Those We Love Most (34 page)

“I feel like I’m on top of the world,” said Erin, raising her glass for a toast. “Happy birthday, Mom.”

“Happy birthday,” they all echoed, and Margaret beamed, dipping her head modestly in acknowledgment.

“Next time you all need to come to Milwaukee for brats and beer,” joked Jen, with a sweeping gesture around her and out at the lake. “This is a little bit fancier than where I usually go with my girlfriends for birthday lunches,” and they had all laughed. Talk turned to the kids and summer vacation plans and then the waitress interrupted with the appetizers, refilling wineglasses all around.

“Dad seems better,” Maura offered tentatively, digging into a seafood salad. “Don’t you think, Mom?”

“I do. I really do think so,” Margaret answered somewhat tentatively. “It’s slow but gradual. You can probably track it better than me. I see him every day.” She wiped a smear of tartar sauce off her lips with her cloth napkin and then took a sip of her chardonnay. Grasping the long graceful stem of the wineglass made her feel elegant. Margaret thought to herself how much Roger would enjoy this restaurant, how little they had socialized since he had been home.

“What do his therapists say?” asked Erin. “About how he is doing?”

“Well. Just that, pretty much,” said Margaret. “They tell you that it’s slow but that progress is being made. The brain has the ability to rewire itself and find new routes for the parts that were damaged by the stroke.”

“He was walking pretty well without the cane when I was over the other day,” said Maura.

“Oh, I’m very proud of your father. There’s no doubt he’s coming along. But he’s much more sure of himself inside the house than outside.” She cut the crab cake with the tines of her fork, her expression guarded.

“How is his state of mind?” asked Erin. “How’s his mood?”

“Well, it’s all gradually improving, I guess. There was a while there I was a little worried about his spirits,” said Margaret with a forced lilt in her voice that belied her true emotion. She was aware of how important it was to be positive for the sake of her daughters. They were grown women, and yet she wondered if her instinct would forever be to protect them, to soften truths.

“What about his job?” asked Jen. Her skin was almost translucent, and she kept her chestnut hair short, almost boyish. Jen rarely wore makeup and favored large chunky jewelry.

“Well, you know they’ve given him a six-month leave. That happened instantly. And actually many of the partners have been over to visit since we’ve been back from Florida. But you know, your father had begun to talk about retirement before the stroke. He had been saying this deal in Tampa might be his last big one.”

“Really?” said Maura, arching her brows in surprise. “I thought Dad never wanted to retire. Wasn’t he the one always going on about how they would have to drag him out of there kicking and screaming?”

“Well, people’s perspectives change,” Margaret said demurely. “There are lots of other things your father wants to do in life.” She reached for a pumpernickel roll in the basket at the center of the table and then passed it to Jen.

They all nodded politely, each of them intrinsically understanding that Roger would likely never return to work, never be able to assume the career he’d held before. Margaret only hoped he would be capable of swinging a golf club and hitting the ball again. Without that, she knew, his life would be even more circumscribed.

Maura had anticipated the arrival of this day with dread. The one-year anniversary of James’s death. Pete had no interest in creating some formality or ceremony that would highlight the loss to Sarah and Ryan all over again. In the end they had chosen to mark the day quietly and in their separate ways. She would visit the gravesite. But Pete hated the cemetery and had been there only twice in the year since James had died. He had told her he planned to go to early Mass at the church near his office and light a candle before work. They would have a family dinner at home, maybe share their memories of James and open some photo albums. One year. It was a minute and it was a vast chasm. Maura could still mostly conjure up her son’s voice in her head. She could imagine his hug. But other things were fading, and that made her panicky. She had walked into his room this morning before anyone else was up and stood, still as stone, as if calling up a spell to bring him back.

After she dropped Ryan off at school, Maura took Sarah to the classroom and headed straight to the cemetery. At the entrance, wilting horse chestnut blossoms swirled up from the black asphalt like flakes of snow as the car passed. Inside the grounds, the shoots and buds flexed their June muscles in verdant greens, and the whorling pattern of recently cut grass swirled between the headstones.

When she opened the car door, Rascal jumped out immediately before she could leash him. His foot had only a slight drag now when he was tired, traces of his former disc issue. He stayed fairly close off the leash, sniffing at the clumps of wild onion that had pushed up near the hedges and borders of the grounds. Maura had no idea if dogs were allowed, but Rascal had just as much right as anyone else to be here at the cemetery today. When she reached James’s plot, she placed the small bouquet of backyard lilacs to the side of the stone and dropped to her knees, murmuring a prayer. Rascal sidled up quietly and nosed her hand, as if looking for a treat.

Closing her eyes, Maura could see the sunlight through her lids, and she concentrated with all of her focus on talking to James, to God, to anyone up there who might be listening in this hushed expanse on the fringe of summer. Her visits here had decreased in the last few months. Early on it was as if she’d been drawn to this plot, tugged by an elemental need. But in the past six months she had come less frequently.

She cried less easily than she had a year ago. All of the emotion was still present, still palpable, but it had tunneled down deeper inside her to find its own quieter place to reside. That was progress, she thought wryly. She could tap into the pain instantly, but it didn’t reside on the surface as much, didn’t linger in every pore and follicle.

Maura’s thoughts settled briefly on her parents, the extreme stress and heartache they had been through. But her father’s stroke and subsequent health struggles were at least a part of the natural order of the universe. She had always assumed that her parents’ deaths would be the first difficult milestone of loss in her life. It was so out of sequence to bury a child. Maura knew she would never really come to terms with that.

Of her two parents, Maura had always been closest to her father. As a teenager she had regularly sought his advice and even selectively confided in him about boyfriends and broken hearts. When she had tried her first cigarette and later, in college, smoked her first joint, Maura had ultimately felt compelled to tell him, despite her fear of his judgment. She couldn’t articulate why. But he had only nodded, listening. When she had finished recounting her experiences or pouring out her heart, Roger would say, “Some things in life you have to find out firsthand. Just as long as you stay true to yourself. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you what you have to do. You know in here.” And he would always thump his heart with his fist.

Her father had been a rudder, especially after James’s death. To see his life force bifurcated, his speech slurred and his movements still jerky, pained her. Her mother was the lodestar, ceaselessly moving forward, caring for her, caring for them all. Maura understood that her sense of duty and devotion was perhaps the greatest form of love.

She recalled the afternoon at her father’s bedside, two days after his stroke. He had still been comatose, but the tubes and the monitors, the abject familiarity of her time in the hospital with James, had put her in a kind of anxious dream state, as if she were stepping out of her own body. It was as if her father, lying completely still, eyes closed, were an older effigy of James.

Up to this point, neither she nor her siblings had spent any time thinking about the inevitable period in midlife when the roles of children and parent begin to slowly reverse. That aspect of the future, which had seemed light-years ahead, had suddenly jumped out and spooked them all. In such a short span, she, Erin, and Stu had gone from nurtured to protectors, from children to advocates. Maura understood now with clarity that was how life worked; the fulcrum of responsibility ultimately tipped.

She wondered, the way anyone who has ever swallowed loss wonders, if she would again experience pure joy, or if those unadulterated moments of happiness that were so abundant in her younger years would now always carry an echo of sadness and nostalgia. And yet she marveled how with time the absolutely unbearable had slithered into shock and then mellowed in to a commingling of sorrow and even poignancy. They had all been crawling forward somehow.

Incongruously, the bezeled edge of a whitewashed ghost moon was set in the daytime sky like a hologram. Maura studied it for a few minutes and then closed her eyes, ending her visit to the cemetery as she always did, head bowed, lips mouthing the Lord’s Prayer. She added the Apostle’s Creed for her parents and conjured up an image of Roger, before the stroke, robust and full of life.

Maura reached her palm out to steady herself against the cool granite of the gravestone before rising to go. The early summer leaves were just shy of their peak. Spring had taken so long to arrive, and she thought about what she had been doing at this exact time last year. This had been the turning point, the day that marked her before and after. One moment she had been walking along a sidewalk, with three beautiful children, and two healthy parents, giddy with the flush of lust. All the Corrigans had been whole, complete. And the next moment everything had crumbled, in an instant.

A whole year. Maura kissed her fingertips and reached to touch his headstone one last time. They’d marked progress in this past year, all of them. There was laughter in the house again, a sense of family reorganized, reconfigured. And she and Pete were making strides too, she thought warmly. They’d need to keep working the rough parts, but their shared history and longevity had counted for something. There were so many different kinds of love, she thought, so many mutations.

Headed back toward the car, through a set of iron gates, Rascal followed dutifully behind her, and Maura pulled out the short grocery list in her pocket and studied it, stuffing it away again. Perhaps she would shop later on with Sarah in tow. This time alone right now on such a sacred day would be spent on her terms.

She had a feeling, as she always did when she pulled out of the cemetery and merged with traffic on the double-lane road, of leaving something important behind. It was an incompletion, the sense of missing a piece of her, of leaving a place that comforted you and broke your heart all at once.

Maura drove by the supermarket and through the center of town and then, on the spur of the moment, emboldened by the significance of the day, she turned down Hawthorne Street, headed toward the very spot where James had been hit. Over the past year she had done everything possible to avoid the spring-loaded memories on this stretch of the neighborhood, but on the one-year anniversary of his death, it seemed important to face down this last demon.

There was nothing remarkable about the spot, nothing to distinguish exactly where it had happened, although of course she remembered. And now here she was, in front of the Carlinos’ house, where everything terrible had unfolded in a split second. Maura slowed and drew in her breath. She pulled the car to the curb and turned off the engine, closing her eyes to let the memories of that day come. She had pushed the exact sequence of events out of her mind for so long and built a berm around the truth. In the wake of all the horrible things that had transpired, she had almost convinced herself of a different and more benign version of what had really happened.

It had all begun with a picnic. Art had packed the lunch, buying prepared foods from a specialty market near his apartment, and he’d iced a few beers in a small plastic cooler. As Maura began her drive to the beach to meet him, she could taste the elation that accompanies sharp anticipation and the desire to savor it.

Maura could picture exactly what she had been wearing that day. She had chosen it carefully, a floral sundress and a white cotton cardigan to buffer the winds from the lake. The sun was warm, and they had spread a blanket on the edges of the beach right before the grass ledge precipice hit rocks. She was aware that Art could see the outlines of her body through the thin material of her dress as she lay back. She’d allowed herself two beers, more than she ever had during the day, and she could picture the way the breeze played with the hem of her skirt and the cowlick of hair at the top of Art’s forehead, fanning it up endearingly like a fringe. They lay together talking, their bodies inching closer as the sun peaked in the sky.

The warmth and the beers had loosened them, and all at once, laughing at something he’d said, she’d curled into his body in a familiar way. And then when Art bent his head and kissed her, fully on the lips, she had momentarily panicked that someone might spy them. But the beach was largely deserted; the spot they had picked was far from the parking area.

Reliving it now, she recalled how her insides turned over and jellied with his kiss. And although they had been leading up to this for months, had danced around serious physical intimacy, she remembered her sense of surprise as he had pulled her tightly to his chest, the appley sour taste of fermentation on his breath from the beer, which called to mind kissing boys in high school. There was no stab of guilt, no moment of hesitation, Maura remembered, because she deserved this. It was possible to be here as long as she didn’t think about what it stood for. This type of happiness was a part of her that could live independently from her family, in a chamber she had built for herself. In this way she would remain Maura, regardless of the many roles she played for everyone else.