Days of Awe: A Novel

by Lauren Fox

  Behind the desk, two receptionists, both wearing pink sweaters, are speaking into their headphones. “Does it itch?” one of them says. “Tuesday, Tuesday,” the other says. It reminds me of an assignment I give my fifth-grade students every year, where they have to write poems from bits of overheard conversation.

  Helene looks around and sighs, then plucks a yellow foam ball out of her purse and begins squeezing it rhythmically, like she’s been taught but rarely does. Printed on the ball in jaunty, bright red type are the words SQUEEZE ME FOR STRENGTH! With her good hand, she reaches up and touches her hair.

  She looks around the open-plan room, the rose-colored chairs clustered in little groups to give the illusion of cozy sociability. “I’ve spent too much time in waiting rooms.”

  I called in for a substitute so I could keep her company at this appointment, where she will find out how much more of her strength is likely to come back after the stroke. These last couple of months her progress has slowed, like a train coming to a halt. She drags her right foot still, especially when she’s tired, and her right hand is so weak she can’t open a quart of milk. At her last few appointments Dr. Petrova has started saying things like “Yes, but under the circumstances” and “Well, all things considered,” little linguistic inoculations against further hope.

  “Isabel,” Helene says. “Thank you for coming with me today. I know you had to give up a personal day.” She picks up a magazine from the side table, then puts it down. “Then again, I gave up my youth for you.”

  “Oh, Mom. Doctors’ appointments always make you so sentimental.”

  “You’re all right,” she says. “But do you know who I really love? Hannah.”

  “I know.”

  “Why are you keeping her from me?”

  We had, of course, come over for dinner two nights ago. And the two of them had gone to a movie together last weekend. “I’m punishing you for things you did to me when I was a kid that neither of us remembers.”

  She smiles and takes my hand, then presses the squeeze-me ball into my palm. “This damn thing,” she says, “is just an attempt to keep me from dwelling on my troubles.”

  “What troubles?” I ask, thinking we’re still just joking around, trying to make each other smile here in the hushed waiting room of the hospital—the architectural equivalent of a clenched stomach. I’m a little distracted, thinking about Cal, the visit with his mother, and everything that came after. I feel a blush rise to my cheeks and hope my mother doesn’t notice.

  “That I won’t regain any more strength. That I’ll be limited for the rest of my life. That I’ll always need help. Your help.” She shakes her head. Her hair is sprayed hard, the way she likes it. She’s wearing a turquoise scarf knotted around her neck, little gold hoop earrings, and a long, soft, camel-colored sweater with small shoulder pads and pockets. She looks like she’s ready for a ladies’ luncheon in 1985. “That I’m at a steeply increased risk for a second stroke. That it will happen some night when I’m alone, and it will be so much worse than this one, and I won’t be able to call for help.”

  I stare at her, speechless. Sometimes I just want to crawl into the lap of the person who has loved me the longest and the best—and how is it possible that this is the same person who is looking at me now as if I’m the only one who can save her?

  The other day on my way out the door I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror: heavy-lidded brown eyes and thick, slightly uneven eyebrows in desperate need of grooming; long, inelegant nose and lips that curve up at the ends; wavy, uncooperative dark hair with strands of gray shooting up at the crown like popped wires in a burned-out lightbulb, and I had the strange and fleeting feeling that in that moment I was both Hannah and myself: I was staring at the face Hannah sees when she needs her mother. This was the face that came to her when she had to get a signature on a permission slip or when she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich, when she hated me or woke up from a bad dream or wanted to know if she could use the microwave, when she missed me in the middle of the day at school and no one else would do. And even after twelve years, the idea that I am someone’s mother stunned me.

  “Mom,” I say now, without really thinking, “why don’t you move in with us?”

  “Oh!” she says. “Oh, no. I don’t think so, sweetie. Thank you. No.”

  “Why not?”

  A man zooms by in an electric wheelchair. A woman wearing lavender scrubs gets out of the elevator, singing to herself. My mother doesn’t say anything for a while, and then, “Do you remember Bob Feldman?”

  “Of course.” He was one of the dermatologists she used to work for; my own indulgent employer, briefly, fifteen years ago.

  “He had another heart attack last week. Joanne from the office called to tell me about it.”

  “Oh, wow. Is he okay?” I’m still, for no reason, squeezing the yellow ball my mother gave me.

  “I don’t know.” She picks up the same magazine from the side table and flips through it. “He might be, he might not be.” She raises one eyebrow at me meaningfully. “He moved in with his daughter six months ago, and now he’s practically dead.”

  “But I still don’t…” I stop myself. The hazy, diffuse morning sunlight is still trying to make its way through the windows, but it’s losing the battle to the fluorescent lights. Helene rummages through her handbag. A snoozing woman a few seats away gives a little snort and wakes up; the woman next to her touches her arm.

  “I’m starving,” Helene says. “Do you want a granola bar?”

  “Not really.”

  A nurse comes out of the office and stands in the arched doorway of the waiting area, holding a clipboard. She looks up. “Mrs. Kaczmarek? Grace Kaczmarek?”

  “That’s not us,” my mother says, as if I’d thought maybe it was. She hands me a little package. “There are two bars in here,” she says. “Open it up for me and we’ll share.”

  I take the package from her and tear open the foil, hand her one. And I bite into mine, forgetting, for a second, that I’m not even hungry.

  Yesterday, after Cal and I left his mother’s apartment, we got back into his car. The slam of the doors echoed like a clap of thunder in the cavernous parking structure. “I was going to take you bird-watching,” he said. His voice was a little gloomy and defeated. It didn’t match the kind, optimistic man who’d pulled into this parking spot an hour before.

  I had the briefest flash that maybe Cal was a serial killer, although if that was the case he was a mellow, nonthreatening one, the sort who introduces you to his elderly, racist mother before offing you. The kind-eyed, gentle type. Still, how well did I know him?

  “Bird-watching!” I said, studying his face for signs of evil.

  “Remember? That shirt you were wearing, and you told me about the baby birds…”

  “I’ve never been,” I said.

  “I have,” he said. “But not for many years. So I thought…” He leaned across me and went for the glove compartment. He had a nice smell, a little gingery.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “What?” He opened the glove compartment.

  “Oh, phew!” I said.

  He looked at me. He was holding a pair of binoculars by its string.

  “I thought maybe you were a serial killer,” I said.

  “You’re a strange lady.” He held the binoculars up to his face and looked at me through them. “Even stranger close up.”

  I reached over and covered the lenses with my hand. “So…your mom’s nice,” I said.

  Cal laughed. “I’m really sorry. For what it’s worth, she’s had a hard life. My dad died when I was seven. And my sister, Mary Claire, has had kind of a rough go of it, so that’s been very hard on my mother, too….” He trailed off.

  “Did she remarry?”

  “Nope.”

  “She still wears her wedding ring.” I had noticed it, back in her apartment, a small diamond set in a thin gold band, sliding around on Vivian’s bony fing
er.

  “Yep.”

  “All this time?”

  “She’s hard-core. She’s taught me a lot about grit. And loyalty. And she won’t be around for much longer, so…” He studied the binoculars. “And yet she makes me feel like garbage.”

  “I hope Hannah says that about me someday.”

  And there was that laugh again. I thought, I would not get tired of that laugh, and then I blushed, even though I had only thought it.

  “Anyway, Isabel Moore,” he said, his voice regaining a little tug of hope. “Are you in the mood for a drive?” He pulled a little paperback from the pocket of his car door and held it up for me. A Birder’s Guide to Southeastern Wisconsin. The receipt was sticking out of the middle of the book like a floppy, waving hand, and my face went warm, there in Cal’s chilly Prius, at the understanding: that he had bought the book for us, for our afternoon, for this date.

  ···

  Chris and I went out for the first time on the Fourth of July (which, in retrospect, may have confused my susceptible heart—fireworks on a first date!). He called me early, told me not to have dinner, that he was packing a picnic for us. I was so nervous, I didn’t eat all day. But Chris was twenty-seven, still just a boy, his psyche not yet forged in the fires of other people’s needs, and so our picnic consisted of a bunch of grapes, a large wedge of Swiss cheese, and two bottles of wine. I guess he thought it would be romantic. I was starving by the time we got to the park and spread out our blanket, practically feral with hunger. About five minutes after I’d wolfed down all of the grapes and half of the cheese and guzzled two paper cups of red wine, my stomach started groaning and gurgling in painful protest. It was an excruciating drive home. Traffic was bad.

  I made Chris wait in the hallway outside my apartment. I was mortified. I decided I would never see him again, just to spare myself further humiliation.

  “I feel like we know each other really well now,” he said later, still smiling. We were in my tiny kitchen. He slipped a piece of bread into my toaster and made me a cup of tea. I had the first inkling of his generous soul, of the way he would try, in our years together, to gentle me out of myself. That night he kissed me in the kitchen, and I am not lying when I say that we could hear the pop of fireworks from where we stood, distant but unmistakable.

  ···

  “So, what do you think?” Cal said.

  I nodded. “A drive would be nice.” I had the strange, disconnected feeling of Chris falling away from me, of my husband, still my husband, floating in space, bright light and color, beyond my grasp.

  ···

  Cal entertained me with bird facts on the drive—Guess which birds have the biggest brains relative to their bodies? Crows. There are between one and two billion birds in the world. The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus rex. He was so delighted with himself, I couldn’t help but get caught up in it.

  “Guess what a group of chickens is called?” he asked.

  “I do not know.”

  “Go on,” he said. “Guess.”

  “A bucket?”

  “A peep!” He grinned at me, then set his eyes back on the road, careful.

  We were already there by the time I realized where we were going: the perennial plight of the directionally impaired. We pulled into the gravel lot and I looked around, and the familiarity of the place felt at first like an unpleasant memory, the creeping, disorienting sense that something is wrong before you know what it is. The Lake Kass Science Learning and Exploring Center building was a brown shack to our left, the trail that led to the lake on our right.

  “Oh!” I said.

  “Here we are!”

  I swallowed the fully formed lump in my throat and got out of the car. Yesterday’s unusual warmth had been blown off by a crisp wind, and it felt like early spring in Wisconsin was supposed to feel: brisk and sharp, just inching past winter.

  “Have you ever been here?” he asked. “It’s so close to the city, but it feels like you’re miles and miles away.”

  “I, uh…” It seemed like the entire weight of our bright, shiny, brand-new gem of a relationship rested on my answer. “Maybe once.”

  Cal led me across the parking area to the trail, still brown and patchy from the winter, then down a gradual slope to where marsh grass edged the lake. It was like stepping back into a photograph. Even the light was the same, bright and clear. The air smelled wet, muddy, alive.

  We strolled along the lake for a few minutes. Tiny waves splished against the shore. A school of minnows darted beneath the surface. It was the kind of lake that lulled you into forgetting about the treachery of water.

  I remembered Kyle Gilson falling in, how he flailed in the shallow water, the drama of it. Oh, my God, he’s going to die! We still thought, back then, that our lives would unfold in a series of close calls and funny anecdotes.

  Cal paused, craned his neck. He pressed the binoculars up to his eyes. He was wearing a light blue windbreaker that flapped like a flag in the breeze. “I haven’t seen a single bird,” he said. “Has something dire happened? Did we miss the apocalypse?”

  Just then a large Canada goose flapped above us, a fat flying bowling pin, then dipped low and plopped into the water. “It’s the goose of doom!” I said.

  He handed me the binoculars. I hung them by their string around my neck. He moved, almost imperceptibly, closer to me. His arm brushed against mine. “I like you, Isabel. I’d like to get to know you.”

  What should I have told him, there on the shore of Lake Kass on a chilly spring afternoon? That I still sometimes slept with my not-exactly-ex-husband? That I may have been partly responsible for the death of my best friend? That I grieved: hopelessly, constantly, fruitlessly, passionately? It seemed like the most important parts of me were also the worst.

  I stopped walking and touched Cal’s arm, turned so that I was facing him. We were practically the same height. Cal Abbott is not a tall man. It annoyed me, briefly, that a fifty-nine-year-old man could look as handsome as he did, as appealing. He reminded me of a retired tennis pro, or a just-past-his-prime James Bond. If I were a forty-three-year-old man and Cal were a fifty-nine-year-old woman, I’d have my hand on her arm just to make sure she didn’t stumble. But here I was, admiring Cal’s face in an entirely nonsolicitous way.

  He had an amused little smile on that face, the same one from the first night in my mother’s living room, like he knew what I was up to. But he didn’t know anything about me. I was not a girl who made the first move. The first boy who kissed me became my boyfriend for two years. The fourth boy who kissed me became my husband. I leaned toward Cal, tipped my face to his. He put his arms around me lightly.

  The kiss was easy, like we’d been married for twenty years, and also new, because it was new, Cal’s unfamiliar lips, the skin and bones of a face I hadn’t touched before. I put my cool hands on his cheeks. My fingers grazed the thin skin of his forehead. More than the kiss, I was moved by the strangeness of his face.

  We separated. I let my arms drop to my sides. That smile crept up his face again. But it was less sure of itself.

  My stomach dropped a little, and my heart thudded. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between thrill and panic.

  “I brought my class here once,” I said. “One of the kids fell in.”

  “I feel like I would have heard about that if it had had a tragic outcome.” He motioned to the water, shallow and calm.

  “You could drown in a bathtub!” I said. “But no, we rescued him.”

  “I used to take Michael here when he was little. We would camp over there.” He pointed to the wooded area across the gravel road. “I always slept closest to the tent flap, in case Mikey got up in the middle of the night and wandered into the water.”

  “You and Michael, just the two of you?”

  “And Catherine.”

  I shrugged and then, for no reason, laughed. Cal pulled me back into his arms and kissed me again, on the lips for a mome
nt and then, unexpectedly, once on the cheek like a punctuation mark, and his face was still strange to me, but a little less so.

  We walked around the lake for a while longer, then headed onto the wooden dock that stretched across the water. Something had been recalibrated between us: our bodies had been magnetized by the admission of desire. Cal held my hand loosely. Our feet clonked like little hooves on the wooden boards. The air was sharp and delicious in my lungs. It felt good to breathe, which was no small thing after so many months when it seemed like I couldn’t take in enough air, like my lungs were sponges saturated with sadness. The afternoon had me feeling bold and exhilarated, in the same way that caffeine does—as if I were about to receive a phone call or an e-mail with excellent news. The memory of Josie floated near me, as it often did, but it was cleaner than usual, somehow, less punishing. I had a friend, and she died.

  A pair of black ducks paddled by. Cal squinted at them. “Mud hens.”

  “Mud hens,” I said, a little giddily. “Mud hens! I thought they were North American flap-winged feather dusters!”

  “What?” He cocked his head and gazed at me as if I were an overly articulate, troublesome five-year-old.

  “Mud hens are not a real thing,” I said. I don’t know why I thought Cal was fooling me with a fake bird name, but I was convinced of it. “Mud hens,” I said again. “You made that up.”

  Cal’s blue windbreaker made a little flit-flit sound as he raised his arm to shield his eyes from the sun reflecting on the water. He squinted at me in utter confusion, and I had the sudden and vertiginous feeling of being whisked far away from him on the current of my own foolishness.

  “No,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “How strange that you think I would make that up.” He reached into his pocket and handed me the bird book with a little flourish. “Allow me to prove you wrong.”

  Page 47. There they were. Mud hens, cross-listed as the American coot, which, if I’d pointed it out to Cal, probably would have put the nail in this coffin.