Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  The past wasn’t really that long ago. Who said that? Maybe I did.

  This bathroom darkroom is even smaller than that one was, now that Owen’s put the washer-dryer in. Although that’s come in handy—I use the open doors of the washer and dryer to hold my chemical trays. The enlarger sits on a kitchen stool. Precariously. The acrid smell of stop bath is what’s bringing back these old memories, I believe. And giving me a headache, as usual, but I don’t mind. “You have the best job in the world,” Greta said during our quarrel. It’s possible. In any case, this is my lot. I take pictures.

  Which is it, you’re good at what you love or you love what you’re good at? I hang dripping prints with clothespins from a wire in the shower and admire my handiwork. Pond studies, mostly, with slow black-and-white film, the old-fashioned way. The pond at dawn, full day, dusk, by moonlight. Mood pieces. They please me enormously.

  So do my pictures of Sock. They’re really good. But, of course, as soon as you put a dog—or a child—in a photograph it’s not “serious” anymore. (Unless they’re starving.) Luckily I don’t care about any of that anymore. I could do fine art if I wanted, I’ve got the skill, the eye. But I like my children. My stinky darkroom. Maybe it was coming back to it, and back to film—coming back around to the beginning—that’s redeemed for me what I do for a living. I don’t know. But I find I’m anxious to get back to work, and I haven’t said that in a while.

  If there were another great flood, I could build an ark and repopulate Earth just with the fauna living on, in, or around my pond today. There’s a turtle sunning itself on a rock; it’s got a dragonfly on its back. All the baby birds fledged and learned how to fly, and now they’re doing whatever teenage birds do—hang out, sing a lot. Ride in jalopies.

  I’ve come down here this afternoon without my camera. That’s so unusual, it must be significant. Do I think I’ve photographed everything? What arrogance that would be, and besides, the evidence is abundant and everywhere that I haven’t. I don’t have the playful submerged mystery of a minnow school, I don’t have a frog’s inflated throat in close-up, I don’t have the shadow of a bird on the water surface, I only have about half the butterfly population and not a single real keeper among those. I could go on and on. Like, buttercups—I can’t get that brilliant acidic yellow. When a dragonfly stops short and holds still, tense and poised—I can’t get it, he just looks stuck in air. Oh, and I don’t have any shots of the mosquito bites on my ankles.

  Still, I’ve come down here without my camera, and I think that means, or is connected in some way to, this sense of…not completion exactly—I mean, talk about arrogance—a step, I’ll say, a movement toward completion. It’s possible I might be finished here for the time being. It’s only a sense, certainly not a fact, because I haven’t come close to finishing all the projects I had lined up for my free week—although that wasn’t the point, of course, to finish projects. A few things have settled inside me, that’s all. I won’t make too much of it. The way it ended with Owen yesterday has something to do with this finished feeling. And this achingly beautiful spring, the most perfect unfolding of a season I’ve ever known—because I’ve watched it so carefully, lived so close to it, my eyes wide open—is nearly over and it doesn’t need me anymore. Everything’s begun, everything’s in progress. The mountain can take care of itself now.

  “Hi, Mama,” I say, imagining she’s that bird up there, coasting so high in the sky it might be in another dimension. The difference is, when I talk to her now, I don’t feel so sorry for myself. The pain isn’t so harsh and jagged; it’s settled into an ache, and sometimes the ache is sweet, almost a comfort. She’s gone and not gone, and she will always be with me, and that’s the best I can have.

  When did this change happen? I feel less frantic. Cottie has something to do with it. And time, prosaic old time. And Chloe…something about Chloe. When she tells me what she wants, what she hopes for, my first reaction isn’t fear. Or if it is, it’s fear for her, not me, and that’s a sea change. My baby is growing up, not abandoning me. Poor thing, she couldn’t abandon me if she tried. Not that I’m cured. If I could, I would keep three steps ahead of her for the rest of her life, hacking down trouble and heartbreak with my machete, making straight her path. Fortunately, I can’t. She can do it herself, and I even get to take some of the credit.

  Mo told me that when Mark was a baby, she used to chant over his crib, “Let go, let go, let go.” In nature it’s simpler; the bird teenagers, the little goslings in the pond, they probably wake up one morning knowing the free ride’s over, this is the day they’ll have to find their own breakfast, use their own wits to hide from the scary predators. The parents are nothing but relieved. Good riddance, they think, now we can get back to the business of living for ourselves. Much less stressful.

  I’m thinking some parent-bird wisdom got through to me this spring. That’s how it feels, as if I absorbed it through my skin. Osmosis, filtration, transmigration. Andrew learns with his brain; me, with everything but.

  I might be ready to go home. Back. Home, back, whatever. Can’t stay here forever. It’s been lovely, but—security is when everything is settled and nothing can happen to you. You might say it’s the opposite of living. I miss talking! Friends, crowds, the Metro, noise, the Safeway. I look forward to teaching Sock how to walk on a leash. I look forward to being one of those people who follow their dogs down Columbia Road with a plastic bag. We can go to the park on Sundays, she can jump in the creek at Beach Drive. We’ll join a dog park and make all new friends.

  Mo needs me, that’s another reason to leave. I’d like to slash a clear path for her, too, with my machete. She’s given up men! She said she was going to, but I didn’t believe her. But now it seems to be true, and I blame it on this we’re-all-ultimately-alone business she’s taking way too far. (Interestingly, she doesn’t want me to give up men. “When are you going to sleep with him?” she asked me the other day—meaning Owen. I was shocked. Well, I say shocked. Shock was on top of a squirmy hill of reactions I didn’t feel the need to examine closely.) Mo, levelheaded Mo, is going off the deep end with her self-abnegation and ego destruction and freedom from desire and all the rest of it. It’s fine up to a point, but where does it end? Belly breathing in a cave by yourself? I must save her. Who can I fix her up with? So that’s another reason to pull up stakes and go home. Back.

  Which leaves Andrew. I sit down in my spot on the dock, my perch, and peel an orange. I’ve been saving Andrew for last deliberately, because he’s the hardest. I thought if I cleared the decks, got rid of everything else but him, I could see more clearly. With Owen out of the picture, that’s another distraction gone—if he was ever really in the picture. Now that he’s out, I like to think he wasn’t. Am I rewriting history? Well, it’s my history, I can write it any way I want to. The point is, I miss Andrew. That’s nothing new—I’ve missed him since I left him. But I’m trying not to trust every little emotion that comes along; be more like him, in other words. What I wouldn’t give for some clarity. Things have gotten muddier since I scooped Sock up and stormed out of the house, and I’m getting tired. I want resolution.

  So I’m off—I’m charging up the hill through the thick, buggy grass, not even picking up my orange peels first. And I am smiling and frowning with purpose, because it’s good to know what I’m going to do about Andrew right now, at least: I’m going to call him up and apologize for never admitting I was wrong to let Chloe in the darkroom.

  The past wasn’t really that long ago.

  I couldn’t do it at the time, because it cut too close, would’ve pained me too much. Bad mother. There was for me then, and probably still, nothing worse. I was ashamed. And proud. Pride—I always thought that was Andrew’s sin. I forgot it’s mine, too, when the stakes are high enough. And where does pride get you? Look at us.

  Inside the house, the answering-machine light is blinking. I almost don’t play the message back—I’m impatient now, dying to apologize. I love
apologies. Most people don’t, but to me they’re like good medicine, or what confession must be like. Apologizing to Greta was positively therapeutic.

  “Dash.” Andrew’s voice comes over the machine. “Call me when you get a chance. I’m at home.”

  I’m laughing as I pick up the phone. What a riot if he were calling to apologize for something. But that’s silly. I rein in my expectations and punch the number.

  “Hello?”

  I pull the phone away from my ear and look at it. Like in a cartoon. “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes?”

  Elizabeth O’Neal is in my house?

  “This is Dash.”

  “Hello, Dash. I guess you want Andrew.”

  Muffled rubbery sounds—her hand on the receiver.

  “Hi. Em. Hi.”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “Em—are you leaving?” Now it’s his hand on the receiver. I hope it’s sweating. More muffled squeaking, then he comes back on. “Em, hi.” It’s all he can seem to come up with.

  “Oh, she didn’t have to go on my account.”

  “No, it’s all right. She was in a hurry.”

  “Why? Down a pint, needed a fresh blood feed?”

  Shocked silence. I’m shocked myself.

  “That’s not nice,” Andrew says, and he’s right; I hang my head. “Elizabeth is a troubled young woman. She doesn’t deserve your scorn.”

  My scorn? That’s too much. Anyway, my scorn? I’ve been putting up with Elizabeth O’Neal’s obnoxious disdain since the day I met her. “You’re right,” I say, “she’s a very troubled woman, and she’s not that young. What the hell was she doing there?”

  “She brought a shrub, a sort of tree. For a present. To plant in the yard.”

  “Huh. Why?”

  “I don’t know. People give people things. She just did.”

  “Well, wasn’t that nice of her. A tree?”

  “Yes. A kind of evergreen—”

  “Maybe she wants to hang upside down in it at night.” Before he can chastise me again, I say, “What did you call me for, Andrew?” That reminds me of why I called him. Funny, all that eagerness to apologize for an ancient mini-sin—gone. Vanished like the undead at daybreak.

  “I called…hold on two seconds.” Pause. When he comes back, he’s crunching something.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  Impatient exhale. “A Rolaid.”

  “Do you have indigestion?”

  “I think it’s…never mind.”

  “What? Go ahead, tell me.”

  “All right, because I’m sure it won’t alarm you. I think it might be my heart.”

  He’s right, I’m not alarmed.

  “I made an appointment with Dr. Kim for next week.”

  “Andrew—you are the only person I know who has a regular cardiologist and no heart problem. You have a strong heart. This is stress, or worry about your father. Or not eating right.” I think he eats ice cream for dinner.

  “I’ll relay your theories to Dr. Kim,” he says huffily. “The reason I called…” Another pause while we both try to shift gears, at least return to neutral. “I’ve been thinking about our situation. I think it’s time for us to make some decisions, Dash. I think we should be speaking to each other. More.”

  A gelled feeling inside me thaws. “Oh, I do, too. Definitely.” I thought he was going to say something else, but I’ve already forgotten what. “We should be talking, I couldn’t agree more.”

  “I don’t want us to go back to Fogelman, though.”

  “No, I don’t either. We could just do it on our own.”

  “Actually, Tim knows someone.”

  “Oh. Another therapist, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m silent.

  “Not the one he and Meg saw before their divorce. Someone Tim heard about from someone else. It’s a woman. I thought you’d approve of that.”

  I’ve been leaning against the sink. I listen to the slide of my T-shirt against the cabinet as I bend my knees and slowly lower myself to the floor. “Sure. Yeah. A woman’s perspective for a change. Can’t hurt.” I roll sideways and stretch out. The dog comes over to lick my face. I can see cobwebs between the light fixture and the ceiling. “Is this what we should do?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “I don’t know.” If only we could synchronize our watches. If only Andrew would want me back the same times I want him back.

  “No, I really think this is for the best,” he says after a long silence. “Don’t you?”

  “What is?”

  “Seeing someone. Get things moving. Get the ball rolling again.”

  I picture a big white ball, big as a car, rolling and stopping, rolling and stopping.

  “In whatever direction it’s going to go,” he adds.

  “Right. Could go either way. Where will I live?” That sounded plaintive. “I mean, the commute from here, if this is an indefinite…separation…”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too, and I think you should have the house. Tim says I can move in with him.”

  An electric tingle coils around my spinal cord. I picture my veins as tiny white Christmas tree lights blinking on and off. “Well, that’s…that’s a…Tim’s little apartment?”

  “There’s a sofa bed in the living room. And starting tomorrow he’ll be in Boston for a couple of weeks. Visiting his brother.”

  “Starting tomorrow. Well, then.”

  “It’ll be convenient for me to be near the college library. I can work there.”

  “On what?”

  “Different things.”

  Different things. If he doesn’t want to tell me, I don’t want to know. Are we throwing in the towel? In a very civilized way? Of all the conversations we’ve had since this whole thing started, this is the worst. I think of the phrase “the banality of evil.” And “a whimper, not a bang.” Underneath some sort of quilt I feel very angry, but I’m too enervated to do anything with it, the quilt is too heavy.

  We leave it that he’ll call the woman therapist and get a few dates for a first meeting. When we hang up, I stay on the floor with the phone on my chest. It’s the middle of the day. The quietest time. I can smell Sock’s dog food because the bowl is over there on the floor by the refrigerator. Smells like leather.

  I don’t want to move back to the house by myself. Let him stay there, he likes it so damn much. I’ll get an apartment. Near the studio, tiny, an efficiency, because money will be tight for at least three more years. I’ll work hard, and once a week, Andrew and I will meet for marriage counseling.

  Well, that evokes so little enthusiasm, it must be mature. And Andrew suggested it—that makes it doubly mature. I try to get up, but I can’t move. Sun shadows float across the ceiling. A fly bats at the window screen to get out. The day is slipping by. I was going home tomorrow, but now I don’t care if I do or not.

  Elizabeth O’Neal brought Andrew a tree.

  The phone is still on my chest—when it rings, I jump so hard it almost falls on the floor before I can grab it.

  “It’s Miz Bender.”

  Owen’s voice, but so strange and thin, like a wire, all the tones on one line, I hardly recognize it. Why is he saying it’s Cottie?

  “Owen, is it you? What’s wrong?”

  “Her heart. Shevlin said it was going too fast. He did CPR. The ambulance came. They took her.”

  twenty-two

  “They’re stabilizing her.”

  Owen and I take heart from that, but a few vague, semireassuring sentences later the nurse rephrases. She says, “They’re trying to stabilize her,” and that’s different. We go back to our scared, stiff-shouldered stances, next to each other but with nothing to say, in the hallway adjacent to the ER waiting area. We tried to sit in there at first, but we had to stand up and move even after Owen turned off the television set—some entertainment news program; listening
to it was physically painful.

  “Her husband is with her,” the nurse adds, but we knew that already. What we can’t decide is if signifies something good or bad.

  “I’ll go get us some coffee.”

  Owen shakes his head. “Not for me.”

  I don’t want any, either.

  I squeeze back against our section of wall, where we’re trying to stay out of the way of aides, office staff, nurses, doctors, patients, relatives, even a policeman bringing in a drunk. Who knew there were so many emergencies in this sleepy county on a sunny afternoon in May? It’s good, that means they know what they’re doing here, but also bad, because what if the doctors are overwhelmed? I don’t know what to wish for. I hate hospitals. Owen asked me to meet him here, to wait with him for news, and I wanted to, but if he knew how profoundly disoriented I am here, he might do without my company.

  But this is not my story, it’s his. Not my drama, not my drama, I tell myself, and take hold of Owen’s wrist. “She’ll be okay. They’ll stabilize her, and she’ll be as good as before.”

  He looks into my eyes, trying to see if it’s true. “Yeah. She’ll be good.” He twists his hand around till we’re palm to palm, our fingers locked. “She’s gonna be okay. This kind of thing happens, I read about it. It’s not that…”

  “

  I follow his eyes. Shevlin, coming around the corner, stops when he sees us. His foxy face seizes up, like a baby’s before it starts to cry. I’m frozen; can’t move or speak. It’s too much, I can’t bear it. He pulls on the bill of his cap, and when his hand comes away he’s himself again, just older looking, grayer. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me, but I doubt he’s paying attention to details right now.

  Owen goes to him and takes his arm. “How is she?”

  “It happened again. She was fine, and then it started up, same as before. They had to shock her again, and I…can’t watch that.”