Authors: Callie Wright
She took a deep breath and measured out her exhale. Her entire life’s purpose reduced to a single goal: to get out of this house without crying.
“Thank you,” said Anne brightly, standing to go.
“Can I—”
“Please,” said Anne. She stalked past Caroline to the entry hall, fumbling for her shoes. As she slipped her heels on, Anne looked into the wicker basket, and there it was, the sleeve of her husband’s sweater, folded in with the rest of the family’s clothes. She started to take it—evidence—then changed her mind. What would she want with it? She needed no reminders of this day.
Anne squared to Caroline, towering over her. “The first thing that needs to happen is that I dispense with this negligence claim.”
Caroline ducked her head, listening.
“Until then, there can be no contact.”
Caroline nodded, and though Anne had no reason to trust this woman, she also had no choice.
“I’m sorry,” said Caroline, and Anne held up her hand but she couldn’t stop it, the lifetime of hurt barreling toward her, coming so fast and hard that the walls would break, but what did it matter, and what did it matter? Everything she’d believed in—her parents, her marriage—was already lost, so let this woman see her cry, let this woman see how deadly fucking hurt she was. And be scared, thought Anne. For the last vestiges of her love—Teddy and Julia—she would stop at nothing.
In the driveway, Anne buckled her seat belt and started the car. Sober, focused, calm, she backed into the tire ruts and eased onto Route 166, then set off in silence, wind battering the windows, the reach of her headlights on the road remarkably bright. Twenty years ago she had been after perfection, a husband who would never let her down. Now they were kicking just to stay afloat, and Anne wondered what it would feel like to let go. Was this what her mother had been trying to tell her out at her father’s farm, that there was love in the letting go? Anne had believed—how had she believed this?—that her mother would be with her at the end of her own life, that if Anne had come into this world with Joanie, then she must also leave with her, and yet Joanie was gone, and the tears that had eluded Anne at her mother’s funeral now sleeted her cheeks, a sob with no end, and it was unexpectedly comforting to finally feel it.
Close to midnight, Anne pulled into the driveway on Susquehanna Avenue, and if she’d expected Hugh to meet her at the front door, she was grateful when he didn’t. Inside, she crept toward the kitchen, leaving her keys on the center-hall table. The house was silent; maybe everyone was already asleep.
Then Hugh emerged from the den with deep red lines impressed on his face: the corduroy couch. She could tell he’d been sleeping downstairs and realized they might never share a bed again. Anne took a deep breath and held it, considering the individual moments of their marriage that had led them here, hairline fissures across their past when she and Hugh had stood on opposite sides of the cracks. If she had been honest with him about her childhood, could they have prevented this, or, like ice floes in the ocean, had they been destined to drift apart?
“I don’t think she’ll testify,” Anne offered.
“What did she say?” asked Hugh.
Anne looked past him to the cavern of their den and saw that he’d already placed a blanket at the end of the couch. A thousand thoughts chased through her mind as she tried to compose a response. “Hugh,” she began, but before she could continue she heard footsteps on the back stairs, and Anne looked up to find her father’s slippers descending into view.
11
When he slept, he dreamed, and Joanie was there.
Bob
, she said,
I do not have all day. Either make up your mind to mow the lawn or I’ll get Ruth Potter’s son over here to do it.
She wore a sleeveless dress with a floral print and it looked pretty on her, but he didn’t say so. Ruth Potter. Before Bob could stop her, Joanie had picked up the yellow rotary phone and dialed, then Bob listened but he couldn’t hear.
In the hallway outside his bedroom: thunder. Clodhopping monkeys, wooden-soled devils, his grandchildren pounding down the stairs. He heard Teddy say something about fainting, but it would take a great deal more than that to get Bob out of bed. He reached for the glass of water Joanie always left him, passing his hand over pill bottles and wadded tissues, a folded newspaper and a pair of reading glasses, his fingers hovering spectrally, then folding into a weak fist as he remembered that Joanie wasn’t here.
Bob had aged a year for each of the nine days his wife had been gone. His only solace: at this rate it wouldn’t be long until he followed her into the grave. At eighty-six, he wasn’t afraid to die but he hadn’t anticipated the pain. A battery of daily pills—digitalis and diuretics and vasodilators, in blue and orange and white; giant nutlike things that he could barely choke down—eased the symptoms of his congestive heart failure but turned an unchristian eye on the rest of his body. When he walked, his joints ached; when he slept, his calves bloated up like wet loaves of bread. Nausea, dry mouth, incontinence; dizziness, headache, irregular heartbeat. For every new complaint, Dr. Brash’s pen flew across his prescription pad, until Bob was in possession of a Russian nesting doll of pills to treat problems caused by pills to treat problems, all the way back to the tiniest doll, his failing heart.
Bob’s bladder was awake again and he had no choice but to tend to it. He needed those pads but couldn’t figure out how to ask his daughter for them. At the house last week, Anne had found his supply under the bathroom sink and assumed they were for her mother; now they were gone, with all the rest of his things.
At the count of three, he pushed off the mattress and grabbed hold of the nightstand. Dr. Brash extolled the benefits of a walker but Bob couldn’t keep track of his—always downstairs when he was upstairs, in the bathroom when he was in bed, like a stooped silver man haunting him through the house, his feet lovingly retrofitted with Julia’s tennis balls.
A series of night-lights lit the path across the rug to the bathroom, where, without Joanie to reprimand him, Bob had left the seat up again. Dr. Brash recommended that he sit to urinate, but Bob had a bit of dignity left, thank you very much. Holding on to the pedestal sink, he turned his eyes to the mirror, and he could almost believe he was looking at a photograph of his father: white hair circled the base of his scalp and made a fan of wisps on top of his head. Whatever muscles he’d had in his youth had gone the way of his cartilage—he was a pair of blue pajamas on a wire coat hanger, and it was hard to believe he’d grown so old when it seemed like only yesterday that he’d begun to grow up.
Bob shook and flushed and returned to bed, careful not to look at the clock, then pulled the covers up to his chin and nestled in. For fifty-four years, he and Joanie had shared a bed, chasing each other left to right and headboard to footboard across the matrimonial battlefield of their queen-size mattress, and now Bob couldn’t sleep without her. When Joanie had been cross, he’d burrowed under her pillow, trying to conciliate her until she’d ceded her cushion and slunk sleepily away. When Bob had been distant, Joanie had cleaved to him while he slithered to the edge of their mattress with his eyes on the window, on the street, on the village and the whole world beyond. Times when Bob and Joanie had fought, they’d shared one pillow, keeping a watchful eye on each other from the center of the mattress while their bodies forked apart, Bob once waking to find Joanie’s feet squarely on the carpet, as though she were preparing to run away. Bob couldn’t know how Joanie had slept on the nights when he wasn’t there, but he had an idea that it was straight across the bed: there had never been a centerline between them.
Bob reached across the nightstand and switched on the light, sending an orange glow over the room. Anne had given him a bureau for his sweaters and cleared a closet for his slacks and shirts, but all his things were still folded in his suitcase at the foot of the bed. Bob needed to believe this situation was temporary, and he hadn’t objected when Anne had said he could bring only a few possessions: his beetle collection; his hat stand, though no one but him wore hats anymore; his trombone, which he’d played in the marching band in high school and also in the Navy in Charleston a lifetime ago. Next to the lamp, he’d put up a framed picture of Joanie, her chestnut hair curled at her shoulders and pinned back by two silver barrettes, her lips painted red. They’d been on their way to a dance somewhere, and although Bob didn’t remember the dance, he did remember the afterward. Even when he’d wondered what someone else’s body might look like in comparison, he had loved his wife.
How horrible to discover, after all these years, that Joanie had kept that book. Bob had been so certain she’d gotten rid of it, a gesture of absolution, forgiveness in their final act, but no, it’d been right under his mattress this whole time, trying to tickle his memory, to force him to look back. After he’d endured for years the sight of
The Sex Cure
flapped open on the coffee table, left on the kitchen counter, winged across his recliner when he came home from work, Joanie had brought it right into their bedroom with them, and Bob couldn’t understand it—what did she want from him that he could still give?
Discordant notes of deafening music sounded from his grandson’s bedroom next door and Bob dreamed of having the energy to charge over there and jerk the cord out of the wall. There was a disturbing lack of discipline in this household. Not only had Teddy cut school this afternoon and destroyed a thousand-dollar baseball card, he’d stuck his nose in his father’s business, where it didn’t belong. He was too big for his britches, but rather than reminding the boy of his place Anne had taken Teddy’s side and now Hugh was in the doghouse while Teddy was feeling his oats and what Bob wanted to know was, who was in charge around here?
Bob pulled the pillow over his head and closed his eyes. All the pieces of his life were in place except one: ventricular fibrillation or acute pulmonary edema; confined to the ICU or quickly and mercifully in his own bed? Any which way, Bob was ready. He thought of his friend Roy Lamb out at the nursing home on Beaver Meadow Road, where Joanie and Bob had visited once a month.
Remember Nona Fredrickson?
Bob would ask, stealing a look at Joanie, then running his hands down his sides in the shape of a Coke bottle.
Remember the rope swing we tied to Mr. Wyatt’s rotten elm tree?
For one glorious week, they’d taken turns swooping out over the sun-sparkled lake, letting go at the last possible second, then wheeling into the water with satisfying splashes. Roy looked at his Velcro shoes, at his plastic water bottle, at the two people sitting across from him, side by side, and Bob could see that Roy no longer remembered. The mind wanted to forget, it bent toward letting go; it took work to hold on to all these thoughts, and yet here was Bob with a lifetime of memories nipping at his heels.
Bob heard voices in the kitchen and finally looked at the clock—11:57. No chance of sleep now. He located his slippers and shouldered his bathrobe. A light from the laundry room guided him to the back stairs, where he descended by advancing his right foot one step at a time.
“Dad?” Anne peered into the stairwell.
“It’s me.”
“What are you doing?”
Bob panted softly, blinking against the glare in the kitchen. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Well, go back to bed,” said Anne.
He stared at her. Add infantilization to his list of complaints. Dementia sounded like a blessing—who wanted to be cognizant for this?
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll get a glass of water first.”
Bob rounded the island toward the sink, nodding to his son-in-law, then paused in front of the first set of overhead cabinets and reached for the knob.
“It’s the next one,” said Anne. “By the refrigerator. Those are the bowls.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Hugh offered, but Bob waved him away.
Clearly he’d interrupted something. Since the earlier incident, Hugh had changed into pajamas, while Anne had dressed for work. He looked as if he’d been sleeping; she looked as if she’d been on a bad date. It was then that Bob saw the blanket and sheet folded on the couch in the den. He smiled to mask his concern.
“Are you okay?” asked Anne.
“Fine,” said Bob. “I’ll get there. It just takes me a while.”
He had to say something, but what? In a different setting—Sportsman’s Tavern, for example—he would’ve expounded on his theory of the marital law of motion: the temptation to stray and its Newtonian corollary, the equal and opposite desire to return unless acted on by a force. Regardless of what Teddy had witnessed, Hugh was home, and if Anne didn’t drive him back out the door, he would remain here.
“That couch,” said Bob, nodding toward the den, “isn’t suitable for sleeping.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
Hugh started to speak but Anne hushed him. In four effortless steps, she’d moved Bob out of the way and poured his glass of water. “Here,” she said, pressing the cup into his hands. “Drink.”
“I’m not saying it’s not nice,” Bob continued. “Only that it isn’t comfortable.”
Anne turned to face Hugh, who shook his head helplessly.
Anne spoke softly to Hugh, and Bob angled his body until he was listening with his good ear.
“Are you sure?” asked Hugh.
Anne nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Guess I’m going up.”
“Good,” said Bob. Putting a man on the couch had never helped anything. “Get some sleep.”
When Hugh was gone, Anne pulled out a stool from the island and told Bob to sit.
“Dad,” she said evenly.
“It’s corduroy,” he said. “Who could sleep on that?”
They stared at each other, blue eyes to blue eyes, and Bob had a pretty good idea of what was on Anne’s mind. He’d never talked to her about this stuff and he had no desire to start now, but he was genuinely worried she was making a mistake.
“I’m not trying to tell you how to run your marriage,” said Bob.
“Yes, you are.”
Bob lifted his water glass with trembling hands and took a sip, then licked his lips and tried again. “It’s just that Teddy doesn’t necessarily know everything there is to know.”