The Pickle Boat House (9 page)

She grabbed a tablet and pen in the study before undressing and climbing in the tub. Resisting the urge to add bubble bath, she sank down in the hot water and tilted her head back against the rim, eyes closed. The warmth of the water spread through body and bones, soothing both. She scooted down in the tub until the water touched the ends of her hair in the back. In the silence within, floating suspended in the water, she let her mind wander where it would.

Before long, she found herself dreaming about her favorite little boy again, all dressed in blue, his chubby little belly peeking out beneath the striped shirt. He reached up and handed her a little yellow flower, smiling with delight, his hand small, warm, and soft. Turning her mind’s eye, she watched as he ran teetering back across the grass, laughing in his high little-boy voice, beckoning to her to chase him. Everything about him inspired the magic of the beautiful summer day surrounding them. “I love you,” she whispered as she watched him go.

She sputtered as hot bathwater slid up over her face. With a start, she realized that she had fallen asleep. Pushing with her feet, she shoved herself farther up in the tub and dried her face off with a towel. With her body readjusted, she again closed her eyes. Sadly, she knew she wouldn’t be able to rejoin the boy in the field, but perhaps she could find him somewhere else.

When the new vision finally appeared, it was nothing quite so lovely or comforting. They were arguing, a man and a woman on opposite sides of a room, neither looking at the other. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving,” the woman sobbed as she began to unravel, turning away as if to spare herself the final indignity of having an audience present. But then, all at once, she seemed to pull herself together, as if drawing strength from some inner source. Pausing to take a deep breath, she stood up, straightened her shoulders, and turned to face the man across the room. “If I thought there was anything good and loving left to express and share between us, I would stay. But there isn’t. There is finally nothing left to say. There’s so much pain inside me, I don’t see anything else when I look at you. Your eyes reflect only the pain—no love, no empathy, no shared purpose or burden.” The woman hesitated. “I need someone to lean on, but I’m all alone. We’re empty to each other. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame me. We’re just broken, and staying together isn’t going to fix us. I would tell you I love you, but I don’t think you’d hear me or that it would matter. Good-bye, Richard. Take care of yourself.” With that, the woman walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Van could feel the tears burning in her eyes as she watched her go. She slid down and completely submerged herself in the tub, becoming one with the humming swish, encased in her protective water-filled womb.

* * *

Van’s mood continued at a low ebb throughout the afternoon as she worked on her family trees and tried to keep the demons at bay. Today was a good day for it. She had been neglecting genealogy lately in favor of the nice weather and other distractions. The “other distractions” did make her smile again. Ryan was her black swan. She wasn’t sure what she had done to deserve him. She knew with certainty only that she was smiling much more often and felt happy for the first time in a long while.

She flipped the computer on and pulled out the top three file folders from the desk. “Get off the papers, cat,” she muttered, grabbing the bottom of the stack and trying to yank them out from under the well-nourished feline. It was like this every time she settled into a nice routine at the computer. She would immediately acquire a little furry friend. Sometimes a warm little purring head would settle itself gently onto her typing hand and doze until she had to use the computer mouse. Other times, she would have to bob and weave to evade the paw that kept flicking at her face, trying to catch her attention. Cats were great. They asked for so little, and that was just what she had to give.

As the time approached for Richard to arrive, she got into a rhythm of reading the wall clock, checking the window, and typing a little. Wall, clock, window, type. It shouldn’t be this hard, she thought. Maybe she cared more about Richard than she was willing to admit. Maybe she did need him in her life. Her gaze wandered outside, and she found herself watching a pair of finches hopping in the limbs of the beech tree. She loved birds. Her grandfather had taught her that they were a symbol of the living soul. She liked that. They put her in a peaceful place, especially when they lined up like pearls on a string across the telephone lines outside her house.

She was so deep in thought and emotion that the knock on the door took her by surprise, and she jumped from the chair where she sat. When she reached the door it was hard to tell whether her heart was racing in anticipation or surprise.

She hugged Richard at the door and swept him into the room with a wave of her hand. He sat on the couch, and she crossed the room and sat near him in the easy chair, although sitting in it was anything but.

“You’re looking good,” she said.

“You, too.” His smile was tight, and he tried to relax his clenched hands. “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been good. Life is good here,” Van said, nodding and smiling stiffly in return.

This set the tone for most of their conversation: soft topics that skimmed the surface of everyday life. Inevitably, the conversation began to slow and falter.

Richard got up from the couch. “I’ve missed you,” he said as he closed the space between them. “We spent so much energy fighting when we were together. That’s all we did. In the last months, I’ve been able to step back and get some perspective on our relationship. Van, I’ve really missed you.”

“Richard, I really don’t want to go down this road right now,” she said, standing up face-to-face with him.

“I just feel like my days are so incomplete without you … Please,” he whispered, and his voice began to break. “Come home.” He timidly reached for Van’s waist and tried to pull her close.

“Richard, please don’t,” she said, pulling back and turning away from him. “I’m not ready to have this conversation. I moved out so I could think things through. I still need time. I just can’t continue the way we were going. I thought you understood that. The last thing I need is for you to pressure me.”

“Van, I’m not trying to pressure you, but the longer we stay apart, the greater the risk that we’ll let this part of our life slip away. We’ve already lost so much. We can weather this. If we go our separate ways, then everything we’ve ever worked for is gone. We’ll have nothing to show for all those years. I’m truly sorry for what happened between us. I wasn’t faithful. To the very bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I needed someone, and I couldn’t find you. As a grieving woman, you couldn’t be there. I understand that. I can’t take back what I did. If I could, I would.”

There was nothing more that Van could say. She looked blankly at Richard, wondering how she could say it all differently so that he would understand. Her mind raced.

“Is there someone else?” he asked.

“Oh, no, no one,” she said, and this was not a lie. Her growing feelings for Ryan had nothing to do with the alienation she felt from Richard.

“Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

“No, I can’t forgive you. You robbed me of two things I can never replace: trust and security. I’m sorry, I can’t. After everything I’ve been through, I’ve lost the ability to forgive.” Van leaned down and picked up Lulu. “I have a need that you just can’t fill. I’m too old to have another baby. I don’t have a grandchild. The only thing I can do is pick up Lulu and hold her close, feel her little heart beating against me, the way she warms and fills my arms. That’s the only thing right now that comforts me.”

“You seem to have tolerance for everyone but me, Van. It’s a bit hypocritical,” said Richard, his voice rising in frustration and irritation. “You talk about turning to God for comfort and how he answers you when you ask for his help, yet the Christian faith is all about forgiveness. Forgiving isn’t an ability; it’s a gift. Why don’t you spend some time asking for that instead of asking only for what
you
need?”

Van looked at him, thunderstruck. “Wow. That hurts. It’s not really about being forgiven, though, is it, Richard? Isn’t it about you wanting not to fail at something?”

“It’s not about failure. It’s about us keeping together as a family.”

“You know it was neither of our fault what happened to James. You don’t have to judge everything in your life by whether it was a success or a failure. You quit telling me that you loved me, and you never hugged or even touched me. How come you could chat me all up when we were dating and then, when we got married, just ignore me? It’s like false advertising, don’t you think? The old bait and switch? No wonder women get bitchy. When I tried to talk to you it was like talking to a wall. No, I take it back. At least a wall will sometimes echo. With you, nothing. ‘Love’ is an active verb. You can’t just love someone in your head.”

“I do love you. I just have so much going on in my mind right now. It never stops. I can’t sleep for hashing and rehashing everything that I can keep at bay during the day. You have no idea the turmoil I feel.”

Van nodded in agreement. “I’ve had those days. Not as many now as in the beginning. Maybe you should go see someone,” she said in a soft voice, putting her hand on his arm. “Maybe you’re depressed. They can treat you for that.”

“I can’t, don’t you understand that?” This time it was his turn to pull away. He put his hands on the back of the chair and hung his head.

“Look, I don’t want to fight,” he said.

She turned away from him. “Yeah, that’s the problem. You never want to do anything.”

“There you go again. Nice comment from someone who only wanted to have sex on New Year’s and Memorial Day.”

“Maybe if it felt more like a lovefest and less like a fuckfest, it might have been more often. I wanted to have more than just sex.”

“It’s a little hard when you just lie there like a stone maiden with ‘please entertain me’ written across your forehead.”

“You took so long, I felt like drawing you a map with an arrow! I don’t want to just give it away to someone who’s just using me as a sexual release. Damn it, you have no idea how much I have loved you. But, I’m going to compartmentalize those feelings, just put them away like I have with Mom and James. I’m going to survive all of this. I’m going to flourish. And I want you to watch it happen!”

In the end, fighting was what they did best. By the time he left, Van felt as if she had gone through the wringer, and she watched in silence as he walked out to his car.

She thought most clearly when she wasn’t with him—his visit only compounded her frustration and confusion. It was achingly lonely, wanting intimacy but knowing that the one you’d promised your love and your life to could not love you back. There was nowhere else to go. Van was in a prison of her own making. She had kept up her end of the “until death do us part” bargain but felt as if she had secretly made a pact with the devil and bartered away her soul. Life just couldn’t continue that way. She had to ask herself whether love was enough to make her stay with Richard even when he couldn’t make her happy. Her love didn’t depend on whether
he
loved
her
. She would always love him. But she wondered if they would ever be whole enough people again to make each other happy. Somehow, the sum of their parts added up to less when they were together.

Exorcise the demons
. She had been down this route before. She grabbed her car keys and took off out of town. She drove a long way in quiet thought before she started to scream, and she didn’t stop screaming until she turned around and headed back into town.

* * *

Day was rapidly giving way to night as she pulled back up to her house. She was too emotionally weary to get out of the car, and so she just sat there. And that was where Ryan found her, sitting in the front seat with a tear-stained face and a preoccupied stare.

“Van, what are you doing out here?” he said, his voice full of compassion as he gently tried to pull her out of the car. “What’s wrong? Come inside, please.”

But he could get her to go only as far as the porch before she refused to go any further. Van sat down on the top step, and Ryan found himself forced to sit down beside her. As he did she turned toward him, buried her face in his shoulder, and started to sob uncontrollably. This time it was so easy to wrap his arms around her and let her cry.

“It started with hang-up calls all the time. One day I hit the auto call-back. Imagine my surprise when I knew the voice on the other end! And e-mails—sexual, teasing, revealing an intimacy way beyond casual friends. He cheated on me, Ryan—the other half of my soul!” She babbled on, but her words drowned in the deluge of uncontrollable sobbing.

Ryan stroked her hair and whispered in a hushed voice as he tried gently to calm her down. For the first time that he could remember, he gave of himself without a thought to what he could get out of it, and it felt good and natural. And the two of them molded into each other like pieces of a puzzle, with neither one wanting to pull back. He held her a long time, even after she stopped crying and her breathing evened.

Finally, Van started to pull away. “I’m sorr—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted, and tightened his arms around her, pulling her closer to him and kissing her hair. She twisted around in his arms, wrapping her arms around his neck and closing her eyes as soft lips met in a gentle, tentative kiss. As the passion rose, the gentleness changed into desperate want, longing, and need.

“Stay,” she implored.

“Yes,” he answered at once. Taking him by the hand, she pulled him up from the steps, led him into the house, and closed the door.

* * *

The next morning, they awoke to the sunlight peeking through the curtains. Ryan’s leaving the house was obviously going to get more notice than his entrance last night. Certainly, Mr. Pickett would bear witness; that was a given. Jean, however, was another story. Van didn’t want the endless stream of questions and scrutiny
that
would trigger.