The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  Benjy is looking out his window across the grasslands. We’ve left the curves of the canyon, the wetness of the river, and now we’re out on the plains, everything gone gold in the late-summer heat.

  “Antelope,” he says, pointing.

  It’s a big herd, closer to the road than I’ve seen, and I can feel the longing in my son to go stalk them, belly-crawl through the furrows of stubbled wheat next to his father. Ed has told me our son is a good shot. My freezer is full of their bounty.

  “Did you hear what I said, Benjy?”

  “You’re going to pretend you’re married to Dad again.” He looks at me, and he is suddenly old, this boy of mine, resignation tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t care,” he says. “He isn’t Dad anymore.”

  “He’s still your dad down in there. He’s just sick.” Again I find myself reciting facts to Benjy, though he’s heard them too many times now. The story is our lullaby, my go-to song to calm these fears. Hush-a-bye. Don’t you cry. Go to sleep, my little baby. I talk about the damage done to Ed’s brain during the surgery to stop the bleeding. I talk about the inadvertent deprivation of oxygen that caused the temporary paralysis. Benjy and I have checked out books from the library. I’ve sat with him, pointing to the different parts of the brain. “The frontal lobe does reasoning, movement, emotions, problem solving, and planning,” I repeat now. “Most of the damage was there, but there was also some damage to the temporal lobe, which does sound, memory, and speech. The doctors say the damage isn’t bad, and your father is a very strong man. He’s going to recover from this, Benjy.” I know he doesn’t understand, but it’s a story with a happy ending that I have to tell.

  He’s going to recover Hush. Go to sleep. In the morning, your father will be mended.

  I am a liar.

  Benjy shrugs and returns to his staring.

  — —

  “He’ll be done with occupational therapy in about ten minutes.” Ed’s primary psychologist directs us to a small room off Ed’s. “Why don’t you two watch this last bit. I’ve found that it helps family members with their own communication techniques.”

  We watch Ed through a two-way mirror. The voices are piped in through a microphone, and it feels like spying—furtive and wrong.

  “This is weird,” Benjy says.

  “It is.”

  Ed is hunched over a notebook with a pencil gripped in his hand. He holds it like Chip would hold his pencils, his fist a clumsy paw wrapped around the instrument, the lead ripping paper. He is close enough for us to see his work.

  “Write no,” his therapist says.

  Ed scratches at the paper a few times, then lifts the notebook and throws it across the room, the pages fluttering, momentary wings in flight. “Fuhhh . . . ck. You.”

  Benjy snorts at my side. “Dad cursed.”

  “That’s not so different from the dad you know.”

  The therapist working with Ed is a man named Martin whom we’ve met several times. All of us have taken a liking to him. He is patient and has a great sense of humor.

  Now he says, “Great pronunciation, Ed.”

  We can see Ed smiling. “He gets it,” I whisper to Benjy. “See?”

  Benjy nods.

  Martin retrieves the notebook, talking all the way. “Your speech is brilliant, Ed. I know the writing is frustrating, but I want you to try again.”

  Ed shakes his head.

  “One word, Ed. Just one, and we can be done with writing for the day.”

  “Puh . . . Puh . . . Pen.”

  “Oh,” I say. Pen. He is remembering Penelope.

  “One word, Ed. Pen’s a great one. P. E. N. Let’s start even smaller, though. Try no.”

  The pencil touches the paper. Ed squints in concentration, and I can see his broken brain trying to find the letters, the meaning, the instructions to send to the hand to move the pencil to prove the point. Straight up-and-down line, then a diagonal line from it to the horizon where it landed, then another straight up-and-down line from the bottom of that diagonal to the horizon where the top started. Lift pencil, move over slightly. Draw a circle, a round sun, a ball, a penny.

  He makes marks on the paper, lines and dots. No letters, no words.

  “Good,” Martin says. “Good try, Edmund. We’ll come back to it tomorrow.”

  — —

  We’re in a big common room now, cleaner and brighter than Boulder’s but similar. This is our usual meeting place. We regularly play board games, an activity suggested by Ed’s therapists. The distraction helps our conversation; it’s also hand-eye practice for him, sequencing, process.

  Martin has brought Ed to us in his wheelchair. He has begun walking, but it is difficult and exhausting.

  “What’ll it be today?” Martin asks. “Chutes and Ladders, checkers, Yahtzee? Go Fish?”

  “Yahtzee.” Benjy loves Yahtzee.

  Ed grunts an affirmation. I nod my agreement. “Good choice.”

  Ed reaches for my leg as soon as Martin turns his back, his touch feral and needy. “Good. See. Laura.” He moves his eyes in the direction of his room. “Come. Bed.” His smile is leering, his excitement obvious.

  Oh, God. I check to see if Benjy has understood, but he looks confused, not disgusted.

  “We’re here to play a game with our son, Ed. Family time.”

  He keeps his hand on my leg but smiles over to Benjy. The left side of Ed’s face has regained nearly all its muscle and movement, and it’s a relief to see symmetry in his expressions again.

  Martin brings our game, and it is just the three of us at a small table in this common room for brain-injured patients. There’s one other man in the far corner, sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, staring vacantly out the window. There are no bars on these windows, no grates or screens, unlike the ones in Boulder. There are plants instead, books and magazines and games, all clean and ordered. It is nice but sterile, and I find myself wishing for the messy din of Boulder, the smiles on the faces of my students, sloppy artwork on the walls.

  Benjy sets up the game, and over the noise of our dice, the shaking and scattering, I listen to him ask the simple questions we’ve prepared. Benjy wanted to ask about going camping; instead, I’ve encouraged him to ask where his father’s favorite camping spot is.

  “I already know that, Mom. It’s up on Trout Creek.”

  “Your dad might not know it, though, Benjy. We’re trying to help him remember.”

  And so Benjy asks this new, strange father where he most likes to camp, looking away as the man tries to form words with his clumsy mouth.

  “Trou . . . Ta,” Ed says.

  “Trout Creek?”

  Ed nods, and Benjy smiles, and my whole body tingles with the warmth of this word from Ed. This is how I felt the first time Benjy spoke, excited not for the word itself but for what it symbolized—this great start, this wide door opening into the world of language.

  Ed’s fingers are exploring my leg again.

  Benjy seems buoyed by the mention of Trout Creek, and he launches into one of his stories. “Do you know why Helena’s nicknamed the Queen City?”

  Ed shakes his head.

  “I just learned it from Hank. He learned it in school, so I’ll be ahead when I get there. There was gold here, and gold is worth more money than the copper they mine in other towns, and they were fighting over where to put the capital, so there was this great—rivalry.” A word he recently learned, also from Hank. Benjy loves new words. “The Helena folks were very fancy, so the copper kings called them Queen City.”

  Ed snorts a laugh. “Why. Hel. Eh. Na. Be. Cap. It. Al?”

  “Why did Helena become the capital?” Benjy scowls at the ceiling, an expression he’s taken from me.

  Ed nods. Go on.

  “I guess people like to feel fancy.”

  “Hah!” A bark of laughter, more emotion than we’ve seen in Ed since he woke up. He struggles to lean forward, to drop his left hand onto his son’s knee, t
o pat it a bit too roughly. I’m proud of Benjy for not pulling away, though Ed’s face is terrifyingly close, his open mouth, his bad breath.

  “Your turn, Dad.”

  Ed pulls back, stealing his hands from our legs. His left arm is still clumsy, and the dice spill out haphazard on the table, one of them plinking to the floor. Benjy rushes over, calling out its number. He is adamant about not rerolling when a die goes astray. One night he argued with Tim about it over a game of Sorry! “Why should you get a redo when it’s your fault for throwing your dice too hard?” Tim conceded quickly. He doesn’t argue.

  Ed picks up five sixes, and Benjy marks it for him, our scorekeeper.

  “You’re going to beat me again, Dad.”

  “This is still anyone’s game,” I say, taking the cup from Ed’s hand.

  — —

  Ed tires easily, and after one round of Yahtzee, he’s ready for a nap. Benjy says his goodbyes and heads to the television to wait while I return Ed to his room. I blather as I push his chair, a long string of words that describe things Ed should know. “The more you can talk about his life,” his doctors tell us, “the quicker these memories are going to come back.” I talk about Beau, whom Tim and I have taken back full-time, like Benjy. Sole custody now and likely forever. “We’re taking Beau to the lake for dummy throws,” I say. “He’s already anxious for duck season.”

  Ed makes his hands into a shotgun, fires it toward the ceiling. “Duh. Ck.”

  “Yes, Ed. That’s right.”

  I talk about the perennials coming up in the beds at Third Street, the bleeding hearts, the wide leaves of hollyhocks. “The Lewises are back,” I say. “Eating all our peanuts.”

  Ed slaps his leg. “Nuh. Ttt. Crack. Ers.”

  He recognizes the Lewises, and it’s this that wets my eyes. Our birds.

  I can’t cry in front of him, though, so I swallow and blink as I turn in to his room with its flood of flowers and balloons and gifts, every surface covered. His fans have sent their condolences—colleagues in Boulder, colleagues at the state, some of the legislators he wooed, the governor. There are also notes and gifts from bartenders and waitresses and lovers I’ve never heard of. Pete and Bonnie make regular visits, and Ed’s parents have rented a furnished apartment in Great Falls to be here during his recovery. All of us leave the room with bottles of whiskey to store away for him until he’s well and home. “No drinking,” the doctors say. I took two bottles home last week, and there’s another new one today, a regenerating whiskey plant.

  “You want to lie down?” I park Ed’s chair next to the bed and come around in front of him, where he grabs for me, his good hand on my hip.

  “You. Too.”

  I kneel and take his hand into mine. “Not yet, handsome. You have to get well first.”

  He rearranges his grip so he can bring my hand to his lap, smiling at me, his eyes bright. Feel that? I’m well enough.

  I can hear one of those doctors saying, “This is a tough road. Trauma to the brain often exacerbates existing tendencies and character traits, usually in the—” He struggled to find a diplomatic way to put it. “Usually on the negative side rather than the positive. Let’s say someone’s a little messy; we often see that become worse after a brain injury, to the extent that a housekeeper might be needed.” What were Ed’s negative traits? Messy. Stubborn. A voracious appetite for food and drink and women. Of course Ed is ready for sex.

  I take my hand back and stand, repeating, “Not yet, love. Not yet.”

  Not ever, love. Not ever.

  I am devastated by the idea of Ed’s celibacy. The Ed I know would forfeit life entirely before accepting it under these terms.

  His face reads fear suddenly, his eyes bouncing in discomfort like those of a disoriented beast. Panicky, ready to flee. I don’t know what has scared him, whether he’s heard my thoughts or whether it’s just one more wave of confusion that’s caught him and knocked him back under.

  “Let’s get you into bed.” The physical therapists and nurses have taught us how to help Ed from chair to standing, standing to sitting on the bed, sitting to lying down. We brace ourselves as he heaves his weight forward. We lift his left leg onto the mattress after his right, the limb stiff and foreign, a dead thing tied to his body. The therapists have shown us how to massage the muscles, to loosen them back into the memory of motion. They tell us, “It’s just going to take time.” They tell us this over and over, but it has been nearly six months, and I don’t know how many months or years it will take to finally amount to Time.

  I prop pillows behind Ed’s head and shoulders as his eyelids flutter. He snaps his eyes open and then closes them softly, just like my boys when they’re fighting exhaustion. I sit on the edge of his bed and watch as his breathing grows smooth and even. I push a thick swatch of hair back from his forehead, the dark flecked with gray I haven’t noticed before. This new Ed is aging quicker than his predecessor, and I worry that he’ll be an old man before he’s released from this place, withered and stooped, resting on a cane. We’ll all be our same ages, and we’ll gather around him, children at his feet, waiting to hear his stories, all the life he lived before this moment.

  Chapter 32

  — Laura —

  Tim has dragged me to this appointment. It isn’t his, but he insisted on coming with me, and now he sits stiffly at my side, uncomfortable. He’s never visited a therapist before, either.

  The office is done up in Easter pastels. Light yellow walls, lavender curtains, a rose and baby blue plaid sofa. I am sitting next to a stuffed bear. Tim rests his arm on the head of a duck. A bowl of potpourri sits on the low table before us, a blend of cedar and cinnamon and sage, too strong. I feel a headache starting at the back of my skull.

  The therapist stares at us. I can’t remember if she’s asked something. I don’t know whose turn it is to talk, or if anyone has spoken at all.

  Her name is Helen, and her eyes are enormous, amber-brown, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, overshadowing the brightest blue or green, and I find myself envying them, though the rest of her is bland and thick. She is tall and wide-shouldered, and she towers over me when we shake hands.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Edmund,” she says, and I try to remember if it’s the first thing she’s said. “We worked together a few times throughout the years. He was a great asset to the state.”

  “He still is.” My voice is too defensive. I hear it.

  Tim takes my hand, and I have to make myself not draw away. He feels less of a husband now that Ed is less of a man.

  A week ago, Bonnie and Pete and Tim cornered me in the kitchen of our house. They’d occupied the children with a movie downstairs. Pete poured us each a whiskey, and Bonnie said, “You need to let Ed go.” Pete was nodding at her side, Tim, too. They were staging an intervention. I thought again about that last day with Ed in his kitchen, all that broiling anger. I thought I’d let him go. I thought I was done.

  But he is sick now, and everything is different.

  Tim said, “Baby, this is too much right now. It’s hard on all of us, but you’re taking the brunt of it. I’ve made us an appointment with a therapist.”

  “She’s wonderful,” Pete added. “Bonnie and I have seen her, and she really helped us work through some of our shit. She’ll be able to help you sort this out. There’s no guidebook here, Laura. You’ve got to talk to someone.”

  I took my whiskey to my room and stayed there through dinner. But they were persistent, and here we are.

  Helen says, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Tim speaks first. “Laura is driving to Great Falls twice a week to visit Ed. His parents were here for a while, but they had to get back to Michigan, and Laura has taken on the bulk of Ed’s care. He still thinks they’re married, and I think—Pete and Bonnie and our other friends, too—that it isn’t good for either of them. Ed needs to understand what his life really looks like, and Laura needs to focus on her own.”

  “You me
an I need to focus on you.”

  “That’s not what Tim said, Laura.” Helen’s voice is calm and even. She has a notepad on her lap, a pen in her hand. She blinks at me.

  “It’s what he meant, and of course he deserves my attention. But I’d appreciate a little understanding while I help Ed get back on his feet.”

  “Why is it your responsibility to help Ed get back on his feet?”

  Her voice is like a metronome, a steady unbroken rhythm. I don’t want it to soothe me as much as it does.

  I say, “He’s my son’s father.”

  Tim says, “I’m your other son’s father, and I’m your husband.”

  Helen says, “Can you understand how this might be hard for Tim, Laura?”

  I look away from her, my gaze catching on the prints and posters she’s chosen to display on her walls—waterfalls and meadows and mountains, their natural colors at odds with the room’s muted tones. Near the window, she’s hung a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer, the words in swooped calligraphy, vines and flowers decorating the border. How can anyone have the wisdom to know what they can and can’t change? We learn only after trying.

  I remember Ed telling me the Catholic Church doesn’t recognize divorce. Ed and I are still married in its eyes, and I am committing adultery with Tim. I am a polygamist, a whore, and I fight the urge to tell Helen that sometimes I feel the same way. I am still married to Ed, I want to tell her. Make my new husband understand.

  Tim isn’t even new anymore.

  “Laura?” the woman asks. “What are you gaining through this time with Ed?” Her pen is poised over the notepad, ready to scribble down my response, because this answer feels like the answer if I can find it. What are you gaining? But I can’t see it in terms of gain. I am focused only on not losing anything else. I have lost Ed over and over—to the institution, to Penelope, to policy, to the state, to his friends. I had so little of him left that I had to finally let go of the last bits, which is maybe a new version of the story I’ve told myself of our divorce, but one that feels true right now. It was Ed who slipped away from me, and I couldn’t hold him, couldn’t bring him back. He was a bachelor and I was a wife, but we would raise our son together, and I would live just a little through the power of him, the great force that was Ed out in the world.