Hope Street Part 4

"I sat on a bench for a while and then I got cold and came inside. You don't have to take care of me, Curt. I'm fine."

His gaze collided with hers. Like h.e.l.l she was fine. Just before she'd fled the room she'd been a wreck. The only reason she'd fled was that she couldn't bear the idea of letting Curt clean up her wreckage.

Skeptical about just how fine she was, he decided to test her. "How about watching a little more of the girls' video?"

Her lips tensed. She knew he was challenging her, and she was too proud to hand him a victory. "Sure," she said, a bit too readily. She returned to the bed, settled onto it, kicked off her shoes and swung her feet up onto the mattress. Then she reached for her gla.s.s of port, which she'd left on the nightstand when she'd bolted. She took a sip and nodded at him. "Let's watch some more."

She'd pa.s.sed that test. Why not give her another? He carried the decanter over to the other nightstand, then climbed onto the bed next to her, propping a few pillows behind his head and shoulders. He shot her a smile that he hoped looked more confident than it felt, aimed the remote at the TV set and clicked the b.u.t.ton.

Accompanied by music from the Evita soundtrack, a series of photos depicted Ellie's final year at Brown. Ellie grinned at the photographs of her at a.s.sorted social gatherings and sports events. Jessie's voice broke through the background music to intone, "'In a way, our last year at Brown was great because Ellie had more time to spend with her friends. Sure, she missed Curt and spent most weekends with him in Boston, but when he wasn't around, we hung out together, danced all night at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel and volunteered to be stagehands for this bizarre campus production of a play called Ovum. It was about an egg.' Anna Krozik."

"Ovum?" Curt scowled. "I don't remember that."

"I didn't tell you everything I was doing while you were in law school," Ellie said, sounding a bit smug.

"Dancing at Lupo's? I used to take you to Lupo's."

"When you were in Providence. Once you moved to Boston, I went to Lupo's with Anna, instead. And other friends."

"Hmm." Of course he'd known that she'd had a life in Providence while he'd been busting his a.s.s at Harvard. He'd had a life, too. He'd hit the bars with his cla.s.smates, scored occasional tickets to Red Sox games, caught Bonnie Raitt performing one night at a coffeehouse near Harvard Square. But he couldn't recall dancing at a rock club with anyone other than Ellie. And he certainly hadn't worked backstage at a show called Ovum. "What was that play about?"

"You heard what Anna said. It was about an egg." Her cryptic smile let him know she was enjoying herself at his expense.

He played along. "So, what did the stagehands do? Build a nest on the stage?"

"It wasn't a chicken egg. It was a human egg. The play explored reproductive issues. Two guys played sperm."

"Lucky guys."

"They were the comic relief."

He feigned indignation, but inside he was laughing. All right, so maybe Ellie was fine. He detected no lingering symptoms of her earlier despair.

The movie moved on to Ellie's graduation from Brown. This time she was the one in the flowing brown graduation robe, while Curt was dressed in civilian attire. One photo showed her flanked by her parents; one featured just Ellie and Curt. In that one, she was holding another bouquet of roses that he'd given her.

When was the last time Curt had given her flowers? Maybe if he'd showered her with bouquets, she wouldn't be divorcing him now.

Yeah, right. A gift of flowers would have infuriated her. In the days after Peter's death, their house had filled with flowers. Flowers from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from Peter's cla.s.smates and teachers. So many flowers that the perfume had cloyed, and then the flowers had died. Day by day, petals had faded to brown and dropped from their stems. Day by day, stalks had drooped and pollen had spread in a fine, pale dust under each vase. Watching the bouquets die was like reliving Peter's death over and over.

Two weeks after the funeral, Curt had arrived home to find Ellie cramming all the dying bouquets into a huge black trash bag. He couldn't imagine bringing her flowers after that.

Shoving away the memory, he focused on the video. A few shots of the nursing-school building at Boston University, where Ellie had received her RN degree. A few shots of Children's Hospital, where she'd worked while he'd finished law school. A few shots of the building that had housed their first apartment, in Allston. He'd had to commute on the T across the Charles River and into Cambridge to reach the law school every day, but the place had been cheaper than the rentals on the Cambridge side of the river, and with Ellie often working a night s.h.i.+ft, he'd wanted her to have a quick commute.

They'd been happy then, he recalled. Shabby apartment, budgeting their pennies, both of them working like dogs, sometimes too tired to eat, let alone make love-but they'd been so exuberantly happy. Their flat had been furnished with Salvation Army castoffs and they'd dined on macaroni and cheese several nights a week. Ellie's parents had been appalled that she was living with Curt without the benefit of marriage. "He's never going to marry you if you live with him, Ellie. You know the saying. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk free?" Ellie's mother had often nagged. But her parents did like him, and once he'd finished law school, he'd bought the cow.

A t.i.tle appeared on the screen: The Wedding. "Oh, G.o.d," Ellie muttered.

"We survived it," he reminded her.

"Barely. I wonder how the girls are going to spin this part of the story." She nestled back against the pillows and sipped some port.

The screen filled with a photo of an engraved wedding invitation and then a faded clipping of the engagement announcement that had appeared in the New York Times. "I'd forgotten that," Ellie murmured. "Your mother got our engagement into the Times."

"My mother could have gotten it onto a billboard in Times Square," Curt noted. "She was very well connected in the city. She probably still is, even though they don't live there anymore."

"My parents were blown away by that. They'd thought it was the pinnacle of something that they'd gotten an announcement into the Pinebrook Weekly News. Then, when they found out your mother got us mentioned in the Times, they freaked out."

Curt shrugged. He remembered how intimidated Ellie's parents had been by his parents. They'd always thought his privileged background was something to be awed, and because Curtis Frost, this blue-blood scion of the American aristocracy, had deigned to marry their daughter, the product of their humble family, they'd ultimately forgiven Ellie for skipping medical school and living with Curt before they were legally wed. That his family, while affluent, was far from the ranks of the megamillionaires hadn't mattered to them. As far as they'd been concerned, a Harvard Law School graduate who belonged to a clan with dozens of Ivy Leaguers dangling like ripe fruit from the family tree, and a mother who could get her son's engagement announcement into the Times, was an aristocrat.

"The wedding of the decade took place at St. Bridget's in Pinebrook," Jessie narrated as the screen displayed a photo of the modest neighborhood church where Curt and Ellie had exchanged vows. "A reception at the Field House of the Pinebrook Country Day School followed."

"To my mother's everlasting fury," Ellie added.

"That was a beautiful place," Curt recalled, his memory confirmed by the pictures of the stone field house overlooking a pond on the campus of a ritzy private school in Ellie's hometown. "I never understood why your mother was opposed to our having the reception there."

"She hated everything I wanted," Ellie reminded him. "First she wanted the reception to be at a wedding factory in Waltham, one of those places that had six weddings going on at once. Then, when your mother got our announcement into the Times, she decided the Frosts were too cla.s.sy for that wedding mill. She announced that she and my father would take a home-equity loan and host the wedding at one of the downtown hotels. The Ritz-Carlton was her first choice because it sounded ritzy."

Curt grimaced. "No one should have to go into that much debt just for a wedding."

"Tell that to your daughters when they decide to get married," Ellie joked. "I'm figuring they'll cost us fifty thousand apiece, minimum."

"I'll buy them each a ladder. They can elope."

Ellie chuckled. "More than a few times during the planning of our wedding, I was ready to buy us a ladder and elope. My mother insisted the field house was going to smell like gym socks. I told her it was a beautiful facility, and it had a full kitchen for the caterers to work out of. I told her lots of parties were held there. She was sure the place would be full of hockey sticks and football helmets."

A photo appeared on the screen of Ellie in a bridal gown surrounded by her brides maids-Anna as her maid of honor and two cousins as additional attendants. Ellie hooted with scornful laughter. "Oh, Lord, the bridesmaids' dresses. The battle my mother and I had over those dresses nearly started World War III."

"Why?" Curt paused the DVD to study the dresses. "What's wrong with those dresses?"

"I decided my attendants should wear tea-length dresses instead of full-length, so they could get more than one wearing out of them."

The bridesmaids' dresses seemed nice enough to Curt, not that he was any expert. He wasn't even sure what tea-length meant. "Your mother didn't approve of tea-length?"

"She wanted them to wear full-length dresses in this hideous green color that made everyone look jaundiced. She thought navy blue was too wintry."

"Those dresses are sleeveless. That's not wintry. Who wears sleeveless dresses in the winter?"

"It didn't matter to her. She told me I was a thankless girl with no taste."

"Yeah, that's you," Curt teased her gently.

"And then there was..." She dissolved into laughter.

"What?"

"The silk purse."

"What silk purse?"

"I never told you about the silk purse?" More laughter, deep and throaty and s.e.xy. Curt might have fallen in love with her after their first, fantastic s.e.xual encounter, but her laughter had clinched the deal. When Ellie really laughed-something she did far too rarely these days-her entire body seemed to glow.

It took her a moment to collect herself. This time, at least, the tears glistening in her eyes weren't from sorrow. While she sniffled and chuckled and dabbed her eyes, he refilled his gla.s.s with port. Swallowing the last s.h.i.+mmers of her laughter, she extended her gla.s.s and he topped it off, as well.

"My mother wanted me to wear a silk purse around my wrist," she said. "It was a long, narrow thing-they actually sell them in bridal shops, although she was willing to sew one for me."

"What would you need a purse for? It's not like you'd be driving off in your wedding gown. I had our keys and a wallet."

"The purse is for collecting money gifts. Instead of having you stuff all those checks and envelopes into your pockets, I would have them hanging off my wrist."

"For the whole wedding?" Curt didn't get it. Why would someone want to spend an entire evening wearing a sack stuffed with money dangling from her arm?

"My mother insisted this was the correct thing to do. I told her I'd rather cut off my hand than wear one of those things."

Curt nodded. "That sounds like something you'd say."

"We had one of the biggest fights of our life over that stupid purse. Bad enough my bridesmaids weren't wearing full-length gowns. Bad enough I wasn't going to have a flower girl or a ring bearer. Bad enough we were having the party at the field house instead of the Ritz-Carlton. Bad enough I wanted to wear my hair straight, the way I always wore it, instead of spending the morning of the wedding at a salon getting it sprayed and gelled into some weird configuration-and that I polished my own nails the night before the wedding instead of getting a professional manicure. But my pa.s.sing on the silk purse? My mother sewed one against my wishes and brought it with her to the field house, insisting that I wear it. There we were, in the powder room, having this violent argument through clenched teeth while all the guests were wandering in and out to pee and touch up their lipstick."

"You should have worn the purse," he said.

Ellie eyed him incredulously. "Are you kidding?"

"In fact, I think both girls should wear silk purses when they get married, too. I think we should insist on it." He tried to keep his expression deadpan, but evidently, he couldn't suppress a small grin.

Ellie poked him in the arm and snorted. "I'll make you wear a silk bag over your head," she grumbled, and they both laughed.

In the midst of his laughter, a wave of sorrow knocked him sideways. When was the last time he and Ellie had laughed together? When had they last teased each other, joked with each other, pulled each other's legs? G.o.d, he missed this. He wanted it back.

Well, he couldn't have it back. During the worst period of their lives, Ellie had shut herself off from him, and he'd dealt with her rejection in a bad way, and too much damage had been done. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put their shattered marriage back together again.

Next to him, Ellie grew quiet, as well. He wondered if she was feeling what he was feeling-that profound loss, that dizzying sorrow. Probably not. He still loved her, despite his anger and resentment, but she no longer loved him. Not after what he'd done. She couldn't forgive him, wouldn't forgive him. He knew that.

He pressed the remote b.u.t.ton and the DVD started up again.

OH, G.o.d, THE WEDDING. Before now, whenever Ellie had thought about that marvelous day, she'd remembered only the joy of exchanging vows with Curt, entering into a bond that she'd believed could withstand anything life threw at it. She'd remembered not the silly fights with her mother over the silk purse, or the tension she and Curt were sure would flare between Anna, her maid of honor, and Steve, Curt's best man. Steve and Anna's breakup had not been amicable, and for their entire senior year at Brown, Anna and Ellie had never mentioned Steve's name. Yet at Curt and Ellie's wedding two years later, they'd greeted each other with surprising affection at the rehearsal dinner. They'd hugged, they'd sat together, they'd whispered intimately. Steve had offered Anna a lift back to the hotel where many of the wedding guests were staying. Before kissing Ellie good-night and sending her home with her parents for her final night as a single woman, Curt had whispered, "I wonder if Steve's going to be luckier than I am tonight."

Mostly, what Ellie remembered about her wedding was that it had given her Curt, forever. It had made her his wife and him her husband. For most of their marriage, she couldn't have imagined wanting anything more than to have Curt beside her for the rest of her life, through childbirth and mortgage payments, school concerts and career challenges. Her marriage had made that wish a reality. Together they had taken up permanent residence on Hope Street.

Not so permanent, as it turned out.

"'Ellie was a wonderful nurse,'" a male voice intoned on the DVD. The screen showed a series of scenes from Children's Hospital. "'She was not just top-notch when it came to medical care, but she was also a natural with the children. She could get them to smile and relax even when they were undergoing grueling treatments. They adored her.' Dr. Joshua Steiner, pediatric cardiologist."

"Wow." She let the video pull her away from thoughts of her wedding. "The girls dug up Josh Steiner for a quote? Last I heard, he was spending his retirement sailing around Nantucket."

"I guess he has to make landfall every now and then. They must have caught up with him when he was blown ash.o.r.e."

"Either that, or they invented the quote," she said. She'd been incredibly lucky to have a doctor like Josh Steiner as her first boss. The hardest part about leaving Children's Hospital had been ending her professional a.s.sociation with him. She'd stayed in touch with him over the years, though. He'd even returned to the mainland for Peter's funeral. That had been the last time she'd seen him.

A group photo of Ellie and two other ward nurses appeared on the screen, accompanied by an unfamiliar woman's voice: "'I loved Ellie, except she was always getting on my case to quit smoking.' Nurse Whitney Rodino."

"Nag, nag, nag," Curt said lightly. He must have sensed that her mood had turned melancholy, and he was trying to recapture their earlier humor.

"I gave her a pacifier from the stockroom once," she said, trying to match his easy tone. "I told her she should suck on that instead of a cigarette."

"I bet she wasn't as sorry as Josh Steiner was to see you go."

"I had only her best interests at heart."

"Nag," Curt grunted. Ellie allowed herself a smile.

She sipped her port and watched as the DVD displayed pictures of her swelling with her first pregnancy. There was a shot of a moving van in front of the house they'd bought just before Katie was born-the house on Birch Lane where they still lived-and a shot of Ellie standing on the front porch of the house, cradling a newborn Katie in her arms. Behind them hung the small s.h.i.+ngle Curt had carved and hung above the front door: "Hope Street." Seeing it adorning the entry to their home, so optimistic, so wrong, brought the sting of tears to Ellie's eyes, but she blinked them away.

"Katie was the perfect child," a narrator-clearly Katie-recited. "She was a genius, beautiful and always well-behaved. At the age of two months she could speak in complete sentences. At five months she was completely potty trained-although she'd been changing her own diapers right from the day she and her mother left the hospital. By the time she reached her first birthday, she could explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity and sing Wagner operas by heart. Ellie said, 'Raising children is so easy. Let's have another child.' It is thanks to Katie's magnificence that Jessie was born."

"Jessie," the narration continued, in Jessie's voice now, "proved that there is such a thing as more perfect. Jessie did everything Katie did, only she did it backwards and in high heels."

Ellie grinned and glanced at Curt. He was chuckling. No matter how badly they'd botched things, she thought, they'd still somehow managed to produce two fantastic daughters.

The movie offered a series of photos of Curt and Ellie and their two little girls-playing on a Slippy Slide in the backyard, posing on the deck of Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor, surrounded by toys and tatters of gift wrap in the living room on Christmas morning with a festively decorated tree looming behind them. Then Ellie began to look plump in the photos.

Not plump, pregnant.

"With two such utterly perfect daughters, Ellie decided there was room for another child in the family," Katie narrated.

"This time it was a son," Jessie continued. "Peter." A photo took up the screen, Ellie in the hospital, smiling blissfully and holding her swaddled newborn son high, her cheek resting against his.

Curt reached for her hand and folded his fingers around it, warm and strong. "You okay?" he asked.

She might have objected to his overprotectiveness, but she didn't. In truth, she appreciated his sensitivity. "I'm okay," she said quietly. "This is my life, the first fifty years. Peter is a part of it." A major part. A crucial part. The rawest, most bittersweet part.

"We could take a break," Curt offered.

"And do what?"

He searched her face. His hand was so warm on hers, his eyes as intense as they'd been the very first time they'd made love, when he'd gazed down at her in his lumpy bed in that ramshackle apartment on the east side of Providence, and she'd seen pa.s.sion and wonder in their glittering depths.

Certainly he couldn't be thinking about s.e.x now. In her film biography, Peter had just been born. His picture spread across the screen.

Yet why wouldn't Curt be thinking of s.e.x now? The day of his son's funeral, he'd wanted s.e.x. His son in a casket, his son lost forever, his son's spirit hovering like a thundercloud above their heads-and Curt had wanted s.e.x.

Two and a half years later, their marriage dead...was that what his eyes were telling her now? On the eve of their marriage's funeral, was he getting h.o.r.n.y?

"The restaurant might still be open," he said. "We could go downstairs and have a snack."

All right, she thought. He wasn't thinking about s.e.x. Which made her wonder why she was thinking about s.e.x.

Probably because she was stretched out on a bed next to the only man she'd ever loved, and because she'd just spent an hour reliving her life-a life that had included an intensely beautiful, decades-long love affair with Curt.

She had no appet.i.te-for food or s.e.x or anything else. But she forced a smile and nodded. "A snack would be nice."