As Pieter turned with the first box in his arms, Luke was just coming up, emerging slowly: head, shoulders, torso, hips, feet. He and Pieter edged past each other, and then Pieter made his way back down the ladder, one-handed. His son followed him, more quickly. Luke had a box under his right arm; he jumped backward a few rungs from the bottom, to land—graceful, thudding—in the hallway.
The bare tree stood in the living room, already shedding its needles. Luke and Angie had made most of the ornaments in grade school: paper chains, the red and white links faded to the same pinky-beige; Styrofoam balls that, as they were lifted from their boxes, rained glitter and chips of yellowed glue onto the floor.
“Who wants something to drink?” Jordana asked. “We have eggnog. Or beer?”
Luke said, “Maybe eggnog.”
“It’s virgin nog.”
“Sounds obscene,” said Angie.
Pieter laughed, too hard, and stopped when he heard that Jordana and Luke were also laughing too hard.
At the hospital, when he’d gone with Angie to get her suitcase, she’d stood for a moment frozen in her room. “Daddy?”
“Yes?” He’d picked her suitcase up from the bed.
“I’m okay here.” She didn’t look at him. “I think I should maybe stay.”
Gently, he’d said, “Your mother and Luke are waiting for us.”
The words came out severe, embarrassingly dry, when he’d meant them to sound simple and undramatic. He’d meant to acknowledge Angie’s fear and also her courage; had meant to communicate that life could be almost unbearable, but you bore it.
Jordana, handing him a cup of eggnog, said, “I wish you didn’t have to play tonight.”
He wished he could stay too, though he wondered, if staying were a possibility, whether Jordana would still want him to.
Angie and Luke argued over which of them, in kindergarten, had made the better pipe-cleaner angel. His wife put her arm around his waist. He sipped the sweet eggnog, which came from a carton and tasted like melted ice cream. He would have to leave in twenty minutes, but for a moment he let himself relax; for once he let himself accept contentment without asking that it last.
Six P.M., long past dark. On the ward, they would be lining up for dinner, each picking up her tray from the rack and taking it into what was called the breakfast room, though it was also the lunch and dinner room. Despite being the focus of much of the afternoon (“What do you think’s for dinner?”), the meal itself was usually over in ten minutes for all but catatonics. Half an hour from now, at six-thirty, the nurse would turn on Jeopardy! The windows had wire inside the glass, cross-sectioning the outside world into dozens of small octagons: manageable pieces. The same kind of glass fronted the nurses’ station, making it seem like a fragment of outside world brought inside.
That the nursing station was glass on all sides made Angie think of a museum case. Exhibit 1: Nurses eating their wan salads, or an extra dinner tray someone didn’t want. Exhibit 2: Nurses writing down everything you said in the log.
Stop it. She was thinking crazy. Going over to the couch, she sat down and sipped from her virgin nog, which had the consistency of Elmer’s glue.
Cole came through the front door, his dark hair and the shearling collar of his coat glittering with snow. He shook his head, and tiny water droplets flew in every direction. He seemed more handsome every time Angie saw him. Raising the silver foil icicles he’d brought, he said, “Ho, ho, ho.”
“I’m going to put on carols,” Angie’s mother said, jumping up to turn on the radio. As she fiddled with the knob, the room filled for a moment with music from the Nutcracker. Everyone but Cole groaned.
“Should we listen to this?” her mother asked, making her face serious.
“What is it?” asked Cole.
“‘The guests depart—the children go to bed—the magic begins,’” said Pieter. “Please change it, Jordie.”
Angie and Luke glanced at each other, brows raised; their father never used pet names.
Cole sat next to Angie on the couch. Beneath his unbuttoned coat he wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans worn to white thread at the knees. As he bent to unlace his boots, his hair falling into his face, she smelled the tang of his soap. For a moment, longing—not exactly for Cole, she didn’t know for what—stuck in her throat.
“So you’re a logger now,” Angie said, about his clothes.
Cole shrugged. “How are you?”
“Mental.”
Cole laughed. “No, how are you really?”
Did he even remember that they’d fucked that time, in the shower room? “Really mental.”
“I made that in second grade,” Luke was saying about an ornament Pieter held, Popsicle sticks in the shape of a listing star. “It has to go on.”
Angie found the remote control between two cushions. Channel 8, 7, 6.
“Ange?” said her mother.
She turned her head. They were all standing very still, looking at her.
Angie said, “It’s time for Jeopardy!”
“It’s your first night home,” her mother said, looking stricken. “Here, come get more eggnog with me.”
“I’m tired.”
“Help me with the angel,” her father said.
Luke jumped to get the stepladder. “I’ll help with the angel.”
“I asked Angie.”
Luke was standing very still, a glass bulb in one hand. “Why don’t you leave her alone?”
“Never mind,” Angie said. “Never mind. I’ll get the fucking eggnog.”
When she came back into the room, someone—probably her mother—had turned the TV off. Cole had escaped to the other side of the room. Her father held the small ladder steady and Luke, on the last step, stretched toward the top of the tree. Jordana came over and hugged Angie, the cardboard eggnog carton awkward between them.
On Jeopardy! there was a rhythmic way the answers came first, the questions second:
This Baltic nation lies between Estonia and Lithuania.
Where is Latvia?
This part of the brain controls involuntary nervous functions such as breathing.
What is the medulla oblongata?
Her mother moved away, pouring eggnog. Angie put her hand around the new watch on her wrist, grounding herself.
This writer’s actual name was Samuel Clemens.
Twain, Mark Twain.
Luke was struggling to make the angel fit. The tree was so high he had to bend the top branch.
Please rephrase that as a question.
Who is Twain?
Luke tried different angles: The top branch bent forward, so the angel seemed to be bowing; sideways, so the angel lay on her flank. Across the room, Jordana raised her mug to Angie. A toast, but one that contained wariness, warning, as though she meant, Please be okay. In return, Angie raised her own mug, wondering how to say I will.
Thirty-one
Wendy stayed at school during winter break, taking a bus home just for a couple of days around Christmas. Her younger sister, Julie, got engaged; her father’s drinking seemed worse. She was back in Madison in time to work New Year’s Eve, a good night for tips. Classes started mid-January. She avoided the guys she’d slept with last semester. She worked on Valentine’s, which waiters called Amateur Night; the restaurant filled with couples who weren’t used to going out to dinner. They had exaggerated visions of what the night would be and took out romantic disappointment on their servers. Still, Wendy made close to two hundred dollars.
She hadn’t heard from Luke since mid-December. When he’d been here, her life had seemed full: boyfriend, studying, friends, work, dinners in her crowded kitchen, all the people on campus she knew by sight and greeted. If asked then, she would have said that she steadied Luke, not the other way around. She wouldn’t have guessed that his leaving—like a log removed from the bottom of a pile—would make everything else fall over, showing wormy undersides.
Her best friend, Kim, said things like,
“You know, I’m totally here if you want to talk.” She had a deep raspy voice, at odds with her pert nose and neat brown ponytail. She sat cross-legged on her flowered bedspread, beneath the Doisneau poster of a man and woman kissing in the street. “Freshman year, when John and I broke up, I was completely depressed.”
“I’m not depressed.” Wendy didn’t turn from her Selectric, where she was typing a history paper about the Belgian Congo. She could have said that she and Luke hadn’t exactly broken up, but she didn’t want to open the conversation any wider. Loneliness vibrated inside her all the time, a motor in her chest. But to let her friends see how pathetically she longed to throw herself at them would be even worse than being lonely.
In the first two months after Luke left, she’d slept with seven people, most of whom she barely knew. Each time, she’d felt so dislodged the next day, so unlike herself, that the only way to feel better was to throw herself into a new flirtation. Over Thanksgiving in Iowa, she’d slept with her old boyfriend Steve, something she thought she’d never do; because Steve was still half in love with her, usually she kept interactions with him cheerfully casual.
After Luke guessed she was cheating, she’d stopped. She just hadn’t wanted to anymore.
Kim pulled a loose thread from the comforter, wrapping it around her finger. “Well, I’m here, if you want,” she said, sounding unhappy.
Wendy typed another line of her paper.
Luke finally called one afternoon in the last week of February and asked what she was doing. She’d been reading Kim’s Vogue, but she said she’d been studying. “How’s your sister?”
Angie had been out of the hospital two months. She seemed stabilized. He named some new drugs she was taking that seemed to be working. Then he said, “I’m not there, I’m here.”
He was at Cleveland’s, and she walked down to meet him. Seeing him through the window, she felt—she couldn’t help it—a surge of happiness. She didn’t think There he is but Oh.
There you are.
She made her way past the tables of aging hippies and crew jocks. Standing, he crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray and shook back his hair. He wore a coat she didn’t recognize, a high school letter jacket. Taking the edges of his jacket in both hands, she pulled herself tight against his warm, solid body. Behind her eyelids, and against her throat, she felt the pressure of tears.
“Oh, Wendy.” He stroked her hair with his big hand. “I really missed you. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She stepped back. Who was he to think he could soothe her? To cover up her annoyance, she did something cheerleadery, laughing as she flicked her hair back from her face. She slid into the chair opposite his. “Since when have you smoked?”
“I don’t know. A few months.”
“I’ve never eaten out here. When I waited, I ate in back.”
He was still puzzling out the smoking question. “At the hospital, everyone smokes all the time. I guess I started to be social.”
She drank some water from her pebbled red plastic glass. “So. How long have you been back? Have you seen anyone?”
He shook his head. “I just got in. I called you as soon—all my stuff’s still in the car.” He nodded toward the street outside the diner. “I guess I’m going to get a job, see if they’ll let me back in school for next fall.” He started to take another cigarette from the pack, then pushed it back in. “Are you still … are you seeing—?”
If she’d been better at lying, she might have said yes, but she shook her head.
He reached across the table. “I missed you.”
“You said that.” She pulled her hand back from his and studied the menu. When she looked up, he was looking hard at her. She smiled quickly and looked away.
“Where’s our waitress?” she asked. “I don’t remember the service being this bad.”
“The service used to be great,” he said, reaching for her hand again.
She waved a waitress over. Luke ordered breakfast—besides smoking, he was drinking coffee now. Wendy shook her head and said, “Nothing, thanks.”
“Being home was so … and my parents. … At least Angie’s better. There was a while when I didn’t know. You’ve never been on a psych ward. God, Wendy, sometimes I’d think of you here, and I missed you so much, and this all seemed so unreal and pure.”
She couldn’t stand him. Mildly, she said, “I don’t think it’s particularly pure.”
He took her hand. “I love you. I want to make things work.”
She pulled her hand away for a third time and stood up. “You can’t just reappear and expect I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Well, since you were fucking someone else, I know you weren’t waiting for me.” Then, “I’m sorry. Wen, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. Please sit down. Please.”
She’d wanted to hear this for months, but it didn’t mean anything. She stayed standing. His eggs came and he stared at them. “I haven’t slept.”
She forced herself to be nice. “Since when?”
“I don’t know.” He put his face in his hands.
Suddenly, she couldn’t stand the way she was acting. She dropped to her knees on the dirty floor next to him, putting her arms awkwardly around his body, burying her face in his stiff coat.
That afternoon, she rose from bed and looked down on Luke sleeping but couldn’t summon any of the relieved tumult of the last two hours. Luke had followed her to her room and they’d made love, touching each other’s faces and laughing. When Luke came, he’d cried, “Oh, oh!” and then he’d pulled her down tight against him, his body shaking.
Sitting at her desk, she opened an anthropology textbook and tried to study. The last owner of the book had highlighted with an orange pen sections of text that seemed random to Wendy: fluorine … becoming common … interglacial … seasonally in some cases. … Luke had cast off the blanket in his sleep; his long pale back was divided by the blue channel of his spine. Late winter afternoon; the sky was a dark, wet gray, with the streetlights haloed pale yellow against it. She copied information she needed onto index cards, got up to go to the bathroom, copied more information down. Her notes seemed messy; she hated looking at them. She threw down her pen in frustration and went into the kitchen to make toast.
When she came back in, Luke opened his eyes. “Wen.”
She wanted to be alone. She could actually feel it in her muscles, as though she were holding them locked to keep from bolting. What was wrong with her? Luke reached out an arm from under the covers and she sat beside him. His body gave off heat. She put her nose down to his shoulder, which was round and smooth. Closing her eyes, she breathed him in, the familiar soap smell of his skin and the new burnt smell—coffee, cigarettes—of his breath.
“There’s a rent party tonight,” she said, face buried in his neck. “Do you want to go to a party?”
A dreadlocked white boy took their money. He was shirtless, fans of faint blond hair around his nipples. Behind him smirked a poster of Jerry Garcia. The boy danced as he counted back their change, head bent, bare feet stomping. A line of darker hair ran down his stomach and disappeared into his pants, which had slipped low on his slender hips. Something about the beauty of his narrow abdomen made Wendy obscurely angry—at him, at everyone there.
“I’ll get us some beer,” Wendy said, and escaped Luke.
In the kitchen, people were sitting on countertops; one group passed a bulbous purple bong. The boy handing out beer stopped to pump the keg, then resumed filling the plastic cups held out toward him. He had long hair that he shook back from his eyes as he handed Wendy two cups of beer the color of urine and not very cold.
Out in the living room, Luke was talking to friends. She handed him his beer, standing just far enough from him that he couldn’t put his arm around her.
How many parties had she spent smiling and taking sips of beer, Luke’s arm over her shoulders? Luke talked easily, so that she’d felt like he covered them both; in groups with him, she
didn’t bother sticking to her say-something-at-least-once-every-twenty-minutes rule. He had the gift of seemingly effortless charm, a way of keeping his attention on other people without making them self-conscious. He was very social—he didn’t like to be alone even to study—but he didn’t show very much of himself to the people he surrounded himself with. They didn’t notice because he came across just the opposite, open and up-front. People learned right away that his sister had a serious mental illness. They probably felt (as Wendy had) that he was revealing himself in a way that was unique and intimate, whereas Angie’s illness was just such a fact of his life that he wouldn’t have thought to withhold it. In return, people told him about themselves. Wendy used to see it back when he brought girls into Cleveland’s for breakfast; the girls talked and talked.
Now she drank from her beer, disliking Luke. He was telling a story about teaching adults to swim, a German woman who kept panicking and throwing her arms around his neck, Mein Gott, nearly drowning him. People laughed. At other parties, Luke’s stories had always been ones she’d heard first, which made the stories almost both of theirs. She knew what he was leaving out, what he embellished. This story was different; he’d probably told it, in an original and truer version, to Angie weeks ago.
The conversation moved on. Luke seemed happy, unhaunted by how long he’d been gone and where. He took a step toward her and she stepped back, saying, “I’m going to the bathroom.”
In the hallway, a girl whose name she didn’t remember said, “I see Luke is back.”
Everyone knew Luke, thought he was great. Turning back toward the living room, Wendy could see him through the arched doorway. He was bent over with laughter.
I hate you.
The thought caught her off guard. But it also felt good, like throwing herself into bed after a night at work. I hate you, she said again in her head, testing the words.
Mark, one of the guys she’d slept with this fall, was at the edge of a group. She must have known he would be at this party. “You’re shitting me,” he cried. “You’re shitting me!” For a moment she wanted to duck away without his seeing her. Then she called his name. He looked up, smiled, trotted over.
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