Me for You

by Lolly Winston

  “Definitely,” she agreed, squeezing each of his shoulders. “What doesn’t kill us, only makes us stronger. I say no!”

  Just like everyone else, Tessie, Rudy’s discharge nurse, seemed to find Sasha a delight. The latter wore a gray cashmere cardigan over a white T-shirt, her blond hair pulled back loosely into a ponytail. The gray sweater brought out the lovely blue-gray of Sasha’s eyes. She wore blue jeans, white socks and loafers. It always thrilled Rudy to see Sasha in her jeans. Not in a sexy way, but because he was seeing her—a coworker, after all—in her casual attire. Wearing the clothes in which she was most comfortable and most herself. It made Rudy feel closer to her. A kind of intimacy he wasn’t sure he could even explain to anyone without sounding silly.

  The three of them stood in a row, using the radiator cover as a table, as Tessie spread out and went over Rudy’s discharge papers. Essentially, he just needed to initial a few spots, and follow the directions for when he got home, starting with a stop at the drugstore by his house for his new meds, which Dr. Ring had already phoned in. The partial hospitalization program (PHP) started in two days, giving Rudy a day at home to rest and acclimate.

  Then came the embarrassingly strong recommendation that someone stay with the patient his first night home.

  “I’ll stay—” Sasha started.

  “I’ll phone Ce—” Rudy said.

  “It’s just that first night—” Tessie explained. “To be sa—”

  “Guest room?” Rudy asked Sasha.

  “Sure,” Sasha replied.

  Rudy felt his face flush red and warm.

  Tessie stood behind Sasha and smiled her broad grin—moon face, straight white teeth, waist-long brown hair tied back in a braid. “You’ll work it out, I know,” Tessie said, diminishing the big deal of these two adults sleeping in the same house.

  Rudy nodded in agreement. He tried to act casually, decided that he’d tell Sasha once they were in the car that she shouldn’t feel obligated. Even if CeCe couldn’t come, he’d be fine.

  Tessie helped Sasha and Rudy load his duffel bag and other items from the room onto a small hospital cart, before ducking out of the room.

  Sasha took the helm of the wheelchair, seemingly happy to push him, despite his chagrin. He was not an invalid!

  The floor secretary bid them farewell from behind the tall nurse’s station. She stood to wave, a flash of bright pink fingernails as they passed.

  “Oh, your wife has come to take you home! How nice!”

  Rudy felt his face redden. “Friend,” he corrected her, calling out over his shoulder. He felt embarrassed for Sasha. Saddled with this old wheelchair man! He was glad to be facing forward, away from Sasha and Tessie, so they couldn’t see his mortified face. They paused at the double doors beyond the nurse’s station and Tessie punched the big silver square button beside the doors, and they slooooowly swung open automatically. But then Sasha pushed the wheelchair around in a U-turn, so that both she and Rudy faced the front desk—the unit secretary and other nurses gathered there now. Tessie continued past them on down the hall.

  “Meet you at the elevators,” she called out.

  Sasha pushed the wheelchair a little closer to the nurse’s station, then stopped. Rudy smelled the clean, green-grass-and-citrus scent of her perfume as she leaned forward over him toward the group gathered there. A delightful tickle of her hair brushed his warm cheek.

  “You are correct!” Sasha called out, holding a forefinger in the air. “Girlfriend.” With that, Sasha spun the wheelchair back through the double doors toward the bank of elevators.

  As they drove home to Rudy’s house, Sasha followed his directions, but he noticed she seemed to already know the way. She pulled into the driveway, parked, and clapped her hands with a we-made-it smack, and winked at Rudy. As he climbed out she scooped up the thick folder of his paperwork along with his medication from their store stop and ferried them into the house with them. Rudy hadn’t wanted it to be like this at all—him an invalid, Sasha a nurse! So he concentrated on picking up his stride, taking care of business.

  After carrying in all his reading materials, his computer, and a small bag of other belongings, he started a grocery shopping list. He was going to cook dinner for Sasha every night. It was the one thing he could start right away that might lighten her burden.

  But then Sasha announced: “We have everything we need for dinner tonight,” as she lined up his meds on the kitchen counter. “A stroganoff, it’s mild, and a salad and sorbet. Plus I’m going to heat up this crusty French bread, and we’ll have it with butter to make the meal more hearty.”

  “But I wanted to—”

  “You need to put on some weight, sir.”

  “And you,” Rudy poked Sasha in the side and she giggled.

  He felt buoyant. He imagined she might be experiencing that pleasing feeling of actually being able to help someone. A capacity he’d yearned for since the paramedics hauled off Bethany.

  As Sasha turned on the oven, Rudy peered into the refrigerator to check what sort of petrified, atrophied, and moldy disasters might lurk within. To his surprise, the refrigerator had been completely cleaned out, wiped down, and filled with fresh groceries, neatly arranged on the shelves. All the dribbles of widower take-out spills and pots of unfinished heated soups he’d been too lethargic to clean up—gone.

  “My daughter sure is organized, isn’t she?” Rudy whistled. “Runs a tight ship.”

  Sasha agreed with a hug, the softness of her cashmere sweater brushing what he imagined to be his too-rough cheek. But Sasha squeezed him tighter, the strength in her arms surprising him. Soft and strong. She released him, pushed his shoulders back to have a look at him, smiled approvingly, then kissed his bristly cheek. Together they fixed a snack of cheese and crackers and bubbly waters, and shuffled to sit in the living room.

  After they’d removed their shoes and set their feet up on the coffee table, they talked about the hospital, Sasha’s job, and how she didn’t like the temporary piano player nearly as much as Rudy.

  “He plays so mechanically,” she observed between bites of cheese and crackers. “And so serious. Like a robot.”

  Rudy felt puffed up by this news. He stood, bowed comically, and crossed the room to the piano to play her favorite Chopin piece, flipping aside imaginary tuxedo tails. But just as he settled in on the bench, he jumped up and swept a large framed photograph of Bee off the center of the piano. He loved the picture, the black-and-white film offering a timeless appeal—as though Bee might still be alive, as though she might walk through the door wearing the wool sweater they’d bought her in Ireland. Yet how would Sasha feel with Rudy’s wife staring at her warmly, as if to say, “Enjoy the piano! Have a drink! I’m on my way home!” He frantically looked around the room and finally settled on stashing the picture on a bottom bookshelf.

  When Sasha realized what Rudy had done—that he had moved Bethany’s lovely photograph—she padded to the bookshelf in her stocking feet, lifted the frame gently—careful not to smudge the glass—and settled it back among a cluster of other family photos atop the piano.

  “It’s a beautiful photograph,” she told Rudy, sitting beside him on the bench.

  He made a show of scooting over, but barely moved, because he loved Sasha’s closeness.

  “She’s so pretty,” Sasha said. “She was a wonderful wife, Rudy. I know, because I was in terrible marriage. She will always be in your heart.”

  Sasha thumped her fist on her chest; just beside a chain with a gold, heart-shaped locket that Rudy knew held a tiny picture of Sasha’s daughter, Stefi.

  Sasha rested her head on Rudy’s shoulder. “You know,” she told him, “this is not a deadline to stop honoring Bee.”

  III

  23

  It was late October now—almost Halloween. Rudy had been home from the hospital for nearly a month.

  His first night home, Sasha had stayed with him, sleeping in the guest room, which had its own bath, on the other
side of which was an office that had been CeCe’s room growing up. Rudy was relieved by Sasha’s decisiveness, choosing the guest room, and placing a framed photograph of Stefi beside the clock radio.

  “May I see?” Rudy had asked, standing on the threshold in his stocking feet, and pointing to the photo. Sasha smiled and brought it to him. Her daughter was the spitting image of her, only with brighter hair—so blond it was almost white, pink satiny ribbons braided through her pigtails. She held a giant turkey drumstick, and the snapshot looked as though it had been taken at a Renaissance fair. The little girl was laughing—her mouth wide open, exposing tiny white corn-kernel teeth. Something chocolaty smudged her cheek. In photographs of people who had died, Rudy felt that he could see the motion within them that day or moment. Stefi’s head tipping back in laughter, little legs kicking in the air as someone held her around the waist.

  “Nutella.” Sasha looked over Rudy’s shoulder, pointing at the smudge. “Her favorite. Sandwiches, on a banana, spoonfuls from the jar.”

  Sasha’s hand brushed Rudy’s thumb. He wanted to hug her. He knew Sasha was being transported back to that day. The hot, dry fairgrounds, the smell of face paint.

  Indeed, Sasha remembered the bees buzzing around the meat kabobs in the heat, sawdust kicked up above Stefi’s little fringed suede bootlets and sprinkled across her calves and knees like cocoa powder. Gabor, several beers into the day, was still jolly, making Stefi laugh as he lifted her into his arms and swung her in a circle. “You are the princess, Stefi, of this entire kingdom. You are the keeper of all the Nutella in the land.”

  Stefi nodded vigorously. “I am! I shall be generous,” she declared. “And share it with all my people!” She and her girlfriends at school had adopted this pattern of speech from the imaginary worlds they inhabited in books and movies. Like a cross between Chaucer and a Disney princess.

  “I like this photograph,” Sasha explained to Rudy, gently setting the frame back on the night table beside the double bed.

  “It is of Stefi, but it is also of a happy day,” Rudy guessed.” Happier California days. When you were a family.”

  Sasha nodded. She sat down on the bed, which was covered with a quilt Bee and CeCe had made together for one of CeCe’s Girl Scout badges. It was to include pieces of fabric from throughout CeCe’s life. “Who saves all their kids’ clothes?” Bee had lamented, frantic to find enough cloth, cutting into a plaid shirt of Rudy’s. “Hey,” Rudy had protested, “I still wear that.”

  “Not anymore,” Bee had informed him. “I’m billing it as part of a Halloween costume that CeCe once wore as Ellie Mae Clampitt.” Bee measured and cut four diamond-shaped swaths out of the back of the red-and-white shirt. “Or maybe she went as an Italian restaurant table.”

  “Hey, that’s Dad’s,” CeCe pointed out with disapproval.

  “You want this badge?” Bee asked her daughter. CeCe nodded seriously.

  “You want to sew a quilt?” she asked Rudy. Rudy shook his head vigorously, grateful for his wife’s ingenuity.

  After CeCe no longer wore her Girl Scout uniform or sash, Bee cut out the part of the sash bearing her badges and sewed it into the quilt, about eighteen inches down from the top and in the center, so it stood out for all to admire.

  Rudy scooted beside Sasha on the bed. She took her hand in his. “Happier days behind us. Happier days to come.”

  “Yep,” Rudy agreed. He kissed her cheek, the warmth of which made hime close his eyes and breathe in the sweet, slightly vanilla, slightly orange smell of her hair.

  The following morning, Rudy got up early to discover that the door to Sasha’s room had blown open. He peeked in on her for just a moment before pulling the door closed. Her spray of blond hair across the pillow filled him with a hope he couldn’t possibly have imagined that first night trying to sleep in the hospital—the room a sterile black cavern of loneliness. When he passed by the guest bathroom, he felt foolish for being so excited by the sight of her toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, and bar of Clinique soap. A hairbrush entwined with blond hairs. He sensed possibility. In that day. In his life.

  And then it was time to be alone for the first time in weeks. Rudy remembered standing in his entryway, trying to convey to Sasha it was no big deal she was going back to her place, back to her jobs, leaving him in sweatpants and a Stanford sweatshirt that had been CeCe’s. After he kissed her on each of her cheeks and she responded with a kiss on the mouth, after she refused to let him walk her out to her car and carry her small bag, after she closed the door, Rudy had been able to keep the smile on his face until he heard the door’s click. Then he felt his face droop, heard the depression scratching at the windows to get in. He tried to be present, focusing on what he would fix himself for dinner, realizing that this would be his first dinner alone in a month. There would be no tray of varied food groups with Sasha or hospital pineapple upside-down cake or Jeopardy! on TV after dinner in the dayroom.

  He had shifted from foot to foot, wondering what to do with his grief. For he had stuffed it under the bed when Sasha returned with him from the hospital. Now it was sliding down the banister. Alone, are we? Here I am! What’s for dinner? A loaf of loneliness? Let’s play the piano—a little song called widower!

  Oh, fuck off, Rudy thought. He wasn’t one to swear often, but sometimes he used his own R-rated version of CBT to ward off negative thoughts. He’d been skeptical at first that any of the piles of handouts brought home from the hospital would help. That his confuddled brain (a cross between confused and befuddled, he’d explained to his new therapist) would remember any of the hospital tricks. On some days his stay there remained as a blur of meal forms to fill out, circles of lost faces in group, and the bright blue expanse of sky above his hospital bed window. But the breathing exercises, the replacement thoughts, the distraction exercises—they had actually worked that first day home. There was nothing to lose, he’d learned. He had a dark inner world separate from Sasha’s, one which he had continued to slay on. He was a brave knight. A CBT musketeer.

  The autumn was Sasha’s favorite time of year in California—she loved the way summer might linger all the way into November. Some days might be as warm as seventy degrees Fahrenheit—with roses still blooming in the yards—yellow ones tinged with red and peach, spotted and bumpy, imperfections from the cold nights that were coming on. Sasha loved these less-than-perfect flowers, which were always far more fragrant than those bought at a store or florist’s. California roses bloomed into the fall. Back home in Hungary, there might be warm days, but the sun would have vanished by now, leaving the world like a black-and-white photograph. Above the houses and concrete apartment buildings, gray clouds would thicken and billow into coal smokestacks of gloom.

  Sasha loved the long line of gingko trees along Rudy’s street. They had turned uniformly yellow now, so that when the sun hit them in the afternoon they looked lit from within, like rows of candles. At home, the leaves all would have fallen from the trees, leaving bare branches like arthritic fingers clawing at a bitterly chilling white sky. The concrete buildings, the frozen yellow-brown grass that was lumpy and unforgiving when you walked across it—so easy to turn an ankle. The world there was raw and depleted, and the change of season depleted one’s spirits. Rainy days arrived by November. Longer nights meant longer and longer drinking hours for Gabor. (But it wasn’t home anymore, was it? Maybe Sasha would take Rudy to see Hungary one day. But surely she could call America her home now.)

  While these delicious two or three extra months of almost-summer were remarkable to Sasha, what she didn’t particularly like was this American holiday—Halloween—that brought children swarming to your door. When Stefi was little, Sasha and Gabor had dressed her up and taken her from apartment to apartment in their first place in Fremont, before they bought the tiny house in San Jose. At the apartment building there were just enough people who knew them to collect a few little treats and have them fawn over Stefi’s costume, as a ladybug or princess. Remembering t
his, Sasha was consumed with a wistful sadness, but she would be strong. Strong for Rudy. Strong for herself.

  Halloween was their first holiday together.

  Rudy had stressed that morning, for the third time, that they could turn out the lights, just leave the bright garage floodlight on over the driveway so no one tripped and fell, and step out to eat and see a movie. Sasha sighed deeply and shook her head. She considered this seriously—playing hooky from Halloween sounded both wonderful and like cheating.

  Holidays had always been opportunities for Sasha to make little celebrations for Stefi. She could buy an inexpensive kit to carve a pumpkin to look like a kitty. Letting Stefi scoop out the pumpkin innards with her bare hands until there were strings and seeds in her hair and she laughed and laughed and rolled on the floor until they had to put her in a warm bath and to bed, and finish the carving kit on their own—Sasha and Gabor. A couple. When they had first arrived in California, Gabor was happy, and he barely drank. He was reliable enough to either give Stefi a bath or finish the fine carving of the outline of a cat’s whiskers through the thick skin of an autumn pumpkin.

  Sasha insisted to Rudy that she would be okay handing out candy with him. He warned her again—with excitement in his voice this time—that a lot of kids came to his house. “Your bum will barely get the chance to skim the seat of your chair before the doorbell rings again.” He and Bee had always loved this about their neighborhood, especially after Cecilia outgrew trick-or-treating, and especially once she went off to college.

  Even if it turned out that next year their tradition would be dinner out and a movie on Halloween night, Sasha wanted to do things with Rudy in as normal a fashion as possible this year.

  They were each afraid that their grief would seep into the other’s psyche—like algae that eventually choked out the oxygen and killed the decorative carp in a pond. Too thick. Eutrophic.