Those We Love Most (5 page)

As the final hymn swelled on the organ, Maura followed the cranberry-colored runner toward the back of the church in slow motion. Darting her eyes on both sides of pews, she spotted the Hulburds. Maura was relieved to see that their son, Alex, was not with them. She momentarily caught the mother’s gaze, and the woman abruptly looked down, flustered. Maura lifted her jaw, almost defiantly, directing her eyes back to her footfalls on the swirling textured carpet in front of her.

As she stood at the back of the church in the receiving line, Maura had to keep a hand on Pete’s arm to steady herself. She felt as if her legs were about to buckle, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten. The almost pleasant detached feeling was dissipating, giving way to a gnawing anxiety. The combination of an empty stomach and the pills hit her suddenly, and she swayed for a moment, righting herself. Her feet hurt in the black heels. A few more minutes, though, and then she’d be outside the church in the fresh air, away from the pervasive and overpowering scent of white lilies.

“Can you hold Sarah?” Margaret asked, placing their granddaughter in Roger’s lap. He nodded and began tickling her. “I’m going to heat up some soup and try to get Maura to eat something.” Roger sighed. So much of the past week since the funeral had been spent indoors, staring at the four walls of Maura and Pete’s home or trying to distract the grandchildren in their own house.

“Hello, beautiful.” Roger bounced Sarah on his knee, and she let out a scream of delight.

“I’m glad Pete went back to the office,” said Margaret. “Both of them moping around here was so hard to watch.”

“I can’t imagine he’ll be able to concentrate.”

“Everyone just needs a place to go,” said Margaret. “People need to try to get back to a routine after something awful happens.”

“I think I’m going to head back into the office this week as well.”

Margaret nodded, as if she’d been waiting for this announcement. Roger avoided her eyes and began bouncing Sarah again, to her delight. “There’s not much for me to do here, and the Crown deal has become a real mess. Too many cooks.”

“Oh?” said Margaret, feigning interest. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and began blowing on it before slurping loudly. “Hot, hot, oh, Lord, I just burned my tongue.” She abruptly turned off the flame under the pan and breathed in deeply.

Roger quickly poured a glass of water and offered it to her, but Margaret waved him away as if he were an annoyance. His inability to take any discernable or effective action left him feeling helpless in the Corrigan home. Roger could only bear witness as Maura’s stoic resolve gradually began to crumple with each successive visit, like time-lapse photography. The bonfire of hope that had kept her spine straight and her adrenal glands pumping for that week in the hospital had been cruelly extinguished. In the lengthy stretches he sat, ate, or watched TV with his grandchildren, Maura looked more and more like a wax version of herself, her body limp, her eyes hollow and empty.

Roger took in his daughter’s kitchen, the warm cherry cabinets and gleaming polished stone counters on the eating island, now under his wife’s command. Soft lights below the cabinets gave the illusion of coziness, and he could see that Margaret had organized and cleaned every surface. Even the chrome appliances sparkled.

Out past the flagstone patio with the boxwood hedges, weeds sprouted in beds and in the potted geraniums. Roger thought momentarily about helping with the gardening and then dismissed the thought. Margaret always jokingly accused him of not knowing a weed from a flowering perennial; he’d better not disturb the wrong things out there. For the time being, he would have to grow accustomed to his ineffectiveness in his daughter’s household.

Suddenly Roger remembered a colleague, a man he hadn’t thought of in ages. Ed Schultz. He’d worked with Roger some fifteen years ago. They’d been on a prospective sales call with a burgeoning developer in Denver and had ended up at the bar together after dinner. Ed had been steadily downing one bourbon after the other, and as he’d moved from tipsy to drunk, he’d weepily confided in Roger that his high school–aged daughter had been raped at a rock concert in downtown Chicago. There was alcohol involved and some rowdy boys, strangers who she had ended up with in the parking lot when she’d gotten separated from her friends.

As the father of two daughters, he found it impossible not to picture every parent’s worst nightmare. The images of the drunken boys holding her down in the back of the car and taking turns had played out in his head. They had been laughing as they raped her, Ed had told him, laughing, slapping one another and making noises like rodeo cowboys. And at that point in the story Ed had begun to sob, erupting over the highly varnished wood bar in the hotel with a strangled, choking sound, almost inhuman, as he struggled to regain control.

He’d felt helpless, Ed told Roger. He’d been filled with a black fury, and yet he was impotent. He raged, but his rage had no outlet. He wanted to hurt someone, to punch something, to inflict physical damage. The boys had never been identified, but he told Roger that if he ever found them, he dreamed of what he would do to them. Each night, he told Roger, he imagined something different, some new, slow way to torture them, to make them physically pay.

“The hardest part,” Ed told Roger, “was that I didn’t protect my little girl. I failed her. And I’m her father.” Ed had drained his glass and wiped the snot running from his nose with his sleeve as he moved unsteadily off the stool, his eyes tight and glassy. Roger helped him to his room that night, opening the door with the key and making sure he made it inside. The next morning, in the taxi to the airport, neither one of them acknowledged the previous evening’s raw confession. Ed sat woodenly in the cab, regretting, Roger was sure, that he had spilled such intimate details to a coworker. Within a year, the Schultz family had moved away from Chicago.

Roger remembered that comingled with the feelings of sadness and outrage on Ed’s behalf that night, he’d had a feeling of relief, of feeling slightly sanctimonious and even superior regarding his own good fortune.
Wasn’t that something
, Roger thought, practically snorting in disgust. He’d felt superior all those years ago that he had been able to protect his girls. And now look at them. Life was a numbers game, a craps table. Apparently, it was his family’s turn to slam head-on into tragedy.

As Roger continued to watch his wife flit around the kitchen with purpose, he realized his feelings of helplessness were exacerbated in direct proportion to her extreme competency with their children in the face of crisis. She was a cyclone of ceaseless activity, the centrifugal force that spoked out to sustain and nurture them all.

Roger was appreciative, even envious of the rote activities women engaged in that moved the family forward: washing dishes, folding clothes, stocking the fridge, and supervising all of the many containers of food that had been dropped off. The organization and sense of purpose required for these mundane activities eluded him. Yet those strengths, Margaret’s capability and industriousness, were the very characteristics that had drawn him to her, he mused, sitting in the Corrigans’ kitchen, holding Sarah and watching his wife ladle the steaming soup into a bowl.

His daughter’s home was now a place of both stagnation and industry; of meals, laundry, and cleaning amid the reflective tide pools of pure grief. This was the kind of stage on which Margaret shone. She could turn her elbow grease on any problem and buff it up. Margaret’s ability to “do” was a manifestation of grieving, a way of putting what had happened aside, of moving only ahead. Inertia, Roger knew firsthand, created a portal for the horrible thoughts and feelings to seep in.

“Can you take Sarah up for me so I can change her?” Margaret asked as she placed the soup bowl on a plastic floral tray.

Roger put Sarah up on his shoulders, which caused more giggling, and then he ducked slightly at the bottom of the stairs, following his wife to the second floor as Sarah reached out to touch the striped wallpaper on the landing. Margaret delivered soup to Maura, lying listlessly in bed in her darkened room, while he veered into Sarah’s room. The cramped spaced smelled vaguely of baby powder, and a cache of stuffed animals was piled next to a wooden dollhouse in the corner. Margaret entered a few minutes later and lifted Sarah from his lap onto the changing table, then efficiently applied the cream and powder from the shelves while steadying his granddaughter with her other hand.
Have I ever done that?
Roger thought. Had he diapered his own children? He couldn’t recall.

“You’ve still got it, Mother,” Roger said, forcing a smile, and Margaret swiveled to meet his eyes, modestly pleased. She turned her attention back to Sarah.

“Oh, I did plenty of this in my day, didn’t I, sweet princess?” Margaret was cooing at Sarah now, who was delighted with the attention from her grandmother and clapped her hands together with a squeal. “You’re almost too big for these now, aren’t you? Almost ready to give up your diapers at night and nap, hmmm?” Margaret lifted her granddaughter off the table and lowered her in the crib. “Do you want bunny with you?” Sarah nodded, her baby-fine sandy curls bobbing, and reached up to grab her favorite stuffed animal, flopping down on the mattress and popping her thumb into her mouth. She poked one chubby hand through the slats to sleepily wave good-bye.

“I just love babies’ wrists,” said Margaret. “I love the way there is a little fold right here where the arm meets the hand, and dimples by the knuckles and then … all that fat just goes away at some point.” Her cadence slowed as they moved to exit Sarah’s room.

They looked at each other for a second, each individually thinking about James, how he had been on the cusp of leaving boyhood at nine. “Double digits” he’d called his upcoming birthday. He had already been planning how he would celebrate.

Being in his granddaughter’s small room, a large closet really, reminded Roger of the time right before Sarah was born. He had arrived unannounced at the Corrigan house one night on the way home from work and come across his very pregnant daughter stripping wallpaper and humming in a pair of ripped sweatpants. This third baby had been unexpected, a “what-a-surprise” baby, as Maura had called her. And yet, after they’d made the initial mental adjustment to becoming a family of five, Maura had embraced the idea of one more, especially when the sonogram revealed it was a girl.

“So, are you going to paint the walls a hot pink?” he had chided her.

“Maybe, Dad.” She laughed, and then grew pensive. “It’s funny, I always thought I’d just have boys.”

“Aren’t you glad James and Ryan will have a sister, like you do?” Roger had asked her.

“Of course. I can’t wait to have a daughter. But I think boys are less complex. It’s all right there on the surface. What you see is pretty much what you get. Then again, I get to paint a room pink.” And she had smiled at him and patted her swollen belly with all the bright confidence of someone who was in the prime of giving life.

Roger reached out now and laid his palm against the blush-colored walls. He closed his eyes and ran his hand against the smooth plaster, ambushed for the moment by the past as tears welled up. Life back then, when the room was covered in wallpaper, had scrolled out before all of them with promise. James had been alive, and his eldest daughter, the one most like him, had been whole.

His cell phone rang in his shirt pocket. As Roger reached to pull it out, a slightly sour expression roiled over Margaret’s face, and Sarah’s head bolted up from the crib. They stepped into the hallway, and Margaret clicked the door shut. Roger studied the number. Julia. He’d spoken to her briefly a few times since the accident, assuring her he was OK. He had described how they were all consumed with the loss, the funeral arrangements, and taking care of his daughter’s family. She had been understanding. But her contact had ratcheted up lately. She wanted more from him, wanted to see him, and to know when he would be in Florida next. He let out his breath slowly and let the call go into voice mail.

“Work again,” he explained lamely and chided himself for using such a booming tone. “I’m going to have to get back to Tampa for the refinancing of that mall soon. The deal is dragging out forever.”

“You’d think there would be other partners at a firm your size to help pick up the slack,” said Margaret disapprovingly. “Younger partners who could fill in on some of these meetings and report back.” They were padding down the hall toward the stairs, speaking in hushed tones. It was so still and quiet now, with Ryan at summer day camp, as if the entire house had been unplugged from its energy source, enervated.

“You know how clients are,” whispered Roger. “People like to see the principals show their faces. This whole real estate deal should close in a few months, and then we can begin to draw up plans for the expansion and get some bids. Everyone just wants to feel important. Human nature.” His phone beeped to let him know a message had been delivered to his voice mail. He blushed for a moment, surprising himself, and shot Margaret a veiled look. She was adjusting her permed hair with her fingers in the hall mirror, slightly sucking in her cheeks and gazing into the backyard from the second-floor landing. Out beyond the shade of the branches the grass looked slightly parched by the sun’s glare, and Roger made a mental note to locate a sprinkler in the garage.

“I think I’ll go back to the house and tackle some paperwork,” he muttered to Margaret downstairs. “Should I look in on Maura?”

“Let’s let her rest now. When I brought the soup in she was trying to sleep.” She set a laundry basket on the mudroom floor and began straightening the family’s shoes, tossing each pair into the assigned milk crates in a system Maura had installed after Ryan began walking.