The Law of Bound Hearts by Anne Leclaire

Author:Anne Leclaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307417190
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Libby

When Libby got home, there were three hang-ups on the answering machine and a message from Richard, calling to say he’d slated a private session with one of the students and reminding her, too, that he had the full rehearsal for the Music Department’s fall concert. He told her not to hold dinner. It was the first time in months that he’d stayed at school late, a sign that he was returning to his normal schedule. She supposed she should be glad, but she wasn’t. It was perverse of her, she knew. Hadn’t she been urging him for months not to worry about her, not to alter his schedule to tend to her, not to pass off all his duties to his teaching associate? But his message left her off balance, as if he had, in some way, gone on with life without her.

In the kitchen, the dishes were still in the sink from breakfast and she filled a pan full with soapy water. She could have put them in the dishwasher, but the ritual of doing them by hand calmed her. There was something almost meditative about immersing her hands in the warm water, wiping each dish with the sponge, and then rinsing the piece free of suds.

When she finished, it was a little after three o’clock, with the remainder of the afternoon to get through. There was always television, but she hadn’t the least interest in watching talk shows or soap operas or, God help her, reruns of situation comedies.

The wide gray stillness of the house encased her. She missed Richard. She missed the twins. She thought about how Hannah Rose could no longer have children, and she tried to imagine how bereft her own life would be without them. All her memories were wrapped up in them. Big moments, of course, the ones every mother keeps in her memory bank (all the firsts: tooth, step, school), but small, cherished ones, too, individual to her children. The time at the aquarium when Matt stroked the silken back of a moray and said, “I wish I had a pillow just like this.” The day she’d looked out the window to see him sitting on the porch, eyes determined, chin slick, as he tried to learn how to spit. Or Matt at seven, when his hamster died and he refused to allow anyone else to bury it and she had watched from afar as he laid the stiff little body in the ground. She remembered the glee on Mercedes’ face the day she mastered layups in basketball, and her Christmas list the year she turned twelve: a soccer ball and pink lipstick. And her rage when she learned about the cruelty that turned calves into veal, and her subsequent, stubborn refusal to eat meat.

Motherhood, she realized, was a series of memories and a gradual progression of loss. Each day, with each new step of independence, children grew farther away until they left, claimed by their own life.

Mercedes was better than Matt about keeping in touch.

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