Authors: Ellyn Bache
The eye problem had begun last fall—a year ago—just when the sale of the
sweatsuit
patent seemed assured. Patrick had been jubilant over the prospect of a commercial success, what with so many boys off to college or about to be. He owned a small manufacturing business where people brought their vans to be upholstered in such fabrics as shag carpeting or fake fur. It was successful enough (though not so lucrative that the money from
Mag's
jobs didn't help), but the recession had been a setback. The manufacturer buying the
sweatsuit
patent was promising a big push. There would be full-color magazine ads and even TV commercials. Male models would demonstrate the Velcro fastenings that replaced the seams in the pants and shirt, showing how easily a runner could rip the suit off, leaving him free to run just in shorts and T-top when he got warm. Similar sweatpants were worn by professional basketball players, but they had never been made quite this way, or quite so cheaply, so as to be mass-marketed for runners. The garments were being promoted under the trade name
RipOffs
, which Patrick said was another inspiration sure to make money, even if the name had come from Madison Avenue and not from Patrick Singer himself.
So they had not expected trouble. It was fall, and Patrick had taken a week off from the plant to conclude a series of meetings about the
RipOffs
. The day the problem started, he had one conference in the morning and then some domestic errands he'd agreed to do because
Mag
was at work. He took Lucifer to the vet for shots, had lunch, and then drove
Izzy
back to his apartment near the University of Maryland, an hour away, where
Izzy
was a graduate student and where his car was on the blink.
Mag
expected Patrick home early in the evening. Instead, just after dark, the phone rang. Simon answered it.
"Dad says he's staying over in a motel," Simon yelled at her. "He says the fog is too thick to drive home."
Mag's
first thought was: He's found some woman. She'd always known eventually he would. The outlying suburbs were often foggy, but Patrick liked the challenge of driving in fog or snow or downpour. At one time he had even invented some interesting-unsuccessful-fog lights for their car. She took the phone.
"What the hell do you mean, the fog's too thick?" she asked.
"It's not the fog," Patrick told her. "I have a splitting headache and I think there's something wrong with my eyes. You know how the pupil closes down when you go into the bright sunshine? Well, mine seems to be doing that now, only it's dark outside. I think it's some sort of migraine."
"Patrick, at least go back to
Izzy's
. What if you need a doctor?
Izzy
can call a doctor."
"No,
Izzy
has some girl there. I'll just wait it out. I've already paid for this place, I might as well stay. I'll come home in the morning when the weather clears up. I should be fine by then. I'll see the doctor at home."
They hung up.
Mag
was not at all sure she believed the story about his eyes. She had never heard of a migraine that caused the pupils of a person's eyes to close. She pictured Patrick with another woman. She didn't sleep. She didn't know until later that Patrick's pupils had shut down all the way after they talked. He spent two hours sitting in the motel room, completely blind. He did not call a doctor or an ambulance or anyone else. When she asked him later what he thought about, he said, "I don't remember. I was scared shitless, of course." He said that in such a matter-of-fact way. But he never really told her anything. When she pressed, he said finally, "I wished to hell I wasn't allergic to liquor and could have had a couple of stiff drinks." Later that night his eyes had relaxed and the pupils gradually opened. His vision had stayed blurry, but he could see. He took two aspirin and went to sleep. The next morning he drove home. He didn't go to a doctor until it happened again nearly three weeks later. Now, after a year, they didn't know much more than they did then.
They moved into the kitchen, and Patrick put the kettle on. He could never get out of bed without immediately preparing himself a cup of tea. He stood by the stove until the water boiled. He took a mug from the rack and a tea bag from the
cannister
. He poured the water on top of the tea bag and dangled it up and down in the cup six times. He always did precisely that. Then he let the bag steep. When the water was almost black, he threw the tea bag into the sink. Later
Mag
would remove the tea bag to the trash. They had been doing this for twenty-five years. She had always hated cleaning up after him. She had resented his freedom to leave trash in the sink and her need to remove it. But she didn't hate it now. She thought: He'll be able to make tea for himself even if he can't see. He could do it in his sleep. She thought often of the tasks she would have to perform for him if he went blind and those she wouldn't. He would hate needing her help-he was so independent-and she would resent giving it. For years the boys had demanded so much from her that a clinging husband would have been unbearable. Now, with the boys mostly grown, she looked forward to abandoning her domestic-servant role, and she did not relish the thought of taking care of a
blindman
. She was ashamed of herself for being glad he would at least be able to make his own tea, but she couldn't help it. Her sense of menace clung to her. Patrick would say she must not imagine things. She must be practical. They must discuss the issue of Alfred as if he were all right.
"I'm too young to be a step-grandmother," she said.
Patrick squinted at her. "You're not that young. You have a few wrinkles."
"Blond hair, though. No gray." Patrick said he had married her because of her blond hair. She believed this. He said he stayed married to her because she had a nice ass. Her ass was not as nice as it had once been, and this was frightening in its way but not something she dwelled on. At the same time, she -had married him partly because of his turquoise eyes-and if he went blind, that would be frightening, too, or perhaps only -ironic.
"Alfred is really acting like a prick," she said.
Patrick got up from the table and brought over an Olan Mills portrait the seven boys had given them for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary a few months ago. He pointed to Darren and Merle. "My sons the twins," he said. A finger on Gideon's face: "My son the athlete." Percival: "My son the Marine.
Izzy
and Simon, my sons the students. And this is Alfred the oldest. My son the prick."
Mag
gave him a disdainful look.
"There are worse things he could do than support another man's kids," Patrick said.
"I hate when you try to make me laugh." She got up and turned away from him, walked into the family room, turned on the television.
A test pattern.
A real-estate pitch.
The twenty-minute workout.
Three perfect-looking women in leotards and leg warmers were doing jumping jacks against a background of pure white: white floor, white walls, as if they were exercising in midair, perhaps on clouds; maybe they were angels. The camera focused on their faces. They were smiling; sweat trickled down their cheeks. A shot of their glistening shoulders, a close-up of their legs, their rear ends.
"That's more like it," Patrick said. The music was simple, a pounding rhythm punctuated with screeches, parrots screaming in the jungle. Beasts.
Mag
was a music lover. The pounding was so jarring that she was amused. She felt calm. It was true that she had gotten up in a sweat when
Izzy's
ankle was broken, but no permanent harm had come of it. Her premonition over his broken ankle then had meant nothing-and her waking in a sweat now would come to nothing, too.
The perfect-looking exercise women disappeared. "We interrupt this program," a voice said, "for a special news bulletin." A man in a newsroom appeared on the screen.
"Forty-three
Mariries
and fifteen French soldiers are dead this morning after a dawn explosion at the Beirut airport where the American contingent of the multinational peacekeeping force …
"That's where Percival is,"
Mag
said. She spoke but did not register the information in a logical way. Her premonition had not been about Alfred after all, but about Percival. The morning
Izzy
had broken his
ankle,
she had rushed into the twins' room first. Her premonitions were never very specific. Percival was off to war. She had woken because of Percival.
Of course.
"The blasts apparently occurred when a terrorist suicide force drove into the two buildings with trucks loaded with explosives."
"Oh, my God,"
Mag
said.
Patrick was holding Lucifer in one hand and pressing the top of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his other. "There are over a thousand men there," he said woodenly. "Only forty-three were killed. That isn't so many. It probably wasn't Percival." But he kept pressing on his nose, which was what he did when his eyes were starting to bother him.
"Preliminary reports indicate that the blast leveled the four-story administration building where an undisclosed number of Marines were sleeping. Other Marines, housed in a nearby barracks …
"It isn't even supposed to be a combat zone,"
Mag
said. She had not wanted Percival to join the Marines, but had thought to herself: At least it isn't wartime.
"Did he live in that building? Did he say?"
Patrick shrugged. They had his address, of course, but it was just an FPO box number, and his letters home were never very specific about his location. Percival would turn twenty next month; he was not yet twenty and they didn't know where he lived.
"When he was little," she said woodenly, "I used to throw him out of the car when he started acting up. I used to leave him miles from home sometimes. I used to make him walk."
"He never minded," Patrick said.
"If he was sleeping in there-he could have died in his sleep."
"Oh, Christ," Patrick said. He was still squeezing his nose.
She could not bear for Percival to die in his sleep. As a child he'd never had a clear concept of tomorrow. "You mean when it gets night and gets morning?" he would ask. Later when he cut school so much, she believed it was because he still didn't understand an abstraction like tomorrow: the consequences that would come tomorrow. Maybe even now he could only relate to concrete darkness and light.
She thought of him sleeping, and willed him to wake up. She refused to see an explosion, a bomb, limbs detached and catapulted through the air. This is what she believed: that if anything bad happened to her children, no matter that they were thousands of miles away-if anything bad happened, it would be her fault. She had not wanted them in the beginning, and the sins of the fathers (in this case the mother) might well be visited on her sons. She had listened to music when she should have been tending babies-and Simon had been born without an ear. Her sons swam in a sea of menace-pastel cartoon figures in a video game, surrounded by black mouths that grew larger and more menacing the more they escaped. Having not wanted them, she could not protect
them,
only wish them safe passage through their lives. There were no guarantees. When she learned Simon's ear could be rectified by a surgeon's knife, she should have known another son would become the sacrifice…but she would not have predicted Percival. Percival had always been active and skinny, had never been charming; he had been bright and bored and given to tantrums. He had not been able to run as fast as Gideon. His life had not been easy. She had loved him the most.
Outside the darkness was absolute and a heavy rain poured onto the wooden deck. In the family room Simon appeared before her. She thought for a moment she was hallucinating, because Simon liked to sleep until the moment he had to wake up to deliver his papers. Sometimes he liked to sleep longer. But it was Simon all right. He had even put on his bathrobe over his underwear. He was stretching and yawning and snapping his fingers. He always snapped his fingers when he was content, though he never knew he was doing it. He arched his back. He had grown so much that he looked even skinnier than usual, almost anorexic: tall, lazy, lovable Simon, nondescript and still prepubescent. His dark hair hung straight down over the ear that wasn't there.
"What's going on?" he said. And even in that moment, when she missed Percival as if he had been cut from her, in that moment she could think only of how it would be to tell Simon what had happened, because then he would stop snapping his fingers-maybe for good. He had been snapping since he learned at six or seven and was still doing it at fourteen. Knowing that, she could hardly bear to tell him, because Simon was the most beloved …and if Gideon had appeared, or
Izzy
or Alfred or the twins, she would have known at once that they were the most beloved, until her mind bogged down with it all. Each was the most beloved.