Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Okay, that was not what I’d expected him to say. At all. So clearly I did get a lot of things wrong.
“Why…” I lick my lips as my mind spins. “Why do you think you should have been the one to do it, Sam?”
He huffs impatiently, the impatient twist of his shoulders acting as a dismissal. “Because I haven’t done anything,” he bursts out. “Because I’ve been acting like a stupid baby since this whole thing started. Dad treated me like one, and I let him.” His face crumples and then, like a child, he starts to cry.
I stretch out my arms for a hug, but he spins away before I can reach him.
“Don’t,” he snarls. “For the love of—Mom, don’t .”
Slowly I drop my arms. Sam wipes his cheeks.
“What do you think you should have done?” I ask quietly.
“Anything,” Sam replies savagely. “ Anything . I just let Dad do it all, basically. He treated me like this little kid who needed protecting from everything. Who couldn’t handle the truth, and that’s because I couldn’t.” He draws a shuddering breath and then continues doggedly, “I mean, at first, I know I was acting stupid, like it was all a—a video game or something. I know how stupid that sounds, but I just…I don’t know, it all seemed kind of…exciting, in a weird way. I can’t really explain it, but it was kind of…cool.” He flinches, even before I’ve said anything. “I know how that sounds, I know, I know?—”
“Sam,” I interject gently. “It’s okay.” I can completely appreciate how unreal everything seemed back then, especially at the beginning. I’m hardly about to begrudge my son having more or less the same reaction I did—the incredulity, the suspended sense of surreality, like it wasn’t really happening, or at least, it wasn’t really happening to me.
“But then…I wanted to do stuff,” he continues, his voice rising. “To help. I offered to go out and look for food, or a car, when we needed one. But Dad always said my job was to look after Granny. She was…well.” He grimaces, and I can imagine. My mother had an immense strength of spirit, but at the end she was frail, vulnerable, and suffering from dementia. It was a miracle that Daniel managed to bring her back.
“I know, though,” Sam continues, “that that wasn’t it, at least not all of it. He was just trying to protect me from the radiation. And I never really argued about it. I just let him…because the truth is…” Sam blows out a breath, his shoulder slumping. “The truth is, I was scared.” He gives me a guilty look, the kind of frightened glance he might have given me at six years old, when he’d done something naughty. “I didn’t want to risk getting burned or zapped or whatever. I wanted to stay safe, so I let him do it all and I pretended it was his idea.”
“And Dad wanted you to stay safe, too,” I return quietly. I hesitate, trying to feel my way through the words, to say what Sam needs to hear. “I can understand why you feel guilty, Sam, but, please believe me, you don’t need to. Dad certainly wouldn’t want you to, and especially now. Keeping you safe was his absolutely number one priority?—”
“But it’s not like I was six,” Sam burst out. “Mom, I was eighteen . I should have dealt with it. I should have…manned up.”
“But Sam,” I protest, “you have your whole life ahead of you?—”
“And Dad doesn’t.” Sam’s expression and voice both turn bleak, and I fall silent, the reality of Daniel’s condition reverberating through the emptiness inside me. “How am I supposed to live with that?” he asks, like he needs to know the answer, as if I could possibly have it. I don’t know it for myself, never mind my children.
But Sam’s situation is different from mine; it is, I realize, the same dilemma Mattie has been facing, with Kerry. How do you accept that someone willingly gave their life to you—in Kerry’s case, the matter of a single second; in my husband’s, month after treacherous month? Both were incredibly courageous and noble sacrifices…but they can be hard to accept.
“I don’t know,” I admit. I think of my trite words to Mattie— make it count —and yet they’re true. Aren’t they? Surely they need to be. “Just with gratitude, Sam, and not with anger or guilt. Dad would have never wanted that.”
“He did something bad,” Sam confesses in a low voice. “Something he wouldn’t tell me about. In Albany, he found a car. He came back with it and he was…crying.” He sounds like he still can’t believe it. “He was trying not to show it, but…” He trails off, shaking his head. “I don’t know what, but I knew it was something. Something had happened. Or he had done something to get it. I don’t know.”
My stomach cramps with anxiety but I keep my voice steady. “Whatever Dad did, he did it willingly, for you. It was a choice he made.”
Sam gives me a level look. “Like you killing that guy?”
I do my best not to flinch. “I thought I was protecting everyone,” I admit quietly, a sorrowful agreement. “It’s been hard—really hard—to accept that maybe…maybe I wasn’t. That maybe I made a mistake, and that guy was just trying to be nice.” Even after all this, it’s hard to admit. To accept…and yet I know I need to.
Sam cocks his head. “While holding a gun.”
“Well, we were all holding guns.” I swallow and force myself to tell him, “I thought you’ve been distant from me these last few months because you were so…so sickened by what I’d done. Killing someone in cold blood, without even considering they might be okay.”
Sam is silent for a long moment. “It wasn’t that,” he finally says. “I mean, that was part of it, maybe, at first. Like, when I found that Bible verse and photo and stuff…well, it would have been easier all around if those guys were bad news, right? But I didn’t blame you, Mom, or Dad. Not for that, for any of it…I was just…I was ashamed .” His face crumples and he gulps several times, staring down at the ground. This time, he can’t meet my eye, but I know it’s not because of me. “Like, that whole time,” he continues in a choked voice, “I was just hiding in the backseat.”
“Oh, Sam.” I step forward and this time he lets me hug him. He clings to me, or maybe I cling to him, and neither of us speaks. Part of me wonders why we couldn’t have had this conversation earlier, made these strides sooner, while another part acknowledges the stark truth that it simply wouldn’t have been possible. Daniel’s condition, his inevitable death…that’s what has forced these painful truths out at last. It’s a blessing amid the grief and tragedy, and one I’m grateful for, but…
Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice…
The verse ripples through my mind, quiet yet insistent; I know I’ll never forget the words. This time though, instead of the usual churning sense of guilt, they leave a surprising and unexpected peace in their wake, a feeling that is not as elusive as it once was. Everything feels so hard, and it’s going to get so much harder…
And yet.
Two words I can choose to live by, even though it’s not easy. Especially though it’s not easy.
Slowly I release Sam and step back. He sniffs, running his wrist along his nose, before giving me a shamefaced smile. “Sorry.”
I smile faintly. “I wish I had a handkerchief.”
“Dad would have one.”
“You’re right, he would have.”
We are, I realize, already talking about him as if he’s dead, but he isn’t. He isn’t . “Let’s go back and talk to him,” I tell Sam, and together we walk back up to the cabin.
That night the community votes on whether we can stay; it only takes ten minutes, but it feels like the longest ten minutes of my life. If we have to move on, I don’t know how we will, or where we’ll go. I’m worried it might hasten Daniel’s death, a prospect I can hardly bear to think about.
Fortunately, that’s not how it turns out. Vicky emerges from the main cabin, smiling.
“Come inside and get warm,” she tells us. “It was unanimous.”
The relief is palpable and sweet. I go back to tell Daniel, and he girds himself to join us by the fire in the main cabin. Vicky makes hot chocolate, an unimaginable treat, weak and watery as it is. This is a beginning of something, yet with a terrible ending wrapped inside it, but I’m still choosing.
And yet .
As we sip our hot chocolate, Vicky takes us through our days. We won’t be assigned jobs here the same way we were back at the NBSRC, but we will all have to chip in and if we aren’t pulling our weight someone will, she tells us with good humor, certainly let us know about it.
“So far, we’ve kept it casual,” Vicky explains. “Based on goodwill. We don’t want to turn into some work camp where you have to carry out orders. That’s not the point of life, even this life, such as it is.”
Daniel and I exchange amused glances; it’s almost as if Vicky overheard me complaining, back at the NBSRC. My sense of relief deepens; this was definitely the right choice, and I think we all know it.
Over the next few days and weeks, we fall into a rhythm of work—making meals, cleaning up, trapping and ice fishing, weeding the boxes in the greenhouses, harvesting the winter parsnips, mending both tools and clothes. Sheryl teaches me how to sew and I darn sheets for an entire afternoon, sitting by the fire, feeling like Ma Ingalls. Sam and Kyle become obsessed with fishing, and Ruby spends every moment she can in the greenhouses with Rose, who is our resident green thumb. Phoebe follows Mattie like her little shadow, and Mattie takes to the kitchen, learning tips and tricks from both Sheryl and Patti about how to make a couple of potatoes and a single swede go a long way.
Nicole and Ben find their place too, albeit a little more slowly. Ben has to drop his too-cool-for-this attitude, but soon enough he’s fishing with Sam and Kyle, and even gutting and cleaning the walleyes he’s caught. Nicole, unsurprisingly perhaps since she was an interior designer, knows how to sew and helps me with the darning.
Life both slows down and speeds up; the days pass in a blur of productive activity without anything feeling frantic or rushed, and yet they pass, and, as they do, I feel Daniel begin to ebb away.
I know better than to pretend it’s not happening. Time is too short and too precious for such pointless deception but oh, how it hurts, not to pretend. To be forced to acknowledge the reality that creeps closer every day.
At first, he went down to the lake to watch the boys fish, applauding when they caught a perch or a walleye or the occasional pike. It brought me such joy, to see him there, to hear the mingled laughter.
Then he stood on the deck, wrapped up well, and cheered them on from there, his hoarse voice carrying on the still winter air while the boys smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. Then it was from inside, in a chair by the big picture window, where he could still at least see them. And then it was by the fire, where he couldn’t, asking me how they were doing, his voice faint and hoarse.
And then it was back at the cabin, in bed, where he started to sleep all the time, stirring only to smile at me faintly and pick at the food I brought him. It was only a matter of weeks from the first to the last; by mid-December, I knew he wasn’t going to get out of bed again, not for any extended period of time, at least. How could something happen so fast? How could I let it?
And yet I was powerless, we all were, and that was part of the pain.
Adam didn’t have much to give to ease Daniel’s obvious suffering, but he’d kept some codeine from his practice and he offered it to Daniel, who, in typical fashion, refused it.
“Save it for someone who really needs it,” he told the doctor, who shook his head, smiling sorrowfully.
“Don’t you think you do?”
“Not for long,” Daniel quipped, his grin turning into a grimace .
“How bad is it?” I ask him one night while I sit with him. Everyone else is up at the main cabin, where they tend to congregate in the evenings. “Really?”
“I can handle it, Alex.”
“You don’t need to be strong for me,” I tell him. “Not anymore.”
He lets out a tired laugh as he leans his head back against the pillow. “You were always the strong one in our marriage.”
“No.” My eyes fill with tears and resolutely I blink them back. “You were. I just acted like…like a bitch.” My voice wobbles with recrimination.
He laughs again and reaches for my hand, pressing it against his cheek. “No, you didn’t. You’re strong, Alex. Stronger than you realize. You always have been.” He pauses, still holding my hand against his cheek. “Promise me you won’t forget that.”
What can I do but promise? “I won’t,” I say, but Daniel must sense my hesitation because he continues more fiercely,
“I mean it. You’re a doer, Alex, a leader. You’ve never thought you are, but I’ve seen it, time and time again. You rise to the challenge. You get things done. After I’m gone…” He holds my unhappy gaze. “You know we need to talk about this. After I’m gone, I don’t think you should stay here, hiding away. This is a good place, a safe one, but it’s not the end for you.” He smiles faintly as he adds, “Never mind Michael Duart, you can be part of the rebuilding of the world. You have it in you. I know you do, and I want you to be part of whatever’s next…for my sake. For our children’s.”
“Daniel…” I shake my head helplessly, because how can I promise such a thing? Daniel is full of fine words, but do I believe them? Can I?
“Do you promise?” he demands, and, unable to speak, I nod again, because I know I’d promise him anything now, and maybe he’s right. Maybe I do have it in me, even if I feel so far from that in this moment.
“I promise,” I whisper. Then I continue, feeling like I have to say it because my chances to are slipping away with every passing day. “The whole thing with the house back in Connecticut, from before…” I begin stiltedly. “Your job…” It feels so long ago, and it’s basically become irrelevant to our lives now, and yet…it’s still there. It’s always been there, between us in one way or another, because I’ve made it so. “I shouldn’t have been so angry,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Daniel shakes his head, still holding my hand. “Alex…I basically lied to you for six months. I would have been angry if you’d done that to me. I would have been furious.”
And yet I don’t think he would have been. He would have been sad, and maybe disappointed, and he would have tried to understand why I’d done what I did…an understanding I never even tried to afford him. “Why did you lie?” I ask, without an iota of the bitterness and resentment I carried self-righteously for so long. “It’s so unlike you. You’re the most honest person I know.”
Daniel is quiet for a moment, considering. “It started out not so much as a lie as a prevarication,” he explains finally. “I was going to tell you when I had another job. I didn’t think it would take that long. I’d tide us over by using our savings and moving assets around…I kept telling myself it would work out, and then I’d be able to explain everything, not even eventually, but soon. Really soon. And I told myself it was because I didn’t want you to worry, but really it was because I didn’t want you to look at me like I’d failed, which, of course, I had.”
He speaks matter-of-factly but with deep sorrow, and it tears at me. “Daniel?—”
“But I should have trusted you with that,” he continues, cutting me off with determination. “What’s a marriage if we can’t share our failures as well as our successes? If we can’t bear each other’s burdens all along the way? I know,” he adds, his voice choking a little now, “that it was the lying that was the hardest part for you. Not the loss of money, or even of the house, hard as all that was. And I’m sorry for that, because choosing to lie, to live in that lie, was the worst failure of all.”
I shake my head, cupping his gaunt cheek with my hand. “We don’t need to be sorry anymore,” I whisper. “For anything.” He smiles at me in response, his eyes filling with tears, and for a moment neither of us speaks.
A thousand memories are tumbling through my mind in a kaleidoscope of poignant fragments—our wedding day, when he choked up during the ceremony. Getting the keys to our first apartment in New York and eating pizza on the floor because we had no furniture. My labor with Sam, when Daniel kept telling me to breathe until I screamed at him, and then he didn’t speak for an hour. When Mattie had pneumonia, and he sat up with her all night. My dad’s funeral, when we held each other and cried. Laughing so hard over a joke nobody else would understand, until my stomach ached and tears streamed down my face.
Tears are streaming down my face now, as well as Daniel’s, as we simply sit there and bask in each other’s presence, as twenty-two years of marriage slip by in the blink of an eye.