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“Can we stop?” She risked her first look at him since they’d left. “I don’t want to go home. I thought I could do it, but…”
He was clenching his jaw so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised to hear his teeth shatter. He glanced into the rearview mirror and then checked over his shoulder and pulled to the curb. “Where do you want me to take you?”
She glanced into the backseat. She didn’t even have a sweater. “Nowhere’s practical.”
“Then come home and think about what you’re doing.”
“I was trying to, but it doesn’t feel like home.”
He nodded, a brief jab of his chin in the air. She didn’t blame him.
“I’m not trying to hurt you on purpose. I just don’t know how to pretend anymore.”
“And you can’t make up your mind?”
She looked out at the passing traffic, at the sun that seemed too bright for a day like this, and at a couple strolling by with their young daughter holding their hands.
“I’m panicking.” She wiped sweat from beneath her bangs. “But I want to be with you. I mean that.”
“Trust me.”
“If it were that easy, we wouldn’t be talking about this at all.” She folded her hands in her lap and glanced over her shoulder. “Let’s go. I’m all right. I won’t do this again.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t promise that.”
She searched his face for sarcasm but found only compassion. It made a huge difference because fear was driving her, and he had a right to be angry. A chip fell out of her massive store of resentment.
Still, she clung to the sides of her seat when he parked in front of the town house. “I’m glad none of the neighbors are out.”
He nodded and pulled the keys from the ignition. “They mean well, but I don’t know what to say when they tell me they’re sorry.”
They both got out of the car. Lydia planted her fists in the small of her back and stared at the wreath on their door, the open drapes she hadn’t been home to close. The baby’s nursery was on the second floor. She walked up the sidewalk as fast as her aching body would let her to avoid looking at that window.
EVELYN STARED at the white phone that hung on her white kitchen wall.
“I should call him.”
“He won’t feel better if you do.”
She jumped. “Bart, I didn’t know you were home.” Turning, she crossed the kitchen to take her husband’s coat and hang it on one of the pegs in the mudroom.
He took off his boots and stared at them. “I forgot to change when I got off the boat.”
“Put them in the bench. If we can’t stand the smell of our own lobster and fish and ocean water by now…” She didn’t know how to end that sentence. “It doesn’t matter. You really think Josh wouldn’t want me to call? Isn’t this different?”
“To us. Not to him.”
“We were supposed to have a grandchild.” A grandchild that might have brought Josh back to them.
Bart pulled her close and kissed her forehead. Usually that made her feel better. “For all we know, it’s brought back memories of Clara and he hates us more than ever.”
“You can’t blame him.” She wiped her mouth. Eighteen years since she’d had her last drink, but the thirst could still bring her to her knees. She stepped away from Bart and went to the sink, grateful for dirty lunch dishes. She started running the water and slid her hands beneath its warmth.
“If you want to call him that badly, maybe you should.” Bart gripped her upper arms for a minute and then let go. “I just hate that you have to prepare yourself to be hurt.”
“He might understand. He’s lost a child, too.” She thought of Clara. Rather, a memory of Clara stole into her mind. Her baby, in pink shorts that bagged almost to her knees, brown hair blowing across her eyes and a spade almost as tall as she was for digging in the sand.
Evelyn clenched her eyes shut and willed that wisp of memory to leave. She didn’t deserve to remember the good times, and the worst day was just a nightmare feeling she could call to mind. She’d been so drunk she only knew what had happened after her daughter had died.
“Josh didn’t lose his child the way we did.” Bart started toward the hallway. “I’ll wash up. You do what you have to, Evelyn.”
“Bart—”
He stopped. She wrapped her wet arms around him, finding his sea scents comfortingly familiar. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m tired of him pushing us away. But how can we complain? He raised himself. He was more father and mother to Clara than we were.”
“Not just because of you.” He looked backward in time. “The catches were so sparse. I was afraid I couldn’t feed you all. I’ve asked myself the same question since the day Clara… Why didn’t I work harder, instead of drinking harder?”
“And why couldn’t I want to be a mom?” Evelyn made herself say the words, each one like hammering a nail in her own coffin. Josh had been a total surprise to her and Bart. She’d wanted to be a teacher, but pregnant at nineteen, she’d dropped out of college. As a mom, she was a total misfit, never feeling the instincts that came naturally to other women.
She’d thought something was wrong with her colicky son, but no matter how many times she’d dragged Josh to the doctor, they just kept telling her he was fine—healthy—and she’d get used to motherhood. She’d tried some of Bart’s vodka one night, just after she’d put her baby to bed. The vodka had eased her pain.
Finally, it had numbed her.
She pulled Bart even closer. “I might have been better with their baby.”
“It wouldn’t matter. You think Josh would have let us see him?”
“He’s not cruel. He’s sad. We have to stick it out—if only because Josh feels as guilty about Clara as we do.” It was only after the state had put her and Bart in jail for eighteen months for negligence that she’d learned not to give up trying to be a good mother.
“He has no reason to feel guilty.”
“If he could believe that, maybe he’d learn to forgive us and be our son again. And I wonder if something’s wrong between him and Lydia. Even when they’re together, they— I feel distance between them.”
“What are you talking about, Evelyn?” He let her go and turned off the water just before it reached the top of the sink.
“If you disagreed with me, you’d say so. You’ve been worried, too.” She dunked the dishes into the sink, taking comfort from the clash of glass and stoneware. “It’s time we stopped just waiting for things to get better,” she said. “I’m going to ask them to come up here.”
Bart took the first plate she handed him. Even filthy from working on the boat, he started drying. It was habit. She washed. He dried. People with addictive, alcoholic personalities found strength in habits.
“Lydia might come. Josh won’t.” He set the plate down and then stared at his dirty jeans. “I’m stinking up the place. Let me shower and I’ll help you.”
“I’m fine. Go ahead.” She set a plate in the other half of the sink, her mind on her spiel to Josh. How could she convince him to come home and get over his sadness?
So aware of her thoughts after thirty-three years together, Bart stopped and said, “Listen to me, Evelyn.” His anxiety came through.
“He may turn me down, but how do you think Lydia feels in that house, with the nursery down the hall? Josh will come if he thinks it’ll help her.”
“Lydia loves us, but her loyalty belongs to him. She won’t come up here, knowing Josh can’t stand to be in this house.”
Evelyn turned. She put her hands on her hips, not caring when a marshmallow cloud of dishwashing suds dropped to the floor. “You forget—you can slide along, think you’re doing all right—but when you lose a child, nothing is ever the same. Lydia loves Josh, but she’ll be hating that room.”
They had a room of their own, hardly opened in the past eighteen years, still filled with Clara’s things. If she could have cut that room out of her house, she would have dropped it over the cliffs on the headland. And yet—it was all she had left of her daughter.
“You’d use Lydia?” Bart didn’t like that.
She struggled with a surge of guilt. “Use her, yes.” She couldn’t pretend to be better than she was. “But I love her as if she were ours. She needs a mother and father as much as Josh does, and I want my son back. This family has lost enough, and I’m through waiting for him to come home.”
“You worry me, Evelyn.”
“We’ve tried to give him time to make up his mind.” She went back to the sink. “We’ve done enough penance. He’ll either cut us off or we’ll convince him at last that he can depend on us.”
“I don’t want him to cut us off,” Bart said.
“This half life of having him come around once or twice a year is good enough for you?”
“It’s what we have.” Bart opened the fridge. He studied the bottles of water and juice and then slammed the door shut. “It’s what we made.”
She started washing again. Bart, loving her, even after what they’d done, had saved her life. Was she about to risk losing him, too? “We can make something better.”
WRAPPED IN A pale yellow chenille blanket, Lydia stared at the evening paper, oblivious to the words. Josh came into the family room and set a cup of coffee beside her.
“Thanks.” She’d craved it. He’d brewed it.
He tucked the blanket around her feet. She tried not to move away from his hands.
Somehow, he knew. He looked at her with the knowledge of her instinctive rejection in his eyes. “Should you go to bed?” he asked.
“I don’t know. They just told me to call if I felt bad.” She hunched her shoulders and cupped her mug in both hands. The coffee should have been too hot, but it warmed her against a cold that came from deep inside.
“If you’re staying down here, I’ll start a fire.”
She glanced toward the fireplace. Gray ash and small black chunks crowded the hearth. The familiar scent of apple and wood smoke usually comforted her. “Okay, but then sit for a while. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”
Surprise made him look at her. “You want to talk?”
“I’d just like knowing you’re near.” She had to believe he wasn’t thinking up ways to get back to the office.
Nodding, he began to scoop the ashes into an old-fashioned coal scuttle they’d found in a shop in his hometown in Maine. No polished copper affair, this was a dusty, dented black metal working scuttle. Like their marriage, it had taken a beating. “Something’s on your mind,” he said.
She glanced at the phone, resting beside a stack of her library books on a table beneath the bay window. “I promised your mother I’d call when we got home.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it.
She’d seen his parents through his eyes at first. Alcoholics, who’d thrown his childhood down the neck of a vodka bottle. But he’d never given them credit for cleaning up after Clara’s death.
“They love us,” she said. “Both of us.” He didn’t seem to need his parents’ love.
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Okay. Josh?”
He stopped, midway across the room. A vein stood out on his forearm as his knuckles whitened around the bucket’s handle.
“Sometimes I wonder what I’d have to do to make you as angry with me.”
“As angry?”
“As you are with your parents.”
“Are you looking for an argument?”
“No.” But she was tired of trying to keep the peace. “I don’t know.”
“I get that you don’t want to be here.”
She couldn’t control a shiver as she thought of the nursery and their bedroom. She hadn’t forced herself to climb the stairs yet. Too many memories waited up there. “Listen.” She willed him to understand how the nothingness pressed in on her. “Don’t you hear the silence? I know you mean well, but all the fires and blankets and warm drinks in the world won’t help. I’m afraid to say anything because I’m hurt. And I’m afraid your mind is at the office.”
“What do you want?” Long and lean and unreachable, he went to the door. “I’m trying. I don’t want to lose you, but I can’t quit my job and sell this house today.” He glanced at the ceiling. “I feel that room, too, but this is our home. I want to learn to live with the empty nursery and your anger and my—” He paused, shaking his head. “My fear,” he said. “That you’re going to leave me because it’s my fault our baby died.”
“Let’s do something,” Lydia said. “Let’s get out of here, spend some time somewhere else, just the two of us.”
“And then come back to the problems you say we’ve ignored for years?”
The phone rang. A frown crossed his face. He picked up the receiver and scanned the caller ID. Then he crossed the room and handed it to her. “I don’t want to talk to them,” he said.
His parents. She clicked the talk button as Josh took the bucket out. “Evelyn?”
“How are you? Is Josh all right?”
“I’m fine. He’s quiet.”
“How quiet? You have to make him talk.”
Or he’d retreat from her as he had from Evelyn and Bart? “We’re settling back in.”
“Come up here instead.”
Lydia knew she should say no. Josh couldn’t talk to his mother and father. He’d refuse to see them. “I’m tired. Staying here might be—”
“Come tomorrow, then. You don’t want to be in that house right now. Let me pamper you and make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Let me have a daughter for a week or two.”
Her voice broke on the final plea. Lydia’s tears, never far away, thickened in her throat. “I want to, but you know how things are, Evelyn.”
“Josh will come if you do. Don’t give him a choice for once.”
Lydia laughed, as convincingly as she was able. “You wouldn’t take advantage of me to soften Josh?”
“I guess I would.” Evelyn was always truthful. “But I only left the hospital because I knew he didn’t want me there. I’ve worried about you. Come let me look after you.”
