If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (13 page)

That morning I had her skip brushing her teeth. And I told her not to flush the toilet. Or wash her hands.

I thought I should call her doctor. I hadn’t thought of that the night before. I had no idea if there was anything to worry about. Anything long-term. If getting shocked that way leaves a mark, does damage, hurts your heart, your brain. Makes you crazy. Makes you nuts.

I didn’t say anything to Allison about my dad. The train. The whole being-dead thing. She’d never met him. I never talked about him to her. I never saw any reason to. The pediatrician told me not to worry. There wouldn’t be any long-term effects.

A
nd from that point on, it’s pretty much all about dirt.

“The thing is,” my new electrician said, “you have the pole where it should be, stuck in the ground. And it seems to be in pretty deep. But it’s useless, because it doesn’t attach to anything. You gotta have every wire in the house leading to this ground, every bit. And you’ve got nothing.

No connection at all. Who did your electric work?” I shrugged. “Some asshole,” I said. “Can you fix it?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’ll run you, but there’s really no choice. It’s either that or frying chicken in the bathtub from now on.”

T
he woman at the cemetery said the plot beside my mother was all in order and ready for use. “Just tell us the day, any day this week. We’ll arrange it with the funeral home. We want this to be easy for you. We just need about two days’ warning to prepare the ground.”

“Let’s do it in two days then,” I said. “If that’s what it takes.”

I
didn’t ask anyone from the Place to come. They were just going to go on about how this really wasn’t their fault, and how sorry they were. How they just can’t understand how this could have happened. And I didn’t feel like hearing that from them. Didn’t feel like pretending that they had given a shit one way or another about some crazy old guy. Maybe they had. I just didn’t care. I asked Harris to be there, of course, because at least with him I know where I stand. At least I know he just thinks it’s all a great big meaningless mess. That nothing means anything. That none of this connects. Not in any significant way, anyway. It’s all just timing, and timing is crap. That’s Harris. That’s Harris’s big point, and now that I haven’t got to be married to him, I am the first to admit that I need that perspective sometimes.

I need that perspective sometimes.

Ba-
buh
ba-ba-
buh
ba-ba-
buh
.

Yeah. Like that. Not all the time. Just like that. Just to keep me grounded.

Ha, ha.

T
he box went in the way it was supposed to do, right next to Mom. There’s a blank space on her stone where they’ll carve his name and dates in along with hers. I’ll have to call someone to get that done. Back to the yellow pages, I guess. And I already know, even now, that every time I see that stone and those names linked together like that, I will lose all belief in God, just one more time. In anything. In anything that makes any sense. Of anything.

I just don’t understand it. I never have. But this is pretty much the way they were supposed to end up, I guess.

While the diggers started filling in the dirt, Harris offered to go pick Allison up at school for me. Said he’d kind of enjoy the chance since he wasn’t at work anyway. I said no, that I wanted to see her too. But he could tag along if he wanted. We could go together. Give her a treat. Take her out for ice cream or something. He is her father, after all. And she really does seem to like him. Strange as that may be. She even looks like him a bit. I do see that. Even though sometimes that’s hard for me.

And I’ll tell you something else that’s hard for me, and that is that maybe Harris is right. About just this one thing. Just this one time. It costs me to say that, but maybe he is right about the root of this problem. Right, that I just can’t believe these two events were unrelated. Just can’t accept that it wasn’t my father in that electric water, not him streaming through my daughter, not him burning down into me as he walked out onto those tracks and waited there to get killed. Not him hurting us, his flesh and blood, even as his life blew away.

I just don’t believe it.

Because I see my father. I do see him there. I see him standing outside of that tunnel, in the dark. And I see myself at that moment dipping my beautiful naked child into her bath. I know exactly where they found him. I know the path he walked from the Place. And I know the ripples of water around her small body as she plays. I know the slight gray tinge of daily dirt that falls around her, and rings that bathtub. And I know how he got out. Which nurse had her back turned. Which orderly thought he knew that my father was tucked into bed. And I know the smell of my daughter’s shampoo. The way her ears emerge as her hair rises into lather. I know what my father was wearing, his gray wool pants I mail-ordered him last month, a white T-shirt bought by my mother God knows when, no shoes. The last time I saw him, he’d lost so much weight. His food was all poisoned, he believed. I know that. The air was growing harder for him to breathe. The air that Allison breathes. I know that he couldn’t breathe her air anymore. I know he was diminishing. I know that she is growing. The nurses were pouring toxins into his room with their words. I know the songs I sing to her as she bathes. The songs she begs me for. He wouldn’t let anyone speak around him. He had forbidden even me to speak. Every word was deadly. Every breath was painful for him.

There once was a man with a daughter,
Whose electricity ran in her water.
When his body was found,
Her house had lost ground,
But what was the lesson it taught her?

And that is why Harris is right about me. Why Harris, who is always wrong, is right. Because I just think there has to be some connection. I just think there has to be.

And Harris. I mean, just look at him. Examine him sometime. Look at Harris. Look into his eyes.

He just doesn’t care.

“So what?” I can still hear him say, like when we first met. “So what?”

I just think there’s an answer to that. Even if I haven’t found it yet. I just think there has to be.

Tableau
Vivant

T
HERE SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN MICE
in late June. Not inside. It made no sense. Later, after the first frost, Jean wouldn’t question their presence. The cottage was in the country after all, that was the point of the cottage, and in the country there are field mice, tiny, silken creatures seeking winter warmth, like everyone else. They weren’t even so terrible then, not when expected. They were—an expression Jean’s husband, Cliff, liked to use—part of the deal. If it weren’t for the droppings and the general sense of God knows what on their feet, they would almost be amusing. One could flick on the light and watch them scurry through invisible exits in the seam of floor and wall, bumping into one another like Keystone Cops; though sometimes, a single mouse would stop, eyes so round and uniformly black, so like plastic toy eyes, it was a mystery to Jean how she knew the creature was gazing into hers—what exactly was that sense of connection?—and a mystery too why, when all the others fled, this one stayed.

But that was the winter, when there was snow on the ground and arthritis in her knuckles, and mice seeking shelter, understandably enough, and this was early summer, when they were supposed to be in the fields, where field mice belong.

Like so much else recently, this was wrong.

With her good hand, the right hand, Jean sprayed the evidence with bleach, then tore off a square of paper towel and wiped the butcher block, the specter of
filth
overpowering concerns about what was and wasn’t good for the wood. At the sink she let the water run hot, washing both hands, the right caring for the left as it had learned to do in the seven weeks since her stroke.

Jean Kurek looked a bit like a field mouse herself, with her close-cut gray hair, in her shapeless gray dress—no zippers, no buttons. Stroke clothes. Her appearance was no more or less distinguished than it had been all her sixty-eight years, the most likely description of her a string of negatives.
Not really tall or short, you wouldn’t say she’s heavy but she isn’t particularly thin, not ugly, not at all, but not pretty either, her hair is that color that isn’t blond or brown
. Arguably, her most striking feature was the absence of any striking feature—though her hair had finally claimed a color, gray. She’d certainly never been considered beautiful, not by anyone other than Cliff, who had been adamant on the point for over forty years; but if she’d ever yearned for greater consensus, that yearning had been tempered by her knowledge of how she would loathe the attention it would bring. Jean had spent a lifetime trying to be inconspicuous, appreciating that nature had given her a head start. As she stepped out from the kitchen now and crunched her way over the garden’s gravel pathways, even the briskness of her pace seemed designed to make her presence as little disruptive as possible, and the arm hanging loose by her side, like something she would soon remember to gather up. Which made it all the more peculiar that while she gave her garden this cursory once-over she was entirely preoccupied with trying to remember where she had stored a certain very long, very flamboyant, very turquoise scarf.

T
he move to the cottage, four years earlier, had come with old age—Cliff’s, not Jean’s. The fifteen years between them had opened up as if blossoming, fifteen full-petal roses, expanding beyond what she had ever imagined possible, so that she and he were no longer in anything like the same stage of life. “Your father turned eighty and became an old man,” she told her children, “while I turned sixty-five and became a full-time caregiver.”

It was Cliff who had wanted to move to the country. He announced this—as was his habit, to announce, pronounce, proclaim—on a particularly nasty January day, in Rochester. “I want to die somewhere beautiful,” he told her by way of explanation, which was startling, if only because he had always seemed to be oblivious to his surroundings, at times enviably oblivious, given the places they had lived.

He didn’t push her. Cliff Kurek was capable of pushing, but their history was such that he had every reason to count on her acquiescence before it came to that. And this time there was no doubt. Jean had lived in small cities all her life, third-tier cities like Wilmington, Delaware, and Richmond, Virginia, Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was not third-tier at all but aspired to be. She had spent more than four decades accompanying—she dismissed the word
following
, when it popped into her thoughts—this restless but oddly unambitious man while he jumped from job to job, lateral jumps, long rather than high, because it turned out that an itch could be as powerful a motivator as a lofty aspiration.

“Running toward or running away?” her own mother had asked when they were still young.

“Toward,” Jean had answered without pause. And then, with an uncharacteristic snap, “Don’t be ridiculous.” But she couldn’t imagine what she’d have said if instead of just looking skeptical, her mother had asked, “Toward what?”

It had never occurred to Jean that there would be a final move, not one acknowledged as such before the fact. For all the time Cliff spent planning, there never appeared to be an actual plan. The endgame had always seemed likely to be one of musical chairs. When the music stops, you are where you are, wherever you happen to be.

The notion of a country cottage settled in her thoughts as a watercolor, red bricks, climbing roses, the house the most intelligent of the three little pigs built, but with some age on it now; and the place they found in western Massachusetts wasn’t far off, solid enough to withstand huffs and puffs, small enough to feel manageable, large enough to hold visiting grandchildren, old enough to inspire optimism about what might, improbably, endure. They made an offer on the spot. Practiced at folding their tents, they moved with little trouble in just over a month, and country life soon began to seep into Jean’s bones. She started going for long walks. She stopped wearing what little makeup she had worn. She took up gardening, literally put down roots. Her life became both more practical and more poetic. “Our cottage is nestled in the crook of three hills,” she wrote on the change-of-address cards she sent, aware as she did of using words she had never used before. Though really, any description of this home seemed paltry. What was required was an explanation, the cottage having slipped in Jean’s understanding from being a beautiful place to being something more like a mystical event; just as all the old cities blurred together into one cold, rainy day spent waiting for a bus running late.

S
he found the scarf in the closet of the large guest room where their daughter, Brooke, was to stay that night. Bright turquoise, covered in an extravagant pattern of pink feathers, it was one of those objects that no one in the family had ever claimed but that seemed unshakable, following them from place to place, never mind that Jean was certain she had given it to Goodwill at least three times. Five feet long, maybe a foot wide, it was the perfect shape. Though the puzzle, the paradox, was how to construct a sling with only one hand. There had been quite a bit of improvement since the stroke
—Any more signs of life?
her doctor would cheerfully ask—but she wasn’t up to tying knots. She laid the scarf out on the bed, doubled it over, then stared at it for a bit, until she decided she could put it on the floor and use her knees to hold the fabric taut while she tied the ends together.

It took a few tries, and she felt ridiculous, as though she were playing Twister by herself, as though she were a bit demented, but eventually she managed to secure the ends together and wriggle her way into it, her left arm loosely cradled in a tropical neon blaze. It was a masterpiece of misdirection, she thought as she stood before the mirror and admired the effect.

C
liff laughed at the sight of her in the sling, great crags appearing on his droopy face. He hadn’t always been so easily tickled, but in old age was prone to chuckles, as though he had finally gotten the joke.

She stood between him and the blaring television set, and turned all the way around, just once, a slow twirl made of many small steps. “Feast your eyes,” she said. “The new me.” She walked to the chair beside his. “I’m an awfully clumsy woman,” she said, as she sat. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t break a hip next.”

“Don’t even think it,” he said. “Goddesses don’t break their hips.”

A lung infection, she had told him seven weeks earlier, to explain her overnight hospital stay. A cold gone bad. The decision to lie had barely registered as a decision, just fallen in line with the deaths of friends he would never see again anyway and various other bits of unhappy, unnecessary news. His world had been winnowed down to conform to his dwindling capacities; if it couldn’t be expanded to experience joy, she surely wasn’t expanding it in order to worry him. And any trace of doubt she might have felt was dispelled by his failure to notice the arm drooping by her side. In the old days, in their young days, there was nothing about her body she could have hidden from him, not the smallest bump or bruise, much less an entire limb gone useless.

“Goddesses don’t trip over trees,” she said.

B
rooke’s early-morning email had read, in its entirety,
I’m going to be there around four
, very much as though it were the second email, the one after the one in which the visit was proposed and she explained whether she was coming alone or with Ian and the kids. It read like a second email, but it was not. It was the first and only mention of her plan, the whole thing feeling distinctly hasty, as Brooke’s actions often did. Her mother thought of her as ramshackle by nature, seeming to move through life in great loops of forward and backward progress, trailing loose ends behind her like maypole ribbons.

It was close to six when she materialized in the living room.

“I knocked and knocked,” she said, reaching for the remote control by Cliff’s side, pressing Mute. “My knuckles are raw from knocking. How can you stand it?” She frowned toward Jean’s sling, her head tilted in a question.

“I tripped,” Jean said. “That’s all. I tripped on a tree root this morning and stupidly broke my fall with my wrist. It’s just a sprain, if even that.” Brooke nodded, a single nod, a sympathetic grimace appearing but quickly gone, leaving Jean feeling a little stung. It was a bit painful having her lie so easily accepted.

She had been going to tell her children the truth—originally—but then she had felt this disinclination to have anyone, to have them in particular, interfere. That was what she told herself, the word
meddle
springing to mind. She didn’t want them to meddle. There was this problem with the children, that they tended to waltz in and try to take over—briefly, for only as long as they chose to stay. They tended to give advice that sounded less like suggestions than demands on how Jean should manage the house, how she and Cliff should eat, what books on the aging body they should read—or, better yet, listen to on the devices they should buy. And then they went home. Initially, the lie had been to ward that off—or so Jean told herself. If there was also at work an intuition that the sympathies of others might somehow limit how sorry she could feel for herself, it was not a conscious one.

“You should fence off whatever trips you up,” Brooke said. “Maybe you should have lights out there.” Jean gave a noncommittal nod.

She thought her daughter looked well. At forty-three, Brooke kept her hair a brassy auburn that Jean hated when she thought about it, hated on principle, but admired face-to-face. It brightened her skin, nudged her eyes from hazel to green. Her body, no longer thin, no longer seemed striving to be thin and had acquired a relaxed, logical quality, as though the wide hips and general sense of plenty were the obvious right choice. She had an appealing aura of overflow to her. She was—a word Jean hadn’t thought of in years—a bit blowsy, and it suited her.

“Did you see?” Cliff asked, chuckling again. “It’s that same damned scarf. Good thing we never threw it out.”

“Though truly, I did throw it out. Several times.” Jean kissed her leaning daughter’s cheek.

“Well, you look very exotic. I wish the kids could see their flamboyant grandmother. You look like you got tangled up in someone else’s dance costume. Hello, Dad. How are you?” Brooke leaned into the pose of a hug, then quickly straightened. Jean recognized the tone, the question not really asked, the embrace not quite given, the legacy of a father so often preoccupied with planning his next move. Brooke turned back to her and smiled widely. “It’s like Isadora Duncan’s infamous scarf! Just be careful in the car.”

“My secret life. You’ve found me out.”

“It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?”

Brooke was still standing between Cliff and the TV, and though it had barely been a minute, Jean could see him growing, if not consciously impatient, physically twitchy. It was difficult for anyone else to understand how immersed he was in that world, to appreciate the degree to which caring about those flickers of color and light kept him from brooding on himself. It was one of the many features of their life that defined even the children as outsiders now. She was relieved when Brooke said it had been a hell of a drive, that she needed a shower, maybe even a nap if there was time.

“There’s plenty of time,” Jean said. “We can eat whenever you’re ready.”

Brooke pressed the Mute button again, and the TV blared on. “Is that better?” she boomed, much more loudly than necessary.

“We’ll still be here,” Cliff said, chortling a bit. “Until a better offer comes along.”

T
he two of them resettled, one of Cliff’s home shows on the TV. A family of five jumped up and down, squealing at the sight of their new family room. In the next half hour, a condo in South Beach went from sleek to unimaginably sleek. Cliff turned out to like design. He liked to talk about materials. He kept track of trends—stainless appliances, mission-style everything, bathroom vanities with double sinks. Granite counters. He could ballpark costs of renovations, costs of the homes themselves. He knew the names and little quirks of all the hosts, developed what Jean could only think of as relationships with them.