Accidents of Marriage (30 page)

What the fuck?

The Camry’s back end stuck out of a gaping hole in the garage door. He turned off his car and got out.

“Maddy,” he called as he opened the front door. “Emma? Kids? Where is everyone?” He walked down the hall, looking for signs of life, hearing scuffling. He walked through the alcove to the kitchen and found the three kids trying to clean up an unholy mess. Gracie knelt on a chair, washing a huge pot.

“What in God’s name is going on?” he asked.

They avoided looking at him. Caleb raised white puffs of dust as he swept debris into the middle of the room. Emma worked on grease smears covering the table.

“Where’s your mother? Is she okay?
Look at me,
” he yelled when they didn’t answer. “Where’s Aunt Vanessa? What happened to the car?”

Even Caleb remained quiet, leaning on the broom until the bristles bent at a ninety-degree angle. Emma squeezed the sponge until Ben thought it would disintegrate in her hands.

“Gracie, what happened?” Ben asked.

She gave a little gasp before responding. “Mommy tried to drive the car. And then she tried to cook.”

“But she’s okay,” Emma said. “She just has a headache. She’s sleeping.”

Ben worked at not flinging his keys or kicking a chair. Jesus, he wanted the satisfaction of hearing something break. He needed some sort of big crashing sound. He needed a place to hurl this ball of anger.

“How come no one called me? Where’s Aunt Vanessa?” He stared from one to another. “Gracie?”

“She left.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” Gracie’s voice trembled. “She wasn’t here when we got home.”

“Don’t yell at us—we didn’t do anything.” Emma pressed her lips together.

“Why didn’t you call me? You know better.”

“Mommy said not to. She wanted to show you she could do stuff,” Gracie said.

“She did a hell of a job, didn’t she?” Ben sniffed. “What’s burning?”

They looked around. Caleb touched the stove. “It’s hot,” he said.

“Oh, God. I didn’t check it.” Emma slumped in the kitchen chair, throwing the sponge on the table, her legs splayed out like a colt.

“Leave it, Caleb!” Scorched food odors overwhelmed Ben when he opened the oven. He lifted out a white casserole dish and placed it on the stovetop.

Dried-out lumps of carrot, shriveled beans, roasted dry pasta. He grabbed a spoon and shifted a shell. The shells had never been boiled, just put in the oven uncooked, although it looked as if maybe milk or some other liquid had been poured over the mess. Desiccated tuna, shriveled celery. Maddy had attempted tuna noodle casserole. Gracie’s favorite.

“Daddy?” He felt Gracie’s tentative touch on his back. “Are you okay?”

His kids trembled in front of him.

“Sure, baby. I’m just going to check on Mommy. Leave the mess. I’ll tackle it later.” He got up, dusted off his pants, and started walking out.

“Dad?”

“What, Emma?”

“We heard your message. Congratulations.”

•  •  •

Maddy lay facedown on top of the bedspread, barely covered by a small thin afghan. She looked cold, small, as though trying to compress her body. Ben sat beside her, then collapsed and took her hand. Saw the grit caked under her fingernails. Flour dusted her black hair so thoroughly it appeared gray.

“Ben?” She gripped his hand and frowned. “Is okay?”

“It’s fine.” He reached over and brushed sticky strands of hair from where they covered her eyes. “But baby, do you know what you did?”

“I tried. To cook supper.” She rolled over and looked up at the ceiling. “But I screwed.”

He waited a minute, trying to remember Zelda’s words. Wait. Let her complete a thought. Don’t finish it for her.

“I try, Ben. My thoughts jam.”

She began crying. Soon the house would be floating in her tears. All their tears. This was their crying season.

“Tried to read.
Joy of Cooking
.”

Hearing her breathe out sentences word by word made him want to join her in crying. He missed his voluble Maddy, her sentences rushing out in waves.

What if she never got any better? What if this was it?

“We appreciate your wanting to cook for us. Really. But honey, it’s going to take time.”

“Time.” She spit the word. “Ha!”

“Patience is harder for you now, which is sad, because you need it now more than ever. But we love you and need you to be safe.”

She stared at him with wide frightened eyes. “Hate for me?”

He rubbed her arm. “Never. Roll over. Let me do your back.”

She pulled up her T-shirt. Ben unhooked her bra, revealing smooth rosy skin. He drew a large loop with his fingernails, then smaller and smaller concentric loops until he hit the middle, and then started again.

“Do you remember driving, Mad?”

“No. Doctor said. I’d never remember.”

“Not the accident, sweetheart. Today. Do you remember driving the car?”

She turned her head toward him, her face scrunched with effort. “Today?”

He nodded. “Today. Can you think hard?”

Her head bobbed with effort and then glee. “I remember!”

“Good. It’s good that you remember. However, it’s not a good thing to have done. Driving is bad.”

Like dealing with a three-year-old. Good. Bad.

Maddy got on her knees, her legs folded beneath her, her face set in a serious expression. “Driving is bad,” she said. “Got it.”

•  •  •

Ben couldn’t do another thing—not buy pizza, not clear the kitchen enough to put out plates, not even search for paper ones. He simply wanted a clean house and hot food, and he wanted it served by someone other than himself.

They arrived at his in-laws’ house dirty and hungry. Maddy slept during the ten-minute car ride from Jamaica Plain to her parents’ Brookline home. When Ben parked, Maddy woke.

The kids ran up the driveway, ahead of Ben and Maddy, and barreled into their grandparents’ house. Emma flew behind them as though years were washing away and she’d become ten years old again.

Maddy still sat in the car, looking stunned.

“I drove?” she asked for the third time. “I get so stupid now.”

Ben took her hand and kissed it. “Hey! Five-word sentence!”

She smiled at him. “Accidental. Car knocked in. Sense.”

He rapped his knuckles lightly on her forehead. “Don’t try it again.”

“Don’t leave keys.” She pointed to her temple and laughed. “Brain-dead. Remember?”

They got out and followed the kids toward the house, holding hands. Ben couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that before the accident. Now it had become their habit. She squeezed, and he squeezed back twice.

“What would I do? Without you?”

“You won’t ever have to. No worries, Mad.”

He brought her in for a hug. She pressed deep, grinding in, bringing an unwanted erection.

“Whoa.” Ben backed up.

“Mmm. Want you.” Maddy hooked her fingers into his belt loop, tugging.

“Right. Me too. But we’re at your parents’, hon.”

“So? We go upstairs? Huh?”

He imagined them walking in and heading to Maddy’s old bedroom. “I don’t think so. Your mother has supper ready. The kids are starving.”

“Kids can eat.” She reached down and stroked him. “We can screw.”

“Maddy . . .” He groaned, feeling her hand wrap around him through his trousers. “Stop. Please.” He pulled her hand away. Christ, he’d be hobbling into his in-laws’ house.

“
No!
” She ran from him, away from the large Colonial and toward the carriage house. “Catch!”

He stumbled after her, barely able to see in the diffuse light given off by the lavender dusk. “Maddy, wait!”

“Catch,” she repeated.

As Ben ducked through the carriage house door, he wondered how her athletic skills could be so intact with her brain so mixed up. Of course he knew it had to do with where her injuries were—not in the brain stem, not in the cerebellum—but what made intellectual sense didn’t make emotional sense.

The carriage house smelled of softening cardboard. Anne constantly considered expanding her catering business and moving it out here, but meanwhile, it remained what it had been for years—an unused space, a dusty version of how it had been when Vanessa and Maddy were children. Toys, dolls, paint, and craft supplies peeked out of old boxes. Army cots that Vanessa and Maddy had once used to play house were stored in the back room. That’s where Ben found Maddy, sitting cross-legged on the olive-green canvas, grinning, unbuttoning her shirt.

“Maddy. We can’t.”

She revealed her breasts button by button. He found the revelation of her white cotton bra under his old denim shirt oddly arousing—her breasts exposed gave him an erection stiffer than he’d felt in years.

“Okay. Fast, then.” She stopped unbuttoning and reached for the waistband of her jeans.

“Very fast.” Quick enough to finish before Jake came out searching for them. Though at the moment, he didn’t give a shit.

Ben yanked the pull chain affixed to the ceiling, shutting out the light she’d put on. He knelt at the edge of the cot, testing it for strength first. “You know I love you, right?”

“Yes.” Lying back, her arms above her head, shirt half open, and the dim light scarcely revealing her bare thighs. She shimmered.

He fell on her, hungry, needing no beginning; they were ready to finish. Her legs closed around him. Maybe these tsunamis of hunger for him all came from a particular clunk in her temporal lobe, but again, intellect lost against emotion and he chose to believe they’d carved out this newfound desire despite the horror. That this one bit of good came out of the bad and his guilt.

No matter how many times they’d made love since Maddy came home, he couldn’t get close enough. Her breasts gave beneath him as he buried his face into her neck, smelling vanilla and sugar from the cookies she’d tried to bake. He pressed her hands above her head, holding back as he felt her building. Her head moved from side to side as she rode out an orgasm.

Sweat dripped from his forehead as he watched her, her eyes wide-open wild. She slowed, and he went faster, deeper, desperate.

Even as he came, sadness enveloped him. Though he’d tried and tried, he couldn’t push in deep enough to feel forgiven.

“So good,” Maddy said. “Sex. Love it. Love you.”

She rose on her knees, nearly tipping over the old cot. Ben steadied them by placing his hand on the cement floor. “Just have good,” Maddy said. “Always. Okay?”

“I promise,” Ben said. “Just good.”

CHAPTER 30

Maddy

Maddy felt sad every minute of every day. A bottomless cold lake of depression threatened to subsume her. Gone was the mania that had brought cookies and driving three weeks before.

Her father tried to fix things in his usual way: money. He gave her a taxi charge account. Ben was upset, though she couldn’t grasp why, but he kept quiet as her father performed his little ceremony, first handing Maddy a set of cards he’d made with the cab company’s phone number written in large numbers and then giving her instructions. “Just tell them your name,” he’d said. “I arranged it. That’s all you have to do. Now you have a bit of freedom, but safely.”

Plus, they’d programmed a new phone that had only a few numbers coded in. Temporary, Ben promised and her mother swore. They’d return all her friends soon. Right now they didn’t want her overwhelmed.

In fact, what she felt was underwhelmed in a bleak nothingness.

She stepped out of the house. The cab company had sent the Russian driver, the one she loved for being silent, for never asking more from her than an address. Emma or Ben wrote out the addresses for where she was going so she didn’t have to wheeze them out word by
word. Wordlessly, she handed the driver a piece of scrap paper with the rehab address written in Emma’s deliberate cursive.

The driver parked in front of the rehab building in a dank end of downtown. All day cabs spit out and then took back the halt and the lame. Getting to Zelda’s fifth-floor office required taking an elevator and then navigating corridors endlessly patterned with brown-and-yellow-checked linoleum. Bright blue, green, and red footsteps guided you, but she always forgot what color to follow.

She opened her worn notebook, shuffling the pages until she found her foot-color note—
Zelda: Blew Feet
—and then followed outlines of blue footsteps until she reached the door reading
Outpatient Rehabilitation
. News played on a fuzzy-pictured television hanging from the wall in the outer office. Damaged people—fellow members of the club—slumped in scratched plastic chairs.

Ever-changing cryptic quotations, uplifting poems, and what she supposed were meaningful Biblical references covered the bulletin board outside Zelda’s office. Looking for fresh hope, word by word she slowly read:

Nothing begins, and nothing ends,

That is not paid with moan . . .

—FRANCIS THOMPSON

Thanks, Zelda and Francis Thompson, whoever you are. That sure lifted my spirits. She considered typing up
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
and sticking it on the board.

If only she could remember how to type.

Ha! She’d told herself a joke. The next saying seemed designed to remind her how much she was failing.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

—ARISTOTLE

Dignified and graceful. Perhaps that should be her goal.

“Maddy. Come on in.” Zelda stuck her head out as she turned from Aristotle to Primo Levi.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

“Just read
Bartlett’s
? All week?” Maddy thought of Primo Levi’s words. Was this the best she’d have, knowing that she wouldn’t always be unhappy? How dark a balm was that?

“You can speak better than that.” Zelda stepped aside so Maddy could enter the office. “You’re forgetting to take your breaths before you speak. Relax the muscles in your mouth. Send your energy to your mouth.”