Sarah's Window (13 page)

Clarice felt responsible in no small part for the accident, felt it never would have happened had she been in the car. But what really devastated her was that Susan chose to convalesce up in Lawrence at the home of John's parents.

Clarice had long been aware of the special bond between her daughter and Nancy Wilde. Even before her marriage to John, Susan had seemed to fit into their family as naturally as if she were their own flesh and blood. On more than one occasion, Clarice had found herself outvoted and outmaneuvered by Susan and Nancy Wilde, and there were times when she felt her daughter was not her own. By their complicitous smiles and their disregard for her meekly tendered suggestions, by their increasing familiarity and enthusiastic solidarity, Clarice knew they saw her as an unnecessary outsider with poor taste and insufficient education. Often she would force a bright smile and nod (perhaps a little too eagerly) in agreement with them, watching as her daughter moved into yet one more degree of separation. Clarice would never forget how she had sat in Nancy Wilde's kitchen while they planned the wedding, blinking back her hurt while they talked of florists and engravers, trying desperately to steady her trembling hand and silence the rattling saucer when she raised her coffee cup to her lips.

Susan's retreat to Lawrence after the accident was more than Clarice could bear. With John frequently up in Lawrence with them or in California, and Will in Sarah's care, Clarice again found herself alone. Much to everyone's surprise, she did not sink into a depression. Instead, she called her brother down in Dallas and asked him to find her a good rehab center. Said she'd pay whatever it cost, stay as long as necessary. She wrote her daughter a long and maudlin letter apologizing for how she had botched up her life, then, disgusted with her own self-pity, she tore it up again. Joy drove her to the airport early one morning, and on the way out of town they stopped by Sarah's house so Clarice could say goodbye to her one and only grandchild.

May arrived, the growing season, and the land was restless with change. The wind swept across the grassy ocean and the prairie moved like the sea, rising and falling in swells of ever-shifting tones of green. The warm wind stirred the grasses into perpetual motion, coaxing birth and renewal from the land. Patches of tiny blue bird's-foot violets that seemed to have sailed in overnight blanketed the greening slopes. There were sudden bursts of color all around in wild, unexpected places.

He gave her no warning, just showed up one Saturday morning out of the blue. It was a perfect day for it, warm with a cool breeze that played with the white curtains at her windows so that they seemed to beckon him inside. The sprinkler stuttered on the front lawn, dashing cool water over his face as he hurried up the sidewalk. No one answered his knock, but the front door stood wide open, so he went inside and called her name. He heard music coming from her room and he went to the bottom of the stairs and called again, and then she heard him and answered, told him to come on up.

There was nothing she could do, dressed in shorts and one of her grandfather's old shirts and covered in paint as she was, and so she just sat there with a rapturous smile on her face listening to his approaching footsteps.

She sat poised on the very top of a ladder in the center of her room, smiling down at him. Her auburn hair shone with the soft radiance of the morning light, and her beauty struck him speechless. She put down her palette and asked him if he'd hold the ladder steady while she climbed down. He set down the tulips he was carrying, a large bouquet wrapped in clear cellophane with a pink ribbon tied around the stems, and walked slowly toward her with his head thrown back, studying the ceiling.

It was not just the ceiling—the entire room had been thoroughly purged. The walls had been swept clean of her work and washed in a whispery blue, and over this was sketched in pencil the outline of fields of grasses and flowers. It was the beginning of a mural.

"Look," she said as she touched the ceiling, directing his gaze to a face peering out from behind the shoulder of a large figure only hazily sketched.

He stood below her, his hands on the ladder.

"It's Will."

"You recognized him."

"Right away," he said, his smile broadening into a grin. "Couldn't miss him."

"He hasn't quite got those fat little cherubic cheeks," she said as she cautiously made her way down. When she reached the floor, she dipped under his arm and tried to turn a bright smile toward him, but she was trembling inside.

"Thank you for the tulips," she said.

"I see they're wasted. You have a room full of flowers."

"They're not wasted," she replied. "Thoughtfulness is never wasted." She crossed the room to where Will sat in his playpen in a pool of toys, mouthing a plastic horse.

"Did you see him?"

When the child saw Sarah approach he dropped the horse and crawled to the rail to meet her. She knelt down and peeked at him playfully through the mesh panel, pressing her nose through the netting, and he smiled and reached out and pressed his palm against her nose.

John stood transfixed by what he was seeing. Sarah reached down and picked him up, and Will came eagerly into her arms.

"He looks good."

"Yes, and he's eating," she said brightly. She shifted him to her hip, and he perched there, easy and comfortable and content. Will's eyes did not leave her face. There was something primal in the way he read her, following her movements and gestures and words. Suddenly, for the first time, John sensed an intelligence in the child, a wordless, natural intelligence that had escaped them during those first months.

Sarah rummaged through a cluster of glass jars full of pencils and paintbrushes, and finally came up with one tall enough for the tulips. She emptied it and handed it to him and asked him to fill it with water, pointing to the small bathroom off the alcove.

He returned with the tulips in the jar and set them on the card table in the midst of all her paints and brushes and rags.

"That's a good place for them." She smiled. "Right in the middle of all my mess."

After that they stood quietly for a moment, Sarah rocking the baby on her hip and John studying the walls and the ceiling.

"It's from the Sistine Chapel, isn't it?"

"Yes.
The Creation of Adam."
She pointed up at Will's portrait. "In the original that's Eve. Cowering behind God."

"Cowering?" He laughed.

"I think so. If you look at her eyes. Of course, all I have are reproductions in books."

She had clipped to the ladder a page torn from her art history book, and she plucked it from the clip and passed it to him.

"What do you see? In her eyes."

John studied it quietly for a moment.

"She does look a little anxious." He smiled.

"Yes. Like she's very unsure about the whole thing."

"What whole thing?"

"Oh, all that man business. And earth. I think she's much more comfortable with God. It's like she's saying, 'Can't we just leave things the way they are? This is fine with me. Why mess with things?'"

She laughed lightly, but then grew quiet when his eyes swept over her face. The curtains whispered and a cool mist blew in from the sprinkler. Even Will perched quietly on her hip.

"I can't have children, Sarah. It's me. Not Susan. One of those classic cases of mumps when I was young. It didn't really bother me. I thought fatherhood was reserved for more ordinary men. Not someone like myself. I always had this belief that I was a chosen one, that I was destined to make some great discovery, work out some theorem that would make history. But when Will came along, he turned my head. Despite what's happened, I still can't help but feel he was meant to be in my life. That he's brought me here."

Sarah took a step toward him but he held up his hand and stopped her.

"No, Sarah," he whispered. "I'm not trying to seduce you."

"I didn't mean..." She paused, mildly flustered.

"Don't be embarrassed," he said quickly. "God knows, I dream of you all the time. I dream of making love to you. But it's more than that, and I don't know how to define it, or what I'm supposed to do with it. I don't know why you're so important to me. But I know you are. And I'm confused."

Will was distracted by a sudden movement in the tree outside the window, the rustle of leaves as a bird took wing. He turned his head, pointed to the open window.

John smiled at the child. "Bird. That's a bird."

He leaned forward and kissed him on the head, then strode swiftly out of the room and down the stairs. Sarah took Will to the window to wave, but John did not look back.

The circumstances of her accident had left Susan with a bitterness that worried her mother-in-law, and so Nancy Wilde urged her to consult a therapist, believing this might help Susan deal more effectively with her anger. Early in the week the therapist had called and asked to meet with John privately. John drove to Lawrence that day, expecting the session to be an update on her progress.

Dr. Redpath took a seat in an armchair next to a table scattered with a few
Field & Stream
magazines, and John sat on the other side. The doctor lifted his glasses off his nose, rubbed his bloodshot eyes with the back of a hairy fist, and apologized for keeping John waiting ten minutes. Then he began to ask questions. He asked about their marriage, about their plans for the future, for their family. They were not threatening questions, but John found them disturbing. They were questions he had never really pondered until these past few months, and now he had no convincing answers. Had Dr. Redpath asked him to explain Bohm's theory of in- visible morphogenetic fields or Ramanujan's partitions theory, John would have acquitted himself with much greater ease.

Dr. Redpath listened carefully to what John said,
and
he could sense that behind his cautious and sometimes vague answers was a man of deep moral integrity. After he had asked many questions and listened to John's replies, he poured a glass of water for himself and took a drink, then he began to speak.

"Your wife is a very intelligent woman."

"Yes. Of course she is."

"She's quite capable of assessing what is happening to her right now. And she knows, and I know, and I thought you should know, that it is not just an issue of trauma we're dealing with here. It's about parenting. It's about the little boy."

John felt his stomach roll over
and a
sudden nausea sweep through him.

"His name is Will."

"She doesn't refer to him by name."

"Why not?"

"She needed to create a distance from him. I helped her do that."

"Why would you do that? Why would you try to create a distance where there needs to be warmth and closeness?"

Dr. Redpath reached again for the glass of water and sat up a little in his chair.

"Susan confided in me some of her behavior with regard to Will. She came very close to some actions that would have had severe consequences."

"What was that? What are you referring to?"

"Well, she came rather close to a violent response.
On
several occasions, I gather. She's been honest with me."

"Has she hurt him?"

"No. She was able to pull herself back. She recognized what was happening."

John leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands tightly. "I didn't know. I knew how frustrated she got. I think she neglected him sometimes. She'd ignore him when he got too much for her." John looked up, quizzical. "Don't other parents ever get like that?"

"They do. Especially with children as difficult as Will."

"He's not that difficult anymore." John leveled his eyes on Dr. Redpath. "He's made a lot of progress since she last saw him."

"I'm sure he has."

"He's calmer. He sleeps better. He's eating. He's gained four pounds."

Dr. Redpath watched the body language, the way the man became animated when talking about his son. He realized it was going to be much more difficult than he had imagined.

"That may be in part because of the young woman you've placed him with. I understand she's developed a bond with him."

John dropped his eyes. "Yes. She has. But I'm hoping it'll carry over."

"Affection... bonding... does not necessarily carry over. Sometimes unique bonds are created... or not created... as the case may be."

There was a long silence, and Dr. Redpath noticed the blank stare.

"Mr. Wilde?"

There was not an immediate reaction, only a slow, tentative response.

"I can't give him up."

"John, not everyone wants to be a parent. Not everyone needs to be a parent. Not everyone should be a parent. I think your wife falls into all of those categories. This is not a judgment on her. It's just a fact of life."

"No," muttered John under his breath, his eyes still fixed in space. "No."

Dr. Redpath hesitated before he said quietly, "You have to make a decision. You chose to marry Susan, and you've lived, from what I can gather, some very good years together. You strike me as an exceptionally compatible couple. And your family is extremely supportive of you and your wife. Would you say this is true?"

John nodded slowly.

"These are assets that only become more important as the years go by, as you grow older together. You have to decide how important that is to you."

"You're saying I have to decide between Will... between my son and my wife?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"Is this your professional opinion?
Or
is this what Susan wants?"

"She wanted me to talk to you before you saw her. She didn't feel she was strong enough emotionally to put it to you as clearly as I could."

"You mean give me an ultimatum."

"The mental health of your wife is at stake. And, of course, Will's safety, too."

There was another long silence, and then, abruptly, John rose and nodded his thanks to
Dr.
Redpath.
Dr.
Redpath followed him to the door, and then John paused and turned and met the doctor's gaze.

"I know you mean well," John said.

He sat in his car for the longest time. Flint-colored thunderheads advanced swiftly across the sky, and he could hear deep thunder in the distance. It started to rain, and he watched as another patient arrived and scurried down the walk with her purse clutched over her head. Finally he started up the engine. He drove slowly, trying to make out the road through the steady downpour.

He pulled into the driveway of his parents' home and cut the engine. The windows of the old BMW had fogged over and he sat locked in his thoughts, hidden from the world, when suddenly the car door flew open and Susan hopped in and quickly slammed the door behind her.

"God, this rain!" She lowered the raincoat from her head and turned to him with a wary smile. "How about if we go for a drive?"

He looked up at her and only gradually the blank look lifted and he seemed to see her and he smiled.

"Hi," he said and reached out and touched her hand.

She gave a sigh of relief and swallowed nervously.

"Shall we go for a drive?"

He wiped a patch of fog from the windshield with his hand.

"In this?"

"Your mother's home."

Her wrist was still in a cast, supported by a sling, but she looked rested and much happier than he had seen her in a long time. She had lost weight and had taken to sunbathing at the club and her skin had a robust, healthy color.

"Oh, John," she whispered, holding his gaze. "I tried so hard..."

"I know you did."

"I thought it was because I was doing something wrong. I thought it was all my fault. But it's not..."

She paused, waiting to hear some word of absolution, but there was none.

"Dr. Redpath helped me see that," she went on. "He said—"

"He explained it all to me."

Timidly, she reached out and laid a hand on his arm.

"But you still blame me."

"Things can still work out. It's not hopeless." His voice was colored with such optimism that Susan withdrew her hand and stared at him in stunned disbelief.

"You didn't understand anything at all, did you? You didn't hear what he was saying."

"But he doesn't see things—"

"No, John," she whispered through a strangled voice. "You're the one who's blind."

There was a long silence, and when she spoke her voice was low and unsteady. "We have something worth fighting for in our marriage. I think it'd be a tragedy to throw it all away. This has been a horrific time for me. For both of us." She tugged the raincoat up around her shoulders and reached for the door handle. "Let's give us time to heal."

She left him sitting there. The sun came out and turned the car into a steam bath. He sat with his hands on the wheel and sweat trickling down his face and fog steaming up the windshield until he could no longer bear it. Then he went inside to shower and get ready for dinner.