The Blessings (18 page)

“About a month ago.”

“Oh,” she says again, stung—a month. Then she says, “I'm sorry,” and she is, though it's something of a relief. Ann had thought they might get married—Rebecca seemed the kind to go after what she wanted, Alex the kind to get carried along—but Rebecca always struck her as a little too uppity, proprietary. The first time the three of them went to dinner, Rebecca had regarded Ann with a knowing air, as if fitting together the pieces of a puzzle, causing Ann to wonder exactly what she'd been told.

Now she looks into her son's face, checking him for damage, but with Alex it's always hard to tell. She remembers the session with the family therapist at Meghan's outpatient clinic. How the therapist pinched his skin:
Alex, can you feel this?

She asks him, “How are you doing? Are you okay?”

“I'm okay,” Alex says. He takes his glasses off, holds them by one arm. “I think it's the right thing.”

“Who was it who…” She tries to be tactful, then just asks. “Who ended it?”

“Both of us, sort of. But mostly me, I guess. I'd been thinking it for a while.” He rubs the skin between his eyes, a gesture that seems strikingly adult. “I just couldn't see her being the mother of my children,” he says, and Ann is surprised by the sentiment, the sensitivity of it, surprised and touched.

The day with the family therapist, the day Dave told the children he was leaving, was the worst and best day of Ann's life. The best because it marked the true beginning of Meghan's recovery, the worst because of the scene itself. Ann will never forget that image of her three children. Meghan crying so hard that she gasped for air. Abby with her arms crossed, staring at the window, the look of leaving in her eyes. And Alex disappearing, going numb before them.
Alex, can you feel this? Can you hear me?
the therapist asked him as Ann's thoughts spun wildly—
We caused this, we're causing this
—and she watched him recede, the color draining from his face. She is most like him, she thinks.

In the months after Dave moved out, alone in the house for the first time, Ann had been committed to her independence. She painted her bedroom, rearranged the living room furniture, cleaned the gutters, and learned to mow the lawn. At first she hadn't wanted Dave to leave, but gradually, she began to feel happier. Not happier, maybe. More comfortable. More like herself.

During that time, she read every self-help book she could get her hands on.
When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder. Eating Disorders: A Parents' Guide. When Things Fall Apart.
She found some comfort in it, reading books that identified her situation, that recognized what she was going through.

And she told Abby things—things she was learning in therapy, things she'd read in her magazines and books. Ann was in a cloud of panic then, saturated with new self-awareness, desperate to keep her children from repeating her mistakes. She told Abby how she and Dave had never learned to communicate. How, when they got married, they hadn't known each other very well. They'd never slept together—it wasn't like today. How even on her wedding day, she hadn't felt completely sure.

This was inconceivable to Abby, almost offensive:
How could you not be sure?

Abby was inexplicably annoyed by these confidences. Maybe Ann told her too much? Abby has had many boyfriends, enough that Ann finds it mildly disconcerting (probably she and Dave were to blame for this, too). On this visit, though, Abby seems calmer. For the first time in a long time, it's just the two of them alone in the house. Ann remembers when Abby was a newborn, rocking her at night, humming into her dark hair, acclimating to her new identity:
mother
. She absorbed it like a second skin.

They talk about Abby's job at the museum, which she seems to be liking, and Alex's breakup—
a good move
, Abby concurs. They talk about Joey, who's getting married this summer; he's twenty-five and his fiancée is only Meghan's age.

“Well, that explains the honeymoon at Disney World,” Abby says.

“I guess,” Ann says, then smiles and shakes her head.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She pauses. “I was just thinking of our honeymoon, me and Dad's.” Hesitantly, she tells Abby about when she and Dave arrived in California. How as they buckled into the rental car, Ann had looked at him sitting there—the side of his face, the large freckle by his ear—and was suddenly sure she'd never seen that freckle before. And then the hand—the one wearing the gold band. Whose hand was that? Who
was
this person? There was a complete stranger behind the wheel.

Two years ago, the story might have sparked impatience in Abby, but now she laughs. Ann is relieved. “God, how weird,” she says, lines fanning around her eyes. In the last year, she's cut her hair to the shoulders, let a few of her old earring holes close over. Her brown hair shows glints of premature gray. She turned thirty last year, which doesn't seem possible. Her child? Thirty? Ann supposes every mother in the world thinks this.

The night before Abby is leaving, they watch a sad movie. Sad movies are Ann's favorite kind. She doesn't think she's morbid, or likes to be depressed. Just the opposite—these stories seem to get at some truth about people, life, that makes her feel connected. She's always had trouble expressing her emotions.
Rigid
—that was the word Dave once used. But the truth is, Ann feels so much that it leaves her paralyzed. Watching movies, she lets other people's feelings move through her, flood her; tonight, a documentary about the children of prostitutes in India moves her to tears. She sometimes has the same reaction to strangers, a teenage girl in a restaurant pushing food around a plate, a pained look on her mother's face. Or one of her students, nine years old but already clearly different, needy or anxious, marked for a difficult road. Ann always pays these children extra attention. She is drawn to sad things, leans into them. Empathy, but something else. A sense of kinship, a comfort.

When Abby's car pulls away, Ann stands waving on the back porch. The sadness swells up from her stitched belly, threatening to split her apart. She's reminded of a night when Abby was twenty-one, home for spring break, and drove to Florida with three friends from college—a plan she and Dave had only reluctantly agreed to—then forgot to call when she arrived. Ann had been beside herself, trying to track down the other girls' families, calling hospitals in major cities from Richmond to Fort Lauderdale. She waves until Abby's car is out of sight.

Then she steps back inside the house. She hears the tick of the oven clock, the refrigerator's drone. Her children are all gone; she is back to being alone. She'd grown accustomed to this after Dave left, but having had the house full again, she now finds the solitude palpable. She thinks briefly of all the things she should be attending to: library books that need returning, bills that need to be paid. Her mother in a nursing home, wondering why she hasn't been to see her. The car sitting cold in the driveway. For now, she shuts the door.

Ann had had plans for her convalescence: things to do around the house, boxes from the attic to sift through, the children's old things to get rid of, donate, organize. Things that, in the interest of other, more pressing things, she never has the time to do. Before Alex went back to Princeton, he brought the boxes down from the attic, but they remain stacked in the dining room, untouched. Alone again, Ann can't seem to motivate.
After three weeks, most women can resume driving and light chores
, the pamphlet says. But once Ann lets herself succumb to the heaviness, ease into it, it's difficult to lift herself back out. To be inside her mind, self-contained, a wall between herself and the world—in a way, she thinks, it is her natural state.

Kate comes to visit, like a small tornado. The children, and all the children's things. Kate and Patrick have astounding amounts of things. Hayley perches beside Ann on the couch, chatting a mile a minute. She's verbal, funny, a little comedienne. Six years old, but her affect is older, like one of those mature child actors. She's wearing a backpack and shoes with little heels—heels, at six? Tate, almost two, races in circles around the room. (Ann had a playpen for her kids, but they've fallen out of favor. The bars, she supposes. Miniprisons.) Kate chases after the baby, talking all the while, relaying her latest funny stories of domestic dishevelment—the peanut butter in the DVD player, the vomit all over the car.
What a scene!
Kate sighs, and Ann smiles obligingly. She's happy for Kate, who jumped through hoops to get pregnant. A relief, when it happened. A shock when it happened again.
My gynecologist actually laughed!
Kate told them. But Ann knows these stories are partly for show, proof of how much work her life is. There's something naïve about them, too. Because the truth, Ann thinks, is that when they're young, it's easy. The part that seems so exhausting, so unrelenting—nap schedules and middle-of-the-night feedings, potty training and ear infections—is actually nothing. When they get older, the problems are intangible, invisible. This is the true hard: the kind that makes your marriage age and stoop and split open. The kind that makes you panic as you listen to them close their bedroom doors. All those nights sitting beside Meghan, helplessly tracking the fluctuations in her mood, as if just by being near her, Ann could stave off whatever was happening to her. The sound of Alex thundering upstairs—he was always so quiet, but how he stomped and pounded and scraped his chair back from the kitchen table, needing a release. Watching them drive away, horns beeping as the cars disappeared around corners, waiting for the call that they arrived safely on the other side, unable to sleep until it came.
I just forgot, okay?
they might say, heaving a sigh, annoyed—annoyed!—by her worry. If she could, she would warn Kate, warn all the young mothers: Your life is no longer just your own. You will feel their every feeling. You will live two lives.

That evening, after Kate leaves, Ann sinks into the quiet. The sun is setting by five fifteen, the undersides of the low, long clouds glowing pink—the kind of thing Ann now has the luxury of noticing. She turns on a lamp and wanders her empty house. She watches a show about an obsessive detective, the first five minutes of the ten o'clock news.
More frigid temps on the way!
There's a numbness in her belly, radiating around the incision, spreading to the tops of her thighs. She goes to bed early, listening to the cars pass by.

A hysterectomy represents an end to your childbearing years
, says the pamphlet.
Even women with children may experience a sense of loss.

Every day, a phone call from Margie. She talks mostly about Joey's wedding—flowers, dresses, the reception at Dugan's Banquet Hall. She rarely mentions Joe. Ann has wondered if everything is right with them, knows that Margie would never say. It took years for her to admit there was any trouble with Stephen, even when it was plain to everyone around him. Ann remembers the night Mother fell in her apartment, how troubled her nephew seemed, drunk or maybe on drugs. But she knows, too, how easy it can be not to see what's right in front of your face.

“Mother's been asking for you,” Margie tells her.

“I know.”

“Are you driving yet?”

“Not quite,” Ann admits. “I will. Soon.”

Regular walks are encouraged
, says the pamphlet, but it's too cold to go outside. Ann does a few laps around the first floor. She picks things up and sets them down, as if looking for something she's misplaced. In the driveway, the car has begun to look bigger, some sort of hibernating creature hunkered down by the garage. The trunk seems wider, the nose longer, the blue of it the color of winter itself. The driveway looks icy, too, and the occasional noise from Spry confirms it—a long screech of brakes, the squeal of sliding tires. Ann cringes each time, fear sweeping through her like a wave.

Saturday: Joey and Amy's engagement party. Ann knows she should be there but can't bring herself to leave the house. Not in the dark, in this deep cold.
Avoiding stress and anxiety is important to your recovery
, the pamphlet affirms. She tells Margie she's not up to it, endures her sister's unhappy beat of silence. Around nine, Patrick's giant SUV pulls up out front and Hayley runs a plate to the door.

Dave stops by after work, a Tuesday. Ann is sure that he waited a while out of politeness, giving her privacy during the weeks that were most raw. “A beer?” she offers—strange, in his own house. The drink, the knocking. He says no to the beer but accepts a glass of iced tea. While she pours it, she notices him gazing toward the back deck; it was always his favorite place.

“You're feeling good?” he asks her when they're settled in the living room. He's sitting in the rocking chair, a chair he never used to sit in.

“Much better, thanks.”

“And you're getting around?”

“Oh, yes.” She doesn't admit she hasn't driven yet, that she called school and told them she needed another week. Instead, they talk about the children. About Abby, who seems happy in Boston; after twelve years, they've resigned themselves to the fact that she isn't coming home. About Alex and Rebecca's breakup—sounds like the right thing, they agree. In a way, it's as it always was: Come together, talk about the children, then go their separate ways. Except now they're older; they are observing from a distance.

“And Meghan seems good,” Dave says. Always, they have to confirm, about Meghan. They were in the dark together once before.