She wonders what can be inside his head.
When she thinks it might be time to reintroduce the children to their father, she speaks to Claire and Tom for a long time and then enters Gene’s room with them. Before they have even reached the bed, Gene confronts his daughter. “What the heck did you do to your hair?”
“Mommy did,” Claire answers in a tremulous voice.
“I loved your long curls,” Gene wails. “You were so beautiful.”
Claire begins to cry.
An hour later, Grace charges into Gene’s bedroom. “Can you just answer me one question?”
He tilts his head on the pillow, his face uncertain.
“Why did you marry me?” she asks.
“You got pregnant, remember?” he says defensively.
“Yes. But before. You were romantic, you courted me.”
“Did I? I don’t think we should discuss the past.”
“But I want to know.”
“You were there.”
“But I wasn’t inside your head.”
“I could lie to you.”
“But don’t.”
He props himself up with his right elbow. “You reminded me of my love,” he says.
Grace at first doesn’t understand. “I reminded you of…your love?”
And so he gives it to her, the answer she thinks she wants, the answer she’ll wish she had never asked for. “You reminded me of the woman I loved when I was in the war.”
He waits to see how Grace will take this announcement, but she’s motionless.
“She was French,” Gene adds. “She looked a lot like you. I couldn’t persuade her to come back to the States with me. I used to write to my mother, and once I sent a picture of the two of us together. I told my mother I would marry the woman.” He pauses. “It’s why she didn’t like you.”
The explanation smacks Grace in the face as if she had walked into a glass door. She leaves the library, climbs the stairs to her bedroom, and lies on the bed facedown.
Amy comes to visit, bringing new supplies. After her time with Gene, she addresses Grace, who is waiting outside his room.
“I heard the visiting nurse was a fiasco,” Amy says.
“What did she say specifically?”
“Only that your husband was completely uncooperative. What happened to the physical therapy? He’s as limp as a fish.”
“He won’t do it.”
“It’s your job to make him do it.”
“There’s only so much I can do,” responds Grace.
“You look like hell. What’s happened?”
Grace shrugs.
“I’m going to go in there and give him what for,” says Amy.
“Good luck with that.”
When Amy drives away, Grace walks down the driveway, reaches her hand into the postbox, and takes out the mail. She sees, between the electric bill and a final check from Dr. Lighthart, a cream-colored envelope. The return address is a hotel in New York City.
Dear Grace,
You thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. I heard you leave the bed, and it took all my strength not to snatch you back. Stay, I called in my mind. But it wasn’t you who was leaving that house, it was I, and it’s likely I never did a more difficult thing.
You, with me, all the time.
A.
Grace leans against the mailbox and closes her eyes. A letter. A tangible letter. He still thinks of her. She is with him all the time.
Two letters now to parse and treasure and remember word for word. Two letters to touch, to trace the words. Two signs that what she experienced with Aidan Berne was real. She wants to savor the moment.
But before she has even climbed the driveway, she understands the agonizing thing she must do.
In her room, she sits at Merle’s dressing table with paper and pen. She writes in care of his hotel address and adds, “Please Forward.”
Dear Aidan,
If only you had caught my hand. Another hour would have been worth the risk. I think of you every day.
My husband, Gene, has arrived home. He was badly burned in the fire and remained in a coma for nearly three months. He has only begun his road to recovery. We are an injured family in many ways, but we are a family. I must keep my children safe and tend to my husband.
I wish you only the best of luck everywhere you go.
Grace
The finality of the letter makes her ache. She wraps her arms around herself and tries to imagine Aidan’s reaction as he reads it. Will he crumple up the paper and throw it into a wastebasket? Who would want to keep such a note?
She knows she has to mail the letter immediately; otherwise, she’ll tear it up. After carrying two recalcitrant children out to the Buick, she backs down the driveway and navigates the short distance to the post office. She marches to the mailbox like a soldier under orders. She holds the letter for a long time until finally she pushes it through the slot.
“Mommy, your eyelashes are blinking,” Claire says when Grace slides back into the driver’s seat.
“Just something in my eye,” she answers, clearing her throat and peering into the rearview mirror.
It’s possible Aidan might never get her letter. No one is obliged to forward it.
“Who wants to go to the playground?” she asks.
Grace can’t make herself get out of bed the next morning. If she lies still for long enough, she thinks, she might be able to fall asleep again and what a luxury that would be. She forgets her children. She forgets her husband. She stares at the medallion on the ceiling, hoping it will hypnotize her.
When she rouses herself, she slips into her robe and heads to the kitchen to start the coffee. Claire, with a mix of hurt and pride on her face, sits before an overloaded bowl of Rice Krispies and milk, a cup of which has spilled onto the table and then to the linoleum. Tom, sitting on the floor with dry Krispies all around him, is eating only those inside his wet diaper because they’re easier to pick up and put into his mouth.
Claire might have dropped the milk bottle, shattering it on the floor.
Grace will set an alarm clock and be in the kitchen at six-thirty every morning.
Gene cries out in the night. Grace sits upright and listens intently. There are no words, merely a harrowing cry into the void of his nightmares. He told her he might do this. She lies back and puts a pillow over her head.
For three nights he does this.
Grace moves herself and the children to the third floor, where they sleep together in the nursery, Grace on a cot she drags into the room.
The house that Aidan once called grand, the house that Grace came to appreciate, turns the way that milk does. The house that once held music becomes silent and menacing. No matter how hard she pushes back the curtains, it seems she can’t get enough light inside. She tells herself that the smell and the lack of light are only in her head, that a house is a house and except for mild decay doesn’t change. But the decay in this house has been fast and frightening. She keeps the windows open, the breeze moving the curtains, so that she can breathe.
Marjorie appears at breakfast better dressed than usual. “Grace, I need to speak to you in private,” she whispers above the children’s heads.
By the time the children have finished their breakfasts and have gone outside to play, Grace has already worked it out. “You’re thinking of leaving,” she says to her mother.
“I can’t spend my life upstairs taking care of children, even children I love,” Marjorie declares. “I was willing and happy to do it in the beginning, but now…”
“You feel stuck up there.”
“I need to get out, see my friends.”
“I understand, I do. But where will you go?” Grace asks, leaning against the counter.
“I’ll stay with Gladys and Evelyn for now, until I can find a place to live. I want to be on my own again. Of course, I’ll visit every chance I get, but I need to be able to breathe,” she answers. “I feel selfish and terrible leaving you in the lurch like this.”