Sea Scope

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoBy the time Derek came to bed, I was almost asleep. He slid in next to me as quietly as possible. It hadn't always been this way, our moving around one another like strangers. It seemed to have started two years ago with Glen's death, but it probably went back to the day he told me he wouldn't try any fertility treatments and we had to accept the fact we weren't going to be parents.

I kept my breathing steady as he turned away from me. We weren't that old. I had turned 30 back in the fall. Derek was 35. My parents had me at those same ages and Glen two years later, but they'd only been married a year before I was born. Dad's family thought he was a confirmed bachelor until Mom came along and swept Martin Brewster off his feet.

Derek began snoring. Up until two months ago, we were still making love occasionally but not with the fervor we had while trying to conceive. The doctors assured us we were both healthy. “Unexplained infertility” was the explanation that wasn't an explanation for our problem.

It was true I'd used birth control regularly until we decided to try for a family, but I hadn't taken a pill for three years. Glen's death made our situation more desperate, or at least I was desperate. The doctors said we could try in vitro, but Derek thought that was crazy. He knew our insurance wouldn't cover it and believed it was possible we could still get pregnant the old-fashioned way. Then he stopped making love to me.

I wondered if all the time he was putting into his classes and taking on extra workshops and intensives, attending teacher conferences and seminars, was his way of coping or whether he was seeing someone else. I hid my pain behind my paintings. Not the cute cat sketches, but a bunch of others I had hidden upstairs—paintings of us when we were happy—on our honeymoon riding a tandem bike, painting the rooms when we first moved into the house, lying on the beach at sunset with champagne glasses to celebrate our first anniversary. Memories that could've been in a diary but were composed on canvas instead. I'd never shown them to him, and as I respected the privacy of his office, he never set foot into my art studio unless invited.

There were a set of other paintings, too. I started them after Glen died. They were paintings of my brother and me as kids at Sea Scope inside, around, and on top of the lighthouse. There was only one of Glen as an adult the last time he'd visited me before leaving for California and his death. In the darkness of the bedroom with Derek snoring beside me, I pictured it. Glen shared many of my features in a male version. He was fair and wore his hair shoulder length. I'd always been after him to cut it, but I had to admit it looked good on him. The only fault in his face was a scar on his cheek. He'd gotten it in a college bar fight when he told someone about his father's suicide and they called his dad a coward for shooting himself and not even leaving a note of explanation.

I pushed these thoughts aside and tried to sleep. If Glen was around, I could confide in him about Derek, something I couldn't do with Mom or Carolyn even though I knew they both suspected we were having difficulty in our marriage. Glen had a special way of listening, and that's probably why he became a psychologist. I laughed to myself at the thought of him in his leather jacket riding his motorcycle around L.A. In his office, he provided a safe ear to drug addicts, those struggling with their sexuality, wannabe movie stars, and pregnant teens. He'd sit there with his hands cupped together, give them a deep appraising glance, and make them feel, during an hour on his couch, that they were still worth something, still had something to live for, unlike his own father.

I wasn't surprised when I finally fell asleep and dreamed of Glen and me at Sea Scope. There was no calendar in my dream, but I knew what day it was. I'd dreamt about it for years until Glen suggested I see his psychology professor who also had his own practice. I had two visits before I quit. Talking about the dream did nothing to eradicate it because it wasn't a dream. It was the memory of what happened that summer nearly twenty years ago. The day my brother and I found Michael's body under the lighthouse.

My consciousness took over, and the scene began to fade. I woke with a start. I was sweating and had thrown the blankets off. My stomach also felt queasy.

Derek stretched beside me but didn't wake. I glanced at the alarm clock. Two a.m. I didn't want to go back to sleep. I was afraid of having another dream. I lay in bed trying not to think of anything and then decided to go up to my garret and draw, hoping it would relax me.