Seeking Sara Summers (3 page)

“They have me working a double shift,” she said. “But I need the extra money.” She scanned and bagged their purchases with the adept swiftness that came from making the same motions for years.

“Hi, Mrs. Stanton. How are you?” she asked, as if she had caught herself ignoring her.

“I’m fine,” Sara said. “Sorry to hear about the double shift,” she added. But her words had little impact.

“Well, I hope they’re paying you double,” Grady said.

Ginny’s middle-aged face registered a glimmer of joy. “I wish,” she said. She looked over at Sara and smiled wistfully, as if to cement her belief that all the good men were taken.

Sara took Grady’s arm to solidify their image, a perfect commercial for marital bliss. It occurred to her that these were the times when they were closest, when they pretended to be someone else. No one suspected there might be something wrong with the picture they presented, not even Grady. No one questioned the fact that they were on their eighth home improvement project in two years, more home improvements per capita than anyone on their block. Even Ernie and David, the gay couple down the street, couldn’t keep up with them. They came over periodically to see what Grady and Sara were working on and looked on in home-improvement admiration.

After their youngest child, Sam had left home—preceded by their daughter, Jessica, and oldest son, John—Grady and Sara had spent months adding on a sun porch to the back of the house. The sun porch addition had actually marked the darkest time of their marriage. Their nest now empty, they had been left without the material that had been holding them together for over two decades. But with the help of treated lumber and galvanized nails, they gave CPR to a relationship that had gone too long without oxygen. Meanwhile, Sara became better at convincing herself that nothing was wrong.

Then she got cancer. Cancer had forced her to take another look at her life. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, she had been given a glimpse of an empty future, where she lived a miserly rendition of what life could be. Yet it was the life the cashier at Home Depot dreamed about: a good job, a good husband, a house in a good neighborhood.

You’re being unreasonable,
the familiar voice began in her head.

Oh, shut up,
Sara thought.

Why can’t you be satisfied with what you have?
the voice continued.
Grady is a good man
.
Don’t you see what you have? Don’t you realize how many other women would be perfectly content with a life like yours?

Grady loaded his purchases into the back of his SUV while Sara slid into the passenger side. She stared at the gas gauge on the console as they drove home. How was it that Grady’s gas tank was always full? This required a diligence she couldn’t imagine. She was always running on empty. Lately her life had begun to mirror this condition. Her so-called life had broken down and left her stranded on the side of the road without the resources she needed to carry on. A crossroads, indeed, she thought.

Grady hummed along with a Bruce Springsteen song relegated to the oldies station. Did he remember she was there? In her imagination she saw herself jumping out of the moving car. Crushed under the axle of her expectations. Sara gripped the safety belt across her chest to avoid the temptation.

You’re getting dramatic in your old age,
the voice clucked.

Sara sighed.
Perhaps a little drama is exactly what I need,
she thought.

Grady turned down the radio. “Are you okay?”

No Grady, I’m not okay. I’m having a conversation with a voice in my head. I’m actually the farthest away from ‘okay’ I’ve ever been in my life. Why can’t you see that?

“I’m fine,” Sara said.

He turned the radio back up, and hummed the last refrain of
Born to Run.

They drove through the neighborhood that had changed very little during the twenty years they had lived here. It was a neighborhood adjacent to the one Sara had grown up in. She thought of Julia again, her girlhood friend. She hadn’t thought of her in years and now twice in the last twenty-four hours. Wasn’t Julia’s parent’s house three blocks over?

“Grady, can we go down Houser Street?”

He glanced at her, then shrugged and took the next block.

Julia had always collected strays—kittens, puppies, and birds—anything the least bit wounded. Sara was part of her flock, as was Grady.

Sara and Grady had grown up two streets west, in houses with the same floor plan, every other one transposed to make them appear different. Julia’s house had been in an adjacent neighborhood marked by more trees and bigger houses, where no two looked alike.

The three of them had been best friends from fourth grade until their junior year in high school when Julia’s family moved away.
The Three Musketeers
they had called themselves, as lame as it was. And then there were only two of them; Sara and Grady left behind like a two-legged stool. Why was she suddenly thinking so much about the past?

They married three years after Julia left. Sara had just turned twenty. It had been a small ceremony. Her father walked her down the aisle and sat next to his new wife, a woman very different from Sara’s mother.

They drove in front of Julia’s old house but Grady kept his eyes forward. Was he still mad at her for leaving? All these years later?

The small rose bushes Julia’s mother had planted with Sara and Julia’s help one hot August day were taller than Sara now. The oak tree they had climbed as children now had branches too tall to climb. And the red front door Julia had convinced her parents would look sophisticated, had been repainted by subsequent owners a smoky gray.

Julia always wore red—red shoes, red sweaters, red dresses—as if she owned a patent on the color. Red was not a color Sara considered wearing, even now. She preferred earth tones; colors that blended into the scenery. Red’s vitality and passion was a moving target for the eyes of the world. Sara preferred safety over passion.

They turned onto their street. Ernie and David stood in their driveway unloading 2 x 4s from their white Land Rover. Grady beeped his horn and waved, then pulled in. “I’m just going to see what they’re up to,” he said to her. “Are you coming?”

“Not right now.” Sara waved at the two middle-aged men who always looked like they had just stepped out of a Lands’ End catalogue. They had been together as long as she and Grady.

Like boys in a locker room, the three men surveyed the length and width of the lumber. Grady laughed at something David said and put a leg up on the back of the Land Rover as if ready to stay for a while.

Sara’s head ached a deep, nagging reminder of how disappointed she was with her life. She closed her eyes and rubbed her throbbing temples. Like a prospector panning for gold, she swirled the past, searching for any hints of an authentic life. Her thoughts returned to Julia. Memories of her old friend became a trail of bread crumbs that she might follow to find her way out of the forest.

CHAPTER THREE

Grady stood over her in the flower garden, his body blocking the sun from Sara’s face. “What’s with you these days?” he asked. “You seem totally self-absorbed.”

She rested her head on her knees. Until a year ago, when Sara discovered the lump, she had lived her life as though it had no expiration date. Those days were over. Sara hadn’t told Grady about the twinge she had had the day before. Besides feeling physically odd, there was something else; an inner knowing that she hadn’t put words to yet.

“I guess I am self-absorbed,” she said. The sun warmed the crispness in the air. It was one of the last warm days of fall. The coming of winter always brought a slight melancholy for her. Winter seemed too perfect a metaphor for her marriage. She yearned to find a tiny bud of new life.

Sara had spent the morning pulling handfuls of weeds with a kind of reckless desperation, as if to rid herself of the regrets in her life.

Nearby, a small cluster of red flowers held onto the last days of bloom. The color red reminded her of Julia and of the email she had sent weeks before. She hadn’t received a response.

An impatient look rested on Grady’s face. “You think too much,” he pronounced. He studied Sara as if she were a case file. Someone he had initially insured but lately had proven too risky a candidate.

“You’re probably right,” Sara said. “Oh, I almost forgot, your mother called while you were in the shower,” Sara said. She wasn’t in the mood for Grady’s analysis.

He tucked his gray T-shirt into his jeans, the words
Stanton Insurance
faded on the front. His mother called him at least once a day to report on her miscellaneous aches and pains. Maybe that’s why he never seems to have room for mine, Sara thought.

Grady had taken over Stanton Insurance after his father retired. His office, located in downtown Northampton, was within ten minutes of their house. He often walked or rode his bicycle to work.

“Well I guess I’d better call her.” Grady walked into the house. To the extent that Sara had an absent mother, Grady had a present one.

Later that night, Sara took Luke for a final walk of the day and came in the kitchen door. The door always stuck and required a hard push, using both hands and a knee to latch it. Sara and Grady had spent hundreds of hours on home improvements yet seemed to leave the little things unfixed.

Sara put Luke’s leash on the hook in the pantry and refilled his water bowl. When she went into the bedroom Grady had showered and shaved. Sara sighed. Was she in the mood to make love?

She undressed and put on her nightgown. Then she sat on the bed and rubbed lotion onto her arms and legs, part of her nightly ritual. Grady ran a hand across her short hair—a gesture that reminded her of how he petted Luke—and climbed onto the bed behind her. He kissed Sara’s neck. This was the moment she usually stopped him if she wasn’t in the mood. But they hadn’t made love since her last round of chemo, and she had missed being held.

Grady lowered her nightgown. He kissed her shoulders and rubbed them with the lotion sitting beside her on the bed. He never looked at where her breast used to be, nor would he touch the place where the cancer had lived. He focused on the perky, good breast; the breast that was left. She wanted him to acknowledge what had happened to her. Was this why Sara had hesitated about getting reconstructive surgery?

“You feel tense,” Grady said. He deepened the pressure with his hands. “Do you want me to stop?” he asked, not stopping.

“No,” she said. Grady could be tender when he wanted something. Sara closed her eyes, knowing the path his hands would travel and the sounds they both would make.

They rolled over in bed and briefly kissed; a fleeting flirtation between tongues. Sara always wished the kissing lasted longer. She longed for a deep, passionate exchange of fluids, instead of the brief mingling of their minty fresh toothpaste.

Grady entered her, his movements accelerating, as if it was his job to pump up their passion. Sara’s mind wandered. She was suddenly reminded of Julia’s father cranking the arm of their old-fashioned ice cream maker. Professor David had made peach ice cream every summer on the patio in their backyard. Julia and Sara would eat so much of it they would get ice cream headaches and collapse into their hammock together.

Julia’s dad had taught European History at Smith College. He looked like a professor and always had a beard, even in the summer. Julia’s mother had been her dad’s teaching assistant and was twelve years younger. She was beautiful, as Julia was beautiful. Flawless skin highlighted by auburn hair that looked perpetually shiny, framing perfectly proportionate features.

“Why are you smiling?” Grady asked, his movement uninterrupted.

Should she tell him that she suddenly had an urge for peach ice cream? She reeled in her smile. “I was just enjoying you,” Sara said.

Grady smiled. A drop of sweat rained down on where her right breast used to be. Perhaps I can grow a new one from scratch, Sara thought.

Grady’s breathing deepened as their ritual advanced. Sara imagined Julia in Florence. Was she married? Did she have children? Perhaps not. She had kept her maiden name.

“Grady, can you go deeper?” Sara said softly, surprising herself with this request.

Grady lifted up and decelerated, like a car shifting down a gear. “What?” he asked. His face was red. Sweat had gathered around his temples.

“Can you go deeper?” Sara whispered. She wanted deeper contact, deeper penetration. She wanted him to touch the part of her that was lonely and scared.

Grady groaned with enthusiasm and began again, putting more effort into his motions. It reminded her of the first time they had made love, a month after Julia had moved away. They had rocked the back of his red Chevy, as if the friction of their bodies might somehow be the magic to conjure Julia up again. Over the years they had graduated from cars, to dorm rooms, to their marital bed, which now creaked loudly with every thrust. Since the children had left there was a certain enjoyment to being louder than they used to be. Loudness, Sara supposed, that could be misinterpreted for passion.

Seconds later, the creaking bed stopped. Grady rolled to his side of the bed with a smile on his face and turned toward her. “That was amazing,” he panted. “How was it for you?”

“Wonderful,” she said, as she always did when he asked this question.

Grady kissed her lightly on the lips, and then rolled over to his side of the bed. Minutes later, he began to snore lightly. Hot tears filled Sara’s eyes.

“I had hoped for better results,” Doctor Morgan said. The head of the oncology department, he sat behind his large mahogany desk, more of a fortress than a piece of office furniture.

Absentmindedly, Sara stuck a finger into the pot of a plant on the edge of the desk to see if it needed water. She was always sticking her fingers into pots at home, afraid that she would find the evidence of her neglect. But in this instance she discovered that the plant wasn’t real. Was the man in charge of her treatment someone who couldn’t even keep a plant alive?