He was out of his truck. Breathing like he’d been sprinting. His chest thudding. The damp air filled his lungs and started him coughing. Took three long steps, scooped the dog up in his hand. Clutched it in. Its heart skittering madly against Jarrett’s palm. It was Anna’s. Anna’s dog. Her hardly-even-a-dog creature she brought to practice, that the band gave her shit about. What was it doing out here? At least three miles from her place.
“You’re okay, idiot.” He tucked the dog in like a football. It would relax in that safe hold.
Jarrett made his way to the red car. He recognized the woman. Her blue plastic glasses. Her thin hair tied in two bunches like she was still a kid. She was local. The food co-op? School? Didn’t know where, but from somewhere here he knew her. He knocked on the glass. The woman’s hands clenched the wheel. She hunched in her fleece jacket, stared at Jarrett like she couldn’t trust ever letting go of the wheel. He motioned for her to crank open her window.
“You did good,” Jarrett said when the window was halfway down. “You okay?”
“Jesus.”
“You handled it like the Indy 500. You professional?” He tried to keep it light.
“I’m vegan,” she said and looked plaintively at Jarrett. Her glasses askew. Her fingers still gripping the steering wheel.
This was trouble. Too much trouble.
“Vegan. Interesting. So that makes you drive faster?” He wanted her to laugh. Reset from the panic. Make sure she was steady to go forward.
He needed to bolt. He needed to get to school. There was a chocolate milk shake waiting for Owen in the cup holder. Then they’d stack wood. He’d cook dinner. Maybe even get Owen to help. Call it boys’ dinner for the girls.
“Well, no worries,” he said. “I’ll take care of the dog.” He loosened his grip and petted Zeus. Let the lady see that the dog was fine. “He’s fine,” Jarrett said. “Not a scratch.”
The woman squinted at him, her blue frames tilting on her nose.
“The dog’s traumatized.” Her eyes went all gooey. Humorless. Made him want to push it. Match idiocy with idiocy. Say he was a survivalist. Loved roadkill. Didn’t discriminate. Squirrel, yes. Dog, too.
“The dog’s traumatized,” she repeated. She was about to go weepy and fog up her glasses. He’d have to soothe her. Listen to her animal sensitivities. He had to get to school.
“Well, it’s pretty darn lucky. You really did great.”
“Dogs know when a person’s dying. They react.”
It smacked him then. What she was saying.
Shut up. He needed her to shut up. Small town. Every person needing to be in the midst, making it their drama. Thinking they were entitled to have feelings. And an opinion. On everything. This reckless lady had better shut up before she said something so stupid that Jarrett lost it. He wanted to lose it. Wanted to bait her. All day he’d been riding that edge. It would be great to press past the point of containable. Stop worrying about getting right all the things he seemed not to get right. Stop trying to be a good citizen, a good husband. It would feel terribly amazing to tear this lady more than one new vegan asshole.
Until, of course, it felt ten times worse.
“You’re one lucky lady.” Jarrett forced a grin. He hitched the dog higher into the crook of his arm and ran back to his truck.
“Hey, idiot, sit right there.” He plopped the dog down in the passenger seat. The dog pawed himself in a circle and settled down like the car was his old home.
“Hey, idiot, we’re going to get Owen.” Jarrett could just see his son’s lit-up surprise. A chocolate milk shake and a dog. What could be better? Pretty basic. Basic was good.
“I’m on my way,” Jarrett sang out loud once, then wailed it again with a big bluesy push. “I’m on my way with a hound named Zeus. Got me a hound, his name is Zeus. When he wags that mangy tail, my heart lets loose.”
That felt good. Thank God for the blues. Singing. Got a lot of people through a lot worse days.
Maybe he’d be a few minutes late, but he’d get to school. He could already see his son’s shiny smile. The boy would be bonkers with happiness when he stepped up into his dad’s truck and saw Zeus.
Secret
Reuben woke to the vibration and ring of his phone. How long had he slept? It was dusk in the room, mossy gray light filtering through the windows. There was a dream. He couldn’t quite hold the thread of the dream. But it had ringing, too. A bell?
And now the buzzing again. He rolled over, fishing the cell phone from his jeans pocket. Reuben considered—for just a moment—letting the call go to message. But it was Julian. He’s promised the children he’ll always pick up. The least he can do. Reuben didn’t have anything new to tell him except that Mom wasn’t home. God knows where. God knows how. She’s barely been able to stand up for two days. And hasn’t spoken in a day. But hey, her friends, her supposed best friends in the world, apparently decided it’s a grand idea to whisk her away. Who knows where they are? When they’re coming back? They haven’t answered the text Reuben sent. Did he send the text? Or did he just think about that Where the hell are you, Helen? text before he shut his eyes.
“Hey, buddy.” Reuben was glad his son couldn’t see him sitting in the hospital bed.
Julian was quiet on the other end, so quiet that Reuben held the phone away to see if they’d disconnected.
“What’s up, sweetheart?”
“I have to tell you something.” His son’s voice was so much like his own. It has always been that way, even when Julian was a child, the boy’s voice had Reuben’s inflections, the trilly laugh, the nervous dip and rise, the occasional stutter, so that Reuben, despite being wrong plenty of times, has always felt he knows how to read every emotional nuance of his son’s speech. Now there was a knot of anxious seriousness. But there was also something from a different depth. Different from the “How’s Mom, Dad?” anxiety calls. Or the calls where Julian tried to manage an adult steadiness, “How are you doing, Dad?”
“Okay, I’m listening.” Reuben pulled a leg out from under the comforter. He felt hot, trapped with the rails up, but he didn’t want to interrupt the call to try to lower the side.
“I told Mom something. A secret. I didn’t tell you.”
Reuben wanted to stop him. Wanted to say, No worries, that’s fair. He also—he felt like such an asshole—felt the old jealousy, that stab of fury when Anna knew things about the kids that he didn’t. She always had. “It’s a mother’s right,” she’d say with an imperious smile. “Is that fair?” he’d say, and she’d barely deign to shrug. “This isn’t about fairness. It’s about I’m the womb.”
“You don’t have to say anything, Julian. I don’t need to know.”
“We lost it, Dad.”
Reuben looked around the room for a focus point. The light filtered duskily, the shapes of things a little borderless.
“We were having a baby. I told Mom.”
“Oh, Jules, I’m so sorry.”
Reuben needed to be on his feet. A sudden urgent necessity. Had to get out of this bed, but the rails seemed locked or stuck. Or just complicated to lower from this inside-the-bed position.
“We lost it. And I don’t want to tell her.”
Reuben knelt on the bed and then clambered out, one leg at a time, the metal wobbling against his jangled, unsteady movement. He hopped his back leg from where it caught between the rails and walked to the bank of bedroom windows. The yard needed raking. The hydrangea needed cutting back. He should get out there later. And what about the old tree house? Half the ladder was rotted.
His son was describing the trip to the doctor’s office. Julian used all the new language: sonogram, fetal heartbeat, D&C.
“The doctor says we can try again.”
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Reuben said, knowing that that was not the point.
Reu
ben hasn’t thought of his son as a father. Or if he ever has, it’s been abstract, in some future order of things stretched far in time. A future that wasn’t now. But now he saw his son’s lean frame, that shag of curls bent over the tiny swaddle of a newborn. It was an image Reuben already knew. An image from a framed photograph taken of him, Reuben, holding Harper and Andy, not an hour old, a little package of infant in each arm and Reuben’s head bent close as he welcomed them into the world.
“I don’t know how to speak to Mom.”
“Yes you do. She loves hearing your voice.”
“So that’s okay? To lie to Momma?”
There it is, “Momma,” the word his eldest child had forced himself to grow out of when he was ten.
“It’s not a lie,” Reuben said.
He opened random cards from the cluttered windowsill. See you soon. Funny notes of hope. There were so many notes sent from Anna’s old students. From all over the country. Word had really spread. Even the ones who were grown up wrote, Dear Mrs. S. They thanked her for their love of math. Sent pictures of themselves on top of mountains. Reuben flipped one card open, and tiny writing darkened everything but a thin border of hearts. Why would anyone write that much? Why would they think Anna wanted to read all that?
Reuben straightened two stacks of envelopes Anna hadn’t bothered to open.
Sorry
Before they turn out of the pond’s parking lot, the women switch on cell phones. It’s a sound bomb, a mad pinging frenzy of messages and texts, screens jammed with increasing desperations. And unpleasantries.
“We’re in big trouble,” Helen announces.
“You’re always worried about getting in trouble,” Molly says, and the others yowl, comparing forty years’ worth of Helen’s goody-two-shoes apologies.
“They’re waiting at the house for us. They’ve all but alerted the National Guard.”
“This is excellent. It’s like eleventh grade again,” Ming says. “I hope we get grounded.”
“Laugh all you want. Do you want me to read Reuben’s texts to you?”
“After we get in trouble and we’re grounded, I need to ask everyone for some talk time. I need help,” Molly says. There’s been a text and then two more from Tessa.
“He’s furious. There’re a lot of mad people.”
“We double-dare you not to say sorry to anyone,” Caroline teases Helen. “Try not to even look or smell guilty.”
“What are you afraid of?” Anna slips her hand into Helen’s.
“We should have at least left a note.”
Anna laces fingers one by one with Helen’s. “What are you really afraid of?”
“A world without you.” Helen blurts it before she can stop.
The car goes quiet; even the motor quiets.
“And that I’ll be able to live in it.” Helen wants to shift to look directly at Anna, but she can’t. Instead she looks out the car window. There’s almost no light left. The last colors nearly all pulled from the day.
Up front Ming moans, a sprained sound.
Anna’s hand is cold against Helen’s. Helen reaches her other arm across, sandwiching Anna’s hand between hers, fighting an impulse to clutch.
“It will be good, even your sadness,” Anna says.
The road, the mowed hills, the row of trees, the rectangle and the square barn—everything at this time of day is shape, soft edges more than specific lines, the palate so contained, still bits of red and blue and green shine inside the great density of dark.
A World Still with Her will be an almost-black painting.
That’s another reason Helen can’t look at Anna. Because Anna knows. Whatever goody-goody, accommodating, worried apologist Helen is, she’s also ruthless. Helen has always joked that artists are cannibals. Pillagers calmly regarding the composition of disaster. And Anna knows that Helen is already doing exactly that, making a Donner Pass of the sadness. Already this great texture, this corduroy of darkness. The hillside with the dark swell of land. The simple geometry of a barn. A car on a road, the headlights cutting a muted path, the shape of heads in the car.
“Are you afraid?” Helen asks.
This was what Helen has never asked, what over all these years of treatment and periods of health Helen and The Old Friends have trained themselves not to ask. It was a tacit agreement. The answer too obvious; it loomed in each moment’s specific worry. When the tumor wouldn’t shrink. When there would be no donor match or the body would reject the match. Or when there was staph infection, sepsis, pneumonia, congestive heart failure. Each complication in the treatment. Each shocking recurrence. Even in the months when Anna was radiantly healthy. The unspoken answer never left; it was there—like the petulant wallflower, like the delinquent fundamentalist playing Nintendo just waiting for the call to jihad—it was there just breathing on the edge of the party when Anna overfilled her healthy dance card. Yes, I’ll hike Mount Washington, yes, I’ll drive to Amagansett, yes, front and center, I’ll clap not only at my own children’s graduations but with Ming at Lily’s graduation. It was there with every yes, with every chance to be alive.
“Are you afraid?” Helen repeats. And now, above everything, Helen needs to hear Anna’s answer. Ming tilts her head, and Molly glances in the rearview. Helen sees they all genuinely don’t know. They’ve been so busy with their own fear. None of them have dared to ask her.
But Helen knows the answer. She’s known it since she arrived two weeks ago and began her adamant petition to pull Anna from hospice. She knew it back at the pond when she agreed to help Anna if Anna asked. Helen’s job all these years was to keep Anna away from fear and close to the yes. But Anna is not afraid. Again, Anna is doing something before Helen. It has always been this way. Boys. Drugs. Marriage. Children. Even the pregnancy that Anna ended. Over and over, Anna went first. Now this.
Anna begins whispering. Is it her breathing? Has she fallen asleep? Is this what they’ve each heard throughout the day, a wisping from Anna, that pale cirrus of utterance in a register outside their frequency? Helen sharpens toward the murmuring, but even just next to Anna she can’t make it out.
“I’m sorry.” Helen flexes her fingers gently against Anna’s. “I don’t know how to do this.”
Magic 9
There is so much magic with 9! I must be sure to tell you all about the Denmark and 9’s trick.
Oh, you will dazzle everyone with this number 9. It really has magic.
Here, first, is one puzzle that is quick and easy:
Take a number and multiply by 9. Add the digits in the answer, and voilà, the number 9. I’m sure you understand, but let me show you: 356 times 9. Equals 3,204. 3 plus 2 plus 4. Equals 9.
Or here’s another. Take any random number—345—scramble it—534. Subtract the lower number—534 minus 354—add the final number—180—to a single digit—1 plus 8 plus 0, and voilà, Dearest One, the number 9.
Now you try.
Hey
Helen angles sideways through the kitchen door, Anna cradled in her arms. She warned the others, but none of them are quite prepared for the crowd or the thick smell of cardboard and pizza. For how harsh the vibe is. It’s clear they’ve already been charged, tried, and hanged.
“Hey! Looks like we missed this whole rockin’ party!” Helen goes bold, goes boisterous. Stupid exclamations in her voice. She’s determined not to lose the double dare, to be something different from what her friends expect.
“Hey, hey!” Ming sheepishly copies Helen.
Molly and Caroline chime in “Heys” too, contrition bleating out the vowels.
Helen feels a ca-ching ca-ching of her slot-machine victory. She can’t wait till later to mimic their heeeeeys. You actually sounded like sheep, she’ll gleefully taunt.
Still, it hurts to look at Reuben and Layla and Connie and John. The crush of their worry. And there’s Jar
rett in the corner, mopishly picking a melody on Anna’s guitar. A couple other Valley friends whom Helen’s met over and over but can never hold on to all their names. One is also an Anna. A.G.
Let them all be named Anna. Anna bird and Anna bunny one and all.
They all look horrified, mouths cast in wounded, Munch-like O’s.
“Anna’s wiped from our adventure. I’m going to get her washed up and into bed.” Helen ducks from the damning glances, pivots to shake a grin at her friends. Let the other three answer questions and face judgment. They’ve sworn not to reveal anything about their holiday.
She smiles at Anna, folded in her arms. Anna is still doing that whispery thing, but even if she’s off in some somewhere else, Helen understands that she’s also taking this in. She knew that Helen would rise to a challenge, that it was part of—not opposite—her good-girl behavior. This Anna knows best of everyone in the room.
Take a Party Bag
She feels the shape of her house. Even with her eyes closed. So many beloveds in the room. All that ampleness. The ampleness of her beloveds and the ampleness of her home. With her eyes closed, she scans all the pretty things in her living room. Her pretty things. They do not know that she is just ahead of them. Lovely friends, lovely things—so insistent. All shiny brightness. All insistent. She who loved a party could not be at this party. There should be goody bags. So many things to put in a goody bag. Take something home. Please. Take a party bag, she thinks, before you leave.
Before Everything Page 19