The Blessings (21 page)

“Just for the record,” Kate says, her voice tight. “I really needed you here sooner.”

“Yeah. I got that.”

“I'm not kidding, Patrick.”

“I didn't think you were.”

He turns to face her. It's dangerous, he thinks, two funny people; humor can so easily turn cruel.

 “I've been here since nine this morning,” she says, arms folded over her chest. “I've spent the last eight hours shopping and cleaning for your family.”

Your family
—after all this time.

Patrick looks at her. Was he wrong to hope things might be different? He resists the urge to mention that the living room looks as if a cyclone hit it, yet she had time to deal with her nails and hair. Because he hates the trading of responsibilities, the contests over who's done more, worked harder, but he can't help adding: “I worked all day, too, you know.”

From downstairs, the kitchen door slams and Hayley shouts, “Hi, Aunt Lauren! Hi, Max!” He hears Lauren's effusive greeting and the mumbled hello from his nephew, John's son, now sixteen. The door slams again and Hayley yells with furious, possibly sugar-addled, excitement, “Elena! Check out my face!”

Patrick's head is pounding. He feels suddenly as if he could implode—with love for his family, frustration with his wife, the two parts of his life that he's always struggled to reconcile, like having two close friends who just don't click.

Kate closes her eyes in a long, decisive blink. When she opens them, she smiles. “I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm sure you're wiped out, too.” Patrick can see the effort behind it as she tries to relax her face. Then she takes a step toward him, touching his wrist—an invitation. They could have a quickie right now, her look says, a furtive session like in the old days. Sidestep the tension between them, smooth things over.

“There are people downstairs,” Patrick says.

“And?”

A glitter in her eye—flirty and willing, but something else, too, a streak of vulnerability. Patrick can see how hurt she will be if he rejects her. Because what he knows about Kate, that most people don't, is how insecure she can be. How her bold personality is a front for her fear of failure. She's tormented by her looks disappearing—the wrinkles around her eyes, the scar from the babies. He should give in, to spare her feelings, but suddenly all he wants in the world is to get outside.

He loosens his arm from hers. “I'll be back.”

“What?”

“I need to take a walk.”

“A walk?” She sounds incredulous.

“Mom!” Tate calls.

“Just a quick one,” Patrick says.

“But you just got here.”

“It'll just be a minute,” he says, starting for the door.

“But there are
people
downstairs,” Kate calls after him, pointedly.

Patrick keeps moving, loosening his tie. From downstairs, Tate keeps yelling. “Mommy!
Mom!
”

“You're kidding me, right?” Kate shouts after him, and he hears a tremble of fury in her voice but continues down the back stairs, feeling weirdly buoyant, out the side door, and onto the beach.

On the sand, Patrick slides off his shoes and peels off his socks. The sand beneath his bare feet feels so cool and smooth, he could weep. He leaves his shoes on the dunes and stuffs his socks into one pocket, tie in the other. The beach is nearly empty, a few stragglers still hanging on to the end of the afternoon. Two sunburned boys whacking a paddleball, a girl sitting on the lifeguard stand with her sweatshirt pulled over her knees. A decent sand castle, adorned with sticks and shells, stands just out of the tide's reach, the foamy waves curling to a stop at the edge of the moat.

Patrick walks down to the ocean, keeps walking up to his ankles, not caring that the bottoms of his pants get soaked. He squints at the horizon, the first glimmers of pink and gold. Of all the hours on the beach, this is the one that makes him most wistful. As a kid, he was always painfully aware of the hours ticking down each afternoon, the number of vacation days remaining, the pleasure of the week so tinged with impending loss it was almost impossible to enjoy. He's sure John never let himself get caught up in thoughts like these—or did he? Did he feel this way, when he knew that time was running out?

A lump wells in his throat and rises to his eyes. He notices a few people glancing over at him. Maybe they recognize him—the eye doctor, the guy who lives in the giant house. Patrick almost doesn't recognize himself. That he ended up as any kind of doctor still mystifies him completely. As a kid, he made middling grades in science. Needles made him squirm. Whenever he tries to retrace the steps he took to get here, he can hardly recall when and why he made those pivotal decisions—unlike his brother, who set goals and achieved them, life just carried Patrick along. It was Kate who pushed for med school:
You have such a good bedside manner
. As with many things, she was teasing but she wasn't. Kate wanted him to be a doctor, wanted the life that came with it. He applied, mostly to make her happy; it was only after John died that he began to take it seriously. A rotation, an internship. A supervisor who remarked:
You have the right personality for eyes
. The ability to put people at ease, to make patients relax and trust him—it was one of the reasons he'd hired Louise. Because people are funny about their eyes. It's a delicate business, and also weirdly intimate—how close you sit to someone's face, staring into their eyes in the darkened office, an inch between your face and theirs, so close you can feel their breath. Sometimes he has the urge to kiss them, just because it would be so easy.

A shore plane flies overhead, trailing an advertising ribbon—
EAT AT O'MALLEY'S! BEST CLAMS AT THE SHORE!
The waves are crashing hard, thumping against the ocean floor.
It's a lion!
Patrick thinks.
It's a T. rex!
The foam rushes around his ankles, a tangle of seaweed wrapping around his big toe. He lets the sand suck his heels under, one inch and another, until his feet are encased comfortably in cement. It occurs to him that his whole life has been shaped by other people—the guilt of surviving his brother, the need to placate his wife. What would his life be if it were up to him? Can he even tell anymore?

His phone buzzes in his shirt pocket.
Jesus Christ, Kate.
He pulls it out and reads the text.

There's an emergency at work. :)

Patrick's lips go dry. He stares at the phone. He considers writing back, something witty. He considers hurling the phone into the surf. He drops it back in his pocket and peers out at the sunset, the sky reddening behind the clouds, his face damp with spray. Then he pries his feet from the wet sand. As he heads back up the beach, he hears a wave crash behind him and watches it sprawl up the sand, far enough to reach the castle, filling the moat and causing one section to collapse gently. He looks up at his house, the grand house on the beach, the bright shapes moving behind the windows.

Back on the highway, driving with the windows down, Patrick cranks the radio as loud as it will go. The game is tied in the seventh. The Phils have two outs, men on first and third. His cell phone is silenced, sitting in the cup holder. The traffic is creeping along, barely moving, but it's intoxicating being on the highway alone.

A work emergency?
Kate had repeated.

I'll just run back
, he'd said.

She had looked at him in disbelief.
There isn't someone else who can handle it?

Like who?
he'd said.
She was in this afternoon. She has glaucoma. She's old.

Patrick
, Kate had said, patiently, as if he were a child.

I'll be back as soon as I can.

You'll miss the entire party.

I'll miss three hours. Four, tops.

Exactly
, Kate had said. She'd looked furious, but with the family around she couldn't make a scene. Instead she'd asked:
Who's going to cook?

Steve
, he'd said, pointing at his nephew.
Right, Steve?

Kate had looked skeptical, which had pissed Patrick off even more.
Here you go
, he'd said, handing his nephew a spatula and clapping his thick shoulder.
The passing of the torch.

Remembering the moment, Patrick feels indignant all over again. On the radio, a crack of a bat, the swelling cheer. Rollins hit a double; two runners score. Patrick yells out loud and thumps the wheel. A woman in the next car glances over. He smiles at her apologetically, inches the car forward another foot.

Pitching change. Commercial. He gazes out at the highway, the billboards for casinos and concerts in Atlantic City, the shimmering sea of license plates. Alaska—they would have never seen an Alaska thirty years ago, he thinks. He lets his mind wander up the road to Philadelphia, his huge house sitting empty in the suburbs. To Louise's stifling city apartment—her
flat
. It must be somewhere near the office; he's heard her mention riding her bike to work. Patrick imagines a walk-up with a small, bright kitchen, a careworn sofa—then realizes he's picturing his and Kate's old place on Spruce Street. Louise's apartment is probably nicer, actually, more domestic. Last Monday, she'd brought cupcakes into the office for no reason—
I just had the urge to bake
, she'd said with a shrug of her soft shoulders. Each one was carefully frosted, transported in one of those Tupperware holders made specifically for cupcakes. It was the kind of thing that, if Patrick had it all to do over again, might just win him over, suggest a certain kind of life.

Ridiculous, he thinks. Meaningless.

The traffic is still barely moving. The mass of bumpers simmers in the heat. If he doesn't turn back now, Kate will be vindicated, for he really will miss the entire party. He could get off at the next exit and turn around, make up one more lie about poor Mrs. Swift and her glaucoma. Or he could keep going and spend the night at home. One night, apart from real life. One night with no consequences.

But Patrick has learned this: Everything has consequences.

And this: He's tired of learning things.

It is nearly nine when Patrick crosses back over the Walt Whitman. The skyline is a dense, dirty gray. The car windows are rolled up tight, the air conditioner cranked. The Phillies won in extra innings and the crowd from the new stadium is spilling onto 95. The old stadium, the one he and John used to go to, is gone now, demolished. The skyline is changed, too, the tall buildings clustered in the distance twice as many as when he was a boy.

Patrick creeps across the bridge. Nearby cars thump and rattle, stereos blaring, unleashing pent-up excitement from the game. As a kid, riding home from the shore and glimpsing the city, Patrick used to feel deflated, sick with the thought of normal life resuming, of having to wait another year. Tonight, though, as the city grows nearer, there is quicksand in his gut, a muddle of giddiness and nerves. He gazes out at the dark, humid city and lets himself imagine tracking down Louise's address, showing up at her apartment door—

Fantasies are harmless
, Kate used to say, but surely this isn't what she meant.

When he exits 76, the traffic lightens, and he quickly reaches the wealthy Main Line suburb that has become his home. When he pulls into the driveway, the sky is dark, but the house glows like a castle, gold lampposts flanking the flagstone path on either side. As he walks toward the door, the backs of his wingtips chafing against his still-sockless feet, he can just make out the sign in his lawn:
CARLSON LUXURY WINDOWS & DOORS.
It strikes him fully then: There will always be some project, some upgrade or improvement. The work will never end.

Patrick yanks the sign from the lawn—it's wedged in good, and he stumbles a little before muscling it out—then crams it under one arm and walks up to the porch, punching in the code. Inside, the empty house yawns around him. He drops his keys on the foyer table, flicking on the lights. Alone, the house feels huge and oddly unfamiliar. That lamp with the glass base—has he ever seen that lamp before? He walks through the foyer with its vaulted ceiling and marble tiles, vases filled with artful flowers. The place is air-conditioned within an inch of its life—it feels like the inside of a florist's refrigerator—and smells clean, professionally clean, which is somehow fundamentally different from the clean of Patrick's house growing up, a smell made of grainy Ajax, soapy water, work, and grit.

He walks past the formal living room, the one they almost never use, and into the ironic joke of a kitchen—the double oven, the fancy espresso machine. Patrick folds the sign in two and crams it into the trash can. Then he rummages in the fridge, finding nothing but juice boxes and leftover SpaghettiOs. He pulls out a beer. Standing at the counter, he gazes out the new state-of-the-art kitchen windows, but with the lights on and the darkness outside, he can see nothing but his own murky reflection in the glass.

He slugs the beer and takes his phone from his pocket. As he powers it back up—two missed text messages, three voice mails—his heart leaps like a kid.

They are all Kate, of course.

The first text:
ETA?

The second:
r u there???

The voice mails are Kate, too. Patrick doesn't bother listening. He drains the beer, then sets aside the empty bottle and picks up the phone and dials.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” he says. “Is this Louise?”

A pause. “Dr. B?”

The title alone is almost enough to stop him, to remind him who he is. But he presses on, keeping his voice light. “Yeah,” he says. “Hey there, Louise.” He can feel her waiting. “Listen—I'm calling because I hear there's a work emergency?”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, right.” She sounds confused, and a little nervous, and Patrick wonders if he's misread this entire thing. If sending the text wasn't Louise flirting but merely following his instructions. “There was no emergency, really, though…,” she says, and then Patrick understands that she's just worried that he took her message seriously.