Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed Page 22

  He was about to repeat that she couldn’t say with certainty what might have happened if they’d gotten Peter to the hospital sooner. The fact was, she knew better than he did. She was a medical professional.

  What if she was right? What if her delay had cost Peter his life?

  He turned away. His gaze settled on the black TV screen across the room from the bed, and its blankness provided a frame for his thoughts, a backdrop for his memories. He recalled the evening Peter had fallen ill. Curt had poked his head into Peter’s room and Peter had said he felt lousy—although, as Curt remembered, Peter had used a stronger word. And then apologized for using it. He’d been himself that evening—a tired, headachy version of himself, but Curt had certainly seen nothing in Peter’s behavior or symptoms to cause alarm.

  Ellie hadn’t viewed Peter as a patient, either. She’d viewed him as a mother and done just what any other mother would have done: she’d ordered fluids and bed rest.

  But what if? What if quicker action on Ellie’s part could have saved Peter’s life? What if he’d died because they’d gotten him to the hospital too late?

  On the other hand, what if they’d rushed him to the hospital that evening and he’d still died? What if in their haste they’d gotten into a car accident and all three of them had died? A person could strangle on what-ifs.

  All the twenty-twenty hindsight in the world couldn’t bring Peter back. That was the bottom line. Peter was dead. Ellie had done the best she could. So had Curt. And they’d lost their son.

  “If I’d gone to medical school,” Ellie said, “I would have recognized the symptoms. But I didn’t want to be a doctor. I let everyone down. My family, my professors…and my son.”

  “Ellie.” Curt twisted back to her. “If you’d gone to medical school, Peter would never have existed. You would have been in school for years. We would have put off having children until you were established. Different sperm would have met different eggs. Katie and Jessie wouldn’t have been born. Neither would Peter. If you’d been a doctor, you might not have wanted three children—or any children at all. You might have decided to devote yourself completely to your career.”

  “How would you have felt about that?”

  If he hadn’t had children, he wouldn’t have known what he was missing. But…“I wanted children,” he confessed. “We talked about that, back at Brown. I always wanted to be a father. If you’d decided you didn’t want to be a mother…”

  “You wouldn’t have married me,” she said, completing the thought.

  He contemplated that possibility before answering. His own words echoed in his head: We’ve always had honesty. Now wasn’t the time to stop being honest. “I probably wouldn’t have married you,” he conceded. “Part of what made me love you was that you wanted children. You wanted to create a home with me, and a family, and our own special world. If you weren’t that way, I wouldn’t have loved you.”

  “Would you have married me if you knew my stupidity would lead to the death of one of our children?”

  Again he thought long and hard before replying. “You’re sounding a little like a doctor now—like you’ve got control of who lives and who dies. Like you’re that important.”

  Her eyes flashed. She looked indignant but also intrigued.

  “You’re not that important, honey. Sometimes fate decides these things for us. Fate or God or whoever you want to blame. Sometimes we can do everything in the world, and we still can’t keep a terrible thing from occurring. We’re just not that powerful, Ellie.”

  She seemed doubtful.

  “We’re only human. We make mistakes. I made a bigger mistake than you.”

  “You didn’t—”

  He held up his hand to silence her. “It doesn’t matter. We made mistakes. But we loved Peter, we loved him as much as any two parents can possibly love a son, and we’ll always love him. You don’t get one without the other. If you’re human, you make mistakes and you love your children. And we’re human.”

  She sighed, evidently unable to argue. Instead, she sank back into the pillows. Her eyes grew shiny with fresh tears. “Do you know why I stopped seeing the therapist?”

  He shrugged. “I assumed it was because she wasn’t helping you.”

  “I stopped seeing her because she was wrong.” Ellie sighed shakily. “She told me I refused to let go of my pain because I feared that if I let go of the pain, I’d be letting go of Peter. If I stopped hurting, it would be as if I’d finally lost him for good. But as long as I still hurt, he still existed for me.”

  “And that was wrong?”

  “I held on to the pain because I felt responsible for his death.” She sighed again. A tear streaked down her cheek to her chin and dripped onto the curve of her breast. “I couldn’t feel happy ever again. I couldn’t feel joy. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve to have a husband who loved me, and daughters who admired me. I didn’t deserve lovemaking. I didn’t deserve pleasure. I’d killed Peter, and I had to suffer for my mistake.” She aimed her shimmering gaze at him, as if seeking absolution.

  Her confession tore at him. Even tonight, when he’d been making love to her, she’d held back. He’d thought she was just rusty after such a longtime, or may be unable to open herself completely to her faithless husband. Now he realized the truth: she didn’t believe she was entitled to that kind of fulfillment. She’d fought the ecstasy as long as she could before finally giving in to it.

  “You should have told me what you were going through,” he said. “All those months, that long, dark stretch when I just couldn’t reach you, you should have told me. Instead, I assumed you were satisfied just to shut me out. And I acted like an SOB. I did a terrible thing. If only I’d known—”

  “I didn’t know. How could I tell you what I didn’t know myself? I knew I’d done something tragically wrong, I knew I didn’t deserve your love anymore—but I don’t think I actually figured it all out until this evening, watching the movie.”

  He glanced toward the black screen again. What in the movie had led her to her epiphany?

  “There was a period when I actually thought I was ready to face life again. It occurred to me that you didn’t deserve to do penance for my sins. So I tried to pull myself together. I tried to be happy. I even thought I’d make love to you. I’d let human warmth back into my heart.”

  “What happened?”

  “You came home from California,” she reminded him.

  He cursed.

  “Bad timing,” she said with a poignant smile.

  “Oh, God, I remember. You’d made a fancy, candlelit, welcome-home dinner for me.”

  “And I’d cleaned Peter’s room.”

  “Yeah.” He recalled his shock when he’d carried his suitcase up the stairs that Sunday evening, preoccupied with how he was going to break the news to Ellie about his affair, how she would take it, whether his compulsion to tell her the truth would destroy her for good. As he’d passed Peter’s bedroom, he’d paused, his attention snagging on something. Nudging the door wider, he’d realized that the computer was off. The bed was made with fresh linens. All the teenage-boy clutter had been removed from the floor and that damn bottle of Gatorade had vanished from the night table.

  The altered condition of Peter’s bedroom had disoriented Curt. For a few strange minutes, he’d wondered whether he had entered the wrong house that night, whether the cheerful woman arranging a gourmet feast downstairs in the kitchen was really Ellie, whether his flight had delivered him to some alternate universe. Whether sleeping with a woman who wasn’t his wife—sleeping with a woman he didn’t love—had transformed him or transformed the world around him.

  He’d recovered from his shock. But he remembered how tense and unnerved and desperately afraid he’d been.

  “So I decided to go to Africa,” Ellie said. “I figured that if I could save enough lives over there, it might make up for what I’d done to Peter here. Pretty ridiculous, I guess—my traveling to a foreign country
to cleanse the stains from my soul.”

  “You did save lives there,” he pointed out.

  She shrugged. “I saved a boy’s hearing.”

  “I said it downstairs, and I’ll say it again. You are not a failure, Ellie.” He faced her fully, took her hands in his and held them tight. “You are not a failure. You’ve saved the lives of sick children. You didn’t save Peter’s life because you couldn’t. And you shouldn’t have become a doctor because that wasn’t your calling. It wasn’t your destiny.”

  She studied him as if he had all the answers, all the wisdom. He didn’t. Hell, he knew how to negotiate a damn good deal with other lawyers, how to litigate when negotiation didn’t work, how to threaten and cajole and get all the conflicting parties to a mutual understanding and a workable agreement. He knew how to wash dishes and clean gutters and how to maneuver a hot sports coupe down a winding country road. He knew how to howl like Warren Zevon singing “Werewolves of London” and how to bench-press a hundred pounds. He could hold his own on a golf course and at any social event. He knew how to argue politics without offending too many people, and how to charm his in-laws when they were driving Ellie crazy.

  He knew how to love. He loved his daughters so much, just thinking about them caused his heart to swell painfully in his chest. He’d loved his son and would continue to love his son for all the days he had left to live.

  And he loved Ellie. No matter what. For better or worse. He loved her.

  But wisdom?

  “What is my destiny, Curt?” she asked.

  “To live each day?” He tossed the idea out for her consideration. “To embrace each day? To wring as much pleasure as you can from it? To try your best?” He contemplated, then added one more choice for her: “To forgive yourself, Ellie. To love yourself as much as I love you, and to be as forgiving with yourself as you are with me. That’s your destiny.”

  She gazed at their hands, clasped between them. “That sounds like a good destiny,” she said.

  “What was it in the movie that helped you to figure everything out?”

  “Oh. The movie.” She peered past him at the television. “I don’t know. Seeing myself at all those different ages. Remembering all my doubts and insecurities. I always thought I had to be perfect, and I always fell short. And this voice inside me whispered, ‘You fell short with Peter.’”

  “Can you forgive yourself for not being perfect?” Curt asked.

  “I guess I’ll have to.”

  He smiled. If she could forgive herself, their marriage would survive. If they could talk this way, if they could always be this honest, whether the honesty was brutal or gentle, they would never leave each other. When Curt had given Ellie his heart, the gift had been forever.

  She had been his destiny. She still was.

  He turned so he could lean back into the pillows, stretched his legs and curved his arm around Ellie, drawing her against him. Her cheek was damp against his shoulder but he didn’t mind. He imagined his cheeks were a bit damp, too.

  His hand brushed the remote control on the night table, and he scooped it up and pointed it at the television. He hit the button to turn the TV back on, and then the pause button to restart the movie.

  “Don’t cry for me, Ghana clinic,” crooned the singer in his now-familiar voice. Curt grinned, imagining Katie in a sound booth with some guy, taping him as he sang a dozen different versions of that Evita tune. The singer must have considered her nuts. Curt wondered if Katie had had to pay him, or if he’d done it for free, as a favor. Maybe he was a friend.

  Or a lover. Maybe he was as in love with her as Curt had been with Ellie at that age. If Ellie had ridden the bus up to Cambridge and asked him to stand in Harvard Square, at the busiest intersection in the city, and belt out a silly song, he would have done it without hesitation.

  He was astonished to realize that his daughters were as old as he and Ellie were when they’d met. Now they were embarking on their own lives, seeking their own destinies. And Curt knew there was no way to protect them from the terrible things that might befall them. All he could hope was that they would be able to forgive themselves.

  “Ellie returned home from her African adventure at the end of July,” Jessie narrated. A video—Katie had brought her digital video camera to Logan Airport to film Ellie’s homecoming—showed Ellie waving as she strode toward her waiting family in the crowded baggage-claim area at Terminal E. The camera bounced as Katie ran toward her mother. She filmed Jessie hugging Ellie, and then a wild arc of their surroundings as she kept the camera recording while she herself hugged her mother. Then she filmed Curt’s approach.

  He’d been apprehensive that day. Had Ellie come home ready to mend things with him, or determined to continue on her adventurous new life without him?

  For the sake of the girls, he supposed, she’d smiled at him, given him a brief hug and turned her cheek toward his mouth for a kiss. She’d looked gorgeous, her skin darkened by the sun, her hair threaded with streaks of silver, her body taut and trim, her posture straight and her gaze determined. All he’d wanted to do was fall to his knees, right there in the terminal, and propose marriage all over again. If he had, though, she would have said no. For all her strength and confidence, he’d felt her reserve when he’d kissed her cheek. His lips could have gotten frostbite from the chill.

  But the girls hadn’t sensed anything amiss. They’d filmed the reunion as if it were the happiest moment in Curt’s and Ellie’s lives.

  “Ellie’s African sojourn was a fabulous experience,” Katie continued in the narration. “Everyone who saw Ellie could tell. She glowed with a new spirit.” The film showed Curt lifting her suitcase from the baggage carousel, and Curt and Ellie walking toward the exit, the suitcase between them, the way her trip to Africa had stood between them.

  “Ellie returned to her job at the Felton Primary School,” the narration continued, with another photograph of her school. “She worked with renewed passion. Everyone who saw her realized how much she’d changed.

  “And yet she was still Ellie Frost, the warm, wonderful woman we love.”

  A collage of photos appeared out of chronological order, floating in and out of focus. A photo of Ellie fresh from Africa, one of her as a radiant bride, one of her with her three children—Katie around eight years old, Jessie six and Peter three. A photo of the whole family on a beach on Cape Cod; they’d asked a stranger to take their picture. A photo of Ellie seated behind the wheel of that dilapidated Jeep in Kumasi, her hair flying and her smile wide and wild. A photo of Ellie and Curt seated side by side on the front-porch steps at their house, the Hope Street shingle visible above their heads.

  Along with the parade of photos came yet another rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” with new words. This time it was sung in three-part harmony—a male voice and two females, Katie and Jessie and someone who, had life taken a different turn, would have been Peter:

  Now let us sing “Happy Birthday”

  To Ellie, our awesome mother

  We’ve always loved you

  We’ll always love you

  And that’s our promise

  We share this promise.

  The song ended, but the photo of Curt and Ellie sitting on the porch steps remained. In the photo, Ellie’s head rested on Curt’s shoulder and he had his arm around her, just as he did right now. They were both smiling.

  When had that picture been taken? They looked ageless in it, as old as they were now, as young as they were the first night they’d spent together on Hope Street. They looked happy, sharing all the promises they’d made and all the promise the world still held for them.

  White letters appeared across the photo: Happy Birthday! followed by an inflated list of credits similar to what they’d printed on the label for the DVD. The instrumental version of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” played in the background. The credits ended when the song did, and then the screen faded to black.

  “Don’t cry for me, Curt,”
Ellie said.

  “Don’t cry for us,” he corrected her. “We’re going to be okay.”

  “You think so?”

  “For at least the next fifty years. Then we can reassess.”

  “I love you,” Ellie said, snuggling closer to him.

  “I love you, Eleanor Brennan Frost.” He circled both arms around her and held her, and prayed that the trust they’d rediscovered, so fragile and delicate, would in time grow more solid and sturdy. He prayed that they would always have their honesty, always have their love—always have hope.

  For tonight, he thought, this très romantic room at the oldee inn would be Hope Street. Tomorrow they would go home to the house with the shingle above the front door.

  THE MARRIAGE BED

  To the XRomX gang

  With gratitude and love

  ONE

  WHAT THE HELL WAS he doing here?

  Joelle stared at the man standing on her front porch and stifled the urge to scream, slam the door in his face…or pretend she didn’t know who he was.

  She did know, of course. Thirty-seven years might have passed since she’d last seen Drew Foster—she was aware of exactly how long it had been, considering how drastically her life had changed that night—but she recognized him immediately. His hair was a little sparser and grayer, his laugh lines deeper, his jaw softer. His well-cut pinstripe suit didn’t hide the slight paunch that had sprouted above his belt, but despite carrying a few excess pounds, he appeared generally fit for a man only a few years away from his sixtieth birthday.

  How had he found her? Why hadn’t he called to give her some warning before he appeared on her doorstep? How could she get him to leave? He’d come close to destroying her life once, but she’d painstakingly rebuilt it—and now here he was, perfectly capable of destroying it all over again. Fear gathered in her gut and squeezed.