Heart of the Matter (18 page)

Jason opens the bag, inhales, and nods approvingly. “So what did you talk about all that time?”

“A lot of things,” she says, realizing that she has not yet told Jason about the basket from Romy. She considers doing so now, but feels suddenly drained, deciding it can wait until morning. “Work. His kids. Charlie’s school. A lot of stuff.”

“Did you mention that you think he’s smokin’?”

“Don’t start,” she says.

“Don’t
you
start,” he says. “It’s a dangerous path, falling for a Baldwin like him.”

“Whatever,” she says, laughing at the term
Baldwin
and thinking that she
did
once have a crush on Billy—or whichever brother was in the movie
Flatliners
—and that Nick does bear something of a resemblance to him. Unfortunately for her, she thinks, as she watches Jason dive into his lasagna, Nick has even nicer eyes.

17

Tessa

Tess?”
Nick says that night when he finally comes to bed just after one in the morning. His voice is tender, almost a whisper, and I feel a rush of relief to hear him say my name like this.

“Yes,” I whisper back, realizing that we’ve just made a rhyme.

He takes several deep breaths, as if collecting himself or deciding what to say, and it occurs to me to fill the silence with a question about what is going on in his head. But I force myself to wait, sensing that his next words will be telling ones.

“I’m sorry,” he finally says, pulling me close to him, wrapping his arms around me. Even without the hug, I can tell he means it this time. Unlike his apology for being late, there is nothing obligatory or automatic in his voice now.

“Sorry for what?” I breathe, my eyes still closed. It is ordinarily a passive-aggressive question, but tonight it cornes from a sincere place. I really want to know.

“I’m sorry for what I said. It’s not true.” He takes several more deep breaths, exhaling through his nose, and then says, “You’re a great mother. A
great
wife.”

He kisses my neck, just under my ear, and hugs me harder, all of his body now against mine. It has always been his way of making up—action over words—and although I’ve criticized and resisted this approach in the past, tonight I don’t mind. Instead, I push back against him, doing my best to believe him, dismiss the brewing doubts about our relationship. I tell myself that Nick has always been a bit of a dirty fighter, quick with cutting words that he later regrets and doesn’t really mean. Then again, I wonder if there isn’t always a grain of truth in them, somewhere.

“Then why did you say it?” I whisper, between his kisses and some of my own. “Why did you say things aren’t working?”

It occurs to me that the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can be a great wife and mother—and things could still be broken. Or slowly breaking.

“I don’t know . . . I just get frustrated sometimes,” he says as he tugs down my sweatpants with rapidly building urgency.

I try to resist him, if only to finish our conversation, but feel myself caving to the overwhelming physical pull to him. The need for him. It is the way I felt in the beginning, when we’d rush home from school to be together, making love two or three times in a night. A way I haven’t felt in a long time.

“I want you to be happy,” Nick says.

“I
am
happy.”

“Then don’t look for problems.”

“ I don t.”

“Sometimes you do.”

I consider this, consider all the ways I could’ve greeted him differently tonight. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I
do
manufacture trouble, like the housewives I once criticized for drumming up drama in order to alleviate the monotony of their days. Maybe there is a void in my life, one that I’m relying on him to fill. Maybe he really
did
simply have a craving for Italian food tonight.

“C’mon, Tess. Make up with me,” he says, sliding off his pajama bottoms, pulling up my T-shirt, but not bothering to take it off. He kisses me hard on the mouth as he moves inside me, offering penance. I kiss him back just as urgently, my heart beating fast, my legs wrapping tight around him. All the while, I tell myself that I’m doing it because I love him. Not because I want to prove anything to him.

Yet, moments later, after I let go, and feel him doing the same, I hear myself whispering,
See, Nick? See that? It’s working. It’s working.

18

Valerie

Valerie watches Charlie intently coloring inside the lines of a jack-o’-lantern, alternating between an orange crayon for the pumpkin and a green for the stern, using careful, steady strokes. It is a boring project for a child his age, requiring no creativity whatsoever, but Charlie seems to understand that it is good for his hand and takes the assignment from his occupational therapist seriously.

She says his name as he draws a black cat in the background, exaggerating each whisker with long strokes. He ignores her, now staring at his drawing from several different angles, moving the paper rather than his head.

She says his name again, wanting only to ask what he wants for lunch. He finally looks up, but says nothing, making her wonder what kind of mood he’s in. It has been a few days since his surgery, and although she is more accustomed to
the mask covering his face, she is not yet used to the way it obscures his expressions, making it harder to tell what he’s thinking.

“I’m not Charlie,” he finally says, his voice low, scratchy, theatrical.

“Who are you then?” she says, playing along.

“An Imperial stormtrooper,” he replies ominously, sounding as much like a grown man as a six-year-old can.

Valerie smiles. She silently puts it on the list of benchmarks—first solid food, first walk around the halls, first joke at his own expense.

“I don’t even need a Halloween costume,” he says as Nick walks in.

Valerie feels her own face light up and is sure Charlie’s does, too. Never mind that they both know why he is here—to assess the graft and remove any accumulating fluid with a needle. The procedure is less painful than it looks, both because of the morphine Charlie’s still receiving intravenously and because nerves have not yet attached to the graft—but it is still not a pleasant one. Yet Nick manages to distract them both, as if the procedure is an ancillary part of his visit.

“Why’s that, buddy?” Nick asks. “Why don’t you need a costume?”

“ ‘Cause I’m already wearing a mask,” Charlie says, his voice a high soprano again.

Nick chuckles and says, “You got a point there.”

“I can be a stormtrooper or a mummy.”

“I’d go stormtrooper if I were you,” Nick says. “And I’ll be Darth Vader.”

You cannot hide forever, Luke,
Valerie thinks. And then,
I am your
father.
The only two
Star Wars
quotes she knows by heart, other than
May the force be with you.

“You have a Darth Vader costume?” Charlie asks him, reaching under his mask to scratch along his hairline.

“No. But I’m sure I could find one . . . Or, we could just pretend,” Nick says, raising an imaginary weapon.

“Yeah. We could pretend.”

Valerie feels a warm glow watching Nick and Charlie grin at one another, until Charlie’s voice grows earnest and he asks, “Are you coming to the party?” He is referring to the Halloween party in the rec center downstairs; all the patients and their families are invited to attend. Of course, she and Charlie plan to go, along with Jason and Rosemary.

“Oh, honey. Nick has two kids—I’m sure he’s taking them trickor-treating,” Valerie says quickly, as she unpackages the Spider-Man costume that Jason picked up at Target yesterday, the only one he could find that fit her two criteria—no horror connotation and a mask that would cover Charlie’s own mask.

“I’ll be there,” Nick says. “What time does it start?”

“Four o’clock,” she says reluctantly, giving him a look that she hopes conveys gratitude but also makes clear that this is above and beyond his duties as their surgeon.

She turns to him, her voice becoming soft. “Really, Nick,” she says. “You don’t have to . . .”

“I’ll be there,” Nick says again, running his hand over the blond stubble beginning to sprout from Charlie’s shaved, pink head.

She pictures Nick’s wife and children at home, waiting for him, and knows she should protest one more time. But instead she basks in the warm feeling in her chest, slowly spreading everywhere.

“That’s really nice of you,” she finally says, and nothing more.

***

Later that afternoon, while Charlie naps, Valerie begins to have second thoughts about accepting Nick’s spur-of-the-moment Halloween promise and feels the sudden need to let him off the hook. From years of logistical difficulties, she is well aware that Halloween is a two-parent operation, requiring one to stay home and pass out candy, the other to take the kids door-to-door—and recognizes the high likelihood of Nick’s wife balking at his decision to attend the hospital party. She wants to spare him that domestic squabble and avoid the awkward exchange that will ensue in the event he loses the debate. More important, the thought of a broken promise or anything smacking of a disappointment in Charlie’s life is too great for her to bear. So she decides to make a preemptive strike—a strategy she has come to know well.

She considers waiting for Nick’s next round to have the conversation, but feels a sense of urgency to settle matters before she can change her mind again. Rapidly removing her BlackBerry from her purse and Nick’s card from her wallet, she fights a wave of inexplicable nervousness and dials his number, hoping he’ll answer.

After the third ring, he answers abruptly, impatiently, as if he’s just been interrupted doing something very important—which is probably the case.

Valerie hesitates, suddenly regretting the call, feeling that she’s just made things even worse, that she has no right to call his personal cell even though he gave it to her.

“Hi, Nick,” she says. “It’s Valerie.”

“Oh! Hi, Valerie,” he says, his tone transforming into a familiar, friendly one. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Everything’s great,” she says, hearing background noise that does not sound like the hospital. “Is this a good time?” she asks, worrying that he might be with his family.

“Yeah,” he says. “What’s up?”

“Well, I just. . . wanted to talk to you about the Halloween party tomorrow,” she stammers.

“What about it?” he asks.

“Listen. It was so nice of you to say you’d come . . . But. . .”

“But what?” he says.

“But it’s Halloween.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sure you need to be somewhere else,” she says. “With your family. Your kids . . . and I just don’t feel comfortable . . .”

“Would it make you feel better to know that I was scheduled to work anyway?” he asks. “So unless you want to call the chief of staff and tell him that you think I should have the day off. . .”

“Are you really scheduled to work?” she replies, now pacing in the hall outside Charlie’s room, feeling simultaneously relieved and foolish for making such a big deal out of the party, and wondering why it never occurred to her that he could have been scheduled to work anyway. That his decision to attend might have
nothing
to do with them.

“Val—“ he says, the first time he has used the abbreviated form of her name, a fact that is not lost on her, a fact that she can’t help liking. “I want to be there. Okay?”

The warm glow returns to her chest. “Okay,” she says.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” he says. “I’m in the middle of buying a Darth Vader costume.”

“Okay,” she says. She feels a silly, uncontrollable grin spread over her face as she hangs up, doing her best not to admit to herself the real reason she just made the call.

19

Tessa

Over
the next few days, the marital gods shine upon our house and things start to feel good again. Nick is a model husband—calling from work just to say hello, coming home in time to put the kids to bed, even making me dinner one night. And yet, his effort doesn’t feel valiant or forced. Instead, he simply seems engaged, as if he’s part of our family’s biorhythms, absorbing the small moments that I sometimes feel I’m navigating alone. He’s so attentive, in fact, that I start to blame myself for our fight—which is always something of a relief, if only because it puts you back in control of your own life. Rachel and Cate, both of whom I confide in, agree that I was at least
partially
to blame for our rough patch, pointing to hormones, boredom, and general paranoia—the hallmarks of motherhood, Rachel jokes.

Our only setback comes on Halloween, mid-afternoon, when Nick calls from the hospital to tell me he likely won’t be able to make it back for trick-or-treating—and will definitely miss the neighborhood gathering at April’s beforehand. I refrain from reminding him that to children, Halloween is the second most sacred night of the year (perhaps the most sacred to Ruby, who has an epic sweet tooth), and that although I try not to subscribe to gender-role parenting, I believe trick-or-treating falls squarely in a father’s domain. Instead, I focus on the fact that he took Ruby to school this morning, staying to videotape her costume parade through the preschool hallways, then coming home to spend time with Frank before he left for work.

“Are you all right?” I ask calmly, supportively.

“Yeah, yeah. Just a lot going on here,” he says, sounding stressed and distracted but also disappointed, which has a way of mitigating my own disappointment. Then he asks if we’ll be okay without him, as far as handing-out-candy logistics go.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll just leave a bowl on the porch. We won’t be out very long. No big deal.”

***

And it really isn’t a big deal, I tell myself as Ruby, Frank, and I walk up the hill to April’s house just before dark and arrive to find her tying a cluster of orange and black balloons to her mailbox. I can tell at one glance that she’s already had several glasses of wine, and I suddenly feel in the mood for one myself. She blows me a kiss and then raves about how adorable Sharpay and Elmo are, her voice and gestures boisterous.