Hope Street (7 page)

Ellie chuckled. “More than a few times during the planning of our wedding, I was ready to buy us a ladder and elope. My mother insisted the field house was going to smell like gym socks. I told her it was a beautiful facility, and it had a full kitchen for the caterers to work out of. I told her lots of parties were held there. She was sure the place would be full of hockey sticks and football helmets.”

A photo appeared on the screen of Ellie in a bridal gown surrounded by her brides maids—Anna as her maid of honor and two cousins as additional attendants. Ellie hooted with scornful laughter. “Oh, Lord, the bridesmaids’ dresses. The battle my mother and I had over those dresses nearly started World War III.”

“Why?” Curt paused the DVD to study the dresses. “What’s wrong with those dresses?”

“I decided my attendants should wear tea-length dresses instead of full-length, so they could get more than one wearing out of them.”

The bridesmaids’ dresses seemed nice enough to Curt, not that he was any expert. He wasn’t even sure what
tea-length
meant. “Your mother didn’t approve of tea-length?”

“She wanted them to wear full-length dresses in this hideous green color that made everyone look jaundiced. She thought navy blue was too wintry.”

“Those dresses are sleeveless. That’s not wintry. Who wears sleeveless dresses in the winter?”

“It didn’t matter to her. She told me I was a thankless girl with no taste.”

“Yeah, that’s you,” Curt teased her gently.

“And then there was…” She dissolved into laughter.

“What?”

“The silk purse.”

“What silk purse?”

“I never told you about the silk purse?” More laughter, deep and throaty and sexy. Curt might have fallen in love with her after their first, fantastic sexual encounter, but her laughter had clinched the deal. When Ellie really laughed—something she did far too rarely these days—her entire body seemed to glow.

It took her a moment to collect herself. This time, at least, the tears glistening in her eyes weren’t from sorrow. While she sniffled and chuckled and dabbed her eyes, he refilled his glass with port. Swallowing the last shimmers of her laughter, she extended her glass and he topped it off, as well.

“My mother wanted me to wear a silk purse around my wrist,” she said. “It was a long, narrow thing—they actually sell them in bridal shops, although she was willing to sew one for me.”

“What would you need a purse for? It’s not like you’d be driving off in your wedding gown. I had our keys and a wallet.”

“The purse is for collecting money gifts. Instead of having you stuff all those checks and envelopes into your pockets, I would have them hanging off my wrist.”

“For the whole wedding?” Curt didn’t get it. Why would someone want to spend an entire evening wearing a sack stuffed with money dangling from her arm?

“My mother insisted this was the correct thing to do. I told her I’d rather cut off my hand than wear one of those things.”

Curt nodded. “That sounds like something you’d say.”

“We had one of the biggest fights of our life over that stupid purse. Bad enough my bridesmaids weren’t wearing full-length gowns. Bad enough I wasn’t going to have a flower girl or a ring bearer. Bad enough we were having the party at the field house instead of the Ritz-Carlton. Bad enough I wanted to wear my hair straight, the way I always wore it, instead of spending the morning of the wedding at a salon getting it sprayed and gelled into some weird configuration—and that I polished my own nails the night before the wedding instead of getting a professional manicure. But my passing on the silk purse? My mother sewed one against my wishes and brought it with her to the field house, insisting that I wear it. There we were, in the powder room, having this violent argument through clenched teeth while all the guests were wandering in and out to pee and touch up their lipstick.”

“You should have worn the purse,” he said.

Ellie eyed him incredulously. “Are you kidding?”

“In fact, I think both girls should wear silk purses when they get married, too. I think we should insist on it.” He tried to keep his expression deadpan, but evidently, he couldn’t suppress a small grin.

Ellie poked him in the arm and snorted. “I’ll make you wear a silk bag over your head,” she grumbled, and they both laughed.

In the midst of his laughter, a wave of sorrow knocked him sideways. When was the last time he and Ellie had laughed together? When had they last teased each other, joked with each other, pulled each other’s legs? God, he missed this. He wanted it back.

Well, he couldn’t have it back. During the worst period of their lives, Ellie had shut herself off from him, and he’d dealt with her rejection in a bad way, and too much damage had been done. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put their shattered marriage back together again.

Next to him, Ellie grew quiet, as well. He wondered if she was feeling what he was feeling—that profound loss, that dizzying sorrow. Probably not. He still loved her, despite his anger and resentment, but she no longer loved him. Not after what he’d done. She couldn’t forgive him, wouldn’t forgive him. He knew that.

He pressed the remote button and the DVD started up again.

O
H
, G
OD, THE WEDDING
. Before now, whenever Ellie had thought about that marvelous day, she’d remembered only the joy of exchanging vows with Curt, entering into a bond that she’d believed could withstand anything life threw at it. She’d remembered not the silly fights with her mother over the silk purse, or the tension she and Curt were sure would flare between Anna, her maid of honor, and Steve, Curt’s best man. Steve and Anna’s breakup had not been amicable, and for their entire senior year at Brown, Anna and Ellie had never mentioned Steve’s name. Yet at Curt and Ellie’s wedding two years later, they’d greeted each other with surprising affection at the rehearsal dinner. They’d hugged, they’d sat together, they’d whispered intimately. Steve had offered Anna a lift back to the hotel where many of the wedding guests were staying. Before kissing Ellie good-night and sending her home with her parents for her final night as a single woman, Curt had whispered, “I wonder if Steve’s going to be luckier than I am tonight.”

Mostly, what Ellie remembered about her wedding was that
it had given her Curt, forever. It had made her his wife and him her husband. For most of their marriage, she couldn’t have imagined wanting anything more than to have Curt beside her for the rest of her life, through childbirth and mortgage payments, school concerts and career challenges. Her marriage had made that wish a reality. Together they had taken up permanent residence on Hope Street.

Not so permanent, as it turned out.

“‘Ellie was a wonderful nurse,’” a male voice intoned on the DVD. The screen showed a series of scenes from Children’s Hospital. “‘She was not just top-notch when it came to medical care, but she was also a natural with the children. She could get them to smile and relax even when they were undergoing grueling treatments. They adored her.’ Dr. Joshua Steiner, pediatric cardiologist.”

“Wow.” She let the video pull her away from thoughts of her wedding. “The girls dug up Josh Steiner for a quote? Last I heard, he was spending his retirement sailing around Nantucket.”

“I guess he has to make landfall every now and then. They must have caught up with him when he was blown ashore.”

“Either that, or they invented the quote,” she said. She’d been incredibly lucky to have a doctor like Josh Steiner as her first boss. The hardest part about leaving Children’s Hospital had been ending her professional association with him. She’d stayed in touch with him over the years, though. He’d even returned to the mainland for Peter’s funeral. That had been the last time she’d seen him.

A group photo of Ellie and two other ward nurses appeared on the screen, accompanied by an unfamiliar woman’s voice: “‘I loved Ellie, except she was always getting on my case to quit smoking.’ Nurse Whitney Rodino.”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Curt said lightly. He must have sensed that her mood had turned melancholy, and he was trying to recapture their earlier humor.

“I gave her a pacifier from the stockroom once,” she said, trying to match his easy tone. “I told her she should suck on that instead of a cigarette.”

“I bet she wasn’t as sorry as Josh Steiner was to see you go.”

“I had only her best interests at heart.”

“Nag,” Curt grunted. Ellie allowed herself a smile.

She sipped her port and watched as the DVD displayed pictures of her swelling with her first pregnancy. There was a shot of a moving van in front of the house they’d bought just before Katie was born—the house on Birch Lane where they still lived—and a shot of Ellie standing on the front porch of the house, cradling a newborn Katie in her arms. Behind them hung the small shingle Curt had carved and hung above the front door: “Hope Street.” Seeing it adorning the entry to their home, so optimistic, so
wrong,
brought the sting of tears to Ellie’s eyes, but she blinked them away.

“Katie was the perfect child,” a narrator—clearly Katie—recited. “She was a genius, beautiful and always well-behaved. At the age of two months she could speak in complete sentences. At five months she was completely potty trained—although she’d been changing her own diapers right from the day she and her mother left the hospital. By the time she reached her first birthday, she could explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and sing Wagner operas by heart. Ellie said, ‘Raising children is so easy. Let’s have another child.’ It is thanks to Katie’s magnificence that Jessie was born.”

“Jessie,” the narration continued, in Jessie’s voice now, “proved that there is such a thing as
more
perfect. Jessie did everything Katie did, only she did it backwards and in high heels.”

Ellie grinned and glanced at Curt. He was chuckling. No matter how badly they’d botched things, she thought, they’d still somehow managed to produce two fantastic daughters.

The movie offered a series of photos of Curt and Ellie and their two little girls—playing on a Slippy Slide in the backyard, posing on the deck of Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor, surrounded by toys and tatters of gift wrap in the living room on Christmas morning with a festively decorated tree looming behind them. Then Ellie began to look plump in the photos.

Not plump, pregnant.

“With two such utterly perfect daughters, Ellie decided there was room for another child in the family,” Katie narrated.

“This time it was a son,” Jessie continued. “Peter.” A photo took up the screen, Ellie in the hospital, smiling blissfully and holding her swaddled newborn son high, her cheek resting against his.

Curt reached for her hand and folded his fingers around it, warm and strong. “You okay?” he asked.

She might have objected to his overprotectiveness, but she didn’t. In truth, she appreciated his sensitivity. “I’m okay,” she said quietly. “This is my life, the first fifty years. Peter is a part of it.” A major part. A crucial part. The rawest, most bittersweet part.

“We could take a break,” Curt offered.

“And do what?”

He searched her face. His hand was so warm on hers, his eyes as intense as they’d been the very first time they’d made love, when he’d gazed down at her in his lumpy bed in that ramshackle apartment on the east side of Providence, and she’d seen passion and wonder in their glittering depths.

Certainly he couldn’t be thinking about sex now. In her film
biography, Peter had just been born. His picture spread across the screen.

Yet why wouldn’t Curt be thinking of sex now? The day of his son’s funeral, he’d wanted sex. His son in a casket, his son lost forever, his son’s spirit hovering like a thundercloud above their heads—and Curt had wanted sex.

Two and a half years later, their marriage dead…was that what his eyes were telling her now? On the eve of their marriage’s funeral, was he getting horny?

“The restaurant might still be open,” he said. “We could go downstairs and have a snack.”

All right, she thought. He wasn’t thinking about sex. Which made her wonder why
she
was thinking about sex.

Probably because she was stretched out on a bed next to the only man she’d ever loved, and because she’d just spent an hour reliving her life—a life that had included an intensely beautiful, decades-long love affair with Curt.

She had no appetite—for food or sex or anything else. But she forced a smile and nodded. “A snack would be nice.”

A
FEW CUSTOMERS
lingered in the main dining room, but the Colonial-costumed hostess, who seemed a bit less fresh and perky than she had when Curt and Ellie had arrived at the inn a few hours ago, explained that no new arrivals could be seated there. However, she informed them, they could order food in the keeping room.

“What’s a keeping room?” Curt whispered to Ellie.

“A room with a fireplace off the kitchen,” she whispered back. She had no idea why such rooms were called keeping rooms, but thanks to her mother’s passion for all things “oldee,” she knew a little about Colonial New England architecture.

The inn’s keeping room wasn’t directly off the kitchen, but it had a brick fireplace with a fire burning in it, and cozy tables set around the room. The hostess seated them at a table close to the fireplace. Ellie inhaled the mellow perfume of burning pine and smiled.

Curt settled into the chair across the table from her. A dessert menu stood in a brass holder at the center of the table and he skimmed it before nudging it toward her. The desserts
looked tempting—Indian pudding, deep-dish apple pie, blueberry cobbler—but she wasn’t in the mood for anything sweet. She’d had trouble choking down a taste of the lavish chocolate birthday cake that had been served at her party.

A waiter in knee britches and a blousy shirt approached the table. “Let’s split a cheese-and-fruit platter,” she suggested to Curt.

He quirked an eyebrow, then nodded at the waiter, who jotted the order onto his pad. “I’ll have an espresso, too. Ellie?”

“A cup of decaf,” she requested. As if caffeine would make any difference. She didn’t expect to sleep much tonight.

The waiter took the menu and disappeared. “You didn’t want the apple pie?” Curt asked.

She shook her head.

“You’ve lost weight.”

She pressed her lips together and leaned back in her seat, surprised that he mentioned her weight now. She’d lost weight in Africa, but he’d never said a word. She’d just assumed that by the time she’d returned home, he no longer noticed her.

“That wasn’t an insult,” he added, reading something in her expression. She wasn’t sure what. Did she look offended?

She shrugged. “I ate differently in Ghana.”

“They didn’t have Goldfish there, I take it.”

Oh, God. Goldfish—those addictive little fish-shaped crackers, laden with salt and cheddar flavoring. They’d been Peter’s favorite snack. When he’d died, Ellie had started eating them. In some subconscious way, she’d felt closer to him while she munched Goldfish crackers by the fistful. She’d sneak into his bedroom, sit in the swivel chair at his desk, play one of his Ludacris or Eminem CDs and devour Goldfish, as if mimicking him would somehow raise his spirit, make him come alive again. Or she’d pick at her dinner, utterly uninterested in the slab of
meat and the ear of corn lying on her plate, and then an hour later she’d slake her hunger with half a bag of Goldfish.

She hadn’t been eating properly, and she hadn’t cared. If she hadn’t gone to Africa, she might still be moping around the house, living on Goldfish and vitamins and an occasional cup of tea.

Losing weight had not been her intention in Kumasi, but she’d had no access to Goldfish crackers there. She’d eaten the meals served at the compound—lots of fresh vegetables, pork and chicken, beans and rice and luscious fruits. Between meals, she’d been too busy to snack. There were always children to take care of, always hearts and lungs to listen to, broken fingers to splint, cuts to disinfect and bandage, diseases to treat. Always arms extended by tearful, wide-eyed children who feared needles but understood that the momentary sting of the injection would keep them healthy.

“Tell me about Africa,” Curt said.

She studied the man seated across the round table from her. Half his face glowed golden where the firelight struck it; the other half was lost in shadow. She didn’t need perfect light to see him, however. She knew every line, every crease, the faint scar above his left eyebrow from when he’d been popped with a bat during a long-ago Little League game, the silver hair that had recently begun to thread through his neatly trimmed sideburns. She knew the slightly crooked tooth that four years of orthodontia had failed to realign and the dimple that dented his right cheek. She knew his eyes, concentric rings of green and gray and amber outlined in black.

She could visualize all his features in the uneven light from the fireplace, but she couldn’t discern what lay behind them. What was he after? Did he really want to hear about her experience so verse as, or was he obliquely questioning her about something else?

“You’ve never asked me to talk about it,” she said warily.

“I’m asking now.” His tone was low and blunt, almost a challenge.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to share those six months with him. Africa was hers, not theirs.

Yet his gaze seemed demanding, almost accusing. What would he do if she refused to discuss her work at the clinic with him? Or if she discussed it and didn’t tell him what he really wanted to know? Would he divorce her? She swallowed a bitter laugh.

She was spared from figuring out what to say by the arrival of the waiter with the fruit-and-cheese platter and their drinks. His appearance gave her a moment to regroup, to decide just what parts of her experience in Kumasi, if any, Curt was entitled to hear about. She shifted her attention to the platter, heaped with grapes, wedges of Gouda and Brie, Cortland apples and pale, round crackers. The waiter left two saucers and fruit knives, their coffee and a sugar bowl and pitcher of cream. Ellie plucked a sprig of grapes and set them on her plate.

“Well,” she said wryly. “We didn’t have Goldfish crackers there.”

Something flickered in Curt’s eyes. Irritation, perhaps.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“What it was like. What you did while you were there. What the people were like. The people you worked with.”

She twisted a grape from its stem and popped it in to her mouth. The tart skin contrasted with the sweet, juicy pulp. She let the flavors play on her tongue and prayed for them to keep her calm.

As soon as he mentioned the people she worked with, she understood what he was asking. And damn it, she didn’t want to answer. Today was her fiftieth birthday, she was on the verge of dissolving her marriage and she just didn’t feel like opening up her soul and letting him stomp all over it.

“I sent you e-mails,” she reminded him, keeping her tone noncommittal. “I wrote you about the clinic and the patients and the weather. And the food.”

“Right.” The word crackled like static electricity, dry and stinging. He cut a small slab of cheese, laid it on a cracker and devoured it in two bites. Ellie knew he would rather have crushed the cracker to powder in his fist. Anger simmered in his eyes.

Good. Let him stew. He was the one who’d shattered their marriage. He was the one who’d broken his vows. He was the one who’d moved away from Hope Street. If he wanted to be resentful, let him resent himself.

She sipped her coffee, then munched on another grape and wondered whether she’d be able to return to their
très
romantic room with him once their snack was gone. Just minutes ago they’d been stretched out side by side on the bed. They’d held hands. They’d gazed at the photo of their infant son on the TV screen and shared the pain of his death. For a few poignant moments, Ellie could have convinced herself she still loved Curt and their marriage bond was too strong to be severed.

Now…Now it didn’t matter what she felt.

“You went to Africa wearing your wedding band,” Curt finally said. “You came home not wearing it.”

She turned to stare at the fire. Lively yellow flames licked the air, tiny tongues of aromatic heat. All these months, he hadn’t said a word about her missing ring. Now that they were actually planning to divorce, he had finally acknowledged her naked ring finger.

“Yes,” she said, turning back to him. “I had to wear latex gloves a lot of the time, and the rings weren’t comfortable. The edges of the diamonds on the eternity ring would tear the plastic. So I stopped wearing the rings.”

“And you didn’t start wearing them again when you came home.”

“What was the point? We were just as far apart when I got home as when I left. It seemed pretty clear nothing had changed.”

“Things changed,” he argued quietly. “You changed.”

True. She’d come home believing that even though she’d lost her own son, she had saved the lives of a few other children. She’d understood that she was worthy, that she was competent, that she was a healer, that she could sometimes, in some circumstances, make things better. She’d discovered that if she kept moving forward and stayed focused on helping others, she might not slip back into the black hole that had been her life from the moment Peter had died.

She’d come home understanding that healing herself wasn’t the same thing as healing her marriage. The first thought that had entered her mind when she spotted Curt and the girls waiting for her by the baggage claim at Logan Airport was,
When I needed him most, he was with another woman.
That hadn’t changed.

So she hadn’t put the wedding band back on.

She sighed. “I don’t want to talk about my rings.”

“Why not? We’re reliving your life, Ellie. For a long time, those rings were a part of your identity. Why can’t we talk about it?”

Because he had no right to ask. Because it was no longer his business.

Annoyed, she pushed away from the table and stood. If she opened her mouth, she’d say something awful, something spiteful, something to remind him of the role he’d played in destroying their marriage. So she kept her lips pressed together and stalked toward the door.

By the time she’d reached the hall, Curt had caught up to her. He clamped his hand on her shoulder, turned her around and
pressed her against the wall. She was vaguely aware of its butter-yellow shade, the brass sconce just inches from her ear—and then he leaned in and kissed her.

It was an angry kiss, hard and possessive and forcing; a hostile claim, almost an assault. Yet the instant his tongue touched hers he grew gentle, his hand easing from her shoulder and his breath escaping in a quiet moan. He cupped her cheeks with his palms and she felt the tremor in his fingers—and a matching tremor inside herself. His kiss was suddenly so sweet, so yearning she wanted to weep.

This was the man she’d loved. The man she’d wed. The man who, twenty-seven years ago, had promised her hope.

The warmth of his mouth on hers melted her. It had been so long since he’d kissed her, so long since she’d felt anything but enraged or numb or hateful. So long since she’d looked at Curt and seen the man she’d counted on to prop her up—but who had instead walked away and let her fall.

He wasn’t letting her fall now. In fact, he was literally holding her up. She was certain that if he let go of her, she would slide down the wall until she was nothing but a pool of seething desire on the faded rug beneath her feet.

But he didn’t let go—and neither did she. She lifted her hands to his chest and felt the fierce drumming of his heart. Her lips pressed his, moved with his. When he ran the tip of his tongue over her teeth, she sighed. Tooth enamel didn’t have nerve endings, did it? Yet she felt the stroke of his tongue in her throat, her chest, the cradle of her hips.

She wasn’t sure how long they stood in the hall beside the doorway to the keeping room, just kissing, kissing, clinging to each other and kissing. Eventually, Curt relented, easing his mouth from hers, tracing his fingertips down her cheeks until
they met at the edge of her chin. She opened her eyes before he did, and she watched as his gaze came into focus on her. In the bright hallway light she had no difficulty reading his emotions in his face: Sorrow. Lust. And, God help her, hope.

He bowed his head and brushed his mouth against her brow. “Let’s go upstairs,” he murmured.

Wait. They were getting a divorce. He’d betrayed her. Their love had died along with their son.

She shook her head, partly to clear it and partly to reject his invitation. No way was she ready to waltz back upstairs to their
très
romantic room to finish what he seemed to think they’d started. Just because Curt could ignite her with a kiss—he’d always been able to, damn him—didn’t mean she should let that blaze consume her.

Not trusting her voice, she turned and walked back into the keeping room, where their fruit-and-cheese platter awaited them. She sat, took a sip of her coffee—which had grown tepid—and waited, wondering if he would follow her or leave her alone.

Alone was something she ought to get used to, she thought, gazing at the creamy wedges of cheese and the apples polished to such a high sheen that their red skin mirrored the flickering flames in the fireplace.

Never kissing Curt again was something she ought to get used to, too.

H
E STOOD JUST BEYOND THE
doorway for a long minute, trying to compose himself.

Hell. He’d been so furious with her—why couldn’t she just
tell
him what she’d done in Africa? It wasn’t as if he’d hate her for having a fling. He deserved as much. He’d strayed. Let her
stray. Then they’d be even. Then, maybe, they could move past this anger.

But no, she had to play games with him. No more rings, no more marriage—yet she couldn’t just tell him, “Yes, I slept with someone else.” Or even, “Yes, I fell in love with someone else.”

He was a big boy. He could handle the truth. What he couldn’t handle was not knowing.

No matter how bad things were between Ellie and him, they’d always been honest with each other. When he’d had his bout of neediness or horniness or just plain insanity with Moira, he’d told Ellie. He’d done it, he’d regretted it and he’d confessed. For the sake of honesty, which had always been the essence of their marriage, he’d kept nothing from her.

She refused to show him that same courtesy. Perhaps this was her way of punishing him. Deny him the truth. Keep him guessing. Leave him never knowing some vital thing about the woman he’d married.