She whispered, “I missed you so much. This house was like a sentence without you. Mealtimes were just awful, and when the alarm clock went off and you weren’t there to roll over against, and when I’d get home from school at night and know you weren’t driving in behind me. And wh... when Chelsea started acting up. Oh, Tom, I n ... needed you there for strength so badly, only you w ... weren’t there and Id ... didn’t understand mys ... self... and ...”
“Shh... don’t cry, Claire, it’s over.” He gathered her up hard against him, rocking her from side to side while she clung to his neck. “We’re together, and that’s how we’re going to stay. Chelsea will be all right as soon as she sees that we’re all right. She’s going to come through this just fine, you just wait and see. Now come on, Claire”—he tucked her under his arm—“let’s go to bed.”
Climbing the stairs with him, she said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep from crying. I’ve ruined our good mood.”
“I think I know a way to make you happy again, and besides, we got all those tears out of the way, so from here on out it’s just going to get better. Come on, take me to our own comfortable bed in our own clean house where I don’t have to wonder how long it’s been since the laundry was washed.”
She obliged him with a chuckle and rubbed her face against his shirtfront to dry her eyes.
“I knew you couldn’t last out there at your dad’s permanently, but I was terrified that you’d move into an apartment of your own, and then what if you just loved it? Maybe you’d discover that it was nice not having rock music ramming through the walls, and teenagers arguing at the supper table, and junk cars needing fixing, and wives who wake you up with their blow dryers when you want to sleep an extra ten minutes in the morning.”
“Are you kidding? You’ve just described what makes me the happiest. It’s called family life, and without it I was a lost man.”
“And I was a lost woman.”
They had reached their bedroom. She slipped from beneath his arm to turn on a lamp while he closed the door. Then he crossed to the bed, cocked one knee onto the mattress, and fell, flipping onto his back with his arms upflung. “Ahhh...” he sighed, closing his eyes as he lay on the familiar softness. She studied him, stretched out, hollow-bellied, his hair dark against the spread. Days past, she had wondered what to expect when and if this moment came, and in her imagination, it was not this. She had pictured swift passion, a reclaiming in no uncertain terms. Instead, he fell back like one exhausted.
But his eyelids were twitching.
And suddenly it struck her: she had wounded him deeply by turning him away time and again. There were still amends to be made.
She removed her clothing, watching him and knowing he listened to the silken rustles of her undressing.
Naked, she went to him, dropping to one knee on the bed, bending to him with a hand on either side of his head.
“Tom,” she whispered, “open your eyes.”
He did, and she saw the last-minute uncertainty within them.
“Tom ... I love you. Through all this, I never stopped loving you, never stopped wanting you ... not even when I turned you away.”
She lowered her mouth and his opened to receive it, though he lay as before, like a body washed up on a shore. She kissed his twitching eyelids, stilling them—first one, then the other—and the bridge of his nose, his temples, left and right, and the cowlick at the center of his hairline, which so reminded her of his other son. And his mouth once more, with infinite tenderness.
“No matter what,” she whispered, “you must never believe it was because I didn’t desire you. I was proving other things. They had nothing to do with this, Tom, nothing.” She touched him where no other woman would ever have the right to touch him, and his arms, lying lax a moment before, became instruments of possession, hauling her down where she had so missed being these past tormented weeks. From out of the past all the memories and promises they had built came back to compel, to move their hands one upon the other and bring an end to their separateness. In tangled bedding, with tangled limbs, they recommitted vows made years before, bringing back all the good, strong, wondrous sexual commitment to bond the spiritual commitment already made.
When their bodies were linked, and his eyelids no longer trembling, but open, and his insecurities no longer present, but put to rout, she moved above him, the aggressor, the seeker, the claimer of the disclaimed.
“I missed this,” she said, her voice rich with passion, her motion insistent and unbroken. He closed his eyes and let his lips fall open and his fingers be webbed by hers, and his hand be pinned against the bedding.
Soon a sound issued from his throat, and his body rose one last time, as if lifted by a breaker, and shuddered within her, and his fingers folded hard upon her knuckles.
He spoke her name softly—“Claire”—and she knew she’d been forgiven. And later, he rolled her free and took her down pathways traveled many times, in their young, struggling innocence and ignorance, and their older enlightenment and certainty—pathways leading Claire to a cry, and an arching, and a following stillness, repletion for them both.
Afterward, they sighed in unison: amens at the end of a prayer. They basked in the familiarity of lazy limbs that no longer clung but lay useless, flung, slung wherever chance had landed them. Eyes closed, they lay with their breath falling softly against each other’s faces.
Her hand happened to be near his hair. She plucked at it a time or two, drawing it through her fingers as if knotting a thread.
Opening her eyes, she murmured, “It’s so good to be here, to have it over with, to have you back.”
He opened his eyes too. “I never want to go through anything like that again.”
“You won’t. We’ll talk about everything from now on, no matter what it is that bothers us. I promise.”
They lay side by side, studying each other, quiet, content. “Someday,” she said, “when we’re very old, do you think we'll be able to look back at this time and laugh at our foolishness?”
He thought for a moment before answering. “No, I don’t think so. What we’ve been through wasn’t foolish. It hurt us both. There’s even a chance that the hurt will never go away entirely, and we might carry a little bit of it with us forever. But if we do, it’ll remind us of how close we came to losing each other and never to make the same mistakes again.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“I won’t either.”
They began growing drowsy. Outside, down the block, somebody’s dog barked, so muted it could scarcely be heard through the walls. Out on Eagle Lake two old men set up their checkerboard and prepared for a long night of insulting one another. Somewhere across town a girl and boy rang the doorbell of their half-brother and, when he answered, exclaimed, “It worked!” And when his mother appeared at his shoulder, “Thanks, Ms. Arens! Thanks a lot!”
On the conjugal bed, Tom’s limbs gave a sudden jerk as he courted sleep.
Claire’s eyes drifted open. “Honey?” she murmured.
“Hm?” His eyes remained closed.
“You aren’t going to believe this, but I really liked Monica. She’s a terrific woman.”
Tom’s eyes opened.
Claire’s closed.
But her lips held the faintest smile.
Table of Contents
One. 9
Two. 15
Three. 22
Four. 30
Five. 36
Six. 45
Seven. 50
Eight 57
Nine. 66
Ten. 73
Eleven. 81
Twelve. 89
Thirteen. 96
Fourteen. 102
Fifteen. 108
Sixteen. 114
Seventeen. 121
Eighteen. 127
LaVyrle Spencer, Home Song
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