“First of all I think we have to talk to her and let her get her feelings out,” Tom said.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“She’s going to blame us, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And she’s right. It’s largely our fault.”
“Yes, I know that too.”
Early dark had fallen, the temperature had dropped, and the wind had kicked up. The empty halyard was making the flagpole ring. Their cars were parked at two different sides of the building. They stopped on the sidewalk in front of Tom’s car.
“Claire, about John Handelman ...”
She turned and looked up at him. “Please, Tom, I can’t handle it right now. I’ve got to get this thing with Chelsea out of the way first. Maybe later tonight, after we’ve talked to her, you and I could go someplace quiet and talk.” Hope took hold of his heart. “Could we make that a definite date?”
“Yes, if I have any voice left to talk with.”
He stood holding his car keys, the wind flapping his coattails and batting his hair while all within him wished for an end to this separation. “All right. So, I’ll follow you home, okay?”
“Okay.”
She began to move toward her car.
“Claire?” he called after her.
She stopped and turned, surprised to find a hint of a grin on his face.
“I know your throat hurts, but it sounds sexy as hell that way.”
He got into his car, leaving her to watch with a faint smile before she turned and moved down the sidewalk away from him.
*****
When they reached home the children’s car was gone from the driveway. Claire pulled into the garage and Tom left his car outside. She waited, and as he approached they both felt the peculiarity of changed routine—for years he had parked in the garage beside her, where the empty stall looked nearly as sad as his half of the bed.
They went into the house together through the family room as they’d done so many times before. Lights were on there and in the kitchen but the house was silent. Claire set her conference materials on the kitchen counter and hung up her coat in the front hall closet while Tom stopped at the kitchen sink to get a drink. She welcomed the sound of the cabinet door thumping closed and the water running, as she went to the bottom of the stairs, and called, “Chelsea?”
No answer.
“Chelsea?” she called a little louder, stretching her neck.
She muttered under her breath and started upstairs. Both of the kids’ bedroom doors were open, their lights on. Pausing in Chelsea’s doorway, she found the room freshly cleaned, some stacks of clean stockings and underwear on the crisply made bed, and the remainder of the unfolded laundry in a pile on the floor. Most days Claire would have assumed Chelsea was somewhere else in the house, but today the empty room set her feet flying. She tore around the corner into Robby’s empty room.
“Robby?”
A brief hesitation beat, then she was barreling down the steps, calling, “Tom, are the kids down there anywhere?” Her heart began clubbing.
He appeared at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. “No. Aren’t they up there?”
“No. Their bedroom lights are on, and Chelsea left half a load of unfolded laundry in the middle of her bedroom floor.”
“What!” He scowled and headed up the stairs while Claire headed down.
“Tom, she was grounded! She wouldn’t leave the house, and neither would Robby without leaving a note!” He took the steps two at a time and shot past her. She watched his coattails disappear into one bedroom, then the other, before he returned and charged down to the main level, throwing a question over his shoulder.
“Did they say anything about evening plans?”
“No, nothing.” She followed him to the kitchen, where he opened the basement door and looked down into the darkness. Next he went into the family room and stood for a long time looking worried, searching the room in slow motion, as if for a dropped earring.
“Well, they’re not here,” he said, returning to the kitchen. “Maybe they went out to get something to eat.”
“Not without leaving a note. They knew conferences were done at six. They’d have left a note. And besides, when I say grounded, I mean grounded. I just don’t believe Chelsea would have defied my orders.”
“There’s probably a perfectly logical explanation.”
She knew Tom well: he was downplaying his anxiety to keep her from panicking.
“Tom ...” she said uncertainly.
He turned away, probably to hide his face, but gave himself away by wrapping one fist around the other and cracking his knuckles. While he was pretending to appear calm, he was glancing out the front window hoping to see the Nova drive in.
“Tom, I’m worried ... what if they—”
He spun to face her. “There’s nothing to be worried about, Claire. You mustn’t jump to conclusions.”
“But she left laundry half folded, and lights on all over the house. If you could have seen how she was dressed last night, you’d know what kind of state of mind she’s in.” They faced each other, needing to assure and be reassured as in the past, each of them hesitant to make the first move. But the force of habit—if not need—finally grew too much for them.
“Claire,” he said, and made the first move.
And she made the second.
Suddenly she was in his arms, in that comforting harbor where love buoyed and made the dire less dire. There were no kisses, only clinging and the exchanging of strength with Claire caught firmly against the canvas texture of his coat collar and the sturdy bone of his jaw. Gripping each other with their hearts racing, they stood in the kitchen, which had never seemed like home without him, whose forlorn table had been surrounded by a scattered group, never a family, since he’d been absent from it. For moments they simply clung and felt the first frayed threads of their relationship begin to mend. Their hearts wallowed partly in fear for their children and partly in hope for themselves, touching once again after all these long weeks.
Their daughter, the peacemaker, had tried to bring about this disarmament and thought she had failed, so where had she run and with whom?
“I failed her, Tom,” Claire whispered with a catch in her voice.
“No, Claire, no,” he soothed. “This is no time for blaming yourself. What we have to do now is find her, and Robby too.” He set her back from him and held her by both arms. “Do you have any idea where they might be?”
“No, Tom, I’ve been trying to think but I ...”
At that very moment lights came sweeping into the driveway and a car tore in at breakneck speed. It careened to a stop behind Tom’s just as he reached the window to peer out. “Oh, thank God, they’re home. Looks like they’ve brought somebody else though ... there are two cars.” Another vehicle had pulled up at the foot of the driveway and stopped. The exterior garage lights sent a ray of teal blue flame along a ridge of paint on the side of the second vehicle. “What the hell?” Tom mumbled, frowning.
“Who is it?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s Kent.”
Tom dropped the curtain as car doors thudded and voices sounded, muffled through the wall. A moment later Robby and Chelsea barged into the house and stood breathlessly, confronting their parents in the brightly lit kitchen. “Where have you been?” Tom shouted.
Instead of answering him, Chelsea keyed on Claire. “Talking with somebody we think you ought to talk to, Mom.”
“Who?” Claire asked.
Chelsea pleaded, “Just come outside with us, please, Mom.”
“Who’s out there?”
Robby stepped in, exasperation honing a sharp edge on his voice. “Will you for once in your life just give over control and do what we ask, Mother?”
Nonplussed, Claire stared at her son. Then at her daughter. The room held a static silence before Chelsea begged, much gentler than Robby, with her heart in each word, “We want you to put on your coat and go
outside. There’s somebody waiting at the end of the driveway. Will you do that for us, Mom?”
“Who is it?”
With a hint of tears in her eyes, Chelsea appealed to her father. “Dad, would you make her do it? Please? Because we’re running out of ideas, and this is our last one.”
Tom turned to Claire, puzzled but willing to encourage her to do whatever the children wanted, because he too felt she needed to consider their feelings more if their marriage was to go forward and their family thrive. And since it was Kent out there, she needed to strike some sort of truce with him, didn’t she? Because Tom had every intention of seeing him on a regular basis and being a father to him from now on.
“Claire?” he said simply.
From the somber appeal in his eyes, she turned to the hope in her children’s, realizing from their intensity that their request held great import for all of them, and that this was not the time to take them to task for defying rules. If she and Tom were to patch things up, whatever awaited her outside seemed a step she must take in that direction.
“All right,” she said, and saw the collective wilting of shoulders before she retrieved her coat and, without one word of repudiation, went outside.
The garage lights laid a golden path down the driveway and lit the side of the blue Lexus. No, Claire thought. Please, I can’t do this! But she made her feet carry her past the two parked cars toward the automobile whose very glint of blue had struck anger and jealousy into her whenever she’d seen it these past two months.
When Claire was halfway down the driveway, the driver’s door opened and someone got out. Monica Arens emerged and stood waiting, studying Claire over the sunroof.
Claire halted fifteen feet away.
“Please don’t go back in,” Monica said.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be you. I was expecting your son.”
“I know. I’m sorry if this is a shock. Could we talk?” Insecurity reared up and caught Claire in its unkind grip: this woman had been intimate with Tom one week before their wedding. He had gotten her pregnant when Claire was already pregnant by him, and that fact still had the power to cow Claire. But she remembered the pleading on her children’s and Tom’s faces as they asked her to see this through. The future of her family rested squarely with her. “Yes. I guess it’s time, isn’t it?”
“Would you like to get in my car? It’s warmer in there.” No, Claire really would not like to, but she acceded, “All right,” and got in.
Inside, the dash lights created a faint aquamarine intimacy. Claire felt trapped and terrified, facing Monica Arens, prepared to dislike her while forced to hide it.
Monica said, “I wouldn’t have chosen to do this in my car, but the children insisted. I thought it would be much better if we met on neutral territory, but ... as I said, the choice wasn’t mine.”
“No, this ... this is fine.”
“I’m not sure what they told you in there.”
“Nothing. They just said someone was waiting outside who wanted to talk to me.”
“I am sorry to spring this on you. I’m sure it was a shock when you saw me get out of the car.”
Claire released a nervous scrape of laughter. “Yes, I think you could say that.” Her tortured tenor seemed pronounced in the confines of the car.
“Well, let me begin by explaining that our children came to me today and asked me to do this. All our children—yours and mine.”
“Together?” Claire retorted in surprise.
“Yes, together. It seems that they had a meeting of the minds and decided they have to make the best of being brothers and sister, and that the sooner they get to know each other, the better. They spent part of the afternoon together here at your house. I don’t know whether you’re aware of that or not.”
“No,” Claire said, the word scarcely leaving her throat. “I ... I didn’t know any of this.”
“Well, after they left here, they came to my house and appealed to me to come and talk to you; and they wanted me to do it here. I’ll admit, I balked at the idea, but they were very sincere and very persuasive, so here I am, no happier about it than you are. But I’m here just the same.” Claire was surprised by the woman’s candor. Some of her defenses crumbled as she realized Monica’s feelings were much the same as hers.
Monica took a deep breath and continued. “I guess this would be easiest if I came right out and told you that I know about your separation from Tom. I know that the two of you have been living apart since shortly after I came to town.”
In the sub-light, Claire felt herself blushing: never had her jeopardized marriage seemed like a greater blight on her pride than when admitting it to this woman.
“Yes, that’s true, but we’re going to start counseling next week.”
“That’s good. But when you do you should know exactly how things stand between Tom and me. There’s absolutely nothing between us, and you’ve got to believe that. The truth is, there never was. The night we went to bed together was a one-night stand, plain and simple. I have no excuses for it, and neither does he. But if you let the past or anything you suppose is happening between us now, stand in the way of your marriage, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
Relief hit Claire like a giant breaker. She was still tumbling in its backwash when Monica rushed on, “You can ask me anything you want about the times I’ve seen and talked to Tom since we moved back here, and I’ll answer you absolutely truthfully. What do you want to know? If I ever saw him? I did. Where? At my house, which was absolutely an arbitrary choice. All we ever did was talk about Kent and what was best for everyone involved.”
Claire’s heart was hammering so hard the top of her head was palpitating, but she seized the opportunity to clear up a detail that had stuck in her craw ever since she’d been told about it. “My neighbor said she saw you with him in a parked car in front of a restaurant right around the time school started.”
“Yes, she did. It was another one of those days when we were caught in the exceedingly emotional tangle of trying to decide whether or not everyone should be told about Kent. Maybe we weren’t wise to meet there, but at the time we just fumbled through it, doing whatever we could to figure out how to deal with the mess we’d created. If you want to blame someone, you can blame me. I made a major mistake years ago by choosing not to tell Tom that I was pregnant or that Kent had been born. Now, in the years since, we’ve all been enlightened, and we know that it’s not just the woman’s prerogative to decide whether or not a man has rights to his child when one is born out of wedlock. But in those days these things were often kept a secret, and a lot of fathers never had the choice about what part they’d play in their children’s rearing. I was wrong. Let me say it again, and ask your forgiveness along with Tom’s and Kent’s. If I hadn’t hidden the truth, this breakup between you and Tom never would have happened, and your family would still be together.”
Tears sprang into Claire’s eyes. Abashed at the idea of Monica detecting them, she turned her face to the passenger window. “I don’t know what I expected when I saw you standing beside the car, but I guess there was still a part of me that thought maybe you were going to ... to tell me that ... well, that you and Tom were in love and that I ... I should set him free.”
“No, never.” Monica reached over and lightly touched Claire’s coat sleeve, bringing her face around. “Please believe me. If I loved him that’s exactly what I’d be saying, because that’s what I’m like. I don’t back down from anything.” She removed her hand and sat sideways in her seat, studying Claire’s profile against the dimly lit square of window behind her.
“There’s something else I need to say, and this is the hardest part of all. I’m saying it for two reasons—because you need to hear it and because I need to say it after all these years.” She paused a beat before continuing. “That night, the night of Tom’s bachelor party, what we did was wrong. I knew it then and I’m admitting it now. Just don’t let it carry too much weigh
t, after all these years. I know that’s a big order, but there’s a lot at stake here. Try to realize that he was young and disillusioned and under a great deal of stress, having to get married. But I’ll tell you something you probably never knew before. When I moved back here, the first time Tom came to my house—the only time he came there—he told me how much he loves you and that since he’s been married to you, every year of his life has gotten better and better.” Monica’s voice faded to a sincere whisper. “Your husband loves you very much, Mrs. Gardner. I think you’ve broken his heart by forcing this separation. You have two very beautiful children, who want their mother and father together so badly. Won’t you please take him back and beat the odds?”
Claire lifted her tear-filled eyes to Monica, who went on her with her appeal.
“There are so many families breaking up today, and so many single-parent families like mine. I really don’t have to tell you that, working in the school the way you do. But even though I have nothing to apologize for as far as my parenting is concerned, I realize that families like yours are still the best kind—a mother and a father with kids they’ve raised together. That remains the true American dream, but it’s becoming obsolete. If I had the history you do with Tom, and two beautiful children, and all those good years behind me, I’d fight to keep my husband, not throw him away. There. I’ve stated my case. Do with it what you will.”
In the luminous silence that followed, the two women sat motionless, bound by this baring of souls. Claire found a tissue in her coat pocket and used it, then sat gazing at her lap, letting her emotions play out their fanciful dance—relief and gratitude and a great deal of respect for the woman beside her; hope and a huge stew of tumult as she anticipated the moment she’d walk into the house and face Tom again. Finally she released a sigh and swung to study her companion. “You know, I’ve always been prepared to dislike you.”
“That’s understandable.”
“I tried to find fault with you at conferences yesterday, but I couldn’t. It actually irritated me that I couldn’t. I wanted you to be ...” Claire shrugged. “I don’t know ... to be lacking in some way. Rude maybe, misguided or haughty, so I could criticize you, if not openly, at least to myself. Now, though, I see why Kent is the kind of boy he is.”