Marriage in Jeopardy

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.”