THE ROOM WAS A SHRINE TO a dead woman. He was living in his own personal Taj Mahal. Pictures of a young woman with mischievous eyes, and a short, sassy crop of curly red hair smiled at Melissa from half a dozen picture frames.
She moved silently to a wedding photo. A much younger Seth, with a smile that held no shadows, hugged his bride. Beside that photo was Claire with the newborn twins, and pictures of family vacations, Christmas, happy family mementoes.
It wasn’t only the pictures, it was the bright yellow, flower-printed chintz draperies and bedspread that spoke of a woman’s touch. The lacy pillows monogrammed with C and S. The brushes and perfume bottles on a spindle-legged dressing table. Melissa could have sworn there was even the faint scent of another woman in the air.
Her mind was obviously playing tricks on her. And yet… She glanced at Seth, standing in the doorway, looking so lost and confused she wanted to take him back to the guest room and simply offer him what comfort she could. But she’d learned a lot about grieving in her nursing career.
That light floral scent hovered in the air like a ghostly presence. Which was ridiculous. Unless…
Melissa grasped a drawer handle on the dresser and pulled.
“No! Don’t—”
But it was too late. She’d already spotted the neatly folded nighties and lingerie, and she knew without looking that the rest of Claire’s clothes would be neatly stacked in the drawers and probably still hanging in one of the double closets.
“Oh, Seth,” she whispered again, her heart breaking for him. The scent was stronger with the drawer open, and in a rush of embarrassment that she had barged into his private shrine, she swiftly closed the drawer. When she straightened and turned around, Melissa was alone in the room.
She heard Seth’s tread thumping down the stairs and decided to give him a few minutes to recover. She needed some time herself.
The lump in her throat threatened to choke her. She picked up the nearest photo. Claire in a flowered summer dress laughing at the camera as though she’d been caught unawares. “You were one lucky woman,” Melissa whispered. “Please understand, I don’t want to take your place, I want to help him. How do I do that?”
But the pretty young woman kept smiling. If she was sending any message, it was that Melissa was on her own.
Carefully, she replaced the picture exactly where it had been and quietly left the room.
She found him sitting in the darkened living room sipping coffee. He didn’t offer her a cup, didn’t even acknowledge her presence, but Melissa knew he needed her as strongly as if he’d sobbed on her shoulder.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself a coffee, adding cream and sugar from the set Seth had prepared earlier, then returned to sit across from him.
They sipped silently for a while.
“The girls look a lot like their mother,” she said at last.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was gruff and full of pain.
“I’m sorry, too.”
He was staring at the floor, his elbows resting on his spread knees, the cup held in his hands. “I thought I could handle it. You’re the first woman I’ve wanted…since…I mean… Oh hell, you know what I mean.”
“Yes. I misunderstood. When you took me to the guest room, I thought it was an insult.”
His eyes burned when he glanced up. “I wasn’t only trying to get laid. I wanted you.”
“I’m glad.”
He’d wanted her, but not enough to brave his own demons. Melissa sighed. She had to put away her own feelings. Later she could think about how she’d been rejected in favor of a dead woman. But now, Seth needed help and she had training in grief counseling. As much as the woman in her was tempted to run, the professional in her had to stay and help him.
“Do you know about the stages of grief, Seth?”
“Yes. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and something.”
“Acceptance.” She let a hint of humor creep into her voice. “You’ve obviously mastered the first four stages. It seems to be the final one that’s giving you trouble.”
“I have accepted it. She’s been gone for three years for God’s sake.”
“Three years and how many weeks, days, minutes, seconds?”
He let out a startled exclamation.
“Leaving everything exactly as Claire left it is denying that she’s not coming back.”
“I’m not a freaking psycho. I know she’s not coming back. I never got around to getting rid of all that stuff.”
“I know of an excellent women’s shelter that would put her things to good use. Don’t you think she’d want that?”
“Damn it, I know she would. She’d want us to be up there humping our brains out on her old bed, too.”
“I’m not trying—”
“No. She would. She made me promise I’d get on with my life and find someone else, for me and the girls.”
Melissa swallowed. “She was a good woman.”
“Yeah, she was. The last couple of weeks, the way I’ve been feeling every time I’m around you…I thought I was ready.”
“But you’re not.” She sighed, knowing there was something she could do to help him.
He shoved a hand through his hair. “I made a nice mess of your birthday. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I understand.” What she planned to do would hurt him, and make him angry with her. She knew that. Sometimes healing really hurt. “Seth, I want you to do something for me.”
He glanced up warily, his face gray. “What?”
“Tomorrow, I want you to take the girls out for the day. And I want you to give me the key to your house.”
He closed his eyes briefly as he understood the unspoken message. That she would be cleaning out his wife’s things while he was gone. “I don’t think—”
“It’s time, Seth.”
“I thought maybe the girls would want—”
He wasn’t going to make this easy. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll label everything and put it away in storage boxes. Nothing will be gone, but Claire’s things won’t be in your room anymore.” She felt the way his body jerked physically when she said Claire’s name. She bet everyone else he knew never mentioned his wife. They’d think they were saving him from bad memories, and he wasn’t the kind of man who’d bring up a subject that he thought would be uncomfortable for other people. So he’d bottled all that stuff inside.
She didn’t need to ask him if he’d ever had counseling. “Claire will always be a part of your life and the twins’. She’s a wonderful part of your past, and a piece of her lives on in those girls.” She put her coffee cup down and moved toward him, kneeling so she could look up at him. “But it’s time for you to get back to living.”
He dropped his head and nodded once. Then he raised his hips and dug in his pocket, pulling out a bunch of keys. They clattered jarringly in the quiet room as he separated one. Leaning forward he snapped the lone silver house key onto the coffee table in the middle of the room, still without looking at her. “Call Janice. She’ll help.”
He needed to be alone for a while. She was forcing him to take the last step in accepting that his wife was gone forever. For now, she was the enemy, and she understood that. She only hoped he would recognize how difficult it was for her to play that role, when she so wanted to be close to him.
But there was no future for them together so long as his wife’s clothes lay neatly folded in drawers and her scent permeated his bedroom. Of course, the step she was about to take might kill any hope they’d have had, anyway. But at least she might help him find peace and eventually he’d be ready to start again with another woman. It was a depressing thought, she discovered, imagining him with somebody else. It seemed like a lose/lose situation for Melissa.
She picked up the key, still warm from being so close to his body, and rose. “I’m going to wake up my kids now. It’s time we were heading home.”
He made an effort to rouse himself, forcing a sorry attempt at a smile as he stood. “Yeah. I’ll get you Janice’s number, and then I’ll help you get them in the car.”
Matthew muttered in his sleep as Seth hoisted him in his arms. Alice didn’t stir as Melissa untangled her from where she’d snuggled in Laura’s arms. The two adults carried their sleeping burdens to the car, but the biggest burden was the unspoken one that weighed on them. The memory of what had happened upstairs, and the knowledge of what Melissa was going to do tomorrow.
Once the kids were buckled in the car, the engine purring softly as the inside began to heat up, Melissa tipped up her face to say good night. Her trite “thank you for a lovely birthday” never made it out of her mouth. One quick glance at Seth’s painfully bleak expression, and she was out of the car and reaching for him, her heart yearning to give him comfort.
Wordlessly, he held her, so tightly she feared for her ribs. She closed her eyes and leaned in, offering him all the strength and understanding she had. Her head nestled against his neck. “I won’t do it if you don’t want me to,” she whispered, not sure if either of them could bear the pain.
“You have to,” he muttered.
“Yes, I think I do.” Despite knowing what the cost could be to their budding romance. Would he be able to accept that she must hurt him in order to help him? Or would he forever hold it against her that she caused him this suffering?
At last she pulled away and slid back into the driver’s seat. “Good night.”
“We’ll go out early tomorrow,” he said in a voice that pleaded with her to get it over with as quickly as possible. She nodded and then put the car in gear and backed away.
The last image she had was of him standing outside in his shirtsleeves, oblivious to the cold, staring straight ahead.
WHEN SETH WALKED up the stairs, he felt like an old man. The girls were sound asleep on the pullout downstairs, and he decided to leave them there for the night. He’d contemplated opening a bottle of Scotch and spending the rest of the night slumped in his favorite chair in the den, but he knew that desire for what it was—cowardice. Getting good and drunk wouldn’t help anything.
His day-care provider and almost-lover was a master of the gotta-be-cruel-to-be-kind school of do-gooders. But he knew she was right. He’d made an ass of himself and denied both Melissa and himself some self-indulgent pleasure they could both use. She’d been so tentative at first, but once she got warmed up, she’d been all passion and fire. He ached all over again thinking of what they’d missed.
But Melissa had understood what he hadn’t. There was a woman standing between the two of them.
Claire.
He touched the wedding ring on his finger. He and Claire hadn’t had a perfect marriage—who did? They used to have the odd fight, and during the first year after the twins were born, they’d both been frazzled, but Claire had been exhausted, what with breast-feeding both kids, which she’d insisted on doing. If one wasn’t crying in the night, or teething, or getting a cold or colicky, then the other was. It seemed that they’d barely ever had a full night’s sleep. But they’d managed.
And she’d loved those tiny redheaded babies with her whole heart. He found he was smiling as he went into their bedroom, his and Claire’s, as he remembered a night when he’d walked in to find his three favorite redheads all sound asleep, one baby still attached to each breast, sucking reflexively.
The old anger rolled through him. It wasn’t fair that someone like Claire should be taken so young. And so cruelly. Her daughters needed her. Who would teach them to be women? Who would help them through all that incomprehensible teen girl stuff that was right around the corner? He, being a banker, and a sensible man, had planned for the girls’ education the minute they were born, just as he had begun saving for his and Claire’s retirement from the day they were married.
She used to tease him about living for tomorrow instead of for today, but he liked to plan ahead.
Nowhere in the plan or in his worst nightmares had he imagined losing a woman so full of life. He picked up one of the photos on his dresser. It was the only one he had of her after her diagnosis. She was still smiling, and she’d promised him she’d fight that cancer with everything she had.
She had, too. A tear rolled down his cheek. She’d lost that brave battle, but Melissa was right. Claire had left a part of herself in the twins. The fact that Claire had lived and that he and she had loved each other was evident everyday in those two girls, who looked so much like their mother.
He wasn’t keeping his end of the bargain. He’d promised Claire that he would make a good life for the girls. She’d told him, near the end, on one of her good days, that he would find someone else. She gave him her blessing. They’d both cried. And at the time, he’d believed it would never happen. He would never find someone to replace Claire.
And, he realized, looking at that bright, laughing face, he hadn’t. He’d found Melissa. She wasn’t Claire. She wasn’t much like her at all. She was quiet where Claire had been outgoing, meticulous where Claire had been happy-go-lucky. They didn’t look a bit alike or have any similarities but one. They were both terrific mothers.
Was that what he was doing? Falling for a woman because she was a good mother and his girls were in desperate need of one?
Even as the notion crossed his mind, he dismissed it. He placed the photograph back on his dresser. No. What he felt for Melissa was what a man feels for a woman. He wasn’t certain how strong it was, or where it would lead—probably nowhere, now that he’d made a total fool of himself—but it wasn’t because she was a good mother that he ached for Melissa.
He’d never fallen out of love with Claire, and he never would. He thought that Melissa, of all people, had understood that. He opened the closet and fingered a random dress that was no doubt totally out of style and would have long since been donated to charity if Claire were still alive.
In that moment he realized that packing away her things, like burying her body, didn’t mean she was gone forever. Her memory would live as long as he and the girls did.
He stood there with his head bowed, knowing this was the last night he’d spend in this room that was still Claire’s. He was still alive. Maybe it was time he started acting like it.
THE NEXT DAY, Seth put off returning home as long as he could. After breakfast in a pancake house, a shopping trip where the girls picked out new clothes that were totally overpriced and so flimsy they looked like they’d last about a week, lunch in another restaurant, a stop at the music shop in the mall to buy the new Bravo Boys CD, and two hours watching a teen romance movie where he munched antacids at the same speed the girls downed popcorn, they headed home.
He’d told Jessie and Laura over breakfast what Melissa and Janice were going to do today. They’d gone quiet for a second, shared a look, then Laura had said, “Okay.”
And they hadn’t mentioned it again. Somehow, he knew it was okay. Maybe because they were younger and more resilient, maybe because he’d sent them to the grief counseling he couldn’t face himself, maybe because they were optimistic, like their mother. “You know, your mom would be so proud of you two if she could see you now.”
“She does see us, Dad,” Laura said, looking at him in surprise. “She watches us from heaven. She told us she would, don’t you remember?”
He couldn’t speak. He could only nod.
When he couldn’t think of anything else to do, they headed home.
He drove so slowly seniors were overtaking him. But, as slowly as the car crawled along with the girls chattering in the back, it arrived in his driveway too soon for him.
“Hurry up, Dad, these bags are heavy,” Laura complained as he stood outside his own front door, terrified to put the key in the lock.
He pushed the door open. Somebody had left some lights on, for which he was grateful. The main floor of the house looked exactly as he’d last seen it that morning. He swallowed while the girls clattered past him. “Let’s try on our stuff,” Jessie said as they hauled their loot up the stairs.
When the hall was quiet again, Seth took a deep breath and started up the stairs himself. Just get it over with. He refused to pause outside the closed bedroom door but pushed the door open and hit the light switch.
He’d half known what to expect. Even so, he felt the air grunt out of his body as though a medicine ball had slammed into his belly.
Nothing was the same.
Oh, they’d been busy, all right. He stepped forward and eyed the green plaid quilt on the bed—which was on the other side of the room from where it used to be. He gulped as he realized they hadn’t taken only Claire’s clothing away, they’d removed the dresser she’d kept her stuff in. God, Janice’s husband or the boys must have helped, too. Humiliation burned within him along with rising fury. The whole room was different.
He stalked to the double closet and yanked it open, shocked to find her side stripped bare, even though he’d known it would be. A fireball of rage clogged his throat. Even the yellow curtains were gone. They’d even taken her goddamn curtains.
They’d left him nothing, those interfering do-gooders. Nothing but the pictures. Claire still gazed at him from half a dozen frames, but she seemed more distant. They weren’t her anymore. They were only pictures.
He collapsed onto the edge of the bed. It didn’t even smell the same. Those thieving women had taken everything. If they could have, they’d have sucked his very memories up in a vacuum cleaner.