by Sue Miller
Still, she was careful with everything; she sorted it all, stacked it – even the napkin. She packed it all carefully into the liquor box, and on the way back to the hotel, she stopped the cab at the post office to mail it along with the boxes holding her computer and printer, to Jack’s house.
That night Cam came over to her hotel for a drink: Lottie had arranged this by phone several days before from Chicago. They sat outside on a wide brick terrace overlooked by the wings of the hotel, by the rows and rows of identical windows and curtains. The lamps were slowly being switched on in the rooms. Lottie was tense. She focused immediately on the house – a safe topic – and Cam seemed willing to go along with her.
He was about to list it with a real estate agent, he said. Their mother had finally been declared incompetent. They talked about money, about how to proceed. ‘Are you going to see her?’ he asked.
Jack had asked this too, before she left. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too much like just looking at her to see her. She gets nothing from it. And it’s horrible for me.’
He nods. ‘She still knows me.’
‘She should. You’ve been very good to her.’
Someone on the other side of the terrace dropped a glass, and for a few seconds everyone was quiet. Cam looked in that direction, then back at Lottie. He didn’t seem the least uncomfortable with her. It became clear it would fall to her to say something about what had happened between them, if anything was to be said.
‘Have there been any … repercussions?’ she started. ‘Of the accident? For you?’
‘How do you mean?’
How did she mean? Have you stayed awake at night thinking about it? Have you heard from Elizabeth? Has anything made a dent in you? ‘Just whether all that … whether your life is any different on account of it, I guess.’
‘Not really.’ His voice was chilly. Or not chilly, just flat. Expressionless. He wasn’t going to tell her anything of any real importance to himself. Why had she thought he might?
He shrugged and smiled just slightly. ‘I got a notice that I passed my blood test.’
‘Your blood test?’
‘Yes, the one I took that night?’
Lottie frowned.
‘In the emergency room. I spent most of that night, the night Jessica died, sitting in the emergency room waiting to have my blood drawn. While every knife fight and … kidney stone in Cambridge got treated first.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Lottie said; and once again, just for a moment, she felt how different his experience of those days had been from hers. ‘I forgot about that.’ After a long silence, she said abruptly, ‘I’m ashamed of myself for the scene we had.’ She had rehearsed this line. This was what she’d decided she needed to say to him.
‘You needn’t be,’ he answered.
Lottie waited, but he added nothing. She looked at him. He was so self-contained, so handsome. He was all she could ever know about her family, and she would never know him.
In her dream that night in the hotel, Cam appeared to her. The dream was strangely connected to the last radiation treatment she’d undergone for cancer, when they threaded rods through her breast and filled them with radioactive material. They’d kept her in isolation for more than a day that time, with a sign on her door that warned everyone away. Lottie had felt like an alien, a mutant, some science fiction creature. When Ryan visited, he had to stand in the hallway to talk to her, looking homely and frightened. He was twelve then, and his legs and nose were far too big for the rest of him.
In her dream, Cameron, like Ryan in life, was standing on the other side of a wide room from her. She knew this to be an emergency room, in the way we know these things in dreams. It was full of equipment, mostly the ordinary machines that fill ordinary lives – televisions, answering machines, Xerox machines, computers. But somehow it was clear to Lottie that their purpose was to read your blood, your heart. There were beeps and clicks, amber and green lines making words on the screens. It seemed to be through these machines that Cameron was speaking to her, but she couldn’t read the words or understand the noises, hard as she tried. Lottie was herself partially just such a machine in the dream, but full of a human straining, to understand, to speak. Her own cry woke her.
Lottie couldn’t have said exactly how everything connected, but somehow, in the plane on the way back to Chicago, she decided that she would write next about emergency rooms. Once she returned, she spent four days sitting and making notes in a waiting room at Cook County Hospital, watching the bits of high drama that jolted quickly past – the accidents, the overdoses, the family fights, the spiking fevers; as well as the ordinary, slower misery and pain of people who waited, who had no other source of medical care. The ceaselessly wailing child with an earache. An old woman with a foot so swollen Lottie couldn’t see her toes. Again and again while she sat there, Lottie imagined Cameron in a setting like this: polite, cooperative with his police escort, nothing showing in his face or bearing of the reality of what he’d done.
She is excited about this project, and so is her publisher. It has everything, they’ve agreed. Dramatic episodes, an angle into the social and medical ills of our time, a commentary to offer on what’s going wrong with American medicine. It’s also become part of the joke about death with Jack – how perfect for her to have access to this never-ending stream. How perfect for him that she does.
But what is perfect for Lottie, too, is going away, being on the road. She’d picked hospitals in two big cities besides Chicago to study, and in three small towns. She has made two trips this fall, one to Seattle and one to southern New Mexico, and before both of them she has felt the familiar hunger to be gone, to be alone; and then, once she’s out there, the yearning solitary pleasure in the anonymity and isolation of the trip.
And when it’s over, each time the coming home again.
Jack had waked her that summer afternoon she’d fallen asleep on the living room couch after her long drive home. He was bending over her and gently touching her swollen cheek.
‘Lottie? What’s going on? What happened to you?’
Lottie opened her eyes and fought off her thick sleep, untangling the bedspread and trying too quickly to tell her tale: the tooth, the girl who died, the drive through the night, the funeral, the fight with Cameron. She had to back up again and again and start over, filling in the missing elements. Finally she began to weep as she was talking – out of fatigue, out of confusion and effort. ‘Oh, don’t look at me!’ she moaned. ‘I’m so ugly.’ Lottie cried as a child does, great hiccuping intakes of breath between her wails, her short sentences. ‘And I wanted so much. I tried so hard. I drove the whole way thinking of it, of how it would be. And then my tooth. But then I saw I was just like him. Like Cameron. The whole drive. I was trying so hard to be different, to love you. And it was just like him. Except I didn’t kill anyone. But I could have. I might as well have. And now I have to have root canal,’ she wailed.
Jack had eased on to the couch with her as she wept, sitting and then stretching the length of his body out next to hers. He was stroking her face, wiping the tears away, murmuring comfort. At last she stopped, and they lay next to each other.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she whispered after a minute.
‘I love to look at you,’ he said. ‘My hollyhock.’ His hand rested gently on her swollen jaw. ‘My half a hamster.’
Lottie laughed, and choked. She turned quickly to her side, coughing, curled against the back of the couch. Finally she lay still. Jack had raised himself on an elbow behind her.
‘You almost killed me, Jack,’ she said, hoarsely. She cleared her throat.
‘With kindness,’ he said.
‘Regardless.’
They lay cupped together for a while, looking up at the trees moving behind the panes of the windows above them, listening to Bader’s snorts and whimpers in sleep on the floor. Lottie slept a little too, and then woke, momentarily feeling Jack’s arms and legs as part of her.
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sp; They roused themselves. Lottie went upstairs to wash her face and put makeup on. She came back in Jack’s bathrobe, rolling up the long sleeves. He was in the kitchen, wiping the counters. He was apologetic about the mess. Lottie insisted on helping him. She wiped too, she scrubbed. She ran the disposal. She put the pizza boxes in the garbage, and then, because they wouldn’t fit, she climbed in and stood on them until they went down. She unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher, rinsed and loaded up the ones in the sink. She swept the kitchen floor.
Jack, meanwhile, set the table, cleaned the stovetop, and fixed them dinner – poached eggs, in honor of Lottie’s tooth. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table and ate them, and then drank wine, talking, until all the color drained from the room and twilight filled it.
Jack was speaking about the weekend he’d come out to visit – only the weekend before, Lottie realized with a little shock. ‘I was going to win you back, Lottie. I was going to give it everything I had. But I didn’t have a chance. You were wild; that was your agenda. If I didn’t want to let you bite me, it meant I was trying to destroy you somehow.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ she said apologetically. She drank some wine. ‘And look at me now. I couldn’t bite oatmeal.’
He laughed.
A little later, when the room was truly dark, he asked, ‘What does this mean, Lottie?’
‘What?’
‘This,’ he said. ‘You. Here.’ His hoarse voice seemed to fill the darkness. It thrilled Lottie.
‘It means, I think, that I’ll pretend I can do it.’
Jack was quiet. His shirt was a pale blur across from Lottie. Finally he said, ‘Well, that’s fine, Lottie. That’s all I ask, I think. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Like a story we tell ourselves. And then, with luck, it comes true.’
The refrigerator hummed steadily. Outside somewhere, a car honked. The kitchen was dark and still and smelled of cleansing powder. Lottie wanted to see Jack. She reached over to the little lamp hanging on the wall by the table and turned it on. Suddenly he was there, startling – alarming, even – in his reality, his otherness. And yet exactly as she’d known he would be. Exactly as she’d been seeing him in her mind’s eye.
And sometimes it still happens that way, when she returns from a trip or when she comes on him unawares. Just as now, turning in her bathrobe from the snowy view outside the window, she feels the shock of pleasurable surprise, not just that he is there in the kitchen doorway when she didn’t hear him coming; but that he is as she expected him to be: the graying shock of hair, the goodness in his lined face, the cat-colored eyes that lift now and meet hers across the dim, winter-lit room.
Sometimes, though, it takes a little longer, and then Lottie feels the way she did that afternoon in the first seconds after she woke from her dreamless chemical sleep on the living room couch. She knew she was nowhere she was supposed to be, and Jack’s face, ehile dear to her – she knew that too – was not instantly familiar. It was in some ways like the feeling we all have on waking in a strange place – but more intense, more deeply disordered. Perhaps more like the confusion recovered stroke victims report feeling in the first moments after it happens: when am I? why is this? what is the being living through this moment?
And then everything shifts slightly and takes on shape and meaning, just as it did that day. And with a great effort, Lottie gathers herself together and begins to tell her story.
A Note on the Author
Sue Miller was born in Chicago in 1943. She is the bestselling author of eleven previous books including The Good Mother, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, Lost in the Forest, The Lake Shore Limited, the acclaimed memoir The Story of My Father and the Richard & Judy hit The Senator’s Wife. Her most recent novel is The Arsonist. Sue Miller lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
By the Same Author
The Good Mother
Inventing the Abbotts
Family Pictures
The Distinguished Guest
While I Was Gone
The World Below
The Story of My Father
Lost in the Forest
The Senator’s Wife
The Lake Shore Limited
The Arsonist
Also Available by Sue Miller
The Distinguished Guest
At the age of seventy-two, Lily Roberts became a national celebrity on writing her first book – a spiritual memoir. But her new-found fame was not well received by her son Alan and wayward daughter Clary, both profoundly disturbed by Lily’s intimate revelations about her married life. Ten years on their resentment is still raw, and when Lily, now ill and frail, comes to live with Alan, the bitter legacy of their very different memories threatens to upset the precarious balance of their lives.
‘Miller depicts her characters with grace and elegance, enriching their perceptions with strands of connecting images and intertwined history … A very moving book’
New York Times Book Review
‘Wonderful – rich, intelligent and moving’
Los Angeles Times
‘Miller’s skill at dissecting relationships is as well-honed here as ever’
Newsweek
While I Was Gone
An Oprah Book Club selection
The New York Times bestseller
Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you…
Thirty years ago Jo Becker’s bohemian life ended when she found her best friend brutally murdered. Now Jo has everything: work she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters and a beautiful home. But when an old friend settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo’s life begins to unravel, as she enters a relationship that returns her to the darkest moments of her past, imperilling all that she loves.
‘A moving story of secrets and lies’
The Times
‘An astonishing mix of the warm, complex and frightening … The stuff of real life that is rarely conveyed in fiction’
Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday
‘Beautiful and frightening … Difficult to forget’
New York Times Book Review
The World Below
What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future…
Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life. Twice divorced, her children are now grown up and scattered across the country. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia’s home in Vermont. There, Catherine finds not only the ghosts of her own past but those of her grandmother’s too. Georgia’s diaries, discovered in the attic, reveal the true story of her life and marriage, and of the tragic misunderstanding upon which she built a lasting love. The World Below tells the parallel stories of two women separated by generations, but linked by the bitter disappointments and regrets that lurk beneath the surface of their ordinary lives.
‘Miller brings unusual skill in the exploration of women’s hopes and regrets. The careful build-up of detail, and an acute understanding of the facts and feelings which lie behind disguises, make this a sensitive examination of two private lives’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Candid and thoughtful … A voice of unusual truth and perception’
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Miller writes with tremendous subtlety and perception’
Daily Mail
The Story of My Father
In the spring of 1986, Sue Miller found herself more and more deeply involved in caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer’s disease. The Story of My Father is a profound, deeply moving account of her father’s final days and her own response to it. With care, restraint and consummate skill, Miller writes of her struggles to be fully with her father in his illness while confronting her own terror of aban
donment, and eventually the long, hard work of grieving for him. And through this candid, painful record, she offers a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, a powerful meditation on the variable nature of memory and the difficulty of weaving a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life.
‘Beautifully written and moving … Every relative of an Alzheimer’s patient feels this guilt, here painfully anatomised … The Story of My Father is the best book of its genre I have ever read’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Much more than a memoir, her book is an exploration of the nature of self and an extraordinary testament to an extraordinary love’
Independent
‘Remarkable for its honesty and courage, and for the muted gallantry with which its subject met the loss of everything that made him human’
Daily Telegraph
Lost in the Forest
One minute John is the cornerstone of Eva’s world, rock to his two teenage stepdaughters and his own son Theo, the next he is tossed through the air in a traffic accident, and snapped like a twig. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the terror and desolation of loneliness, and finds herself drawn back to her untrustworthy ex-husband; Emily, the eldest daughter, grapples with her new-found independence and responsibility. Little Theo can only begin to fathom the permanence of his father’s death. But for Daisy, John’s absence opens up a whole world of confusion just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality. And in steps a man only too willing to take advantage.
‘Sue Miller brings unusual skill in the exploration of women’s hopes and regrets’
Daily Telegraph
‘Miller’s novel may be firmly rooted in the domestic, but its dreamy, mesmeric prose gives this tale of grief and loss the quality of a fable’
Daily Mail
‘Meticulously observed and utterly gripping’
Marie Claire
The Senator’s Wife
The New York Times bestseller