“Well, look who’s here,” Annabelle said when I arrived with Erik to pick up the kids on Saturday morning. “It’s about damn time.”
Already the girls were tugging on my hands and asking if I was coming to ballet with them, and Spencer was bouncing on the balls of his feet as he recited facts about glaciers: “Some glaciers can travel three feet a day, and one in Greenland traveled ninety-eight feet! Ninety-eight feet is longer than our driveway! And there are glaciers in forty-seven countries and glaciers over one hundred miles long!”
Scott was standing in the kitchen doorway, smiling sleepily over the edge of his coffee cup, barefoot in low-slung jeans and a T-shirt that said “Les Paul Guitars.” “Welcome back, stranger,” he said. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, clicking her heels together and repeating “There’s no place like home,” then waking to find around her all the people she loved.
We met everyone at Hattie’s the following Friday, and the next day, the kids spent the night. But mostly in those weeks, Erik and I stayed to ourselves, talking in a way we never had before, almost as if we were stitching ourselves back together with words. We talked about my choice to go back to a better, private hospital just after the one-year anniversary of the accident. I was so terrified to be with Lucy, I told him. What if I did something wrong, what if I scared her, hurt her, made another mistake? I told him about the visits, how I barely recognized her—she was almost two by then, two! And she was wary in a way no two-year-old ever should be, never taking her eyes off Nick or his mom, whimpering when I tried to hold her. I told Erik about arriving early to Nick’s mother’s house one afternoon and watching from across the street as Andrea took Lucy from her car seat. Lucy was pulling on Andrea’s ponytail, and Andrea was pretending to gobble Lucy’s hand and Lucy was laughing—laughing!—with such joy. I realized then, I told Erik, that I would have to let her go. I don’t think I’d ever felt such anguish, not even when I learned what I’d done the day of the accident. This was so much worse, because although I didn’t feel I had an option, I knew it was a decision I’d have to live with for the rest of my life, and I didn’t think I could. Erik told me how unprepared he’d been to witness Spencer’s birth, to see Annabelle in such obliterating pain, “and all I could do was offer her ice chips?” We talked about his grief over Spencer’s difficulties, the numerous doctors and inconclusive tests and nebulous diagnoses that hadn’t really helped, his anger at his mom, how he felt as if his father’s life had been erased. I told him how much it hurt that my dad couldn’t talk to my mom about Lucy.
“I don’t want that to happen to us,” I told him. We were in bed, only the hall light on. He held his hand up to mine, aligning our palms. “I want us to tell each other everything. No matter what. There will be times when you hate my past and maybe me.”
“No—”
“My own father can’t deal with it, Erik. But it’s not just that. I want you to tell me when you’re depressed about Spencer or you feel guilty because you wish he were different, and I want to be able to tell you that…I don’t know, that it scares me to be happy.”
“It does?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Because I caused so much damage—mostly to Lucy, but to Nick and Kelly and their parents, and God, my parents. My dad lost his family’s house because of me! I feel like I don’t have the right to be happy.”
“But you are, despite all that?” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“I am.”
May. June. July. He gave me the key to his house again, made space in his closet for my clothes. My shampoo in his shower. My books by the bed.
Those months were some of my happiest. Erik and I meeting at the Y after work, cooking dinner, stretching out on his couch and watching The West Wing and ER. We attended fundraising events, had Margaret over for drinks, saw Eva play Elmire in Tartuffe. I forgot she was Eva during the play; I was laughing and rooting for the haughty, décolletage-revealing wife she’d become.
On Saturday mornings, while Erik took Spencer to the library—he loved that he had his own library card and would proudly showcase the books he checked out each week—I’d take the girls to ballet. Annabelle would greet me at her front door and hand over the girls’ My Little Pony gym bags and whisper over their heads, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I loved that I could give her this time to herself. I’d sit with the other moms on metal folding chairs in the hallway, watching the girls through a large window, my lap heaped with their sweaters and shoes. Sometimes Annabelle would join me for the last half of the lesson, bringing coffee in Styrofoam cups, the two of us half covering our eyes in mock horror at the spectacle of twelve toddlers, some with diapers bunched up under their leotards, trying to plié. Later, I’d watch the Weather Channel with Spencer or sit with him as he read his library books about glaciers or the constellations or the moon. He loved science, loved facts, loved sharing those facts with the rest of us.
Something healed in me that spring.
And then in June, my mom phoned midmorning when I was at work. She was crying, and I thought something had happened to my dad until she said, “Lucy,” and I felt myself go still.
“What about Lucy?” I whispered.
“I saw her. With Nick.” She started crying again. “I was in the car, and they were crossing the street right in front of me. She was talking and gesturing, and he was grinning. She was so animated, Claire. She’s beautiful.”
“You’re sure it was her? Not her sister?”
“She has your horrible posture—” My mom half laughed, then started weeping again. “She walks like you did. And she’s got your cheekbones.”
“Did Nick see you? Did she?” I was clutching the receiver so hard my fingers cramped.
“I wasn’t sure, but just as they got to the sidewalk, he looked back and lifted his hand in a wave. His eyes were so kind, Claire.” She took a shaky breath. “All that hardness, that anger—it’s gone. He was like the old Nicky.” Her voice hitched, and she was weeping again. “She’s okay. She’s really okay. He wouldn’t have been like that if she wasn’t.”
I had a sense of déjà vu that summer, the past seeping into the present, or maybe the present lifting up to reveal the past. Pentimento. The discovery of an original painted element the artist had covered over. Erik handing me the crust from his pizza, my favorite part, and for a flash, it was Nick setting a crust on my plate. Or Erik and me pausing in the doorway of the girls’ room, listening to their rhythmic breathing, a ladybug night-light on the wall by the window, and for a second, it was Lucy’s room, her crib catty-corner by the built-in bookshelves, a butterfly mobile bobbing in the draft of the heating vent. I could feel the weight of Nick’s arm around my shoulder. Can you believe she’s ours? As I pulled tiny pink or yellow T-shirts from the dryer, memories I hadn’t thought of in years bloomed open. There was an unexpected joy in this, like finding things I thought I’d lost: a favorite coffee cup on a bookshelf, an earring tangled in the cuff of a sweater not worn in months. That sense of relief, of things returned.
Of me, returning.