The Lost Husband (5 page)

“I can keep an eye on them,” Jean said.

I wasn’t used to anyone but me doing anything for the kids. My mother had never offered to babysit, or take them to the park, or handle bedtime, and I would have refused even if she had. In three years of doing it all myself, I had come to believe that I was the only person who could possibly get it done, anyway.

“They’re not great sleepers,” I said. “Tank still gets up almost every night.”

“Probably time he stopped doing that,” Jean said.

I nodded and tried not to look irritated. Yes, of course it was time he stopped doing that. “Nothing works,” I said. “I’ve tried everything.”

Jean patted me on the shoulder. “You haven’t tried sleeping downstairs in Frank’s old office.”

“True,” I said.

I wanted her to offer me her room, right next to the kids. It seemed like the only sensible arrangement. But she did not.

I could already see the disaster ahead. After five years, I had the system down with Tank. Getting him back to sleep when he woke up meant getting him quickly, before he woke up fully. If you waited or messed around at all, he could be up for hours.

Abdicating my nighttime duties seemed both impossible and irresponsible. Still, who was I to tell Jean what to do in her own house?

She walked me next door to a similar room. “And this is where I see my clients,” Jean said.

“Your clients?”

It turned out Jean was not just a goat farmer but a certified therapist—something my mother had never once mentioned, and I wondered if she even knew. Jean saw clients in the afternoons out of this office—just two or three people a day, she pointed out, but she pretty much had the whole town covered.

“Everybody needs a little help sometimes,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” I said, as if I knew exactly what she meant.

But she would, actually, have to tell me about it—because I didn’t know what she meant. I certainly knew what it was like to need help. I just wasn’t clear on what it was like to ask for it. I had learned at my mother’s knee that help was for the weak—and how vitally important it was to stay strong at all times, even when the earth was crumbling beneath your feet. At
your husband’s funeral, for example. With your two-year-old in your arms.

Even my mother had marveled at the way I held that stoic smile on my face as friend after friend of Danny’s dissolved into tears.

“He was a good guy, Libby,” one after another said, their faces collapsing. Then we’d hug, and somehow I found myself patting their shoulders instead of the other way around. Only later—kids asleep, dishes done, laundry folded—did I lose it. Only when there was absolutely no one around to offer any comfort. A fact that might have made a good topic for therapy, if I believed in that sort of thing.

I smiled at Jean. My aunt: therapist and goat lady. How was it possible she and the woman who raised me shared any genes at all?

“You must be good at keeping secrets,” I said at last.

“Honey,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders for a quick squeeze, “I’m a vault.”

Before bedtime that night, Jean bathed the kids in the claw-foot tub.

As Abby started to undress, I realized that I hadn’t warned Jean about the scar down the side of Abby’s leg from the accident. It was about ten inches long and still pink, and I worried that Jean might gasp at the sight. But I underestimated her.

“Cool scar,” Jean said as Abby wriggled out of her leggings.

“Thanks,” Abby said.

“I’ve got a scar, too,” Tank said then, pointing to the spot on his chin where he’d once hit the sidewalk.

“I’ve got one myself,” Jean said as the kids stepped into the
bathwater. “Though it’s not as impressive.” She pulled up her sleeve to show them the dot from her smallpox vaccination.

“It looks like the moon when it’s full,” Tank said.

“Mine looks like a river on a map,” Abby said.

Jean nodded. “It sure does. Like the mighty Mississippi.”

Eavesdropping a little, I bustled in the kids’ room, unpacking their PJs, their favorite books, and framed family photos. Every single time my mother and I had moved when I was growing up—once a year, at least—my first order of business was to make things homey. Just the way hiding under the bed on moving day was always my last.

Jean’s place didn’t need much work to feel homey, but I needed to go through the motions. I set out stuffed animals. I fluffed pillows. I inspected the room for deadly spiders. I sized up the width between the iron bars on the headboard to decide if I needed to worry about broken necks. And then, at last, I borrowed a piece of wire to fasten shut the dormer window in case one of my kids might suddenly take up sleepwalking, climb out the window, and plunge to his or her death.

Jean obliged me without comment, but I couldn’t help but defend myself in my head. These things happened all the time. Mothers heard these stories constantly: normal, likable, unsuspecting parents who just went to answer the telephone and came back to find their children killed in unimaginable ways.

I knew the kids had been safer in my mother’s beige condo in the middle of the city, from which dangers like rattlesnakes had long been purged. If I dragged my children out to the country and one of them got, say, eaten by a bear, I’d have no one to blame but myself.

Did they even have bears in central Texas? I’d have to Google that later.

By the end of the kids’ bath, it was already an hour past bedtime. We skipped toothbrushing, and even skipped the vitamin E that we always rubbed on Abby’s scar at tuck-in time. I was ready for the day to be over. The kids had forgotten it was New Year’s Eve, and I had no intention of reminding them. Last year I’d reset the microwave clock and let the kids count down to “midnight” at about seven-thirty. But this year they were so tired I didn’t even have to pretend.

Before I turned off the light, I reminded them where I’d be sleeping, and described in detail how to get there. I had this crazy feeling that I was abandoning them.

When I’d finished tucking them in at last, Jean showed up at the door and said, “If you go straight to sleep, tomorrow I’ll show you where the pirate treasure is buried.”

Usually bedtime in our lives was a lengthy ordeal. I can’t even describe all the hours I’d spent begging them to go to sleep as they came out over and over, asking for water and cheese sticks and back rubs. Tank often asked for one more kiss and then, when I bent over, clamped his arms around my neck in a “love lockdown” until I physically wrestled myself free.

That night, though, as Jean and I headed downstairs, there was only quiet in our wake.

I waited for the sound of feet on the stairs while Jean made us tea.

I waited as we got situated in the comfy chairs in the living room.

And I continued to wait as Jean asked me all about my life. What were my interests? My hobbies? My passions? What had I majored in? What was my favorite time of year? Favorite holiday? Favorite animal? At first I was just polite: I liked to water-ski, though it had been years. I’d gone through a knitting period that
produced several scarves I never wore. I liked to work crossword puzzles. I liked to read biographies. I liked black-and-white movies of every genre.

Jean leaned on her hands and soaked it all in as though I were the most fascinating person in the world. Before I knew it, an hour had gone by—and I had forgotten about the kids entirely for the second time in a day.

“I think they’re asleep,” Jean said when I finally took a breather.

“Not possible,” I said. “They don’t just fall asleep.”

“Never underestimate pirate treasure,” she said.

“Sometimes when it’s really bad, I just let them watch TV until they conk out.”

Jean shrugged. “No TV.”

My eyes snapped open. “No TV?”

She shook her head.

“None? Not even one?”

“Nope.”

I looked around her living room in disbelief. No TV. After all the crazy things I’d seen that day—the stool in the bathroom made from a turtle shell, the picnic table with old truck tires for legs, the eight deer that had sauntered through the yard that evening single file—
this
, this one thing, was blowing my mind.

“Not even a tiny one in the kitchen?”

Jean shook her head. “Nope.”

“No Internet, either,” she added with a note of pride.

I gaped.

“You’ll have to hit the library,” she added. “That’s where I update the farm’s Facebook page.”

“The farm has a Facebook page?”

“Of course,” she said.

Several moments passed as I tried to absorb it. Finally I said, “What on earth do you do for fun?”

“Oh, lots of things. Take walks. Look for stones. Read in the hammock.” She studied my face and then offered, “I do have a radio in the kitchen.”

“A radio?”

“A loud one.”

And what good, exactly, was a radio? Who curled up in front of a radio at the end of a long day?

“We have our own public radio station here in town. It’s got a great bluegrass show.”

I couldn’t even fake it for her. She wanted me to replace
Project Runway
with bluegrass? This whole move suddenly felt like a mistake. I wasn’t a goat farmer. I wasn’t even a small-town person.

“I have a record player, too,” she said.

I felt queasy. I didn’t belong here. What had I been thinking? Not only was I going to have to crawl back to Houston and beg for my old job, I was going to have months, possibly years, of I-told-you-so faces from an extra-self-satisfied version of my mother.

But I’d been up since five, and it was close to eleven. I’d left every familiar thing behind. I’d gambled on a new life that had turned out to be too much. I felt that thickness in my chest that you get before you start crying, and, as if to make a literal escape from it, I stood up.

Jean blinked at me.

“I should probably hit the sack,” I said, faking a stretch.

“Sure,” Jean said, plainly reading every feeling I was trying to hide. “Of course.”

I turned to go, but she called for me to wait one second.

She popped out of the room and then reappeared with a pair
of faded overalls over her arm. One knee had a heart-shaped patch. “For you,” she said, holding them out. “You will absolutely live in them.”

I stared at them. “I will?”

Jean nodded happily. “Go on to bed.”

I was mid-escape when I stopped at the door on a matter of business. “Jean?” I asked, turning back.

She had picked up our teacups. “Yes?”

“If every night of the last five years of my life is any kind of pattern, Tank will wake up between two and three in the morning, calling for me.”

“Okay,” she said.

“When that happens,” I went on, “will you come and get me?”

“Of course.”

“And Jean?” I added, anticipating that sometime after breakfast the next day I’d be packing the car up to head back to Houston.

“Yes?”

“Thank you so much for all those birthday cards.”

I took a shower in the tiny white bathroom, and then dug around until I found my nightgown. There didn’t seem to be any point in unpacking, so I just flipped off the light and crawled on top of the bedspread. It was old-timey cotton chenille, and I ran my palms over the nubs of fabric as I stared at the ceiling.

How had life taken me here? How had I ever become so dependent on the kindness of strangers? Not that long ago I’d been a bona fide, functioning adult at the helm of a tidy, sensible household with a sweet bear of a husband at my side. A mom like any other, with a grocery list, a full calendar of play dates, personalized
notepads with my name in script, and evidence all around me that I had made the right choices. Now it was all gone. I was off the grid. I had no model for a life like this. I had no sense of where I was headed. Or any idea how it would turn out.

Off in the distance, I could hear the crackle and pop of fireworks. The people of Atwater were ringing in the New Year, making the choice to celebrate whatever was to come. But I couldn’t do the same.

When I’d moved in with my mother two years before, after twelve months of trying to manage the wreckage of my life, I’d been too shell-shocked to even contemplate looking back. Now, though—with my little ones at the far end of the house and nothing to do but stare at the ceiling—my mind drifted back for the first time in ages to linger over what I’d lost.

The last New Year’s Eve I’d spent with Danny, we’d both conked out by nine-thirty at night. When the fireworks started at midnight, they woke us up, and we lay side by side, eyes open in the dark, holding hands and making resolutions.

“I’m going to go to the gym this year,” I’d said. “At least once.”

“I’m going to clean out the garage,” he said.

“I’m going to learn how to make crepes.”

“I’m going to teach myself how to juggle.”

I turned to study his profile. “I don’t see you as a juggler,” I said.

“My dad couldn’t do anything cool,” he said. “I want to be the kind of dad who’s sort of a badass.”

“You could learn to do magic tricks, too,” I said.

“Next year,” he said, tugging on my hand to pull me closer. “One awesome thing at a time.”

It had been a miracle, really, to have had a real home for the first time in my life. Even if I didn’t always trust it, and even if I
worried too much about it, it had been a real thing. A real thing I’d planned, deep down, to keep forever.

Now, limp against the bed, I let myself ache for the past. My old bed, my old house, my old life. And then, maybe because I was so tired, or maybe even because it was long past time, I let that ache surround me, and swallow me, and pull me down into a lightless, airless, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 4