After Melanie Page 24

  ‘I really must go,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  His acquiescence was immediate, commingling regret and easement. They had approached a dangerous border and were mutually relieved to have passed safely across it.

  ‘I’ll call you about when I’ll be available next week,’ she promised.

  ‘All right.’

  As always he carried the cartons out to her car. As always he reminded her to put her lights on and drive carefully. He stood in the driveway as she drove away. Through her rearview mirror she saw him stare after her, his shoulders hunched, his hands stuffed into his pockets, lonely and solitary. She knew he would soon return to his silent house and worry about his daughters who lived across the continent.

  She drove very slowly, the car window open, a soft breeze brushing her face. The radio was tuned to a station that played golden oldies and she smiled when the DJ selected ‘Greenfields’, a song she and David had loved in their student days.

  Oh to be young then and close to the earth

  To stand by your wife at the moment of birth …

  She sang along, surprised that she remembered the words but, of course, it was a song to which they had laid claim. ‘Our song’, they had called it. They had slow-danced to the lilting voices of The Brothers Four in the tiny living room of their graduate school apartment, her chin on his shoulder, her natural grace compensating for his awkwardness. They had moved as one, on those quiet evenings, each step a gentle glide into tender togetherness.

  She drove on, humming now, and trying to remember when they had stopped dancing, why they had stopped dancing. The song ended. She switched the radio off. A wave of sadness washed over her. She pulled over to the side of the road and waited for it to subside.

  When she reached her home, she remained in the car for a few moments and then stepped into the shaft of silver moonlight that stretched across the pathway. The house was dark but there was an amber aureole of lamplight in the room where David now slept. She saw his silhouette at the window, saw him move away.

  She fumbled for her key, but before she could find it, David opened the door and she stepped into his outstretched arms.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ he said.

  ‘I was worried about myself,’ she replied.

  They walked up the stairs hand in hand, and paused, looked at each other, smiled, then turned and went into their separate rooms. In that quiet parting they willed themselves to patience, acknowledging, with sadness and optimism commingled, that the time for a decision had not yet come.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Judith arrived at the thrift shop the next morning a full hour before it was due to open. Juggling her coffee and biscotti, she disentangled the key from the long red ribbon and entered the empty room. Heat hung heavy on the air and she turned on the fans, training them on the gently used garments that dangled on wire hangers and formed colorful pyramids on the trestle tables.

  She walked past the small table on which small household items were cleverly arranged, the displays whimsically altered from day to day. She took note of rainbow-colored glass tulips, a souvenir of someone’s long-past Venice vacation, placed next to a snow globe that held the Eiffel tower in its cloudy interior. Bird-shaped bookends carved of heavy dark wood stood sentinel over a heavy gold ash tray of depression glass. It was a sad assortment, she thought, those rejected legacies of homes once furnished with care and pride. Decorators and antique dealers occasionally visited the thrift shop in search of small treasures. Judith had packaged a menagerie of crystal animals for a shrewd interior designer who had returned within a week to pluck up a family of marble-carved polar bears. Collections were markers of a marriage, of shared passion and delight. One couple she knew collected turtles, another focused on penguins. Wood carved, of kiln-fired ceramic, stone sculpted, her friends recounted the history of each acquisition, one bought on honeymoon, another discovered during a vacation.

  It was copper that she and David had collected from the earliest days of their marriage. Candlesticks and graceful bowls, planters and pots, all regularly polished to a burnished gleam that emitted brightness and warmth. Their very first find, back in their student days, had been a coffee pot, blackened by age and discarded on a curbside. David had hammered out the dents and she had rubbed its surface until it glowed. They had set it on a sagging shelf in their sparsely furnished apartment and smiled at each other, proud of the graceful finjan made bright and beautiful by their joint effort.

  As the years passed, and their circumstances changed, they had accumulated other copious treasures, each a reminder of happy vacation discoveries. The proud bird that perched above their fireplace had been found at a yard sale in rural Vermont. The string of bells was from a Paris flea market. Brian, during his rambunctious boyhood, had raced happily through the house jangling them. A set of hammered copper cups purchased in a Montreal antique shop had been used by Melanie for the tea parties at which she had served her dolls an imaginary brew.

  Judith, moving slowly through the empty shop, was assaulted by memories, interrupted by a thought that came unbidden. If she and David were to part, if their possessions were to be divided, she decided that she would not lay claim to any of their copper pieces. In a new life she might begin to collect pewter instead, a cold and wintry metal that would hold no memories.

  She trembled, a dangerous biliousness filling her throat at the invasive imagining of such a terrifying impasse. She had never before considered the dissolution of her marriage, the dismantling of her home, of her life. Gasping for air, she willed herself to calm, dismissed the noxious thought. A separation, and what might follow, was not a reality, only a dark and tenuous possibility. It would not, could not happen. The wounds of their marriage could be healed, their grief assimilated.

  She offered herself assurances, repeated them as a mental mantra, and was suffused with relief when Suzanne arrived and bustled about, turning on the lights, filling the cash register. Normalcy was restored.

  Suzanne asked Judith’s opinion about pricing a newly donated designer gown and she considered it carefully, grateful that it elided the haunted fantasies that had obsessed her earlier. The familiar routine rescued her from wild irrationality.

  Mid-morning brought a spurt of activity and during a brief surcease a harried woman entered, pushing a shopping cart loaded with household items, atop which a long mirror was unsteadily balanced.

  Judith rushed to help her. ‘That’s a lot for you to manage,’ she said.

  The woman sighed. ‘It is. But I’m emptying my daughter’s room. She’s moving to California. You can’t imagine what a job that is.’

  Judith nodded. She did not tell the woman that she knew exactly what a job that was. She helped the woman unload the cart, expressing admiration for the soon-to-be-gone daughter’s collection of movie posters and ceramic cats.

  ‘You’d think she’d want them,’ the woman said sadly.

  ‘Well, she’s starting a new life,’ Judith offered.

  ‘Thanks so much for helping me. You’ve been very kind.’

  ‘I’m glad I was able to,’ Judith replied and realized that she spoke the truth.

  Kindness now came more easily to her; it softened her heart, eased her thoughts. She carried the long mirror to the corner concealed by a shower curtain, their improvised dressing room, and hurried back to the register.

  It was pay day at the hospital and Suzanne anticipated an onslaught of customers. She was not wrong. Shoppers swarmed in, intent on scavenging bargain buys for late-August vacations. Bathing suits and bath towels were snapped up as plans for day trips to neighboring beaches were happily discussed. A portly grandmother, a clerk in the county government office, plundered the shelves in her search for sun hats for her grandchildren. She was treating them to a weekend at the Jersey shore, she confided proudly. Three young women, hospital aides, favored by the volunteers for their easy laughter and exuberant conversations in Spanish, seized newly donated gem-col
ored terry-cloth robes. They had chipped in to rent a cabana in New Rochelle.

  Consuela, the Guatemalan grandmother, plucked up two pastel-colored sundresses. ‘One for Juanita. The other for my bambina, my beautiful little Rosalita,’ she said happily.

  Judith, caught up in the excitement, rushed from one table to another. She carried cartons from the stock room to replenish the rapidly depleted shelves.

  That frenetic activity continued throughout the week as the race to exploit the last precious days of summer continued unabated.

  She did not call Jeffrey Kahn. She was too busy, she told herself and then wondered fretfully why he had not called her. She drove to the university and took refuge in the library, dutifully filling one index card after another. She told herself that she was making progress on her essay, which, Evelyn assured her, was a certain sign of recovery. But recovery from what? Death? Grief? Fear? She refrained from dredging for an answer.

  David went to a two-day conference in Boston and called her each night.

  ‘Are you all right?’ they asked each other.

  Are we all right? she thought to add but instead complained about the heat. ‘I miss you,’ she added, but he had already hung up.

  Did she miss Jeffrey Kahn? she wondered. Did he miss her? The idle thought filled her with guilt. Why would she miss him? Why would he miss her? She was only teasing herself, flirting with danger.

  She went to lunch with Suzanne, who pecked nervously at her salad and glanced repeatedly at her cell phone.

  ‘Is something wrong, Suzanne?’ Judith asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ve been getting a lot of calls on my landline. Hang-ups. Sometimes late at night. Sometimes early in the morning. The same thing on my cell phone.’

  ‘What about caller ID?’

  ‘The numbers are always different and can’t be recalled. Probably throwaway cell phones. Maybe pay phones. I think it’s Eric calling.’ Her voice broke.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Instinct, maybe. Hope, maybe. Fear, maybe. Or all of the above, maybe.’ She spoke in a monotone. Her fork clattered against the plate as it dropped from her trembling fingers.

  ‘What about Stan? Eric’s father. Has he been getting such calls?’

  Judith would not call Stan her ex-husband. Ex was Latin for out of, but surely even after divorce husbands and wives were not out of each other’s lives. Not when there was a child. A child alive, a child dead, a child whereabouts unknown – all heavy presences on parental hearts.

  ‘I spoke to Stan,’ Suzanne said. ‘His home number is unlisted. Eric wouldn’t have it. He has a new cell phone number, which Eric also would not have. Eric might call the practice, of course, but he hasn’t done that. At least not yet, as far as Stan knows.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘Not much. Eric doesn’t know where I live now. I added the thrift shop phone number and address to both my voicemail messages saying that I can be reached there. It will give Eric a place to go if he wants to find me. A public place.’

  ‘You’re afraid of him?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid of myself.’

  ‘I understand,’ Judith said.

  She too was afraid of herself, paralyzed by a fearful uncertainty that prevented her from calling Jeffrey Kahn, from talking openly and honestly with David. She knew that a decision had to be made, that she had to go forward, but she did not know how or when.

  ‘You will know what to do, what to say, when the moment presents itself,’ Evelyn had said unhelpfully, and Judith had bolted angrily from the therapist’s consulting room and then regretted her anger. Evelyn, who knew nothing about her afternoons with Jeffrey Kahn, could hardly offer helpful advice.

  It startled her to repeat Evelyn’s words to Suzanne. ‘You will know what to say to Eric when the moment comes,’ she said.

  ‘I hope so,’ Suzanne murmured.

  Neither of them finished their salads.

  The very next day, as they prepared to close the shop, a young woman rushed in. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her freckled face reddened by the pitiless August sun, the bodice of her yellow halter dress sweat-stained. She was familiar to the volunteers who knew and liked her. A student at the local community college who waitressed and babysat, she usually ferreted out T-shirts and jeans. Judith had noticed her wandering through the shop over the last several days, lingering in the rear where evening gowns swayed forlornly and leaving without a single purchase. But on this visit she walked purposefully to the rack where the wedding dress, still encased in its clear plastic shroud, hung. She plucked it up and disappeared behind the shower curtain into the improvised dressing room.

  All movement in the shop paused. The volunteers and customers who had watched her waited in frozen expectation. They smiled as she emerged and stood before the full-length mirror, her bright hair floating about her shoulders, the ivory silk hugging her slender body, emphasizing the narrowness of her waist, the fullness of her breasts. The long skirt, across which the golden embroidered butterflies flew, fell from her hips in graceful folds. She was aglow, a princess bride, proud and graceful. As she studied herself in the mirror, turning from side to side, now bending low, now pirouetting, the watching women applauded. She whirled about and bent her head in gratitude for their admiration.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ she said. ‘I’m getting married next month and I never thought I’d be able to afford a wedding gown. Not one like this.’

  ‘We all hope you’ll be very happy,’ Suzanne said.

  She spoke for all those assembled in that cluttered room, where fans did battle with unremitting heat and rhomboids of light danced across the scarred linoleum floor. She spoke for the watching wives, contented in their marriages, and for those who struggled against unhappiness, for the single women who lived in hope, for those like Suzanne herself who had married in good faith and divorced in sadness. And, Judith thought, she spoke for wives like herself, who trembled in the limbo of a life that was newly uncertain, who waited too long to say ‘I miss you’ to absent husbands and fantasized about men to whom they owed no attachment.

  ‘We’ll be happy,’ she promised and disappeared behind the shower curtain.

  She reappeared minutes later, wearing her flimsy sundress, her hair pulled back, cradling the wedding gown, her freckled face still aglow. She went to the cash register and handed Judith four five-dollar bills, a ten and a handful of quarters.

  ‘Coffee-shop tips and babysitting money,’ she said apologetically. ‘I had to wait until I had enough and I was so scared someone else would grab the dress.’

  ‘You could have asked us to put it aside for you,’ Judith said. ‘We do that.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘And now you do. Live and learn. And the best of luck.’

  ‘Red-headed gals look great in white,’ Suzanne said as she placed the bills in the register and counted out the change.

  ‘Denise, Brian’s fiancée, is a redhead,’ Judith murmured.

  She thought of the young woman who would marry her son: exuberant, generous Denise. Denise, when she told Judith that she and Brian would marry sooner than they had planned, had said, shyly, that she hoped Judith thought of her not as a daughter-in-law but as a daughter.

  I had a daughter, I do not need another … Judith had thought to say, but she had remained silent and turned away. Denise, after all, had meant well. She had been, in all their interchanges, kind and considerate. It was unfair to drain her wedding plans of joy.

  She had smiled apologetically at Brian’s bride and promised herself that she would not turn Melanie’s absence at that wedding into a spectral presence; that, yes, she would, in fact, try to think of Denise as a daughter.

  ‘She seems really nice, Brian’s gal,’ Suzanne offered. She had met Denise once or twice on her fleeting visits to the shop.

  ‘She is nice. More than nice,’ Judith agreed.

  Her cell phone rang then. It was David, speaking with the stutter that indic
ated unease. She braced herself for disappointment but was instead surprised.

  ‘I’m taking an early train,’ he said. ‘Do you want to eat in or go out?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll decide when you get home.’

  She felt a thrill of hope. She glanced at her watch. If she hurried, there would be time enough to wash and blow-dry her hair, to change into the white summer dress David had always favored.

  ‘Do you mind if I dash out?’ she asked Suzanne who was staring down at her own silent cell phone.

  ‘No. Fine.’ Suzanne waved but did not look up as Judith left.

  David had wanted to take Judith out for dinner since his return from Boston, but the press of work had been overwhelming. Nancy had stayed late when she could and more than once they had worked at her apartment because she did not want Lauren to be alone. They had talked vaguely about working on a new project that evening, but Brian had called that afternoon.

  ‘How are you doing, Dad?’ his son had asked hesitantly. ‘How’s Mom doing?’

  ‘Fine. We’re both fine. We may go out to dinner tonight.’

  The lie that he had told with such ease morphed into truth. He realized that he did in fact want to have dinner with Judith. Uneasily, he had called her. With the greatest of ease, she had agreed.

  He went to Nancy’s office and told her that he had decided to leave early that day. They would discuss the new project the next morning. He placed a copy of Pippi Longstocking that he had bought that morning on her desk.

  ‘For Lauren,’ he said. ‘It was one of Melanie’s favorites.’

  ‘That was thoughtful of you, but I’m not sure it would be wise to give it to her.’ She spoke very softly, her head bent low, her hair falling in silver sheaths about her narrow face. He pulled a chair up, the better to hear her, the better to see her.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s confused about you. About us. She’s still nursing the fantasy that you could be her new father. She asked me about it again last night.’

  ‘And what did you say?’ His voice was gentle; his heart was heavy. He could not tell her that he had, more than once, entertained the fantasy of Lauren as his surrogate daughter, although Nancy herself had never been part of such fleeting illusions.