A Man of His Own

by Susan Wilson

  If he can grasp the cord, maybe he can jerk the plug out. The band leader introduces the guest singer, and suddenly the room is filled with the throaty crooning of a woman lamenting her lost boyfriend. She’s lost him to another. It’s pure blues, and tears spring to Rick’s eyes. “Pax, let’s try something else.” Together, they position him so that he can grab the latch on the cupboard door. It sticks a little, but he gets it open. Inside the cupboard, replacing the games and puzzles of previous tenants, are the medical supplies that he uses—tubing and sponges, basins and bandages.

  Rick has to reach across his dead legs in order to feel around inside the cupboard for the cord. He thinks of them as ballast, that they’ll hold him steady in the chair as he reaches. Because he can’t move them, or feel them, he’s perfectly assured that they will stay put. Because they don’t move, he can’t quite reach far enough into the deep cupboard to touch the cord plugged into the hidden wall outlet. He needs to get a little lower, a little closer. He pushes his chair backward and leans forward, but he’s blocked by the length of his unfeeling thighs. The electric cord is a tantalizing inch from his reaching fingers. Rick tries moving his legs apart, lifting one, then the other and placing them against the sides of the chair, but the wheelchair is too narrow and the best he can do is a mere five or six inches of freeboard. Even with that, bent nearly in two, the solid roof of the cupboard obstructs his getting any closer. Rick bangs his head on the edge. It’s hopeless; he’s stuck here listening to the music that his wife and his caretaker are no doubt dancing to. Keller’s hands on her waist, she’s reaching up to place her left on his broad shoulder, her right hand—he pictures it bare, not gloved—in Keller’s, palm to palm, fingers linking at some point in the dance.

  The lament is wrung out to the last note and the song is over. She wasn’t betrayed; she’s betrayed her lover. She’s done him wrong.

  Rick tries one more time, lunging past his dead legs and reaching deep into the cupboard. The next thing he knows, he’s facedown on the floor; the wheelchair has catapulted backward, where it knocks into the tray table, upending it with the force of its empty trajectory. Everything on the table flies off; his water glass smashes on the bare floor, his magazines scatter, and his empty coffee cup rolls out into the hallway.

  Pax is there, standing over him as if he’s a fallen soldier on the field. The dog is upset, and keeps pawing at him. “I’m okay, Pax. I’m okay.” The dog doesn’t seem convinced. He barks, paces, comes back, and settles only when Rick touches him. “Francesca is going to kill me.” Pax must agree, because he lies down beside Rick and heaves a great sigh. His normally upright ears are flattened side to side like immature puppy ears. “Maybe you can get me rolled over. Let’s try. It’s going to be embarrassing enough for them to find me like this, but at least I can be looking up.” Rick runs Pax through his lexicon of commands to get the dog to fetch the knotted rope, then use his weight as leverage so that Rick can flip over. On his back, Rick looks right into the cupboard and, finally, reaches the plug.

  Chapter Forty-five

  If I had been reluctant, and maybe even a little mad, about going to the Totem Pole with Keller on my seventh anniversary instead of with my husband, that reluctance finally gave way to a relaxed enjoyment that I hadn’t expected. I admit it, it was fun. It was fun to be in the company of a crowd of happy people, to have a drink or two. To dress up and feel pretty and desirable. To dance. Being there was a reminder of what I had rejected poor Buster for.

  Keller wasn’t the best dancer, and my shoes took a beating, but he improved as the night went on and we got over the shyness of two wallflowers on a forced date and let the music and the momentum carry us. An hour. That’s all we stayed, a hour, maybe an hour and a half. Just long enough to have some fun, a laugh or two. An hour when our strange confederacy faded and a new dynamic emerged. Not employee and employer, or caretaker and the cared for, but a couple of friends out for a night on the town. We didn’t speak of Rick, at least not after we started dancing. For this golden hour, we weren’t two of three; we were just the two of us.

  “We should go.” I don’t remember which one of us whispered this first. Between us, I think we said it twice or three times. And each time the band would launch into another terrific song and we stayed on the dance floor. My second martini grew warm on our table, untouched. We’d sat down between sets, Keller stealing the olive out of my glass, biting it off the sword-shaped pick with a smile.

  To tell the truth, I was a little shocked at Keller’s admission that he’d spent seven years in a reform school. Truancy. Hardly armed robbery, but still. If my initial reluctance to have him live with us had been based on nothing more than a primitive fear of strangers, this confession underscored how instincts are sometimes valid. It’s a good thing he hadn’t mentioned it at first, or I would never have let him into our house. But now I knew him. I saw every day how he had risen above such a rough beginning. My own growing up had been so effortless. Oh, sure, filled with bumps of childhood and the foibles of adolescence, but I was secure and educated and loved. Keller was not. The little I had gleaned about his early life had chilled me. After he’d been orphaned and passed around from relative to relative, reform school and the harsh life with his great-uncle might have turned him into a monster incapable of kindness. Here was this perfectly nice man, and the only affection he’d ever had was from the dog we all loved. In some way I understood that, although I don’t think I had articulated it to myself at that point. All I knew was that I was glad he was there, that he was a gentle man who had somehow become a part of our lives. Part of our family.

  “We got engaged here.” I had finished my second drink and suddenly it felt necessary for Keller to understand why this place had significance; that it wasn’t just Rick’s whim that had sent us there.

  “He told me.”

  “We barely knew each other, but I was sure he was the one.”

  “How did you know?”

  How to answer that question? “I just knew.”

  Keller didn’t say anything, and I wondered if he was thinking that I regretted my choice.

  “I love him. He’s not the same, and everything we planned on has been changed, but that doesn’t change how I feel. I just wish I could convince him of that.”

  “He knows it.” Keller gently took my two hands in his. “He knows it.”

  Those big hands holding mine were so warm, heated up by the warmth of the ballroom and the dancing, maybe the alcohol. I left mine in his and closed my eyes. “The thing is, sometimes I wonder.” I couldn’t finish the thought. I couldn’t say it.

  “Wonder what?”

  “No. It’s a terrible thing to say. I just sometimes wonder if it would have been better…” I trusted this man sitting there, but not with my worst thoughts.

  “If he’d been killed, would it have been better? Is that what keeps you awake?”

  It was, and Keller’s saying it out loud shocked me. A tear leaked out, threatening to spoil my mascara. “No. Not exactly.” I scrambled to deny it.

  “Francesca, it’s a natural thought. It doesn’t mean anything.” He handed me his folded handkerchief. “You’d be a saint for not thinking something like that now and again. And, as much as I admire you, I’m thinking you’re probably not really a saint.”

  That made me laugh and gave me the knees to get up and go to the ladies’ room to collect myself. Maybe I wasn’t a saint, but I was beginning to think that Keller Nicholson was. No, certainly not a saint. A reform school angel sent to me.

  Keller offered to fetch the car and pick me up at the door, but I refused. We’d been gone longer than I had wanted, and suddenly I was filled with a need to get home, to make sure that we hadn’t misjudged. Despite what Rick had said about our staying out nice and late and having a good time, with the music reduced to a muffled pulse behind the heavy closed doors of the ballroom, I was gripped with a guilty sense of having called Rick’s bluff. I grasped Keller’s arm and, ignoring ho
w sore my feet were in their trampled peep-toe heels, I pushed us both along to where the car was parked, Rick on both our minds, although we didn’t say so. We didn’t have to.

  * * *

  I knew that something was wrong the moment we pulled up in front of the house. Pax was barking, his deep and alarming bark, the one Keller said he’d used when cornering an enemy. The tone of it rose into a wolfish descant. Keller was out of the car and in the house before I could even open my car door.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Rick was flat on his back, his head half in the open cupboard, his useless legs at an awkward angle, and yet he kept insisting that he was fine. It took a couple of tries, but between us, Keller and I got him up and into his bed. His nose was bleeding and a fresh bruise was ripening on his cheek.

  Keller dashed into the kitchen for ice.

  “What happened?” I was gathering the shards of the broken water glass. Shards once again. My life seemed as though it was forever breaking into bits.

  “Did either of you realize that I can’t shut the goddamned radio off?”

  Rick was all right I mean, as much all right as he could be. I knew that the humiliation of being on the floor when we got home was injury enough. Keller got him ready for bed and I went in to say good night. It was our anniversary, and the best I got from my husband was a dry kiss. He pulled back when I cupped his head in my hand and pressed my lips on his. “I’m tired. Goodnight,” he said.

  I tamped down a little flare of anger. It had been his idea for us to leave him. His insistence that we have some fun. His assurance that he could be left alone without harm. And the first thing he did was blame us for his stupid action. The anger was snuffed almost before I had a chance to recognize it. We’d left the radio on for him, thinking that in some way it meant he could be a part of our evening. The evening that should have been his and mine, not mine and Keller’s. It struck me then that all the time we’d been dancing to the ballroom orchestra, he’d been listening. I blushed a little, a guilty blush that somehow he might have seen how close I let Keller hold me. And how nice it had felt. Maybe that’s why he’d been so determined to shut the radio off, so that the image of his wife happy in the arms of another man would shut off.

  “Happy anniversary.” I swung the sickroom door half-closed. Rick didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Keller waited for me in the kitchen. Even though we’d had most of two martinis that evening, he held out a bottle of lager to me and popped the cap off another. Pax was conspicuously absent. I think he was upset about what had happened, too, and maybe thought in his doggy way that he needed to stay close to Rick that night. It was more likely that Rick wasn’t asleep, and Pax never left his side until he was. So we didn’t stay in the kitchen, afraid, I suppose, that somehow Rick would overhear us. And even worrying about what we might say that would upset him, upset me. Nonetheless, we drifted into the garage. Keller offered me his rescued easy chair and leaned back against the workbench. We didn’t speak, just took mouthfuls of the beer, studied the labels, our fingers, the ceiling. My adrenaline-charged heart rate slowed with each sip and, along with it, the conflicting emotions of anger and self-inflicted guilt. I rested the bottle against my forehead and sighed. I didn’t feel teary, just done in.

  “He’s fine. It wasn’t our fault.” Keller squatted in front of me.

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I’ll fix it so he can control the radio.”

  “You think you can fix everything, don’t you?”

  Keller didn’t say anything, just swallowed the last of his beer and stood up. He’d shucked the jacket and tie and stood there in his white shirt, the cuffs folded back, revealing surprisingly fine-boned wrists. It was late, almost eleven-thirty. My beer had gone warm and flat, and I really didn’t want the rest of it. But I wasn’t ready to call it a night. To get up and go now would leave the last thing I’d said to Keller hanging in the air. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean it like it came out. You’re a godsend.”

  “It’s all right, Francesca. Everything is all right.”

  That’s what Keller said, but it wasn’t true. Nothing was all right, and I couldn’t believe that it ever would be. I think that that evening was when I finally came to terms with what the rest of my life was going to look like. Rick wasn’t going to improve beyond where he was. It was always going to be a delicate balance of helping him without humiliating him.

  Rick wasn’t alone in the extent of his injuries. Hundreds upon thousands of other soldiers had returned as damaged as he had—or even more so. But Rick’s soul had been injured along with his limbs, and that was something no amount of physical therapy or a state-of-the-art prosthetic device could improve on.

  “We should call it a night.” Keller took my unfinished bottle of beer and offered his other hand to help me out of the chair. “Things always look better in the morning.”

  The warm touch of his hand made me realize how chilly I was there in the garage. “It’s cold in here. You should think about moving into the house.”

  “Not yet.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  The letter from Miss Jacobs is waiting for him when he gets home from class. Keller sees it propped up on the hall table, resting benignly against the empty china vase, which is the sole object on the table other than the car keys and, occasionally, a random dog toy. Pax comes out of Rick’s room to greet Keller, ready for a break from his duties. Keller can hear Francesca’s voice coming from the room and the sound of a spoon against china, so he knows he has a moment to take the dog out. The postmark suggests that the letter has been some time in reaching him, having followed him from the retraining center to here, and he thinks that he should have thought to write her to let her know that he’s working and in college. She’s going to be pleased with him.

  Keller slides the letter into his pocket and snaps his fingers at Pax. “Let’s go.” They head out into a blustery November afternoon. Leaves skitter in front of them as they walk down the sidewalk. Pax becomes puppyish and chases them as if they’re little animals scurrying away. A stepped layer of cloud bank hovers in the northeast, reminding Keller of when his days were forecast by the sky. These are merely clouds.

  Keller doesn’t think of the letter again until he takes his supper into his garage room. Even before he gets a first mouthful of ham, his dinner is cold. He should have started the space heater earlier, but he hates leaving it untended. It may be time to swallow his reluctance to move into the house. Keller sets the cold plate aside and pulls out the letter.

  My dear Keller,

  I know your uncle Clayton hasn’t heard from you, so I am compelled to put my oar in. Your uncle is not well. In fact, I think you could say that he is failing. He’s suffered from a cough for months now, and, typically, is refusing to see a doctor. I’m no physician, but I’d guess he has pneumonia. He’s still working, but Stan at the fish market says that he brings in only a half bushel of quahogs or a penny’s worth of bottom fish. What I’m trying to say here is that he needs you, Keller. I know things weren’t good between you, but you’re all he has.

  Keller carefully folds the letter without reading the rest.

  “Keller, come into the kitchen and let me give you a new plate.” Francesca leans into his doorway, wraps her arms around herself against the chill, and shakes her head. “Don’t be stubborn. We’re finished and I’ll be doing up the dishes. Come in where it’s warm.”

  Keller nods, picks up his unfinished plate, leaving the folded letter on the ammo box. The breezeway is cold, too, so that the warmth from the kitchen touches his skin like a blanket as he comes into the house. Francesca takes his cold plate and hands him a new one. Macaroni and cheese, ham and canned peas. There is a pat of butter melting on the peas. He unbuttons the heavy woolen army-surplus sweater he wears in his room.

  “Keller, you need to move into the house. I can’t have you freezing to death out there.”

  Discomfort has overcome any reluctance, and Kel
ler nods. “I guess maybe it’s time.”

  “We’ll have to move your stuff up there, because I don’t have a bedroom set for that room. I’ve just dumped a lot of stuff in it that I haven’t had time to put away properly. You wouldn’t believe that we’ve been in this house for so long and I still haven’t really moved in. I just don’t know what fills my hours.”

  Keller catches the glint in her eye, and laughs, pleased to see her good humor return after a long absence—since the night Rick fell out of his chair. Sometimes it seems to him that no matter what Francesca does, Rick has no true appreciation. She goes into that room all smiles and comes out looking upset, looking like she’s trying hard not to let him know that she is. It makes him crazy. Rick should be kissing the ground she walks on for the way she’s always there for him, and he treats her like … Keller reins in his thoughts. It’s none of his business. Married couples aren’t always lovey-dovey. He sure knows that from observing his aunts and their spouses and how they snapped and snarled at each other and called it marriage. Rick snaps, but he has every right to. Not at Francesca, but at his situation. Keller has to keep reminding himself of that. Over and over.

  He has to remind himself that he has no idea what a marriage really looks like.

  * * *

  He’s been upstairs now for more than a week. Empty, the bureau wasn’t heavy, and Keller and Francesca managed to get it up the stairs with only one misstep. His army cot was easy enough for him to wrangle by himself. Francesca carried up one armload of clothing; he carried up another. The room is too small to afford him a sitting area, but he has commandeered a small table to use as a desk.