Cameo Lake (15 page)

Somehow the grief that I had detected in his deep brown eyes had diminished since knowing him. I often saw amusement there, even pleasure as we chatted on board the raft or bumped into each other at the grocery store. Or as he played Trivial Pursuit with my children.

“You were right to yell at those kids today.”

Ben's smile melted away. I hadn't meant to remind him of the horrible name the boy had called him, only to praise him for being a caring neighbor. But in an instant I knew that there was not one without other. He dropped his glance back to the tabletop, fingering his silverware into perfect parallel lines and said nothing.

“They were stupid boys, wannabe gangstas. Their parents ought to be shot for giving them so much freedom.”

Ben kept his eyes on the table, and I knew I was never going to pull grace from this faux pas. “Ben . . .”

“Cleo, I didn't kill my wife.” He looked directly at me, daring me to look away.

Words, my life and living, failed me. Instead I reached out across the table and grasped his wrists. “I know you didn't.”

He took a long breath, “No, you don't.”

I struggled to come up with words to convince him I did understand that he wasn't responsible. But I didn't yet know the circumstances and so hesitated a little too long. “Ben, I don't know what happened. Until you tell me, I can't judge for myself. But I know, knowing you, that whatever did happen was . . .”

“What happened was a terrible accident.” His liquid brown eyes froze over and I kept my grip on his wrists. He didn't try to pull away. I had never seen such a gaping wound. “I shouldn't let them get to me.”

“They aren't worth it.”

“You have no idea how much . . .” He did pull away then, some self-editing reflex preventing him from saying what he so obviously needed to say.

“How much what, Ben? Tell me.”

“How much it hurts to be rejected because of something you had no control over. There, I've said it. Now you know that I'm all façade, that I just pretend to be aloof from the snide remarks.”

“We all have façades. We build them as self-defense against the indefensible.”

“What have you got to build a wall against?” He lifted his glass to his lips. His eyes challenged me at first, then softened into an invitation.

I didn't say anything for a minute. I had never spoken of Sean's affair to anyone since it happened. I'd kept the story so locked up that I hadn't even used it in my work. “Don't pick at that scab.” My mother's directive. “You'll scar.” She was dead before Sean and I got married. She'd called his family lace-curtain Irish and refused to meet them. She and Father, in an unexplained moment of togetherness after their divorce, died in a car crash of their own inebriated fault. I once said I thought it had been mutual suicide. Anything to prevent their daughter from “marrying beneath her.” Alice McCarthy had enfolded me into her family, and the most legitimate way to stay was to marry Sean.

“When I was pregnant with Tim, Sean had an affair with a neighbor.”

Ben stayed quiet, his silence opening a path for me, allowing me to tell the story without bends or twists in the journey.

“Every summer in July all of the McCarthys go to Narragansett and rent a couple of cottages. Sean's is a big family and where they used to be able to fit in one, now, with all the husbands and kids, they have to rent two. This was eight years ago, and Francis, Sean's dad, was still alive. The women went to the beach for the month and the men, Francis and Sean and Margaret's husband, Jack, all stayed in Providence and came down on weekends. The traffic from all those husbands and fathers traveling south was awful and they'd all try to come down midday on Friday to avoid it.

“Lily was fifteen months old, just beginning to toddle. I was seven months along and feeling like Shamu. Everything was swollen, belly, breasts, ankles, wrists, you would never have recognized me. Lily and
I stayed with my in-laws. Sean's youngest siblings were there, too, so it was a house of women, happily going to the beach all day and eating hot dogs every night. We only cooked when the men came home.

“Every Friday, Sean and Francis and Jack arrived, sweaty and city-dressed. Ties loosened around their necks, they arrived looking tired and saggy. On that first Friday they arrived, Sean, who hadn't seen me in a week, made some flip remark about my size. It wasn't especially meant to be hurtful or demeaning, but, being hormonally challenged, I burst into tears and his mother took him to task. ‘You made her this way, be proud of it.’

“Sean apologized but there was something in the way he kissed me that made me think he found me slightly repulsive. As if he had to make himself touch me. We had always been very physical with each other and I craved him. By the next Friday, we had somehow given up physical love. He kissed me hello and goodbye and held my hand as we walked along the beach, but we didn't make love. I know that some men find their wives more attractive when pregnant, but Sean was quite clearly not of that number.”

I took another swallow of the first glass of wine and smiled at the server setting my haddock in front of me. Ben poured a second glass from the bottle he'd ordered and let me go on.

“I had a doctor's appointment in the city on a Thursday. Alice was going to drive me up and then I would spend the night at home and come back to the beach with Sean and Francis on the Friday. Lily was going to stay with the family. This was to be my first night away from Lily, and I was in anguish about it. Tuesday morning I got a call asking if I could change my appointment to that afternoon. If I hadn't been so on the fence about leaving Lily overnight, I might have said no, I couldn't change my plans. Instead, I saw the change of appointment as a sign from God that I should just go up and back the same day and not be away from my baby. Given Sean's sudden reluctance to touch me, I figured it wouldn't really matter to him whether he saw me just for lunch or slept beside me in our bed at home.

“‘Can you drive yourself? Do you want me to go with you?’ Alice asked, but I assured her the forty-five-minute drive up and back
wouldn't tax me at all. I took orders from everyone around for various missing things to bring back from Alice's house, things like the extra set of car keys, the pair of sandals Siobhan had forgotten under her bed, last month's
Good Housekeeping
with the recipe in it for fruit barbecue sauce. The stuff of living ordinary lives. I kissed my baby and off I went to change my life forever.

“I didn't call Sean to tell him I was coming. I had some silly idea that I'd surprise him at work and make him take me out to lunch. I had time, so I went to Alice's house first and collected the desired items. My house is only a street over from hers, so it seemed the most natural thing to go there next. I knew that Sean was neglecting my plants, and I had a couple of things I wanted to take back with me as well.”

By this point in my narrative I could feel my heart pound as if I were reexperiencing the event from eight years ago. I stopped long enough to slow its rhythm. I allowed myself a mental deep breath by commenting on the food we were slowly eating. Ben encouraged me to keep telling my story with a gentle nod and a soft gesture of his fingertips.

“The house was as much of a mess as I had expected. Dishes, towels-strewn, papers piled in every chair. I knew he'd get it tidied up before I got home, but also that I'd spend the last month of my pregnancy cleaning the house. He'd call it nesting, I'd call it house reclamation.

“I went into the bedroom to get the maternity jeans I'd left behind. The bed was like a storm-tossed island, or a battlefield. Pillows punched, blanket on the floor, and sheets twisted tornado-shaped. ‘At least they aren't the same sheets I put on when I left’—I actually said it out loud. These were the newer, monogrammed ones, an elegant white on white, an anniversary present from his parents. I grasped the top sheet and pulled, then lifted the corners of the contour bottom sheet. A tiny square of foil bounced on the floor as I yanked. Even as I bent over to retrieve it, I knew what it was. In novels, such an act is the catalyst, the thing which sets into motion the story. The conflict. The mystery.

“In my life that action—picking up the condom wrapper from
my bedroom floor—was more like an abrupt ending. At first I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the empty package. Then I carefully placed it on the nightstand on his side of the bed. Then I took it back and crumpled it up and flushed it down the toilet. The heat of that July day was suddenly unbearable. I needed the soothing breeze off the bay. I saw myself in the long mirror on the back of the bedroom door and I began to cry. It seemed to me then that I was at fault. I had let myself grow huge with this baby, safe in the knowledge that I had sprung back to normal within days after Lily. I had left Sean by himself. I had left Francis McCarthy's only son alone. We all knew that Francis had what they so quaintly called the ‘roving eye.’ We all knew, at least those of us older ones, that he'd cheated on Alice. Now Sean had cheated on me. I finished stripping the bed. I bundled my brand-new sheets under my arm and went out to the trash, where I stuffed them into a half-full pail.”

Seated in that intimate corner of the restaurant, the soft and sexy eyes of a different kind of man focused on me, I felt myself pull away from my story and back into the present and I was very glad to be there.

“Did Sean ever know you'd found out?”

“Oh yes. He did. I remade the bed. I went to my appointment and got a lecture on blood pressure. Then I drove back to Narragansett and found Alice. She'd lived through this and I needed her to tell me what to do.”

“Let me guess—she recommended you stay with him?”

I nodded and finished the last of my haddock. The fish had grown cold and I only ate to give myself time to construct my narrative more effectively. “Alice held me and rocked me and whispered, ‘There there,’ over my head. ‘They all do it, Cleo, it doesn't mean anything. You're his wife and the mother of his children and it's to you he will always come home.’

“I was too tired and too demoralized to stand up and debate her Old World point of view. ‘Things have to be different, Alice. I can't live like this.’ She agreed I must confront him, I must know who the woman was and I must exact punishment. ‘How did you punish
Francis?’ ‘I hit him, square across the face, and then I told him the next time I would leave him.’ ‘And he remained true?’ ‘I never caught him again.’” Telling this story whole, speaking it out loud for the first time to anyone outside the family, I suddenly realized that all this time I had missed the nuance behind those words, “I never caught him again.”

Ben's conducting fingers brought me to speak the conclusion.

“Alice called Sean and told him to come to Narragansett that night. At first he thought the baby was coming and he got very excited. ‘No, Sean. You need to tend to your wife about something else,’ and she hung up on him. Thus alerted, Sean arrived contrite. We needed a privacy the crowded cottage couldn't provide so we walked to the closest beach and sat in the sand. It was sunset and any other night this would have been a romantic scene, shimmering Narragansett Bay, red streaks in the West, golden bands shooting through the strips of clouds on the horizon.

“‘Who is she?’ I asked. Not, ‘How could you do this to me,’ or ‘Why?’ or ‘What were you thinking?’ What I most wanted to know was
with whom.
It seemed almost more important to me to find out it was someone who might look like me, like I usually did, rather than someone random. Does that make sense?

“He named a woman who lived a couple of houses up, a slightly older woman, a divorcee with three kids and not a lick of sense in her head. ‘She came over to make sure I was eating properly. She brought lasagna. We never meant . . . ’ She was attractive, I suppose, in an overdone, kind of former-beauty-queen way. But what fascinated me most was her preying on my husband. You see, that's how I saw it. She was older, lonely, horny. Sean was classic weak male, thinking with his other head, as we put it when the sisters and I discussed the matter. It was a family matter, this mistake of Sean's.

“I told him I should leave him, that he deserved nothing less. He begged my forgiveness.” I set my utensils down side by side on the plate and folded my hands into my lap. I stared at my clenched fists, stared at the wide wedding band on my left hand. Then I looked up at Ben. “And I did. I gave him my forgiveness. And, you know, I've
never told that story to anyone because, in making my peace with Sean, I made an implied promise to keep the incident buried.”