The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [70]
“You couldn’t possibly be as surprised as I am,” Courtney had replied, with perfect, frigid calm.
Paisley shifts her weight, makes a small noise. Pain, Andrea thinks. Always now, a modicum of pain, impossible to hide when she’s sleeping. It seems ludicrous, on top of that, to be worrying about something as unimportant as Max Logan, who is no danger to Paisley or her family or anyone else who doesn’t get too close when he’s at the wheel of a car. Max. A teenaged boy so nondescript that his salient feature is his inability to drive. A child who, for no reason other than Paisley’s returning paranoia, is suddenly, again, the emblem of an act of despair. Why?
Andrea puzzles over this. In Paisley’s place, Andrea would have put all that behind her. Having been a wild woman once, before her daughter’s cancer tamed her, she knows there are some indiscretions—drunkenness on a night before an exam, an unfortunate pairing with a man—that have no consequences. There really are.
All the same, Andrea feels responsible for Paisley’s troubled state of mind. Her memory drags her back once again to the months after Paisley’s last miscarriage, the one they never talked about until months later, on the morning when Paisley leaped up from Andrea’s kitchen table while they were drinking coffee and vomited violently into Andrea’s sink.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Andrea demanded after she wiped Paisley’s face with a towel and helped her back to her seat. “Are you pregnant? Still sick from the miscarriage? What?”
Paisley set her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands for long moments before she spoke. “After the miscarriage,” she whispered, “the idiot doctor who did the D&C told me I’d never have children again. That’s what I didn’t want to talk about. I’ve never even told Mason.”
“Good God.” Andrea was stunned.
“I figured if I couldn’t have other children, if I couldn’t even do that, then what good was I?”
“What good are you? You’re a good wife! A great mother! Pretty! Nice. People like just being around you.”
Paisley nodded, as if she understood all this. “Good qualities don’t count if you can’t feel them inside.” She put an index finger to her heart, then to her temple. “I should have told you,” she said. “For a while the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning was having to get Brynne off to kindergarten. Even then I would have gone back and slept all day, but I promised I’d go for a walk first.”
“Oh, Paisley.”
“I didn’t want anyone to see me. You know the overgrown field behind the Honeywells’ house? There’s hardly ever anybody back there. That’s where I went.” Paisley had grown calmer, almost detached. “Once, I saw Iona Feld, but we didn’t speak to each other. The only other person I ever saw there was Eddie Logan.”
“Eddie Logan?”
Paisley nodded. “It was a day when I didn’t get out there till almost noon, which was unusual. There he was, all by himself, sitting on this blanket he’d spread out under a tree, with one of those thermal lunchboxes. Having a picnic like someone on vacation.”
“I thought he ran that hot tub store.”
“He said he was playing hooky—and he looked like it, too. He was wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt—imagine, a lumberjack shirt!—and chomping away on some kind of sandwich. He waved to me like his sitting there was the most normal thing in the world. I asked him if he did that often.”
“And did he?”
“He said he did it anytime he could. Ginger and the children were at her sister’s, so he’d left an employee in charge of the store and come home