The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  Slowly he unkinks his cramped arms and legs and turns over. The tears settle in the wells of his eyes, and he is loath to blink, loath to touch them, even more fearful than usual because he has no idea what this latest indignity means.

  Lions charging at him yesterday, ravens today, during the frightening half hour of near-slumber, and now he is crying. It’s Sisyphean, when he’s already been laboring with his hijacked sleep, with his terror in having forgotten how to do what is natural, with his inability to figure out why this is happening, at such odds with how he otherwise perceives his life: as a mostly happy man whose marriage, young children, and professional pursuits mostly afford him pleasure and satisfaction.

  A movement in the bed, Elena shifting under the striped comforter. In this year of his sleeplessness, he has learned his wife wakes in stages. He had not known that fact before. Deep sleep on her stomach until she shifts to her left side, facing away from him. Then the countdown begins. Twenty minutes until she shifts onto her back, the slightest of whistles coming through her full lips, thinned by dreams. Another twenty before she cracks one eye open, then the other.

  He looks at the long line of Elena’s hip. When his misbegotten nights were new, she suggested supposedly surefire ways to shut down his nonsensical thoughts: walking after dinner; meditating before bed; taking a boiling-hot shower in their unlit bathroom and crawling wet between the cool sheets. Desperate, he tried it all. Altered his diet, too—no meat, no cheese, cut back on his drinking. Increased his exercise—yoga first, then cycling instead of yoga, and now, instead of cycling, he runs hard and fast and long every morning. But what is a boon for his body has done nothing for his soul, has not altered his inability to sink down into bliss, too aware of the spirits gathering around him in the dark. Only recently has a thought begun to form, that what he needs perhaps cannot be supplied by healthy eating or abstinence or exercise.

  In the beginning, in that first month when he thought his failure to sleep was a temporary malfunction, he rocked the bed in the middle of the night and palmed the perfect globes of Elena’s ass, hoping sex would empty his brain, but Elena had sighed and mumbled, “I’ll get the pills.” A sylph in a nightgown that left her shoulders and back bare, the long yards of her black hair tight in a bun, his sleep guru refusing her mission, and when the light in the bathroom flicked on, Simon called after her, “What pills?”

  Sleeping pills prescribed to Elena a year after Lucy’s birth, expired before Isabel was born.

  “They’ve expired,” he’d said when she handed him the orange container. He’d looked inside and been unable to tell if, or how many, she’d ever taken.

  “I think it takes decades to break down the components. They’re probably as strong, or nearly as strong, as when I got them. Give it a go. Nothing lost and all that.”

  He had wanted to ask why she needed sleeping pills during that exciting time when Lucy was walking and laughing, her hands reaching out to the world, but Elena’s eyes were already closed, her breath even and composed.

  For several successive nights, he took a pill that was small as a dot and weightless on his tongue, hoping she was right, but she wasn’t; potency was vanquished by time. When he told her the pills didn’t work, she looked at him in frustration. “So call the doctor and get a new prescription.” Which he did, and he took them for several more nights, but his body refused the sedation, simply wouldn’t be knocked out.

  Never again has he bothered Elena during his racked hours. Sometimes he watches her sleeping, curious about what she’s dreaming, envying the way she goes under and stays under, missing how they used to wake nearly simultaneously, her first smile of the day beaming him fully alive. He’s forgotten how to sleep, but something’s changed in her, too, and he can’t trace the alteration to any specific temporal point, to any specific event, but she no longer smiles and tucks into him or rolls onto him when she wakes. Now, when she comes to, she sits upright, her face hiding its secrets from him, and it’s only when he’s back from his run, when they’re drinking their second cups of coffee, that she graces him with a smile, but it doesn’t seem to him her same I love and adore you so much smile.

  He could be mistaken; it could be some pathology of his sleeplessness that is causing him to blow out of proportion the changes he senses in her, the feeling he has that she’s created subtle distance between them. But what he’s not mistaken about is that Elena no longer dresses like the woman his heart toppled for. Gone are her gauzy skirts and ruffled blouses, her tight dresses with narrow slits and strappy, sexy heels, her fitted slacks with stiletto boots, all replaced with a uniform: jeans, button-down shirt, ballet slippers. And that soft black river that once streamed over her shoulders and down her spine, that he would gather up in his hands because she left it unbound, is now always center-parted and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.

  There’s a pretty Chinese bowl from a New York museum in the bathroom, a gift for her when he had been gone for weeks on a case, that holds Elena’s stock of bobby pins. In the two years since Isabel’s birth, he has often considered whether her tightly coiled hair, her adopted uniform, indicates the practicality of doubled motherhood or something far more charged—proof that the loss of her freedom is so wild within her that she must keep herself regimented and pinned together. She is a gorgeous woman no matter the clothes she wears or how she arranges her hair, but she is severe this way, and when he sees the Chinese bowl, he always wants to dump those securing pins in the garbage, shatter that bowl, bring back his sensual, loose-haired Elena, their early-morning lovemaking, her explicit love for him.

  Maybe he’s a coward. Maybe he already knows the answers, but he refrains these days from asking how she feels about no longer flying away as she used to. Until Lucy, Elena wrote for glossy travel magazines, and in those halcyon days, Simon occasionally went with her to those off-the-beaten-path places when he could. Her nightstand is stacked still with the latest issues of the travel magazines that published her work. When she was breastfeeding at night she read those magazines by the low rosy light, telling him she was keeping pace with what was going on in her absence, would not count herself out of the game. Naturally, their daughters changed everything. Now he’s flying as much as she once did, which was a lot, and she refuses to say what it’s like being unable to vanish into the excited glaze of the working day. As he does when the hollowness lifts, when he has run his daily ten miles, and drunk his coffee, and kissed his daughters. As always, he kisses Elena last before he’s out the door, but where he once found the blackness of her eyes so enticing, now he is afraid to fall into them, afraid of what he will learn, or be told, fearful that if he can’t fix his failure to sleep, he can’t fix anything else.

  And this morning, tears. Poised to spill down his cheeks. There’s no way he can rise and run, not when he’s this done in. Then he’s smothering his face in his pillow, heaving silent sobs, freezing when Elena shifts onto her back, worrying she’s woken and waiting to hear why he’s crying his eyes out. What would he say? He wishes he knew, but he has no answers. And then deliverance—Elena’s soft sleeping whistles.

  He wipes his face against the pillowcase, then turns over again, and checks on the crack in the uneven ceiling. A hairline days ago, it has grown wider and longer and looks like it will soon split apart the paint and the plaster.

  Does that crack mean the roof is going to collapse?

  He needs to do something about it, call someone, make that call this morning, before they leave for Palm Springs, arrange for whatever person fixes cracks in ceilings in old houses in the hills to come Monday, first thing. He’ll even forgo his start-of-the-week run to be here, to handle it, to not put another thing on his wife’s list of things to take care of. He should pull out the house file, see what the agreement says about the roof, if any issues were noted. He doesn’t specialize in real estate, but he is a lawyer, and he would have asked the critical questions. They’ve owned this ninety-three-year-old house for a mere five yea
rs; previous owners must have replaced the roof at least a few times over the last decades.

  God forbid they need a new roof. How much would it cost? How long would it take? Would they have to bunk elsewhere for the duration? Where would they stay?

  Phoebe’s apartment in the flats of Beverly Hills Adjacent is too small to house five; her second bedroom is her study, in which there is no pullout couch.

  He has an older colleague at the firm, Tim Devins, who owns some huge estate in Brentwood, is always talking about how he and his wife, childless by choice, have eight bedrooms that are never used, and a guesthouse no one has ever stayed in. Tim is a friendly, generous guy, and if Simon laid out his need, Tim would probably say, “Sure, buddy, no problem, for however long, mi casa es tu casa.” But how awkward it would be to see Tim in a towel after a shower, or eating his breakfast, or lounging in his Jacuzzi attached to his pool, which surely is Olympic-sized, or kissing his sharp-featured wife before tootling off to the office.

  Why is he thinking about asking Tim Devins if the Tabor family can move in while their roof is being fixed? Their roof will not need to be fixed; it is simply a small crack that needs to be filled, the ceiling repainted. And if they do have to fix the roof, and leave home for the duration, he would never ask Tim Devins.

  They would stay in a hotel.

  No, they would not stay in a hotel; they couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel, not if the roof needs fixing. They’d have to stay in a motel. The four of them in a dingy room at some Motel 6, he pulling his tie tight and striding out the door, leaving his wife looking as if she might lift up their daughters and fling the three of them over the second-floor railing, pitching down into a parking lot filled with campers and vans.

  Why is he picturing that?

  Are the changes in Elena—in her waking routine, her delayed first smile of the day, her distance, her daily uniform—because she has postpartum depression? Lucy is five and Elena was fine after her birth. And Isabel is two—does postpartum depression last for two years? And, really, most of the time, she seems herself, with her customary intensity, occasionally humming as she brushes out Lucy’s tangles, as she encourages Isabel to wear something other than the drooping purple tutu, her everyday favorite since last Halloween.

  Simon pinches his arm hard. There will be no more crying. There will be no roof fixing, no motel living, no bodies hurtling to their deaths. Elena does not have any kind of depression, while he, on the other hand, cannot sleep, and whatever is keeping him up far exceeds run-of-the-mill insomnia.

  But there is the crack in the ceiling, which he can arrange to be handled on Monday.

  His watch says it’s seven twenty. Elena won’t wake until seven forty. The girls will wake up shortly thereafter. Elena’s probably already packed for herself and their daughters.

  He could get up now and pack what he’ll need for the weekend. He could do that, and then start the coffee, make them all breakfast. Eggs? French toast? Pancakes? No, nothing hot because whatever he prepares will go cold before everyone sits down at the table. Lucy will insist on swimming in the pool before she eats, as she’s been doing each day this summer, running out of her room buck naked and leaping into the water, requiring him, half dressed, to follow and sit by the pool until he can convince her his day needs to get under way. And Isabel will cry elephantine tears until Elena climbs into bed with her and reads her a story. The only kid he’s heard of who prefers being read to in the morning and not at bedtime. So, no, no reason to cook a family breakfast. And what’s even in the fridge? Didn’t Elena say she didn’t bother going to the market because they would be gone the weekend?

  Most of today and all of tomorrow on Agapanthus Lane, with both of the children in tow. A babysitter will take care of the girls tonight while everyone else—Harry and Roma, Phoebe and her new beau, Camille, and he and Elena—dressed up in tuxedos and gowns, will be miles away at the resort in Rancho Mirage, sipping champagne on the Starlight Terrace rooftop, where he and Elena married in front of three hundred guests. They haven’t been back to the resort since their wedding, though they considered returning on their first, and second, and third anniversaries. They never did, never even made a reservation, and up there tonight his father will be named Palm Springs Man of the Decade.

  What comes with that designation? Will Harry be handed a plaque, or a sculpted piece of glass with his name inscribed, or the key to the city? In their conversations the past month, his father has played down the honor, saying, “I’ve just done what any other person with resources would have done to help unfortunate souls.” Which isn’t true, and when Simon said, “Dad, that isn’t true,” Harry said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Simon puts his hands to his face, feels his lips turning up, and he wants to laugh because it’s been such a long time since he has smiled in bed. He was crying, and now he’s smiling, thinking of his father. Thinking of their spring, summer, and fall camping trips, star-studded nights, sleeping bags unrolled in the desert sand drifts just beyond the back patio, sand that was soft at first, then scratchy as the hours piled up, Harry teaching him how to converse and debate, getting into the grit of politics and free will and truth; the long hikes traversing the mountain peak, talking about manhood, and what it means to be a rare man who qualifies as a full human being. No baseball throwing, no football tossing, no Frisbee silliness, no Boy Scouts, no Pop Warner, no Little League, those activities weren’t for Harry, and hence not for Simon. There’d been no sense of loss, of missing out, because they had all those special times together. How he loves his father and his inimitable qualities for probity, his infinite well of paternal love, and marital passion, and universal caring for those finding where they fit in their new world.

  Sunday morning, tomorrow morning, he could say, “Dad, let’s do our regular San Jacinto hike,” and, on their ascent, ask his father if he ever experienced a lengthy bout of sleeplessness, and if he did, what he had done to solve it, where he had looked for the answers.

  “Tell me, Dad,” he would say, “help me figure out what’s going on in my head.”

  Yes, that’s what he’ll do. He’ll grab his father’s hand and say, “I need a little father-and-son time, just you and me alone.” And Harry will grin and grab Simon’s face, kiss him hard first on one cheek and then the other, and say, “Did I tell you today how much I love you?”

  His emotions are seesawing from happiness back to tears.

  What is going on with him?

  The crack in the ceiling has disappeared because his vision is again blurred. Are these new tears because when he says, “Let’s you and me sneak away for some time alone,” his father will exude palpable pleasure, or because his father is seventy now, robust and strong and active, but there is a sense of the hourglass, of the grains diminishing in the upper, gathering in the lower?

  He tests the notion in his head of a world without Harry, and immediately swats it away. He can’t imagine not being able to call his father, talking to him at length on his drives home. He blinks hard several times, forces some of the wetness away.

  One thing put to rest is the fear that his sleeplessness is a presage to his own death. He’s been to the doctor, had a complete physical, including a stress test, an EEG, an EKG. He is in perfect health, his blood pressure within the recommended range, his cholesterol terrific, his blood revealing no hidden issues, the electrical activity in his brain and heart as it should be. Whatever is keeping him awake, it’s not his eventual demise, but something he’d better figure out soon. The one question he forgot to ask the doctor was: How long can a body go without sleep?

  THE SILENCE IN THE house is growing heavier, wife and children in that place he no longer goes, a smothering silence ripped apart by the telephone ringing.

  Simon’s hollowed heart thumps into action, and he leaps from the bed, an errant tear running down the side of his nose, and he grabs the receiver from Elena’s nightstand, steps out of their bedroom, his voice low and froggy when he says, “Yes? Hel
lo? Do you know it’s seven thirty on a Saturday morning?”

  “Mr. Tabor, my apologies,” says a deep male voice with a strong accent. “This is Altan Odaman, the president of the International Lawyers Association, calling from Istanbul, Turkey. If I figured the time difference incorrectly, my heartfelt regrets. Nonetheless, I am delighted to personally invite you to this year’s conference. To be held in Medellín, Colombia, from September tenth through the twentieth. I am also delighted to inform you that, by special vote, you have been chosen to make a presentation. This is highly unorthodox, as you know. No first-time invitee has ever been afforded the opportunity to address the group. But your legal approach for recovering those Goya paintings is of great interest to everyone. Do you need time to determine your availability, or can I assume you will clear your schedule to attend? Spouses, of course, are invited as well.”

  In the small landing that leads from their bedroom to the living room, Simon stares at the photograph on the wall—Elena in the hospital bed with their first child barely an hour old, named Luz within moments of her worldly entrance and called, ever after, Lucy—and he sees nothing.

  For several seconds, he is made speechless by this call to join the most elite of lawyers who handle global cases that alter the international landscape. But his eight years of experience as a cross-border litigator focused on the repatriation of stolen art, relics, religious icons, and sometimes ancient bones kicks in; he is naturally quick on his feet, able to pivot his courtroom cross-examinations as required, and he gathers his wits and his words and expresses his sincere and honest delight and grateful thanks to Altan Odaman and the nominating committee.