Hope Street (13 page)

“Is that a bad word, Mom?” Jessie asked, turning her big, hazel eyes to Ellie.

“No.” Ellie sank onto one of the chairs and watched her daughters smooth the plastic wrap around the plate.

“It sounds bad,” Jessie said, glaring at Katie. “I don’t think you should use bad-sounding words when Mom is upset.”

“I’m not upset,” Ellie assured her daughters. She’d already been branded a liar; one more lie didn’t make much difference.

“Anyway, we loved the house,” Katie insisted, patting Ellie’s shoulder. “Let’s go watch
The Secret Garden.
”

The girls disappeared to the den to view their new DVD. Alone in the silent kitchen, Ellie let her head drop into her hands. Another shudder passed through her.

Peter could be dramatic, she reminded herself. And the holiday excitement, the presents, the food and all the rest of it had wound him tightly. He’d overreacted to the news about Santa. It wasn’t Ellie’s fault. It wasn’t.

Yet guilt rolled over her like a tidal wave with a sharp undertow, dragging her down and pulling her away from shore. She’d betrayed her son. She’d—well, not lied, perhaps, but fudged the truth.

She was a failure.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat alone in the kitchen, inhaling the lingering scents of good food and hearing the muffled music and dialogue from the movie playing in the den. When she felt two strong hands alighting on her shoulders, she flinched. She’d been so lost in her thoughts, so busy wallowing in guilt, she hadn’t heard Curt enter the room.

She raised her head and peered over her shoulder at him. He massaged the base of her neck gently, rubbing his thumbs over the sore, knotted spots. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“The hell with me. How’s Peter?”

“Sulking. He’ll survive. You might even get an apology from him before bedtime.”

“I should apologize to him,” Ellie said glumly. “He’s right. I lied to him about Santa.”

Curt released her and circled around to the chair across the table from her. He gazed at her, then reached out and covered her hands in his. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, babe. You don’t have to be perfect.”

“Maybe not perfect, but I have to be good enough,” she countered. “I’m not.”

“Oh, Ellie…” He dragged her hands across the table and lifted them to his lips. He kissed one hand, then the other. “You’re good enough.”

This was why she loved him—because when her confidence slipped, he shored her up. When doubt gripped her, he pried that monster’s claws off her. When she was sure she wasn’t good enough, he insisted she was.

She wasn’t convinced, of course. Curt was telling her not the truth but what she needed to hear.

Sometimes, though, being lied to was a good thing. Maybe someday Peter would learn that.

In the meantime, Ellie treasured Curt’s lie, met his gaze and gave his hands a loving squeeze. The one thing her mother had said today that Ellie could agree with was that she should thank God every day for a husband like him….

S
TRETCHED OUT ON THE BED
, Ellie appeared wistful, lost in a reminiscence. Her eyes glittered, focused on something he couldn’t see.
Let me in,
he begged silently, then realized she wasn’t thinking about Africa, about the stuff she didn’t want to share with him.

“What?” he asked.

She smiled faintly. “I was just remembering the Christmas when Peter smashed the gingerbread house.”

“Oh, God.” Curt let out a short laugh. “What a horror show.”

“He could be awfully intense sometimes.”

“No kidding.”

“Remember when he got into a fistfight in the middle-school cafeteria because someone said his Little League team cheated?”

Curt laughed again. “I thought I’d have to represent him in court.”

“No one got hurt, as I recall. Sixth-graders don’t have big fists.”

“Yeah, but someone wound up with peanut butter in his hair.”

Ellie nodded. “And Peter’s shirt got torn. I wasn’t happy about that.”

“Then there was the time he went to some friend’s house and the two of them drank their way through the kid’s parents’ liquor stash,” Curt reminded her.

“Oh, God.” Ellie winced. “Peter and Doug Rauss. They always found trouble. That was the summer before they started high school.”

“Peter was sick as a dog.”

“A good thing, too. If he hadn’t vomited out all that crap, we might have had to take him to the hospital to get his stomach pumped.”

“Funny,” Curt said, though it wasn’t that funny at all, “when I think about Peter, I don’t remember the bad stuff, all the gray hair he gave us. My memory just sort of edits it out.”

Ellie sent him an odd look. Then she relaxed and picked up her glass of port, which sat where she’d left it on the nightstand, an inch of ruby liquid in it. “That’s the way memory works,” she agreed. “Selectively.”

“Defectively,” he corrected her.

“Self-protectively,” she corrected him back.

He studied her from his vantage in the wingback chair. The pillows behind her head had mussed her hair, and he wished he could slide his hands through it. He longed to rejoin her on the bed, to have her next to him, to feel the warmth of her and lean into the dip in the mattress caused by the weight of her body. Maybe the reason he wanted her now was that his memory had edited out all the bad things between them, all the reasons divorce had made so much sense when they’d broached the idea a month ago.

“Hit the play button,” she said, angling her head toward the TV. “Let’s keep going.”

He wondered if she’d read his thoughts and decided to use
the movie to distract him. He wasn’t so easily distracted—the movie only reminded him of how good things had once been between them—but he wasn’t about to pressure her. That he’d gotten her to trust him enough to return with him to their
très
romantic room was some kind of miracle.

He tapped a button on the remote and the movie resumed. The screen went black, and then a written caption appeared in stark white: “They say the greatest tragedy a mother can experience is to outlive her child.”

The muscles in Curt’s neck tensed. He’d known it was coming—any story of Ellie’s life would have to include this part—and he’d been worried about how she would respond. He’d neglected to consider his own response. But damn, it was going to be hard on him, too. To outlive one’s child was also the greatest tragedy a father could experience.

A series of photos filled the screen, one fading into the next: Peter at around age four, towheaded and freckled, standing between his two sisters and reaching up to hold their hands. Peter perched on Curt’s shoulders, his grin so big it nearly split his face. Peter in front of the Magic Kingdom castle at Walt Disney World, a Goofy sunhat on his head. Peter in a school portrait, stiff and formal against a blue-gray background. Peter with one of his Little League teams. Peter with one of his basketball teams. Peter with Ellie and Curt at his middle-school graduation ceremony, dressed in pressed khakis and a collared polo shirt, one hand clutching the various certificates and citations he’d received and the other arched around Ellie’s shoulders. That was the year he’d surpassed Ellie in height. He clearly had an inch on her in the photo. Her smile was as bright as his.

The montage was accompanied by a plaintive Warren Zevon song. Curt recalled how much Peter had loved the old Zevon
hit “Werewolves of London.” He’d been too young to know what a werewolf was, but whenever Curt sang that song to Peter, he’d howl along: “Aaa-oooh!” He’d sounded as wild as a mystical beast.

Peter had probably never heard the song Jessie and Katie had chosen for this part of their movie, though. Zevon had recorded it when he himself was dying of cancer—a wistful ballad imploring his loved ones to remember him once he was gone. “Keep me in your heart for a while,” he crooned in a broken, heartfelt voice.

The images on the screen blurred as Curt’s vision filled with tears. He closed his eyes but couldn’t shut out his own pictures of Peter, all elbows and knees, all fierce energy. So much love in that boy, so much righteous indignation. Just like Curt, he’d wanted to conquer the world. Just like Ellie, he’d wanted to save it.

The song washed around Curt and he swallowed, struggling against the sorrow that welled up inside him.
The greatest tragedy was for a parent to outlive a child.
Christ, what an understatement.

He hadn’t heard Ellie’s approach, but suddenly, her hand rested on the back of his neck, caressing. She pried the remote from his fist and the song stopped. She must have paused the DVD. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled, ducking his head so she wouldn’t see his tears. Damn it. He wasn’t fine. He was falling apart.

She walked away—with the movie’s soundtrack no longer playing, he could hear her footsteps—and then returned and dabbed at his face with a tissue. He pulled the tissue away from her. He wasn’t going to have her wiping his tears as if he were a helpless child.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, opening his eyes and gazing at her.

She was kneeling on the floor in front of him, gazing up into his face. “This is the first time you’ve cried,” she said quietly.

She didn’t have to finish the sentence.
The first time you’ve cried since we lost Peter.
“I’ve cried plenty,” he said.

“I never saw you cry.”

“I cry in the shower.” He meant to use the past tense, but the truth slipped out. He still wept for Peter sometimes—in the shower, or when he was jogging on the treadmill at the fitness center near his office and his tears were camouflaged by the sweat dripping down his face. Or sometimes at night, when Ellie was asleep and he lay beside her in their cold, loveless bed, and grief crashed over him.

Now Ellie knew—not only that he cried, but that he deliberately concealed his tears from her. He’d never wanted to break down in front of her. She’d been such a wreck after Peter’s death—withdrawn, out of touch, teetering on the razor-edge of clinical depression. She’d been emotionally mutilated. One of them had had to remain strong, so Curt had remained strong.

“You should have told me,” she said.

He heard a hint of reproach in her tone, and it transformed his embarrassment into anger. “Told you what?” he retorted. “That I was hurting, too? You needed to be told that?”

“I only meant, you shouldn’t have hidden your feelings from me.”

“I didn’t.” His tears were gone now, his resentment building. “I was quite clear about how I felt and what I needed. You didn’t want to hear it, Ellie. Every time I reached for you, you shut me out and retreated into yourself. My feelings disgusted you. So I stopped sharing them.”

His outburst vibrated in the air, hot and bitter. Ellie held his gaze for a second, then turned from him. She pushed herself to stand and moved back to the bed, her head held high but her steps uncertain.

He’d drawn blood and it felt good. Maybe he was a son of a bitch—Ellie undoubtedly believed he was—but he took satisfaction in making sure she knew she wasn’t the only one who’d been betrayed. She wasn’t the only one with ugly scars etched onto her soul, the remnants of wounds inflicted by the person she’d married.

He watched as she sat on the edge of the mattress near the night table, her feet planted on the floor and her hands resting on her knees. She still held the remote control. Fine. Let her control the freaking movie. She liked to think she was the injured party in all this, but the fact was, she’d always been in control.

Curt was passionately in love with her, insanely dependent on her—but she didn’t need him. She had Africa, after all. She’d saved a kid’s hearing. She’d probably saved a few kids’ lives, too. She’d been respected over there, revered. Loved.

Damn it,
he
hadn’t sent her to Africa. She’d chosen to go there, eager to put as much distance between herself and him as she could. She’d walked away from him, all the while insisting that he’d walked away from her. If he had, it was only after she’d slammed the door and bolted it.

She’d been in control all along.

She startled him by speaking. “I still miss him. Every day. Every minute. Even when I think about him smashing the gingerbread house or chugging booze with his friend.” She glanced toward Curt but didn’t meet his stare. “I don’t cry that much, though.”

“You cried earlier this evening,” he reminded her, the rage gone from his voice.

She nodded and lowered her gaze to her hands in her lap, folded around the remote. “I wasn’t crying for Peter then,” she reminded him.

He frowned, trying to recall what the movie had been dealing
with when she’d started sobbing earlier.
Them.
Their courtship. Their love. She was done crying over Peter, but not over their dying marriage.

We don’t have to get a divorce.
The words hovered on his tongue, so close to slipping out. But her face was shuttered, her thoughts as far away as Ghana. And really, what could he say to change her mind at this point? He’d apologized a thousand times. He’d told her he loved her. She’d told him she could never trust him again. And she hadn’t told him she loved him.

In those stolen moments when he wept for his son, he acknowledged, he was crying for other losses, too. He was crying for the woman he’d once been convinced was all he would ever want. He was crying for all the promises their love had held. He was crying because, somehow, he’d been exiled from Hope Street.

Three Years Ago

L
ATE
M
ARCH WAS STILL
roaring in. When would the lamb part replace the lion part? Curt wondered as he steered up Birch Lane. The road was fringed with dirty mounds of snow, and his front lawn, barely visible in the evening gloom, was crisp and brown. But the living-room windows glowed amber and the lights above the garage doors were on, brightening the driveway and making him smile at the knowledge that he’d soon be inside all that warmth, with his family.

It had taken him several months to get used to Katie’s absence. Ellie had suffered full-blown empty-nest syndrome once they’d lugged the last of Katie’s things up the stairs to her third-floor dorm room at Wesley an and kissed her goodbye. That two more children still lived with them had provided small comfort for Ellie. She’d whined and moped and hovered for long stretches of time in the doorway of Katie’s unnaturally neat, empty bedroom, unable to accept that her first born had truly left home. She’d barraged Katie with e-mails and instant messages. And eventually, she’d adjusted.

This year, Katie’s second year away at school, had gone better. But now Ellie was gearing up for Jessie’s graduation and her departure for college. Jessie had received an early-decision acceptance to Bates College, up in Maine. Two and a half hours by car. Much too far, according to Ellie. Wesleyan was only an hour and a half away. Why did Jessie need to go so much farther from home than Katie?

At least they would still have Peter. And frankly, Curt thought as he recalled Peter’s recent booze-bingeing escapade with his moronic friend Doug, once their son was gone Curt and Ellie might just heave sighs of relief.

He steered into the garage, shut off the engine, grabbed his briefcase and entered the house. The kitchen’s atmosphere was thick with a warm, beefy fragrance that negated the chill of the early-spring night outside. A small pile of mail sat on the table, waiting for him. He riffled through it—all junk—and tossed it into the trash can unopened.

“Hi,” Ellie said as she swept into the kitchen. Her hair was pulled back in a barrette, and the overhead light caught the streaks of reddish-blond in it. A few years ago, he’d asked her why she was highlighting it that way—he’d always thought it looked great when it was just a rich, pretty brown—and she explained that the highlights helped to cover the gray. Curt hadn’t noticed much gray in her hair, but then he didn’t really
see
her anymore. She was Ellie, she was beautiful, and if her face had developed a few lines over the years, if her waist had increased by an inch or two, her hair acquired a smattering of gray, the changes didn’t register on him.

He opened his arms and she moved in for a quick hug, then drew back. “Peter’s in bed,” she said, and he realized she was talking more softly than usual. “When he got home from school,
he said he was tired and had a headache. I just tried to give him some chicken broth, but he wasn’t hungry.”

“Peter not hungry? The world must be coming to an end.” Curt scowled. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. Just run-down, I think. They’re doing those two-hour practices every day for the freshman baseball team. He really wants to make the team, so he’s knocking himself out.” She shook her head and left Curt’s side to check something in the oven. “Freshmen shouldn’t have two-hour daily practices. It’s not like they’re varsity.”

“So he’s not having dinner with us?” Curt asked, tugging his tie loose.

“I left him a bottle of Gatorade. He’ll drink that.”

“Is that good for him?”

She gave him a haughty look. “Who’s the medical professional here?” When he held up his hands in mock surrender, she smiled. “Those sports drinks are great, especially if he isn’t eating. They’ll keep him from getting dehydrated, balance his electrolytes and give him some energy.”

“Whatever you say.” Curt peeked over Ellie’s shoulder at the contents of the oven—all he saw was a casserole dish—and then went upstairs to exchange his suit for some comfortable clothes. Once he was in jeans and a flannel shirt, he walked down the hall, passing Jessie’s closed bedroom door, through which he heard her babbling on the phone, and tapped on Peter’s before he inched it open. “Hey, buddy,” he murmured. Peter was sprawled out under the blanket, his body intermittently illuminated by the swirling colors of his computer’s screen saver, flashing beams of light from his desk.

“Hey, Dad,” Peter grunted.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Shitty.” Peter laughed. “Sorry. Just tired.”

“Mom said you’re planning to sleep through dinner.”

“I’ll eat something later,” Peter promised.

“Okay, pal. You want me to turn off your computer?”

“Nah. It’s not bothering me.”

Curt left, closing the door behind him. Peter’s voice had been dropping in pitch all year, and it now rested somewhere between a tenor and a baritone. Next year he’d probably be shaving, whether or not he needed to. Curt smiled, anticipating that ritual. He remembered his father ushering him into the bathroom and showing him how to whip up a rich lather with a badger brush and a mug of shaving soap, how to stretch his skin to avoid nicking himself, how to trim his sideburns evenly. Not that he’d had sideburns when he was fifteen, or even much of a beard. But he’d felt so close to his father that morning. They’d been two men then, not a father and a little boy.

Soon, Curt thought, he and Peter would be two men together at the mirror, sharing that manly ritual.

Jessie collided with him in the hall near the top of the stairs. “Hey, Dad! Amanda and Kirsten and I are going to the mall tonight, okay?”

She was already halfway down the stairs before he answered, “It’s a school night.”

“Dad.” She favored him with a classically scornful glare, lips pursed and eyes rolling. “I’m a senior, I got into college and I don’t have any homework due tomorrow. And we’ll be home by ten, anyway.”

“All right,” he said, aware that he didn’t have much clout with her anymore. She was eighteen, old enough to drive, to vote, to enlist in the armed forces if she wanted. He and Ellie had done their job with her as best they could, and she’d turned out
pretty wonderful. If she wanted to go to the mall with her friends, Curt couldn’t stop her.

Jessie gulped down her dinner and waltzed out of the house, leaving Curt and Ellie to linger over their food, refill their wine-glasses and share the news of their days. In only a few more years, all their dinners would be like this—just the two of them, catching up, bouncing ideas off each other, sipping their wine. Ellie resting her feet in Curt’s lap under the table. Curt absorbing her words and the glow in her eyes and undressing her in his mind. No worries about kids barging in on them. No demands to be driven here or there, to sign this or that form, to critique an essay on
Anna Karenina
or the Emancipation Proclamation.

Ellie would be devastated, at least temporarily, when all her babies flew the nest. But Curt would distract her. Sex in the kitchen. Sex in the family room. Sex on the stairs, like in that movie she’d loved so much, with the actor who went on to play James Bond in a few 007 flicks. Watching one’s children grow up and leave home could make a person melancholy, but there were compensations.

Curt volunteered to clear the table while Ellie went upstairs to check on Peter. She returned after a minute and carried the casserole dish to the refrigerator. “I don’t think Peter’s going to be eating tonight,” she reported. “He’s out cold. Or maybe I should say out warm. I think he’s running a fever.”

“Should we call the doctor?”

Ellie shook her head. “I gave him some ibuprofen, and he rolled over and went back to sleep. There are lots of little bugs making the rounds at the moment. It’s the end of a long winter. Kids are run-down. We’ve got about a dozen cases of strep throat at my school. If Peter’s throat is bothering him tomorrow, I’ll take him in for a culture.” As Curt rinsed the dishes and she
stacked them in the dishwasher, she told him about the student at her school who’d been diagnosed with croup earlier that week. “It’s got such a distinctive cough,” she said. “At least Peter doesn’t have that.”

Finished with the dishes, Ellie settled at her desk to pay bills while Curt reviewed his notes from a complicated case he’d gotten dragged into at the firm—professors from two different universities suing each other over research they’d collaborated on. It was like a divorce, except that the baby they were fighting for custody over—their research—had a monetary value. Curt’s firm and the firm representing the other researcher had to figure out what that value was and how to divide it. No matter what they negotiated, the settlement was doomed to end with hurt feelings and bristling resentment. He hated cases like that.

At nine-thirty, he tossed the file aside and beckoned Ellie to join him on the sofa. They caught the last half of a college basketball game on TV, Ellie nestled against him. After a few minutes she dozed off, her head heavy against his chest and her breathing deep and steady. She roused herself when Jessie bounced in at around ten-thirty, carrying a few bags with boutique logos on them. Curt and Ellie followed Jessie up the stairs, but while she no doubt intended to spend at least another hour exchanging instant messages with her friends, her drowsy parents were ready to tumble into bed.

Curt almost didn’t have enough energy to make love to Ellie. Almost. He could always muster the energy for that. Fortunately, Ellie was too drowsy to demand acrobatics and fireworks tonight. All she wanted was what he wanted: the closeness, the release, the gorgeous lethargy that settled onto them afterward and escorted them to sleep.

He climbed out of bed ahead of Ellie the next morning. He
usually rose before she did; since he had a longer commute to work, he got first dibs on the master bathroom. Once he was showered and dressed, he went downstairs to get the coffee started.

Jessie was already in the kitchen, wearing a snug shirt he’d never seen, and even snugger jeans. “Hey, Dad,” she greeted him, amazingly cheerful for 7:00 a.m. No one else in the family was a morning person. Curt liked to joke that Jessie was their foundling, having inherited some other family’s circadian rhythms. Whenever he said that, she’d always retort, “Yeah, my real family left me in a basket on your porch because I looked exactly like you.” Of all three children, she did resemble him the most.

“You want French toast?” she asked, pulling the container of eggs out of the fridge. “I’m making some for myself.”

French toast was too much bother this early in the morning. “Plain toast is fine for me. Get out the milk for your mother. She’ll probably have cereal,” he mumbled, waiting impatiently for the coffee to finish brewing so he could pump some caffeine into his body.

“Curt?” Ellie’s voice shot down the stairs. She sounded wide-awake, too—but not bubbly like Jessie.

Her sharp tone was enough to rouse him fully. He bolted for the stairs. “What’s up?”

“It’s Peter.” Ellie stood at the top of the stairway, but as soon as he drew near, she spun and raced down the hall to Peter’s bedroom. “He’s burning up, Curt. He’s spiking a fever. We’ve got to get him looked at.”

“For a fever?” Kids got fevers sometimes, and Peter was a strong, strapping boy. Couldn’t they just dose him with some aspirin or something?

“A high fever.”

Ellie’s terse comment rattled Curt. If Peter had a high enough fever to alarm Ellie, aspirin wasn’t going to do the trick.

Curt trailed her into Peter’s room. The computer screen saver was still spinning, spraying colors around the room and splashing odd hues across Peter’s pale face. He lay in bed, his eyes half-closed and his respiration shallow. Curt didn’t have to touch him to feel his fever. Waves of heat rose off his body.

“Hey, buddy—what’s going on?” Curt asked gently.

“My head hurts,” Peter groaned. “My neck…”

“I can’t get him in to see his doctor this early,” Ellie whispered to Curt. “We’re taking him to the hospital.”

The hospital? For a
fever?

He drew in a deep breath. As Ellie had said last night, she was the medical professional. If she thought Peter needed to go to the hospital, Curt wouldn’t argue.

With a nod, he turned and strode from the room. He descended the stairs so quickly he didn’t feel his feet touch them. In the kitchen, he grabbed his wallet and keys and switched off the coffeemaker. “Peter is sick,” he told Jessie bluntly. “We’re taking him to the hospital. Call your mother’s school and tell them she won’t be coming in today.”

Jessie’s eyes widened with alarm. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing serious, I hope. We’re just going to make sure.”

“Do you want me to call your office?”

“No, I’ll call them.”

“What about me?”

He shrugged. “Go to school.”

“Curt?” Ellie was yelling for him again.

Jessie looked so worried he hated to abandon her. “Keep your cell phone with you,” he said. “I’ll call you as soon as we know what’s going on.”

“Okay.” She sounded shaky.

“Hey. He’s going to be fine,” Curt promised, then he kissed Jessie’s forehead and dashed back up the stairs.

Peter was too weak to stand. Curt managed to hoist him over his shoulder, one hundred and forty pounds of muscle and dangling limbs plus the blanket in which he was wrapped. Somehow they made it down the stairs, through the kitchen and out to the garage without banging into anything.

Ellie sat in the backseat with Peter as Curt drove through town in the murky morning light. A cold rain was falling, or maybe it was sleet, tapping like pebbles against the roof of his car. He felt chilled, even with the car’s heater blasting. Was heat good or bad for someone running a high fever? Damn it, did they really have to take Peter to the hospital?

What kind of illness caused a kid to spike a fever? Peter had been vaccinated for all those childhood diseases—measles, mumps, whatever. Strep throat? Ellie had said that was making the rounds. She’d also said she thought Peter was run-down—but kids didn’t spike fevers from fatigue.