The Husband Hour(2)
Matt jostled for a spot in the crowded pen, nodding to a few journalists he knew and then looking up at the video of the president eulogizing the hockey star turned soldier. Beside him, a woman wearing a CNN badge began to cry at the words “American hero.” Seriously? Matt thought. Okay, it was a tragedy. But was it more of a tragedy because Rory Kincaid had been a famous athlete? There were thousands of guys deployed overseas at that very moment.
The jumbotron screen went dark, and a three-star general stepped up to the microphone.
Matt was more interested in the woman seated just a few feet away from him, Rory Kincaid’s young widow. He adjusted his camera, watching her through the lens. Her dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail, her face obscured by large black sunglasses. She was the epitome of fragile grief, and for a second Matt felt a pang. He shook it away.
Matt understood grief. He understood loss. But his hero had died without fanfare, just a footnote in history. One of tens of thousands; no one cared about that story.
So Matt supposed the Rory Kincaid story would have to do.
Chapter Two
Beth Adelman tried to keep up a cheerful patter of conversation during the hour-and-a-half drive from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore. Her daughter was having none of it. A month since Lauren had lost her husband, and she was only getting more withdrawn.
Lauren slumped in the passenger seat, staring out the window. Late January; the sky was gray and the trees bare. Beth turned on the defroster and glanced over at Lauren.
It was hard not to think of all the summer Saturday mornings when she and her husband and the girls had made this same drive. She would wake her daughters at the crack of dawn, and Lauren and Stephanie would climb into the backseat wearing bathing suits under their shorts and T-shirts. Still yawning, with butter-slick bagels in their hands, the girls squabbled. In those days, arguments over foot space and other backseat boundaries began before they even pulled onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. If a foot or stray beach-bag strap strayed over the line to someone else’s side while the car was still in the driveway, yelling would ensue, and Howard, cramming their suitcases into the trunk, would call out, “I’m going to stick one of you in here!” Joyful noise.
Such a contrast to the current ride.
Beth knew she was looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but even the eternal bickering between the girls was something she would gladly take in exchange for the current silence.
She turned off the Atlantic City Expressway, and Lauren lowered her window. Beth heard the call of seagulls, and she tried to convince herself that everything was going to be fine. That Lauren wasn’t making a mistake.
Beth didn’t usually think of the beach house that her parents had left her as secluded, but geographically it was out there. Absecon Island was a barrier island on the Jersey Shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Beth was afraid that it was the remoteness that attracted Lauren to the house, not just the comfort of family memories.
There was no traffic on Ventnor Avenue. In the winter, the Jersey Shore felt deserted. Beth was certain Lauren was underestimating how isolated she would feel all alone in that big house in the half-empty town under gray skies and with the chill of the wind off a cold ocean. But in the weeks since Rory had been killed in Iraq, there was just no talking to her. It was a tragedy, a god-awful tragedy. Of course it was. But her daughter had shut down, and for the life of her, Beth had no idea what to do about it.
“Lauren, look—there’s Lucy!” Beth said, pointing to the six-story elephant, a tourist attraction that had fascinated Lauren as a child. “You girls used to get so excited whenever we passed her. Remember?”
Lauren glanced to her left but said nothing.
Minutes later, Beth turned off Atlantic Avenue and onto a short cul-de-sac. The house her parents had left to her was a beachfront four-bedroom Colonial Revival, gray and white but somehow stuck with the name the Green Gable. In the old days, it wasn’t until hours after their arrival that the girls set foot inside. As soon as the car turned into the driveway, they pulled off their flip-flops and ran to the sand like they were “shot from a cannon,” as her father said every single weekend. It was still early, and the beach was empty enough for them to make an easy beeline to the ocean, Stephanie calling out, “Last one to the water is a rotten egg!”
“It’s not a race!” Lauren yelled, and yet she always dashed to keep up with her sister, her feet sinking into deep pockets of sand as she ran, stumbling but moving forward.
Beth sighed. Why couldn’t life always be that simple?
Now, the Green Gable was exactly as it had always been, except the wind-and sand-battered wood sign was more faded, the moss-green words almost indistinguishable from the gray background. Beth turned off the car and closed her eyes. How she wished her own mother were still around to tell her how to deal with this. But she was gone, leaving a beautiful house that was small consolation.
Lauren just sat there, zombielike.
“Come on, Lauren. Grab one of the bags.”
The house smelled musty and close. Beth cracked some windows despite the frigid wind. When she’d left in August, she hadn’t expected to return until spring. She couldn’t have imagined that a few months later, her handsome, vibrant son-in-law would be dead, leaving her younger daughter a widow, and that the Green Gable would beckon to Lauren with some false promise of peace.
“I’ll make a run to Casel’s for groceries,” Beth said, heading for the kitchen to take stock of what, if anything, she had left behind.