A Bend in the Road (2 page)

“I thought you
said school was going okay.”

“Schoolis going
okay. Miss Andrews is really nice and all, and I like it there.” He paused.
“It’s just that sometimes I don’t understand everything that’s going on in
class.”

“That’s why you
go to school. So you can learn.”

“I know,” he
answered, “but she’s not like Mrs. Hayes was last year. The work she assigns
ishard. I just can’t do some of it.”

Jonah looked
scared and embarrassed at exactly the same time. Miles reached out and put his
hand on his son’s shoulder.

“Why didn’t you
tell me you were having trouble?”

It took a long
time for Jonah to answer.

“Because,” he
said finally, “I didn’t want you to be mad at me.”

• • •

After
breakfast, after making sure Jonah was ready to go, Miles helped him with his
backpack and led him to the front door. Jonah hadn’t said much since breakfast.
Squatting down, Miles kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t worry about this
afternoon. It’s gonna be all right, okay?”

“Okay,” Jonah
mumbled.

“And don’t forget
that I’ll be picking you up, so don’t get on the bus.”

“Okay,” he said
again.

“I love you,
champ.”

“I love you, too,
Dad.”

Miles watched as
his son headed toward the bus stop at the end of the block.  Missy, he knew, wouldn’t have been surprised
by what had happened this morning, as he had been. Missy would have already
known that Jonah was having trouble at school. Missy had taken care of things
like this.

Missy had taken
care of everything.

The night
before she was to meet with Miles Ryan, Sarah Andrews was walking through the
historic district in New Bern, doing her best to keep a steady pace.  Though she wanted to get the most from her
workout—she’d been an avid walker for the past five years—since she’d moved
here, she’d found it hard to do. Every time she went out, she found something
new to interest her, something that would make her stop and stare.

New Bern,
founded in 1710, was situated on the banks of the Neuse and Trent Rivers in
eastern North Carolina. As the second oldest town in the state, it had once
served as the capital and been home to the Tryon Palace, residence of the
colonial governor. Destroyed by fire in 1798, the palace had been restored in
1954, complete with some of the most breathtaking and exquisite gardens in the
South. Throughout the grounds, tulips and azaleas bloomed each spring, and
chrysanthemums blossomed in the fall. Sarah had taken a tour when she’d first
arrived. Though the gardens were between seasons, she’d nonetheless left the
palace wanting to live within walking distance so she could pass its gates each
day.

She’d moved
into a quaint apartment on Middle Street a few blocks away, in the heart of
downtown. The apartment was up the stairs and three doors away from the
pharmacy where in 1898 Caleb Bradham had first marketed Brad’s drink, which the
world came to know as Pepsi-Cola. Around the corner was the Episcopal church, a
stately brick structure shaded with towering magnolias, whose doors first
opened in 1718. When she left her apartment to take her walk, Sarah passed both
sites as she made her way to Front Street, where many of the old mansions had
stood gracefully for the past two hundred years.

What she really
admired, however, was the fact that most of the homes had been painstakingly
restored over the past fifty years, one house at a time. Unlike Williamsburg,
Virginia, which was restored largely through a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation, New Bern had appealed to its citizens and they had responded. The
sense of community had lured her parents here four years earlier; she’d known
nothing about New Bern until she’d moved to town last June.  As she walked, she reflected on how
different New Bern was from Baltimore, Maryland, where she’d been born and
raised, where she’d lived until just a few months earlier. Though Baltimore had
its own rich history, it was a city first and foremost. New Bern, on the other
hand, was a small southern town, relatively isolated and largely uninterested
in keeping up with the ever quickening pace of life elsewhere. Here, people
would wave as she passed them on the street, and any question she asked usually
solicited a long, slow-paced answer, generally peppered with references to
people or events that she’d never heard of before, as if everything and
everyone were somehow connected. Usually it was nice, other times it drove her
batty.

Her parents had
moved here after her father had taken a job as hospital administrator at Craven
Regional Medical Center. Once Sarah’s divorce had been finalized, they’d begun
to prod her to move down as well. Knowing how her mother was, she’d put it off
for a year. Not that Sarah didn’t love her mother, it was just that her mother
could sometimes be . . .draining, for lack of a better word. Still, for peace
of mind she’d finally taken their advice, and so far, thankfully, she hadn’t
regretted it. It was exactly what she needed, but as charming as this town was,
there was no way she saw herself living here forever.  New Bern, she’d learned almost right away, was not a town for
singles. There weren’t many places to meet people, and the ones her own age
that she had met were already married, with families of their own. As in many
southern towns, there was still a social order that defined town life. With
most people married, it was hard for a single woman to find a place to fit in,
or even to start.  Especially someone
who was divorced and completely new to the area.  It was, however, an ideal place to raise children, and sometimes
as she walked, Sarah liked to imagine that things had turned out differently
for her. As a young girl, she’d always assumed she would have the kind of life
she wanted: marriage, children, a home in a neighborhood where families
gathered in the yards on Friday evenings after work was finished for the week.
That was the kind of life she’d had as a child, and it was the kind she wanted
as an adult. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Things in life seldom did,
she’d come to understand.  For a while,
though, she had believed anything was possible, especially when she’d met
Michael. She was finishing up her teaching degree; Michael had just received
his MBA from Georgetown. His family, one of the most prominent in Baltimore,
had made their fortune in banking and were immensely wealthy and clannish, the
type of family that sat on the boards of various corporations and instituted
policies at country clubs that served to exclude those they regarded as
inferior. Michael, however, seemed to reject his family’s values and was
regarded as the ultimate catch. Heads would turn when he entered a room, and
though he knew what was happening, his most endearing quality was that he
pretended other people’s images of him didn’t matter at all.  Pretended,of course, was the key word.

Sarah, like
every one of her friends, knew who he was when he showed up at a party, and
she’d been surprised when he’d come up to say hello a little later in the
evening. They’d hit it off right away. The short conversation had led to a
longer one over coffee the following day, then eventually to dinner. Soon they
were dating steadily and she’d fallen in love. After a year, Michael asked her
to marry him.

Her mother was
thrilled at the news, but her father didn’t say much at all, other than that he
hoped that she would be happy. Maybe he suspected something, maybe he’d simply
been around long enough to know that fairy tales seldom came true. Whatever it
was, he didn’t tell her at the time, and to be honest, Sarah didn’t take the
time to question his reservations, except when Michael asked her to sign a
prenuptial agreement. Michael explained that his family had insisted on it, but
even though he did his best to cast all the blame on his parents, a part of her
suspected that had they not been around, he would have insisted upon it
himself. She nonetheless signed the papers. That evening, Michael’s parents
threw a lavish engagement party to formally announce the upcoming
marriage.  Seven months later, Sarah and
Michael were married. They honeymooned in Greece and Turkey; when they got back
to Baltimore, they moved into a home less than two blocks from where Michael’s
parents lived. Though she didn’t have to work, Sarah began teaching second
grade at an inner-city elementary school. 
Surprisingly, Michael had been fully supportive of her decision, but
that was typical of their relationship then. In the first two years of their
marriage, everything seemed perfect: She and Michael spent hours in bed on the
weekends, talking and making love, and he confided in her his dreams of
entering politics one day. They had a large circle of friends, mainly people
Michael had known his entire life, and there was always a party to attend or
weekend trips out of town. They spent their remaining free time in Washington,
D.C., exploring museums, attending the theater, and walking among the monuments
located at the Capitol Mall. It was there, while standing inside the Lincoln
Memorial, that Michael told Sarah he was ready to start a family. She threw her
arms around him as soon as he’d said the words, knowing that nothing he could
have said would have made her any happier.

Who can explain
what happened next? Several months after that blissful day at the Lincoln
Memorial, Sarah still wasn’t pregnant. Her doctor told her not to worry, that it
sometimes took a while after going off the pill, but he suggested she see him
again later that year if they were still having problems.  They were, and tests were scheduled. A few
days later, when the results were in, they met with the doctor. As they sat
across from him, one look was enough to let her know that something was wrong.

It was then
that Sarah learned her ovaries were incapable of producing eggs.  A week later, Sarah and Michael had their
first major fight. Michael hadn’t come home from work, and she’d paced the
floor for hours while waiting for him, wondering why he hadn’t called and
imagining that something terrible had happened. By the time he came home, she
was frantic and Michael was drunk. “You don’t own me” was all he offered by way
of explanation, and from there, the argument went downhill fast. They said
terrible things in the heart of the moment. Sarah regretted all of them later
that night; Michael was apologetic.  But
after that, Michael seemed more distant, more reserved. When she pressed him,
he denied that he felt any differently toward her. “It’ll be okay,” he said,
“we’ll get through this.”

Instead, things
between them grew steadily worse. With every passing month, the arguments
became more frequent, the distance more pronounced. One night, when she
suggested again that they could always adopt, Michael simply waved off the
suggestion: “My parents won’t accept that.”

Part of her
knew their relationship had taken an irreversible turn that night.  It wasn’t his words that gave it away, nor
was it the fact that he seemed to be taking his parents’ side. It was the look
on his face—the one that let her know he suddenly seemed to regard the problem
as hers, not theirs.  Less than a week
later, she found Michael sitting in the dining room, a glass of bourbon at his
side. From the unfocused look in his eyes, she knew it wasn’t the first one
he’d had. He wanted a divorce, he began; he was sure she understood.  By the time he was finished, Sarah found herself
unable to say anything in response, nor did she want to.

The marriage
was over. It had lasted less than three years. Sarah was twenty-seven years
old.

The next twelve
months were a blur. Everyone wanted to know what had gone wrong; other than her
family, Sarah told no one. “It just didn’t work out” was all she would say
whenever someone asked.

Because she
didn’t know what else to do, Sarah continued to teach. She also spent two hours
a week talking to a wonderful counselor, Sylvia. When Sylvia recommended a
support group, Sarah went to a few of the meetings. Mostly, she listened, and
she thought she was doing better. But sometimes, as she sat alone in her small
apartment, the reality of the situation would bear down hard and she would
begin to cry again, not stopping for hours. During one of her darkest periods,
she’d even considered suicide, though no one—not the counselor, not her
family—knew that. It was then that she’d realized she had to leave Baltimore;
she needed a place to start over. She needed a place where the memories
wouldn’t be so painful, somewhere she’d never lived before.

Now, walking
the streets of New Bern, Sarah was doing her best to move on. It was still a
struggle at times, but not nearly as bad as it once had been. Her parents were
supportive in their own way—her father said nothing whatsoever about it; her
mother clipped out magazine articles that touted the latest medical
developments—but her brother, Brian, before he headed off for his first year at
the University of North Carolina, had been a life-saver.  Like most adolescents, he was sometimes
distant and withdrawn, but he was a truly empathetic listener. Whenever she’d
needed to talk, he’d been there for her, and she missed him now that he was
gone. They’d always been close; as his older sister, she’d helped to change his
diapers and had fed him whenever her mother let her. Later, when he was going
to school, she’d helped him with his homework, and it was while working with
him that she’d realized she wanted to become a teacher.

That was one
decision she’d never regretted. She loved teaching; she loved working with
children. Whenever she walked into a new classroom and saw thirty small faces
looking up at her expectantly, she knew she had chosen the right career. In the
beginning, like most young teachers, she’d been an idealist, someone who
assumed that every child would respond to her if she tried hard enough. Sadly,
since then, she had learned that wasn’t possible. Some children, for whatever
reason, closed themselves off to anything she did, no matter how hard she worked.
It was the worst part of the job, the only part that sometimes kept her awake
at night, but it never stopped her from trying again.  Sarah wiped the perspiration from her brow, thankful that the air
was finally cooling. The sun was dropping lower in the sky, and the shadows
lengthened. As she strode past the fire station, two firemen sitting out front
in a couple of lawn chairs nodded to her. She smiled. As far as she could tell,
there was no such thing as an early evening fire in this town. She’d seen them
every day at the same time, sitting in exactly the same spots, for the past
four months.  New Bern.

Her life, she
realized, had taken on a strange simplicity since she’d moved here. Though she
sometimes missed the energy of city life, she had to admit that slowing down
had its benefits. During the summer, she’d spent long hours browsing through
the antique stores downtown or simply staring at the sailboats docked behind
the Sheraton. Even now that school had started again, she didn’t rush anywhere.
She worked and walked, and aside from visiting her parents, she spent most
evenings alone, listening to classical music and reworking the lesson plans
she’d brought with her from Baltimore. And that was fine with her.  Since she was new at the school, her plans
still needed a little tinkering.  She’d
discovered that many of the students in her class weren’t as far along as they
should have been in most of the core subjects, and she’d had to scale down the
plans a bit and incorporate more remedial work. She hadn’t been surprised by
this; every school progressed at a different rate. But she figured that by the
end of the year, most students would finish where they needed to be. There was,
however, one student who particularly concerned her.