Once More With Feeling Read online

  I blew out a breath, and couldn’t tell if the shake in it was laughter or something else, some emotion I was afraid to name.

  ‘And here’s the funny part.’ I leaned closer to the bed, to Tim’s ear – half of me feeling ridiculous because there was no one listening, not even the person I was supposedly talking to. But only half. ‘I don’t know when I stopped wanting that. When I started wanting only our life instead. Or why. Did you do that, Tim?’

  I laughed then, a little bit, though I couldn’t have said why. Nothing was funny. I was frozen right through, and I had no hope of that ever changing, not as that baby grew daily inside Carolyn. Not while all of this continued to be so grim and sad and true. And Tim only lay there, healing. Or dying.

  I didn’t know what it said about me that I couldn’t tell which one I wanted more. Or that when I’d sobbed in that far-off, battered little corner of this terrible hospital, I’d been crying for the babies I would never carry and the life I hadn’t really been living, after all. But not for him. What did that say about me? Did I really want to know?

  But I worried that I already did.

  ‘Did you do that?’ I asked him again, tears in my voice if not on my cheeks. ‘Or did I?’

  5

  ‘I’m really glad you came over tonight, Sarah,’ my father said all of three bites into his signature lasagne, the one he usually slaved over for days, and which he only made on very special occasions.

  The fact that this supposedly casual dinner, just me and my parents on an unremarkable Thursday evening in December, gathered around the cosy little round table in their kitchen like all the dinners of my childhood, qualified for the lasagne treatment alarmed me. To say the least. I mustered up a smile and tried to kerb the paranoia, without much success either way.

  My mother, who notoriously didn’t like to eat heavy meals in the evenings, even if the meal in question was Dad’s famous lasagne – the recipe handed down from his Italian mother who had spoken only a few words of English – had been picking at her usual small bowl of salad, but she put her fork down abruptly then, as if she expected things to get ugly. It occurred to me that my assumption that this dinner – to which I’d been invited by my father in curiously formal language two days before – would involve any clearing of air, long-overdue apologies for the production of their first-born daughter, Ruiner of Lives that she was, or, at the very least, expressions of support from my parents was, perhaps, naïve.

  I tried to tell myself that was just paranoia, too.

  ‘Thanks for the invitation,’ I said as lightly as I could, ignoring the clear signs that my parents were ready to have a talk with me. ‘You know I love your lasagne, Dad.’

  ‘We just want to check in with you,’ he said, smiling warmly. The warmth was definitely alarming. ‘See how you’re doing. This must all be so hard on you. It’s hard to believe it’s been going on this long now. Three weeks, isn’t it?’

  I swallowed the forkful of lasagne I’d tossed into my mouth, though I hardly tasted a thing. Certainly not the explosion of flavour and cheesy goodness that this dish was supposed to deliver in spades.

  ‘Something like that,’ I muttered.

  ‘This is such a terrible situation,’ Dad continued, frowning down at his plate. At least the frown was more normal. The attempt at warmth only made me nervous. I loved my cerebral, professorial father, but he had never been much in the way of an arbiter of justice in the family. No one had. The Stone family motto was Ignore, Repress, Pretend. ‘Just terrible.’

  ‘A terrible situation all around,’ Mom chimed in, shaking her head as if at the enormity of it all.

  I waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. I wanted to ask what, exactly, Mom meant by all around. But maybe I was hearing support for Carolyn under every syllable when it wasn’t necessarily there. It was possible, I could admit. I’d promised myself on the drive over that I wasn’t going to pick a fight with them, and by them I mostly meant my mother, because what was the point? They were my parents. They didn’t change – maybe they couldn’t. And that meant it was the very definition of insanity to keep acting as if one day, left to their own devices and apropos of nothing, they might.

  I was determined to stick to my plan. To any plan, at this point, just to prove that I could. That there was something left that couldn’t be taken from me.

  ‘Do you remember that I wanted to be a public defender?’ I asked, deciding it was better to talk about other things. Safer things. Things so far in the past that they couldn’t possibly hurt anybody now. ‘I wanted to travel all over the place, save the world. I’d forgotten all about that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mom said in her arch way. Or maybe it was just her innate chilliness. She let out a little laugh. ‘All you ever talked about was this third world country, that social ill and plights.’

  So much for my theory that nothing from the past could hurt me. I told myself that this was my mother being funny. Such a laugh riot, that Roberta Stone. Ha ha ha.

  ‘Plights?’ I echoed. All in good fun, etc., I thought. So I smiled as if I really believed that.

  ‘The plight of the downtrodden. The plight of the lower classes. The plight of the rainforest.’ Mom picked up her fork again and speared an anaemic-looking tomato with it, only to wave it in the air as she spoke. ‘You had a great many plights and you were very concerned with all of them.’ She let out another laugh, which I found a tad too thin to be entirely good-humoured. ‘We were all so happy when you met Tim and grew out of it.’

  I stared at my lasagne as if likely to see my own history play out in the meat sauce, the recipe for which Dad guarded as if it was a matter of national security, and realized that I’d lost my appetite. Mom – 1, me – 0. As usual.

  ‘I don’t know why I grew completely out of it, though,’ I said, frowning at my plate. But determined, somehow, to continue having this conversation, however unlikely it seemed that my parents might possess any particular insight into my life choices. It was better than the alternative subject matter we had on hand, which was even now thundering about the room like a wild circus elephant, daring us to keep ignoring it. ‘I mean, maybe it’s a little self-indulgent to want to wander around the Kalahari Desert for a year, but why did I give up the kind of law I wanted to practise? I certainly never dreamed at night of being the go-to Rivermark DWI attorney.’ I shook my head, baffled by my own choices. ‘It’s like I turned into someone else and I don’t even remember doing it. Is that normal?’

  ‘People change when they get married,’ Dad said, in his low, easy voice. So soothing. So supportive. So suspicious, really, when I thought about it. I tried to stop thinking about it. ‘It’s part of becoming a unit – of forming a partnership. Not only is it normal, I think it’s necessary.’

  But I wondered. There was a partnership, and then there was pretending to be someone you would have laughed at if you’d met them a few years earlier. Did everybody go through that? I didn’t think they did. Lianne, for example, was exactly who she’d thought she would be when she grew up. That was one of the reasons she was so solid. She had worries and problems, like anyone, but she didn’t have doubts. She wasn’t racked with regret. I kind of thought this was a crucial distinction. Or should be.

  ‘The public defender’s office would never have been a good fit for you,’ Mom said, with a dismissive wave of her fork that rubbed me the wrong way.

  ‘You don’t really know what would be a good fit for me.’ I fought to keep my voice calm, light, easy. Because I knew points would be deducted if I got noticeably emotional. That was how my mother played this game. It was where Carolyn had learned that insulting calmness she’d used on me at the hospital the night of the accident. ‘I don’t even know, so how could you? But who knows? Maybe this is the perfect opportunity to think about it again.’

  I was surprised to feel that little click inside, as if something had finally fallen back into place. Or wanted to, anyway. Maybe this really was an opportunity, however
unwanted. Or maybe the key point here was that I had to start thinking about it that way, or I’d go crazy. I was close enough to crazy as it was. No need to walk any further down that road.

  ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea,’ Dad said, smiling as if he couldn’t hear Mom or see her concerned frown. As if the conversation he was having was perfectly pleasant and lacking all murky undertones. ‘It’s never too late.’

  ‘Of course it’s never too late, and you should do anything you set your mind to,’ Mom said then, sounding almost impatient. She shrugged. ‘But do you really want to start a new career at thirty-three? Or older? As a single woman? That sounds exhausting. You’d be far better served continuing to reap the benefits of the career you already have and finding a new husband if you want one, surely.’

  ‘A new husband,’ I repeated, unable to believe what I’d heard. I pressed my fingers against my eyes and shook my head, helplessly. ‘Did you really just say that, Mom? You’re aware that I’m still married to the old one, right?’

  My mother sighed, as if I was being unnecessarily argumentative.

  ‘There’s no point clinging to something that’s already gone,’ she said, and the worst part, I knew, was that this was my mother’s version of being gentle. Caring and thoughtful, even. It just happened to feel like a baseball bat to soft tissue. Surely she didn’t mean it.

  But I’d been telling myself that for a long, long time.

  ‘I’m glad that you’re over my marriage,’ I said, when I could speak. Not that my voice was at all even. It was a mark of how upset I was that I was letting them see it. ‘I’ll let you know when and if I am, but I should warn you – it might not happen on your schedule.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help you, Sarah,’ Mom said, in that aggrieved way, as if her feelings were hurt, as they so often were. She put a hand to her temple as if she had a sudden headache – the implication being, of course, that I’d brought it on. ‘You don’t do yourself any favours by being so intense all the time, you know.’

  This was not the first time my mother had told me I was too intense. Oh, no. Intense, as far as I could tell, was my mother’s favourite code word for me. Sometimes it meant too loud, too passionate, too excited. Sometimes it meant pathetic and silly. Or just childish. Sometimes it was used as a pat on the head, something patronizing and dismissive. But one thing I knew: it was never, ever, a compliment.

  I glared back at her, no doubt with all of that intensity she hated. And who knew what I might have said?

  ‘I think this has gone off the rails a little bit,’ Dad said then, forestalling whatever I was about to say. Saving me from a total meltdown, more like.

  He smiled at me, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to return it. ‘I know you’re upset, and I don’t blame you. Who wouldn’t be? And no one’s saying you shouldn’t be. You have the right to your feelings.’ He leaned his elbows on the table, and angled himself toward me. His smile deepened. Every alarm inside me started ringing. Loudly and ominously. ‘But what your mother and I really want to talk about tonight is what we can do to help patch things up between you and Carolyn. This family is our primary concern. Do you see that as any kind of possibility?’

  It felt like a knife in the gut, a betrayal. He might as well have kicked me. Those internal alarms were never wrong – and still, I never listened to them. I might as well have kicked myself, really.

  ‘There’s no patching this up,’ I said, my voice much calmer than it could have been, all things considered. ‘I’m surprised you would think otherwise.’

  ‘No one’s asking you and Carolyn to suddenly be the best of friends after all of this,’ Dad said, and the worst part was how kind he looked then, how compassionate. It made a part of me feel like some kind of monster for not being over the divorce that hadn’t even happened yet. For not simply hand-waving away Carolyn’s actions. Once again I saw that damned blue blouse, frozen in the air, stuck in the last moment my life had made any kind of sense to me.

  Imagine, I thought now, if I’d been a little less reasonable and calm and easy about the whole thing from the start. If I’d taken Lianne’s expletive-laden advice and burned all of Tim’s belongings in a blazing pyre in the front lawn. If I’d punched Carolyn straight in her face, the way I still wanted to. The way Lianne still claimed she would. What would my parents have done then?

  But I suspected I knew.

  ‘You girls have never seen eye to eye, and this situation is only exacerbating that,’ Dad continued in the same reasonable, rational, horrible way. ‘No one says you have to transform yourselves into best buddies. But how about a little civility? Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said flatly. ‘It is far too much to ask.’

  ‘Oh, Sarah,’ my mother said. So very sadly. As if I had reached across the table and plunged that fork of hers directly into her heart. ‘This kind of thing will eat away at you and make you brittle if you don’t find it in yourself to forgive and forget.’

  ‘Then I guess I’m going to calcify right here,’ I snapped, outrage and the deep hurt beneath it making me sound very nearly flippant. ‘Because I’m not going to all of a sudden forgive Carolyn when she can’t even bring herself to apologize for ruining my entire life, and none of us are likely to forget the fact that she’s having my husband’s child, are we?’

  ‘And what about that child?’ Mom pounced on that as if I’d walked into a carefully constructed trap. ‘That poor little thing. It’s not going to be the baby’s fault that any of this happened, is it?’

  I felt another surge of sympathy for that baby, who would be born through no fault of its own into this complicated mess. Of course it wasn’t the baby’s fault. But it also wasn’t mine.

  ‘Is it my fault?’ I countered. ‘Have you sat Carolyn down like this, to tell her what she needs to do to solve the situation?’

  ‘This is not about Carolyn—’ Mom began.

  Which meant no, she hadn’t sat Carolyn down anywhere, unless she was holding her hand in the ICU waiting room and offering her support she didn’t deserve.

  ‘It is entirely about Carolyn,’ I said, cutting her off. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘Don’t play the attorney with me, Sarah,’ Mom snapped back at me. ‘This is not a courtroom!’

  ‘All right, that’s enough,’ Dad said then. He reached over and put his hand on mine, giving my fingers a quick squeeze. I wanted to yank my hand away, but restrained myself. ‘No one is choosing sides, sweetheart. We’re your parents and we’re also Carolyn’s parents. That makes us neutral parties in this.’

  I looked at him for a moment, and then I looked at my mother. I thought about my sister. I thought about all the little things we’d all swept aside over the years, all the minor indications that Carolyn had no boundaries and no moral compass, and worst of all, no sense that she should ever restrain herself from going after what she wanted. So she never had. And look what had come of it.

  In my bed.

  With my husband.

  Fucking doggy-style.

  ‘If you’re claiming that you’re neutral,’ I said quietly, pulling on some inner strength I didn’t know I had, when all I wanted to do was scream and sob and howl and break things, ‘you’re actually choosing sides.’

  I moved my hand away from his. Pointedly, I admit.

  ‘Sarah—’ Dad started, frowning so hard that his regulation college professor beard bristled slightly.

  ‘There aren’t sides to take,’ I continued, ignoring him. And then I started acting like the lawyer I was. Because this was a courtroom. Of course it was. This family had never been anything else. I held up my left hand, palm up. ‘Here’s Carolyn, who had an affair with my husband, who let me walk in on her in my bed with said husband, who broke up my marriage, and who then announced she was going to have my husband’s baby.’ I raised my right hand. ‘And here’s me.’ I waited a beat, and then looked at each of my parents in turn. ‘How are those two things the same? How do they even compare?�
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  For a moment, they were both quiet. I saw them exchange a look. A whole conversation in a single glance.

  ‘Carolyn is our daughter too,’ my father said eventually, with a ring of finality in his voice.

  Because he had to sound that way, I understood. Because, of course, there wasn’t any counter-argument to be made. There was no pretending that I had actually done anything to bring about this situation. There was no matching tally of my behaviour that could be trotted out to explain away what Carolyn had done. There was only my reaction to Carolyn’s actions.

  I wasn’t being friendly enough. I wasn’t pretending everything was okay. I was making a difficult situation worse. I wasn’t helping anything.

  They didn’t like my reactions.

  ‘The fact is, Sarah,’ Mom said, in what was, for her, an attempt at a calm and reasonable tone, ‘marriages end. Look at your father and me. We’ve certainly had our troubles. But we did what we had to do, quietly, and we moved on. What’s the benefit of sharing your personal problems with the whole wide world?’

  I could feel the curve of my lips, and I knew it was no smile.

  ‘I haven’t put up a billboard up in the middle of town saying Tim is a cheating bastard and my sister is a whore,’ I pointed out acidly, ignoring the protesting noise Dad made at, I could only assume, my word choices. However appropriate they might have been, description-wise. ‘Though the fact that the two of them have been shacked up in the B&B right smack in the middle of town kind of accomplishes the same thing, don’t you think?’

  My mother shifted in her chair. My father rubbed his hand over his beard as if it would tell him what to say.

  ‘However unfortunate the situation might be, Carolyn is our daughter, and she’s having our grandchild,’ Dad said, with a tone in his voice that I didn’t understand. Was that sorrow that it had come to this? Or was it some form of anger at me that I wasn’t falling all over myself in understanding? And wasn’t it sad that I couldn’t tell the difference?