The Love Trap by Nicole French

22

The idea came to him in the middle of the night. Jane was asleep next to him, curled into herself like a nautilus shell, per usual. Well, her new usual.

For more than three weeks now they had been living a strange life out of Skylar and Brandon’s guest room, watching everyone but them live some semblance of normal around them while Eric floated between New York and Boston. It was uncomfortable, taking advantage of someone’s hospitality like this. Eric wanted home. He wanted his own bed. His own coffee. His own fucking life.

But Jane put off every suggestion that they return home.

To their credit, the Crosby-Sterlings didn’t say a word. They just went about their daily routines, taking the kids to school, going to work, basically living their normally busy lives around their perennial houseguests. The perfect hosts.

Yu-na seemed to be getting right back to herself. Eric still didn’t know his mother-in-law very well, but between her cousin and Skylar’s grandmother’s insistent nurturing, Jane’s mother had definitely been stepping out more and more confidently each day, and largely without her daughter. She and Ji-yeon had hooked up with some new friends through the Korean church just a few blocks from Skylar and Brandon’s house, and they had started taking daily sojourns around town with Sarah, Skylar’s grandmother.

Yu-na wasn’t enjoying her veritable playdates, however, she was trying to harangue Jane out of bed, and Jane wasn’t fucking having it. If she and her mother had been fighting properly, that would have been one thing. But the conversations mostly consisted of Yu-na shaming her daughter’s grief, and Jane just murmuring wordlessly into her pillow.

Because three weeks later, and a full five after Eric had found her in that dusty, freezing house, Jane still couldn’t seem to shake the despair that had invaded her normal buoyant self. Korea had broken her. Carson had broken her. And, it seemed, she didn’t believe she could ever put herself back together.

The nature of that despair, however, hadn’t really reached Eric until he had overheard a conversation between her and Skylar just after he arrived home from New York that day.

* * *

“Do you ever regret it?” Jane was asking her. “The first one, I mean.”

There was a long pause.

“I…” Skylar started. “Yes and no.” Another pause. “It’s not really the same thing, though.”

“You lost a baby,” Jane countered. “And you’ve told me yourself you wondered what it might have been like.”

“Sure, I do. But…well, it was totally different circumstances. To start, it was my choice. When I found out that I was pregnant, I was twenty-six, broke, and I thought Brandon was married and totally lost to me. I was in no place, mentally or otherwise, to take care of a child the way it deserved, and so I thought I was doing the right thing, even if sometimes I wish I could take it back now.”

There was some shuffling on the covers and a long silence.

“I should have protected her.” Jane’s voice was so weak, the words almost inaudible. “I should have done more somehow.”

Her? Eric shook his head. She had barely been eight weeks along. No wonder she was a mess, in there imagining a child that hadn’t really existed yet.

“Oh, Janey…there was nothing you could do. You have to understand that. But you have a partner to help you through it. Don’t push him away like I did. That’s my real regret, you know. Not treating him like the partner he always was.”

* * *

Jane hadn’t responded.And so Eric had entered and Skylar had left, giving him a meaningful green look before bidding them good night. Jane had only wiped at her eyes and turned away, claiming she was too tired to talk anymore that night. Or at all. Maybe ever.

Now, Eric watched her sleep with hands pressed protectively over her stomach. Her guilt that was eating her alive.

He turned back to the book of Yeats poetry, an old favorite. It was flipped to one of Yeats’s last poems, “Man and the Echo,” which reckoned with the writer’s regrets, written as a call and response between a man’s thoughts and the echo from somewhere else.

Man

In a cleft that's christened Alt

Under broken stone I halt

At the bottom of a pit

That broad noon has never lit,

And shout a secret to the stone.

All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great strain

On that woman's reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have checked

That whereby a house lay wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and die.

Echo

Lie down and die.

That was the answer to guilt, the echo seemed to say. You want to lie down and die? Fine, do it. Give yourself up to the sorrow, the hopelessness. Sink into the night, if that’s where you think you’re going. No hope, no introspection. Just an echo chamber based on the spiral of despair that could sometimes overtake a person’s soul.

Or maybe its parody, calling its bluff.

Because the poem ended with the man’s voice, not the echo’s. Pulled out of his thoughts by the immediacy of the world, the man abandoned his introspection for more important things:

Man.

O Rocky Voice,

Shall we in that great night rejoice?

What do we know but that we face

One another in this place?

But hush, for I have lost the theme,

Its joy or night-seem but a dream;

Up there some hawk or owl has struck,

Dropping out of sky or rock,

A stricken rabbit is crying out,

And its cry distracts my thought.

Yes, Eric thought as he read the end of the poem again, and again. Some interpreted this poem as a dismal reckoning on the meaninglessness of life. How easily one’s purpose could be flung away with small distractions. But Eric saw it differently. He saw it as a description of the visceral connections between all forms of life and the pains they experience. A recollection that one wasn’t truly alone.

It was this passage and ones like it that had helped pull him out of his own despair after Penny’s death. His father’s death. Reminders that real life existed outside the clamor and darkness of one’s own thoughts.

Poeticscame to mind, via an essay on Aristotle that had saved him when Penny died, so long ago. When Eric’s own guilt had been eating him alive too.

Aristotle wrote that the point of reading and hearing and viewing tragedy was to help readers or listeners “purge” of emotions like fear, sadness. And, sure, guilt. People, in other words, had too many damn feelings. And if they didn’t let them out in some way or another, they were eaten up by them. But most people, Aristotle said, couldn’t articulate those feelings, the complicated emotions of life. That’s why they needed others who could express them in words, music, art, drama. Through poetry, they faced the terrible conditions of life again and again, and in doing so, were able to let them go. Were able to purge and make way for the next round.

But despite being someone who had made her living on words as a lawyer, Jane wasn’t a huge reader. She was a tactile person, kinetic. She coped with life’s difficulties by living it, not passively absorbing others’ impressions.

It was one of the ways in which they were so different. But that didn’t mean Eric couldn’t understand some of her.

Guilt. Yeah. He knew something about that.

Jane’s emotions were eating her up. But her catharsis would have to come through experience, or perhaps witnessing someone else’s in real time. And that, Eric thought, he could help with.

Finally.

* * *

“Jane,get up. We’re going out.”

It was past ten o’clock. She had been sleeping later and later every day instead of getting up earlier and earlier. Another sign of her deep depression, or so confirmed her doctor.

Jane pushed his arm away. “I’m still tired,” she mumbled into her pillow, which had left a brutal red mark across one cheek. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

Eric sat up on the bed and worried his lip for a moment as Jane’s eyes remained shut. He could be gentle about this. He could pet her head and murmur nice things into her ear and coax her downstairs for breakfast, like he’d managed a few times before. But he’d been gentle for weeks, tiptoeing around the woman all the damn time like she was about to break. It seemed to be making things worse, not better.

Fuck it.

He yanked the pillow out from under her head, causing her head to flop down onto the mattress.

Her eyes flew open. “Hey! What the fuck?”

“I said get up,” he repeated. “I have something to do today, and I need you to come with me.”

She scowled, though she did grab her glasses off the nightstand and shove them on to glare at him with more clarity. “And I said I don’t want to go anywhere. Can’t you do your little errand without me?”

Eric opened his mouth and paused. Was he pushing her too much? It had only been five weeks. Maybe she needed more time.

As if in response, the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed with the hour. No, she didn’t need more time to stew, pushing everyone and everything away so she could wallow deeper in her own misery. He was starting to suspect the longer she did that, the less likely it was she would ever emerge.

“No,” Eric said firmly. “I can’t.”

With a groan, she pushed herself to sitting. Her hair was matted a bit in the back, and despite the twelve or more hours she had already slept, she still had dark, puffy circles under her eyes. She was still beautiful.

“Why are you dressed like that?” she asked through a yawn.

Eric looked down at his clothes, a comfortable pair of chinos and a tailored blue shirt. Somewhere between the suits he wore for work, and sweats he preferred at the gym and, yes, the shooting range (he’d visited a few more times since last week). A gray pea coat was tossed on the chair.

He looked up. “What’s wrong with this?”

“I think you wore that exact outfit at mock trial during our third year.”

He examined his clothes again, trying to remember what she was talking about. “I definitely wasn’t wearing Prada at a law school mock trial. I would have at least worn a tie.” He smiled. This might have been the first joke in over a week. “Are you trying to say I look like a young student again, gorgeous? Is it getting you going?”

“I’m saying you look like a just-off-work bank manager.”

“I was going for respectable.”

He waited for another comeback that he might volley over the proverbial net. But none came. Jane fell back into her pillow.

Eric sighed and squatted next to her side of the bed. “How’s this, Lefferts? You come with me now, you can dress me however you want this afternoon.”

For a moment, she brightened. Her full, somewhat paler-than-usual lips parted, and he could practically see the word “Really?” on the tip of her tongue. But then, her face fell back, assuming that same, blank stare.

“Wear what you want,” she murmured. “They’re just clothes, after all.”

Shit. Even if this had been the first interaction he’d had with her in years, he would have known something was horribly wrong when she said that. Tentatively, Eric reached out and covered her hand with his. The one still resting over her practically concaved stomach. Fucking hell, was she eating at all?

“Jane,” Eric said. “Please. I need you with me today. Your mom is already gone.”

“What?” At that, she perked up again. “Where is she? Where did she go? Is she all right?”

“Relax. Sarah took her and Ji-yeon to Quincy Market, and then I think they are planning to go to a bible study at the Korean Presbyterian church this afternoon.”

Jane sat up, shoving her hair back from her face. “What? Eric, how could they just leave like that? Anyone could follow them, you know, and Quincy Market is incredibly crowded and—”

“Everyone has a personal detail,” he replied calmly. “They are fine. I promise.”

Jane’s eyes glistened. She sighed irritably. “I can’t believe you just let them go, Eric.”

For a moment, he blinked, unsure of himself. She was annoyed now, not scared. That was good. But she was using his given name. That was bad. He never thought he’d actually want to hear that stupid fucking nickname—Petri dish—again, but these days, he’d probably do a fucking cartwheel if she said it.

Instead, he mustered the best smirk he could. “Your mom and cousin are grown women doing what grown women do. They are living their lives. Now it’s your turn, Lefferts.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Jane mumbled, rolling back into the folds of the comforter.

Fucking hell. “No, you’re not.” This time Eric grabbed her wrist and yanked her back up so that the covers fell away in a pile.

“What the hell!” Jane shrieked as she tucked her arm away. “What’s with the gestapo treatment, asshole?”

Mercilessly, Eric flung the covers off the bed entirely. Jane’s long, bare legs wobbled in the sudden chill. She really was getting too thin. “Well, first you’re going to take a shower and brush your hair. You’re starting to look like the creepy girl from The Ring.”

Jane scowled. “So sorry I couldn’t keep up my looks while I slept. And that’s mean.”

“You’re two seconds from climbing out of the television, Lefferts. Do it now, or tomorrow I’m staging an intervention.”

“This is draconian,” Jane muttered, though she did finally swing her feet to the floor. “Bully.”

“Then we’re going to Zaftig’s for some food,” Eric continued as he walked to the closet and started picking out some clothes for her to wear. He’d brought more things last week from their apartment, but only because if he had to see her put on one more pair of fucking yoga pants, he was going to burn them all. “You’re getting the banana-stuffed French toast. And maybe some eggs too.”

Jane grabbed a bathrobe slung over the chair. “Bossy, aren’t you?”

Eric tossed a pair of jeans, a sweater, and Jane’s favorite combat boots on the bed. “After that, we’re going to run some errands. I want some company, and you need to get out of this room so Skylar’s housekeeper can finally change the damn sheets.” He surveyed the outfit. Jane would probably pick out something else entirely, but it was a start. “I’ll meet you downstairs in thirty minutes. I’ll get you a coffee.”

Ignoring her grumbled protests, he walked out.

“One more thing,” he said, turning at the door. “If you come down without that goddamn lipstick, I’m dragging you back up here and putting it on you myself. And since my handiwork will probably make you look like The Joker, I suggest you do it right the first time, pretty girl.”

When her lips—already with more color in them—fell open, Eric only shut the door behind him and hoped he was doing the right thing. But a few seconds later, when he could hear her muttering to herself, Eric finally exhaled and smiled.