Not that they’d try again.
The steak on his breath the night Alison was born. The way he’d looked at Timmy Pouliot’s girlfriend at their Labor Day party. A time—such a small moment, but it had stayed with her; had she imagined this?—when, with his arm draped across her body in the dark, a few months after the birth of one of their children (Ursula? Toby?), he had gathered up the loose flesh of her belly and said, “Maybe somebody needs to cut down on the butter.” A look on his face when she stepped out of the tub.
And then no look at all. He didn’t watch anymore when she pulled her dress over her head or dropped her towel to the floor.
They had argued about stupid things—who cleaned the vegetable bin in the refrigerator, whose job it was to check Ursula for head lice, and when they found them, whose job it was to spend the next six hours picking out the nits. They’d sworn this wouldn’t happen to them, but days had gone by in which they exchanged little more than the details of who was picking up which child at which friend’s house, or what to bring home from the store. There had been a time when she’d loved it that Cam was an artist, and loved how excited he could be, finding a great piece of wood or creating from it some amazing salad bowl, never mind that nobody was ever going to buy it.
Then it changed. Then, when he embarked on some new and amazing project—a rock cairn, a bed in the middle of the woods planted with moss, a wind chime made from old spoons—a vague sense of irritation overtook her.
Why didn’t he get a job?
She remembered a night, not so far back, that until now she had chosen to forget.
Eleanor sat at the kitchen table, paying bills. Too many of them, asusual. Once again, she was going to have to figure out which to pay, which to put off for a month.
Cam was doing pull-ups on the bar he’d attached in the doorway going into the living room. She studied that perfect chest of his, those chiseled abdominal muscles. She set down the calculator.
“Don’t you ever think about money?” she said.
It was November—always a hard month, with the days suddenly short and dark, once they’d set back the clocks. The ash tree was bare, its leaves swirling outside the window, and all of winter still ahead of them.
For a moment there, he had looked confused. They were having a nice evening up until then. He was, anyway.
“It’s no fun thinking about money,” she said. “But someone around here has to.”
The grin disappeared. A different expression came over him. He stood in the doorway, bare chested. Like a man waylaid, unarmed, in an alley. No escape possible. For a surprising length of time, he just looked at her.
“You care so much about money? I’ll give you money,” he said, his voice low and filled with contempt, a voice she’d never heard before. He disappeared from the room for a good ten minutes then, into his woodshop. When he came back, his pockets were stuffed with pieces of paper the size of dollar bills, except that instead of the face of George Washington or Ben Franklin on the front, the face was an ugly green caricature of her own.
The bills fluttered down over her head and onto the kitchen floor like wedding confetti, but not. Twenty of them at least. More likely fifty.
“Here’s that money you’re always so goddamned eager for,” he said. “All that beautiful cash you love so much.”
Even in the middle of this, they both understood not to wake the children. He spoke in a voice she didn’t recognize, a terrible whisper. Not a whisper so much as a hiss.
“You happy, Eleanor? Happy now?”
Later, he had apologized. Cam was good at that, always ready to make peace, quick to admit when he’d been wrong. Cam was goodat letting go of the bad parts. But the memory of that night—his face as he scattered the pretend money over her as she wept—had stayed with Eleanor. Until that night she had not known he was capable of so much coldness or, call it what it was, so much quiet rage. Maybe that’s what happened when someone who had once been in love with you wasn’t anymore.
Part 2
52.
Faulty O-Ring
February was when Eleanor had always brought out the box of supplies for making valentines—origami paper and wallpaper samples and doilies, glitter and stickers and stick-on rhinestones and stacks of old magazines and seed catalogs to cut up. Every year their creations got more elaborate. The previous Valentine’s Day, Ursula had used a glue gun to attach interesting shells around the edges of a heart-shaped box that had once contained her grandparents’ annual gift of holiday chocolates, with a different note in each of the spaces that used to hold a chocolate—every one of the notes for her mother. Al, never into fanciness, had cut pictures of all different kinds of tomatoes out of the Burpee seed catalog and stuck them on an old cigar box for Cam to use, to store fishing lures and the car keys he was always losing. Toby, before the accident, used to pick out stones from his collection that he’d cover with red poster paint and ice cream sprinkles. One year he had glued hearts all over his naked body and told them the valentine was himself.
Things were different now. By the first week of February they would have been working every night on their cards, but this year Eleanor had not gotten around to putting out the usual abundance of craft supplies—just a stack of construction paper left over from the previous year and a couple of dried-up markers.
It was an odd moment to engage in a celebration of love. In the week since she found out about Cam and Coco (if she hadn’t seen them that day, when was he going to tell her?), the five of them (Cam, Eleanor, the children) had carried on with their routines much as before, though a heaviness hung over the household, and even Toby seemed to pick up on it. He was even quieter than usual, and more listless. The formerly pink ribbon remained permanently wrappedaround his pointer finger, its frayed tip twirling inside the soft pink opening of his ear.
Eleanor figured the girls would attribute the mood to what happened to theChallenger.The morning after the explosion Ursula had taken down all the pictures she’d hung in her room. When she took out the trash that afternoon, Eleanor found the commemorative coin Cam’s parents had sent from Florida, with the date January 28, 1986, engraved on the front along with the profiles of the astronauts.
A week or so after Eleanor had seen Cam and Coco together, he came to her as she was putting away the leftovers from dinner. The children were asleep. The house was quiet.
Ever since that first night, the two of them had barely spoken to each other. Now he put a hand on her shoulder, in a way that almost made her think he was going to tell her the whole thing was a huge mistake and ask her forgiveness.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he’d say. “You’re the woman I want to spend my life with. We made this family together.”
