Pictures of Us Page 15

  And of course, I couldn’t do that. I had a wedding to go to and an electric bill to find.

  I was wrapped in a light summer robe, the heavy mass of my hair still wet against my back as I searched the surface of Michael’s desk for the bill. We split up the chore most of the time, which was a spectacularly stupid way to run a household, and this month we’d both been too preoccupied to keep track of what had been paid when. Only when I’d checked the calendar this morning had the date rung a bell, and I was petrified that if I didn’t mail off a check when I left the house, we’d wake up a few days from now with no power.

  It wasn’t as if Michael would ordinarily attend the wedding with me, or as if Emma needed a babysitter. But I wasn’t used to surprise trips, and that same small, unworthy part of me bristled at his words: I knew you’d be okay. Okay with what? That he was taking off to visit the son he’d never known until a few weeks ago? That he was taking off at all? That he was staying in his ex-lover’s apartment while they worried together over their son dying?

  Why would he so blithely assume that I was okay with any of it, much less all of it? The only answer I could reach, the one had that had kept me awake Thursday night until the only thing left on TV was infomercials, was that he didn’t believe I loved him enough to be bothered.

  In my heart, I knew Michael didn’t feel that way. But I couldn’t erase the memory of that moment, sprawled in bed, the TV flickering across the darkened room, Walter snoring beside me on the mattress, that my head had offered up the thought. And the panic had been a fist in my gut.

  I didn’t have time to agonize over it now, of course, and I shouldn’t have been agonizing at all. But as I sifted through the assorted papers on Michael’s desk, my fingers skimmed over a yellow legal tablet, half hidden under an article clipped from the newspaper and a credit card offer. The top page was covered with Michael’s precise, upright hand.

  He’d written a letter to Drew. Or started one, at least. And even though it was none of my business, I pulled the tablet from the pile and sat down in his desk chair to read it.

  Drew:

  I’m not sure how to begin. There are things I’d like to tell you, things I’d like you to know, and when you first contacted me, I thought we would have plenty of time to cover all of them. There are things I’d like to know, too, memories of your childhood only you can tell me, and I hope I have a chance to hear them.

  I’m sorrier than I can say that I didn’t have a chance to share any of those years with you. I understand your mom had reasons for her decision to keep me out of your life, and I have to respect that. Now that we’ve met, however, I’d like to get to know you. I’m not sure if I can be a father to a young man who has grown up so well already, and I don’t know if you want that kind of relationship with me, but I’d like for us to be friends if we can

  I don’t know how much your mom has told you about our relationship. I’m not sure if you want my feelings about it, but as it’s the only detail of your life—its very beginning, at least—that I can offer, I will. I hope you don’t mind.

  As the last sentence sank in, I swallowed hard. I didn’t have time to sit and read the letter, and anyway, I had no place reading it all. Michael had given me the bare-bones version of his relationship with Sophia, and I hardly needed to torture myself with the details. But I couldn’t help myself—I couldn’t bring myself to ask Michael about those months he had spent with her, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t curious about how he had met her, what he had seen in her that he couldn’t resist—what she had been able to offer him, all those years ago, that I couldn’t.

  I met your mom in the laundry room of the apartment building I had just moved into. She was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt with a caricature of Jane Austen on the front, but the first thing I really noticed was her eyes. They were so very dark, and that day they seemed to be laughing—at me, at my odd collection of dirty clothes, at my frustration with the washer that wouldn’t take my quarters without a fight. She was so calm, so self-possessed, that I couldn’t believe there was anything she couldn’t do if she set her mind to it.

  I’m sure you’re thinking, you got all that from an hour doing laundry together? No, not quite, but my first impression proved to be true the longer I knew her. I loved it when she spoke to me in Italian, I loved to watch her paint, and she kindly listened to me as I rambled on about the stories I was writing, and the literature I was studying in my first year of graduate school. It was late spring, and I had decided to stay in Boston for the summer, which I had never done before. Part of the reason for that decision was a serious rift between Tess and me, and your mother—also very kindly—sat through hours of me pouring out all my anger and sense of betrayal.

  I’m not sure how much you want me to say about this. There are a million details I could supply—nights spent eating Chinese takeout on the floor of the shabby little apartment I was sharing with a roommate, the summer day your mother and I took the bus to the beach, with a picnic lunch she had packed, the rainy weekend we spent at an art house theater during a William Wyler retrospective. But none of those details tell the whole story of what we shared.

  I can tell you this, though. Your mother meant a lot to me, and I respected her—her passion for her art, her ironclad streak of practicality, her generosity and compassion, her enormous heart. There are other things that I loved about her, of course, things that are too private to outline here. I don’t regret breaking things off with her, because I wanted another chance to make things work between Tess and me, but I know…

  I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t finished the letter. Heart pounding, I stared at the trailing sentence, the words that might lead to a hundred different places. What did he know? That he loved me more than Sophia? That Sophia would be all right on her own? That he couldn’t have us both?

  The unwritten answer to that question was something to hold on to as I went back upstairs to dress, electric bill in hand. If I didn’t focus on that, I would have to think about what my husband had said about loving another woman.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “HE’S HOME,” EMMA SHOUTED from the front porch Monday at dinnertime. I walked into the hall as she ran barefoot down the walk to the cab that had pulled up to the curb in the velvet twilight. Walter pressed his nose to the screen door, waiting, his tail thumping wildly.

  My heart was beating just as frantically, but anticipation wasn’t the reason. For the first time, I was almost frightened to see Michael. Our phone calls over the weekend had been brief, and Michael had been distracted every time we talked, full of words and numbers that I didn’t understand, white-blood-cell counts and liver function and blood-oxygen levels.

  A foreign language to me, as foreign as this strange apprehension about facing my husband after days apart. I couldn’t forget Michael’s letter to Drew—the ink seemed to have stained my fingers, indelible, leaving me to carry the words around for days.

  Emma threw her arms around him as the cab pulled away, and he punctuated a one-armed hug with a kiss on her forehead. “How’s my little girl?” he asked as they walked up to the house. Her answer was to rest her head against his shoulder and keep her arm tight around his waist as they mounted the front steps.

  “And how’s my big girl?” Michael asked me. He dropped his suitcase on the dusty porch floor and gave Emma a nudge into the house, watching me, waiting for me to say something.

  Tears were a hot, sudden pressure in my eyes, and dangerously close to spilling. Michael looked so good to me, and yet he looked so awful at the same time, exhausted and distracted and too thin. All I wanted to do was throw myself into his embrace as Emma had done, but if I did that, I was afraid the tangled knot of confusion and fear inside me would unravel.

  I let him take my hand, tug me toward him, and the taste of him when he kissed me was so comforting, so familiar, I couldn’t resist running one finger along his jaw. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two. “I’m okay,” I murmured. “How about you?”
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br />   “Exhausted.” He reached for his bag, and we went into the house together. “It’s been a long couple of days.”

  Emma was waiting in the kitchen, where I had made a meat loaf despite the heat. It was Michael’s favorite.

  “So how is he, Dad?” she said. She’d painted her toenails purple earlier in the afternoon, and beneath the overhead light they resembled fat, ripe grapes. “Really. Is he going to be okay?”

  Michael sat down heavily at the kitchen table, and I opened the fridge to grab him a beer. As he twisted off the cap, he met Emma’s steady gaze. “I don’t know, honey. He’s out of danger right now, but he needs a bone marrow transplant to have any chance of surviving more than a couple of months.”

  I braced for tears, but instead, Emma nodded slowly. Her eyes were troubled, but something about the set of her jaw wasn’t right. I’d seen that determination in her before, and I could only hope she knew that sheer force of will wouldn’t keep Drew alive.

  She didn’t disappoint me, either. During dinner, she put down her glass of water and faced Michael and me across the table, most of her meat loaf untouched on her plate, her fries cold and limp. “Can I ask for a favor?”

  This will be interesting, I thought. I wasn’t prepared to lift her punishment for the prom-night stunt even if her half brother was terminally ill, and I was already angry to think that she would use Drew as leverage to ask for special treatment.

  But she surprised me again. “I know I’m grounded, but I wanted to ask if Jesse could come for dinner tomorrow night. I mean, I was the one who decided to stay out on prom night, not him. I’m the one who screwed up—I can’t let you think he’s a bad influence or something.” Her face was bright with hope, and when I glanced at Michael, he had nearly choked on a piece of meat loaf.

  “Dinner?” His eyes were wide. “Um, Tess, is that okay with you?”

  Wasn’t it too early for her to bring a boy to dinner to meet the parents so formally? That newly familiar fist of panic squeezed again. Everything was still changing, including Emma, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.

  But I didn’t know how to deny her, either. Being grounded should have meant friends weren’t allowed to visit, but I was glad that she had at least asked, instead of springing him on us. Maybe she deserved a little consideration for trying to go about something the right way.

  And if she was serious about this boy, as I was beginning to suspect, we needed to know him better.

  “It’s okay with me,” I said finally, suddenly aware that I was still holding a French fry halfway to my mouth. “But don’t expect anything gourmet.”

  “Mom.” She laughed. “As if. Although I would love it if you made your special pasta and that herb bread. I bet Jesse would love it.”

  Really. I could only hope my mouth wasn’t hanging open as she cleared her plate without a reminder and hugged me before she left the room in search of her homework.

  “She must really like this kid,” Michael murmured as we listened to her setting up in the next room, humming something. “I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

  I gave him a sympathetic smile. Life moved faster these days, and kids grew up quicker. Sex hadn’t been scandalous between seventeen-year-olds when we were in high school. Did that mean that now, at fifteen, it was completely acceptable? I shuddered. “You and me both, babe.”

  Emma’s request was a perfect distraction, though. As concerned as I was about her relationship with Jesse, it gave Michael and me something to focus on aside from Drew, and the unanswered questions I had nearly convinced myself not to ask. If I squinted and angled my head, I could almost see the three of us as we had seemed to be only weeks ago, and the image was a comforting one. I could hold on to it if I tried, and by the time we were finished eating I had decided that I had upset myself for nothing. Michael loved me. Michael knew I loved him.

  As I scraped our plates and loaded the dishwasher, I repeated the words to myself. I didn’t need to ask him anything just to soothe my own wounded ego. He was tired, and understandably stressed. Drew’s appearance in our lives may have rocked the boat, but I wasn’t about to tip it over with ridiculous insecurities.

  It was a gorgeous night, too. The day’s heat had faded into a warm breeze, and when I took Walter out, the stars were thick and bright in the sky. I unclipped Walter’s leash and gave him his biscuit, tonight wasn’t for conversation, especially not an awkward one. If I wanted Michael to know how much I loved him, I had a better way to show him.

  I turned off the lights downstairs and locked up early. Emma had retreated to her room, and Michael was already upstairs, too. I found him sprawled in bed, naked under the sheet, idly flipping through the mail he’d carried up with him.

  “You paid the electric bill?” he said without looking up, and I smiled. Even distracted, unshaven and tired, he was beautiful. The stubble along his jaw gave him a slightly dangerous air, and despite the weight he’d lost, his body was still hard, the muscles in his shoulders and his abdomen still defined. Desire flickered inside me, a hungry tongue of flame, and I started to undress before I answered.

  “I did,” I said, and pulled off my shirt, unhooked my bra and let it drop to the floor. Michael always slept naked, even in the dead of winter, but I usually wore a T-shirt. He’d noticed, too—when I turned off the lamp on the night table and got into bed, leaving only the TV’s faint glow to light the room, I thought I heard a husky rumble in his throat.

  “I missed you,” I said, sliding in next to him and running my hand along his thigh. The hair was bristly under my fingertips, and the muscle there stiffened in response to my teasing touch.

  The mail fell to the floor when I moved closer, rustling the sheet, hooking my bare leg over his and laying my cheek against his chest. There it was, the heartbeat that had lulled me to sleep so many times, the rhythm as familiar as my own. His arm came around me, and his hand stroked idly over my ass.

  My fingers found him already hard, a pulse of arousal in the vein that ran the length of his erection. But when I turned my face up to kiss him, he wasn’t there. His mouth moved under mine, his tongue was hot against my lips, but his mind was somewhere else, somewhere other than our bed and the sweet friction of our bodies.

  I could change that. At least, I hoped I could. I flicked my tongue over the flat disk of his nipple, rubbed his calf with my foot, but I got only a vague grunt in reply. “What’s wrong?” I whispered, but a part of me was panicking already, because I knew the answer.

  “I’m sorry, babe.” He kissed the top of my head, but he was already shifting away, sitting up. “I’m just preoccupied about Drew. And Sophia.”

  Something inside me broke. A dam opening, maybe, a precarious floodgate that had so far held all my confusion and fear safely inside. They poured out as I wrenched away from him, and before I knew it, I was asking him, “Why? Why?”

  He was stunned. “Why am I preoccupied? Because Drew’s dying, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  I stumbled out of bed, ashamed for him to see the tears on my cheeks. “Not that,” I snapped as I grabbed up the T-shirt I had left sitting on the bed. “Why did you sleep with her? How could you?”

  The words seemed to hang in midair, flashing like a neon sign, and just as harsh and inevitable. I hadn’t realized how unbearable the weight of them inside me had become, but now that they were out, hovering between us unanswered, I would have taken them back if I could. How could anything Michael said now possibly make me feel better?

  He swung his legs out of the bed, and his feet hit the floor with a dangerous thud. The outrage rippling across his face was huge and hot, and I flinched when he stalked toward me. He hadn’t even bothered to put on a pair of shorts.

  “How could I do it?” He grabbed my arm when I looked away from the shock of betrayal in his eyes. “How can you even ask me that? You’re the one who said it was over. You fucking drove to Cambridge to tell me in person. ‘Over,’ you said. How was I supposed to know you’d change
your mind?”

  It was true. I’d known it all along. But hearing it from Michael, who was angrier than I could recall him ever being, was more painful than anything I’d felt.

  I couldn’t even speak. I sank to the floor, the fringed edge of the carpet rough under one bare thigh, and vaguely wondered if Emma could hear us. It didn’t seem to matter, though—I couldn’t imagine that the room, the house, the world, could bear Michael’s fury. Any minute we would both shatter into pieces, too small and broken to repair, and the world with us.

  He wasn’t finished, either. He paced the room, still unabashedly naked, the blue light of the TV reflected in his dark eyes, the hair that fell across his forehead.

  “Do you know what it did to me when you told me you were ending it?” he demanded. “Do you have any idea? I loved you from the moment I met you, Tess. I gave you everything I had. But you weren’t sure, you wanted time or space or whatever goddamn thing it was, and I gave it to you. I gave it to you!”

  This last was punctuated with his hand smacking the top of my dresser, and I flinched again, not even trying to hide my tears now.

  “What I found with Sophia was comfort, not revenge. And not love. Not at first,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair restlessly as he paced the room again. “I didn’t know you would change your mind! All I knew was that I missed you, and I still loved you so much. And when you called that day, when you asked me to come back, I jumped. I fucking jumped at it, Tess. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  I managed to nod, and a moment later he dropped to the floor beside me and gathered me against his bare chest. My cheeks were wet and flushed, and his cool skin was a blessing as he rocked me.

  “Love is a choice, Tess.” His voice had softened, too. “It’s a choice you make every day. I didn’t choose our separation—you did. Maybe I should have lived like a monk, but for how long? I had no idea how long it would last, and I was pretty sure it was supposed to be forever. I needed someone, Tess. I needed comfort.”