Those We Love Most (6 page)

“Roger?” Margaret suddenly cried out in a wounded pitch. She had stopped moving, poised in a bent position, and he noticed she was holding a small black Merrell shoe.

“Roger …” Margaret’s voice cracked, as she stooped over the crate, holding the shoe. James’s shoe. “What … what will we do with his milk crate?”

“I don’t know …,” said Roger. He hadn’t yet thought about the “things,” all of the physical reminders of James, his possessions. On some level, he imagined that James would simply appear back in the house one day, as if some kind of magic was at work, or as if he had merely been at sleepaway camp.

“We can deal with that later, I imagine,” Margaret said softly, but her voice was strong, and her face wore an expression of resigned determination. “We can’t do this now.” She tossed the shoe and its mate into the crate with James’s flip-flops and baseball cleats and a good-as-new pair of winter boots.

“So, I’ll go, then,” Roger said again, leaning in the doorjamb of the mudroom now, suddenly desperate to get outside.

“OK,” called Margaret, her back to him, bent at her task.

Roger hesitated for just a second and then turned toward the back screen door. He thought again of Maura. Hopefully she was napping, but more likely she was awake, sitting in the rocking chair, the same one in which she had nursed and comforted all three of her children. He had come upon her rocking yesterday, her body erect and perfectly still, only her feet gliding the rocker back and forth. Sarah was asleep on her chest, legs splayed out. She seemed to have Sarah in her arms all the time now, touching her, singing with her, drawing comfort from her physical nearness. “I want to freeze you, right here at this age,” he had heard his daughter mumble to the child, and he had backed away, the plush hall carpeting absorbing his footfalls.

Outside Maura’s house Roger let out a huge breath and climbed into the convertible. At the first stop sign, he steered the car off Maura’s street, canopied by elms, and onto the wider avenue that eventually snaked along Lake Michigan. As he accelerated, the suburban Chicago houses in their North Shore town flicked by, growing larger as he headed east toward the water; white wooden columned structures, curving turn-of-the-century shingled edifices, and brick Georgian homes represented an earlier time of industrial affluence in the history of the North Shore. Here and there a flagpole accented a scallion green lawn, and planters bursting with boldly hued annuals graced porches and entryways. The residences became more expansive as he got closer to the water, the landscaping and flowers more magnificent. He loved summertime in Chicago, the large, evenly spaced oaks lining so many streets in their town, the way the merchants on the main street of Greenhaven all sported lush hanging baskets overflowing with orange-red geraniums, ferns, and purple petunias. The bright promise of the season and the cloudless indigo sky were in such stark contrast to everything his family was experiencing now.

The theme from
Mission: Impossible
began to play on his phone, something James had rigged on a lark only three weekends ago. He didn’t have the expertise to deal with the technical functions of cell phones, but James had been a whiz at anything electronic. When his secretary had called, Roger realized that somehow James had programmed his phone with this silly personal ringtone, so incongruous with the seriousness of his office. James had gotten such glee out of the fact that Roger could never fix it. And so it had rung like that since, each call from his office now a painful reminder of his eldest grandson. His secretary had been holding calls and canceling meetings since the accident. The team at his commercial real estate firm had been working on pitching a big deal out of the San Francisco office, and things were now simmering in Dallas. Work would give him a purpose, something to focus on, maybe even a sense of measureable accomplishment.

“Roger Munson.”

“Roger, it’s Cristina.”

“How are you? How is everyone at the office?”

“We’re well, and all wondering how you are, and the family of course. I hope that Maura got the food basket we sent? The one with the ham?”

“Yes, thank you, that was very thoughtful,” he said, although he had no recollection of such a basket. There had been so much food brought to the house, it was impossible to keep track of it all, though he had no doubt Margaret had already devised an efficient system for sending out thank-yous on her very best stationery. They’d actually had to throw a number of things out. Margaret had gone on about that, with a frustrated resolve. It always bothered her to waste food.

“We made a nice meal out of it,” he added unnecessarily. “Very thoughtful.”

“Well, I was just checking,” Cristina said. “Checking to see if you needed anything. I saw your e-mail about Tampa and wanting to go down there in two weeks. Do you have a date in mind?”

“Let me check the calendar and get back to you. And, Cristina, I’m coming into the office tomorrow,” Roger said, almost too abruptly.

“Oh. OK.”

“There isn’t much I can do here,” Roger offered. “Maura … we … well, I guess time will just have to work its magic.”

“I’m sure—” his secretary’s voice began, and then a call-waiting interruption clicked, cutting off the end of her sentence. Roger removed the phone from his ear and glanced at the number. It was Julia, calling again from Florida.

“Do you need to get that?” asked Cristina.

“I’ll call them back,” he said abruptly.

Before James’s accident, a call from Julia would have hastened him off the other line. He would have felt that slight lift, something hopeful at the sight of her number, and he would have ended his conversation hurriedly in order not to miss her. Now, as he drove past the corner diner in the heart of his town, the sight of her number filled him with competing emotions. It was hard to tease out the strands. It wasn’t a dread, but her call carried a new weight of responsibility and complicity, as if she were somehow tied to what had happened to James.

Roger sighed and apologized to Cristina, asking her to repeat her question, the interruption of the call-waiting mercifully allowing him to change the topic back to some trivial issue, phone messages and an upcoming client meeting. For the second time that day, feeling vaguely guilty and unsettled, he let Julia’s call go into voice mail.

Maura had always taken a secret pride that as a homemaker she hadn’t resorted to those salads that came in a bag with the packet of dressing and the separately wrapped croutons. A month after the funeral, as she rummaged through the fridge, gathering ingredients to make dinner, she wondered why she hadn’t saved herself the trouble all of those years. Why hadn’t she done more takeout? Now she was staring into the refrigerator overflowing with casseroles and unfamiliar Tupperware. Her church, friends, the women in the PTA, had organized a schedule of dinners and grocery shopping and even rides to sports practices for Ryan, which made her feel immensely grateful. But this also highlighted her inability to perform these simple functions for her family. Tonight she was determined. It wouldn’t be elaborate, but after weeks of reheating one of the unidentifiable dishes left by neighbors, Maura had decided it was time to cook a real meal for her family. They needed to all sit down together and reach for some semblance of normal. She would even try to get down a few bites herself, though her appetite had largely deserted her weeks ago. She thought of the stubborn ten pounds she had finally managed to lose. The jeans she was wearing now hung loosely on her hips, despite the belt she had dug out of the closet. The grief diet, her sister had called it.

Yet at odd times she would find herself ravenous, like an animal, and in those moments she’d eat an entire sleeve of Oreos or gobble up the remains of the kids’ Day-Glo orange mac and cheese, right out of the saucepan. Last night she polished off a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs, almost as if she were in a trance, savoring each spoonful for the immediate gratification it provided and then feeling disgusted, and yet still empty, when it was consumed.

Her mother had been at her house almost every day, unloading the dishwasher, walking Rascal, folding laundry, and urging Maura to rest. In the first week after the funeral, when Ryan’s summer camp had begun, she would hand Sarah over to Margaret and crawl back under the covers, to feel the weight of grief and guilt in shifting ratios.

Maura had been a morning exerciser, but now she could barely find the energy for a shower. Stopping for a loaf of bread or grabbing a roll of stamps had all fit seamlessly into her days before James’s death. These trivial tasks outside of the house now overwhelmed her. It all seemed insurmountable, devoid of any importance. Her light blue eyes, always her favorite feature, were lifeless. She hadn’t shaved her legs or plucked her brows since before the accident. She looked like that Muppet, which one had the unibrow? Bert? And there were new frown lines on her face, furrows between her brows that hadn’t been so pronounced before. Grief had etched them there, she thought. Grief had disfigured and disemboweled her.

For all of her listlessness, though, Maura was rarely able to drift off during the day. She would lie in bed, willing herself to quiet her mind and sleep, rolling back and forth on the mattress as her trapped thoughts swirled like bats in a cave. She couldn’t stop thinking of James. Sometimes images of him rushed into her mind at once, like a pixilated sensory overload. And then at other times she would panic when she was suddenly unable to recall the exact features of his face.

Maura moved toward the refrigerator door and fixed her eyes on the black-and-white photo of her son held in place by a magnet. She studied his wide, boyish smile, the splay of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and thought for the hundredth time how grateful she was that they had splurged for their first professional family photo shoot last November. The photographer had managed to capture the personalities of each child, including this one of James. How could anyone have known that some six months later, her favorite snapshot of her eldest child would be enlarged for his funeral?

She glanced at the photo of Sarah and Pete, laughing, from that same day, her daughter’s head tossed back and giggling as her father tickled her. Pete. She sighed. Thinking about Pete was so complicated, laced with many competing emotions—guilt, anger, and anxiety. Their marriage, which had not been in a terrific place before the accident, was strained now, filled with long silences. While there was an affable varnish over the top of their parental duties, so much was left unsaid in the corridors between them. When they did talk, it seemed to be more about schedules and the children’s needs and other perfunctory subjects.

Things had been operating on this half-speed for a while, Maura acknowledged, each of them heading down that easy slipstream in marriage where the valuable, intimate parts begin to erode in a tidal wave of banality. Maura had no doubt that she still loved her husband, but she no longer felt
in
love. How much was enough love? Funny how chemical attraction waned, how the things that made you fall in love with a person changed and the things required to stay in love were so different, deeper.

And then there was Pete’s drinking. Pete had always been a drinker, but in the past, his boozy excess had mostly been contained to his weekly boys’ nights out, although over the years this had become increasingly annoying to her. In college Maura had gravitated toward Pete’s frat-boy, life-of-the-party personality. He had been so like her gregarious father in some ways, always ready to dazzle with a good story or make a self-deprecating remark followed by a perfectly timed punch line. She’d loved the raucousness of him, the spontaneous entertainer side, which was such a nice yin to her quieter yang. After James was born she had tried to lodge a firm protest, expressing her desire for more family time, more attention from him, and she’d even suggested they see a counselor, but Pete had bristled at that. Especially after the birth of Sarah, his simplicity, formulaic life, and unchanged adolescent drinking rituals seemed merely juvenile. Each time she had registered her need for him to change, she’d largely been met with a joking resistance or occasional lip service.

And in the years that followed, Maura had mostly held her tongue about the drinking and gradually about other things as well until she had submerged whole parts of herself from him. She and Pete had lost that easy access to each other’s deeper thoughts and emotions. Part of her wondered if he had even noticed the growing gulf between them. Now in the wake of their son’s death the pace of his drinking seemed to have lurched stealthily forward—a few fingers of vodka refilled at home, the beer bottles piling up in the recycling bin, the sound of a toppled stool as he entered the dark kitchen after his now more frequent evenings out.

It felt as if she and Pete had exhausted all there was to say during the weeklong period that they’d hovered over their son’s hospital bed, taking turns holding his hands and talking to him. In those brief hours they were united by the logistics of fear and grief, alternately bucking the other one up, getting the cafeteria coffee, and quelling each other’s tears with hopeful platitudes.

Maura thought again about Pete’s spontaneous accusation at the hospital. Though he had never said anything more about it, had never raised those questions again in her presence, the guilt hung around her like a shroud.

She knew couples could and did survive losses on all scales, but could theirs? Could it continue when one person was holding back, harboring a secret? She pushed that thought away. She had no interest in rehashing that past or conversely in thinking that far ahead. It took all of her concentration just to stay here in the present. James’s death was so recent, so fresh, right now it was an enormous effort to plant both feet on the floor each morning and haul her reluctant body out of bed. She couldn’t begin to examine the fault lines in her marriage now.