by Mad Dash
She yawned; her breath smelled like coffee. “This is the second time I’ve been here today. Do you remember?”
“Your friend Cottie. Her heart.” Some of the things she’d told him during the long wait in the emergency room hadn’t quite sunk in, they’d discovered later. But he remembered Cottie. Her husband had saved her life.
“Owen’s taking care of Sock.” Dash opened her eyes to say that. Everything she’d told him about Owen he recalled with perfect clarity. And believed, so he ought to feel sorry for hitting him. And yet he didn’t.
“You should go to sleep,” she said. “Although all you have to do tomorrow is lie there.”
“Piece of cake.” His skin flushed hot, then cold. He rested his wrist on his forehead and stared at the shadowy line between the wall and the ceiling. “Just in case, though. Some fluke. I’d like you to do something.”
She raised up on her elbow. “Are you worried? Andrew! Nothing’s going to happen tomorrow.”
“Oh, I know. But just in case. I’d like you to tell my father they offered me the chairmanship of the department.”
“You never told him?”
“I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.”
Silence while he, and he imagined she, contemplated the stupidity of that.
“So just tell him I was going to take it.”
“What? You were? Are?”
“If I’d lived. No, I know, but tell him. I decided to take the job.”
She was quiet. Then: “Not for me, I hope. In fact, I don’t even want you to take it.” She picked at the sheet, eyes downcast. “It kills me that I’ve been as mean to you as he was. Edward.”
“No.”
“I have. I’ve been a shrew. Telling you what you should do, like it was any of my business.”
“Well, it is your business.”
“Nagging isn’t. Making you feel bad about yourself isn’t. You’re a teacher, a wonderful teacher, and you’re so lucky to love what you do. I was stupid and mean. I’m just glad you ignored me. Except you didn’t,” she remembered, sitting up again. “Don’t take the job, Andrew. I’m afraid it would be for the wrong reason.”
“Darling.” She could be so lovably self-important. “I would take it for myself, not you.”
“I wish you’d stop saying ‘would.’ Stop using the subjunctive.”
“I think I could—can—help reshape the department in positive ways.”
“Well, of course you can. What about Peter Flynn?”
“I’ll write his chapter for him. And then the chips will fall where they may.” Elizabeth was right—he’d been paralyzed. But not anymore. Maybe it was the drugs, but the problem had never seemed less important, more manageable. “He can bury me in the next chapter for all I care, but I won’t throw Jefferson to the wolves just to satisfy the current party line.”
He would acknowledge the great man’s flaws—as he hoped he always had—but he would also contextualize them, and he wouldn’t be shy about reminding the nouveau detractors that, despite his moral shortcomings in a crucial (but single) area, Jefferson’s legacy to the republic was still precious and unequaled.
“He was a good man,” Andrew told Dash, who nodded readily, humoring him. She’d heard it before. “I can forgive him his sins—and of course you’re thinking, ‘Easy for you to say, you’re a white male.’”
“What a mind reader.”
“The interesting thing is that this is all mixed up with forgiving my father.” Now he had her attention. “For not being a very good one—but after fifty years it’s probably time to let that go.” Dash looked puzzled, but the connection had never seemed clearer to him. “If I can forgive Jefferson for being an imperfect man, I ought to be able to forgive my father for the same failing. Don’t you think?”
She smiled a slow, appreciative, faintly wondering smile. Instead of answering, she leaned over and pressed a slow kiss to his lips.
A funny time—or not—for a confession to bubble up from his subconscious. “I went on a date.”
She pulled back. “Who with?”
“Elizabeth O’Neal.”
“I knew it!”
“Nothing happened.”
“A date? A real date? And then she gave you a plant.”
“A half-assed date.”
“Who asked who?”
“She asked me. And nothing happened.” Nothing to speak of, certainly. “Elizabeth is a sad, troubled, very intelligent young woman—”
“She’s not that young.”
“A friend and colleague, nothing more.”
“But it was a date, you said ‘date.’ How did it end? Did you kiss her? Come on, Andrew, tell the truth.”
Not at the end, and it was more that she’d kissed him. So he could truthfully say, “No.” Technically.
“Why not? The sun was coming up, she had to run?”
“Dash.”
“I don’t know why I’m not more upset!”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Good, because I’m not. I’m profoundly unworried.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Well, this was a first. To his knowledge, Dash had never been jealous before, not on his account. He hoped he didn’t feel gleeful or invigorated; he hoped he was better than that. He couldn’t help noticing the symmetry, though, a certain unasked-for equilibrium in effect between them. He hoped Elizabeth and Owen Roby weighed precisely the same, not a gram more on either side, on the scale of attractiveness and significance. Hoped, but was reconciled to never knowing.
Dash played with the snap on the shoulder of Andrew’s hospital gown and thought about Elizabeth O’Neal. Now wasn’t the time, but someday she would have to ask him what he saw in her. Had seen in her. How he could like her and Dash at the same time—unequally, of course—given that they couldn’t be more different. Did he like Elizabeth because of that? In spite of it? It added a new dimension to him, just when she thought she’d seen all his dimensions, that he could feel an attraction to…the moon instead of the sun, you could say. Yes, very apt. Dark versus light. Spooky versus sunny. Elizabeth’s creepy mystery to her open book.
Amika came in again. Since she’d already made friends with her, Dash didn’t worry that she’d throw her out or make her get in her own bed. “Five more minutes,” she promised, “then he goes to sleep,” while the nurse listened to Andrew’s heart and adjusted the plastic bags on his IV stand. “Five minutes,” Amika confirmed, with a smile that said she’d seen it all and wasn’t impressed, and padded out.
“Did you call Chloe so you could say good-bye?”
“Hm?”
“In case you don’t make it tomorrow?”
He looked at her disapprovingly.
“I can make light,” she said, “because I’ve had a laparoscopy. Remember that uterine fibroid?” He turned pale, she noticed, every time the subject of his surgery came up. “That was nothing. Truly.” She took his hand, stroked the knuckles across her cheek. “Are you glad I’m back?”
“What do you think?”
“Gimme the words.”
“I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad you came down and got me.”
“Wolfie told me to. He’s very wise in the ways of women.”
I’m glad we’re three, she thought. It’s much better than two, and three times better than one. “We’re going to be fine now,” she said confidently. “Because it’s not true that we have nothing in common. Think of it—we both like life. We like where we live, we like our friends, our jobs.”
“You like your job? What about forest ranger?”
“No, I’ve given up on that, too much science again. But I did finally figure out the perfect job for me.”
“What?” he asked, sounding cautious.
“Wine bottle label designer. Wouldn’t that be me? I would be so great at that.”
He blinked rapidly, searching her eyes for a sign she was joking, she was serious—she loved
it that he hardly ever knew. She cut the suspense by snickering, and his face cleared.
“No, yes, I do love my work. You were right about that, but I think I had to watch Greta give it up to appreciate how much it suits me. Just because I fell into it accidentally doesn’t make it an accident, something random like, I don’t know, landscape architect—although I would be fabulous at that. But what luck, really, that I fell into my life’s work.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t. You defied your father to do what you love. You don’t give yourself enough credit for that.”
“I missed you.”
They pressed their foreheads together.
“I missed you,” she whispered back.
“I had enough time to make a sensible new life while you were gone, but I didn’t. Things never fell into place. When you’re gone, it’s like gravity…gravity…”
“Gravity ceases to exist,” she suggested.
“Yes,” he said, but so carefully, she knew she’d gone too far. “Was it the same for you?” he asked.
“Yes. Well, no. But women are better at being alone than men. I had a good time in the beginning, but it didn’t last—and it was very short, the good time, an illusion, really, smoke and mirrors. Childish imaginings of a life on my own.”
“I like your hair like this.” He had his hand in it, softly rubbing her scalp.
“You’re my rock. Your name should be Peter.”
“You said rocks are sedentary.”
“Yes, but that’s the beauty of rocks. You’re my ground, my base. I should never have left you. Although I’m glad I did, because if I hadn’t we wouldn’t be saying these things right now.”
She decided not to tell him she’d known all along that leaving him would only be an interlude. “Known”—no; assumed, then, and on a deep, barely aware plane, that she was playing, that this wasn’t real. She was scaring herself on purpose, letting herself be seduced by the perverse lure of disaster. Sometimes the deep, comforting assumption that it was pretend disappeared or hid from her, and those were the panicky times. “That night at Dr. Fogelman’s,” she said. Horrible; that time it wasn’t playing. “I hated that night.”
“Maybe therapy isn’t for us,” Andrew said.
“Oh yeah, this is much better. Gallstones.”
“Big as a golf ball.”
“I wish I could stay right here. Don’t want to get up.”
Andrew smiled with his eyes closed. “Stay.”
She sighed, rose. Their five minutes were up. She leaned over him for a good-night kiss. “Here we are in a hospital in Virginia, but as far as I’m concerned we’re home. You’re my home.” She rubbed her cheek against his whiskery face. “My love.”
They kissed again.
Her face looked yellow in the fluorescent light over the bathroom sink. She could be the sick one. She peed; washed up; wished for a toothbrush.
She turned all the lights out except the one in the bathroom, and left the door open only a crack. It was still too bright, and nobody was making much of an effort to be quiet in the hall. Hospitals, gack. Amika had made up the bed next to Andrew’s for her; she climbed in and lay quiet, testing the slant she was on. She pressed the button on the side, enjoying the low hum and the slow, mechanical descent until she was flat.
“Are you awake?”
Eventually Andrew made a noncommittal humming sound.
“I was thinking. Something Cottie said. She said—marriage is like an old tree. It starts out a sapling…no, it starts out an acorn, a passionate little acorn, and slowly, slowly it grows and sends out its branches and leaves, and every year new buds. All the things you did together, every trial you lived through, they’re scored into that old trunk. The tree is the thing, not the acorn or the sapling or even the strong young tree. After all is said and done, you want the old tree, no matter how misshapen it’s gotten from ice storms and lightning strikes or bugs and what-have-you.”
Andrew didn’t speak.
“I’m paraphrasing.” She yawned. She punched her pillow into shape and turned on her side. “Night.” And drifted to sleep.
Andrew dreamed of a tree framed in a window. At first it was the oak tree outside his bedroom window when he was a boy. Then it changed, became an old, gnarled, knobby child’s book illustration of a tree. Someone was chopping it down. He couldn’t see who, he could only hear the rip of the saw, zz-zit, zz-zit, back and forth, cutting through the tender, stubborn trunk. Sadness filled him, and fatalism, that nightmare inability to move or change anything. A voice: “It was Lincoln, you know, who said marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it’s purgatory.” Dr. Fogelman?
The dream turned a corner, as if he were driving, and at the end of a lane a house appeared. Not the cabin, not the house in D.C. A wooden house, square, with four windows, door, and chimney. Dash had painted it Lantern Glow. She was standing on Fogelman’s other side; the doctor had his arms around their shoulders. “You know where that wood came from, don’t you?” he said. “You know what this is, don’t you?” Neither of them wanted to give him the satisfaction, but they couldn’t deny it. It was too obvious. Behind his back, they touched hands. “The House of Love,” they singsonged in unison.
The last place Dash expected to see Cottie the next morning was in the corridor on the far side of the nurses’ station, the equivalent of about a city block from her room. Striding along at such a vigorous, arm-swinging pace, Dash had to hustle to catch up to her.
“Hey, lady! Where’s the fire?”
Cottie wheeled around, already grinning. Over the regulation blue-striped hospital gown, she had on her own red wool bathrobe—Shevlin must’ve brought it to her. She held out her arms. Dash came into them gingerly, but the older woman gave her such a powerful squeeze, she laughed and lost her fear of hurting her.
“You look fabulous. Look at you,” she marveled, holding Cottie’s elbows. “What a fraud. You’re not even sick.”
“That’s what I said. Let me out of here so I can get something done. I left sixteen tomato plants sitting in a tray in the hot sun on the kitchen counter, and do you think Shevlin’s going to remember to shove ’em over to the side? Much less water them?”
“I don’t think so,” Dash said, catching her exuberance, laughing again with her, both so glad at how things had turned out. Cottie did look good, pink-cheeked, practically glowing—nothing like impatience to get out of the hospital to turn your medical condition around.
“How is your husband?” she demanded. She took Dash’s arm and they set off at her speed-walker’s pace for her room.
“He’s in surgery.”
“Right now?”
“This minute, so I can’t stay long. I just wanted to see you, plus I couldn’t sit still in the waiting room or his room.” Sometime in the night all of Andrew’s anxieties had migrated from him over to her. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, it’s not even a complicated operation.”
“When does he get to go home?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Me, too. Shevlin’s scandalized. ‘They kick you out in one day no matter what you’ve got,’ he says, but me, I couldn’t be happier. The sooner the better.”
“I thought they were going to put in a thing, a pacemaker or something.”
“Not right away, in a week or so. And even that’s outpatient.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a gizmo they put in right here, right under the skin, like a pack of cigarettes.” She pointed to a place above her left breast. “When my heart goes too fast, like yesterday, I get a shock and it resets it.”
“Wow, that’s incredible. Isn’t it amazing? Cottie—you could live forever.”
Her laugh sounded pleased but self-conscious, as if she’d already thought of that.
“Here’s me.” They turned into a beige-painted replica of Andrew’s yellow room. The curtain around the bed on the near side was drawn, but not all the way; tiptoeing past, Dash caught a peripheral glimpse of
a tiny, white-haired lady, asleep with her mouth open. “Heart,” Cottie mouthed, quietly pulling the extra chair from the old lady’s side over to hers so she and Dash could sit next to each other.
“I really can only stay a minute. I told him I’d be there when he wakes up.”
“I know, I know.” Cottie was all but rubbing her hands together. Her eyes sparkled. She leaned close. “Owen says he hit him.”
Dash covered her cheeks with her hands. It was so much more exciting now, with Cottie to share it with—and being in the past—than it had been when it happened. “I was right there. He socked him in the jaw. Owen fell.”
Cottie put her hands on her knees and rocked.
“I know we aren’t supposed to enjoy that sort of thing, we women. It’s absurd. It’s not civilized.”
Cottie made a grinding sound in the back of her throat. They leaned toward each other, shoulders shaking.
“I guess I won’t be seeing much of you anymore.” Cottie pulled a long face.
“Oh, you’ll see plenty of me. But, no, not as much,” she admitted. “I’ll be going home with Andrew.”
“I’m so glad.”
“I want you to meet him. It seems strange that you never have.”
“What’s strange to me is that you’ve never met my daughter.”
“Is she coming in today?”
“Shortly. Owen and Shevlin went to pick her up at the airport.”
“What do you think will happen?” Dash asked. “With Owen and Danielle?”
“That I do not know. They need a push, that’s for sure. Especially him.”
A push, Dash thought, or else three beers. “I hope it works out,” she said. She had such a fondness for Owen, now that she’d lost all interest in him. She wanted only the best for him, like a best friend’s son or a favorite nephew. She looked at the clock and jumped up. “I should go. I’m a jack-in-the-box, I can’t be still.”
Cottie got up, too. “I want to hug you again,” she said, and did.