Heartwood (31 page)

As the visibly rattled anchorman was delivering this news, Laura was on her way to LaGuardia Airport to pick up Robby, who had boarded Midwestern Airlines flight 5533 an hour and a half earlier in Cincinnati.

–—

When Laura tried to look back on that evening in April, one thought was clear in all the horror:
Thank God, I didn’t bring Katie to the airport with me to get her father
. The rest was a nightmarish blur.

She’d left the house to drive to LaGuardia with time to spare. She’d been trying to gather her thoughts because she knew she’d be asking Robby for a divorce, so she hadn’t turned on the car radio. She hadn’t heard the news coming out of Cincinnati.

At the airport she checked the Arrivals board and saw that Robby’s flight was delayed. That was what it said, at first. Then the listing was withdrawn and there was an announcement on the loudspeaker asking that anyone who was meeting a passenger traveling on flight 5533 from Cincinnati to report to the Midwestern Airlines ticket counter.

After that, the blur began. The soothing tones of airline officials melded with the shrill voices of loved ones demanding information. The loved ones were then rounded up and ushered into a room that was away from the rest of the airport, and—Laura realized later—away from the airport televisions, which were now reporting the accident. There were fluorescent lights
and folding chairs in the room, as well as a phalanx of clergymen, policemen, a doctor, a nurse and other professionals whose job it was to help in a crisis. The white-faced families and friends stared with big panicked eyes at a man from Midwestern Airline’s customer relations department as he stood in front of them and delivered the message they had already figured out but had not yet comprehended; that Flight 5533 had crashed. Cries and screams filled the room, but no one left it. The customer relations man didn’t yet have any information about fatalities. So they all waited, each one hoping that somehow, some way, there had been one survivor after all. Or that one passenger on the list hadn’t made it to the airport on time and had missed the flight, or that they themselves had gotten the time and date and flight number wrong. They rocked back and forth in grief, they cursed and wept and prayed, but no one left—at least not right away. Because to leave was to accept the horror; to admit that there was no mistake, no miracle and no hope.

Laura would never remember when she finally accepted it. She didn’t remember calling Phil and telling him she couldn’t drive home, but she must have, because he came for her. She didn’t remember the trip back to her house, walking in the door, or telling Katie what had happened. She knew she’d done all of these things but she didn’t remember them. She never knew how Phil got her car back from the airport. Jimmy and Janet came to spend the night, and Iris was there in the morning. But she didn’t remember calling any of them. All she knew was, there were no survivors, and Robby was gone. And she thanked God that she hadn’t taken Katie to the airport.

A
fter Robby’s death, it was as if everything went black. The blackness was deep and it crashed over Laura in waves. She felt as if she might drown in it.

I wanted to be rid of Robby. I wanted to be free
. And even though she knew she hadn’t wanted this or willed it, another wave would crash over her.

Mother McAllister wanted to bury Robby in Ohio, and the minister of the church he’d been attending had called Laura to ask if she would give her consent.
I didn’t even know Robby had started going to church again
, she thought.
I didn’t know
. But she had agreed to the Ohio burial. That was where Robby had been happy. And besides, she realized with a shock, in the whole time he’d lived in New York, he hadn’t made one real friend. Nor had he felt close to anyone in her family but her mother.

All those years with no one but Katie and Mom and me. Robby, who loved a crowd and a party. He must have been so lonely. Why
didn’t I see that? But I know why. I was where I wanted to be and I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to know if he was lonely
.

She flew to Ohio with her mother and Katie, who cried together—but she stayed dry-eyed.

I can’t seem to cry. But that’s as it should be. I wanted to be free of him. It would be hypocritical if I cried
.

Her mother-in-law had already started making the funeral arrangements when Laura arrived.

“How can she do that?” Christina demanded. Laura’s brothers and their wives had driven out to Ohio for the funeral. “You should be the one planning this. You were his wife!”

But she wasn’t planning to walk away from him and I was
.

So the funeral was held in the church Robby had recently rejoined. Hymns Laura didn’t know were sung. Words she didn’t recognize were said for the soul of the man who had slept at her side for more than a decade. And after the ceremony was over, strangers who were friends of her mother-in-law provided salads made of mayonnaise and Jell-O and casseroles made with cream of chicken soup. And Laura sat in a chair in her mother-in-law’s house like a guest.

“How could she treat you like that?” Janet fumed when they were driving back to the motel.

Because I didn’t love him. I cared about him, but I didn’t love him. And she did
.

–—

After she was back home in New York, she waited for the reality of what had happened to sink in. Somehow she had to comprehend that Robby’s life was over, but she didn’t seem to be able to do it. She remembered how he had loved Paris and
couldn’t make herself understand that he would not go back to see it again someday. He would not see Katie graduate and he would not walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. He’d never live in that new house he’d loved so much. And he would never know that Laura had decided that she wouldn’t be living in it with him. The boy who had married her under the pear trees in her grandmother’s garden when the phlox filled the air with the scents of cinnamon and vanilla would not know that she was going to desert him.

For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health
, she had promised him, but then she had wanted to be free. And now she was. The black wave crashed over her.

–—

“I can’t, Nick. I can’t see you anymore.” She was in the doorway of his loft. She wouldn’t go inside. She would not stay.

“You’re upset, give yourself some time.”

“No!” Laura was shouting. But she wasn’t crying. She seemed to have lost the ability to do that. “Don’t you see? It would be like dancing on his grave.”

“It feels that way now, but in a few months—”

“You want me to benefit from his death? Is that what I’m supposed to do?”

“Of course not!”

“He wasn’t even forty years old!”

“I know. But for God’s sake, the accident wasn’t your fault.”

“I cheated on him. I was going to tell him I wanted a divorce.”

“It wasn’t a good marriage. Stop punishing yourself.”

“Guess what, Nick? Sometimes punishment is what we deserve.”

“I don’t think I deserve it. So stop punishing me.”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll get the hell out of here.”

And she left him.

He called her over and over, until she changed her phone number. He must have accepted the fact that she was serious, because he didn’t try to find out what her new one was.

One morning when the dry brown leaves were swirling in the wind outside her kitchen window, she called her mother on the phone.

“You’ll be happy to hear that I ended it with Nick,” she said, and hung up. And then, at last, she cried for a long time.

–—

There was plenty to do, thank God. Katie was the first concern. She was grieving for her father, and while sometimes she needed to talk, most of the time she just seemed to need Laura’s company. They went to movies and out for pizza. They watched television together and walked around their property with old Molly. And Laura went back to work. She started writing her second book with Lillian, who, thankfully, didn’t ask any questions when Laura said they would have to find a different photographer. Laura signed the contract to do the homemaking segment of the morning television show. Everyone was very kind to her—she was a widow after all. Accepting their sympathy made her feel like a fraud. She felt she should confess that she had not been the loving wife they thought her to be. She should say that she was sorry for Robby because he had died much too soon, but she should admit that she had wanted to be free. And there was another man she was mourning. That was the real loss.

There was only one person who knew about that loss—her
mother. And Iris would never understand it. So Laura read the warm little notes that came in the mail and she listened to the offers of sympathy and help that were left on her answering machine, and if she wished she could talk to Iris, she pushed the wish away. She couldn’t afford to think about it. And she couldn’t afford to think about green-blue eyes, or the man who had laughed at her jokes. And smiled at her … for a while.

T
here is a saying that time heals everything. It doesn’t. After a loss, the passing of time allows you to absorb the pain, and make it a part of yourself. But after that, you can never expect to go back to being what you were before. You’ll find new ways to laugh, and even to enjoy life, but you’ll never do it the same way you did when you were a wife, and not a widow. As a widow you are a new person. All of this, Iris had learned; she had been a widow for a little more than a year.

It had been a year full of loss; her son-in-law’s death in a random accident had been shocking and tragic. Iris had grieved and still did grieve for a life ended much too quickly. But it was the loss of Theo that had changed her into a new person, that was what had made her a widow instead of a wife. And a year after the fact she was still waiting to find out who the new Iris Stern was going to be. And how she was going to live.

Which was not to say that she was sitting in her home with
the blinds drawn. She was functioning quite well. She prepared three meals a day for herself, and since she’d learned about cholesterol and salt content during the last three years of Theo’s life, she was actually eating more healthily than she had when she was younger. She slept the requisite eight hours a night, and taught her classes at the college with the same focus and dedication she’d shown before she became Iris Stern the widow. She had even gone to the opera twice with Janet and Jimmy. Once they’d seen a modern thing she couldn’t remember ten minutes after they left Lincoln Center, and the other time it had been
La Bohème
, which she had liked as a girl. Janet, she knew, had been worried about that choice, fearing that a tragic love story might be too painful for the recently bereaved Iris.

Don’t be ridiculous!
Iris had wanted to say to her daughter-in-law and, indeed, to all of her sons, who were still tiptoeing around her.
If I try to avoid everything that reminds me of Theo, I’ll have to kill myself
. And after the first moments of searing pain following his death, she’d known that she would never even think about doing that. It would be an insult to Theo, and a betrayal of the love they had shared. No, she was more than willing to go on living; she just needed to know how to do it. And who she was now. Those were the big questions. She wasn’t sure where the answers would come from, she just knew that she couldn’t get on with her life until she had them.