What Burns Away Read online

When I came down the stairs with six smiling pregnancy test sticks, the sum total of two boxes, a bouquet of optimism that I presented to Miles where he sat on the couch writing a grant, he looked up at me, then examined each one.

  “I guess there was nothing wrong with us,” he announced, pulling me into his arms. For a moment he held my face between his hands, his eyes wide open and glossed with tears. “Finally,” he whispered. Then he pulled me onto the couch, the weight of my body creasing his stacks of manila envelopes and medical journals as he climbed on top of me, breathing me in deeply, kissing my wrist, and directing my arms around his neck.

  We held each other a long time. I cried from exhaustion and joy. And with most of our clothes on, clinging to each other, we surrendered the blame and made slow, deliberate love. Our jeans kicked off into crumpled piles by our toes, we kissed. Deep kisses. Kissing until our bodies boasted a celebratory rhythm and Miles’s research notes slipped off the couch and scattered across the floor.

  And for those first fourteen weeks of gestation, Miles read aloud to me each night from What to Expect When You’re Expecting, whose title he edited with a black Sharpie marker to read instead: What to Expect Obsess about When You’re Expecting Obsessing.

  Nervous, we remained tentative with our humor and our hope, anticipating the second ultrasound, waiting for the thud of the heartbeat to confirm the good news we would deliver to the world. Each of us raced to that appointment on our lunch breaks from work and waited in the darkened room, our hands folded in our laps, as we fixed our gazes onto the screen.

  The sonographer guided the jellied end of the knob over my belly as I studied the black-and-white projection, depicting a clear image of our baby’s head on a tiny tadpole body.

  The technician said, “Let’s see.”

  On the screen the image was static.

  “Shouldn’t it be right there?” I said. “The flicker?”

  “Just a moment,” the technician told me, nodding at my husband as she stepped through the door.

  But I already knew from my husband’s exhale, the furrow of his brow, his false smile, that there was no more baby.

  “It’s early,” he whispered into the dark. “We haven’t told anybody. And this is good news, really, that we even got pregnant.”

  Something inside of me unhinged. “Good news?”

  “We can try again.” Miles squeezed my hand as the doctor walked in.

  I didn’t squeeze back.

  After that, Miles never mentioned the miscarriage.

  I took a cab back to work.

  The following day, another cab drove me to and from my D&C at the hospital where Miles held his clinic. There, a surgeon dilated my cervix before putting me under general anesthesia to remove the contents of my uterus, first using vacuum aspiration to take away the lifeless fetus, then a metal rod with a sharp loop to perform the curettage to prevent infection, scraping and scooping my insides that already felt broken.

  While I was in the recovery room, Miles did not come to greet me. He said he wanted to be there, but I asked him not to. He didn’t push it. Diving into a private sorrow, I chose to endure the loss of our baby alone because seeing Miles’s disappointment only made me hurt that much more, believing my body was responsible for failing us and our marriage somehow.

  Six months passed before we finally made love again, when following a holiday celebration for Miles’s lab staff, we had drunken sex on the rug by the fireplace, where I woke up with my high heels and cocktail dress on, under a quilt Miles tossed over me on his way up to bed. The next morning, while I stood at the coffeemaker rubbing my eyes, he planted a wet one on my check and handed me a pint glass he had pilfered from the bar, filled to the lip with orange juice. “Fun night?” he said, a question to which he tentatively awaited my agreement.

  Four months later, when I was too sick to hide it any longer, I announced to Miles that I was pregnant with our son Jonah. I had taken the initial pregnancy test at work, pushing away any glee as I dropped the result stick in the biowaste bin behind the Atmospheric Resources Lab where I conducted my research.

  During workdays, when I knew Miles was with patients and too busy to contact me, I scheduled my ob-gyn appointments, along with the first three ultrasounds—one at seven weeks, one at twelve weeks, and one at twenty weeks, more pictures of my tiny baby than younger, more fertile moms ever get.

  I didn’t want Miles at those screenings because I knew if we lost Jonah, he would never shatter the way I would. So I made the pregnancy all mine. And as I navigated my fears for all nine and a half months of my term, I did so mostly alone, turning inside myself, hiding in the walk-in closet when I needed a good cry.

  Jonah was born two weeks past his due date, a big ten pounder, with both of us present. And once we moved beyond the complications of his birth—the cord around his neck, the slice through my middle, both of us battered and bruised—Miles and I went home and clung to each other inside the farmhouse we had restored and finally furnished together. By the time the baby was seven or maybe eight weeks old, a time when I could not yet discern where my son began and I ended, Miles’s desire for me became inexhaustible.

  It was me, once insatiable and greedy with our love, who grew ambivalent about our marriage, struggling with the idea of sex after childbirth, incapable of recalling how exactly we came to make the sweet baby boy who took everything I had to offer. And as my breasts became a food source, their circumference expanding while my mind withered from sleep deprivation into something as sharp and capable as a bowl of oatmeal, Miles sought me more than he ever had in our shared life.

  “Claire,” he would whisper. “Let me touch you.”

  On the rare occasion that I attempted to undress for him, out of a sense of obligation for his patience and relentless desire, I grew modest in the company of that blousy flesh stitched together by a raised purple seam, where my formerly taut belly had been a place of pride. Instead, I wore my postpartum body like a relic of the labor trauma we were all fortunate enough to survive, but for me, my body seemed an impossible source of pleasure.

  “Your body is so much curvier, and sexy and full,” Miles whispered to me one night, taking a milk-drunk Jonah from my arms and lowering him into the bassinet beside our bed. “And I miss you, Claire. I want to be close to you.”

  Dizzy with fatigue, I ignored his request and fell onto the mattress with a peanut butter sandwich, wondering if I would ever again read a book, hold a complete thought, fit into my jeans, or be myself in some recognizable form. All day I had fantasized, not about making love to my husband, but about finishing my morning read of a one-page article in the New York Times, reporting the arrival of the Leonid meteor shower.

  Leonid was at its cyclic crest that night in November, and from the heels of the constellation Leo the blitz of meteors would radiate as midnight struck, just when my new baby would stir for his third round of nursing for the night.

  I told Miles: “If I sleep through Leonid, I will have to wait decades to see anything like it. At a peak like this, it will stream forty meteors per hour. It’s no Halley’s comet, but the sky will be majestic.”

  Miles pledged, “I won’t let you miss this one.”

  He kissed a smudge of peanut butter from my upper lip and rolled over to set the alarm clock on his bedside table. He stirred restlessly as I read, and a few seconds later he pulled the article out of my grip. Kissing me again, tiny pecks, his uncertain hands fumbling with the buttons on the old flannel shirt that had become my uniform.

  “I’m so tired,” I said.

  “Let me touch you, Claire,” he pleaded. “It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.” He tugged the shirt over my head. The scruff of his face grazed my back. The warmth of his mouth navigated down my spine. He caressed me for hours like that, one vertebra at a time.

  Afterward, while Miles stayed sound asleep, I woke to Jonah�
�s cries before the alarm ever rang. And with my tiny son swaddled tight in a blanket, I went downstairs, took my jacket from the hook, and walked out onto the deck, where I nursed him in a patio chair and Leonid fell over us like magic.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nostalgia

  For the final hours of my fortieth birthday, Miles left me alone with Jonah to sleep. Beside him I pulled my knees to my chest beneath the blanket and fell into the memory of Dean feeding me a slice of sheet cake, each of us licking icing from the candles and kissing cake crumbs from the corners of each other’s lips.

  For so much of my adult life, I had kept those nostalgic memories of Dean archived, because stowed with them remained the grief I experienced as a girl, its expanse tucked away in an empty, haunted place inside of me, like a drafty cellar to which I kept the door closed. But exhausted by a sense of uprootedness, forlorn and longing for that feeling of home, disillusioned by the tedious nature of motherhood and marriage and aging, I permitted myself to reminisce with Dean and unlock the door to that memory, writing him again the next morning.

  Dear Dean—

  It was a Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker that I wore—Very Cherry. And I still wear it, even though I am, yikes, officially forty! (Great picture BTW.)

  And, yes, I remember that windowsill in my mother’s husband’s house after my dad’s funeral. I was wearing a navy blue romper and my pink ballet flats. It had to be 100 degrees in that room. So hot that summer. You told me you were sorry. You told me that my dad loved me, that you loved me. But then shortly after you slowly slipped away. I remember calling your house. Your mom always answered and I hung up. Then, for the first time in months, you surprised me with that giant cake. I remember thinking everything would go back to normal between us after my birthday. But, a week later, the neighbors told me you had gone off to Texas with Eddie Gabes. I realized that the cake was your good-bye. By the time you returned, I had already left for college.

  I haven’t thought about that in years.

  Claire

  We were in our church clothes when Dean reached under my romper, my face wet with the tears I tasted on his lips. Writing the email to Dean, I relived it, how it felt—being in the house that had haunted me all those years—the heat of that windowsill we pressed ourselves against, the vaulted walls in the cavernous Victorian house at Quayside that was like the hold of a ship into which my mother moved the wreckage of our lives after my father died.

  And now I couldn’t stop myself from seeing it, that big, white house emerging from the fog in a daydream that preoccupied my thoughts as I stood at the sink a thousand miles away, slicing an apple for my son.

  So, when Dean told me that he was the new titleholder of 101 Quayside, perched in that very room where we had made love, the home office from which he wrote me, I felt the ache I’d always felt inside that house.

  Claire—

  Pretty tragic we never crossed paths when you were still in Connecticut. And in Mystic of all places, only twenty minutes up the road. We could’ve been doing this all over drinks. Also, I feel awkward mentioning this to you since you hadn’t brought it up when you contacted me, and I’m surprised your mother wouldn’t have told you, but I bought 101 Quayside from them a few years back. I saw Kat and Craig at the closing. Your mom looked great. She and I are actually Facebook friends. She reached out to me just once, maybe six months after the real estate market crashed, saying she felt bad, telling me she was certain that over time the house would regain its value. It’s weird, right?

  And, I should mention, I hadn’t sought out the place or anything like that. Another broker told me it was listed. He thought it was a great investment but didn’t have the capital and talked me into it. He got the commission, of course.

  Anyway, I never intended to live here. We kept it as a corporate rental, you know, an income property. Too much of you inside these walls for me to consider it otherwise. But then things changed, business-wise and personally, so now I’m here on the waterfront.

  Really, can you even fathom it? Me, a cranky east-end son of a bitch, taking up residence with the yuppies? It’s temporary. A transition. Soon I’ll need to make some dough off the property, which never happened as it was supposed to, due to the market crash.

  Anyway, I’m sitting in our window and all I can think about now is that romper and your skin underneath it.

  Yours,

  Dean

  That evening at the kitchen table, Miles sat across from me looking over patient records while I reread Dean’s letter over a glass of wine. My husband’s glasses crept down the bridge of his nose, and he held the weight of his chin in his hand. His exhaustion and the stress of the job were evident in his posture.

  “Can I get you something?” I offered, but Miles shook his head no without looking up, sighing before signing his notes.

  Upstairs, Jonah was zipped into his sleep sack, curled onto his side, and through the video monitor, I studied his profile, the aquiline nose and cleft chin a mini replica of his father’s, features I loved even more on the face of my boy for whom I would sacrifice everything.

  “Is there some way I can help you?” I whispered to Miles. “Maybe organize your files?”

  Again he shook his head without looking up from his paperwork, so I turned back to my computer screen and clicked on the list of Dean’s Facebook friends. Skimming through the names, I noted our mutual acquaintance, Eddie Gabes, who Dean graduated with, the sweet, unsupervised teenage boy who grew up in a motor lodge, the same dear Eddie who sent me a friend request only hours after Dean and I reconnected.

  With it, he attached a message about surviving a recent motorcycle accident that had claimed his right arm from the elbow down, asking for my prayers of support in what would be a very hard journey toward sobriety and wondering if I’d be willing to make a financial contribution on behalf of his recovery. And so I sent a money order for one hundred dollars in secret, never mentioning it to Miles, who would only have pointed out the statistical odds of our donation benefiting Eddie’s cause.

  Moving past Eddie, through the alphabetical listing of Dean’s 422 other friends, I found Jimmy Pistritto, also from our hometown, who, last I heard, had served jail time for robbing a convenience store with a hunting rifle. Jimmy had always scared me, even before he pinned me down on a bed in the motor court where Eddie lived. That darkness at the center of him was something I’d recognized, even then, as having the potential to surge.

  And just after Jimmy’s name, I found my mother’s, Kat Stackpole, toward the bottom of the list. I clicked the profile picture to enlarge it and studied her face smiling up from a book, a pink sunset and sandy beach behind her.

  Facebook asked me, “Would you like to send Kat Stackpole a friend request?”

  “No thank you,” I said aloud and snapped my laptop shut.

  I studied a waning last-quarter moon out the window over Miles’s shoulder, and it was minutes before I realized I was crying, although I’m still not completely sure why.

  This time Miles glanced up. “Claire, what’s wrong?”

  I topped off my wine. Held out the bottle toward his empty water glass.

  “Babe, do you think maybe you’re drinking too much?”

  “It’s only my second,” I said defensively, wiping my face on the sleeves of my sweater.

  “You seem down, sweetie. I worry that you’re depressed. And I’m not sure what to do for you.” Miles took off his glasses and set them on the table beside his stack of charts.

  To his credit, my husband tried to comfort me. The following morning, sensing that I was lost, that something inside me was slipping, he made a rare appearance at home on a Sunday during a long weekend of cardiology call. Pushing through the door, he was full of apologies.

  “Sweetie, I’m so sorry. Health care is changing so much right now, and this job is way more intense than I thought it’d be. I’m
trying to juggle all the patient care demands at the hospital with teaching the fellows and my research responsibilities at the university. The whole academic clinician role feels impossible. I’m exhausted. All of this work, and not enough research time, then the pay cut combined with our student loans and the insane loss we took on the house when we sold. It’s disheartening. Is Jonah sleeping already?”

  “He’s been down over an hour,” I said flatly. “It’s nine thirty. There are leftovers in the refrigerator. Foolishly, I had hoped we might eat as a family.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You need to let go of that expectation, Claire. It’s going to be crazy for a while.” Balancing an armful of shoeboxes stuffed with plastic bags, all of them ballooned with air and knotted at the top, he headed upstairs, calling back, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Curious, I followed him up to our bedroom and peered into the boxes, examining silver glints of light.

  “Fish?” I said.

  But Miles had already run back out into the cold to heft a fifty-gallon aquarium from the hatchback of his Volvo, shuffling the bulk of it up the walk while trying to avoid a slip on the ice.

  His weighty steps on the stairs signaled me to open our bedroom door, inside of which he steadied the tank on a wooden stand, catty-corner along my bedside. He stood back to admire the gift, his hands on his hips, as he stretched up onto his toes and grinned at me like a kid with cookie.

  “Well,” he admitted, “it won’t sound exactly like the tide rolling in, but it’s water. Salt water. And maybe watching the fish will soothe you some. Make you feel more at home, with your own tiny ocean.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said, softening, meaning it, wanting to unbutton the resentment I felt about the lonely weekend in a city where I was too new to possess friendships and too unfamiliar with the map to explore in what felt like a never-ending snowstorm.

  We sat together in the good kind of quiet.

  Still wearing his scrubs and wrinkled white coat, Miles cleaned the glass, tested the brackishness of the water with a hydrometer, installed the filter and heater, and added the coral, the plants, and the sand.