“Were you?” Tate asked.
“Nope,” Barrett said. He paused, licked his lips. “There were months when we fought all the time, where we couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and when she called my cell phone, I wouldn’t answer. And then, when she was seven months pregnant, she dropped her coffee cup.”
“Dropped her coffee cup?” Tate said.
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Barrett said, burrowing his head into Tate’s side.
He revisited the dropped coffee cup a few days later without provocation, and Tate was grateful. She didn’t want to push, but she wanted to know. She felt like she was watching a movie and she knew something really bad was going to happen and then, at the critical moment when she was bracing herself, the reel broke and the screen went blank. Tate was caught up in a sense of sickening dread. Just tell me! If he could give her the nightmare stuff, then she could be his happy ending.
“She dropped the coffee cup and it smashed against the floor,” he said. “And I thought she threw it out of anger, because that was where we were with each other. There was a lot of anger and resentment, and a smashed coffee cup wouldn’t have been the worst thing that had happened. But Steph said she dropped it accidentally. She said her hand had stopped working.”
This seemed odd, he said, but they ignored it. Steph’s hands were numb, and then her feet. She had problems walking in a straight line; she weaved like a drunk. Her handwriting deteriorated because her fingers didn’t work right. It was strange. She thought it was a symptom of the pregnancy; some women got acute carpal tunnel while carrying. It had something to do with the way the baby was positioned. When Steph mentioned the symptoms to her obstetrician-and added the fact that she kept biting her tongue-he suggested she fly to Boston for some tests. At first, Stephanie declined. They didn’t have the money to go to Boston, she wasn’t sure her medical insurance would cover the tests, she couldn’t miss work. But the symptoms got worse, and she said she’d go. She went alone. Barrett had to work and pick up Cameron at day care.
“I should have gone,” Barrett said. “But honestly? I wasn’t that worried.”
Stephanie was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was always fatal, though no one knew how quickly the disease would progress.
Always fatal.
Here, Barrett tried very hard not to cry, but his voice was thick and his lower lip trembled. Tate had seen the very same look on Tucker’s face the day before when he fell down in the boat and skinned his knees.
“So we went from being one way to being completely another. She was going to die. I had one kid two years old and another kid not even born yet, and Stephanie knew she wasn’t going to live to see them grow up. She wasn’t sure she would live to see their next birthdays. I don’t know if there is anything sadder than a mother who knows she has to leave her babies behind, but if there is, I don’t want to see it.”
He was crying, oh, God, of course, and Tate was crying, and she thought of Barrett Lee, five years old, sitting on the stern of his father’s boat in his orange life preserver. You just didn’t know what life was going to hand you. You didn’t know what love you would find, what love would be snatched away.
They performed a C-section, Barrett said, got the baby out five weeks early. Tucker was on a respirator for six days, but he was fine. The doctors immediately went to work on Stephanie-drugs, therapies, experimental procedures meant to slow the sclerosis down. But the disease was brutal and aggressive. Tucker was born in February; by May, Steph was in a wheelchair. Cameron would ride his tricycle, and Barrett would push Tucker in his carriage with one hand and Steph’s wheelchair with the other hand. They would go up the street, then down the street; it was the happiest they were during that time, but Barrett said he couldn’t stand to think about it.
Steph lost the ability to speak, and she could no longer write. Still, she used a kind of sign language. A fist to the heart meant “I love you.” Cameron still held his hand to his heart every time he and Barrett parted, and Barrett hoped he always would.
“The worst thing was that Steph had lucid thoughts. Intellectually, she was fully functional, the doctors said, but she had lost the ability to communicate. She was trapped in this failing body. And I just worry that she didn’t get everything out. There were so many things she wanted to say-to me, to the kids.” He looked at Tate. “I don’t know how to raise them.”
“Of course you do,” Tate said.
“There were times after Steph died-like when Cameron got the chicken pox-when I would think, You didn’t tell me how to deal with this. Where are you?”
Steph died in November, at home, thanks to a full-time nursing staff that Barrett borrowed a large sum of money to pay for. Stephanie had been bedridden since September and on a feeding tube since October. Barrett would bring the kids in to her and he would read stories aloud to all of them. Only funny stories. Happy stories.
“And then she died. Early in the morning, while I was watching her. She looked at me and I could see her trying to move her arm, and the next second her eyes closed, and she was gone. And in a way I was relieved because I didn’t have to be strong anymore. I cried every day for twelve months. I cried with the kids and I cried alone. I thought back on all the arguments we’d had and how angry we’d been, and I felt ashamed. But at the time those things were happening, they seemed unavoidable. We were young parents with young kids and no money and even less time. I always knew we were in a phase of our lives that would pass. I believed things would get easier and we would grow older and wiser and we would have our chance at perfect happiness.”
Perfect happiness: Tate knew it was naive of her, but she believed in it. She had, for example, been perfectly happy on the beach when the kids came to Tuckernuck for the bonfire. Sitting on the cold sand, intertwined with Barrett, Tucker asleep across their laps, with the fire and her mother and India sitting bundled in blankets, and Chess throwing rocks into the water with Cameron, and the full moon and the stars above, Tate had thought: Stop time. I want to stay right here.
Once Barrett had finished the story, Tate lay beside him, humbled. She wasn’t worthy of him. She hadn’t survived what he had survived. She hadn’t survived anything. Her life had been bloodless. Maybe that made her the ideal partner for him. She was whole and strong and unscarred; she could be a pillar for him, if he would let her.
Perfect happiness existed, but perhaps only in small increments. Because not two days later, Birdie-Tate’s darling, beloved mother-spoke the words that drove a stake through Tate’s heart. She called Tate and Barrett’s relationship a “fantasy”; she called it “make-believe.” Tate was deeply hurt, and she was angry. She fled from her mother’s words, and even though Birdie came up to the attic to apologize, she didn’t take back what she had said. Tate wondered: Was her relationship with Barrett a fantasy? Was it make-believe? Why? Because it was summertime? Because she was supposed to return to her condo in Charlotte? Or was it something else? If Tate was in a relationship, it must not be serious. She was, in Birdie’s words, “as naive as a child.” Only Chess’s relationships were to be taken seriously, such as her relationship with Michael Morgan. That relationship had been taken seriously-because they lived in New York City, because Michael Morgan owned his own business and wore a suit to work-and look what had happened there. Tate didn’t know why Birdie would have said what she said, but Tate didn’t dare probe deeper. She couldn’t bear to hear Birdie say that Barrett wasn’t good enough for Tate or that he was unsuitable because he hadn’t been to college, or because he worked with his hands, or because he was a native islander and was therefore somehow a lesser person than Tate, who had been born and raised in New Canaan.