A Permanent Member of the Family (3 page)

Vickie wasn't around all that much, but Sarge was not attached to her in the same intense way as to the three younger girls. Sarge pretty much ignored Vickie. From the dog's perspective, I think Vickie was a late-arriving, auxiliary member of the pack, which I hate to admit is how the three younger girls saw her, too, despite my best efforts to integrate all four daughters into a single family unit. No one admitted this, of course, but even then, that early in the game, I saw that I was failing to build a recombinant nuclear family. Vickie was a free radical and, sadly, would remain one.

Mostly, when the children were at school or up at their mother's, Sarge slept through her days. Her only waking diversion, in the absence of the girls, was going for rides in my car, and I took her everywhere I went, even to my office at the college, where she slept under my desk while I met my classes. From dawn to dusk, when the weather turned wintry and snow was falling, if I was at home and my car parked in the driveway, Sarge's habit, so as not to miss an opportunity for a ride, was to crawl under the vehicle and sleep there between the rear wheels until I came out. When I got into the car I'd start the engine and, if the girls were with me, count off the seconds aloud until, fifteen or twenty seconds into my count, Sarge appeared at the driver's-side window. Then I'd step out, flip open the tailgate and lift her into the back. If the girls weren't there I still counted, but silently. I never got as high as thirty before Sarge was waiting by the car door.

I don't remember now where we were headed, but this time all four daughters were in the car together, Vickie in the front passenger's seat, Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha in back. I remember it as a daytime drive, even though, because of Vickie's classes and the younger girls' school hours, it was unusual for all four to be in the car at the same time during the day. Maybe it was a Saturday or Sunday; maybe we were going ice-skating at one of the local ponds. It was a bright, cloudless, cold afternoon, I remember that, and there was no snow on the ground just then, which suggests a deep freeze following the usual January thaw. We must have been five or six months into the separation and divorce, which would not be final until the following August.

Piling into the car, all four of the girls were in a silly mood, singing along to a popular Bee Gees disco song, “More Than a Woman,” singing in perfect mocking harmony and substituting lines like “bald-headed woman” for “more than a woman,” and breaking each other up, even the youngest, Andrea, who would have just turned seven then. I can't say I was distracted. I was simply happy, happy to see my daughters goofing off together, and was grinning at the four of them as they sang, my gaze turning from one bright face to another, when I realized that I had counted all the way to sixty and was still counting. That far into it, I didn't make the connection between the count and lifting Sarge into the back of the station wagon. I simply stopped counting, put the car in reverse and started to back out of the driveway.

There was a thump and a bump. The girls stopped singing. No one said a word. I hit the brake, put the car in park and shut off the motor. I lay my forehead against the steering wheel rim.

All four daughters began to wail. It was a primeval, keening, utterly female wail. Their voices rose in pitch and volume and became almost operatic, as if for years they had been waiting for this moment to arrive, when they could at last give voice together to a lifetime's accumulated pain and suffering. A terrible, almost unthinkable thing had happened. Their father had slain a permanent member of the family. We all knew it the second we heard the thump and felt the bump. But the girls knew something more. Instinctively, they understood the linkage between this moment, with Sarge dead beneath the wheels of my car, and my decision the previous summer to leave my wife. My reasons for that decision, my particular forms of pain and suffering, my years of humiliation and sense of having been too compromised in too many ways ever to respect myself again unless I left my wife, none of that mattered to my daughters, even to Vickie, who, as much as the other three, needed the primal family unit with two loving parents in residence together, needed it to remain intact and to continue into her adult life, holding and sustaining her and her sisters, nurturing them, and more than anything else, protecting them from bad things.

When the wailing finally subsided and came to a gradual end, and I had apologized so sincerely and repeatedly that the girls had begun to comfort me instead of letting me comfort them, telling me that Sarge must have died before I hit her with the car or she would have come out from under it in plenty of time, we left the car and wrapped Sarge's body in an old blanket. I carried her body and the girls carried several of her favorite toys and her food dish to the far corner of the backyard and laid her and her favorite things down beneath a leafless old maple tree. I told the girls that they could always come to this tree and stand over Sarge's grave and remember her love for them and their love for her.

While I went to the garage for a shovel and pick, the girls stood over Sarge's body as if to protect it from desecration. When I returned, Vickie said, “The ground's frozen, you know, Dad.”

“That's why I brought the pick,” I said, but the truth is I had forgotten that the ground was as hard as pavement, and she knew it. They all knew it. I was practically weeping by now, confused and frightened by the tidal welter of emotions rising in my chest and taking me completely over. As the girls calmed and seemed to grow increasingly focused on the task at hand, I spun out of control. I threw the shovel down beneath the maple tree and started slamming the pick against the ground, whacking the sere, rock-hard sod with fury. The blade clanged in the cold morning air and bounced off the ground, and the girls, frightened by my wild, gasping swings, backed away from me, as if watching their father avenge a crime they had not witnessed, delivering a punishment that exceeded the crime to a terrible degree.

I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn't see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls, and I slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn't know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.

But the girls were gone. I looked across the yard, past the rusting swing set toward the house, and saw the four of them disappear one by one between the house and the garage, Vickie in the lead, then Sasha holding Andrea's hand, and Caitlin. A few seconds later, they reappeared on the far side of the house, walking up the lane toward the home of my ex-wife. Now Vickie was holding Andrea's hand in one of hers and Caitlin's in the other, and Sasha, the eldest of my ex-wife's three daughters, was in the lead.

That's more or less the whole story, except to mention that when the girls were finally out of sight, Scooter, my black cat, strolled from the bushes alongside the brook that marked the edge of the yard, where he had probably been hunting voles and ground-feeding chickadees. He made his way across the yard to where I stood, passed by me and sat next to Sarge's stiffening body. The blanket around her body had been blown back by the breeze. The cold wind riffled her dense white fur. Her sightless eyes were dry and opaque, and her gray tongue lolled from her open mouth as if stopped in the middle of a yawn. She looked like game, a wild animal killed for her coat or her flesh, and not a permanent member of the family.

I drove the body of the dog to the veterinarian's, where she was cremated, and carried the ashes in a ceramic jar back to my house and placed the jar on the fireplace mantle, thinking that in the spring, when the ground thawed, the girls and I would bury the ashes down by the maple tree by the brook. But that never happened. The girls did not want to talk about Sarge. They did not spend as much time at my house anymore as they had before Sarge died. Vickie moved in with her boyfriend in town. By spring the other girls stayed overnight at my house every other weekend only, and by summer, when they went off to camp in the White Mountains, not at all, and I saw them that summer only once, when I drove up to Camp Abenaki on Parents' Weekend. I emptied the jar with Sarge's ashes into the brook alone one afternoon in May. The following year I was offered a tenure-track position at a major university in New Jersey, and given my age and stage of career, I felt obliged to accept it. I sold my little house down the lane from my ex-wife's home. From then on the girls visited me and their old cat, Scooter, when they could, which was once a month for a weekend during the school year and for the week before summer camp began.

CHRISTMAS PARTY

Harold Bilodeau's ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, but Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he was not. Their divorce had been, as they say, amicable. She'd had an affair and fallen in love with Bud Lincoln, one of Harold's friends and their Hurricane Road neighbor, and Harold had soon realized there was no way he could prevail against it.

“I guess love happens,” Harold told folks, and shrugged. “Can't fight it.”

“We married too young, Harold and me. Right out of high school, practically, for God's sake,” Sheila explained.

People in Keene understood romance and forgave Sheila, and they respected Harold for his quiet acceptance of his wife's love for another man. Keene is a village in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York with barely a thousand year-round residents, most of whom keep careful track of the births, deaths, marriages and divorces that occur among them. They monitor remarriage, too, especially when both parties are longtime residents of the town and continue after the dissolution of their previous marriages to live there, as both Harold and Sheila Bilodeau had done. Bud Lincoln had not been previously married and lived in his parents' house, but until he took up with Harold's wife he had been regarded in town as a “good catch,” so people watched him anyway.

After the divorce, Harold got a bank loan and bought out Sheila's interest in their double-wide and lived in it alone with their three dogs and two cats, all mixed-breed rescues from the North Country Animal Shelter, the half-dozen chickens, and the Angora goat.

That was three years ago, and Sheila and Bud had been married now for two of those years. While the two men were no longer close friends, they frequently ran into each other at the post office or gassing their trucks at Stewart's or grabbing coffee to go at the Noon Mark Diner, and there appeared to be no lingering hard feelings on Harold's part. Harold seldom saw Sheila in town, but when he did she was friendly and full of chat, and he, in his taciturn way, reciprocated.

Bud Lincoln was a building contractor, and he had built for Sheila a splendid three-bedroom, solar-heated house with mountain views up on Irish Hill. In spite of how friendly everyone was since the divorce, Harold was not surprised when back in October he wasn't invited to Sheila and Bud's housewarming party. In fact he was almost grateful not to be invited. It meant he didn't have to decide whether to attend or stay home.

But when in mid-December he opened a printed invitation to Sheila and Bud's Christmas party, he was surprised and almost displeased. It meant he'd have to admit to himself that the divorce and Sheila's remarriage still stung his heart, and he'd have to invent an excuse for declining the invitation, or else he'd have to test his ongoing pain against the new reality and attend the party. He'd have to act like an old family friend or a distant cousin, someone more than merely a neighbor and less than a cuckolded, abandoned ex-husband.

“Help us decorate our tree!” the invitation said. “Bring a decoration!” The return address listed them as Sheila & Bud Lincoln. So she had taken Bud's last name, just as she had once taken Harold's.

Sheila and Bud Lincoln had built their new high-tech log house expressly to establish and celebrate their marriage. It was more than a fresh start; it was a repudiation of the past. Her past, especially. The new house turned a simple case of adultery and divorce into a story about finding true love. Sheila's decade-long, childless life with Harold was now a closed book.

Nor was the divorce itself a part of Sheila and Bud's story either. Otherwise they wouldn't have stayed in Keene and built their fancy new house on Irish Hill, barely three miles from Harold's place. They wouldn't have adopted a baby from Ethiopia, big news in an otherwise all-white, all-American small town. And they wouldn't have invited Harold to their Christmas party, which they hoped to make an annual event. That was her story. And Bud's.

To Harold, however, Sheila was the past that wouldn't stop bleeding into his present and, as far as he could see, his future too. Nearly every night, alone in the queen-sized waterbed they'd once shared, she appeared in his dreams, looking the same as when they went to Montreal on their honeymoon, a smiling blond swirl of a girl who adored him for his quiet, stoical ways. Now every morning, before heading to the garage for his truck, when he fed the dogs and cats, the chickens and the goat—creatures they'd acquired at her urging, not his, and which she, not he, had fed and cared for—he had visions of Sheila setting out the pans, casting the corn, filling the bins, gathering eggs in the morning sun with her long, tanned hands, and he ached all over again with the pain of knowing that she'd wanted the animals because she couldn't get pregnant.

They tried every possible solution, from old wives' folk remedies to in vitro fertilization. Nothing worked. He even went through the embarrassment of having his sperm counted. No problem there, apparently, which relieved him somewhat, but only because it narrowed the potential solutions to the overall problem by 50 percent.

It did not relieve Sheila, however. She could no longer blame Harold's body. She had to blame her own. One by one, month after month, she ticked off the list all the possible causes of her body's inability to conceive a child: ovarian cysts, pelvic infection, blocked fallopian tubes. None of these. Until finally, after being examined by a female gynecologist at St. Mary's Hospital in Troy, she learned that her uterus was scarred from endometriosis, caused by a burst appendix when she was fifteen. The chances of her ever conceiving were pretty much nil.

By now sex with Harold had become a self-conscious chore for both of them, an obligation with a defunct purpose. They ceased making love altogether. Then one spring afternoon, while Harold was down in the valley excavating the foundation for the new Keene firehouse, Bud Lincoln dropped by their place to borrow Harold's backhoe for one of his jobs, and Sheila had sex with Bud for the first time.

The affair intensified and continued for nearly a year, and on a cold dark February night Harold found himself drinking late and alone up at Baxter Mountain Tavern, idly watching a Rangers game that wasn't carried by his home satellite service. Harold had played serious hockey in high school and rarely missed a televised Rangers game. One of Bud Lincoln's old girlfriends, Sally Hart, was tending bar that night. There were no other customers, and the owner, Dave Deyo, had gone home early, so Sally shut off the outside lights and poured herself a rum and Coke and took a stool at the bar next to Harold.

The subject of Sally Hart's ex-boyfriend came up. Harold said, “What's with ol' Bud, anyhow? I haven't seen him up here in months. He avoiding me? Or you?” he said and laughed to show he wasn't serious.

In the two years since Sally and Bud had split up, she had gone through two subsequent boyfriends and was five months pregnant by the third, whom she planned to marry. So nope, Bud wasn't avoiding her. “Me and him are still pals. You, though,” she said, “different story there, Harold.”

“What do you mean, ‘different story'?”

She hesitated, then said, “Look, honey, I hate to be the one to say it, but somebody's got to. When you leave here, I'm supposed to text Bud so he knows you're on your way home.”

“Why?”

She exhaled loudly and looked up at the TV. “All my choices always seem to be bad choices.” She was silent for a moment. “I don't know. I guess it's so you won't run into him when you get there, Harold.”

He didn't say anything. He put down his beer, paid his bill and zipped up his parka. The hockey game was almost over. The Rangers were down three. When he got to the door he turned and said, “You might as well send Bud that text now, Sally. I don't want to run into him any more than he wants to run into me.”

When Harold got home Bud was gone. He stood at the open door and told his wife what he had learned at Baxter's. Sheila sighed and said that she had fallen in love with Bud. And it was more serious than just a love affair. She said she would have his child if she could.

He said, “Sounds like there's no turning back now. Sounds like you're planning a whole different life, Sheila.”

She said, “That's right.”

She packed a single suitcase and drove her old rusted-out Honda to Bud's apartment in his parents' house down in the valley. Harold did not contest the divorce. A year later Sheila and Bud Lincoln were married.

 

A
LINE OF VEHICLES
was parked the length of the long, switchbacking, freshly plowed driveway to Sheila and Bud's house at the broad crest of the hill. Harold pulled his pickup into a cleared spot close to the mailbox, got out and walked slowly up the driveway between two rows of shuddering white pines. It was close to four thirty in the afternoon, and the sun was setting behind the mountains. The invitation had said the Christmas party was from three to six, so he figured he was not too early, not too late.

As he trudged past the parked cars and pickup trucks he recognized most of them. Nearly everyone at the party would be a friend or at least a neighbor. He never knew what to say to strangers, especially at social events, so was comforted. But he knew that nearly everyone attending the party would be checking out how he and Sheila and Bud behaved together in public, and that annoyed him. Well, let them, he thought. Sheila and Bud didn't invite him to their Christmas party because they wanted a confrontation, and he hadn't accepted their invitation because he was still angry at them. People move on. What's over is over and done with. The past is past. That's what this party is all about, he thought.

At the top of the hill the driveway straightened and led to the two-car garage below the house proper and the wide deck and huge brook-stone fireplace chimney and the soaring glass-fronted living room. Harold stopped for a moment and, breathing hard, took it all in: the snowy meadow, the woodsmoke curling from the chimney, the high-peaked roof and floor-to-ceiling two-story windows facing the mountains. Rose-colored light from the setting sun bounced off the glass front of the house and tinted the field and the snow-draped firs at its edge.

He was looking at Sheila's dream house, the house he knew she had always wanted, which he would never have been able to give her. He was an excavator, that's all. A guy who dug holes for people who were contractors, people like Bud Lincoln, who were smarter and better educated than he was, who knew how to negotiate and estimate cost and profit, who could talk easily to people and turn them from strangers into clients. All Harold Bilodeau knew was how to run machines that dug foundations and trenches. He had started out in high school buying a used lawn mower at a yard sale and mowing his neighbor's lawns and shoveling their walks in winter and had gone on to borrow his father's tractor and cut people's fields and meadows and plowed their driveways, and after graduation he had bought a used backhoe and a few years later a ten-year-old bulldozer and flatbed trailer and got the artist Paul Matthews to make him a sign,
Harold Bilodeau, Excavating
. The sign was bright yellow, like a highway sign, and had a black silhouette of a backhoe on it that Harold liked enough to have tattooed onto his left shoulder. At first Sheila thought the tattoo was sexy, but after a while she decided it was ugly and cheap and told him he ought to get it removed, which he was planning on doing when he found out about her and Bud. After that he decided to keep the tattoo.

He walked up the stairs to the front deck and entered the crowded living room through the sliding glass door. At a glance he recognized nearly everyone. People smiled and nodded at him, but their attention was on the Christmas tree in the far corner of the room, a ten-foot-tall blue spruce, heavily decorated and brightly lit.

Harold stood by the door for a moment, trying to get his bearings. Finally he shrugged out of his parka, found a pile of coats behind one of the sofas and dropped it there. He made his way to a long table that had been set up as a bar and asked the pretty kid tending it for a beer.

She said, “Sure, Harold, but you can have whatever you want. They got hard stuff. Eggnog even, with bourbon in it.”

He said a Pabst would do fine. The girl worked as a waitress part-time at Baxter's, and he wished he could remember her name, but he didn't know how to ask her for it without seeming like he was hitting on her. She had a tattoo of a thorny rosebush on her arm that disappeared under the sleeve of her black T-shirt and reappeared with a bud at the side of her neck just below her ear. She'd probably like his backhoe if he showed it to her.

Sheila was beside him. She was wearing a red dress with a bow on one shoulder, which reminded Harold of a valentine. She kissed him on the cheek, which surprised him; she had never kissed him on the cheek before, or anyone else that he could remember. She said, “You're almost too late to help decorate the tree. We're practically finished, except for the star at the top. What'd you bring for a decoration?”

“I guess I forgot. I mean, I didn't know.” She looked like she was putting on some weight, a bit thicker through the face and shoulders and waist. Or maybe it was the red dress. He felt his chest tighten and his arms grow heavy. She was still beautiful to him, and she was growing older, and he wasn't going to be able to watch it happen, except from a distance.

“It was on the invitation, Harold. We're starting a tradition,” she said. “Next Christmas we'll fill a box with all these decorations for people to pick from and take home for their own trees, and we'll put up a whole new set. It's like recycling. Except for the star on top. That stays. It's from Bud's family. Look, aren't some of these great?” She pointed out carved wooden animals, gingerbread men with M&M for eyes, delicate glass bells and balls, large and small candy canes, chocolate Santa Clauses, plaster angels, and birds with real feathers.