He limped out from the trees. She brushed his backside of ice and crumbled leaves. He looked down the road. “Here comes Barb Miller,” he said.
The car was angled into the street on the wrong side of the road, as if it had swerved to avoid an accident. They stood still as deer and watched their neighbor approach. Barb slowed the SUV and powered down the window.
“Everything okay?” she asked. Her words formed white plumes of smoke in the cold air. Butch Miller sat beside her.
“Oh, everything’s fine,” said Jane. “Everything’s fine. Just something with the car.”
Butch leaned over and waved. “Hello,” he said through the window.
“Hello, Butch,” said Tim.
“Do you need us to call someone?”
“No, no. Triple A is on its way, thank you.”
“Thanks, Barb,” said Tim.
“Do you want a ride back to the house? You can’t stay out here, can you?”
“They promised to be here any minute,” said Jane.
Barb smiled and said okay. They waved good-bye and she started the car rolling again. Butch turned his head and they could see him continue to stare through the tinted windows. They watched the SUV dip and disappear out of sight. Then they exchanged a look that conveyed their shared exhaustion. Triple A? Could they really be at it again? The futility of communicating their predicament to the Millers had turned their kind gesture of help into something onerous and unwanted. To approach the world with evasion and thanklessness—that was no way to live. Jane walked around to the driver’s side and she and Tim got in and closed their doors at the same time.
They drove home. Soon after Jane killed the engine, the car began to crackle in the silent garage. “I have to go in,” he said.
She was surprised. He had shown such resolve the night before: no gerbil wheel. She wondered whom he intended to see. Bagdasarian? Copter at Mayo? Did he mean Switzerland again?
Then she realized her mistake. He meant in to work.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Janey, I’m all rested up. I have to go in.”
The night before, she had pushed aside how they would deal with the long-term things like his work, in order to make him safe for that one night. Now she had to deal with the reality of the light of day, and she should not have been surprised that he would want to go in.
“You should take the day off,” she said.
“No, that would just be…”
“We need to—”
“… capitulation.”
“—to deal with this, Tim. Capitulation? It’s called reality.”
“But the case,” he said.
“Oh, fuck the case!” she said. “It’s back, Tim! You said it yourself last night. It’s back.”
The car was losing heat. He sat unmoving in his fleecy chrysalis of Patagonia and down, staring straight through the windshield at the spare gas tank and paint cans and the coils of extension cords and rubber hoses on the garage shelves. A row of old Vermont license plates had been nailed into the wall. Jane turned away from him in the still car and they sat in silence. Within the minute their breath became visible. She waited for him to say something, preparing the counterargument. After waking he always felt this false rejuvenation, but that strength was fleeting and within hours he could be walking again. And then what would he do, out in the cold with his frostbite and dressed in nothing but suit and tie, walking around Manhattan and ending up God knows where? She was about to remind him of this when he started pounding the glove box with his gloved fist. He rained blow after blow down on the glove box and she let out an involuntary cry and jerked back against the cold window. He stopped hitting the glove box and began to kick it until the latch snapped and the door fell. He continued to kick as if to drive his foot clear through to the engine block. One of the door’s lower hinges snapped, and thereafter the glove box had the cockeyed lean of a tired sun visor. It would never be fixed.
When it was over, he withdrew his foot and out spilled a handful of napkins. His heel had compacted the owner’s manual and ripped the maintenance records and insurance papers. He returned his feet to the mat and things were calm again, but he would not look at her.
“I have to go in,” he said finally.
Her gaze had a fire’s intensity.
“Okay,” she said. “You should go in.”
“I’m trying to tell you that I feel good.”
“I will pack your backpack,” she said, “with your winter gear, in case you need it, and you can take the pack in with you.”
“I have to go in,” he repeated.
“I understand.”
Then he turned to her. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said.
5
Becka was up for school, showered and sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal. At seventeen, she wore a silver loop in her left nostril and never properly washed her hair. She was surprised when the door to the garage opened. She had figured her parents were upstairs. They came into the kitchen brooding and silent. Her father was overburdened with winter clothes and her mother looked pale and terrified.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Nobody said anything. She just knew.
She stood up and hugged her dad, a rare hug. She approached him sideways, resting her head on his shoulder. He took hold of her forearm and squeezed.
“It’s not a hundred percent yet,” he said.
“It’s a hundred percent,” said her mom.
Becka had been nine the first time. She remembered driving with her mother into the city. She was scared by her mother’s silent, impatient driving. She wondered why she had been picked up at the school bus stop, and where they were going, and what had happened. Her mother turned and smoothed her hair in the stop-and-go traffic over the bridge but said nothing. Becka expected him to be waiting on a street corner with his briefcase and a rumpled newspaper under his arm, dressed in his beige overcoat. Instead they came upon a small triangle of park with a lone tree in a grate and a pair of trash bins, a phone booth and four or five wooden benches. Her mother pulled up to the curb and threw the hazards on. She told Becka to stay put. Taxis raced past as she stepped out. Becka watched as her mother approached a bench and bent down. She touched the man laid out there and he sat up. Becka recognized him only when he stood and began walking toward the car.
They began picking him up more frequently, never in the same place, three times a week, sometimes four. Becka accompanied them to the doctor when she was not in school and sat in the waiting room with her mother. She went with her mother into the room where her father sat on the metal table with the tissue paper and she listened to the doctor and to the questions her mom and dad asked, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. They were saying everything it wasn’t. There was confusion and frustration and much talking over one another. She stood behind a glass window holding her mom’s hand as her dad moved inside the scary tunnel of an MRI machine. On the ride home they were silent and her father was distant.
Sometimes she came home from school and the car was gone and nobody was in the house. She watched TV until it got dark and ate after-school snacks instead of dinner. Her dad woke her on the sofa and carried her to her room and tucked her into bed. She asked him if he was sick and he said yes. She asked him if he was going to be all right and he said yes.
He started staying home from work, which he’d never done before. One afternoon after school she heard them in the bedroom. The door was ajar. She put her head in and saw her mother standing over him. He was dressed differently, not in a suit and tie but in sweatpants and T-shirt, and he was handcuffed to the headboard. His arms were stretched tight as if they were hanging from iron rings in the wall. He might have been doing calisthenics like at school, the one called bicycle-in-the-air, except his legs moved lower and kind of jerky. The fitted sheet had popped off and all the bedding was bunched up around him. His face was hurting and his T-
shirt was stained with sweat. She fled from the doorway.
Soon after her mother came downstairs surprised, almost panicked, to find her there, as if she were a stranger. She told her to be quiet because her father was sleeping.
“Is Daddy addicted to drugs?”
Jane had moved to the sink to fill a pot with water. “What?”
“Because at school they told us about drugs. They showed us a video.”
“Daddy is sick,” said Jane, and turned the water off.
“Because of drugs?”
“No, sweetie, of course not because of drugs.”
“Then how come?”
Jane placed the water on the stove without answering. She went into the pantry for the rice and when she returned she took the meat out of the fridge and bent down for a cutting board. Becka waited for an answer, but her mother continued to squat in front of the cupboard, one hand on the open door, motionless and refusing to look at her. No one looked at her very much lately. Her mother was usually tired. She often told her to clean her room or asked her to go out and play. The house had never been so quiet, a hush timed by strikes from the grandfather clock and broken only when her father was kicking.
“How come he’s in handcuffs?” she asked.
Now finally her mother stood with the cutting board and looked at her. “Did you see Daddy in handcuffs?”
Becka nodded from the kitchen table.
“Daddy doesn’t want to leave the house,” said Jane, setting the cutting board down and the meat on top of it. “We’re just trying to keep Daddy inside the house.”
Becka didn’t want him inside the house. She heard him at night making noises like he was straining to lift something heavy. She heard the rattle of the handcuffs. His curses filled the house and his mumbling carried through the walls. Sometimes she heard nothing at all. Once she tiptoed to the door and put her head in the room and found him bound to the bed, staring into space. He saw her in the doorway and called to her but she ran away. “Becka, come back!” he cried. “Come talk to me.” She raced down the stairs. “Becka!” he cried out. “Please!” But she kept going.
It left as quickly as it came and he went back to work. After a few months her memory of him bound to the bed faded. They didn’t talk about it. They talked about other things. He came to her recitals again. Once again he woke her in the mornings and made her breakfast and got her ready for school. He never let a day pass without calling her before bedtime. Jane slept in and took care of her at night. That was the routine, the blissful family groove, and it had returned.
6
Was she up for this? She lay in bed under the covers, her breath visible in the slant moonlight. Really up for it? The long matrimonial haul was accomplished in cycles. One cycle of bad breath, one cycle of renewed desire, a third cycle of breakdown and small avoidances, still another of plays and dinners that spurred a conversation between them late at night that reminded her of their like minds and the pleasure they took in each other’s talk. And then back to hating him for not taking out the garbage on Wednesday. That was the struggle. Sickness and death, caretaking, the martyrdom of matrimony—that was fluff stuff. When the vows kick in, you don’t even blink. You just do. She had to be up for it.
She had nursed him once, and then a second time. About a year and a half of their lives, all told, and by the end of his first recurrence it was a full-time job. He was exonerated of all trifling matters when it returned. They were up against a specter that dwarfed the daily vexings. He could die out there. And so she set to the task of picking him up immediately, of learning how to properly rewarm the skin, of what food to bring with her in the car. She read survivalist manuals and prepared the pack. And when she wasn’t picking him up or preparing the pack, she was making the appointments and taking him to the doctor. She was his support staff and counsel. And when she was driving him home from the doctor she was the sounding board for all the confusion, doubt, anger and frustration. And when not the sounding board she was the cheerleader, dragging him out of the morass of self-pity. And when not the cheerleader, the quiet, supportive presence that said simply, I’m here, said without a word, you are not alone. But it was all-consuming, two intense periods of uncertainty and fear to which she gave herself entirely, often at the expense of Becka—after which, once it was over, in a mad dash to catch up with his life, he went back to work. He treated his first day back like any other day, while she was left wondering just what day is it? What cycle of their marriage had they left off on? How did she resume ordinary life after so many arguments with doctors and late-night car rides to random street corners? He was fine again, as if nothing had ever happened, but she wasn’t unchanged. She was suddenly bereft of purpose. And he wasn’t there to say, I’m here, you are not alone. She didn’t fault him for that. If anything, she envied him. He had an admirable passion for the work he did, and partnership at Troyer, Barr meant he did important work. But she did no favors to anyone by ignoring her own needs. She wanted what he had, something that would not abandon her to her own devices upon his recovery. She needed a purpose not entirely predicated upon other people, loved ones, the taking care of loved ones. She earned her license and started selling real estate.
Was she really up for a third time? To do it right, she would have to quit. She could not keep showing houses with him lost in the world. But what would happen when it was over? When it was over, if she quit and took care of him for however long, what life would she have to return to?
Jane stepped out of bed into the freezing room and walked down the hall to Becka’s. Becka was playing a late-night set of coffeehouse ballads cryptic with yearning, which came to a halt when Jane opened the door.
“What happened to knocking first?”
Gone were the days of her good-faith efforts to fit in with the TV-commercial vision of life. No more running shoes, no more hair gels. She let her heartbreaking weight be what it was, hiding behind the acoustic guitar. Senior year in high school and she refused to so much as order a yearbook. She wore her flannel shirt, Roxy Music tee, black sweatpants. Big surprise.
Jane peered unrepentantly around the room, at the mounds of clothes just waiting for the torch, the slag heap of dirty dishes on desk and nightstand. The room smelled heavily of itself. “Any good developments in here lately, Madame Curie?” she asked.
“I’m making music right now, Mom.”
“And a vaccine or two?”
“Do you even realize how old that joke is?”
“What are you doing up? It’s one in the morning.”
“What are you doing up?”
“Can’t sleep.”
Becka had eight or ten thick dreadlocked strands. They moved about her head the way mitter curtains dance lazily over the car at an automatic car wash, heavy and grayish. Their weight exposed the pale faultlines of her scalp. They cushioned her head as she leaned back on the headboard. “Do you think he fakes it, Mom?” she asked.
“Fakes it?”
“Have you ever Googled it? Google it and see what comes up.”
“Google what?”
“Exactly.”
“What comes up?”
“Some disease horses get when they eat poisonous plants.”
“That doesn’t mean he fakes it.”
“Not faking, then,” she said. “Just… I don’t know… mental.”
“There’s a lot of debate about if it’s psychological or not,” said Jane. “He doesn’t think it is. He thinks—”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” she said. “I know he thinks it’s the legs. I just have a hard time buying it. I think he’s mental.”
“You’re talking like a real jerk, kiddo.”
“He could control it if he really wanted to.”
“Like you can control your weight?” said Jane.
It was as if she had slapped the girl in the face, and for a moment, before the recriminations and tears, they stared at each other unmoving and silent, stunned into recognizing, after so long an in
difference, the wicked force they could work on each other. Becka threw a guitar pick at her. “Get out.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Get out!”
“I was just trying to make you see things from his—”
“Get! Out!”
The room was cold. She was relieved to find him still there, asleep in the down coat on top of the covers, as if he could expect only a brief nap. He was breathing heavily, perspiring through troubled dreams.
She got under the covers. She didn’t mind the cold. She preferred it, actually. One day she had been a young woman, and the next a panting complex of symptoms. The hot flashes and night sweats, the mood swings and sleep disruptions. And there was no way, no possible human biological way, of explaining to him, a man, what her body was putting her through. She could talk to her gynecologist, who understood. She could talk to her friends. But the words hot flash hit his ears and bounced right off. She imagined how maddening it would be for a doctor to insist that her discomfort was “all in her head,” or the burden of explaining symptoms no one had ever heard of. Thankfully she didn’t need to. Her problems were widely shared. Pharmaceutical companies spent millions developing medicines to ease her suffering. She was alone with specific hot flashes, but she was not alone in the world with them.
After menopause set in she stopped speculating that he might be crazy. She stopped speculating altogether. She didn’t know what had its hold on him. She didn’t care. He couldn’t know about hot flashes and she couldn’t know about walking. They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other’s air. She chose to believe him when he told her that his condition was not a disorder of the mind but a malfunction of the body.