37

VIENNA

THE BEDROOM SMELLED LIKE Jon, like his aftershave, that warm and subtly masculine scent Claire had long associated with him. For a moment, she felt immobilized by the unexpected pain of longing. She had to force herself to walk into her closet and gather up the clothes and shoes she had come for.

Jon had been reluctant to have her come to the house at all, finally agreeing that she could stop by if she did so when he wouldn’t be there. It had only been three weeks, but already the house felt as if it belonged to someone else. Things had been rearranged: The suitcases were no longer in the laundry room but had been lined up in the hall closet. The bread box was now on the counter closest to the sink. The coffeemaker had been moved next to the refrigerator. She received her biggest surprise, though, when she opened the cupboards to put away the food she’d bought in anticipation of Susan’s arrival for spring break. She’d spent seventy dollars on Susan’s favorite cookies and crackers and soups and frozen pizza, only to discover that Jon had already stocked the kitchen with the same items. She’d simply stared at the full shelves in the open cupboards, stunned that he had even known what to buy. He was doing okay. He was in control of his life. The house was clean, orderly. He’d even gone skiing, he’d told her. He was doing perfectly fine without her.

He’d asked her not to call so often. She didn’t think she’d been calling him that much—every couple of days or so—but he said it made it harder for him when she called. So she’d stopped, and now there were days when she found herself missing his voice. She zipped up her packed suitcase and carried it into the kitchen, setting it by the back door. Then she went into Jon’s bedroom closet, opened the trapdoor leading to the attic, and pulled down the stairs.

It took her twenty minutes to find the old photograph album. It was at the bottom of a trunk filled with Susan’s ragged stuffed animals and lying beneath—ironically—two old hand mirrors, which Claire quickly turned facedown on the floor.

“I’m a danger on the road,” she’d joked to Randy the night before, when she’d looked in her sideview mirror to check her blind spot and saw it filled with a shifting sea of green.

The album felt fragile in her hands as she carefully lifted it from the trunk. Randy wanted to see pictures of the barn, he said. He wanted to see her grandparents and parents, and Claire-the-child and her sister Vanessa. Claire had told Randy she didn’t want to disturb Jon by coming to the house to pick up the album, but the truth was, she was afraid of the memories those pictures might elicit from her. She had enough elusive thoughts floating in and out of her head as it was.

She stood up, feeling the weight of the album in her hands, and had a sudden recollection. She had rescued this album at one time. Someone—who?—had thrown it away, and she’d saved it from the trash pile. She looked down at the smooth brown leather, ran her hand across it, and for a moment considered sitting down at the top of the folding stairs to look through it. No. Not here in the cold dark of the attic. Not until she was with Randy.

She left a note for Jon on the kitchen table. I took some clothes, my old Harte family photo album, and a few books. She thought of other things she might say. She wanted to ask him if he recalled ever seeing a bloody towel on one of their trips to Italy, but she suddenly remembered the guarded, apprehensive look that would come into his eyes when she’d mention one of her flashbacks. That made her miss him less. Good. Being here, surrounded by Jon’s things, Jon’s scent, she needed a reminder as to why she was no longer with him.

There’s enough food to keep Susan happy for several spring breaks. You did a good job grocery shopping. Was that condescending? She wished she could erase the line, but she’d written it in ink.

She stared at her daughter’s name. Tomorrow Susan and Jon would be together in this house while she would be in her cubbyhole of an apartment. It seemed unnatural, unreal, and for the first time during this entire ordeal, she felt pure guilt: She was terribly selfish to put her daughter through this.

AN HOUR LATER, JON picked up Claire’s note from the table. He smiled at her allusion to the food he’d bought for Susan. Of course he’d taken care of that. What did she think?

She’d taken the photograph album. The words sent a chill through him.

He wheeled over to the refrigerator and took a plastic container of leftover macaroni and cheese from the shelf. He put it inside the microwave, then poured himself a beer, taking a sip as he waited for the oven to heat his dinner.

A decade ago, he had looked through that album with Mellie.

Mellie had been living with them a little over a month by then, suffering through the final stages of her lung cancer. Jon had been home from work with a urinary tract infection. Mellie was bedridden, but at least Jon could get around. He would make her lunch, change the television channels for her. Their odd bond of illness lasted close to a week. Claire would come home from work and ask how the two invalids were doing, and Susan, who was nine at the time, made them dual get-well cards, which they hung on the wall in the guest room, temporarily transformed into a room for Mellie.

Jon had never liked his mother-in-law. It was hard to like someone who kept a wall around herself, who answered questions with whatever she thought her questioner would like to hear, who never let people know who she really was. Something changed during their week together, though. Mellie began talking, saying things he knew she would never say to Claire. Perhaps not to anyone. “You’re the strongest man I’ve ever met, Jon,” she told him. “I can tell you anything, and you won’t fall apart.”

They sat together in her room one day—Mellie in the hospital bed they had rented for her, Jon beside her in his wheelchair—and looked through the old album, dusty from the attic. He loved seeing those pictures of Claire when she was small. So tiny and big-eyed and innocent. The pictures made him ache with love for her.

The album seemed to draw confidences from Mellie’s lips. She told Jon that her husband used to beat her late at night after Claire and Vanessa had gone to sleep. She told him how her mother, whom Claire thought had died peacefully in her sleep, had actually died an undoubtedly frightening death of a hemorrhage, entirely alone there in the farmhouse in the middle of the night. She told him many things she’d never told anyone before.

One cold, rainy day, when his infection was much better and Mellie’s cough was much worse, she told him that she knew where Vanessa was. Vanessa and Claire’s father had died the year before, and he had left a letter to be delivered to Mellie at the time of his death. Vanessa was just graduating from college—at the age of twenty-eight—and planning to start medical school, he had written. She was extremely bright, but it had taken her a while to get her feet on the ground. And he’d enclosed an address for her.

Jon was repelled by the man who would keep his daughter separate from her sister and mother, and even more angry with Mellie for keeping her knowledge of Vanessa’s whereabouts to herself.

“Claire has a right to know where her sister is,” he’d argued.

“Why? They don’t even know each other now. And it would only wake up the past.” Mellie clutched his hand. “Claire’s got a good life with you, Jon. Let the past rest.”

She told him that she had traveled to Seattle herself after receiving the letter from her ex-husband, showing up at Vanessa’s rundown apartment building only to have her daughter tell her to “get the fuck off my porch.”

Jon continued to argue with her until Mellie reluctantly gave Vanessa’s address to Claire. Claire wrote a letter to her sister, the first of several that never received a reply.

Jon grew to like Mellie, if not love her. He grew to understand that although her secrecy might be misguided and harmful in the long run, it was borne of her intense love for the people around her. She simply didn’t know how to be any different. In those last days before her death, though, she learned to open up, if only with her son-in-law.

After a particularly gruesome attack of coughing one day, she told him, “I’m going to die soon.” His first impulse had been to say, “Of course you’re not,” or “Don’t think that way,” but he caught himself. She thought he was strong, and so he would be strong for her. He’d held Mellie’s hand and looked her right in the eye.

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

And she had smiled at him.

And then she told him something that took all his strength to endure.