The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  The world is her oyster right now.

  No kids, no Harden. Nowhere she has to be.

  Which means, for the next maybe hour or so, she’s free to do whatever she wants.

  Seven weeks ago, she was still really going to leave. It was only a matter of when.

  The night they returned from vacation, back in July, instead of telling the kids, she stalled again. Told Harden that she’d let him know when she felt ready. To which he’d bitterly said, I won’t hold my breath.

  After two weeks of this, David began to get worried. Are you having second thoughts? he texted one afternoon.

  It feels impossible, that’s all, she replied.

  Remember that I’ll be helping you. It’s not all on you.

  I know, she replied. But really, she thought, it was mostly on her. What he would have to give up—a single man with a dog—was basically nothing. You couldn’t even compare. Not being with her kids every day would be the worst part—that she already knew. But also: some friends would drop her. Harden’s parents would never forgive her. And she’d really miss her house.

  She barely functioned, hardly ate. She fell behind at work, unable to concentrate for more than ten minutes at a time. At night, she needed three Tylenol PMs to sleep. Mornings, after she made the kids’ lunches and got them on the bus and before she drove in to work, she took a shower and sobbed. Sometimes, through the steam, she would watch her curdled face in the mirror like an anthropologist observing a specimen of grief. In a single day, she might change her mind about Harden and David three times, each decision feeling ironclad—until it wasn’t. It was like being seasick. Like vertigo. All she wanted was to sleep until she woke up so rested and clearheaded a direction would be obvious. But no amount of sleep was ever enough.

  Then she received a call from Evan’s principal, on the fourth day of school. During earth science, one of Evan’s classmates had called him a spaz, and Evan had lost it and stabbed the boy in the hand with a pencil. The graphite tip went all the way in. The school nurse had had to use tweezers to pull it out. Evan’s aide was with him right now, the principal said. Understandably, the parents of the boy were very upset. If she or her husband could come as soon as possible to pick him up, that would be very much appreciated.

  Three times in five minutes she’d called Harden, but he didn’t pick up. Not picking up was his new thing. It reminded her he had power too. So she’d driven straight there by herself.

  When she walked into the front office, Evan was slumped forward on a bench, head in his hands, his aide Janelle sitting meekly beside him. When Maura said his name, he looked up sadly, then stood like a little soldier, his giant yellow backpack high on his back. Only when he was sitting in the passenger seat beside her in the parking lot did he start to cry.

  On the ride home, Evan sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve, and all the things Maura could have said—about using your words, about using your calming rituals—didn’t need to be said. He knew what he should have done; he just hadn’t been able to do it. So instead of talking she held his hand with her free hand, moving her thumb over his knuckles like a tiny windshield wiper, all the way home.

  In their kitchen, she served him a bowl of rocky road ice cream and sat beside him watching as he ate it, taking gulps of air between each bite, still recovering. Once he was done, he set the spoon respectfully in the bowl, looked straight at her, and asked if she and his dad were getting a divorce.

  Why would you think that? she asked, trying desperately to buy time.

  I heard Dad talking about it.

  To who?

  Just to himself. He was mumbling in the bathroom.

  She snorted instinctively, but the serious look on Evan’s face erased the little curl of her lips. She’d imagined the awful moment of truth so many times. Now here it was. He was waiting for her to say no, terrified she would say yes. It was all there in his brown eyes and his shut mouth, a watery smudge of brown ice cream on his upper lip.

  No, sweetie, she said. We’re not.

  That night, she called David from the backyard to tell him she couldn’t do it. He was quiet for maybe fifteen seconds, then said, You said you didn’t love him anymore. You said the marriage was dead.

  I know, she said, and tried explaining, but she did a bad job of it, and a few minutes later David said he was hanging up and did. A first.

  Driving to work the next morning, in the soundproof vacuum of her car, she screamed and sobbed and swore, and fuck all the people craning their necks in the cars nearby. That night, she found Harden on the basement sofa watching ESPN. She told him she and David had broken up. Tomorrow, she was going to call a therapist for them and try to fix this.

  For a while, he watched her stand there, breathing heavily, unsure what to do. Eventually, he turned off the TV, stood up, and walked over, like an actor tentatively following stage directions. He hugged her, stiffly, like it was job. Which, in a way, it still was.

  I’m glad to hear you say that, he said. Then he pulled away and looked at her. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

  It just feels wrong, David wrote her three days later, finally breaking down. We make each other so happy.

  Though she’d desperately wanted to reply, she didn’t. Nor did she reply to the other two texts he sent a few days later, equally heartbreaking. Only when he called and left a voice mail, clearly very drunk, did she take pity on him.

  I got all your messages and I love you, she texted. But I need to stop this now or I never will. It hurts me too.

  I was afraid it might end like this, he texted a minute later. So be it. I’m not going to beg. Hope you figure out your life someday. Xo D.

  His last words to her three weeks ago. She hates them, and wishes they never existed, and knows them by heart.

  Moving across the church parking lot to the road that winds through the countryside, Maura’s mind is empty—the gift of still being barely awake. The sun peeks over the horizon, warming the sky and lightening the trees so they’re no longer silhouettes but brushy three-dimensional things, the lightening a reminder that change is natural, change is the story of life, and as she moves along the gravel collar of the road, she feels her tense body loosening up, the kinks from sleep ironed out by the swinging of her arms, the grasping of her legs.

  She sees but doesn’t think: for a change, she feels truly present to the moment, the way her former yoga teacher always challenged her class to be. Naked to the world like a child. To her right is an abandoned barn, splintery and gray, the morning light casting a thicket of shadows inside. An old pickup moves slowly on the opposite side of the road, the driver wearing sunglasses perched on his head. Above and all around her, a big sky clear but for a few long cotton candy clouds.

  What she could be thinking about, she knows, if she let herself, is David: lately, when she isn’t completely locked in on something—a work project, cooking dinner for the kids—her mind goes there almost automatically, and she tries to resist. Thinking about how she isn’t thinking about David, of course, usually turns into actively thinking about him—in fact, she can feel the shift happening now—but she also senses a resolve in herself that isn’t usually present. It has to do with this being the day of Paul’s funeral. If she should be thinking about anyone right now, it should be him. Especially considering how negligent she’s been.

  Uncle Paul, Uncle Father Paul, ol’ UFP—what enters her first now is a feeling: solidity, support, warmth, though behind the warmth there’s coolness too. He was a fixture in her life from day one. Benevolent and constant as this rising sun. A card every birthday her whole life; a short, sometimes awkward chat every time he called to talk to their mom when they were kids. More recently, likes on her Facebook posts, birthday cards for her own kids. She loved him and he loved her, no doubt about that. But he’d never been someone she opened up to the way she did with her mom or Don or good friends. He’d always seemed so self-contained. To need so little. To be content being the one who gives. M
aybe this was why she’d taken him for granted for so long.

  As a girl, she’d been fascinated by him: the first time she watched him say Mass, apparently she told her mom he was like a wizard, in his colorful robes, casting spells the crowd obediently repeated. But then she’d grown up and became fed up with the Church the same way her mom had. She stopped thinking of him and priests as special and instead as company men: fussy managers of an antiquated business that sold comfort and community, custodians of a cyclical world that didn’t evolve on purpose.

  Rarely, Maura realizes as she reaches an intersection and turns right, did she wonder about his life. He was her priest uncle who did good, vaguely boring priest things—surely not one of the sick ones you read about in the news. A person who supported her, from whom she’d grown apart in the end. But of course, he was more than the sum of her half-hearted imaginings. Being here in Northfield, where he’d spent his days, she can feel the weight of her ignorance.

  It hits her again, the guilt. Different cause, same feeling. There’s nothing to be done about it anymore, of course, but she wants to make it up to him anyway. Right her little wrong.

  According to Kate, her life drawing instructor at Boston College, the key to seeing things as they really were was to unsee them first. To illustrate her point, Kate had them bring in photos of family members, tape them upside down to their easels, and draw them that way. Doing this blinded you to the image of your mom or dad or brother you held in your mind’s eye and forced you to reckon with their faces and bodies simply as shapes in relation to other shapes. To see them fresh.

  The images that arrive first are the usual ones: Paul slightly hunched forward, saying the prayer at their wedding in a blue polo; the Polaroid of her and him holding up drawings of monarch butterflies they’d made one Easter; the Sears photo studio portrait of him a few years ago that graced his Facebook page—white hair, kind eyes. They evoke tenderness but offer nothing new. So she searches her memory more, her mind wildly casting nets. Here’s Paul smoking on their back porch after Thanksgiving dinner, looking wistfully up at the moon. Paul cleaning his glasses with his handkerchief, looking at her blindly as she spoke. Paul squatting uncomfortably to talk to Evan when he was a toddler, about who knows what.

  It’s a comfort to know she can recover more if she cares to. That the past still lives inside her. But the connection she craves, she realizes, will require her to do more than remember. She needs to see what she never actually saw. So now she imagines him in bed, heavy eyes looking up at the ceiling. In a shower, water barraging his closed eyes. Walking along this very road, like she is now, in comfortable old-man shoes. In the past few months, though, he couldn’t have walked this path—he was too sick. So she sits him on a chair, looking out at water. Stands him in front of Michelangelo’s David, beside her mom, before she remembers the statue is in Florence, not Rome. Imagines him thinner, with fuzzy chemo hair, though no—he didn’t do chemo. She forces herself to see him crying, calm face curdling, as he did at her grandma’s funeral. He’s crying because he’s just told her mom about his diagnosis, he’s crying because he knows he’s dying. To comfort him, she imagines him receiving love. She makes her mom hold his hand, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles, the way Britta did to her when she was a girl, the way she herself now does with Evan and Ella. She imagines him getting hugs. She hears Paul’s phone ringing—the portable one that still sits charging in its little port on his kitchen counter—and when her mother answers, asking who it is, she says, It’s me, Maura. Can I talk to Paul?

  A tiny cannonball seems to sit on her heart. She can barely see through her tears.

  She keeps on walking. An intersection is up ahead. When she reaches it, she’ll stop, turn around, and head back.

  I’m so sorry, she thinks. Then she says it out loud too, as if, wherever he is, Paul might hear her.

  An hour later, after an egg and toast breakfast with her mom and brother, Shade drives her to the rectory at St. Boniface in town, where her family is staying. It’s one of those cathedralstyle numbers built at the turn of the century, mortar and gray stone. Maura knocks on the back door, and half a minute later Harden opens it.

  “Hey,” he says, and immediately he leads her toward their two bedrooms down the hall. “The kids need to get dressed. And I could use a break.”

  The viewing starts at nine thirty, the service at eleven thirty, and it’s a quarter to nine right now. After quickly putting on her dress and pulling up her hair, Maura dives into helping the kids. Curls Ella’s hair, as she’s asked her to. Irons Evan’s pants and shirt, which he’d balled up into a duffel bag. Meanwhile, Evan watches a YouTube video on how to tie a Windsor knot, but when he tries it for himself, he fails three times. “This stupid tie’s too thick!” he shrieks. “I can’t fit it all in the fricking loop!” He throws the offending thing across the room, where it lands, like a sad, flattened little snake.

  “Evan,” Harden says firmly, “just calm down. Let me help you.”

  “I wanna do it myself!” he yells.

  “I know. But this is hard for even grown-ups to do. So just take a breath and let me show you.”

  Evan hates attention when he’s hyper and vulnerable, so Maura watches only in glances as she toasts bagels in the kitchen. Evan takes the first stab, then Harden makes adjustments. First, he tightens the bulb. Then he tells Evan to press his thumb on it to help it keep its shape as he pulls the long tail through, and that works.

  Disaster averted, Harden palms Evan’s shoulder. He’s always been nothing but competent, she thinks. Another possible crumb.

  “Now just leave it,” he says. “’Cause I’m not doing that again.”

  Three hours later, they’re all outside, the sky is a faded blue, and there’s an Ansel Adams clarity to the clouds. The coffin has been positioned on a golden rail above the hole in the ground, which itself is tactfully shielded by what looks like bright green Astroturf.

  When they pulled up to Paul’s house, the parking lot and the grass along its edges were entirely filled with cars and trucks. Men in dark suits blocked the entrances and waved to cars to move along, park on the side of the road, their demeanor firm but warm. On the short walk to the church, Britta asked her and Shade to hand out programs, and they did. She watched strangers file up the aisle, as if for Communion, and pause before the coffin, before crossing themselves and moving on. When Mass began, the choir sang enthusiastically if not exactly in tune. Kneelers clattered and people stood to sing. Father Tim welcomed everyone, then Jean and another friend of Paul’s read from Scripture, careful with every word…but the meaning of what they were reading escaped her; it was like trying to concentrate at a poetry reading: impossible.

  In his eulogy, Father Tim talked about Paul’s great work ethic, his brilliant mind, his generous heart. He told the mourners that Paul couldn’t bear to sing the “wretch like me” part of “Amazing Grace,” because he thought no child of God could possibly be a wretch, and Maura had to fight back a sob. Her mom’s speech was great—warm stories about Paul as a boy and a nerdy teenager—then swiftly, the Mass wound down: more hymns, Communion, and finally the processional. Six men rolled the casket reverently down the aisle and out the front door to the grave.

  Over the course of the next few minutes, the mourners pool around the casket, like slow-moving lava. When they stop, Tim says a few more blessings, the heel of his hand on a corner of his page to keep the wind from fluttering it. There’s a bit about entering the kingdom of heaven, then one of the funeral home guys hustles over with a gold baton filled with holy water. Tim shakes it twice, then hands the baton to her mother, who shakes it and hands it to Shade, who shakes it and hands it to Maura to do the same. Less and less water flies out of the little holes until the baton is empty. Then Tim gestures to someone behind them, and when Maura turns, four teenagers she hadn’t noticed before come forward, carrying balloons, each the shiny pink white of pearls, twenty-some in each hand, bopping in the breeze. They begin to ha
nd out the balloons, though there won’t be quite enough. “Please do share,” Tim says, “and wait for my instructions.”

  When the time comes, everyone lets go and cranes their heads to watch the balloons rise. Maybe there’s two hundred. The sun is so bright Maura has to shield her eyes with the flat of her hand, even with her sunglasses on. Some go perfectly straight up. Some wriggle, resisting, before accepting their fate.

  At first Maura watches them as a group, but soon she focuses on one balloon in particular, on the fringes; she’s pretty sure it’s hers. She watches its ascent even as she senses other people losing interest, turning to each other, murmuring things. The balloons are supposed to be symbolic of something, but it’s not clear to her what—Paul’s soul going up to heaven, maybe. The ongoing beauty of life in the face of death. Their collective purge of grief. All of these would make sense, but as her personal balloon gets very, very small and darkens against the sun, all she can think of is David.

  Who has been let go. By her.

  Who has left her life. At her insistence.

  Who has all but disappeared.

  Suddenly, she’s sobbing: it’s too much, too soon. Some people turn and kindly stare. Thinking this show of grief is about a woman and her beloved uncle, Harden moves closer and puts his hand lightly on her shoulder, doing what a husband should do.

  There’s a big meal in the fellowship hall—ham, mashed potatoes, baked beans, milk—and Maura fills her plate to be polite to the old women hovering near the Crock-Pots, but she barely touches her food.