … I want … to not—” Maura stopped herself. Under the tree, in a moment of honesty, she had been about to confess, about to be swept up by some overwhelming need to confide in Pete all that had happened that day as their son had rolled off the curb. Something coldly rational swam up inside her and stifled the urge. This would do no good now. It wouldn’t bring James back, wouldn’t heal the breaks in their marriage.

“I wish,” Maura had started and then continued boldly, “I wish you would drink less.”

Pete rose, wordlessly, pulled his pants back on, belt unbuckled and flapping as he grabbed his shirt from the floor and padded upstairs without looking back. She could hear him fumbling, running water in their bathroom, and then he thudded down the hall. Maura understood then that he had gone into James’s room to sleep. The thought occurred to her that she would have to make up a story the next morning, tell Ryan something about Pete when he flung open the door to their room on Christmas day and found only one parent.

Maura waited almost thirty minutes, until she knew Pete would be asleep. She unloaded the dishwasher, set out the bowls for cereal in the morning, and grabbed their wineglasses to rinse in the sink. She paused for a moment, absentmindedly gazing out the kitchen window, past the flagstone patio and into the indigo black of the yard beyond. She had always loved this time of night, when everyone was asleep upstairs and the still of the house was hers to inhabit. Before James’s death, gliding through the rooms to plump pillows and straighten up had given her an immense satisfaction, a sense of restored order, that all was right with the world. Awake in a house of sleeping family, the view from her kitchen sink up into the vast night sky had made her feel, at times, like the captain of a ship, responsible for the cargo and the safe passage of all aboard. She felt none of that contentment now. Sighing, Maura grabbed the empty wine bottle and some of Pete’s beer cans to take out to the garage recycling bins.

Pausing on the back porch, she looked up into the vast winter sky, clustered with tinseled stars. Maura inhaled the metallic scent of arctic air into her lungs. She leaned her head back farther to locate the outline of the Big Dipper, the brighter stars forming other constellations whose names she had once known. The North Star eclipsed all the others in brilliance, and she recalled how much James had loved anything to do with astronomy.

She could not remember the tribe; perhaps it was Eskimo, or maybe the Norsemen, who believed that when someone died, their spirit flew into the sky to become a star. Maybe that was where her son was, she thought with a weak smile, a steady ball of light fixed above in the prehistoric blackness, to forever keep watch. James had loved that idea when they had read the story. He had been fascinated with the constellations for months after that, pulling her outside with his little telescope and a map of the night sky for identification.

Maura headed nimbly down the porch steps in her slippers, mindful of the patch of ice Pete kept promising to chip away, and she moved toward the side door of the garage in the frosty night, holding the neck of the empty wine bottle in one hand and cradling the beer cans. Peering down the driveway she could see her neighbors’ decorations, the strands of lights on bushes, the blow-up Frostys, steroidal candy canes, and the reindeers arranged on the snowy grass, motorized necks moving mechanically in the still, windless night. The Presslers had a crèche scene on their front lawn, the Dyalls had a giant grinning plastic Santa, lit from within. It hadn’t snowed in two weeks and the crusty top of the old snow reflected the lights like a glaze.

Maura pulled the down parka tightly around her and tried hard to reach for anything resembling the holiday spirit. But the magic moment by the tree with the kids before bed had evaporated. The failed night of intimacy was clearly a turning point for both of them, and standing now under the night sky on Christmas eve, looking up at the glittering stars, Maura felt a sudden stab of clarity, a conviction about what she needed to do. She dumped the bottle and cans in the recycling bin and headed back indoors, watching her breath huff out in little cartoon gusts.

Very early that Christmas morning, alone in their bed, Maura dreamed of James, one of those rare and haunting, intensely memorable experiences that obscures precisely where the dreamer ends and the dreamscape begins. She had been waiting for something like this to occur, wishing for her son to send her a message by dimming lights or knocking objects off shelves. She’d been hoping he would visit her in her sleep. Up to this point she assumed that the sleeping pills had mostly interfered. Yet even as she was dreaming, Maura knew that when she woke, she would remember elements of the experience for the rest of her life.

In the way that dreams take place in locations both specific and surreally distorted, she and her family were sitting in rows in a church that resembled St. Thomas the Apostle. A small white-and-gold-painted coffin sat in front of them on the altar, and Maura understood, with the internal clarity that dreams provide, that her son was not inside. Instead, she began to realize that the essence of him, his spirit, was somehow moving among and between her and Pete, Sarah and Ryan, his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Softer than a whisper, he brushed against each of their hearts and wove between their hands and interlocked arms on the velvet cushioned pew, absorbing their breath and reassuring them imperceptibly with an unuttered comfort.

Although in her dream James couldn’t speak, she knew that from the moment he had left himself in the hospital, floating briefly above his broken body, his job had been to stay close to them, a sentry watching over the ones he loved at the house, until the time was right. Maura understood that this new version of her son, ethereal and physically insubstantial, no longer fathomed what it was to be tired or heavy or bound by gravity. She could intuit, as a mother does, his growing anticipation for what would come next, a buoying sense that another warm place was waiting that would feel as good and secure to him as living with his family had felt.

In her dream, James was now entering their bedroom, although Pete was there next to her, instead of lying in James’s room as he was in real time. Swirling around his father’s sleeping form, James dove down, burrowing himself in his chest. She watched Pete’s even breathing rise and fall, and then he stilled for a moment and rolled serenely onto his back. James moved now to Sarah’s room and dipped down into her crib, tenderly caressing his sister’s face, her curls blowing back from her sleep-damp forehead as her hand rose involuntarily, and relaxed its fist. James appeared to be zooming faster now, with a greater sense of urgency, moving into Ryan’s room, and Maura was inexplicably keeping pace, she was with him, observing it all from the inside out. She watched as he circled the room’s perimeter once, past Ryan’s books and games, the discarded clothes on the floor, and moved to the bed to embrace him before retreating.

Now James was increasing his speed, swirling like a mini-cyclone toward Ryan’s front bedroom window, and all at once they were through the glass, outside by the big maple tree and up in its leafless branches. In the night air Maura had the sensation of riding bareback, fused to a winged horse, and yet there was nothing beneath her. James whorled once around the exterior of the house, the white painted boards on the outside of the garage so close that she reached out to touch them.

And then they began to pick up speed, rising swiftly over the neighborhood, now the elementary school, the grid of their small town telescoped beneath them. They soared above the dark turgid waters of Lake Michigan, arcing over shores, lighthouses, and islands, and then swooped across the Great Plains with their checkerboard farmlands and circular irrigation systems. Beneath them in the dark, small towns with single intersections glowed like a hundred lit crosses. Now she could make out the Upper Peninsula above the mitten of Michigan, the shrinking comma shapes of the Great Lakes, and then she saw the whole continent, embedded in the ancient sapphire blue of the ocean. She and James flew past clouds luffing in the shapes of animals and physical things for which he no longer needed to remember the words. He continued up past stiff air currents and colliding weather patterns and up, up, up … and then all at once Maura’s forward movement dissolved as a golden warmth infused her veins, a glow, and there was a sudden sensation of uncoupling, like the second firing of a rocket ship in space. She observed James continuing above her as one watches a meteor, with a consuming sense of wonder.

The force that was her son soared now at even greater speeds. Unencumbered by weight he accelerated beyond the planets’ rotation, burning like a comet, compressed and focused into one tight pure glowing mass. And in Maura’s dream, as her son broke through the byzantine darkness to join the universal light of a trillion twinkling stars, all that had once been James expanded and then burst into a million particles of explosive, refractive love.

With Thanksgiving and Christmas behind them, Maura felt the blues set in doubly hard this year. She had always hated January, that long stretch of a month with no festive holidays and nothing but gray, ice, and the deep suck of cold. She had rejoined her Tuesday tennis group and was playing in the bubble two towns away with her old gang. And twice, she and Pete had been out to dinner without the kids. Maura considered that a form of progress.

Yet still, Art danced through her thoughts. It had been almost eight months now, and unanswered questions percolated in the backdrop of her mind. She was becoming less effective at pushing them away. That relationship, which she had tried to will into mental storage, lingered as unfinished and undone. It was hard to fully put herself back into repairing her marriage with Pete until she had filled in those blanks.

Maura lifted the phone off its base in the kitchen and walked into the living room, sitting on the couch. Anxiety and excitement zipped around like bees in her diaphragm, and she took a deep breath to calm herself. She let her head fall back on the couch and studied the room for a moment, the soft mint green walls and geometric fabric of the armchairs. Above the TV was an oil painting she and Pete had purchased at a local art show on the Navy Pier when they were first married. It was a view of Lake Michigan with the skyline of the city behind it. The giant Ferris wheel on the pier and the buildings were shaded in dusky violets and grays in the gloaming light that immediately chased sunset. How ironic that a painting purchased in her first year of marriage to Pete would be from the vantage point of a beach, similar to the one she had frequented with Art. Maura sighed and before she could reconsider, she furtively punched in the number she knew by heart. After four rings, he picked up.

“Hi, Art? It’s Maura,” she said cheerily.

“Maura? Hey. Wow. Maura.” Art had drawn her name out softly the second time in a long vowel sound, as if working to reassemble his composure. She had surprised him.

“In the flesh,” she had answered.

“Wow. I don’t think I expected this … I … ahhh … I left you those messages and … when I didn’t hear back …” His voice trailed off.

In those quick seconds, Maura tried desperately to determine what she detected in his words. She strained to process the nuance of his tone, his level of excitement. It was more difficult without the ability to study his face.

“I just wanted to … say hi,” Maura began unsteadily. “I know I’ve been awful. It’s … um … been hard. But I think of you, have thought of you so much. After everything that happened, all of it, and trying to not think about you … I can’t. Couldn’t. I’m calling because I need to see you, I guess. Maybe we could have lunch … if you want.” The words had all came out in one jumbled but stilted rush. And despite everything Maura had rehearsed and polished in her daydreams, it sounded awkward, childish, and pleading.