by Pete Nelson
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I can explain it,” she said. “I just don’t like the way this engages me. I get drawn in, trying to fix somebody else’s problem, and I know I shouldn’t but I feel guilty if I don’t try. And when things don’t work out, I feel even worse.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You cleaned my fish tank?”
“Was that okay?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to get to it.”
“I’m still confused,” he said, returning to the subject under discussion.
She took his hand, holding it in both of hers. The gesture meant more to him than he could say.
“I’m not saying, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ — this is definitely you,” she said. “But this is also familiar.”
“What is?”
“I take on too much, and then I get overwhelmed. It makes me want to hide or run away. It’s why I didn’t want to stay with my mother in the hospital when my father died,” Tamsen said. “She told me she didn’t need me to be there, but I knew she was just saying that.”
“Where were you?” Paul asked.
“Down the hall,” Tamsen said. “Watching CNN. Not paying attention, just letting the news sort of wash over me. Hoping it would happen and he’d die while I wasn’t in the room. And praying. I’d been praying ever since he was diagnosed, asking God to save my father. Then when we knew it was hopeless, I prayed for God to take him in his sleep. But I meant my sleep.”
“You went down the hall to watch television,” Paul said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I was hiding,” she said. “And God didn’t answer any of my prayers, so I decided then and there to stop praying, because it wasn’t helping anything — I was just fooling myself into feeling better, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said.
She looked at him.
“You certainly are,” she said. “I’m not saying you can’t count on me. I don’t walk away from somebody just because they screw up. Which you did. It hurts to be lied to. It just does. But I know you. And just so you know, I am steadfast, and I am forgiving. Caitlin said everybody should get one chance to fuck up. Deep down, I do believe in you. I know how I feel about you. My love isn’t going anywhere. If you want to know, I wasn’t coming up to break up with you. I was coming up because I didn’t feel like I’d explained things properly and I wanted to be clear.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Just don’t …” She dropped the thought. He didn’t pick it up for her.
“It’s not going to happen again.”
She looked at him. He suspected that was the same promise her ex-husband had made to her. It was weak. What else could he say?
“I’m reluctant to say too much because I know how down on yourself you get,” Tamsen told him. She paused and seemed to him to be choosing her words carefully. “Look, I’ve made mistakes just like everybody else. I’m no one to sit in judgment. And I’m not your mother either. I just think you need to look at some of the things you do and consider what sort of changes you might want to make. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
“We can talk about it some more if you want,” she said.
“I’m good,” he said. “Unless you want to.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “My internal clock is five hours different.”
“I got you something,” he told her. He went to his bag and retrieved the Red Sox hat he’d purchased for her at Fenway Park, a genuine MLB model and not one of those one-size-fits-all adjustable hats they sold at supermarkets. She tried it on. It fit.
“How did you know what size?” she asked.
“I measured.”
“Measured what?” she said. “I don’t have any other hats.”
“I measured your head,” he said.
“With what?” she asked.
“With a shoe lace,” he told her. “While you were sleeping.”
“That’s a little weird,” she said. “Thoughtful but weird. I got you something too. Wait here.”
As he watched her aquarium, a blue cichlid about the size of a mint Milano cookie took a nip from the tail of a smaller fish. The tail on the smaller fish had a saw-toothed edge from multiple bites. Paul saw the cruel logic of it, each nip inexorably reducing the victim fish’s ability to propel itself, making it slower and slower until it was finally easy to catch.
When Tamsen rejoined him, she sat next to him on the couch, leaned against him, and handed him a present, about the size of a Kleenex box. In it, wrapped in white tissue paper, he found a small brass replica of the Eiffel Tower with a thermometer attached to it.
“You collect thermometer kitsch, right?”
He’d told her how his father had brought him an Empire State Building souvenir thermometer after a trip to New York, and a Washington Monument souvenir thermometer after a trip to Washington, D.C. He was surprised that she remembered.
“I love it,” he told her. “It’s really thoughtful.”
“It would look nice next to my Paul Bunyan snow globe,” she said, smiling. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to, or maybe he was just reading things into her statement that weren’t there, grasping at straws, but unless he was mistaken, she’d just evoked an image of the two of them living together someday.
“I’m so jet-lagged I can’t see straight,” she said. “Do you mind?”
She lay down on the couch, her head in his lap. He took the acrylic throw from the back of the couch and covered her with it against the cool night air. He stroked her hair.
“Oh — have I said I forgive you?” she asked, her eyes closed.
“Not in those exact words,” he said.
She gave him a moment to think about it, then whispered, “I forgive you.”
16
The Gathering Storm
He retained Tamsen’s good opinion through the summer. He’d lost almost fifteen pounds since he’d started running and cutting back on Klondike bars and doughnuts. Sometimes she joined him on his runs. In his competition with Stephen, he neither gained nor lost ground, as best he could tell, though he tried not to measure.
At the end of August, the students returned, Smithies and their moms, and occasionally dads walking three steps behind, trolling the store aisles and forming lines at the cash registers downtown, buying printer cartridges and plastic laundry baskets and message boards for their dorm room doors. You could tell the freshmen by the dubious glaze in their eyes. He was getting ready to head down to the Bay State one night to check out a blues band when Stella was suddenly in the doorway.
“Don’t go. Something is going to happen,” she said.
She was panting. It was a warm late-summer evening, maybe seventy-five or eighty degrees, but not so warm that she’d be overheated. A breeze had kicked up, making the air quite pleasant. Saliva dripped from her tongue.
“Just calm down and tell me what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t know. Something bad.”
“Something bad?”
“Paul, please …”
“What? What do you want me to do?”
“Don’t go. Stay here. Make it stop.”
“Make what stop? What do you want me to stop?”
“The thing that’s going to happen.”
“Well, if you won’t tell me what you think is going to happen, how can I make it stop?”
Stella was beside herself with fear.
Then he heard it, distant but distinct, a low rumble that could have been a train slowly snaking through town but wasn’t. He looked out the window at the sky. He saw a distant flash of lightning. Stella paced and panted, unable to listen.
“It’s just thunder,” Paul said. “You’ve been through thunderstorms before.”
“This one is different,” she insisted.
“How is this one different?”
“I don’t know. I just know it is. I have a feeling.”
“You have a feeling. Now you’re psychic?”
“You don’t have to be psychic to know when something bad is going to happen. These things cause fires. I can’t run like I used to …”
Another rumble sounded, still distant but stronger than the first, which meant the storm was indeed getting closer. That she’d heard it before he did was no surprise.
“Do you want me to close the windows? Let me — ”
“I don’t care if you close the windows,” she interrupted. “What good is closing the windows going to do?”
The sky was lit with a flash of lightning. He heard the first few drops of rain splattering down on the roof. The air smelled of ozone, a stainless steel fresh-cut hay smell. She’d probably smelled the storm coming long before she’d heard the thunder.
“You want to go for a ride in the car or something?”
“Oh God, no!”
This time the thunder was loud and explosive, maybe a seven or an eight on a scale of one to ten. He tried putting his hands over her ears, tried putting his arms around her to calm her down, as the clouds broke and the rains came down all at once. Wind shook the lilac tree outside the kitchen window.
“Stella, it’s okay, you’re indoors. Nothing is going to happen.”
“Make it stop.”
“Shhh, shhh … Come on.”
He led her under the kitchen table and told her to lie down. She often took shelter under the kitchen table during storms, but tonight it wasn’t enough. He turned all the lights off, grabbed the bedspread from his bed, and threw it over the kitchen table, arranging it so that the hem touched the floor, and then he got under the table with her. When the lightning flashed, the bedspread blocked the light, save a thin line where the bedspread met the floor. He put his arm around her and stroked her face. She was able to sit, but too nervous to lie down.
“Paul, I don’t like this. This is dangerous. This is a bad one.”
“Shhh, shhh, shhh, there’s no danger, Stell — you’re in a big, strong house and you’re very safe here. You’re very safe.”
“This house is made of wood. Wood can catch fire.”
“That’s your blood memory, Stell,” Paul said, stroking her. “Thousands of years ago, back when you guys were still evolving and living outdoors with the wolves — ”
Another crackle of thunder.
“Jesus. Shit! I’m sorry, I’m sorry — oh my God …”
“Do you remember the story about men and dogs?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“About how we got to be friends?”
“No.”
She seemed terribly confused, as if she didn’t know where she was.
“Tell me the story again,” she asked.
“I’d be happy to,” he said. He put his face next to hers. “Thousands and thousands of years ago, back when you were living outdoors with the wolves, sometimes forest fires started from lightning strikes, and those of you in the pack who were too old to run away from the fire got left behind, and now you feel like that’s what’s going to happen, so that’s what you’re afraid of, but Stella, that was thirty thousand years ago. That’s over two hundred thousand years ago in dog years.”
“Tell me the story,” she insisted. “Tell me about thirty thousand years ago.”
“Thirty thousand years ago is when dogs and people first got to be friends. Today, scientists digging around in the ruins of old Neolithic villages sometimes find the remains of dog bones and human bones lying side by side.”
“Were the dogs chewing on the human bones?”
“No,” he said. “The dog bones were usually found near where the garbage dumps were, which means that some dogs stayed wolves but others decided to become scavengers and live off what the humans left for them, and then some of you who’d become scavengers got to be very clever and figured out how to make humans your friends.”
“How did we do that?”
“By looking us in the eye and not being afraid,” Paul said. “Only the very bravest and the very smartest among you had the courage to come up and eat out of human beings’ hands, because up to then we’d been the enemy. We’d both been wild animals, humans and dogs, but somewhere along the line, at about the same time in history, we decided there was a better way to live together, and that’s when dogs moved indoors instead of hanging around the dumps. And dogs liked it indoors because it was warm and dry and easier to get food, and so out of gratitude, dogs learned how to do jobs for humans.”
“Like guard sheep?”
“Like guard sheep, and pull carts …”
“And rescue people?”
“And rescue people by using their keen sense of smell. Dogs even guarded children from other beasts in the wilderness. Dogs were very helpful and very happy to earn the table scraps the humans would give them, and the humans were very grateful to have dogs as friends. Humans and dogs had learned to love one another, in a way that no other two species have ever learned to love one another. Out of all the other animals on the planet, there’s never been another example of two species that decided to love one another.”
“Not cats either.”
“No, not cats,” Paul said. “People love cats and cats certainly enjoy people, but cats don’t lay down their lives and die for people the way dogs do. Cats don’t swim out into lakes and pull drowning children ashore, or run into burning buildings, or leap into the darkness when they hear a threatening noise. And if a person dies in a cabin in the woods, and there’s a cat in the cabin with him, the cat will eat the human’s dead body rather than starve to death, but a dog would starve to death too, rather than betray the friendship. Some people say that makes cats smarter, but I say that makes dogs better.”
“So if you died, I couldn’t eat you?”
“You wouldn’t want to.”
“I wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“Could I roll in you?”
“Sure, that would be all right.” The lightning and thunder had stopped. It was still raining.
“So people let dogs live in their houses because they loved them, not just because they needed their sheep guarded.”
“That’s right,” Paul said. “And it used to be that lightning would hit houses and make them catch fire, but that doesn’t happen anymore because of lightning rods.”
“What’s a lightning rod?”
“It’s a thing that directs the electricity away from the house.”
“What’s electricity?”
“That’s what lightning is made out of. It’s too much to explain right now, but the point is, you’re going to be all right in the house because you’re safe and dry and I think the storm is over. Do you feel better?”
He listened and heard only the sound of rain drops dripping from the trees.
“A little.” She was calmer. She looked at him. “Are you still going out?”
“No,” he said. “Feel like lying in bed and watching television?”
“Sure,” she said. “The bed is the softest place in the house.”
He lifted the bedspread and let her out from their improvised shelter beneath the table. When he looked down, he saw that Stella had had an accident — the storm had literally scared the crap out of her, a solid turd on the linoleum beneath the table. He picked it up using a wad of toilet paper, wiped the floor clean, and flushed it all down the toilet. He saw no need to tell her. He cleaned her up, put the bed spread back on his bed, and lifted her up onto the mattress, where she lay down with her back to him, one leg up, asking for a belly scratch. He complied, turning on the television to The Tonight Show.
“Whatever happened to that white-haired guy?” Stella asked.
“Johnny Carson?”
“Yeah.”
“He retired a few years ago.”
“I miss him. I knew him my whole life.”
; “Me too.”
“He was really kind to animals. These new guys just make fun of them. What’s he doing these days?”
“Playing tennis, I guess,” Paul said.
“That’s good exercise,” Stella said. “I love you, Paul.”
“I know. I love you more.”
“Yeah, probably. Just kidding.”
17
Water Bears
Once Stella had fallen asleep, her legs twitching, Paul went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He opened a book he’d been reading about protozoans and spent a few minutes with it but lost energy. It was still raining. On CNN, the pundits were calling for the president’s impeachment because he’d lied about getting a blow job in the White House cloakroom. He turned the TV off and logged on to his computer, where he discovered that his father was online.
PaulGus: Are you feeling better than you did yesterday?
HarrGus: YES
PaulGus: Did you have a good dinner? You have to eat, you know.
HarrGus: YES
PaulGus: Are you still having trouble remembering things?
HarrGus: YES
PaulGus: You never complain. I don’t mean now. I mean before.
HarrGus: NO
PaulGus: You just soldier on.
HarrGus: YES
Maybe it was his annoyance with the CNN pundits, the hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou Republicans with past and future Lewinskys of their own, channeling their obvious arousal over White House revelations into spluttering outrage. People were emotionally complex. The ones who weren’t, or pretended they weren’t, were the freaks. For whatever reason, he thought he might push his father a bit, nudge him toward an examination of the inner life.
PaulGus: Good in theory. In practice, that doesn’t help children learn how to deal with their problems. Children aren’t soldiers. If you spend your life keeping your problems to yourself, your children have no coping mechanisms in place other than to “take it like a man” when the shit hits the fan for them. Pardon the expression.
PaulGus: Just a thought I had. No need to respond.
HarrGus: NO
PaulGus: I met a guy once who bragged that he never cried. To me that’s like saying he never laughed. An emotional IQ approaching zero. Anybody who buys the idea that God created us would have to admit he gave us each a complete set of emotions to help us get by, right?