Remedies

by Kate Ledger

  “The point is, I met Charles, and he saved us, you and me. I’d made a mistake, and he helped fix it. We moved on. And when you do that, move on, I mean, it’s best to leave the past behind. Wouldn’t you agree?” She took a sip of her tea. He couldn’t tell, but he damn well suspected that she was saying, cryptically, something about Caleb. She was reminding him that there were sources of pain too difficult to carry with you. When he didn’t respond, she added, “So you understand, people move on.”

  Then, quickly, she pushed her cup and saucer away from her, and she stood. He didn’t watch her as she headed down the hallway. There was the sound of a closet door opening and then closing. When she returned, she had a pale green folded blanket and a pillow cradled in her arms.

  “More blankets in the hall closet, if you need them,” she informed him. “I’m tired. It’s time for bed.”

  Long after she’d retired to her room, Simon lay awake, his feet jutting upward on the armrest, the blood draining from them, wondering about Charles and how she loved him. Did that love have anything to do with Charles, in particular, or did it spring from her sense of gratitude? It looked the same from the outside, and only she would know the difference, if, in fact, there was a difference to know.

  She hadn’t been kidding. It was not a comfortable couch.

  They escorted Charles home from the hospital the following afternoon in the glaring sunshine. There had been no diagnosis. It was like the stupefying end of a foreign film where you were left hanging. The scans showed no compression anywhere. There wasn’t a hint of a tumor to be found. Simon had begun to inquire about other tests, but Dr. Smitts had put up his hand. “There are mysteries we can only wonder at,” he said, and pronounced that it was time for Charles to go home.

  Simon drove them from Landesmont to the condo. Lucille sat with Charles in the backseat, holding his hand. When they arrived, Charles stepped gingerly from the rental car, but waved off assistance as he teetered toward the entry hall of the building. It was a building for old people that had a smell, Simon thought. Despite its cheery pastel color, a beauty-salon pink with aquamarine trim, it smelled like boiled barley, he decided. It smelled like the oily inside of a hat. The doorman, wearing a costumelike suit with epaulets, looked even older than the residents. Charles greeted him with a salute. Lucille trailed a step behind, holding her head high.

  “How’s everything, Mr. Bear? Heard about that accident.”

  “I saved a dog’s life,” Charles said triumphantly.

  “That’s the way to do it. And you’re feeling all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Give a call if you need anything.”

  “Will do.”

  Charles and Lucille appeared no more flustered or out of sorts than a couple that had just returned from the local bridge game. Simon, holding the paper shopping bag with the clothes his father had been wearing in the accident, said hello to the doorman, accompanied by a grave dip of his head. He hoped the gesture, if not his tone, would reveal there was more gravitas to this slow trek through the lobby. He’d had to fight his mother to let him carry the bag of clothes. She would have carried them herself. They’re incapable of accepting help, Simon told himself. It has nothing to do with me. It’s that they fear death. If they accept my help, they accept that they’re capable of dying. As long as they refuse assistance, they can keep up the illusion their lives will go on forever.

  “Can I help you into bed or would you prefer to be set up at the couch?” Simon asked as they entered the apartment.

  “Lunch first,” Lucille called out.

  “He could have lunch in bed,” Simon suggested.

  “The table is fine,” Charles insisted. “We’re not going to make this into a big to-do. I feel fine. I don’t need bed.”

  “But Dr. Smitts said—”

  “Simon, get yourself a chair from the closet if you’re going to sit and have lunch,” Lucille instructed.

  After the meal, Simon said, “Now’s the time to rest,” but his father puttered around the apartment. He wanted to finish fixing the door of the entertainment center, which he’d been working on just before the accident. “Did you not hear them at the hospital?” Simon demanded.

  Finally, Lucille pulled him aside by the elbow. “He’s doing fine,” she said. “Just leave him be.”

  But when he saw Charles going for the toolbox, he suggested, “Why don’t you just instruct me and let me do the work?” He put out his hands in a gesture he knew looked clownish. He felt like a clown. He proffered himself to his father. “Just use me. I’ll be the hired help.”

  Charles sighed and lowered himself onto the sofa. Simon sat cross-legged in front of the entertainment center, with the toolbox open at his side. Above him on the shelves surrounding the television, the carefully arranged display reminded him of props. Webster’s dictionary, a Time magazine three-volume history of the United States, a National Geographic atlas of the world, and a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (which Simon doubted either of his parents had read), all of them possessing a secretive air in their upright, affected poses.

  Above the volumes, from silver frames, a pair of unsmiling Russian im migrants stared into the room, the man in a shapeless dark coat and the woman in a long peasant skirt, yellowed and fading portraits that looked like they’d been rubbed against stone. Simon knew almost nothing about Charles’s grandparents except that they’d emigrated from Russia as a young couple with a young daughter at the end of the nineteenth century. Industrious and hopeful, they’d fled the pogroms, their little village burned to the ground, neighbors and relatives killed as they hid. With just sacks of clothes, they’d disembarked at Ellis Island, where they’d guilelessly traded in their rubles for what they believed was American paper currency but were actually gum wrappers. The moment they realized they’d been had, Charles had often said, was the beginning of a family legacy of distrust in the government.

  “It wasn’t the government that got them,” Simon had pointed out. “It was some shyster working at a money exchange window who realized he could make some extra cash.”

  “The window was on the island,” Charles said. “That shyster represented the country.”

  Twenty-some years later, the immigrant grandparents wound up raising a very young Charles after his mother died in a building fire in New Jersey. They distrusted the government, refused to put their money in banks and held disdain for everything modern and, Simon believed, pleasurable. As the details had emerged, they’d refused to believe the radio accounts of events unfolding in Europe. They were skeptical about the government’s motives for the war. When they witnessed firsthand the photographs of the American liberation, they disavowed God. They’d seen it themselves, but here was proof for the rest of the world. No God worth believing in would allow such a thing to happen. You could see it in their faces, Simon thought, peering into the yellowed photograph. These were people who depended on nothing beyond themselves. The more insular they were, the better their defense against the universe. Charles, who was in his twenties when they finally died, had grown up in their spartan apartment with no toys (or so he said) and an abundance of chores. His understanding of their love was the fact that they had taken him in.

  “What are we doing with this bookshelf?” Simon asked, rooting through the tools. “Looks fine to me.”

  “Your mother wanted me to adjust the hinges. Doors aren’t straight. See that?”

  “Easy as cake.” He selected a Phillips screwdriver and set to work inside the low cabinet door. “I’ll keep tightening. You tell me when they’re even,” he said, happily unscrewing. “Did I tell you I hired a new nurse?”

  “You’re not doing this right, see? You have to loosen both sides at the same time.”

  Simon shifted his weight onto his other knee and leaned into the cabinet. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” He was thinking about Julie. “She’s just starting off, a new graduate. Which is the best way to train peopl
e. Fresh. She’s very motivated, and she’s already won prizes. She’s very determined, and she wants a mentor who’ll take a real interest in her career, not just whether she’s clocking in and clocking out.”

  He bragged about her, still complimenting himself on the decision. What he did not mention was that kiss. It had happened quickly. After he’d dared to bare his soul, telling her about how he was planning to surprise Emily with a bottle of her own Barolo. He’d been describing the kit and the casks, the wholesome, nesty smell of the wood surrounding them. Julie had responded with warm and rapt appreciation for his romantic spirit. She’d made an incredible gesture with her hand, pressing it against her heart, and he’d felt such a swell of emotion, standing in front of the barrels, envisioning Emily’s response to a bottle of wine, that he’d managed not to contain himself. Julie McKinley had been standing there, looking at the casks, and he’d simply reached for her.

  The gesture had been a gentle one. No pulling or groping. His frame, broad across the shoulders, turned in front of her, a kite moving in an arc. She couldn’t have been any taller than five-three. He angled, swooped like a swift, and kissed her. Their lips met warmly, without wetness, an almost chaste kiss, like a boy would kiss a beloved babysitter, with exuberance, knowing and not knowing what he was doing. She smelled like powder, like the end of a bath. He backed away with embarrassment. He hadn’t intended anything; he wasn’t even attracted to her. Those features had a fundamentally cold look, and the body, in his opinion, was too thin. Her expression appeared somewhat less surprised, as if she were aware of a certain effect she had on men, but he apologized.

  “Hm,” he had said, stumbling. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she reassured him.

  “I didn’t mean to. I mean, I didn’t plan to.”

  She produced a small smile. “I know.”

  “It won’t happen again. I love my wife. I really do.”

  She blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were fine with the decision, either way.

  He astounded himself. He had never cheated on Emily. All the years they’d been together, he’d been wanting and waiting for Emily. Other women did not interest him. Their bodies were in front of him in the office, their bra straps down, their legs wide as they asked him to look at this mole or that patch of skin on the curve of their buttocks. He was between their thighs doing Pap smears, and their bodies failed to look sexual to him. They were puppets, dolls. Their bodies were machines. And in fact the idea of being aroused near them slightly repulsed him. But this? What was this? He had not expected it to happen. He wasn’t sure what had compelled him, and he had gone back to the office with her and he’d quickly put out of his mind that it had happened. He hadn’t planned it. It just as easily might not have happened. Anyway, she said it was okay. She didn’t seem offended.

  “Listen,” Charles was reprimanding, pointing at the cabinet doors, “if you just tighten, they’re still going to be crooked. You have to loosen both sides.”

  “Just trust me,” Simon insisted, twisting and twisting at the tiny screws. When he stood, opening and closing the doors, he’d managed to readjust them. The upper corners of the doors appeared aligned, but now the bottoms were too close together. “I can fix this,” he said, attacking an upper hinge again.

  “I’m telling you, you have to take them off and start again.”

  “I can do it with some simple tightening. Trust me, you’re not supposed to have to take the whole thing apart.”

  The peasant in the shabby black coat and his stony-faced wife gazed over them. Their expressions looked as though they concurred with Charles: The doors would have to be removed and the hinges rescrewed in tandem. It was the cabinet that screwed you back. It was possible, Simon realized, that marrying Lucille might have been less an act of heroism and more a way for Charles to escape their dark and burdened world. What would Lucille say to that?

  “How’s that?” Simon asked, twirling the screwdriver. “Close enough, I think. If they’re uneven, you can barely tell.”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask Lucille. I would’ve taken them off.”

  “Yeah, but this way was easier. What’d your grandparents say when you told them you were getting married?” Simon asked, looking into the photograph.

  “What do you mean, what’d they say?”

  “Did they approve?” It was the closest Simon had ever come to asking Charles about his past.

  “I never crossed them. Ever. Now”—he stood up from the couch—“I’m going to sit on the balcony and read my paper.”

  It dawned on Simon then that Charles might not know anything about the Larry his mother had known. But if Charles did know, and had known for years, then he and Lucille shared yet another bond that had long excluded Simon. Simon stood, watching Charles lumber toward the balcony. “You don’t need to be a stoic, you know.”

  Charles folded his paper under his arm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t need to pretend this wasn’t a major event. You’re not young, for chrissake. You can’t take your body for granted anymore.”

  Charles gave a brisk, phlegmy cough. “All I can say is what I know, and I know I feel okay. I don’t need your diagnosis. Got it?” He slid open the glass door, which made a wet-sounding shushing noise.

  Simon suggested, “I’ll go down to the pharmacy and fill your prescriptions. Just in case you need them, you’ll have them on hand.”

  Charles pooh-poohed with his free hand. “I wouldn’t waste the money.”

  “Dad, you’re allowed to lean on other people besides Mom. In fact, if you think about it, it isn’t fair to make her the only person responsible for you.”

  “I’m sure I’ll hear from her if she’s got a problem with it.”

  Simon repacked the toolbox, testing the doors and squinting to verify their realignment. With satisfaction, he returned the box to its nook under the sink. He saw that Lucille, too, was seated out on the two-chair balcony with a flat folder that seemed to contain stationery. He’s obsessed with death, Simon thought. By refusing my help, he forces me to think about it too. He forces me to think about Caleb. This is how he controls me.

  “A lot of good it did,” Charles had once said, “your being a doctor.” The words shot back to him, like a torpedo darkly through an ocean of sixteen years. A lot of good, indeed. Caleb had been born on a Tuesday in the lucid, wide-eyed hours of an afternoon. Emily’s water had broken that morning just after she arrived in Bethesda, having insisted on working right up until her due date. She’d driven herself back home to Baltimore, contractions and all, entering the house through the north side door, standing in the waiting room with the rest of the patients.

  “You’re sure?” he’d asked her, after Rita had pulled him out of an appointment. “We should go to the hospital.” He’d refused to take a Lamaze class, which he’d considered a crutch for those unfamiliar with bodily fluids and biological processes, and he was beginning to regret the decision.

  “No chance,” she breathed, as a new round of tightening began to wrench her abdomen. “I’m not getting back in that car.”

  “You want to deliver here?”

  “I want it over with,” she seethed.

  “Then we should go to the hospital.”

  “No chance, no how.”

  “Well, honey,” he said, feeling desperation creep up on him along with a clammy sweat.

  “Do something,” she gasped, as the contraction took hold, and he realized they were late in the game.

  From a stash in a locked cabinet, he found her an injection of morphine to make her more comfortable, but he knew it would only take the edge off the pain. Suddenly, he was panicked. He hadn’t delivered a baby in years, not since his residency, and he struggled to remember how to catch a newborn. She lay on the exam table, telling him that she wanted to push, she couldn’t keep from pushing. And yet the baby who was Caleb descended and then retreated and then descended and retreated, and Simon gre
w increasingly desperate as he began to recall a whole list of possible complications that could trip up what was supposed to be nature’s most inevitable event. It was the first time in his life he’d felt the strain of knowing too much information.

  “Call 911,” he shouted to Rita.

  The ambulance arrived, and a ponytailed paramedic named Tony guided Simon’s son through the birth canal, unlooping a twice-wound purple cord from the baby’s neck.

  Later, they called Lucille and Charles from the hospital and recounted the story. “A lot of good it did,” Charles commented wryly, “your being a doctor.”

  Simon heard the remark but dismissed it in the roar of his ecstatic mood. He had a healthy baby boy. A boy. His wife, barely torn, heroic, tender and tired, now rested. He would never forget the stunned look in her shining eyes, the way she gripped his hand from the bed, finishers in a great race. The baby, wheeled in from the nursery, had perfect lips and a nose as geometric as a cat’s. Under rice-paper eyelids, his eyes moved inside newly dry dreams. Then his mouth opened and released a shriek worthy of a barn animal.

  He and Emily could not speak of Caleb’s death. Back then, when he looked at her, suddenly, at breakfast, or emerging from the bathroom holding a jar of cream, he used to think she might be about to say something. The longer she said nothing, the more he dreaded what she might say. They bickered instead over the inane, insensitive commentary other people provided. “You’re lucky you’re young,” said a neighbor. “You can try again if you want to.” And a friend (who would consequently be dumped) said, “It’s got to be easier now than when they’re older and they’ve developed a little personality.”

  “The nerve,” Emily fumed.

  “They mean well,” he reasoned. He meant to keep her from being hurt. She was intent on proving to people that they were okay, they were getting through it. And so they began to act as though they were getting through it.

  But people knew, and they had opinions. He was certain of their accusations, even if no one would dare to be explicit. He and Emily weren’t merely an unfortunate couple who’d lost a child. They were the victims of the worst of ironies. Caleb died despite having a father who was a doctor. Simon had failed. There was nothing to do but try not to dwell on it every minute, follow Emily’s strong, forge-ahead lead. He made every effort to move energetically, optimistically into an unburdened future. He suspected she was suffering even more than he was—wasn’t that the burden of mothers?—but her anguish wasn’t evident on the surface and she would not discuss it. He didn’t intrude. The way he explained it to himself, he was respecting her space. He came across her in the kitchen, throwing nipples and bottles, unused diapers, packages of unopened booties, into a black trash bag.