Commuters (14 page)

On her last night, they had dinner reservations at Deacon’s, a quiet waterside lobster restaurant. Winnie, who was a little tired of grilled steak and corn on the cob, was looking forward to it. At least they
thought
they had reservations—as soon as they pulled into the packed driveway, it became clear that something was awry.
CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE PARTY
, read a sign just inside the door. Dozens of people were packed around the front bar, and the noise level was deafening. While Danny and Yi-Lun argued with the manager, Winnie touched Matthew on the sleeve and told him she would be just outside. She slipped through the crowd, making her way to a side door, out to where the sun was setting in a perfect orange globe over the gray-green water. Winnie was toggling the features of her digital camera, trying to capture the moment, so at first she didn’t notice him sitting there—Jerry Trevis—at a round empty table.

“May I take your photograph?”

“Pardon me?” She turned to the man who spoke. He was smiling at her.

“If you’d like, I can—” Here he gestured to the camera, and then to the view.

“A shot of me, standing alone in front of the sunset?” Winnie laughed. “To tell you the truth, I only came out here to get away from the noise. It’s awful in there.”

“You said it,” Jerry said. He cocked his head and gave her another one-sided grin. There came a burst of noise from the party inside, and she moved a little closer. They held each other’s gaze
just one moment longer than was necessary. “Or I could take one of you and your family…your husband?”

Thinks he’s pretty smooth,
Winnie thought. But she simply shook her head a little, which to another person her age, she knew, would say everything that needed to be said about George’s being gone. And he picked up on it, nodding once. She put the camera on the weathered wood of the empty table and he rose halfway as she took a seat.

Then there they were, together alone, in the quiet of the side porch of a restaurant off the highway in Atlantic Beach, while Jerry’s niece’s second wedding gathered steam inside and Winnie’s son tried uselessly to wrangle a table—ten minutes at most, until their flustered children discovered them and took them away. She hardly remembered what they said, how they found a way to introduce themselves, or what specifically occasioned that first, formal letter that arrived in Hartfield five days later, on rough cream stationery in a never-wavering hand that jolted her stomach even before she completely understood who had sent it. But Winnie remembered Jerry’s absolute attention to her, his serious consideration of everything she said, the spotless white of his shirt, and thinking that they were perfectly matched in all things—that they had traveled along similar paths through the wilderness of aging and had separately reached the same place.

She remembered this:

Turning away from him, in an effort to regain some inner calm. There was the sun, now mostly gone, a spectacular fiery sinking that spilled flecks of dark gold across the ocean. She said some inane thing about how beautiful it all was, and how odd it was that the most ordinary event could be so stunning. And when
she turned back to him, still going on about the view, she saw that Jerry hadn’t bothered to look at the sunset at all.
Not bad,
he said, his voice indifferent. But his eyes were only on her.

At L’Auberge, their corner table was secluded. Jerry took a long first pull from his scotch and soda.

“Firstborn children,” he said, raising the glass. “Fuck ’em.”

Winnie was just relieved that he had spoken at all, and that they were safely ensconced in the cream-and-white formality of the restaurant. In the cab, she had been the one to speak to the driver, and in the restaurant foyer, she had been the one to step up to the maître d’ and explain that yes, they were with the Ed Weller party, and no, Mr. Weller would not be joining them. She had even ordered Jerry’s drink, from the boy who put down their menus. But now that they were here, in an oasis of muted luxury, and his color was starting to come back, she felt shakiness overtake her from all that effort. The idea had been to be alone, so they could talk about it. Now Winnie realized she didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’ll probably have Dover sole,” Winnie said, scanning her menu, which was devoid of any prices. “You ought to order the tenderloin.”

“Not hungry.”

She pretended to further study the heavy card stock. “I suppose you might try the duck.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. We’ll have a nice hot lunch and head straight home. Are these wines by the glass? Can you make that out?”

“Ah, Winifred. I’ve really flubbed it, haven’t I?”

Winnie waited until the boy had put down their slices of bread with his silver tongs and then left. She tried to look anywhere but Jerry’s face, for she knew whatever she saw there would crumble her. Where on earth was the waiter? There had to be a way to right this, amid the desperate wild heaving all around them. “Have you thought any more about the shape? We should decide by the end of the week. I like the kidney-bean one, but you tell me if that’s not right for swimming laps.”

Jerry just looked at her.

“Or a plain old rectangle. Why not a rectangle? Everyone always wants to get complicated.”

“But he said not to—didn’t you hear—?”

“I heard,” Winnie said. “If only Rachel—” But here she stopped. No. Bringing up Rachel would veer too close to the subject she was avoiding—would contrast Annette too sharply; she didn’t want Jerry to face the difference between the two, their daughters, right now. Underneath this, at a deep level Winnie only barely acknowledged, whispered another fear, inchoate, immediately pushed aside, having to do with all the money Rachel had recently borrowed from Jerry. A tiny blood-pulse of anxiety ran through her—
there is danger in this
—and then was gone.

Luckily, their waitress arrived, a tall and sturdy fortyish woman with her hair pulled severely back. She was so warm and solicitous that Winnie had to blink away tears. She fell silent as the woman simply took over their lunch, deciding straightaway for Winnie which wine and cajoling Jerry into ordering the duck, and even—once—into smiling like his old self. The sense of being taken care of, Winnie decided, was what you were paying for. No wonder so many of the other patrons in this wainscoted and chandeliered
room were as white-haired as she and Jerry.

When the food came, Jerry said he had no taste for it, and then promptly set about eating half the meat and all of the mashed rutabagas, as well as several forkfuls of her fish. They made small talk about the food, and the weather, the crowds on the sidewalks—each new topic a balm between them.

When their waitress returned, with dessert menus they wouldn’t need and nothing but the warmest concern for their overall well-being—
A pot of tea? Not even a plate of the plainest sugar cookies?
—something about her tucked-in smile reminded Winnie of Rachel. And suddenly she was furious. Where
was
her daughter? Where was she when Winnie doubted her own ability to walk much farther in these stiff shoes, when exhaustion was building at a rapid pace, and when she needed the restroom but everything about the journey there and back threatened to swamp her? Rachel, with all her own needs and her uncontainable fixation on money.

Where is she?
Winnie cried inwardly.
Now that I need to go to the bathroom? Now that I’m old?

Outside their window, the light had changed to a dull, shadowy gray.

“
Incompetent
,” Jerry said bitterly, all of a sudden. She had let the silence go on too long. Their waitress whisked away the check and his credit card. “Annette had no problem when I chartered that boat for her birthday and they all took a good long sail around the Caribbean. Or when I bought that beachfront condo two years ago and let her turn it around for a nice chunk of change. She didn’t run after me with lawyers
then
.”

“What’s done is done,” Winnie said. “I guess.”

“I should have told you,” he said, and she met his eyes for the
first time. “I was a fool, and I thought it would never come back to bother us. It was never as bad as they made it sound, but I still should have. Even if—”

“Yes, you should have,” she said, letting the words cover over everything else:
Why did you think I couldn’t handle this? Don’t you know how much I love you?
“You should have,” she said again, quietly, and Jerry bowed his head. Winnie began to think she might be able to try for the restroom. In the ladies’ lounge, perhaps she should call Matty, too, to pick them up.

“Think my grandson’s going to be able to dish up anything as fancy as all this?” Jerry said after a moment, trying to smile. Wordlessly, they had agreed to leave it at that, for now.

And so, arranging her face and voice to match his, Winnie said, “I don’t imagine the younger crowd wants Dover sole anymore. They like sushi, and things like that. Don’t they?”

Jerry grunted.

“Is he really going to go through with it, I wonder? Last week, he said there was some problem with the building license.”

“He sure as heck better go through with it,” Jerry said, scowling, his usual force returned. “I put up half.”

She fiddled with the phone cord, plugging and replugging it into the side of their old laptop. Soon the Internet connection started up, with its buzzing little song, and Rachel felt relief. You never knew if it would work on this computer, and without quite knowing why, she hadn’t wanted to use the girls’ computer, in their room, for what she was about to do.

The house was quiet; Bob had gone to the store and Lila and Melissa were watching a friend play tennis. She rolled her head twice, once to the left, then to the right, trying to dislodge some of the tension there. Finally, the browser sprang open; she narrowed her attention to the screen.

It hadn’t been hard at all, to set up a new bank account in her own name. Jerry had talked her through all of it, and with surprising speed and ease she clicked open the right folder and entered her password, and then there it was: $25,000. For a full moment she held herself still and stared at the sum, a figure shining brightly in computer blue. And then she got to work.

She paid down MasterCard first, slowly typing the unfamil
iar account number into the form, and then she paid off Discover entirely, with a muttered curse for that 19 percent interest rate. It took longer to figure out how to access the various medical and insurance companies, but eventually she knocked down just a few of those many outstanding debts. The first couple thousand that Jerry had lent her had gone to the most persistent of the collection agencies, the one whose Tampa-based phone number everyone in the house had learned to recognize on caller ID, and ignore. Rachel had planned to hold on to what was left from this $25,000, to string it out as slowly and as cautiously as she could, but on a whim she stood up, went into the kitchen, called Waugatuck, and prepaid Lila’s diving fees through the winter. That brought the MasterCard back up, so she went back to the computer with a bowl of raisin bran and paid it down again.

And then, even as she told herself not to, Rachel began to browse a few of the clothing stores that the girls loved, and before she knew it, she had ordered two Banana Republic tops for Lila, plus a skirt for Melissa from that other brand they craved, the English-sounding preppy one.
For Christmas,
she told herself,
or birthdays.
But then again, who knew? Maybe she would just lay the clothes out on their beds, and wait for them to be surprised. She pictured herself in their room, watching them try on the new things, admiring a new style or color, the three of them together. Yes.

Rachel felt like she could breathe again. There actually seemed to be a millimeter’s worth more room down around the bottom of her lungs. The deception she was practicing was a temporary one, she told herself. And maybe it wasn’t even a deception. After all, she didn’t know
for sure
that Bob wouldn’t have agreed to borrow
from Jerry—she only suspected it. Rachel had said nothing about it to him, then, and it was the first real secret she could remember keeping from her husband; the whole thing, from idea to planning to execution, had been done without his knowing. But not for long, she told herself. She would just get them out from under some of the worst of it, those endless thin envelopes with their cellophane windows; she would ease the burden a little bit, and then tell Bob—if he hadn’t already found out. In any case, whatever would ensue—the arguments, his surprise and hurt—was distant, compared to the immediate relief that the past few minutes had brought.

“I don’t really know how to thank you,” she had admitted to Jerry last week, embarrassed by the way her voice caught on the words.

“Don’t have to,” he’d said, shaking his head with finality. “Family’s family.” But then the phrase hung in the air between them. Rachel had been thinking of Bob, with a small measure of guilt, and Jerry, she realized now, must have been thinking about Annette.

Rachel logged out from the bank’s website and closed the windows on the screen. She stretched her hands back behind her, as far as they would go. The real secret, she knew, was that Jerry’s money—and his generosity, his no-bullshit way about everything—had given her another idea. A plan that Rachel hadn’t exactly articulated to herself or anyone else; it had to do with her house, and it had to do with Jerry. She looked slowly around the living room, her eyes traveling up the back wall, which bordered her other home—her real home.

She was about to close the computer when the words on the screen stopped her. It was a file Bob had left open. She read a bit,
and then scrolled down to read more, one hand holding a spoon, the other on the track-pad.

Most of the science books and nearly all the head-trauma movies have this part wrong,
he’d written.

Rachel stopped. It wasn’t just that the writing was better than she had guessed it would be—though it was, more confident and clear than she had any right to expect. (Not that she was any expert. But nothing about Bob’s life before this had suggested any talent or interest in writing. No one they knew was a writer, after all—Hartfield just wasn’t that kind of place.) So what had shocked her about what she had read? Was it that he hadn’t told her any of this before? Was it strange or sad or hard to find out these painful thoughts about what he had been through because she
read
them?
Or was it that Rachel hadn’t imagined that the experience was a profound one, to Bob, one worthy of examination and—well, why not say it—art? She knew it was hellish, she’d known it was brutal agony as he recovered, and she certainly knew it did a world’s worth of damage to their finances. But that it was something
else
, this injury, this recovery—something else to Bob—she hadn’t known.

A muffled thump came from inside the house, and then the sound of the grinding gears of the garage door opening. Rachel shut the computer and walked through the apartment, and outside. The pavement was wet under her bare feet as she stood on the path that led to the front of the house. Vikram backed his car out, saw her standing there, and gave a brief wave, which she returned.

If she could only know what had happened the day of Bob’s accident, she could handle the rest—where they lived, the fear she knew the girls still had, what had changed between her and Bob. Why she believed this, Rachel didn’t know, but she clung to the idea, anyway: someday, she would know, and then everything else would fall into place. But Bob had moved past the events themselves, she understood now. What he had written, what she had just read, confirmed the divide: they were each struggling, but with different mysteries.

She could hear her phone ring, but Rachel remained in front, long after Vikram had driven away. She looked from the garage to the side of the house, up to the windows, and back again. In her mind, Rachel paced out an imagined version of Bob’s steps that day, of her own, counting silently. It was an equation she had to get right, so she kept adding and subtracting, over and over, to figure out what might have been lost.