The pregnancy was a surprise. George had been terrified that they would end up a statistic, that his child would be born with an impossibly small head with eyes bulging out, mouth fishing for air. He had asked if they should consider their options more, but Jamie was a fierce Baptist. She froze him out for weeks for the mere suggestion. He resented her then, and he still worried that he’d never recover what they once had, which was never the passion he’d witnessed in movies, but it was faithful and devoted to the needs and desires of each other. They did their best, and that was love, wasn’t it? But a child like that. He couldn’t want it. He tried to imagine holding such a child and thinking, She is ours, a part of us forever, and it made his skin go cold with a sudden sweat.
When Jamie had the test, months of this dark imagining had marked him. She hugged him tight with the relief of a woman who had tethered all her hope and dreams to this one thing, but he had already built a wall around the outcome, bracing for the worst so that when the good news came, it felt like a distant whisper. He could barely feel it.
“Suzie was a preemie,” Kevin said. “You get through something like that, you’re not just a marriage anymore. You’re something else.” He stared George down. “No matter what happens.”
“Good for you,” George said, wincing at his bland words.
Then the front door slammed, and Mindy marched into the center of the party crowd, scanning the room until she saw Kevin.
“Are they here?” she said.
For a second, Kevin assumed she meant his wife, but who could they mean? Zach was out of commission. He glanced back at George, who averted his eyes and focused on plucking an ice cube to chew on. It seemed improbable.
Besides, they had a rule. He had broken it with Holly, but Holly was discreet. They weren’t supposed to sleep with others from Coffeeville. They had a few rules. They were his recommendations, but Colleen had agreed. No long-lasting affairs. Each experience had to be finite, self-contained, and left behind. There were the usual safety precautions that they had each tepidly endorsed. They’d only been married a few years when they reconceived their boundaries, but on some level, Kevin always knew he would want something less conventional. “We’re the most curious animals on earth,” he had said to her. “Isn’t it more honest to know that about ourselves?” And she had consented, with a caveat. “Promise me,” she had said, “promise me that you’ll always love me the most.” Kevin had agreed, expecting that it would be true, but also not worrying if life changed his mind someday. Wasn’t any promise a commitment contingent on the assessments of that particular day? If the data changed, he would reassess — anyone would if they were honest with themselves — but he still meant his devotion in the act of devotion.
He thought he still loved her the most. He needed her the most. When Suzie came, when they couldn’t take her home and her tiny body was contained in a clear box like a medical experiment, he had wanted nothing more than for their lives to remain whole and connected. This is my family, he had thought. We are bound in flesh.
Now the virus had left him scared to touch Colleen, but it wasn’t just that. She barely touched him at all, not even the brief grazing of hands in the kitchen or the passing caresses of a couple readying themselves for sleep. Her attention had shifted away from him, perhaps to become a they, to become a we defined by the exclusion of others. Perhaps he was one of the others now.
“The girls,” Mindy said. “Where are they? I’ve been trying to call.”
Of course, he thought. They. “I thought they were with you,” he said, registering relief that his imagination had gone so far afield before the parental worry descended.
“We all had dinner and then they went to Bella’s room, but they weren’t there when I checked in on them. It’s not that late. Maybe Suzie forgot something? Are you sure they didn’t come back here?”
Colleen surfaced from the back of the room. “I’ll check.”
Kevin noticed the way Mindy’s mouth tightened at the sight of Colleen, the way her eyes followed her.
When Colleen returned, she shook her head and said, “You have no idea where they might have gone?”
“No, I don’t,” Mindy snipped. “Do you?”
“I wasn’t the one watching them.”
The party had gone silent. People had encircled Mindy and Colleen, some too drunk to affect the appropriate degree of polite concern, merely seeking a view of the spectacle. Someone hollered out at the women, “Do the girls have boyfriends?”
“Of course not,” Mindy said, but then she noticed Colleen’s uncertainty and said, accusingly, “Is Suzie dating already?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Suzie doesn’t tell me anything like that.”
The women turned to George.
“You think they’d tell their teacher who they’re dating?” he said.
“You at least see who they hang out with, don’t you?” Mindy said.
It was true. George had noticed Suzie with a peculiar goth boy at lunch. When he didn’t have cafeteria duty, he liked to take his lunch to one of the study carrels in the library. It was against the rules, but the librarian feigned ignorance as long as he was subtle about it, sitting in the far corner away from the book stacks and cleaning up after himself. One day he was peacefully munching on his peanut butter and mayo sandwich when he overheard a boy ecstatically describing the plot of a story by a deceased local author. How refreshing, he had thought, to encounter an adolescent resisting the chains of the internet age. After he had finished licking the peanut butter from his fingers and wiping down his desk, he walked past the budding bibliophile and discovered it was the little goth boy, still regaling Suzie with his literary expertise. George quickly averted his eyes, hoping not to intrude on such an endearing interaction.
George told Mindy about the boy. He couldn’t remember his name, so Colleen hollered out to the room, “Does anyone know who the little goth boy is at Coffeeville K through 9?”
Calvin shrugged. “Are you sure there’s only one? I saw a whole slew of kids wearing nothing but black on the courthouse lawn the other day.”
They were all dismayed.
“Fuck it,” Mindy said. “Why don’t we just go to the cemetery?”
If you grew up in Coffeeville, the cemetery became a strange vortex for transgressive energy. The teens liked to screw there, and sometimes, to prove their youthful passion, adults would also make the desperate choice of having sex amidst the tombstones. If the cops — there were actually a handful of police officers despite the size of the town — were bored on the weekend, and they often were, they could scan the old cemetery with their flashlight, startling naked flesh. Or sometimes kids snuck out and just told ghost stories. But now the mosquitoes carried the virus, and that fear was much more concrete than the abstract thrills of century-old statues and headstones.
“I’ll go,” Colleen said. “You should all stay here. It’s safer for me to go.”
“I’ll drive,” Kevin offered, his highball in hand.
“Obviously I’m driving,” Mindy snapped. “I drove here.”
Colleen pulled two cans of bug spray from the cabinet of an entrance table and watched as everyone else doused themselves. Then they all packed into Mindy’s van, which she had parked as close to the entrance as possible. George climbed in last, after Kevin, Mindy, and Colleen, and when Kevin looked inquiringly at him, he said, “I know where the popular tombstones are.”
They didn’t need to drive far. On the way, they passed Mindy and Zach’s house with the windows brightly lit, and Colleen pictured him sitting in the living room, waiting for the screen of his phone to glow with news. Moments later, the road dipped and rose again, revealing the edges of the cemetery, made sprawling by centuries and war and yellow fever.
Mindy drove the perimeter of the cemetery as they all peered through the windows, trying to see a hint of flashlight or the silhouettes of the girls.
“I don’t see anything,” Mindy said, defeated after they
had completed a lap. “Where else could they be?”
“The little goth boy likes Larry Piedmont,” George said. “You can’t see Larry’s grave from the road.”
“Suzie doesn’t even like to read.” Colleen was strangely of fended that her daughter had taken up such a secret life that she had not only snuck out during a modern plague, but she had also developed an affection for an iconic author after years of refusing to look at any book that her mother had gifted her.
“I’ll be right back,” Colleen said, hopping out and slamming the door to keep out the bugs.
They all watched her march up the checkered hillside until she disappeared in the shadows of a grove.
“When did she get infected?” Mindy asked.
“Last summer,” Kevin said. “No serious issues though. We were lucky. It was like having the summer flu, and then it was gone. Although, it’s not really gone, of course …” he trailed off.
“It was like that with Zach, right after that party in July, but clearly it just got worse.”
Mindy had suspected for a long time. Colleen was a little too eager to visit the house, a little too gracious with the casseroles and offers to help in the initial weeks. And she had seen the way they spoke to each other at school events and parties — that woman, too pretty for fairness, leaning in for each word and Zach, suddenly standing a little taller. When Mindy thought about their disease, she envied it, like it was a sacred bond they’d passed between them.
Zach had confessed. He had sobbed as he told her, his weak tongue mangling each slow word. She resented his broken body then and was ashamed of her resentment — because she wanted to hurt him, but his disease disallowed her that satisfaction. Her care for him became more perfunctory. She scrubbed his body like he was an ailing child, his once taut skin now puffy and loose, hanging away from his atrophied mus cles. If she warmed up soup and discovered it was still tepid, she would serve it to him, aware that she had chosen convenience over his optimal satisfaction.
They watched a lot of TV now that his mobility was limited. It was astounding how many shows were about affairs. They would watch the horror unfold on screen, and Mindy would wonder, Does he feel guilty seeing a reenactment? One movie embraced the frigid wife stereotype, and the woman — always dressed in pristine shift dresses, hair in a precise bun — apologized to her husband. It was her fault too, she said. She hadn’t loved him enough. Mindy felt her face flush watching it. After she had situated Zach in bed and flicked off the lights, she said to the dark room, “That movie was awful.”
“Yes,” Zach said.
“She didn’t deserve that.”
“Yes,” Zach said. At the peak of his illness, each word took a lot of effort.
“Yes what?”
“Sorry,” he said.
He wrote her a letter. They bought him software and equipment that would let him write with eye movements and put his more complex thoughts to paper, where they would be more easily understood. He told her to check the printer, and there it was, three crisp pages, full of apologies and a tenuous explanation. Their life had become routine. He saw each milestone mapped out before them, and he could too clearly see each step as a progression toward death. They never spoke about ideas anymore. They only shared to-do lists, the petty disappointments of their days. Bella was the only thing that kept them go ing. But, he concluded after so many insults, he wasn’t making excuses. He should have confronted this directly. He should have talked to her.
She had ripped the paper into tiny pieces and let it fall like confetti into his lap. She let those pieces stay there for hours. She cried in front of him. She wanted him to see it. “When you get better,” she told him, “you’ll need to leave.” That hurt him. She could see it in his eyes, and against all intention, this reciprocal hurt fostered the tender concern they had lacked for so long.
She began to think of this time as their last year together. This is our last Fourth of July together, she thought as they watched Bella light sparklers at the foot of the driveway, the fizzling flames obscured by the low-lying sun. Bella had begged to light more, to push the festivities beyond sunset and draw her name against the dark — a trick they’d done in years past, using Zach’s camera set to a slow shutter speed so that each movement branded the image. But Mindy wouldn’t allow the risk, and Bella grew bored with the daytime fireworks. Still, Mindy took pictures of Bella in the sunlight, Zach looking on in tired bemusement, to remember that they had been together, that they had at least completed the ritual of celebration. A couple weeks later, Mindy thought, This is our last time watching Bella open birthday presents as husband and wife. On the longest day of the year, she watched the morning light stream through the windows and touch Zach’s once-dark hair, mussed as always, and thought, When I see him in the future, when he’s well again and only Bella’s father, his hair will always be perfectly combed. How sad, she realized, to never see him in disarray. And then she realized, in counting down the last moment of each category, that she had begun to care again, and to care deeply. The resentment remained, but she also hoped for something real to return.
Colleen could hear the mosquitoes swarming her. She had always been susceptible to bug bites with her type O blood. She always thought of herself as unlucky, so it had shocked her that she was resistant to the worst effects of the virus. She hoped she had passed along that luck to her daughter, the budding nihilist.
She found them at the grave, the girls with two boys huddled in front of Larry’s tombstone. She had expected some sort of Marilyn Manson getup, black eyeliner and pancake makeup, but the boy next to Suzie wore a simple black tee. He sat cross-legged with a book in his lap, a flashlight trained on the pages. Another boy in flannel sat beside Bella, his arm draped over her shoulders. From a distance, she could hear the boy in black reading. She knew the story. It was about fishermen in a swamp and a mythical catfish. There was nothing goth about it.
When she drew near, Suzie startled first. She screamed, having noticed a shadow, and the boy’s flashlight tumbled to the ground. Bella leapt up, ready to bolt.
“Suzie! It’s me,” Colleen said.
“Mom? What are you doing here?” Suzie clutched her elbows.
“Everyone needs to get to the car, right now.” Colleen pointed toward the van, even though she couldn’t see it beyond the hill.
Suzie grabbed the boy’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
“I’m dead serious. What the hell were you thinking?”
“It’s not a big deal, Mom,” Suzie said in an all-knowing tone. “Young people don’t die from it, unless you’re sick already, so it’s better to just get it over with. Then I’ll be immune like you.”
“Where did you get a stupid idea like that?” She turned on the suspected boyfriend. “Did you tell her that?”
“I mean no disrespect, Mrs. Wright. I’ve done a lot of research — ”
Colleen held up her hand to silence him and turned to her daughter. “Are you bit?”
“I hope so.” She crossed her arms.
“Get in the car.”
The girls and boys looked at each other, deciding.
“Run. Now. Or else.”
She swung her arms over her head like she was trying to deter a bear rather than herd teenagers from certain paralysis. The boys ambled after the girls, demonstrating their independence, Colleen thought, by thwarting her with their glacial pace.
As they crested the hill, Bella pointed toward a grove of trees in the middle of the graveyard. “Is that my dad?”
At first Colleen thought it was just the shadow of a tombstone, but then she recognized his hunched silhouette, his chair melting into the lawn. He wasn’t moving.
“Don’t stop,” Colleen said. “I’ll take care of him.”
Bella hesitated but Colleen shooed her along, physically spun her away from the scene and gave a push. She watched the children, made sure they climbed into the van before she descended the hill. As she got closer, she could see that Zach was as
leep, or passed out, his head lolled to the side, accentu ating his hollow cheeks. His chair was tilting into the earth. Maybe he was dead. She felt a sharp prickling at the nape of her neck. She had assumed he would recover, that it was just a matter of time.
“Hey,” she said, touching his knee, then gripping it to find the warm, living flesh beneath the fabric of his sweatpants.
He startled and jerked his head back before his eyes found her.
“You okay?”
“I’m stuck,” he said.
She crouched to discover a cell phone in the grass, next to his wheel, which had sunk into a molehill. She pictured the rodents digging into graves, violating the bodies that still existed like moldering plums below. Only one person in town had died from the virus. He was a great-grandfather, already on dialysis. They said it only killed the very young and the very old. But for most people, would it become a normal rite of passage, to lose control of their body for months or years, relying on family to carry them through to the other side?
“We didn’t know you’d be here,” she said, placing his phone in the cloth carrier strapped to the arm of his chair. His hand was trembling on his thigh. She wanted to hold it.
“I left right after Mindy,” he said. “She didn’t want to wait for me, but I couldn’t just sit there, doing nothing.” He looked up at her, his gaze steadier than she’d expected. “I’ve spent months looking out the window, watching people come and go. I’d see kids headed this way in the daylight. I didn’t think they’d be this stupid, but I thought I could do something. Check to be sure. Do my part.” He smacked the back of his hand against the metal arm of his chair. She reached for him, not sure if it was the tremor or some act of angst, until he said, “Stop.”
It surprised her, how strong his voice was, not quite steady yet, but getting there.
“You’re coming out of it,” she said.
“Still can’t walk,” he said. “I can’t even get out of this rut. Look at this. It’s a literal rut.” He pressed a keypad that triggered the wheels. They spun, kicking up thimbles’ worth of red clay, but the chair didn’t budge. Zach sighed and added, “Can’t even control when I fall asleep. I just nod off. I slept through Bella’s violin recital.”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 13