Be Mine

by Laura Kasischke

  I DIDN'T have to get dressed. I'd never changed into my nightgown. I found my card key on the counter in the dark and slipped it into my purse, stepped out of the room, and pulled the door closed behind me.

  The light in the hallway was absurdly bright, the carpet wild with geometric designs—too chaotic and one-dimensional to look at in the glare. I took the elevator to the lobby and found the pay phone. I punched in my own phone number, and then my calling card. "H'lo?" Jon said, sounding as if I'd woken him. And the sound of his voice—open and willing—brought tears to my eyes. I said, "Jon."

  "Sherry," he said. "Is everything all right?"

  "No," I said.

  Behind me, at the desk, the receptionist was, herself, talking on a phone. She was arguing with someone about money. I told you Fd pay my half, but not a penny more. The rest is your responsibility. Jon said, "Sherry, sweetheart. Tell me what's wrong."

  "Jon, I've ruined everything." I started to sob. "I've ruined it all."

  He was quiet on the other end of the phone, listening to me cry. Behind me, the receptionist had also grown quiet. She was listening, too, I supposed, to me, speculating about what domestic conflict might have brought a middle-aged woman to the Holiday Inn lobby after midnight and had her sobbing into a pay phone.

  "No, you haven't," Jon said. "Everything's going to be all right, Sherry. And you haven't done it, Sherry. Whatever mess we're in here, we're in it together."

  "No," I said. "It's my fault, Jon. It's all—vanity. It was all—"

  "It doesn't matter now, anyway," Jon said. "It's over, Sherry. Whatever happens next, we'll handle it together. But it's done now. It's done. You need to get a grip on yourself. You need to get some sleep. You'll—"

  "Jon," I said, "Chad knows."

  There was a silence for what must have been a full minute on the other end of the phone, and then Jon said, "Fuck."

  "Jon," I said. "I've ruined it. Our whole life. Everything. Can you imagine what he must think of me? I've wrecked it. I've wrecked the past, Jon. All of it. He'll never forgive me, he'll—"

  "Yes, he will," Jon said.

  "No." I was sobbing.

  "Yes, he will, Sherry," Jon said again. He said, "Chad's smarter than you give him credit for. He's older than you think he is. He—"

  "But this, Jon. He always said how lucky he was, that I was the perfect mother, that he would marry me himself if he could. Remember? He would send me those cards, even after he was sixteen, seventeen years old, telling me how much he loved me, that I was everything to him. And, also, us, Jon. Us. Always. He was always saying how lucky he was that his parents loved each other so much. Remember? He always said we were the perfect couple, that—?"

  "No," Jon said. "He knew we weren't."

  Something in his voice.

  I held the phone a little tighter in my hand. I said nothing. And then I asked, "What do you mean?"

  "Sherry," Jon said. "I want you to know I'm not telling you this to hurt you. This has nothing to do with what's happened now, my telling you this. I'm not mad at you, about this bullshit, with—Bram—" He seemed to choke on the name before going on. "But you're not the only one," he said, "who's made a mistake in this marriage. And Chad knows that."

  Behind me, the receptionist had begun to whisper into her own telephone. There was a man standing at the counter, filling out his check-in card. He was in his fifties, maybe, a balding man, but with strong arms, and he looked at me, and for a moment I had the sure sense that we'd been here before, together, this man and I, in this very situation, when we were younger, or in another life. There was such compassion in his gaze. He knew that I was crying. He remembers, too, I thought. He knows.

  Then I turned my back to him and said into the phone, to Jon, "Tell me."

  Jon inhaled.

  Exhaled.

  "Oh, Sherry," he said. "It's been at least ten years ago. At least. Ten years or longer. I don't know. Chad was little. Really little. Third grade? Maybe fourth? I—I was having an affair."

  I looked up at the ceiling.

  Why?

  Had I thought I would see the stars above me? Planets?

  What I saw, instead, was a water stain on the ceiling tiles overhead.

  To Jon, I said nothing. His breath sounded close and fast in my ear. I could even hear him swallow. It was as if, now, a hundred miles apart, we were standing as close to one another as we ever had.

  "Did you know it, Sherry?" he asked. "Have you known it all along?"

  "No," I said. "I never knew."

  There was a long, concentrated pause.

  Years were compressed into the pause.

  That pause had the texture, the density, of slate.

  Then, Jon said, "I—I thought maybe you knew. I thought it. But I was never sure. I didn't know, I thought maybe Chad had told you. He knew, Sherry, because he came home one day, and she was there, and I had to tell him, I had to explain—"

  "Where was I?" I asked, alarmed enough suddenly by my own absence to ask him a question, to sound angry. It wasn't possible! I'd caught him in a lie. I had never, in all those years, not been home for Chad when he got there after school, had I? On the afternoons I didn't pick him up myself, I was waiting for him at the edge of the driveway when the bus dropped him off. How could I have been erased from a day of my own life? How could Jon erase me? Where was I in this new life Jon was describing, the one I hadn't been there to live? Some mistake, surely, was playing out here, some kind of identity theft, a complete misunderstanding—

  "You weren't there," Jon said. "You were in Silver Springs. You were moving your dad into Summerbrook."

  And then it came back to me.

  The boxes. The Realtor. The clothes unpacked and folded in my father's new dresser at the nursing home.

  Two days. Maybe three. I would have been here, perhaps, alone, at this very Holiday Inn. Ten years ago, I might have been at this very phone. I would have been calling Jon to check in, to make sure that Chad had gotten home from school, that he'd done his homework, that he and Jon had eaten dinner.

  Out of two decades—three days. I'd gone away, and those had been the days in which my life, my real life, had been lived.

  "Chad was supposed to be taking the bus home," Jon went on. "But he missed the bus, and Garrett's mother found him in the parking lot, waiting, and drove him home. You know how slow the school bus used to go. He was home at least forty-five minutes earlier than I'd thought he would be. And she was still here, in the house, when he walked in."

  "She was there."

  "Really, Sherry," Jon said. "It was nothing. He saw almost nothing. We were dressed, but we were on the bed, and we were kissing, and Chad walked in."

  The man from the front desk passed by me then.

  A ghost.

  A memory of a memory of a lover from some other lifetime—a lifetime in which he and I had danced, perhaps, to the song that was being piped in now, too quietly to really hear it, through the ceiling of the lobby of the Holiday Inn. It had been some other May, another night, but not unlike this one. A lovelier hotel. I'd been wearing a silver ball gown, but my feet were bare. Then, he stepped into the elevator, and he was gone.

  "Sherry?" Jon said. "Are you there?"

  "I'm here," I said.

  "Do you still love me, Sherry?"

  I said, "Who was she?"

  I asked it as if it mattered, as if I were expecting some important information that would change everything, bring sense and reason to it all—but I already knew it wouldn't. I already knew who it was.

  "Sue," Jon said. "It was Sue."

  I looked back up at the water stain. It was shaped like a face of a clock. The clock, however, had no hands.

  "Sherry?" Jon asked.

  I said, "Yes."

  He said, "Sherry, haven't you always known? I never told you because, what good would it have done? But I always thought you knew. Sue was so—furious then. She wanted me to leave you. She told me she was going to tell you. She—In m
y heart, I thought you knew all along, and that you forgave me, that you forgave us both."

  I said, "I never knew."

  ON MY way back down the hall to our room, I watched the floor more carefully this time. The geometric shapes were not, after all, haphazard. They were arranged in careful patterns. If I got down on my hands and knees, I could decipher the pattern. I knew I could.

  But I didn't do it.

  Instead, I leaned up against the wall for a moment before opening the door to the room, and I considered it:

  My whole life spinning ahead of me and behind me down that long corridor.

  My whole life, spun out there, like a fascinating lie.

  MY FATHER was asleep in the chair in his room when we got there—chin resting on his chest, a string of spit spilling from his lips to his belly. It wasn't until I knelt down beside him to touch his hand that I realized he was tied to the chair with straps—one around his chest and two at each wrist—but Chad noticed right away. He said, "Jesus Christ. What the hell is this?"

  My father woke up then and looked around him, his gaze passing over me, then freezing on Chad. He gasped, and his mouth stayed open afterward, staring. In pleasure, or in shock?

  "Dad," I said, squeezing his wrist, but he didn't look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on Chad, who knelt down then beside him, too, and began untying the straps around his left wrist. When that hand was free, my father reached out and touched Chad's face.

  "Hey," Chad said, looking softly at his grandfather. "How are you, Grandpa?"

  "Robbie," my father said, moving his fingers around on Chad's face.

  "No, Dad," I said. "It isn't Rob. It's your grandson. It's Chad"

  "Son," my father said, still not looking at me, not seeming to have heard what I'd said. "My boy. How are you? Where have you been, Robbie? Where did you go?"

  "I've been at college," Chad said. "I missed you, Grandpa."

  "College?" my father said, leaning back as if to see Chad more clearly. "How is college?" my father asked—and then a cloudy tear ran zigzagging down his face. He stuttered out, weeping, "I missed you, too. Robbie, I missed you, too."

  I got a Kleenex off the bedside stand to wipe away my father's tear, and also the spit that had run from his mouth to his stomach while he was asleep in his chair, and I dabbed at my father's face. As I did it, I said, "No, Dad, this isn't Robbie. This is—"

  "Mom," Chad snapped. He gave me a long, cold look.

  I put the Kleenex in my purse, instead of the trash can.

  Why?

  Was I planning to keep it?

  IT WAS later, at the front desk, waiting for the physician's assistant, that I realized I still had it—that tear my father had shed for my brother, a little melted diamond, caught in a scrap of tissue, stuffed into my purse.

  We'd gone down to speak to the physician's assistant, but she wasn't in, so we had to speak to the head nurse, who seemed so rushed and exasperated to have been called out of a resident's room to the front desk that, when she finally got to us, I couldn't form words.

  Standing before her (a beautiful woman in her midthirties, or maybe even younger, with sleek blond hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, looking like a goddess, molded to perfection at Vic Tanny's) I felt that I would be challenging one of the Fates to ask the question I'd summoned her to ask. I felt that I should bow to her, make offerings to her, not complain to her about my father's treatment. When I opened my mouth, only to have nothing come out, Chad spoke instead. "Why is my grandfather tied up in there? What's the problem here?"

  The head nurse looked in the direction of my father's room, then back at Chad with what I could tell was a patience so difficult to feign that if she were forced to do it for very long she might crack straight down the middle, revealing the clean hollow perfection that was inside her. "Your grandfather," she explained, "has started wandering."

  "Okay," Chad said. "Okay." There was an edge to his voice—not sarcasm this time, but something else, something so startling and sharp I stepped a few inches away from him. I looked at him. He was staring directly into the eyes of the head nurse. Where has he come from? I thought, looking at him—this new man, challenging the Fates, carrying with him this cold blade in his voice? I had given birth to him, hadn't I? I felt awed, and proud, and also afraid.

  "So," Chad said, "if he's wandering, is he causing problems for you, or for himself?"

  "As you can imagine," the head nurse said, "it's extremely dangerous. We have carts full of medicines here. There are patients here on respirators. Your father wandered into the kitchen one day. He could have burned himself."

  "Oh, no," I said. They both looked at me. I felt I should apologize. I wanted to go. My father, I could have told this head nurse if Chad weren't handling all of this now, had been a mailman. He wasn't used to being indoors. He had wandered for a living for decades. If he were going to hurt someone, hurt himself, with the wandering, she was probably right, it was probably best that my father be—

  "Well that explains why he's strapped to the chair, I suppose," Chad said, "although it seems like you could handle this by keeping a better watch on things, rather than tying people up. But why are his wrists strapped to the arms of the chair? Why can't he even move his hands?"

  She'd been waiting for this, I could tell. What was it the Fates did? They wove the cloth that was your life? They cut the thread that ended it?

  "He unzips his pants," she said. (Was I mistaken or did she take a small, threatening step in Chad's direction as she said this?) "He masturbates all day if we don't restrain his hands," she said. I put my own hand to my mouth.

  "Well, so what?' Chad said. He took, himself, a step in her direction. He wasn't scared of her. It amazed me. He wasn't scared of her. Nothing she could say would scare him.

  But I was terrified.

  I touched Chad's arm, trying to stop him from saying anything else. If she said more, I couldn't stand it, I thought. I thought, the physician's assistant, on the phone the other day, had been right. My father belonged to these people now. These strangers were his family now. There was nothing we could do. They knew what was best. His fate was in their hands now. I squeezed Chad's upper arm, and for the first time realized that he was made of pure muscle. He was like stone, himself. Had he been lifting weights? Had he always been so strong?

  Of course he wasn't afraid of her. He was a million times stronger than she was.

  "It's his room," Chad said, "and if he wants to masturbate in it all day, whose business is that?"

  "Well," the head nurse said, then licked her lips before continuing. "It's the business of the people who have to work here, sir. It's the business of the people who have to take his food into him, and the families, some of them with little children, who come here to visit their relatives. Obviously, for safety reasons we can't keep his door closed, so it becomes everyone's business if your grandfather is in his chair masturbating all day."

  "Maybe if you let him walk around," Chad said, "and had the personnel available to keep an eye on him, he wouldn't be so bored that he had to sit in there and masturbate all day. Maybe if you were tied to a chair,you'd be jerking off all day, too."

  "I have to go," the head nurse said. Her face had flushed. She'd turned away. She said, without looking at us, "The physician's assistant is at a conference. He'll be back on Monday, and you can speak to him then."

  But I had spoken to the physician's assistant only a few days ago, hadn't I? Then, the physician's assistant had been a woman. I said, "I just spoke to her. She said my father was better, that he'd been making Easter baskets, that—"

  "These things progress and change quickly, ma'am," the nurse said, still walking away from us. "I'm going now," she said.

  And then she was gone—a white blank in the corridor, and then just an absence.

  MOSTLY we were silent on the drive home. Chad said he wanted, himself, to call the physician's assistant on Monday, and that if he didn't get a satisfactory response, he would call the
director of Summerbrook.

  I tried to assume the parental role again, to say that I would do it, but he said no. "You can't, Mom. You don't stand up to these people. You never have."

  I didn't ask him what he meant. I said, "Well, maybe your father—"

  "Dad?" He practically laughed. "You've got to be kidding, Mom. I'll handle it."

  He fell asleep then for an hour—eyes closed, mouth open, the steady rhythm of his breath.

  I fiddled with the radio for a while, and, finding nothing to listen to, turned it off and listened to the silence, to the sound of the road rolling under us, the other cars with their own passengers passing us. Occasionally, I looked over and locked gazes with some other driver, or a woman beside the driver, or the child in their backseat—but it happened too fast to even bother to raise a hand, to wave.

  We were almost home when Chad woke, looking like a child again—eyes heavily lidded, the muscles in his face slack. He looked out the car window for a long time, without seeming to be seeing anything, and then he sat up fast, as if he'd glimpsed something that had surprised him traveling on the other side of the freeway.

  "What?" I asked.

  He still seemed groggy, confused. He said, "I thought I saw Garrett's red Thunderbird."

  No. "Mustang," I said, quietly.

  "Yeah. Right," Chad said, and let his head drop backward on the back of the car seat again, and closed his eyes.

  IT WAS late afternoon when we pulled in the driveway—too early for Jon to have gone to work and come back, but his car was there, parked, and he was standing in the backyard with his rifle, pointing it at the roof of the house. When he noticed us, he put it down. He turned.