Taking Paper to Marie
On Saturday morning, Vivian outdid herself at breakfast: french toast, home fries, thick-cut bacon, and a heaping bowl of fresh fruit with cream—just like breakfasts at the lake she had cooked with Marie.
The house would be filled with the smell of sizzling country ham and the table piled high with fresh biscuits, steaming scrambled eggs, and even (poured by Vivian when Harry looked the other way) a mug of “coffee,” for Tess.
It was mostly warm milk, but Vivian knew it would give Tess that delicious sense of being grown-up.
“That was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks,” said Tess. “I feel almost human this morning. I thought I might go see Marie.”
“Why would you do that?” asked Vivian.
“Why wouldn’t I? She’s my mother.”
“You haven’t used that reason to see her for…how long has it been?”
“Four years.”
“So, why now?”
“My therapist thinks it would be a good idea. She says we have unresolved issues.”
“Hard to argue that point. But don’t you want to get settled? Give it a week or two and then go see her?”
Vivian had no idea if anyone would be watching Marie’s house and if they were whether they would know who Tess was, but with October 14 only four days away, she thought it best to take no chances.
If she could convince Tess to just lie low until after the fourteenth, there would be plenty of time later to attempt reconciliation with Marie.
“I feel good this morning,” said Tess. “For once I feel like she can’t hurt me, like I’m emotionally armed to see her. Who knows what I’ll feel like two weeks from now?”
“Probably even better,” said Vivian.
“Or maybe a lot worse.”
“There’s another reason you might not want to go over there,” said Vivian. “Marie met someone.”
“You mean another man?”
“Yes.”
“How did you find out? Do you see her? Do you talk to her?”
“She’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t want to talk to me, and I respect that. But this is a small town and word gets around.”
“All the more reason to go visit her. I can meet my new stepdaddy.”
“I don’t know if it’s that serious yet.”
“One way to find out.”
“Think about this, Tess. Take a minute and go through in your mind what it might do to you—not just to see Marie for the first time in years, but to see her happy with another man.”
“It might be good for me to see her happy,” said Tess. “I haven’t seen that since the fire.”
“I’m just afraid she’ll disappoint you like she always does.”
“Maybe I need to prove to myself that she has no power over me anymore,” said Tess. “Can I borrow the minivan?”
Tess drove out to the Costco on the edge of town to pick up a peace offering of paper products.
Marie Maxwell refused to become a member of anything.
“Membership is a dangerous thing,” she once said, without explanation.
But Tess knew of her mother’s propensity for keeping an endless supply of certain essentials squirreled away, so she filled the back of the van with bulk packages of toilet paper and paper towels and tissues.
She pulled up in front of her mother’s house just before noon to find Marie standing on the front steps in a housedress, her hair in curlers. She looked like some 1950s version of a suburban housewife.
“Tesla Maxwell, this is a surprise. I almost didn’t recognize you all grown-up.”
“Hello, Marie.”
“I won’t explode if you call me Mom.”
“When did I ever call you Mom?”
“Never.”
“I made a Costco run. I thought you might want some supplies.”
“A peace offering.”
Tess felt an instant pang of annoyance that Marie had used the same words she had thought as she piled items into her cart. “I didn’t know we were at war.”
“What did you think?”
“Never mind,” said Tess, and then after a pause and because she couldn’t resist, “Aunt Vivian says hello.”
“I thought you were in college.”
“I’m taking a break.”
“And of course you run straight to Vivian.”
“She takes care of me, Marie.”
“That woman! If it hadn’t been for her your father wouldn’t…”
“Wouldn’t what? I’ve heard you say that sentence a thousand times, but you never finish it. Wouldn’t have shut you out from his work? Wouldn’t have spent so much time at the office? Wouldn’t have been happy?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
Her mother’s solution to everything.
“I’ll put these away,” said Tess, nodding at the minivan.
“Thank you,” said Marie tersely.
Tess lay awake many nights wondering about that unfinished sentence that Marie had repeated nearly every time Tess had come to stay with her after Harry’s death.
“If it hadn’t been for Vivian, Harry wouldn’t…
” She had made a game out of speculating endings.
Her favorites included, wouldn’t have understood half of what he did about physics, wouldn’t have made the secret scientific breakthrough that no one will ever know about, and wouldn’t have been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
So far as Tess knew, Harry Maxwell hadn’t been nominated for a Nobel, but she liked that ending nonetheless.
Once she even finished the sentence with wouldn’t have had a daughter.
It would explain a lot, but it seemed unlikely. In another universe, maybe.
Despite her creative clauses, Tess suspected the more mundane.
If it hadn’t been for that woman, your father would have been faithful to me.
Even as a child, watching her father and Vivian sitting in front of the fire at the lake house, leaning in toward each other as they spoke, Tess wondered if there was a more than collegial friendship between the two.
She knew that their relationship was based on a level of scientific understanding that, by its very nature, excluded her mother.
What she didn’t know was how far beyond science those discussions by the fire extended.
What happened after her father had told Tess her story and tucked her in, after Tess had fallen asleep and Marie had gone to bed alone and Harry Maxwell returned to Vivian?
When Tess finished arranging the tissues and paper towels and toilet paper on two dedicated shelves in the curiously barren pantry, she found her mother outside on the front step, smoking a cigarette.
“I thought you quit,” said Tess, without trying to hide the scorn in her voice.
“I did,” said Marie, dropping the cigarette on the brick steps and grinding it out under her shoe. “Lots of times.” She blew a long plume of smoke toward the street and turned to Tess. “Would you like some lemonade?”
“That would be very nice, Marie, thank you,” said Tess, trying on kindness to see how it might feel.
Tess thought Marie might have invited her into the den to sit, but instead her mother poured out two glasses of lemonade and stood at the kitchen counter drinking one of them.
Tess picked up the other and took a long drink.
It tasted of happier days—of days when her father had just come in from mowing the lawn and Vivian was putting plates on the table and Marie was cooking fried chicken.
“Aunt Vivian says you have a boyfriend.”
“How would she know?”
“Small town.”
“It’s true. I do have a companion. His name is David, and he installs and services heating and air-conditioning equipment.”
“Wow, you went the other way.”
“He’s a good man, Tess. He makes me happy. And he doesn’t start fires.”
“Harry didn’t start the fire.”
“There is so much you don’t know, Tess.”
“I’m getting sick and tired of people saying that. If there are things I don’t know, then tell me.”
“Now is not the time.”
“It’s never the time. And I don’t understand why you always have to blame someone for what happened. You blame Harry, you blame Vivian, you blame me.”
“You want me to tell you something?” said Marie, setting her glass on the counter. “Okay, I’ll tell you something. David and I got married.”
Tess almost couldn’t swallow her mouthful of lemonade.
She felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach by this simple declarative sentence.
She suddenly realized why Marie hadn’t led her into the den—what she hadn’t seen when she glanced into that room on the way down the hall laden with paper towels.
Harry’s picture no longer stood by the television.
“Marie, you didn’t…” began Tess, but she couldn’t complete the thought.
Instead, she ran down the hall and threw open the door to Harry’s study.
The Museum of Harry Maxwell—books untouched on the shelf, a neat stack of papers on the desk where he had left them—had been replaced with a pair of exercise bikes and a yoga mat.
The built-in bookshelves held nothing but an assortment of DVDs and a large television.
Only Harry’s desk, cleaned of its papers and shoved into a corner, gave any hint of the room’s former occupant.
“You erased him,” said Tess, turning to Marie, who had followed her. “You erased Harry. Just like you erased me.”
“Harry erased himself,” said Marie, not rising to Tess’s tone of anger. “Your father is dead, Tess. Dead. When will you get that through your thick skull?”
“But that doesn’t mean his books and his picture and his desk should be…”
“Those are things, Tess. Things are not life. I don’t need Harry’s things anymore.”
“Still, you had no right to—”
“I had every right. Harry gave me the right when he…” A pause hung in the air and then Marie’s tone softened. “David and I are married, Tess. He’s a good man. You’d like him.”
“But couldn’t you have waited?”
“Waited for what, Tess? I’m done with waiting. Done with living in mourning. Believe me, I’ve been through all the stages of grief. The anger lasted a particularly long time. But I’m through grieving.”
“But Harry—”
“Harry would want me to move on with my life,” said Marie.
“Harry would want you to take care of your daughter,” said Tess with bitterness.
“The past is past, Tess. And it’s much more complicated than you will ever know.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“I still have a life to live, Tess, and David is kind and he loves me and I want to spend the years that I have left someplace warm and comfortable where I can forget all about—”
“About me?”
“About the things in my life that have made me unhappy for so long.”
“I think that answers my question.”
“We all deserve happiness, Tess. You deserve it, too. Vivian deserves it. But so do I. I should have told you about David before, and I’m sorry for that. But we’re married and we’re moving to Florida, so I can have a fresh start.”
“You’re moving?”
“We bought a condo close to the beach. I’m flying down on Thursday.”
They stood looking toward each other but not making eye contact for a long minute.
“And Harry? All his books and…”—she motioned around the room—“and everything.”
“I won’t take the past with me, Tess. The books are still here, boxed in the garage. Everything else…”
“Everything else is gone,” said Tess flatly.
“Not everything,” said Marie. “Come with me.” She led Tess back into the kitchen and opened what Tess had always called the stuff drawer, though Harry and Marie called it the junk drawer.
She pulled out a framed photograph and handed it to her.
It showed Harry and Tess standing on the dock at the lake in their bathing suits.
The sun sparkled off the water behind them and they both smiled broadly.
Tess had no memory of the red-and-white-striped bathing suit she wore, but she did remember Marie snapping that picture.
“I was eight,” said Tess.
“You should have this,” said Marie.
Tess didn’t understand how she could be so furious with her mother yet still feel tenderness toward her.
“Thank you,” she said.
They sipped lemonade in silence for a few minutes and then Tess spoke again. “I’m happy for you, Marie. I’m happy that you found David and that you can…can leave it all behind. I wish I could.”
“Do you want the books?”
“Harry’s books?”
“Harry wanted you to have them. They’re yours if you want them.”
Tess felt tears welling up at the thought that she might still have this part of Harry in her life—the books he had loved so much. “Yes,” she said, trying not to cry. “I would like that.”
“We have a couple of boys with a truck helping us clean out. I’ll have them bring them over to Vivian’s on Monday. Call it my wedding present to you.”
“And what should I get you?”
“I don’t need anything from you, Tess.”
Crushed by her mother’s words, Tess left the house. When she reached the minivan, she turned to see Marie standing in the yard. “Goodbye, Tess,” she called, as if they had just enjoyed a typical mother-daughter visit.
“Goodbye, Marie,” Tess managed. She pulled out of the driveway and made it halfway down the block before breaking into sobs.