Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed Read online

  “My parents were blown away by that. They’d thought it was the pinnacle of something that they’d gotten an announcement into the Pinebrook Weekly News. Then, when they found out your mother got us mentioned in the Times, they freaked out.”

  Curt shrugged. He remembered how intimidated Ellie’s parents had been by his parents. They’d always thought his privileged background was something to be awed, and because Curtis Frost, this blue-blood scion of the American aristocracy, had deigned to marry their daughter, the product of their humble family, they’d ultimately forgiven Ellie for skipping medical school and living with Curt before they were legally wed. That his family, while affluent, was far from the ranks of the megamillionaires hadn’t mattered to them. As far as they’d been concerned, a Harvard Law School graduate who belonged to a clan with dozens of Ivy Leaguers dangling like ripe fruit from the family tree, and a mother who could get her son’s engagement announcement into the Times, was an aristocrat.

  “The wedding of the decade took place at St. Bridget’s in Pinebrook,” Jessie narrated as the screen displayed a photo of the modest neighborhood church where Curt and Ellie had exchanged vows. “A reception at the Field House of the Pinebrook Country Day School followed.”

  “To my mother’s everlasting fury,” Ellie added.

  “That was a beautiful place,” Curt recalled, his memory confirmed by the pictures of the stone field house overlooking a pond on the campus of a ritzy private school in Ellie’s hometown. “I never understood why your mother was opposed to our having the reception there.”

  “She hated everything I wanted,” Ellie reminded him. “First she wanted the reception to be at a wedding factory in Waltham, one of those places that had six weddings going on at once. Then, when your mother got our announcement into the Times, she decided the Frosts were too classy for that wedding mill. She announced that she and my father would take a home-equity loan and host the wedding at one of the downtown hotels. The Ritz-Carlton was her first choice because it sounded ritzy.”

  Curt grimaced. “No one should have to go into that much debt just for a wedding.”

  “Tell that to your daughters when they decide to get married,” Ellie joked. “I’m figuring they’ll cost us fifty thousand apiece, minimum.”

  “I’ll buy them each a ladder. They can elope.”

  Ellie chuckled. “More than a few times during the planning of our wedding, I was ready to buy us a ladder and elope. My mother insisted the field house was going to smell like gym socks. I told her it was a beautiful facility, and it had a full kitchen for the caterers to work out of. I told her lots of parties were held there. She was sure the place would be full of hockey sticks and football helmets.”

  A photo appeared on the screen of Ellie in a bridal gown surrounded by her brides maids—Anna as her maid of honor and two cousins as additional attendants. Ellie hooted with scornful laughter. “Oh, Lord, the bridesmaids’ dresses. The battle my mother and I had over those dresses nearly started World War III.”

  “Why?” Curt paused the DVD to study the dresses. “What’s wrong with those dresses?”

  “I decided my attendants should wear tea-length dresses instead of full-length, so they could get more than one wearing out of them.”

  The bridesmaids’ dresses seemed nice enough to Curt, not that he was any expert. He wasn’t even sure what tea-length meant. “Your mother didn’t approve of tea-length?”

  “She wanted them to wear full-length dresses in this hideous green color that made everyone look jaundiced. She thought navy blue was too wintry.”

  “Those dresses are sleeveless. That’s not wintry. Who wears sleeveless dresses in the winter?”

  “It didn’t matter to her. She told me I was a thankless girl with no taste.”

  “Yeah, that’s you,” Curt teased her gently.

  “And then there was…” She dissolved into laughter.

  “What?”

  “The silk purse.”

  “What silk purse?”

  “I never told you about the silk purse?” More laughter, deep and throaty and sexy. Curt might have fallen in love with her after their first, fantastic sexual encounter, but her laughter had clinched the deal. When Ellie really laughed—something she did far too rarely these days—her entire body seemed to glow.

  It took her a moment to collect herself. This time, at least, the tears glistening in her eyes weren’t from sorrow. While she sniffled and chuckled and dabbed her eyes, he refilled his glass with port. Swallowing the last shimmers of her laughter, she extended her glass and he topped it off, as well.

  “My mother wanted me to wear a silk purse around my wrist,” she said. “It was a long, narrow thing—they actually sell them in bridal shops, although she was willing to sew one for me.”

  “What would you need a purse for? It’s not like you’d be driving off in your wedding gown. I had our keys and a wallet.”

  “The purse is for collecting money gifts. Instead of having you stuff all those checks and envelopes into your pockets, I would have them hanging off my wrist.”

  “For the whole wedding?” Curt didn’t get it. Why would someone want to spend an entire evening wearing a sack stuffed with money dangling from her arm?

  “My mother insisted this was the correct thing to do. I told her I’d rather cut off my hand than wear one of those things.”

  Curt nodded. “That sounds like something you’d say.”

  “We had one of the biggest fights of our life over that stupid purse. Bad enough my bridesmaids weren’t wearing full-length gowns. Bad enough I wasn’t going to have a flower girl or a ring bearer. Bad enough we were having the party at the field house instead of the Ritz-Carlton. Bad enough I wanted to wear my hair straight, the way I always wore it, instead of spending the morning of the wedding at a salon getting it sprayed and gelled into some weird configuration—and that I polished my own nails the night before the wedding instead of getting a professional manicure. But my passing on the silk purse? My mother sewed one against my wishes and brought it with her to the field house, insisting that I wear it. There we were, in the powder room, having this violent argument through clenched teeth while all the guests were wandering in and out to pee and touch up their lipstick.”

  “You should have worn the purse,” he said.

  Ellie eyed him incredulously. “Are you kidding?”

  “In fact, I think both girls should wear silk purses when they get married, too. I think we should insist on it.” He tried to keep his expression deadpan, but evidently, he couldn’t suppress a small grin.

  Ellie poked him in the arm and snorted. “I’ll make you wear a silk bag over your head,” she grumbled, and they both laughed.

  In the midst of his laughter, a wave of sorrow knocked him sideways. When was the last time he and Ellie had laughed together? When had they last teased each other, joked with each other, pulled each other’s legs? God, he missed this. He wanted it back.

  Well, he couldn’t have it back. During the worst period of their lives, Ellie had shut herself off from him, and he’d dealt with her rejection in a bad way, and too much damage had been done. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put their shattered marriage back together again.

  Next to him, Ellie grew quiet, as well. He wondered if she was feeling what he was feeling—that profound loss, that dizzying sorrow. Probably not. He still loved her, despite his anger and resentment, but she no longer loved him. Not after what he’d done. She couldn’t forgive him, wouldn’t forgive him. He knew that.

  He pressed the remote button and the DVD started up again.

  OH, GOD, THE WEDDING. Before now, whenever Ellie had thought about that marvelous day, she’d remembered only the joy of exchanging vows with Curt, entering into a bond that she’d believed could withstand anything life threw at it. She’d remembered not the silly fights with her mother over the silk purse, or the tension she and Curt were sure would flare between Anna, her maid of honor, and Ste
ve, Curt’s best man. Steve and Anna’s breakup had not been amicable, and for their entire senior year at Brown, Anna and Ellie had never mentioned Steve’s name. Yet at Curt and Ellie’s wedding two years later, they’d greeted each other with surprising affection at the rehearsal dinner. They’d hugged, they’d sat together, they’d whispered intimately. Steve had offered Anna a lift back to the hotel where many of the wedding guests were staying. Before kissing Ellie good-night and sending her home with her parents for her final night as a single woman, Curt had whispered, “I wonder if Steve’s going to be luckier than I am tonight.”

  Mostly, what Ellie remembered about her wedding was that it had given her Curt, forever. It had made her his wife and him her husband. For most of their marriage, she couldn’t have imagined wanting anything more than to have Curt beside her for the rest of her life, through childbirth and mortgage payments, school concerts and career challenges. Her marriage had made that wish a reality. Together they had taken up permanent residence on Hope Street.

  Not so permanent, as it turned out.

  “‘Ellie was a wonderful nurse,’” a male voice intoned on the DVD. The screen showed a series of scenes from Children’s Hospital. “‘She was not just top-notch when it came to medical care, but she was also a natural with the children. She could get them to smile and relax even when they were undergoing grueling treatments. They adored her.’ Dr. Joshua Steiner, pediatric cardiologist.”

  “Wow.” She let the video pull her away from thoughts of her wedding. “The girls dug up Josh Steiner for a quote? Last I heard, he was spending his retirement sailing around Nantucket.”

  “I guess he has to make landfall every now and then. They must have caught up with him when he was blown ashore.”

  “Either that, or they invented the quote,” she said. She’d been incredibly lucky to have a doctor like Josh Steiner as her first boss. The hardest part about leaving Children’s Hospital had been ending her professional association with him. She’d stayed in touch with him over the years, though. He’d even returned to the mainland for Peter’s funeral. That had been the last time she’d seen him.

  A group photo of Ellie and two other ward nurses appeared on the screen, accompanied by an unfamiliar woman’s voice: “‘I loved Ellie, except she was always getting on my case to quit smoking.’ Nurse Whitney Rodino.”

  “Nag, nag, nag,” Curt said lightly. He must have sensed that her mood had turned melancholy, and he was trying to recapture their earlier humor.

  “I gave her a pacifier from the stockroom once,” she said, trying to match his easy tone. “I told her she should suck on that instead of a cigarette.”

  “I bet she wasn’t as sorry as Josh Steiner was to see you go.”

  “I had only her best interests at heart.”

  “Nag,” Curt grunted. Ellie allowed herself a smile.

  She sipped her port and watched as the DVD displayed pictures of her swelling with her first pregnancy. There was a shot of a moving van in front of the house they’d bought just before Katie was born—the house on Birch Lane where they still lived—and a shot of Ellie standing on the front porch of the house, cradling a newborn Katie in her arms. Behind them hung the small shingle Curt had carved and hung above the front door: “Hope Street.” Seeing it adorning the entry to their home, so optimistic, so wrong, brought the sting of tears to Ellie’s eyes, but she blinked them away.

  “Katie was the perfect child,” a narrator—clearly Katie—recited. “She was a genius, beautiful and always well-behaved. At the age of two months she could speak in complete sentences. At five months she was completely potty trained—although she’d been changing her own diapers right from the day she and her mother left the hospital. By the time she reached her first birthday, she could explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and sing Wagner operas by heart. Ellie said, ‘Raising children is so easy. Let’s have another child.’ It is thanks to Katie’s magnificence that Jessie was born.”

  “Jessie,” the narration continued, in Jessie’s voice now, “proved that there is such a thing as more perfect. Jessie did everything Katie did, only she did it backwards and in high heels.”

  Ellie grinned and glanced at Curt. He was chuckling. No matter how badly they’d botched things, she thought, they’d still somehow managed to produce two fantastic daughters.

  The movie offered a series of photos of Curt and Ellie and their two little girls—playing on a Slippy Slide in the backyard, posing on the deck of Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor, surrounded by toys and tatters of gift wrap in the living room on Christmas morning with a festively decorated tree looming behind them. Then Ellie began to look plump in the photos.

  Not plump, pregnant.

  “With two such utterly perfect daughters, Ellie decided there was room for another child in the family,” Katie narrated.

  “This time it was a son,” Jessie continued. “Peter.” A photo took up the screen, Ellie in the hospital, smiling blissfully and holding her swaddled newborn son high, her cheek resting against his.

  Curt reached for her hand and folded his fingers around it, warm and strong. “You okay?” he asked.

  She might have objected to his overprotectiveness, but she didn’t. In truth, she appreciated his sensitivity. “I’m okay,” she said quietly. “This is my life, the first fifty years. Peter is a part of it.” A major part. A crucial part. The rawest, most bittersweet part.

  “We could take a break,” Curt offered.

  “And do what?”

  He searched her face. His hand was so warm on hers, his eyes as intense as they’d been the very first time they’d made love, when he’d gazed down at her in his lumpy bed in that ramshackle apartment on the east side of Providence, and she’d seen passion and wonder in their glittering depths.

  Certainly he couldn’t be thinking about sex now. In her film biography, Peter had just been born. His picture spread across the screen.

  Yet why wouldn’t Curt be thinking of sex now? The day of his son’s funeral, he’d wanted sex. His son in a casket, his son lost forever, his son’s spirit hovering like a thundercloud above their heads—and Curt had wanted sex.

  Two and a half years later, their marriage dead…was that what his eyes were telling her now? On the eve of their marriage’s funeral, was he getting horny?

  “The restaurant might still be open,” he said. “We could go downstairs and have a snack.”

  All right, she thought. He wasn’t thinking about sex. Which made her wonder why she was thinking about sex.

  Probably because she was stretched out on a bed next to the only man she’d ever loved, and because she’d just spent an hour reliving her life—a life that had included an intensely beautiful, decades-long love affair with Curt.

  She had no appetite—for food or sex or anything else. But she forced a smile and nodded. “A snack would be nice.”

  SIX

  A FEW CUSTOMERS lingered in the main dining room, but the Colonial-costumed hostess, who seemed a bit less fresh and perky than she had when Curt and Ellie had arrived at the inn a few hours ago, explained that no new arrivals could be seated there. However, she informed them, they could order food in the keeping room.

  “What’s a keeping room?” Curt whispered to Ellie.

  “A room with a fireplace off the kitchen,” she whispered back. She had no idea why such rooms were called keeping rooms, but thanks to her mother’s passion for all things “oldee,” she knew a little about Colonial New England architecture.

  The inn’s keeping room wasn’t directly off the kitchen, but it had a brick fireplace with a fire burning in it, and cozy tables set around the room. The hostess seated them at a table close to the fireplace. Ellie inhaled the mellow perfume of burning pine and smiled.

  Curt settled into the chair across the table from her. A dessert menu stood in a brass holder at the center of the table and he skimmed it before nudging it toward her. The desserts looked tempting—Indian pudding, deep-dish apple pie, blueberry
cobbler—but she wasn’t in the mood for anything sweet. She’d had trouble choking down a taste of the lavish chocolate birthday cake that had been served at her party.

  A waiter in knee britches and a blousy shirt approached the table. “Let’s split a cheese-and-fruit platter,” she suggested to Curt.

  He quirked an eyebrow, then nodded at the waiter, who jotted the order onto his pad. “I’ll have an espresso, too. Ellie?”

  “A cup of decaf,” she requested. As if caffeine would make any difference. She didn’t expect to sleep much tonight.

  The waiter took the menu and disappeared. “You didn’t want the apple pie?” Curt asked.

  She shook her head.

  “You’ve lost weight.”

  She pressed her lips together and leaned back in her seat, surprised that he mentioned her weight now. She’d lost weight in Africa, but he’d never said a word. She’d just assumed that by the time she’d returned home, he no longer noticed her.

  “That wasn’t an insult,” he added, reading something in her expression. She wasn’t sure what. Did she look offended?

  She shrugged. “I ate differently in Ghana.”

  “They didn’t have Goldfish there, I take it.”

  Oh, God. Goldfish—those addictive little fish-shaped crackers, laden with salt and cheddar flavoring. They’d been Peter’s favorite snack. When he’d died, Ellie had started eating them. In some subconscious way, she’d felt closer to him while she munched Goldfish crackers by the fistful. She’d sneak into his bedroom, sit in the swivel chair at his desk, play one of his Ludacris or Eminem CDs and devour Goldfish, as if mimicking him would somehow raise his spirit, make him come alive again. Or she’d pick at her dinner, utterly uninterested in the slab of meat and the ear of corn lying on her plate, and then an hour later she’d slake her hunger with half a bag of Goldfish.

  She hadn’t been eating properly, and she hadn’t cared. If she hadn’t gone to Africa, she might still be moping around the house, living on Goldfish and vitamins and an occasional cup of tea.