“Sam, look at me.”
Her body was rigid.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” he said. “It’s like I don’t know you at all.”
She shrugged.
She opens the door, sees them, although they do not see her.
“You’re the best I’ve ever had,” she hears Jay say. “You should give your sister lessons.”
“I’ve never seen you like this. So cold.”
She closed her eyes against remembered pain.
“Talk to me, Sam,” Lee said. “You’re behaving like—like you have the heart of a terrorist.”
“You want to know?” She turned back to him. “You want to know who the terrorist is?”
“Yes. Because it’s about you. And because I need you to trust me enough to tell me.”
She turns to flee, but before she can escape she hears Libby. Hears her laugh.
“She fucked my husband.” The words were torn from her, burned in her throat. “My sister fucked my husband. And then she laughed.”
The laugh. Harsh as a side of beef slapped on a table. The laugh. Libby. So pleased to have bested Sam.
Libby
Laughter floated toward her. It intruded on her need for solitude.
Last night, anxious about the day ahead, Libby had barely slept, despite Kelly’s promise that today she’d stay right beside her the entire time and monitor her saline levels. The nurse had said a “pain episode” probably wouldn’t occur again. Probably. No ironclad promise there. Probably.
At dawn Libby had left the house and driven to the lake instead of heading directly for the dialysis center. This early in the day, this late in the season, she had thought she’d be alone, but several joggers were running along the shore. And out on Michigan, a couple sailed. Theirs was the laughter that echoed across the water. The mainsail and jib of their sloop formed chalk-white silhouettes against the rose-streaked October sky.
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. The saying popped into her head. It was one she had learned back when she and Richard sailed, one of those old maxims crews used to forecast weather in the days before electronics. Wind before rain, the sun will shine again. Rain before wind, take tops’ls in. Even now she relied on them for a forecast as much as she did on the weatherman.
Again, laughter reached her from across the lake, pulling her attention to the hull slipping through the water. Watching, she remembered the exhilaration of sailing and felt the sharp pang of regret and loss. She supposed boating was something she would never do again.
She glanced at the dashboard clock. If she left right then, she would just about make it to the center in time. The staff stressed the importance of promptness. If a patient was late, it set the schedule off for the entire day. What would happen, she wondered, if she didn’t show up at all, if she missed a session?
She was tempted, just this once. Since waking, she’d dreaded the treatment and the possibility that she would again experience the pain. The memory of it was so fresh, so immediate—the way it had seized her body, shutting out everything. She didn’t think she could tolerate such anguish again. The prospect of continuing treatments for another month, never mind a year, was unthinkable. Even a transplant, once an inconceivable resort, now seemed preferable.
Yesterday, she had gone to the guest bedroom and dug out the booklets Carlotta had given her. She had read them through. Then, marshaling strength, she had called her brother, the neutral country. Cynthia, the Swiss Guard, answered the phone.
“How are you doing?” her sister-in-law asked.
“I’ve started dialysis.”
“Josh will be so sorry he missed you.” Cynthia rushed right on, as if Libby had said she’d started painting the dining room walls.
“I go for treatment three times a week.”
“That’s good. It’s amazing what they can do nowadays. We have a friend who just got new lenses implanted in her eyes. She swears her eyesight is better than ever.” Cynthia prattled on. “So how are the twins? And Richard?”
“They’re fine.” Libby couldn’t do small talk. “I really need to talk to Josh. When would be a good time to catch him?”
“These days his schedule is pretty erratic. It’s the middle of the hockey season.”
“Could you have him call me?”
The wire hummed. Libby could almost hear electricity flow over wires.
“What about?”
If she could just talk to Josh without Cynthia running interference. “My doctor suggested he be tested.”
“Tested? What for?”
“To see if he’s even a possible match.”
Another moment of humming electricity.
Cynthia finally spoke. “What about Richard? Has he been tested?”
Libby held back a sigh. “Of course he’s been tested. I told you.” During their last conversation, Libby had explained to both Josh and Cynthia why Richard couldn’t be a donor, how he was AB-positive and she was A-negative. Did Cynthia honestly think she’d be calling them if he could?
“Listen, Elizabeth. Josh can’t do this.”
“What are you saying? That he won’t even be tested?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what he said?”
“You’re putting him in a terrible position. You’re making him feel guilty for saying no. It isn’t fair of you to ask.”
Fair. What did fair ever have to do with anything?
“He has responsibilities here. To his own children.”
“Yes,” Libby said. “Of course he does.”
“And even if he didn’t, think about what you’re asking him to go through. I mean, how can you ask him to do that? He’s a coach. He relies on his body.”
Libby called up the facts and figures she’d read in the booklet Carlotta gave her. “They’ve done studies. Ninety-two percent of donors haven’t had one bad side effect.”
“That still leaves eight percent. And what if he does get this disease? I mean, have they guaranteed that this disease you have—what is it?”
“Focal sclerosing glomerulonephritis,” Libby said. “FSGS.”
“Well, have they guaranteed it isn’t hereditary?”
“Yes, they have. They’re pretty certain of that.”
“Pretty certain.” Cynthia jumped on the qualifier. “And what if he gets it? Or something else? Diabetes? Or what if someday one of our boys ever needed a transplant?”
Libby had no answer for this. What would she do if the circumstances were reversed, if Josh needed a kidney? She knew without question she would want to be a donor. How could she not? “Could I at least send him some donor information? It doesn’t commit him to anything.”
“Really, Elizabeth, Josh can’t do this. I don’t know if you’ve thought this through, if you understand the implications of what you’re asking of him. It’s a sacrifice I don’t think you have a right to ask of him. He has his family, his career.”
And what of her family, her life?
“Has your doctor put you on a list yet?” Cynthia continued.
“A list?”
“Isn’t there a national register or something for people who need organs?”
“Yes.”
“Are you listed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re all set then.” All set. “But keep in touch. Let us know how you’re doing. Promise.”
“Promise.”
Libby had hung up, wondering if Cynthia would even tell Josh she’d called.
She was really going to be late. If only someone could promise her that today there would be no pain.
Here was a question: If it were possible to know the future, to absolutely know what lay ahead, would you want to? She couldn’t imagine. It would be a curse. To know what lay in wait and not be able to change it? Far better not to know. For if it were truly possible to see the future, a person would be forewarned of not only joy and success but of illness, betrayal, loss, and of unbearable pain. And what then? How cou
ld a person bear to go on? No, it was just as well not to know. It was bad enough knowing the past, to have to live with that, with memories.
She never had understood why anyone wanted to go to fortune-tellers or palm readers. (Several years ago Mary Hudson had had a tarot card reading, for all the good it had done her. Like most people, Mary had gone hoping—expecting—to receive promises of long life, success, wealth, love, health. As Libby remembered it, the reader hadn’t promised Mary riches, but neither had she said one thing about Larry running off with a girl nearly the age of their daughters.)
On the dash, the clock ticked off minutes. Time was running out. Well, that was all time did. Run out. Minute by minute.
And what had she done with the time allotted her, all the months and weeks and days and hours of her life? All those days she had been cleaning when she should have been celebrating. All the time wasted, thinking there was plenty of it, as if there were an endless supply of days. The arrogance.
There were a lot of things she had dreamed of doing, things she had tucked away in her mind, thinking, someday. Seeds planted over a lifetime, like wanting to see the northern lights ever since the sixth-grade geography book told them about the aurora borealis. Just saying those words, “aurora borealis”—so full in your mouth, a magic incantation—you could just imagine what kind of lights would bear such a name. She wanted to do those silly, romantic things that sounded so appealing, like swimming with dolphins. (Just thinking about it, she could almost feel the sting of salt water, the heft of a buoyant body at her side. Was it only women who longed for this, found in it both sensuality and freedom? She had never heard a man say he wanted to backstroke with Flipper.) Important things, too, like seeing Mercedes get married, and holding her first grandchild. (The first time she’d breast-fed the twins, she’d felt a near-sexual twisting in her womb, as if it was remembering how, for nine months, it had cradled those bodies. Now, at the thought of holding a grandchild, she felt deep in her belly the same sweet spasm.)
She wanted to learn Latin, the parent tongue of so many ordinary words she spoke every day. She had always thought someday in the future she would master the real thing, not the veni, vidi, vici of high school freshmen. And then she’d travel to Italy and sit in a pensione and read the Aeneid in the language in which it was written.
And while she was traveling—Portugal. She dreamed of walking through country vineyards and later, at night, drinking wine and dining from glazed pottery the colors of the sky and sun, plates formed from the same earth that had produced the grapes in her wine.
And England. Her grandparents and Richard’s, too, had come from Great Britain. Somewhere in her papers, she had the deed for the cemetery lot where her maternal great-grandparents were interred.
She wanted to play tourist in London. A funny thing, but over the years, as she had listened on the local NPR station to concerts broadcast from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, she had dreamed of going there, had even found the church’s Web site. The church was in the West End, on Trafalgar Square, directly across from the National Portrait Gallery. There were free concerts at lunchtime and candlelight concerts in the evening. She imagined sitting there and listening to a Bach oboe concerto or a Haydn symphony. She had told no one of this dream, not even Richard, but she had always believed they would go there someday.
And once, long ago, she had thought she would write poetry, even publish a collection.
In that long-ago time, everything had seemed possible, but life narrowed one’s choices and possibilities, and existence grew narrower and narrower, marked with the regrets and longings of all the things one would never do. Countries never seen. Adventures never had. Music never heard. Poems lost, never written.
She felt robbed. Ripped off. She wanted to have lived before she died.
“Am I going to die?” She had asked Carlotta the question during her last visit.
“We’re all going to die,” Carlotta had answered. “We just don’t know the date and time.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Carlotta had hugged her. “We’re all dying,” she said again. “The trick is to really live while we are dying.”
The answer—so facile, so like one of the sayings on Eleanor’s affirmation cards—had irritated Libby, but now Carlotta’s words echoed. To really live while we are dying. Suddenly it seemed important to write down all the things she had dreamed of doing.
Usually she kept a notepad in the glove compartment, but now it wasn’t there. She pawed through her tote but couldn’t find one piece of paper, not even a bank deposit slip or supermarket register printout. The only paper in her bag was Adrienne Rich’s book of poetry. She opened the book to inside the back cover and began. Slowly she penciled in the list of all the things she had once believed there would be more than enough time for.
When she had finished, the dash clock said it was nearly seven. Now she really was going to be late. She supposed the staff would be angry with her. Once, that thought would have paralyzed her. Once, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to show up late for an appointment because although a maverick as a teenager, it seemed to her that she had lived her entire adult life trying to please others. Richard. The twins. Her friends. Her mother. Wasn’t that why she had turned into the perfect wife? Wasn’t all the cleaning, cooking, baking, gardening nothing more than an attempt to please her mother? To make up for all the ways Libby had disappointed her? To show her mother that she was not a screwup? Well, the plane crash that had taken her parents had also taken any possibility of fixing that part of her past. The past. What was that line of Faulkner’s? She stared out at the lake and pulled the quote from memory: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That line had always haunted her, the idea that a person could never walk away from her history. Certainly she couldn’t separate her present from her past when it came to Sam.
And this was the truth of her life: She and Sam were hopelessly estranged. Time was running out and she was left with recriminations and wizened dreams.
Sam
So we’re watching this old movie on AMC,” Stacy said. “The one with—what’s her name? The swimmer?” She shouted to be heard over the roar of the Hobart.
“Mmmm.” Sam was bent over the sketch for the Sanderson cake, tweaking the final details.
“Williams. That’s it. Esther Williams. So Carl says, ‘If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the others have to, too?’ ” Stacy switched off the mixer and looked over at Sam. “And then he laughs like that’s the funniest thing anyone’s ever said. If one drowns, do the others have to, too? That man’s living on borrowed time. Skating on thin ice. I swear, between his sorry jokes and his toe fungus, we’ll be lucky to last the year.”
Sam frowned, debating whether to set a couple of roses at the base of the cake, an echo of the spray on the top, or to stay with the double row of seed pearls that trimmed each layer. Normally she could have made this kind of decision in an instant, but this morning her brain felt foggy. It was hard to focus. All she could think about was Lee.
“Hello? Earth calling Pluto. Anybody home?” Stacy cupped her hands around her mouth. “Helloooo.”
Sam gave her a blank look. “What?”
“Okay, so maybe I’m not Entertainment Tonight, but you could at least pretend to listen.” Stacy lifted the beaters from the batter.
“I’m listening.”
“Really? I don’t think you’ve heard anything I’ve said in the past fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, I have.” Sam closed her eyes, pulled the words from somewhere. “You said that between Carl’s humor and his foot fungus, you don’t think you’re going to last.”
“I know you can recite the words.” Stacy swirled a rubber spatula around the rim of the Hobart’s bowl, then dipped a finger in the mixture and tasted it. “I’m just saying I don’t think you heard.”
Stacy was right, of course. “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I was concentrating on this.”
Stacy looked str
aight at her, narrowed her eyes. “Okay. Spill it.”
“Spill what?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I told you. I’m just preoccupied with this cake.” Sam reversed the drawing so Stacy could take a look. “Whaddaya think? Should I put a couple of the roses at the base?”
Stacy ignored the sketch. “Try again.”
“What?”
“Listen, it’s plain as sugar on powdered doughnuts that something’s flying up your ass a million miles an hour.”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t smiled once since I walked in. Not once.”
Sam sighed, then flashed a toothy fake grin. “There. Better?”
Stacy carried the beaters to the sink and rinsed them. Then she leaned back against the sink and crossed her arms. “Just tell me straight out. Is it me?”
“Meaning?”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Why in the world would I be mad at you?”
“You know. ’Cause I got drunk Saturday night.”
“Good God, no. If memory serves me, I was as drunk as you. No, of course I’m not mad at you.”
“Well, who then? Because you’re sure pissed at something or someone.” Stacy cut parchment paper for the bottoms of four cake tins, brushed the sides of the tins with oil, and spooned batter in.
Sam paused. If she told Stacy about the argument with Lee, she’d have to explain about Libby and the whole story and she wasn’t sure she was ready to have her history exposed. It was hard enough to keep some semblance of an employer/employee boundary with Stacy without opening up that mess.
The Law of Bound Hearts Page 13