Suddenly (18 page)

“Actively,” he said with what she could have sworn was a grin and a smug one at that, but when she shot him a look, his lean lips were carefully controlled.

Intent first and foremost on flight, she started off down the drive in the direction of the woods, wanting to be there when the first of the girls appeared. But there was Noah, beside her in no time at all.

“That’s a very rude habit,” he informed her from the edge of the umbrella.

“What is?” she said without breaking stride.

“Turning and walking away. You do it a lot.”

“You’ll get poked if you stay there.” The umbrella was bobbing with each step, its spiked tips perilously close to Noah’s face.

“Raise the umbrella.”

“I’ll get wet.”

“Okay, then stop walking and tell me why you can’t stand still.”

His saying she couldn’t do it was reason enough for her to prove him wrong. She stopped walking and stood still in the rain. “I walk away because I have places to go and things to do. My life has become complicated in the past two weeks. I’m feeling stressed. Besides, I don’t know how to deal with you. You’re intimidating.”

“Me?”

She stared at him.

“Okay,” he conceded, “so I’m authoritative.”

“And large and imposing and persistent.”

“Those are qualities that get things done.”

She thought of their night on the grass. He had been large and imposing and persistent then, but in incredibly appealing ways. Given her frame of mind, she hadn’t had a chance.

She started walking again. He was beside her in an instant. She tried to steady the umbrella.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

She humored him. “What am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking that you were vulnerable that night and that I used those same qualities to accomplish the seduction that I’d had in mind right from the start, but you’re wrong. If I’d had sex on my mind when I was driving over there, I’d have brought a rubber.”

Paige glanced around nervously. “Can’t we talk about this another time?”

“I’d like to, but you keep shooting me down. Tell me when, and we’ll talk.”

But Paige changed her mind. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to forget that anything had happened that night, and God willing, once she got her period she could do that. “Look,” she said with a sigh, stopping again well short of the crowd waiting at the edge of the woods, “there really isn’t any point in talking. What happened the other night was an aberration. It was a weak moment for me. I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Because,” she said deliberately, “there’s no future to it. My life is chock full. I have more than enough to keep me busy without juggling a relationship with you, and besides, you’re here for a year, then you’ll be gone, so what’s the point?” She started walking, quickening her pace when a runner emerged from the woods.

It wasn’t one of Mount Court’s. Nor was the second runner. Or the third. Sara, who was indeed the first of the Mount Court girls to cross the finish line, was the seventh overall to do it. Annie placed second for Mount Court, eleventh overall, Merry third, fourteenth overall.

It was a dismal showing for Paige’s team.

She didn’t say as much to the girls. Nor did Noah, who commended each—with enthusiasm—on a fine run as she crossed the finish line.

Unable to forget what he had told her—fascinated, actually, the more she thought about it—Paige watched him with Sara. He asked her how the course had been, asked her where she had felt strongest and weakest, and told her no less than three times how well she had run. She answered him in a bare minimum of words, and when he put a hand on her shoulder, she turned away.

Paige felt for him. She didn’t want to, but she did. It seemed to her one of the great tragedies of life that families couldn’t get along.

“Dear Lizzie,” she read later that afternoon, as she sat on the floor, rocking Sami in the portable swing:

Paige put down the letter. She was the intruder, the eavesdropper, the Peeping Tom on Mara’s thoughts. She knew it was wrong to read another person’s mail, had deliberately left the packet of letters at Mara’s the night before so that she wouldn’t be tempted, but it hadn’t worked.

On her way home from Mount Court she had detoured to the house, which the family moving to town had adored. Preliminary papers had been drawn up. They were hoping to move in within the month, which left Paige the unenviable task now, on top of all else, of disposing of its contents. On this day, her sole conscious intent had been to take home the best of Mara’s photographs, but with little more than a fast glance at the photos she had gone to the wicker basket and dug through the balls of yarn until her fingers had hit the packet of letters. When she drew it out, she found that it was a different packet from the other, these letters written on blue stationery, tied with red yarn. On impulse she had upended the wicker basket and found four packets in all, each containing anywhere from six to ten letters. Taking a single photograph to ease her conscience, she had brought the letters home.

She would send them on, perhaps, one day when she could bear to part with them. For now they seemed the only source of clues to the mystery of Mara.

“Do you remember the time,” Mara wrote on:

which dated the letter to three years earlier, Paige realized, and read on:

Pained, Paige set the letter aside. She didn’t understand how Mara could consider herself a failure, but the thought had been in the first letter, too.

“How are you doing, sweetie?” she asked Sami, who was a small lump in the formless seat of the swing. Carefully she lifted her out, and in a voice so light that it belied the gist of the words, said, “She wasn’t a failure, but she was coming from a different place from her parents. Like me, I suppose. Only I have Nonny.” She folded her legs and propped Sami in the middle, then squiggled a finger toward the little girl’s tummy, tickled for a minute, withdrew, and squiggled forward again. “I think you’re putting on weight. There’s more here than there was this time last week.” She tickled. “Come on, Sami. I want a smile. Just a little one to let me know I’m doing things right.” She was in the middle of another squiggle when the phone rang. She answered it with Sami propped on her hip.

“Hello?”

“You asked what the point was,” Noah said without preamble, “and I say that the point is pure fun. You have too much going on in your life to be involved, and I’ll be outta here at the end of the year, but in the meantime it might be nice to have some fun.”

She took a steadying breath. Even his
voice
upped the temperature a notch. “Fun is watching a movie or playing Boggle or discussing a book. What we did wasn’t fun. It was sex.”

“Sex is fun.”

“It was an escape. It wasn’t rational. I’m not sure I was aware of what was happening.”

“And you’re a totally rational creature,” he said on a note of exasperation that didn’t bother her one bit. Let him be exasperated. In the long run, it was better that way.

She thought of Sara, amazed all over again at the relationship between the two. She wondered how often Noah had seen her over the years, wondered how close they were. If there was caring, Sara had never let on—neither when the other girls had been denigrating Noah nor when he had reached out to her after the race. And then there was Noah’s own declaration that Sara wouldn’t confide in him. Clearly their relationship had problems.

Paige wondered if he ever felt like a failure where Sara was concerned.

“Well,” he went on, all business now, Head of School to cross-country coach, “for a totally rational creature, you’re missing something when it comes to your team. They ran terribly.”

When Sami reached hesitantly for the phone cord, Paige nudged it into her hand. “The conditions weren’t ideal.”

“They were the same for the other squads, and they ran better than we did. You’re too lax, Paige. That’s the problem. I’ve watched practices where you and the girls sit talking.”

“When something important comes up, we talk. I believe in doing that, and I don’t care if we lose every race we run, if my talk can help these kids through the nightmare of adolescence. Actually, though,” she thought aloud, “we haven’t done much talking lately. Lately we’ve worked hard.”

“So why such a lousy showing?”

Paige sighed. “No great mystery. Our girls don’t see themselves as runners, and they sure don’t see themselves as winners. But that’s what we need, a win. One win. That’s all. It’ll turn the tide.”

“How do you get the win without changing the self-image first?”

“That’s what I have to figure out. Any suggestions?”

Noah had one, but he wasn’t sharing it with Paige. He was annoyed with her because not only had he thoroughly enjoyed making love to her, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. She might have been unaware of what was going on, but he sure hadn’t been. He remembered every detail, from the way her hands had stolen over his body, to the way her nipples had hardened under his tongue, to the tiny sounds that had come from her throat at the moment of climax.

Her desire to dismiss the whole thing annoyed the hell out of him. So he didn’t say a word about his plan—it was none of her goddamn business—and at that moment he wasn’t sure it would work, anyway. There were permissions to secure and equipment to buy, steal, or borrow, and even then he was taking a chance. Granted, history was in his favor, but he was still going out on a limb for a project that could fail. Given the Mount Court community’s questionable opinion of him, on top of Sara’s decidedly negative one, failure was the last thing he needed.

A
NGIE CAME HOME FROM WORK EARLY. SHE
had shifted appointments to free up a few extra hours, not quite sure what she would do with them, knowing only that she had to do something. She had been working longer and longer hours, hoping that the demands of her job would blot out painful thoughts, but the thoughts remained. If pushed aside, they crowded back at the first chance. She couldn’t escape them. Her life had become a nightmare of going through the motions of the ordinary, while nothing about it was ordinary at all.

Dougie, who had always before been free with words and affection, was suddenly miserly with both. During drives to and from school, he sat silently in the car, giving the briefest answers to her questions, volunteering little. It wasn’t much better at home, where he spent the bulk of his time in his room, either studying or on the phone. Clearly he had issues that weighed heavily on his mind, not the least of which, now, was the tension between his parents.

Ben barely looked at her, rarely spoke to her, certainly never touched her. He was living at home without being there—although even the latter was in doubt now. She had thought he would be working when she got home, but the house was deserted. His studio was dark, pens capped and papers neatened. The television was off. His car was gone.

She sat down at the kitchen table, not waiting so much as trying to decide what to do next. If Ben had been home, they might have talked. She supposed that had been at the back of her mind when she had left work early. But the house was as silent and empty as her mind. She felt helpless. The paralysis of not knowing what to do was nearly as bad as the not knowing itself.

The irony of it was that she knew plenty, just not the right things. She knew how the human body worked, had taken course after course on its intricacies, and had become a skilled mechanic. She could take what was there, clean it, patch it, and get it working again, but she couldn’t create. She couldn’t produce something where nothing was before. She couldn’t take emptiness and fill it with meaning.

With neither her husband nor her son talking to her, she felt as though something vital had been removed, as though her body were continuing to function on the force of momentum alone. But it couldn’t continue for long. The hollow inside was large and growing. Like a black hole, it would swallow her up in time.

She wondered where Ben was. Wondered if he had gone to the post office. Or the Tavern. Or the library.

She laced her fingers together on the table, them unlaced them and laid them flat on the inlaid tiles. Her hands were slender, straight, and efficient hands, their fingernails neatly filed and unpainted. After years of being washed umpteen times a day, moisturizing was little more than a placebo. She had a worker’s hands. They showed their forty-two years in every crease, every tiny scar, every vein that hadn’t been as prominent the year before.

She sighed and looked at the window. Her reflection looked back, midnight black hair that was cut on an angle toward her chin to give a look of practical chic. Her face was pale and slim. She was a petite woman whose knowledge level had always added inches to her height.

Her knowledge level was zip now, making her feel small, forlorn, and powerless. She laced her fingers together again, unlaced them seconds later, then tucked them in her lap. She thought about the past and how efficiently she had run her life, thought about the trauma of the present, worried about the future. Once Dougie was off to college, it would be just Ben and her in ways that it had never, in the entire course of their marriage, ever been.

She heard Ben’s car turn into the driveway and, shot through with sudden jitters, rose from the chair. There were things to do, always things to do. Idleness accomplished nothing and only left more to be done down the road. She could start dinner, or put in a load of laundry, or water the plants, or call the bank about the new bankcard that was overdue.

But she didn’t do any of those things. It was as though the paralysis that was in command of her mind now spread to her knees. She sank limply down on the chair.

He parked the car. She heard the door slam shut, heard his footsteps on the walk, then the steps. He opened the kitchen door, came in, and stopped short.

“Angie. I didn’t know you were home.”

“I parked in the garage,” she said, wondering what would have happened if she hadn’t, whether he would have driven on past. He wasn’t pleased to see her; she could hear it in his voice. Uneasy, she rubbed her fingers together, steepling the thumbs.

“Is something wrong?” he asked warily.

She nearly laughed. Was something wrong? The most basic thing in their lives was wrong. She gaped at him.

“I meant,” he specified, “are you sick?”

She shook her head.

“Dougie isn’t due home for two hours,” he pointed out.

“I know.”

He regarded her cautiously, waiting, poised at the door as though he could go either way, in or out, with a word.

“Why is it I feel like the guilty one?” she asked when she couldn’t stand him staring at her, silent, guarded, subtly accusatory. “You’re the one having the affair, but I’m guilty. It doesn’t make sense.”

His look said it made sense indeed. She was the one who had deprived him during their marriage and driven him to seek comfort in another woman. If he had been wrong in taking a mistress, she had been wrong long before that.

She felt a heaviness in her legs, her middle, her arms, and for the first time wondered if there was a positive side to paralysis. It freed its victim from action, from response and responsibility.

But if she didn’t act, no one would. Ben had always taken his lead from her, and she had never minded before. Right now, she did. She wished that for once he would be the initiator.

But she had trained him well. He waited.

Finally, with a sigh, she said, “I think we have to talk.”

“We?” Ben asked. “Or you?”

“You,” she shot back, pouring into that single word every bit of the negative feeling she had. Ben had hurt her beyond belief. Nothing she had done to him merited that. “I need you to tell me what’s happening here. We go through the bare motions of life as usual, but it’s a farce. Our family is falling apart. We walk around each other. We avoid looking each other in the eye. There’s zero communication.”

He didn’t move a muscle.

“Ben?”

He shrugged. “What can I add? You just said it all.”

She took a shaky breath. Old habits died hard; he wasn’t helping in the least.

Quietly, wearily, humbly, she said, “Please, Ben. Tell me what you’re thinking. What you’re
honestly
thinking. I’m not telling you anything, I’m asking. I don’t know what’s going on in your mind. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“That’s a change,” he said.

She looked at her hands. “Okay. I deserved that.” She looked away. “But it’s been a way of life, knowing what to do. I’ve always taken pride in it, and no one—including you—ever discouraged me from being that way. But I never thought I was putting you down. You may have felt that, but I didn’t intend it. I was just being me.”

“Little Miss Perfect.”

She studied her hands. The force of his resentment continued to stun her with sharp, grazing blows. Gathering the tatters of her self-esteem, she said, “Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Talk to me, Ben. Tell me where we go next. Tell me what you want to happen. You say that I never hear you. I’m trying to do that now, but I can’t hear unless you speak.”

He stuck his hands in the waist of his cords and stood thinking for a while before finally saying, “Okay. We have to do something about Doug. He’s annoyed with both of us right now. I doubt he says any more to me than he does to you. I got a call from his Spanish teacher this morning asking if there was a problem at home.”

“How did
she
know?” Angie asked in sudden horror. She suddenly imagined the whole
world
knew, and she was appalled.

“He failed a test yesterday. He’s never done that before.”

“Not by a long shot,” Angie said, feeling an awful defeat. It wasn’t the grade. No one made it through school without an F or two. He could make up the test or average it in with his others. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he wouldn’t have failed a test if he wasn’t deeply upset.

“So,” Ben said, “we have to talk with him.”

Several weeks before, Angie would have done that on her own. But Ben had accused her of being controlling and manipulative. So she asked, “What should we say?”

He shifted one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

She studied her fingers. If he didn’t know, and if she wasn’t supposed to tell him, where did that leave them? Holding her tongue, she looked up and waited.

After what seemed an eternity, he said, “There are two issues. One has to do with what’s going on between us. The other has to do with him and the space he needs.”

“They’re connected,” she said, and regretted it the instant she heard his drawl.

“Obviously, but one is more easily solved than the other.” The drawl gave way to something more serious. “I think we should let him board at school.”

She shook her head fast. Everything inside her rebelled at the idea, but she didn’t say a word until Ben asked, “Why not?”

She calmed herself. “Because he’s too young.”

“He’s in eighth grade. Mount Court kids start boarding in seventh.”

“But if he’s failing Spanish, he may need more supervision.” She had a cursory knowledge of the language and tested him regularly on vocabulary.

“He isn’t failing Spanish,” Ben corrected. “He failed one test. And he might get better supervision at school, what with mandatory study halls every night.”

“He’ll be overwhelmed, being with kids constantly.”

“Maybe. He’ll probably say that that’s better than being here every night. You smother, and I work. And he’s a lonely only. It would be different if he had a sibling.”

“We agreed that one would keep us busy enough.”

“You agreed. Another Angie dictum.”

“Well, damn it, you didn’t argue, so you’re every bit as much at fault!” She thought back to when Dougie was little. She couldn’t even remember their discussing having another child. They had planned everything just so to allow for Angie’s return to work.

They
had planned? Or
she
had planned? She had the awful thought that it was the latter.

“Well,” she said with a discouraged sigh, “it’s a little late to be talking about this now. Just like it’s a little late to be talking about Dougie boarding. The semester’s already begun. I doubt they’d take him.”

Ben guffawed. “Mount Court? For the price of room and board, they’d take a baboon.”

Angie felt as though she were in a game of tug-of-war, with Dougie in the middle and Ben on the other side. “Do you have no qualms at all?” she asked, bewildered.

“Of course I have qualms. I love the kid, too. I like having him around. But he wants this, Angie.”

“He also wants a car for his sixteenth birthday, but that doesn’t mean we have to give him one.”

“Not the same at all,” Ben said. “A car is a luxury. Granted, boarding is, too, but at least it’s an experience with some merit to it.”

“You’re right. Boarders learn great things.”

“You don’t think he’ll learn those things anyway? You don’t think he knows that some cigarettes don’t have tobacco in them? You don’t think he knows what the term
druggie
means? Come on, Angie, get real. He’s a bright kid. He’s a
normal
kid. He’ll be discussing girls’ breasts with his friends whether he boards or not, and if he wants a condom, he’ll get one without asking you to buy it.”

“He’s only fourteen!” she protested.

“It doesn’t mean he’s going to
use
one, but guys talk about it for years before they do it.” He put a hand on the back of his head and held on tight. Angie hadn’t seen that gesture since the day they had moved to Vermont, when the moving company had dropped his computer. “Jesus, Angie, think about it, will you? You raised the boy. For fourteen years you’ve been teaching him to be honest and considerate and hardworking. Those values are part of him now. It’s not like all of a sudden he’s going to forget them—unless you put him in a little cage and make him break his way out by whatever means he can find. Give him air, Angie. Trust him a little.”

“Like I trusted you?” she blurted out.

The words hung in the air. For the very first time, she saw guilt on his face.

“I did, you know,” she said more quietly. “I assumed you believed in fidelity. It never occurred to me that you would have an affair. Never
occurred
to me.”

His hand was on the back of his neck now. He let out a breath. “It wasn’t intentional. It just happened.”

“For eight years?” she cried. “Ben,
you
get real. If it had happened just once, I might have been able to buy the fact that it wasn’t intentional. But to continue it for that long? You’re a bright guy. You know what’s happening in the world. You can sit over dinner and tell me about the latest scandal that’s breaking in the government. Sometimes it has to do with money, sometimes perks, sometimes sex. I can’t count the number of times you’ve talked about some man who was cheating on his wife. Didn’t you see that you were doing it yourself?”

He looked away. “Of course I did.”

“Do you know how much it hurts?”

He looked back at her, and though she hadn’t planned it, tears came to her eyes. She brushed them away, lest he accuse her of being manipulative, but they came back. Ignoring them, she asked, “How did you get together with her?”

“It’s not important.”

“It is to me.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Because it’s special? Because it’s yours and not mine? Because you’re afraid I’ll try to control it somehow?”

“Because, damn it, I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew you didn’t expect it. I knew it would hurt you. I may have blurted it out in anger, but that isn’t how the thing itself has been all this time. I didn’t do it out of defiance. I did it because I had a real need that wasn’t being met.”