Blameless (2 page)

Craig chuckled low in his throat. “Letting go of guilt isn’t one of your strong suits.”

“I know, I know,” Diana said. “And Nina wasn’t my fault either.” But inside her heart of hearts, Diana knew that James’s death
had
been her fault. Just as her sister Nina’s had been. She shivered, and Craig wound his arms around her more tightly.

“You can’t blame yourself whenever something bad happens to someone close to you.”

“But I feel so responsible—”

“Shush,” he said, slipping his hand inside her nightgown and cupping her breast lightly. “You’re a wonderful, caring therapist. You’re sensitive”—he kissed the back of her neck—“responsive.” He gently turned her toward him. “You’ve helped lots of people—and you’ll help lots more.”

Diana pulled her nightgown over her head and pressed herself closer to him, aching with pain and desire. She began to cry softly.

He kissed her eyes and her lips and her wet cheeks. “You can’t rescue everybody,” he murmured, rubbing the small of her back in deep, soothing circles. “Nobody can.”

“I know.” She buried her head in his chest. “I know.” Then she was caught up in his hands and his mouth and his body. And, for a few luxurious moments, everything else disappeared.

Afterward Diana lay quietly, safely entwined in, and protected by, Craig’s love. But all too quickly the world they had managed to hold momentarily at bay rushed back at her. James had killed himself. She touched Craig’s cheek. “Mind if I take the first shower?” she asked.

He kissed her and then reached for the remote control on his night table. “Go ahead,” he said, pointing the remote at the television. “I’ll catch the news.”

Diana went into the bathroom and threw cold water on her face. James was dead, and today she had to go to his funeral. No amount of love or sex or consoling words could change the facts. She pressed the cool washcloth to her eyes. Well, she didn’t exactly
have
to go to the funeral. It wasn’t as if she would know anybody there. Except for James’s sister, Jill, and Diana was certain that Jill would be more than happy if she stayed away. She climbed into the shower.

Standing under the pounding water, Diana wished the shower could wash away her indecision along with the shampoo. Maybe she would just forget the whole thing. Twisting the faucet off, she stood for a moment in the silent, steamy tub. She had to go. She needed the formality of the funeral service. And she needed to say good-bye.

Diana dressed quickly, but instead of going down to the kitchen, she found herself in the nursery, thinking, not for the first time, that she had probably been the last person to see James alive. She shivered and rubbed her arms, looking around the room. Except for a solitary moving carton on the floor, the nursery was white and empty, a blank backdrop awaiting its character. The rising sun bounced slivers of light off the newly varnished floor, and an imperfection in one of the old windowpanes refracted a wavy rainbow over the closet. Diana suddenly realized that the last time she had been in this room, exulting in her own joy at the coming baby, James must have been pulling the trigger.

The day of the suicide had been wild even before she had received the phone call, a roller-coaster of highs and lows: her futile argument with James in the morning; the good news from the doctor; her colleague Adrian Arnold tearing her preliminary research results to shreds during their lunchtime peer supervisory meeting. After the meeting Diana had wandered around Copley Place, troubled by James’s intractability, worried that perhaps Adrian was right, and overwhelmed with joy at Dr. Jasset’s news that the amniocentesis results showed the baby was healthy and female.

She thought she would buy something special for the baby or the nursery—purchases they had been postponing until after the tests—but had found herself too agitated to make even the smallest decision. So she had gone home and tried to work on her research. But that too had proved futile, and after a couple of hours of twirling her pencil and staring blankly at computer printouts, she had climbed the stairs to the nursery.

Diana looked at the carton sitting in the middle of the empty room; it was just as she had left it that afternoon when the phone had rung. “You better come quick,
Dr
. Marcus,” a gravelly voice had ordered. “To James’s. He’s tried to kill himself again. And this time it looks like he did the job right.”

“Who is this?” she had demanded. “What’s happened?” But the line clicked dead in her ear. For a long moment Diana had looked at the silent phone in her hand as if it were an alien being. When the dial tone began to buzz across the wire, she slammed the receiver down. James. She had to leave the nursery and the happiness it stood for. She had to go to James.

But the nursery was here now, silently urging her to reclaim her joy, to forget about James. Diana touched the slight curve of her stomach and looked up at the rainbow. The riot of strong colors confirmed Craig’s decision to use primaries for the fantasy mural he was going to paint on the walls. And, Diana thought, the rainbow could be seen as a harbinger of their bright future.

Kneeling down, she reached for the carton of baby clothes her mother had sent the last time she had been pregnant. The carton she hadn’t been able to look at—let alone open—for almost two years. Lifting the lid, Diana thought of the years of infertility, the ectopic pregnancy, the doctors’ consensus that she would never be able to have children. Even with Craig’s unerring support, she had used her career as a refuge during that painful time. Her success as a psychologist became an antidote to her sterility, as well as an outlet for her need to nurture. But now there was a healthy baby growing in her womb.

The scent of pressed cotton and baby powder and her own childhood wafted up to her. Gently, almost reverently, she lifted a layer of tissue paper. The paper was yellow and crackled under her fingers, but beneath it lay a baby-blue dress with pink and white smocking. The embroidery thread was satiny smooth to her touch, and her eyes filled with tears. She remembered Nina wearing this dress, but her mother had told her that she, Diana, had worn it also.

Pressing the dress to her cheek, drinking in its memories and its promise, Diana felt her career recede to its proper position in her life. Being a psychologist was no longer her only defining role. Suddenly she saw that Adrian’s cutting critique of her research methodology was more likely due to his jealousy than to any errors she might have made. And James’s death had been the inevitable result of his illness, not her own personal failure. Carefully returning the tiny dress to the carton, Diana promised herself that she would come back here after the funeral. She would go and say good-bye to James Hutchins. Then she would get on with the rest of her life.

Her step was lighter as she walked down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. They lived in a renovated nineteenth-century town house in a tiny neighborhood of Boston at the intersection of Back Bay, the South End, and the Fenway, and everything in the house creaked all the time: stairs, doors, windows, handrails—even the two of them, Craig said. As she turned a tight corner, a stair tread squeaked loudly. She pushed the tread hard with her foot; it gave more than it should, indicating that their repairs were far from finished. Making a mental note to tell Craig, she continued down the open narrow stairway that absorbed a quarter of every floor.

Diana loved living in the city. When life began to close in on her, when she got claustrophobic from the suffering her patients heaped on her head, from the calls to make and the exams to grade, she would burst through the front door and into the roaring, anonymous city. She walked for hours, down her narrow tree-lined street to the grand breadth of the Christian Science Center, across Boylston and down Fairfield to window-shop at the trendy stores of Newbury Street. She crisscrossed the Back Bay, wandering along the park-like mall of Commonwealth Avenue, gawking at the white marble and brick mansions, drinking in the bustle and excitement as a nature lover drinks in the scent of evergreen. Rejuvenating herself.

Diana looked out the dining room window at the silent, dawn-streaked sidewalk. All the houses on St. Stephen Street were small and narrow, their angles hard and no-nonsense; utilitarian homes well-suited to the sensible people who had built them, she liked to think. Although she and Craig admired the elegance and expanse of Commonwealth Avenue, they were more comfortable here. She turned and went into the kitchen, filling the coffee maker with the decaffeinated she had learned to tolerate over the past few months.

As the coffee dripped, permeating the room with its thick morning aroma, Diana looked out the oversized mullioned window into their “back city,” as Craig called it—a couple of parking spots for themselves and Diana’s patients, and a fenced area just waiting for a swing set. Dead leaves from their one tree swirled around the base of a fence post, in a forlorn, lonely dance. Watching the leaves, Diana felt her conviction waver and wondered if she might be better off skipping the funeral after all.

Feeling a light touch on her shoulder, she looked up as Craig wrapped his arms around her from behind. He rested his palms on her stomach. “Aren’t you supposed to be bigger by now?” he asked.

She covered his hands with hers. “I just hope you learn to worry less after she’s born—otherwise you’re going to drive the child wild. I don’t even want to think about what you’re going to be like when she starts dating.”

“Dating?” Craig cried in mock horror. “You think I’m going to let some pimply twerp paw at my daughter?”

They stood silently, watching the swirling leaves for a while. Then Diana said, “I thought I’d go to the funeral, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Oh?” He let go of her and reached for his favorite chipped blue mug. “Want some?”

Diana nodded. “There’s no point. And I’m sure Jill will appreciate it if I don’t show.”

He poured a cup and handed it to her. “So don’t go.”

She took the cup. “I canceled the therapy group.”

“The one James was in before you kicked him out?” Craig asked, referring to her borderline personality disorder group.

“Terminated with him,” Diana corrected.

Craig sipped his coffee and watched her closely.

“I canceled out of respect,” she said. “But there aren’t that many of them left anyway. Borderlines aren’t exactly known for their stick-to-itiveness.” Diana smiled sadly. “With James gone and Ethan pulling another one of his disappearing acts, well, there’s just Terri, Bruce, and Sandy …”

“Is it even worth your effort?”

Diana sat down at the table and stared into her mug. “I need to go to the funeral. If I don’t go, I’ll never really believe it’s true.” She took a sip. “I’ll always think in the back of my mind that James is just playing one of his mischievous little games. That he isn’t really dead.”

“But you saw him …” Craig’s voice trailed off. When Diana didn’t lift her head, he popped some waffles into the toaster. “So go.”

Diana watched him in silence for a moment. “But I don’t want to.”

Craig rolled his eyes dramatically at the ceiling. “So don’t.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Diana said. “I’m struggling here, and all you can say is ‘go,’ ‘don’t go,’ ‘go,’ ‘don’t go.’”

Craig sat down next to her at the table. “Honey, I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m just trying to help.”

“Nothing,” Diana mumbled into her coffee. “Just don’t say anything.”

Craig nodded and covered her hand with his for a moment. He gave it a quick squeeze, then stood up and walked through the dining room to get the newspaper off the front stoop.

When he came back, Diana held out her hands. “Sorry,” she said.

He leaned over and kissed her. “It’s okay.” He handed her the front section of the paper and pulled out the sports for himself. They sat in silence for a while, Craig eating and reading, Diana motionless, staring, unseeing, at the
Boston Globe
headlines. Suddenly Craig put down his paper and turned to her. “Do me a favor?”

Diana just looked at him, saying nothing.

“Go.”

She blinked.

“You need to go. To help you accept that James is really gone from your life.” He leaned toward her. “That you aren’t responsible for him anymore.”

Diana looked at her husband, at his kind, earnest face, at his troubled eyes. She nodded. “I’ll go.”

3

A
S
D
IANA CLIMBED THE WIDE MARBLE STAIRS LEADING
to the funeral home, she thought how perfect James would have thought this day was for his funeral: dreary, rainy, cold. It was even October, “the month of looming death,” he had once called it. James had loved it when things matched, when everything was either black or white. He had hated the incongruous, the grays. And there was no incongruity here; everyone looked as miserable as the weather felt.

They stood amid the oversized floral arrangements in small whispering clusters of edgy gloom, somber organ music pumping through speakers mounted on the walls. Three diminutive older ladies, their creased faces displaying the resemblance of age as much as of blood, inspected the card attached to a wicker basket. Nearby a circle of uncomfortable young people squirmed; the men pulling at their ties, the woman tugging at their skirts and fussing with their hair. “The nerve,” one of the older woman sputtered as the other two nodded sagely. “Nora hasn’t talked to the family in twenty-five years.”

These must be the aunts on the mother’s side, Diana thought. And the cousins. She knew James’s mother was dead, and that there were three aunts who had more or less continued their sister’s negligible presence in James’s life in the years since her death.

The father was long gone—dead or alive, no one knew for sure—but Diana guessed the fidgety bunch clinging to the wainscot in the corner must be his side of the family. They reminded her of James: tall, gawky, handsome, and nervous, playing with their rings, pursing their lips, looking from side to side. Obviously unused to being together, they avoided eye contact, while seemingly afraid to leave the security of one another. Could one of them be the infamous Uncle Hank? she wondered. He must have served out his prison term by now. Although she saw no sign of communication, suddenly, like a school of jittery lemmings, they moved in awkward unison toward the chapel.