LIFE'S LOVE LOST
By Jeff S. Martindale
 

They intended to stay at the mountain resort for a long weekend at the behest of their therapist, who suggested a few days away from their troubles at home might do them some good.  But neither of them had the mettle for it and they decided to leave after barely a day.  Brenda drove.  Howard sat next to her but they might as well have been miles apart. 

Tufts of black clouds cast imposing islands on the rural landscape. Howard wore a faded blue Memphis State T-shirt, his favorite shirt, and black nylon shorts—much more comfortable for traveling than pants, he always said. Pants, with their stubborn, firm seams, and restrictive waistline, made him uncomfortable within the first few minutes.  He was everything you might expect in a middle-aged husband: portly, balding, risk averse, prone to passionate bursts of indignation. Brenda wore a plain white T-shirt and denim shorts over her petite frame. They might have been going to the beach. They both needed a tan. Their alabaster skin was the kind that readily blistered.

They passed a large green highway sign that announced over 300 miles remained before home. The heavens faded to black and occasional drops of rain dotted the windshield.  Brenda straightened her back.  “Please don’t let it rain today,” she sighed.

“We need it though,” Howard said.

Brenda stretched her neck, rotating her head in a slow counterclockwise motion, keeping her eyes focused on the highway.

They passed a church van teeming with chatty teenagers, then a motor home that loomed larger than a Greyhound bus, its white wheel cover painted with a blue jay and salutation script reading, ‘Dick and Scottie. Bells, TN’.  The drops fell on the windshield with greater frequency.  Brenda hated to drive in the rain, and silently wished she had let Howard drive, but she knew he’d find sports on the radio. Despite the eminent threat of thunderstorms, she’d rather drive in silence to the lulling thrum of rain on the roof than listen to Howard get himself worked up over the game.

A blustery rain-swept wind flattened the wildflowers in the highway median.  It pushed their white Taurus onto the shoulder, and Brenda eased up on the accelerator pedal.

“Do you want me to drive?” Howard asked.

“No,” Brenda said with thinly veiled annoyance. “I’m okay.”

Soon a trailer truck pulling a load of new cars impeded their progress.  Its rear wheels flung sheets of rain and mist in the air.  Brenda slowed down and created some distance between her and the truck.  Howard sighed.  Brenda knew how he hated her passive driving.  He would have passed the truck, she thought, and sped up until the truck had dropped safely behind.  But she hated that moment of watery blindness that made her grip the wheel in panic and fear for her safety.  No, she would drop back.

“It’s not that bad,” he said.

“I’m driving. Okay?”

“Maybe if you turned the wipers on high then—”

“Will you let me drive!” Brenda snapped.

Brenda squeezed the steering wheel, her slender fingers turning white at the joints.  She had narrow, sunken eyes that belied her efforts to conceal her age, and as she spoke an imperceptible string of spasms distressed the right-hand corner of her mouth as if there were some deep-seated conflict between her thoughts and her words.

The car contracted around them like a deflating balloon. The click-swoosh cadence of the wipers ticked away the landmarks, and the smell of the summer rain wafting in through the vent carried the smell of pollution.  They coasted underneath an underpass she recognized as the exit for Fairfield Glade. Barbara reflected on the months – which now felt like years – since they had vacationed there soon after learning of her pregnancy.  The showers ceased for an empty, disquieting moment.  Brenda exhaled a pant of relief, but the thrashing on the windshield began almost as soon as it stopped.  She stared pensively in her rear view mirror at the memories, which shrank swiftly in the void.

“Did you notice that?” Brenda asked.  She had to elevate her tone; the persistent, unrelenting sound of a thunderstorm overwhelmed them.

“What?”

“Back there. The exit we just passed.”

“No. Why?”

Brenda heaved a deep sigh. “Never mind.”

Not even the double time pace of the wipers could clear the insistent shower, and Brenda debated silently whether to pull over and wait it out.

“Do you want to pull over?” Howard asked, sensing her hesitancy but more anxious to learn the score of the game. 

“No, I’m okay,” Brenda replied.

They passed a series of smokestacks whose tops disappeared into the clouds.  The rain-swollen lake surrounding them tested its banks, and the rain looked to persist for a while.  Brenda explored tactily whether the wipers had a higher speed.  They didn’t.

“Look, if the rain’s too heavy then just—”

“I’m not pulling over, Howard.”

She passed another exit and saw a solitary gas station choked with parked cars and fatigued travelers waiting out the storm. She wanted to join them but couldn’t. The rain gushed down with a Biblical vengeance, transforming the median into a quagmire. Brenda maintained a stable velocity, pointing the car west towards home.

“I didn’t think you cared,” she said.

“What?”

She shook the thought from her mind.  She knew better. “You’re not listening to the game,” she said, flatly.

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were, Howard.”

He sighed away the anger and leaned his head against the headrest.

“Brenda, I just want—”

“You just want what?” she snapped, momentarily jerking the car over the center line before righting it.  “What about what I want, Howard? Have you ever thought about that?”

“I’m hurting, too, you know,” he replied, evenly, eyes closed.

They rode in silence for several minutes.  The tune of Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head entered Brenda’s consciousness, and she rubbed her eyes in an attempt to eradicate the annoying melody.

Howard whispered something inaudibly and Brenda asked him what he said.

“I said I can’t take this anymore.”

Brenda sighed.  “It should stop in a few hours.”

Howard sighed back, and Brenda realized then he wasn’t referring to the storm.  They had tiptoed around the matter, never so much as saying the ‘d’ word but alluding to it with obvious inferences.  They were at wit’s end even when Brenda finally became pregnant after many years of trying, but the burden of her miscarriage was the last straw of their relationship, though each did their best to deny the inevitable.

Howard slouched in his seat.  Brenda stared at the road ahead.

“Maybe you’re right,” she mumbled.

Brenda surveyed the highway, but her eyes seemed duller and moister, as if the unavoidable had finally hit home.  She brushed the tears away with the back of a hand.  “What do we do now?” Howard asked.

“I don’t know,” Brenda said, though she knew.

“Maybe we should just end it now,” Howard blurted.  It came out more strongly than he meant, and the timbre of his words made Brenda cry.

“I never wanted it to come to this,” she said through the tears, her words so softly spoken that the loud thumping of the rain on the roof made it look as though she only mouthed them.

“Me neither,” he said.

Howard sighed then closed his eyes. Brenda was content to let Howard sleep the whole way to Memphis, but a few minutes shy of Cookeville she hit a deep pothole, and with the resulting shock he gasped, sat up, and looked around.

“I’m sorry,” Brenda said.

Rain fell on the roof of the white Taurus, making a sound like God firmly drumming his fingertips.

Howard moved out two days later.  Brenda thought she would be relieved after he left, but the house without Howard’s TV sports and incessant snoring felt, instead, devoid of soul, spiritless.  There was something callous about the empty spaces, as if they mocked her.

The glaring vacancies left by Howard’s personal belongings made a stronger impression on Brenda than she expected.  Not just the little things, like his underwear and socks, but in particular the larger items, like the stationary bike where he hung his shirts and the empty void in the garage where he parked his car. She had always criticized his sloppiness but now those chaotic piles of dirty clothes and cluttered arrangements of lawn tools in the garage called to her, like the remnants of a child who has left home for good.

They owned an impressive midtown home, an abundant surplus for only two people.  An arbor of tall oaks lined their street, overarching the road to block out the harsh Memphis sun, creating a tunnel of refreshing shade.  The wide porch wrapped around either side of their house like a tight embrace. The rooms inside were spacious and ashen.  Brenda’s closet looked unusually exposed what with only a handful of dresses, skirts, and assorted coats hanging from the dusty bars.  She kept the professionally decorated baby’s room impeccably neat. It lacked only the pitter-patter of little feet on its hardwood floors to make the scene whole.

The prospect of redecorating the house triggered a spark of Brenda’s interest.  She could organize it as she wanted and preserve it with ease. No more unread newspapers piled up on the coffee table. No more empty food containers littering the counter tops. No more dirty dishes collecting in the kitchen sink, awaiting transfer to the dishwasher. Brenda found that particularly upsetting.

She attended to a stack of dinner plates and began to rinse each one, ruefully tracing the china pattern with a finger. She sensed that she could hear the summoning cries of an infant echoing through the empty halls. A solemn quality marked her expression; she knew it all too well.

In this delusion of hers, the baby wore a white onesie underneath a blue chenille shawl that was a gift from her mother and still soft to the touch.  She felt like a ghost – like she wanted to die.  In a way, she had died, for the youthful and vivacious bride who spoke her wedding vows with all the hope in the world had been transformed into an embittered and hopeless woman who mourned for the life she so desperately wanted.  Reflecting on the day that she learned she was pregnant, she thought it the final answer to their prayers.  When she saw the sonogram of the squirming fetus and squeezed her husband’s hand, she temporarily forgot about the tense and unhappy years, forgot about the trampled expectations with each negative pregnancy test, forgot about how close they had come – on several occasions – to ending their marriage.  She turned on the tap and reached down into the warm streaming water, lifting a cupped handful to her face, feeling the sting in her eyes.  It had amounted to nothing after all, she thought about her marriage.  It could have also been her life.

At times – when she reorganized the baby’s clothes or took an extra moment to stroll past the church nursery – she knew she had to let it go.  She couldn’t understand why she had been denied a life that, in her advancing years, left little prospects for hope.  She’d always loved children.  Thinking then of Howard’s lukewarm reception to the news of their pregnancy, she doubted they could’ve made it last for long.  Perhaps she’d spent their entire marriage holding onto a dream that only she shared, staying with him long enough hoping that eventually he would give her what she wanted.  But both eventually left her, and she wasn’t exactly sure how it had happened.

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