The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,74

things, but his was worse: his wife had had a seizure. She’d fallen to her knees walking into a neighbor’s house to play bridge. Crumpled. Her friends were stunned, thought she was joking with them. Too young to have such a thing happen. He said she was in a coma; he didn’t know whether she’d make it through the next day, let alone speak or walk. Her future is up in the air, was what he said. His voice came apart in the telling, actually broke up, like static on the line.

“Oh, Peter, dear god,” I said. “What can I do? Do you need help with the children, or with dinner or something?”

He shook his head, explained that his in-laws had come to help.

Sun streamed in the windows, warming the front seat of the old Buick, and I couldn’t help thinking that it smelled like Play-Doh and crayons. It smelled like what I was trying to escape.

After a few minutes, he took my hand.

“Don’t you see, Ann, that this is a wake-up call?”

“Wake-up call?”

“Life is short,” he said through his tears. “I lost you once, and I don’t want to be apart from you any longer.”

“Peter, you’ve had a great shock—”

“It shocked me into realizing that I love you and I belong with you. It’s always been you, Annie, always.”

“Peter, now is not the time to—”

My front door opened. I knew the sound by heart, the creak of wood scraping ever so slightly across slate. I turned my head slowly to the right, dreading what I knew was coming. Emma, on the front porch.

“Go back inside, sweetie,” I said, climbing out of the car.

“Who’s that man?”

“No one, honey.”

“Mommy, I want my bath.”

“In a minute.”

“No, now! Now, Mommy!”

“I’ll wait a bit,” Peter whispered. “Go.”

When I went upstairs the baby started to cry, so I drew the water and put the children in together. Efficient, I guess you’d call it. And it should have been fun for them, no? Other mothers did this, I knew. There was nothing wrong with trying to get it done fast, even if someone wasn’t waiting for me downstairs.

Emma begged for bath bubbles and when I told her it was too slippery for the baby, she whined, splashing her fists repeatedly until I gave in. I tried to direct the capful of Mr. Bubble toward her end of the tub, but of course the baby was delighted. He squealed and splashed his hands; the water was an inch or two higher than he was used to, but he sat up sturdily; I didn’t even need to steady him anymore.

I put bubbles on their chins and laughed at their silly faces. It was fun, it was friendly; doesn’t it sound like fun? But I was thinking of Peter and his comatose wife and his little house, the defeat of the roof, the old flowers that needed deadheading. So different from the house I grew up in. Our house is old and crumbling, but it’s stately. It’s always in need of repair, but we always repair it.

I thought of Peter daydreaming of me at the office, the surreptitious phone calls, in contrast to how Theo worked all the time. And I couldn’t help thinking of what had started it all, when I found him at my high school reunion and he twirled me around the floor, shocked at my husband being away on business. He said, as he always had, the perfect thing. His words just right even if his house, his life, his marriage were all wrong. “If I was married to you, I would never leave you home alone, Annie, never.”

It finally hit me: Peter had no passion, no ambition, for anything but me. He didn’t care about his job. He didn’t tend his own yard, or scrape the curls of old paint off his house. He always said the right thing, but he didn’t always do the right thing.

And that’s what I was thinking as I clung to my son, mine, dipping my hand full of water over his hair, smelling his newly washed scalp. He was mine, not Peter’s, not Theo’s. I’d gone home the night of the reunion, after Peter and I lay beneath the bleachers together and he told me he had always loved me, and that he always would. I’d gone back home after that marvelous release of finally sleeping with Peter, after too much wine and too many cigarettes on the third-base line, I’d gone home and grabbed Theo roughly, wrestling