Between Husbands and Friends (19 page)

The walls and carpet of Fegan 5 are a soothing periwinkle and gray, and next to the office is a
waiting room filled with a child’s dream of toys. Parents sag on chairs, reading magazines or holding their children while other children play as happily as if at home or in a day care center. I smile at a woman with a three-year-old in her arms; she smiles at me, as if nothing in this place is dangerous.

A young woman with a mole next to her nose and earrings like lilies approaches us. She’s smiling, too.

“Hi, Jeremy. Mrs. West? I’m Serena. I volunteer here, and I thought maybe I could play with Jeremy. Dr. Hall would like to speak with you. Dr. Hall’s office is right down that way, Jeremy. Your mom won’t be far away.”

But he’s not frightened. I am.

It’s absurd, how nervous I feel in this office, and how
subordinate.
Like a kid facing a test. Or worse, like a student facing the principal, knowing she’s been caught, knowing she’s in big trouble now.

Dr. Hall shakes my hand. He’s a small man with salt-and-pepper hair and a firm handshake. He gestures to a chair.

I sit, smoothing my skirt over my thighs.

His office is small. Three walls are lined with bookcases crammed with books, medical texts, thick doorstops of journals. Behind him a window shows a perfect rectangle of blue sky. His desk is piled with a confusion of papers, computer printouts, manila envelopes, Xeroxed articles, pens, memos, writing tablets, chains of paper clips.

He is wearing a gray suit, white shirt, navy tie. He must be in his forties.

He begins to speak, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but Jeremy—”

I’ve always loved watching storms hit Nantucket. I’ve left the warmth of the house to drive to Surfside where I’d stand on the beach watching the ocean surge, swell and crash, roaring angrily, full of a nearly personal and certainly living power. The wind would buffet me, knock me backward, nearly push me over, making my raincoat shiver and crackle against my body while rain spattered like pellets against my face.

The noise and expansive power fascinated, exhilarated, and somehow
owned
me like nothing else could. I’d stand watching wave after wave roll inexorably toward me, hands shoved down into the warmth of my pockets, nose dripping, eyes tearing, face soaked with salty spray, until my face grew so cold I couldn’t feel it and my teeth chattered and my body shook like a flag whipped in a gale. Still I couldn’t seem to get enough of it, I was like a screaming adolescent fan at a rock concert, shaken to my core, losing all reason and shudderingly glad to
lose it, grateful …
thrilled
 … to be clutched and claimed by such ferocious power.

Eventually I would become so cold that it was painful, or someone else would arrive at the beach and want to talk, or I’d remember an appointment, and I’d force myself to turn my back on the ocean. I’d sit in the car, turning the heat on full blast, dripping water everywhere, my skin flushed with warmth, my body glowing and humming like a great engine that had just been refueled.

But in the early part of this decade a series of storms hit Nantucket Island with an unexpected violence. For two years in a row, these storms rose up in the autumn with a destructive fury that was unanticipated and unchecked. First came the thundering waves that swept away a long expanse of beach on the northeast side of the island. Then came the second attack, the real onslaught, unimaginable waves like marauding hordes, attacking the homes on the shore, smashing down on them, destroying them, carrying them out in ruins into the victorious sea while their owners stood on the shore, weeping or watching with numbed helplessness.

We were there for that weekend. We saw the second storm, the storm that raped the shoreline and ravaged the homes. We watched while waves rose up like colossal mouths, white teeth biting down into rooftops, crunching porch railings, chimneys, trellises, shutters, and doors into sticks and swallowing them into the ocean’s voracious maw. I did not feel exhilarated then; I felt cowed.

I had always been taught to take care when I was on Nantucket. To wear my life jacket when in a boat, to swim close to shore and with friends, not alone, and not at Surfside, where every summer the friendliest, most playful waves heartlessly tossed some unsuspecting swimmer down on the sand, snapping his neck. I had liked to flirt with the ogre-hearted ocean, I had liked to wade in its cool, glittering waters, tempted, but safe.

Now as I sit listening to the kind and articulate Dr. Hall, it seems I feel my chair tremble beneath me. I know I am at the very edge of my life. The floor resonates with the vibrations of an approaching force. I clutch the arms of my chair. An invisible wave, the dark, heartless side of nature’s gifts, rises up in the room and plummets down over me, pulling me down into its frigid, roiling gloom.

“Cystic fibrosis …” Dr. Hall says.

His lips continue to move, but somehow the words don’t quite reach my ears. Now I know why I’ve been having anxiety attacks. All along my body has been warning me. Still, it’s too much. I’m sitting deadly still, but I feel as though I’m thrashing through thick water that
moans in my ears and makes the universe tilt. Which way is up? I am nauseated.

“Inherited genetic defect … both parents …”

His words swim past me like the fish Jeremy admired in the aquarium. What is it they say? The sins of the fathers are visited on the children? How about the sins of the mothers? Obviously the sins of this mother. But this is beyond fairness, beyond justice, beyond bearing.

“Your son is not in crisis now, however …”

Jeremy, I think,
Jeremy.
My God. What have I done?

At the end of July, almost three months after little Maxwell was born, I went to the offices of
The Sussex Gazette.
It had been a long time since I’d been there. Weeks. Months. Perhaps almost a year. As the newspaper’s circulation had grown, so had its staff, and even though there was the normal amount of transience, Max did have a loyal quartet—reporter, photographer, business manager, and copyeditor—who kept the paper running smoothly. I wrote an article only occasionally, in an emergency.

Over the years the ranch houses around the newspaper had been transformed into beauty shops and photography studios, and the willowy saplings had broadened out into substantial shade trees, giving the area a prosperous air. What had once been the front lawn had been converted into a parking lot with tubs of flowers on either side of the front door, and as I pulled in, I could see through the large picture window a warren of computer-topped desks, swivel typing chairs, and people talking on phones or bent over notepads, chewing on pencils.

I took a deep breath and pushed through the door into the main room. The air was full of chatter, which stopped abruptly when Dora Gilbert cried, “Lucy!” The plastic clatter of computer keyboard keys ceased. People looked up at me, as surprised to see me as if I were a ghost. Carrie O’Connell was the only one who continued working. “The dog’s name was what?” she asked the person on the other end of telephone.

I had just had my hair cut, and it looked as good as it ever would in the humid summer, curling around my face. I wore lipstick. I had a tan from taking Margaret swimming. My yellow flowered sundress was loose around me, but not grotesquely so. I didn’t look like a madwoman. Still, most of these employees had not seen me since Maxwell’s birth, and even though they’d sent letters of condolence, I could tell they were now struggling with how to approach me. Should they mention my misfortune or not?

“I just dropped in to see Max for a moment,” I announced brightly.

“He’s in his office,” Dora said.

“I know the way.” I smiled at her and walked confidently on by.

Max’s office was divided from the rest of the large room by glass walls; I could see him bent over a filing cabinet. I knocked and entered at the same time, and once in the room, I shut the door firmly behind me.

He looked over his shoulder, saw me, and turned so sharply that he hit his knee on the filing cabinet.

“Lucy. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I just wanted to talk with you a moment.”

He looked wary. “Sure. Sit down.” He gestured at a scarred wooden desk chair.

I sat, moving the chair slightly to position it so that my back was to the outer office. “Could you sit, too?” I asked, smiling.

Max went to the wide leather chair behind his desk, the only other chair in the room. He leaned forward, arms folded on his blotter. The sleeves of his red-and-white-striped shirt were rolled up to the elbows. He wore a white cotton sweater vest. A blue bow tie. But his beard was about three inches long now, and ragged.

I tried to be positive. “You look patriotic today.”

“Do I?” He looked down at his tie. “I guess I do. What’s up?”

“Max, I want you to go to Nantucket with me in August.”

He blinked. “That’s why you came in here today?”

“We don’t seem to be able to talk much at home.”

“Honey, listen—”

“No, Max. You listen. What you’re doing isn’t fair.”

“What I’m doing?”

“Working all the time. Ignoring me. Shutting me out.”

“Come on, Lucy. By now you should know that working all the time goes with the territory of—”

“You haven’t talked to me,
really
talked to me, since Maxwell died.”

“This is hardly the place—”

“You haven’t held me, we haven’t made love—”

“This is not the place for such a personal discussion!” His face flushed red with anger and embarrassment.

“It seems to be the only place,” I calmly pointed out. “You never talk to me at home.”

“All right. I’ll talk to you at home. But not here. Not now.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.” His mouth thinned into a exasperated line.

“Max.” I leaned forward and spoke softly. “Max, I love you. I need you. Margaret needs you. I won’t let you go into another depression. I can’t.”

He rose. “Not here, Lucy.”

I sat firm, crossing my legs, folding my arms over my chest, glaring at him. He sat down again. “I’m not depressed.”

“Not here, you’re not. Here you’re managing just fine, here you’ve barricaded yourself from your emotions with all this, this—” I waved my arm to indicate the glass walls, the activity in the outer office. “But at home you’re another person. You’re silent and miserable and closed off. It’s hurting Margaret. It’s hurting me.”

“I have a reason to be miserable.”

“So do I. But life has to go on. For our daughter if not for each other.”

We stared at each other, deadlocked.

Max’s shoulders sagged. He rubbed his hand over his jaw. “What do you want me to say? I’ll try.”

“I think you should see a therapist.”

“I said I’d try, Lucy. I don’t need a damned therapist.”

“I want you to promise to stay with us a full week on the island. You need to lie in the sun and build sand castles with Margaret. You need to sail with Chip.”

“You think it’s going to be that easy? A week on Nantucket?”

“I didn’t say it was going to be easy. And if you don’t think a week on Nantucket will help, then why are you so dead set against seeing a therapist?”

“A therapist won’t bring back my son.”

I looked down at my hands. My son, too, I thought. I wanted to say a hundred different things to my husband, but all I could think of was that Maxwell had had curly black hair, like Max’s. Even in his newborn state, he had resembled Max clearly. His loss shot through me like an arrow of grief.

I leaned forward. “Max,” I whispered. “
Help me.
I can’t do this alone.”

He looked away. He cleared his throat and swallowed. I wanted him to come around the desk and hold me. He had not been able to hold me since Maxwell’s birth. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll try.”

His phone rang and he snatched it up.

I sat a little longer, regaining my calm, until I could walk back out through the office, dry-eyed.

Margaret has made lasagna. The house smells of garlic and olives, a hearty aroma, a comforting one. Jeremy runs straight through the house to his sister.

“I’m going to get an aquarium!”

“Cool.” Margaret picks her brother up and carries him to the stove. “Look what I made for you.”

“When can we eat?”

“We were just waiting for you to come home.”

“The plates are on,” Abby says, coming in from the dining room. She’s carrying a tray with the worldly ease of someone who works as a waitress when she isn’t in school. “Now what?”

“Give everyone glasses,” Margaret tells her, and Abby hastens to obey. Our two families are tangled with skeins of idolatry: Jeremy adores Abby, who admires and copies Margaret, who in turn worships cool, perfect Kate. “Wineglasses for the adults.”

Matthew stands at the counter, slicing tomatoes for a salad. This simple fact takes my breath away. Never before in his fourteen years has he shown any interest in cooking. And I don’t believe it is cooking that brings him to the kitchen now.

Matthew wears a tattered T-shirt and baggy madras shorts; Margaret a short blue-checked sundress. Her long chocolate-brown hair is held back with a pale blue headband. I loved headbands on my daughter, they made her seem serene and collected … and young.

But Margaret is no longer a child. Any implication that even a remnant of childishness remains turns Margaret into a fury.

Matthew and Margaret have been buddies all their lives. How will adolescence change that? When the two were infants, Kate and I had joked about them marrying, but now I find that thought disturbing.

It doesn’t matter now. This will certainly be the last summer our two families would share a house. Possibly the last night.

“Hey.” Kate comes into the room, one finger bookmarking a paperback. She wears loose white trousers and a blue T-shirt. “How did it go?” She looks perfect as always, and just for a moment she stands in a shaft of sunlight that backlights her, rings her body with an aurora. She
looks like an angel, beautiful, calm, cool, but she is only human, and vulnerable, my best friend, to age and time. To loss. Tears well up in my eyes.