Hope Street (9 page)

Ellie heard the impatience in his tone and touched his arm. “Let me,” she said. She was seated on a wooden bench next to Adrian. Enam, a plump, dimpled toddler with thick curls crowning his head like black bubbles, had climbed onto her lap. She wrapped her arms around him, savoring his weight on her knees. So many years had passed since her own children were small enough to fit on her lap.

She turned to Enam’s mother, who sat rigidly on a chair facing her visitors, her fingers knotted together in her lap and her gaze fastened to her child. “He’s a sweetheart,” Ellie said gently. “Do you know that term?
Sweetheart?
”

“It’s something nice,” Mrs. Braimah guessed.

“Yes. It means he’s gentle-natured and loving. You’re a lucky woman to have a son like this.”

“He’s good,” Mrs. Braimah boasted. “No evil spirits in him.”

“Actually, there
is
an evil spirit in him. It’s the infection that
makes his ears hurt. If you let him get the surgery, the little cut inside his ear will let the evil spirit escape. It won’t let the evil spirit
in.
It will let the evil spirit
out.
But if you don’t let Enam have the surgery, the evil spirit will stay inside him and hurt his ears.”

“There’s no evil spirit in him,” Mrs. Braimah said, clearly fuming.

“Yes, there is. It’s called an infection. We have to get that evil spirit out of him. That’s what the surgery will do.”

Mrs. Braimah rocked in her chair, her gaze drifting and her hands clasped even more tightly as she fretted over whether the surgery would let the evil spirits in or out of her beloved son. Finally, she relented. “How much this surgery cost?” she asked.

“Our clinic will make the financial arrangements,” Adrian said. “Don’t you worry about that. It won’t cost you anything.”

“And it lets the evil spirit out?”

Adrian gave Ellie a smile that brimmed with gratitude and admiration. Then he addressed Enam’s mother. “Yes, Mrs. Braimah. We will get those evil spirits out of Enam.”

“You’re a miracle worker,” he praised Ellie a few minutes later, as they climbed back into the Jeep. Their hours driving on back roads had layered the vehicle with dust, and Ellie wiped the cracked leather of her seat clean before settling into it. Adrian didn’t bother. Now she understood why he dressed in khaki whenever he wasn’t wearing surgical scrubs. The tan fabric hid the dust.

She smiled modestly. “I’m not a miracle worker.”

“I’ve been trying without success to get Mrs. Braimah to agree to the surgery for six months. You got her to say yes.”

Ellie shrugged. She didn’t believe she’d worked any miracles, but she liked the idea that Adrian thought she had. He was the one working miracles in the villages surrounding Kumasi. That he would consider her single triumph with Enam’s mother enough to elevate her to his level filled her with warmth.

Back home, her job as a school nurse demanded no miracles of her. Sometimes youngsters remembered to thank her before they galloped back to their classrooms after having a splinter removed or a scrape bandaged. Sometimes, when they were ill and had to be sent home, the parent who picked them up thanked Ellie. But no one ever called her a miracle worker.

Then again, back home she was never called upon to rid a child of evil spirits.

She and Adrian didn’t talk much during the long drive back to the clinic. But he wore a faint, devilishly appealing grin throughout the trip, and Ellie—rightly or wrongly—decided that she was in some way the reason for that smile.

She shouldn’t have been so pleased with herself. Getting a man to smile wasn’t that difficult, most of the time. Lately, she hadn’t gotten Curt to smile, but she hadn’t gotten herself to smile, either. Cheering everyone up was usually a woman’s task, and Ellie had abdicated that responsibility the day Peter died.

Getting Adrian to smile was…special. He was in love with his clinic—and his smile had nothing to do with love anyway—yet he’d called her a miracle worker. She’d accomplished something he hadn’t been able to do on his own. She’d come through for him, fulfilled a need for him and maybe, just maybe, saved a little boy’s hearing. She hoped Enam would have his surgery before Ellie had to leave Ghana. She wanted to be present, to see him through it, to celebrate with that adorable little butterball of a child once he was liberated from his evil-spirit ear infection.

And shame on her for being proud, but she wanted Adrian to turn to her once Enam was out of the hospital and recovering at home with his doting mother, and say,
You did this. I couldn’t have made it happen without you….

“S
O YOU SAVED A LITTLE
boy’s hearing,” Curt said.

Ellie had never before told him about the children she and the doctor had visited in the hinterlands of Ghana. When she talked about those children now, her eyes glowed with a kind of ecstasy he hadn’t seen since…God, since the good days of their marriage, when the kids were all asleep and she would lure him upstairs to their bedroom and have her way with him. It was the glow of a woman who’d reached a pinnacle, a woman who’d mastered her universe. He hadn’t realized that something other than sex could light up her eyes like that.

Then again, he wasn’t convinced she was telling him everything. Yes, he believed she’d traveled from farm to farm with the doctor in a squeaky, dilapidated Jeep with nonfunctional shock absorbers and an open roof that sucked all the road’s dirt in on her, and that she’d gotten this superstitious rural woman to trust her with her baby’s infected ears. She’d e-mailed him and the girls photos. The Jeep existed. So did the dirty roads. So did the doctor.

But he knew there was more, something beyond simply curing a kid’s chronic ear infections. Ellie was editing herself.

If he pressed her, she’d shutdown and seal herself off from him. So he simply drank his coffee and munched on grapes and encouraged her with nods and brief comments at appropriate places.

“I didn’t think it was such a big deal,” she said with a shrug. “I suspect the mother listened to me because I was another woman. But Dr. Wesker acted as if I’d done something astonishing.”

“In his eyes, you did.” Curt studied her face, loving how radiant she looked as she recounted the incident and wishing he’d been the source of that radiance. “Remember when you saved that guy’s life at Walt Disney World?”

She shrugged again, and brushed the notion away with a wave of her hand. “I didn’t really save his life.”

“You really did.” The moment crystallized in Curt’s memory, a warm, slightly muggy February afternoon during the kids’ winter-break vacation from school. They’d stood in line for what seemed like a year to ride on the Space Mountain roller coaster—a three-minute thrill worth the wait, they’d all agreed—and staggered out of the building into the blinding sunlight. A few steps ahead of them, a portly older man had been walking a meandering path over to a bench. Curt had scarcely noticed him—just one more dizzy roller-coaster rider trying to regain his bearings after an exhilarating ride. But Ellie had immediately noticed that the man was struggling to breathe, his face was deeply flushed and he had his right hand pressed to the left side of his chest.

“Oh, no,” she’d muttered just as the man had tipped over sideways and sprawled out on the bench. The woman with him let out a scream, and suddenly, there Ellie was, bowed over him, unbuttoning his shirt and beginning CPR while she shouted to Curt to find a park employee. She kept up the compressions for several long minutes until an ambulance arrived and EMTs
took over. Someone from Disney security took her name, and the next day a huge bouquet of flowers arrived for her at their hotel, along with a note that read, “Thank you for saving my husband’s life.”

Curt remembered that note vividly. Yes, Ellie had saved the man’s life. She hadn’t had to travel all the way to Africa to be a hero.

“You’ve always done that,” he remarked, wondering why he’d never called her on it. “You make light of all your accomplishments. You say you didn’t really save the guy’s life, or that kid’s hearing in Ghana. You say all you do at the school is wipe noses and take temperatures.”

“That
is
what I do,” she argued.

“You wipe their noses and take their temperatures and make them feel better. Damn it, Ellie—you do a lot of good in the world, everywhere you go. Africa, Disney World, here at home. You save people’s lives.”

She made a face. “Believe me, I wish I could save lives. But I can’t. When a third-grader has a sniffle, I’m hardly saving his life if I hand him a tissue and tell him to blow.”

Curt shook his head. “Sometimes I think your parents brainwashed you into believing that being a nurse instead of a doctor meant you couldn’t possibly be healing people,” he said. “You do heal people. You make them better. You convince the mother of a little child halfway around the world that the child should have surgery to save his hearing. Don’t put yourself down, okay? You save lives. Accept it.”

She stared at him dubiously. He hadn’t launched into that speech in an effort to win her heart—or even to win himself a bit of predivorce physical pleasure tonight in the
très
romantic room. He’d said it because it was the truth. He’d been listening
to Ellie belittle her work ever since she’d quit her job at Children’s Hospital and accepted a position as a school nurse at the Felton Primary School in town. “So I can be home in the afternoon, when the children get home from school,” she’d said, justifying her decision, but it had required no justification. Suburban children got sick just like city children, or village and farm children in Ghana. Ellie used her expertise to make those suburban children feel better. She deserved a few medals and a ticker-tape parade.

He wondered what she saw in his face. Pride? Admiration? Longing?

Or perhaps regret that he’d never praised her accomplishments, never assured her that she was every bit the miracle worker her Ghana buddy, Dr. Wesker, had declared her.

She lowered her gaze to the nearly empty fruit platter, then turned to watch the fire. How had they traveled from fighting to kissing to tension and anger to this moment of honesty in so little time? Were fiftieth birthdays supposed to be full of introspection and analysis and emotions with as many peaks and dips as the Space Mountain roller-coaster ride at Disney World? His birthday hadn’t been. It had been full of rage—rage at Ellie for denying him the chance to feel fully alive, to recover completely from the grief. Rage at himself for wanting what she remained unable to give him. Rage at the brutality of fate, at the cruel whimsy of a world that could snatch his son away from him and destroy his marriage.

Rage and a hot car.

He’d bought his BMW and spent his birthday testing the engine’s limits on a barren stretch of Route 2, hoping no state troopers happened to be waiting on that same stretch with their radar guns aimed in his direction. He’d driven until he’d burned
off enough anger to trust himself not to erupt in another fight with Ellie when he got home.

Not the happiest birthday of his life.

The keeping room had grown darker, and he realized that the fire was burning down. He glanced at his watch. Nearly midnight.

How many hours until they could go home?

How many hours could he keep Ellie here at the inn and convince her…to make love with him? To forgive him? To call off the lawyers?

To tell him the damn truth about the time she’d spent with that noble doctor in Africa?

He kept his tone light when he said, “What do you say we go back upstairs and watch some more of your life on TV.”

Her eyes flashed, shadowed with doubt. “Curt, what happened outside…” Her voice faded into a sigh.

Outside the building or outside the keeping-room doorway? The blush that rose to her cheeks told him she was thinking about their kiss. “You were as much a part of that as I was,” he reminded her.

She pressed her lips together, then leveled her gaze at him. “I’m a human being. And you’re a good kisser. But we can’t—I mean, we’ve already decided…”

To get a divorce. To treat each other with chilly civility until then. To avoid anything the least bit pleasurable, the least bit sexual, anything that might remind them that they’d once been crazy in love with each other. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,” he said, filtering the resentment from his tone. It was a promise he could keep. He’d never forced himself on Ellie. Never. She’d always been willing.

Except maybe for what had happened in the hallway outside the keeping room. But she’d been willing then, too. Surprised
at first, perhaps, but she’d kissed him back. God, how she’d kissed him.

Her hesitation rankled. “The hell with it,” he muttered. “Why don’t we just go home and tell the girls what’s going on. We don’t have to be prisoners at this freaking hotel. If you don’t want to stay, we’ll leave.”

“No.” The word slipped out of her mouth before she could have given much thought to her response—and her cheeks grew rosy again. She managed a crooked smile. “I want to see the rest of the movie.”

“Okay.” Hoping he didn’t look too pleased, he pushed his chair back from the table. Glancing around the keeping room, he spotted their waiter, who hurried over with a check. Curt signed it to the room, stood and extended his hand to Ellie.

She peered up at him for a long moment, then slipped her hand into his and let him help her out of her chair.

That simple gesture shouldn’t have felt like some kind of victory, but it did.

B
ACK IN THE ROOM
, Curt settled into the easy chair. Ellie was grateful; his avoidance of the bed was clearly an attempt to let her know he wasn’t going to make any unwelcome overtures. Not that she’d expected him to pressure her. He was Curt, for God’s sake.

Still, when he’d grabbed her in the hallway and spun her around and kissed her…Even then, he hadn’t pressured her. He’d startled her, certainly, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about that kiss as she kicked off her shoes and resumed her seat on the bed, leaning back into the pillows she’d propped up against the brass headboard. That she’d responded to his kiss was only natural—he was her husband, the only man she’d ever
loved. But she hadn’t expected to feel such need in him, such yearning. She’d thought they were beyond all that by now. He had his car, after all. She had Ghana. They’d agreed to go their separate ways.

Yet a treacherous desire gnawed at her, a desire for Curt to join her on the bed, to arch his arm around her and offer his shoulder to lean on. It would be more comfortable than pillows against a headboard. It would be more…

Loving.

Fortunately, he distracted her from that thought by turning on the TV and hitting the play button for the DVD. The video biography of her life would keep her from dwelling on any idea that included both Curt and loving.

“Don’t cry for me, carpool mother,” crooned a man’s voice on the soundtrack, accompanied by a montage of pictures that illustrated the frantic scheduling of Katie’s, Jessie’s and Peter’s various activities. A photo of a soccer ball appeared, followed by a photo of Jessie in a green leotard and a headdress of large, floppy yellow petals, the costume Ellie had sewn for her when she’d landed the role of a sunflower in a dance recital. A photo of all three children in swimsuits at the community pool. A photo of Peter climbing the jungle gym at the town’s toddler playground. A photo of Katie playing the piano at another recital. A photo of Jessie holding a soccer trophy. A photo of the three at day camp, displaying clay models of horses they had made in arts and crafts—although Peter’s horse looked more like a Salvador Dali nightmare vision of a melting giraffe. A photo of Peter in his T-ball shirt and a Red Sox cap. A photo of Katie holding a soccer trophy. A photo of Peter holding a soccer trophy. A photo of the bookshelf in the family room, the top surface of which was covered with soccer trophies, several dozen of them.

“I never bought into that philosophy of handing every kid in the league a trophy,” Curt remarked.

“It built self-esteem,” Ellie argued mildly. “It made every participant feel like a winner.”

“Yeah, but most of the kids weren’t winners. Why make them feel like something they aren’t? It devalues the trophy.”

“I remember how excited our children were whenever they got a trophy. They were more excited by the trophies than by the game.”

“Yeah…well, it was soccer,” Curt said, then laughed. “How can you get excited about soccer? All you do is run around and kick a ball. Big deal.”

She knew he was teasing, so she didn’t bother replying.

“Now, this…” He gestured toward the screen, where the girls had spliced in some video footage of Peter, a few years older, hitting a double at a Little League baseball game. Ellie and Curt had been experimenting with their new video cam, and the shots weren’t exactly brilliant. But even though the film was as jumpy as a silent-era movie and Peter wasn’t always centered in the frame, it was clear that by the time he was eight he had a natural swing and he ran like a jaguar, every bone and joint in his body moving in perfect synchronicity. “Baseball is a real sport.”

Tears beaded along Ellie’s eyelashes, but she refused to cry. Peter had been such a beautiful, talented child. That he’d died was so wrong. It made no sense. Why couldn’t she have died, instead, and he have grown into manhood?

Don’t think about it,
she ordered herself. She took deep breaths and stayed focused on the screen, as Peter tagged a runner out at second base and a country-sounding song, about sitting in the cheap seats and watching the boys hit it deep played on the soundtrack. Ellie had never heard the song before, but she remembered
sitting on the hard bleachers at so many games. The winter Peter was seven, Curt had bought her a bleacher cushion for Christmas. She’d used that padded seat until the seams wore out, then mended it with duct tape and got a few more seasons out of it.

Oh, yes—that Christmas. The bleacher cushion was one of the best gifts she’d ever received, more practical than jewelry, more satisfying than a new food processor, as comfortable as a bathrobe but better, because she could use it while watching her children. They’d all loved sports, the girls graduating from soccer to field hockey and softball while Peter played baseball all spring and summer and basketball through the fall and winter. She’d loved watching her children play, especially once she had her padded bleacher seat.

But that was still an awful Christmas. So many years ago, yet the pain of it swept over her, as fresh as a night breeze. The Christmas disaster that year had been about a gingerbread house. And about Peter.