I slept in Spencer’s room. I wasn’t trying to punish Erik. All I knew was that I needed to cry, and if Erik tried to comfort me, it would undo something in me I would never get back. I would have been grateful again, and I would have hated him for it.
I didn’t turn on any lights, just crawled beneath Spencer’s down comforter, still wearing my jeans and T-shirt. Tears leaked into Spencer’s pillow as I silently cried, my chest shuddering. The pillow smelled like him, a mix of his medicinal dandruff shampoo and something else—boy funk, I called it, a smell like old pennies. I wanted to inhale that scent, I missed him so much. He was my child too. I wept, aware of the chasm of loss in me that stretched back to Lucy. How could Erik not have understood this?
As soon as the jagged peaks of my sobs flattened out, I’d picture Annabelle’s look of contempt as she flung that manila envelope at me and the way I’d crept forward like a beaten dog to retrieve it, or I’d hear Erik’s beleaguered sigh as he sat on the chaise, his quiet fury that I was angry—how dare I—and I’d be crying again, the grief like dominoes, one hurt knocking into the next and the next. I was crying for Nick because I’d loved him with everything in me and it wasn’t enough, there was no such thing as enough after what happened to Lucy, and I was crying for Lucy, always Lucy, because there would never be a grief in my life that didn’t contain her. I cried about Kelly telling Erik flat out that she wouldn’t have come if she’d known I was here, and I cried for Eva, whom I had betrayed and would keep on betraying. I cried because I had believed Annabelle was the friend I could one day tell about Lucy, and it was unfathomable to me, even now, that she wasn’t. Mostly, though, I was crying for that frightened, desperate woman Erik had brought to Annabelle’s six years ago to meet his kids. That young woman who would sell her soul to be liked and accepted. I thought of our first Thanksgiving and those stupid T-shirts and how everyone must have pitied me. I cried because I had tried and tried and tried, and despite everything, she didn’t want me in the same house as her kids, and he regretted coming back.
If there had only been anger in his voice, we could move beyond this night, I thought, but what did I do with the defeat I’d heard, as if he’d pushed those words down a dozen times before? And along with the defeat was sorrow—not sadness but something so much deeper—and I understood that Erik had been carrying this regret in him for a long time.
My life would have been easier without you.
I stared into the blackness of Spencer’s room, tears streaming into my ears, and I tried to find the when of Erik’s regret. When had he first thought it: I wish I hadn’t come back or My life would have been easier…
But there was no such moment. Instead, I kept thinking about a morning earlier that summer when I returned from a run, elated because I’d finally figured out what to get Spencer for his thirteenth birthday. “A Cuisinart!” I said to Erik as soon as I found him. He was sitting on the bed, pulling on socks. I was bouncing with excitement.
“You want a Cuisinart?”
“For Spencer! Since he loves baking!”
Erik looked up at me, amusement radiating across his face.
“I know it’s a little out-there.”
“He will love a Cuisinart, Claire. And I love that you do this. You actually worry about what to get for their birthdays or Christmas. And you do this in a thousand little ways, every day. I don’t tell you that enough.”
I turned the soaked pillow over. Spencer’s birthday was only six weeks ago. Six weeks! Had Erik regretted me then?
All night I fell in and out of sleep, the room airless, Spencer’s sheets tucked so tightly under the mattress, it was a struggle to turn over. Even when I wrenched them free, I couldn’t get comfortable.
I finally woke around four. The zipper of my jeans was digging into my skin, and my T-shirt was damp with sweat. I pushed myself up, my back sore from the hard mattress, and tried to remember if I had any clean running clothes in the laundry. The thought of creeping into our room and gathering my things in the dark like some fugitive—I couldn’t do it.
In the laundry room, I dug out the running shorts, sports bra, and singlet I’d worn two days ago, holding them to my nose to make sure they were okay to wear. All I smelled was my vanilla body spray. For a moment I held the clothes to my face. These were the clothes I’d worn when walking the girls to the bus stop, Annabelle and me joking about Phoebe becoming a teenager; they were the clothes I’d been wearing when I told them about Lucy. I want to go back, I thought desperately. I want to put on these clothes and go back to just two days ago.