The usual accidents and slow-downs greet him on his commute home from campus, but Nick is still relishing the natural miracle of endorphin high, freshly showered following the near-hour ride with Gilmore. He calls Emily on his cell phone to let her know he should be about an hour at the office of Dr. Peters, their family internist.
He knows Peters well, but his pulse still races when the tranquil, middle-aged doctor gives him a quick physical. Peters talks with Nick briefly about the EKG results he requested and received from the emergency room doctors—results verifying Nick's solid basic health. Peters reminds him to talk with Dr. Marsden at his session tomorrow about the Ativan / Prozac cocktail, shakes his hand, and tells Nick to say hello to Emily and Alex for him.
As he pulls up at his house a few minutes later, Nick watches Alex amble through their white picket walkway gate with a bug-eyed kitten in her arms. He climbs out of his Saab and unknowingly slams its door; the kitten leaps up and out of his little girl's embrace. He laughs and crouches on the ground with open arms, almost sensing his daughter's smile before it opens wide to decorate her pretty face.
"Hi, Papa; I love you," she says.
Scampering across the crushed stone, Alex sits on her Papa's knee with a giggle. She wraps her delicate arms around Nick's shoulders and bends her neck to feel the tickle of his beard.
Nick pulls his only baby to him, perhaps a little tighter than he ever has before. Alex cries out with delight and kisses Nick on the nose. Father and daughter conspire in whispers how they will sneak into the kitchen through the living room and surprise Mommy.
He follows Alex into the garage and coatroom entrance. As they tiptoe through the coatroom, past the fireplace and into the hallway that opens into a full-size kitchen, Nick sees Emily starting to open a package of chicken breasts at the sink.
Nick lifts Alex high into the air so they can rush upon their unsuspecting victim from behind; he growls and Alex makes monster faces. The plan works. Emily shrieks and drops the package of chicken breasts, then turns to stare wide-eyed at her approaching tormentors.
She pursues the monster to where it has retreated and finds her husband and child on the brown living room carpet, still rolling with laughter in their victory. Emily kicks Nick in the shin and tumbles into the warm jumble of her family.
"I don't know why I put up with you, Fenton," she says as she straddles Nick's waist. "And just look at this child. One hundred-percent goofy like her father."
Alex screams with glee as she wraps her arms tightly about Nick's neck and stretches her body out to lie on his chest. She has quickly gotten into the sport of playing tag-team wrestling, pitted with Mommy against Daddy in a fight all for fun.
This is one fight Nick does not mind losing, at least for a minute or two. He sits up suddenly with an evil laugh and wraps an arm around each of his opponents. Moving gently, he rolls Alex and Emily over his body until they are both pinned on the carpet. Nick places a hand on each of their tummies and puffs out his chest; then he raises his arms aloft.
"Now tell me both of you," he bellows. "Who's the chief around here?"
Emily and Alex just laugh. Nick helps them up and brushes the wrinkles out of their clothes. Dinnertime has arrived and raw chicken still lies in the sink. Nick pulls his two girls close on his left and right. He walks with them slowly, past the fireplace and through the hallway.
Moving quickly to the sink, Emily finishes rinsing the chicken. She cuts the meat into strips and drops it into a pan of olive oil and herbs. Nick has already ignited the burner beneath it, as well as those under the green beans and rice. Emily lightly runs her index finger over the back of his hand as he moves to make green salads and cut the sourdough bread.
Nick whispers, "hey, woman" in Emily's ear as she slips by him to open the cabinets beside the stove. She pulls down the blue china plates. Her cotton skirt rustles against his thighs as she passes.
"How were sales at the shop today, Emily? Did we do as silly a thing as I think by getting a loan to open that place?"
Emily smiles wryly at Nick's sarcasm. "No, hon, I don't think we took too big a risk. We've sold a lot of postcards, gift boxes and stuffed animals over the past three months. And besides, more artists and craftsmen come in every day looking to sell their stuff on commission. It's been a great experience so far, Nick."
He remembers how Emily had convinced him to help her open the arts and crafts store about two years ago. They had only recently begun renting Steve Harkness' old accounting office in South Boston. Emily still teaches math, and even with his mother's help, it is still mostly a summer business. With its old-mill, warped wooden planking floors, high ceilings and tall windows, it provides the perfect environment for baubles, hanging baskets and dolls in calico dresses.
Nick cannot understand it, but tourists and locals alike apparently love to buy things they can, he thinks, probably make for themselves. He just hopes they keep on buying. Small businesses have not done well in Boston, or anywhere else these last recession years. But Emily had insisted opening the store would be a wise decision. And Emily rarely made bad decisions. From the moment Nick had first met her, the quiet practicality and deliberate action she evinced had instantly attracted him. Or, he hesitates to admit; perhaps these qualities remind him of his mother.
Although alike in the fundamental qualities that make them strong feminine forces in his life, Emily and Katherine (or "Mama Kate," as her loved ones call her) may as well be water and oil when it comes to mothering and being two of the women in Nick's life. But they work to let difference energize their unique daughter and mother-in-law relationship, a bond only strengthened in the decade of Nick and Emily's marriage.
Katherine still lives in the same neighborhood where she raised Nick; after teaching third grade for twenty-eight years at a south Boston elementary school, she retired to painting still lifes in oils and helping Emily at Favorite Things.
Nick loves his mother for her unflagging support and his daughter for being the pure light of love in his watchful eye. He loves Emily for being strength and sweetness, while having soft, thick brown hair, a full, sensual mouth, and firm slender legs.
The summer after their high school graduation, Nick had begun dating Emily Catherine Brown. By their first summer's end, Emily went to Bangor to pursue a psychology degree. Nick stayed in Boston to get his BA in English at Northeastern. Emily dated in college, and Nick dated a few girls in his Boston neighborhood that stayed in town.
Emily and Nick spent the majority of four years apart. But each summer offered them the opportunity to build, one stage at a time, something they could believe in. On lazy July Saturdays, they would drive his rusted Austin-Healy to Newburyport to scour old book stores, or walk the dunes at night before making love in the sand and saw grass.
Emily had ended up dropping out of school in Maine and returning to her home state in Worcester, where she got her BA in secondary education and Math 8-12 certification. She came back east thereafter and took a job at a decent high school in South Boston. Not too long afterward, Nick asked her to marry him and she said yes. They had enjoyed many meals as a family since, even before Alex had made them three. This meal would be no exception.
The chicken has cooked thoroughly in oil and herbs. Together with the rice and green beans, it fills the house with a plentiful smell. Nick feels his stomach rumble as he takes a piece of sourdough bread and sits down beside Alex to butter it.
Alex wants Kool-Aid instead of milk to drink with dinner. Soon, her pudgy little fingers will be covered with butter, which she will run through her hair. Kool-Aid somehow makes Alex's blue-gray eyes sparkle with the uniquely mischievous glee of a six-year-old.
Nick tries to keep an eye on how much sugar goes into the countless batches of Blueberry Blue Alex asks Emily to make. The stuff makes every kid crazy. In particular, it brings on giggling fits in Alexandra, and leaves a sticky grin on her round, freckled face.
The Fentons commence to enjoy their supper. Emily explains how an old lady customer in Favorite Things today left her glasses in a glazed-straw bird's nest full of porcelain eggs. Alexandra takes twenty minutes to relate how she would prefer if Andy Thompson sat at any desk except the one next to hers during phonics.
As Alex relates the singsong details of her story, Nick quietly tells Emily why he will have to leave the house at 6:30 tomorrow morning. Alexandra overhears and pouts for a moment. Nick's early plans mean his daughter will not be able to kiss him in the morning as usual.
After finishing his plate, Nick rises to help Emily clear the table. He tousles Alexandra's hair as she asks to be excused and runs into the living room, all in one motion. She plops down in front of the TV and switches it on to reveal a Partridge Family rerun.
Nick steals behind Emily, who has started running hot water into the left basin of the double sink. He wraps his arms around her waist, feeling the curves of her body complement his. She reaches behind to run her fingers through his hair and pull his face closer. Their mouths meet slowly and linger as they clasp hands. Nick thinks how good tonight will be in the Fenton house.
For a few minutes he is able to put out of his mind how he will be leaving for the office early in the morning. He will arrive at Emerson before anyone else, so he can leave early enough in the afternoon to make his 4:00 p.m. session with Dr. Marsden. Then, as he lets himself get lost for an instant in the scent and sense of skin at the nape his wife's neck, Nick shudders and closes his eyes tightly.
The sessions with Marsden have initially been very effective in helping him get to the root cause of his dreams of the girl and the lake. But in the past couple weeks, particularly on the nights after his sessions with Marsden, Nick's dreams of the girl have become even more vivid, almost psychedelic, to the point where he feels as if he is dreaming as his twenty-something self, asleep and dreaming within a dream, but from the perspective of himself now, as Dr. Nicholas Fenton.
Nick's dinner table conversation tonight had faded as his anxiety over seeing Marsden tomorrow spiked. Now, putting dishes in the sink with Emily, Nick's eyes begin to dart back and forth in their sockets. As he looks over his shoulder at their grandfather clock, he hears it chime seven times; the breath catches in Nick's throat.
He looks out on the enclosed porch, past the grandfather clock and through the sliding glass doors at the other end of the den adjoining the dining room. There, a few feet from where he sat moments ago with Emily and Alex, the girl from his dreams stares at him with tears in her empty black eyes.
Nick barks a sudden, sharp shriek.
