Twilight's Child (Cutler 3)

9

LIFE GOES ON

DESPITE MY HOPES AND EXPECTATIONS, THE RECUPERATION FROM my miscarriage took months and months. Even though Dr. Lester assured me I was recovered physically, I was continually tired and listless. Even after I had become pregnant, I was used to wo

rking an endless stream of hours without so much as pausing to go to the bathroom, but now I found a mere hour or-so seemed to exhaust me. I had to retreat to take frequent naps. Sometimes I would just lie there with my eyes open, wondering and dreaming about the baby I had lost.

Jimmy tried to get me to take a winter vacation. He wanted to go fishing in the Florida Keys, but I kept postponing it until he finally gave up.

"You're behaving like a bear in hibernation," he told me. I did welcome the gray, cold days because they drove me to sleep, and sleep seemed to provide the only hours of relief.

Nothing excited me, not even Jimmy's plans for our house. I tried to show interest, but he took one look at my face as he explained the architectural drawings and saw that I wasn't really listening. I knew he had deliberately thrown himself into this project soon after my miscarriage in the hope that it would plant new seeds of happiness and joy in the garden of our marriage. He was trying so hard, every way he could, to pull me out of the doldrums.

Finally, one spring afternoon when he came up to our room and found me staring blankly up at the ceiling, he exploded. I hadn't seen him in this sort of a rage since our early days when Daddy Longchamp would rip us abruptly out of one place to speed us through the night to another, making us leave treasured possessions and new friends behind.

Jimmy threw up his hands and almost made me jump out of my skin with his outburst.

"This can't go on, Dawn!" he exclaimed. He paced in front of me, pounding his feet down so hard, the whole room shook. "You're letting everything get the best of you. Everyone's noticed it and is upset. It's even affecting Christie."

"I'm sorry, Jimmy," I said. My tears began to rise against the floodgates, threatening to overflow and send torrents down my cheeks.

"It's not enough to apologize, to lie there day after day, night after night, for months and months, feeling sorry for yourself. A terrible thing has happened, I know. I hate that it has happened, but we can't change that now. We've got to go on and build anew," he lectured.

"I've spoken repeatedly to the doctor, and he assures me there's no physical reason for you to be this way," he added. "What you've been doing," he fumed, "is letting Clara Sue win, giving her the satisfaction of knowing she's succeeded in destroying you, and in destroying you, she's destroyed us." He flopped into a chair, lowered his head to his chest and folded his hands in his lap, exhausted.

I couldn't stand to see Jimmy so unhappy, looking so beaten down. I hated myself for doing this to him. He had been so patient and loving and understanding, but even he had limited tolerance. For the first time I realized that I could very well drive him away from me. What was I doing? I had to get hold of myself.

"Oh, Jimmy, I'm sorry," I repeated, sitting up. "I don't mean to be this way. Really, I don't. But every time I try to snap out of it a dark gray cloud sweeps in and makes me feel as if I will live under stormy skies forever."

"Dawn, you're beginning to sound and act more and more like your mother," he replied. "Is that what you want to happen to you? Do you want to become that sort of invalid, just lying around all day and night moaning and groaning about how hard life has been to you?

"Well, it has been hard, and it might even be harder before we're through, but we're still very young, and we've got to be strong and do the best we can to overcome every defeat. What about Christie? What about our new baby when he or she finally comes? What about each other?" he pleaded, his eyes filled with tears.

I swallowed mine back and bit down on my lower lip. Then I nodded.

"You're right, Jimmy. I am being like Mother, self-centered, self-pitying. It's not fair to you," I confessed.

"Not just me," he corrected quickly. "It's not fair to yourself, either. Now I insist," he said, rising, "that you get yourself up from that bed and follow me outside."

"Outside?"

"I'm about to break ground for our new home," he announced, “and that requires some celebration."

"You're about to break ground?" I asked incredulously. All this was going on around me, and I hadn't even noticed. Before the miscarriage I had gotten so a doorknob wasn't changed on a room without my knowing about it.

"Yes. I rushed things along as soon as the warm weather permitted," he admitted. "I want us to be living in our own home by this summer season. I've come to the conclusion that you might have been right about our lives in the hotel. Not that I believe in ghosts and all that sort of thing," he added quickly, waving the idea away. "But I do believe that being in these same surroundings day and night might be taking its toll. Grandmother Cutler left her mark on too much here. We don't have an opportunity to get away from it for a while, no relief. And I know how it plays on your mind all the time.

"Living in our own home, away from the hotel, even though it's still technically on hotel grounds, we'll feel free, more like we're in our own world—a world we're designing, and not one we're inheriting already designed by someone else," he explained.

"Besides, Philip is getting married at the end of his last college term and wants to live here with his wife. I think," he said, perceptively and perhaps prophetically, "it will be better for us to be further apart, better for all of us to have some privacy."

Suddenly what Jimmy was saying and doing did excite me. I would never forget how Mother looked when she left the hotel to marry Bronson Alcott, how she seemed to have had a burden lifted from her shoulders, escaping from under Grandmother Cutler's shadow. She was happier, more energetic and alive. Why couldn't the same be true for me? "You're right, Jimmy. Let me just wash my face and freshen up. I do want to be part of it and see the ground-breaking."

"Well, that's why I came up here to get you, and when I saw you laid out again and moping about, I just couldn't stand it. I'm sorry I was so angry," he said.

"No, Jimmy. You had every right to be. In fact, I'm glad you were," I said, and I kissed him. I washed my face and threw on a cable-knit blue sweater, and then we went down and out a rear entrance of the hotel.

Jimmy had chosen a house lot a good half mile or so south of the main building. It was on a rise and provided an unobstructed view of the ocean, yet there were enough trees and bushes to give us a sense of privacy.