The Perfect Son (29 page)

Harry held it in for a moment, but then his giggle exploded. Harry’s giggle had always been infectious. Even Felix joined in.

“Thank you,” she said when she ran out of breath for more laughter. “Both of you. For this most perfect evening. I wish I could preserve it in a snow globe.”

Harry sat down on the hearth and stared into the fire. Orange firelight illuminated one side of his face, as perfect as that of a Botticelli angel; the other side remained in shadows. Felix stopped laughing, and the atmosphere in the room shifted. The fire crackled, but the air became cold and heavy. Ella shivered. It was as if the house itself had stopped breathing. She glanced from Harry to Felix and back again.

“Dad and I had a really good chat about colleges the other day, didn’t we, Dad?”

That had to be good, right? So why the dread clawing at the back of her neck?

“And we’re going ahead with the spring tour. Want to tell her the rest, Dad?”

Yes, want to tell me the rest, Felix?

Felix moved in front of the fire and clasped his hands behind his back. “I’ve given my permission for Harry and Max to visit Brandeis University outside Boston. They will be attending an open house on February twenty-seventh.”

“That’s great.” She pulled herself up on the mound of cushions and pillows. “I’m happy you’re thinking about college. Are Max’s parents driving you?”

“They’ll be flying,” Felix said. “Alone.”

“Harry, sweetheart, you’re phobic.” Her heart began to thud. “You’ve never flown without me.”

“I know, Mom, but my anxiety isn’t as bad when Max is with me.”

“And if something goes wrong?” She kept her voice level.

The log in the fire made a weird whistling noise, as if oxygen were trapped inside and could detonate at any second.

“Then I’ll have to face my fear. Gotta live outside your comfort zone. That’s where all the good stuff happens. Or so they say.” Harry grimaced and blinked, and then gave a Harry shrug—quick and floppy. “And if I can do this, then I can consider applying to out-of-state colleges. Maybe even Harvard.”

There it was, the elephant in the room. The one that had caused her to have a panic attack, that had brought back all those memories from the plane. She slowed down her breath, visualized the ocean—calm and flat.

“Dad thinks I can do it. And we were hoping we could stay with your old roommate in Boston. Dad doesn’t want us in a dorm.”

Ella’s brain struggled to keep up even as her heart threatened to explode through her rib cage. Was this what happened when she made Felix the primary parent—he cut their son loose?

Felix moved back toward her and sat on the arm of the sofa. “We have to let him try this. We have to let him go. Isn’t that what it means to be a good parent—to let go?”

No
, she wanted to scream,
I’ve spent seventeen years holding on. I can’t let go. I don’t know how.

“Maybe you guys should talk about this without me.” Harry bounced up. “I’m going to call Sammie, see if they have power.”

“No, you’re not,” Felix said. “We need to reserve our mobiles for emergencies. Besides, we haven’t finished the family discussion. Ella, what are you thinking?”

What was she thinking? A mudslide of contradictions: she had to let go and she couldn’t. She used to be the family anchor, but now she was the reason Harry couldn’t use his cell phone. She was a potential family emergency twenty-four seven. Despite the sudden chill, she began to sweat. Thoughts of Harry on a plane, in crisis, needing her. Memories of being on the flight from Florida. The living room seemed to slant away from her.

She stared at Harry, her thoughts building like a migraine. She had once been the gravity of his universe, the focus of his unlimited adoration. Silently, she grieved for the little boy who had never been embarrassed by her, who had never ignored her when she’d volunteered at school functions, who had never dodged a kiss given at an inopportune moment. Who had never rolled his eyes and said, “
Mooommm.
Really?”

“I’m thinking how hard it is to let my baby go. I love you.”

Harry grinned.

“What are we going to do when he leaves for real?” She looked up at Felix.
Make it better. Make it go away.

Felix dipped toward her. “I think we’ll figure it out, don’t you?” His expression turned uncertain, boyish, like he was asking her on a date. And then, with a quirk of a smile, he leaned closer still and kissed her. A soft, gentle kiss that slowed her breath, her thoughts, and her heart. She was okay; everything was okay. She was no longer the passenger in a driverless runaway car. Felix was in the driver’s seat; he had been all along. Cupping his face, she rested her forehead against his.

“
Eeew
, guys. Get a room!”

“I’ll leave the two of you to figure out the details.” She pushed up and attempted to stand; Felix was by her side instantly. “But if you’ll excuse me, I think I do need to go to bed after all.”

THIRTY-THREE

Embers glowed on a pile of ash, but there would be no hope of sleep. Primeval instinct kept Felix alert. Left arm braced against the fireplace surround, he leaned in with the poker to kill what remained of the fire. He’d never been a pyromaniac; he’d never enjoyed igniting Guy Fawkes effigies on Bonfire Night. A fire was a poorly chained beast with the power to break free and roar out of control, and when you were teetering on the edge of hell, one spark could ignite and consume your world.

With Eudora in the spare room, he’d planned to sleep on the sofa, but the living room had become an icebox. He glanced toward the glacial nether region of the house where his warm wife was asleep in their warm bed under their warm duvet. His heart began to race; desire snaked through his body. He wanted his wife.

Disgusted, Felix jammed the poker into the ash and embers. He would stay out here and freeze. What kind of a lowlife thought about sex when his wife barely had the energy to drag her body to the loo?

Felix replaced the poker on the fire tools stand. The house echoed with sleep; dawn seemed an eternity away. He puffed up the two pillows he’d retrieved earlier from the hall closet and shook out the antique quilt that had been a wedding present from Ella’s aunt. It smelled of the passage of time. Numb with exhaustion and cold, Felix settled down on the sofa and listened to his thoughts.

Would he ever make love to his wife again? Death had tried to claim Ella on that plane and had failed. But he needed to remind himself that death was irrelevant, because she had lived. And as Eudora kept reminding him, they needed to celebrate life.

He flipped onto his side, then gave up when his lower leg tingled. He turned onto his back.

Katherine had said, “We all struggle, but suffering is a choice. Your wife taught me that.” He would choose to not suffer; he would choose to be positive and enjoy each day with his wife. Yes, they would make love again.

A cramp grabbed his calf muscle, and Felix launched himself off the sofa.

Don’t scream, don’t scream.

He wanted to scream.

Goddammit.
He massaged the hard clump of muscle and gritted his teeth.

Forcing his weight onto his leg, he attempted to stand. As the contractions weakened, he grabbed the torch and began walking. Instinctively, he turned down the hall, flicking random light switches on and off, which was utterly pointless. If power were back, he would have heard the heat kick on.

Pointing the beam of the torch at the floor, Felix cracked open Harry’s door. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Felix spotted a big mound of duvet and teenager. He eased the door shut and turned. His bedroom door was firmly closed.
His
bedroom.

Hand trembling, he reached for the knob. Was he about to do something incredibly stupid? If only his mind were as quiet as the rest of the world. Without the constant thrum of appliances, the house had become a sound vacuum. A silent, freezing tomb in which nothing moved but him.

He opened the door.

His wife was broken, and yet he had never loved her more than he did at that moment. She was nestled into the white pillows as if she had constructed an igloo around herself, but she had left one pillow on his side. Was it his Tempur-Pedic pillow? Had she left it there as a statement? He reached out to touch the cold, white linen pillowcase. Yes, it was his pillow. He knew the subtle—and not so subtle—ways Ella shut him out if she wanted to be left alone. This was a welcome card.

Felix tiptoed around the bed to the chair where he’d dumped his pajamas after changing the sheets for Eudora. Then he turned off the torch, so as not to wake Ella, and felt his way along the bedroom wall and into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth in polar water, and with a sharp intake of breath, lathered up soap and scrubbed his face. He stripped off his clothes, pulled on his pajama pants and T-shirt, and hurried back to the bedroom.

A movie played in his head of his first night with Ella, the taste of her, the smell of her, his hands shaking as he’d started to unbutton her black fitted shirt, which she’d left open to reveal a hint of lacy black bra. All evening at dinner, he had thought only of removing it. By the time they returned to the flat, Ella was drunk. Not fall-down drunk, but tipsy enough to raise the level of her giggle and cause her to sway against him as he fumbled to unlock the front door. Their first time was on the hall floor; the second time was on his flatmate’s sofa. The third time, they made it to his bed, where they stayed all weekend. The toast crumbs had lingered longer.

He moved around the edge of the bed like a crab, hand over hand. The cotton sheet was as cold as steel, their Tempur-Pedic mattress as solid as concrete. Had it frozen? Slowly, he lay down and huddled under the duvet, his limbs desperately searching out pockets of warmth.

Once the blood started pumping freely to his fingers and toes, Felix eased himself up onto his elbow. Ella was curled on her side, facing away from him. He wanted to touch the back of her neck, to run his fingers through her hair, but he didn’t.

On New Year’s Day, he’d started a research file for their twentieth wedding anniversary—a trip of a lifetime that would take three years to plan. Tomorrow he would destroy the file. They would go nowhere. There was only one thing he wanted for his twentieth anniversary: for his wife to live. And to mark that, they didn’t need to travel to the end of the world. All they needed was a weekend in bed that left behind a smattering of crumbs.

Felix pushed aside one of Ella’s pillows and slid his arms around her waist. Gently, so as to not hurt or wake her, he eased her back against his thumping heart.

He curled his legs under hers, and his mind stilled.

The heating chugged through the overhead vent and the clock on the cable box flashed 6:00 a.m. Power was back, but Ella’s side of the bed was empty and cold. Felix sat up and listened. She wasn’t in the bathroom. Where was she?

He jumped out of bed and raced into the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, hands folded in her lap, staring at the dead fire. Her pose, that of a woman wearing stays, was oddly uncharacteristic. All those years spent hunched over pieces of jewelry had wrecked her posture. She never sat bolt upright; she rarely sat straight. She was a woman who tucked and folded herself into every chair.

“Ella, what on earth are you doing out here?” How did she get this far by herself?

“There are things I need to tell you,” she said quietly. “Things I should have told you years ago. Things you have a right to know.”

“And you want to tell me now?” Felix had never believed in spousal sharing. Marriage was more delicate than a hothouse flower. It should exist under a dome of glass, protected from the elements, not exposed to the storms of truth:
My father whipped me; I’m about to lose my job.

Ella nodded but didn’t turn. “The conversation last night, the realization that I can’t hide from the future, that Harry will leave home and I won’t be there to keep him safe. I’m not ready to let him go, Felix, to let the world dig its claws in. Adults get bullied, too, you know.”

“Ella, keeping him close isn’t the answer, either. It still singles him out as different. We have to let him do this.”

“I know. He has to move forward and so do we—so do I.” She paused. “I have to move through the rest of my life with no regrets.”

“You have regrets?” He forced himself to swallow. She’d had an affair; she wanted to leave him; she didn’t love him. Had she ever? He’d never deserved her, never.

“You’ve always had such faith in me, Felix. But it’s a burden I can’t carry anymore.”

Felix leaned over the back of the sofa and dug his fingers into the padding. Whatever she confessed, he mustn’t lose his temper; he must keep her calm. “Did—did you have an affair?”

“No, no! Goodness, no.” She swung round and grabbed his arm. “But you think I’m such a good mother. And I’m not. I haven’t been.”

“Codswallop!”

“Please just listen.” She guided him round the end of the sofa, but the moment he sat, she curled away from him, resting her head on the sofa arm.

“When Harry was little, I used to pray for him to sleep all the time, because the moment he woke up, I was in hell. He had no fear. He trusted everyone and he never stayed still. He was an uncoordinated dynamo—a wrecking ball. Other parents at birthday parties muttered about bad mothers unable to handle their kids. Strangers in supermarkets said the same thing. And during the rage attacks there were days”—she lowered her voice—“when I struggled to love him.”

Felix kept still.

“I used to dream about having ten minutes to myself, ten minutes without being dragged into some crisis: ‘Mrs. Fitzwilliam, your son kicked little Johnny.’ And then we hit middle school, and I had a different set of worries. Would academic pressure trigger new tics? How would he cope with standardized tests? Could I get him extra time? Throughout school, I had to supervise, oversee, question. Did the school have enough backup meds; was the new teacher giving him the breaks he needed; was he getting enough sleep to manage his stress? Had someone made fun of his tics?”

Felix reached for her cold bare feet. He eased them onto his lap and started massaging warmth back into them.

“And thanks to you,” he said, “our messy, unfocused son has a level of self-confidence I could never have imagined at his age. He’s in love, he has devoted friends, and he’s trying to take control of his future, all because you taught him to believe in himself. You laid the foundation for the young man who’s developing before our eyes. He’s going to be fine.”
Provided he takes his afternoon Ritalin pills.
“You’ve given him the tools he needs to be Harry. Now you have to let him find his own way.”

“There’s more.” Ella raised her head and glanced to the hallway, where a single night-light burned outside Harry’s closed bedroom door. “During the rage attacks, I felt dead inside. I wasn’t sure I could be his mother. I wasn’t sure I could be anyone’s mother.” She lowered her voice. “I looked into a residential home.”

“You”—
stay calm, Felix
—“considered sending our son away?”

Ella yanked her feet from his lap and sat up. “I have no excuse. Nothing I did worked, and I thought that maybe all those people who’d judged and criticized had been right—that I was the problem, that if he got away from me, he might have a chance. For so many years, I wanted to be a mom—and then I was filled with nothing but failure and doubt. What kind of a monster considers sending her child away?”

“Sometimes residential care is the answer. It’s not a statement about parenting; it’s a question of need. Imagine if we’d had other children to consider.”

“I was grateful we didn’t.”

Felix threw himself back against the sofa. “You should have come to me—you should have told me what was going on. And I should have helped out more. I failed you and Harry in those years.”

“No. You didn’t. We made an agreement, remember? You did your job, I did mine.”

And it was a bad agreement. He never should have accepted her terms. “Do you know when I fell in love with you—really fell in love?” He rolled his head toward her. “When I watched you become a mother. Nursing Harry, rocking him to sleep, singing to him. No one with my upbringing would ever want children, but you showed me something I’d never seen before—unconditional parental love.” He reached for her hand and entwined their fingers together. “Ella, please never doubt what an incredible mother you are.”

“There’s more.” Ella stared straight ahead. “I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. And then I was scared you would overreact, and then I thought maybe it didn’t matter, but it does. The heart attack has taught me that everything matters. And then Harry, talking about comfort zones. You need to know . . .”

“Know what, Ella?”

She drew in a deep breath and nodded at the painting above the fireplace, the vile picture of Ella distorted into
The Scream
. “That sums up how I felt after Mom died. And then I met you and the screaming stopped. When my thirtieth birthday came around, I knew what I wanted.” Ella withdrew her hand and slowly turned toward him. “I wanted a child; I needed a father.”

“Wait, wait.” Felix shot up. “Are you telling me that the pregnancy wasn’t an accident? You set me up?” To hell with staying calm.

“This is why I never told you. I wasn’t trying to set you up. I was in love, I thought it was hopeless. You’d told me you never wanted a family, but I wanted a child desperately—and I was prepared to raise him alone. I never expected you to turn up in America with your grandmother’s engagement ring. Once you were here, in the States, I couldn’t risk losing you. After that, it all happened so fast—the wedding, Harry’s birth, the craziness of life with a newborn. And then somehow it seemed irrelevant. We were a family. Did it matter how we became one?”

“But he’s seventeen.” Felix dragged his hands through his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me after he turned five or twelve? We even talked about this while you were in hospital. I gave you the perfect lead-in.” Yes, he was angry. He was flat-out furious. How could she have done this? He collapsed back on the sofa. “Good God, Ella, there must have been a thousand opportunities to tell me in seventeen years.”