by Susan Perabo
“The queen is dead; long live the queen!” Evan said in the lion’s voice.
She snatched the lion from him. “Stop it,” she said. “Get out. Stop messing with my stuff.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your stuff?”
She could not stand him sitting here on her floor. All she wanted was to be left alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Listen, really, I am sorry. All I’m trying to say is, life at Parkway North marches on. The world keeps spinning.”
Spinning, yes. That was an accurate description of her current state. For thirteen years she’d never felt the motion of the earth, and now suddenly she couldn’t stop feeling it. And this earth, this new earth, was rotating her through two worlds simultaneously, spinning her so fast that she was no longer certain where one world ended and the other began.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Evan said. “Let’s watch something funny. Something stupid.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
He stood up, stretched. Sometimes he seemed massive, ten feet tall. “C’mon, Mer. Something mindless. Good for the soul.”
“I don’t—” she started.
“I’m gonna carry you,” he said.
“No.”
He grinned. “You know I’ll do it.”
Would he? He used to all the time, before the injury, trap her in the polar bear hug and then in one swift motion swing her off the ground and into the cradle of his arms, like a bride or a baby. Long after her parents had stopped picking her up, Evan was still doing it. Sometimes when he put her down he’d flex his muscles and kiss his biceps. She had imagined those days were over.
“My only concern is the stairs,” he said. He paused a moment, put a finger to his chin in mock consideration. “Probably we won’t fall. Probably.”
“Okay,” she said. “Stop. Okay. I’m coming.”
•
Meredith closed her eyes. Lisa was still on the couch and the man was in the bathroom. What was he doing in the bathroom? He’d been in there a really long time. Something was amiss. Lisa was sitting cross-legged on the couch. Something was missing. Something was—Annie. She was not on the couch. The television was turned off and the remote was on the table and Lisa was just sitting there by herself looking at the black television.
Meredith listened for the jingle.
Lisa stood up and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was nearly empty. There were some Baggies of shredded cheese and an almost empty jar of black olives; the few olives inside bobbed around in the juice like little shrunken heads. Annie was not in the kitchen. More alarming to Meredith was the fact that Annie’s bowls were not on the kitchen floor. Where the bowls had been there was a little rickety table with a bunch of brown bananas on it. On top of the refrigerator, where Annie’s box of Milk Bones had been yesterday, there was an old radio.
Maybe he was giving Annie a bath in the bathtub and he had taken her Milk Bones in there to give her as treats and her bowls were in the dishwasher. But there were no sounds coming from the bathroom. Lisa went past the bathroom door and into the bedroom. The door was only partially open, but Meredith could see there were clothes lying on the bed and the sheets were askew. Annie was not curled on the pillow, not stretched out at the end. There was no sign that Annie was there, or had ever been there.
The door clicked open and the man came out of the bathroom. He was wearing black boxer shorts and nothing else. Lisa was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked up wearily.
“There’s my girl,” the man said. He went into the bedroom and closed the door.
Where the hell was Annie? Meredith was in the apartment now. Actually in the apartment, for the first time. She could see everything. She could walk from room to room regardless of where Lisa was. She had stopped spinning. She was not going to walk into the bedroom because she already knew what was happening the bedroom, but she was going to find Annie because she wanted Annie to be there when it was over and she was going to pick up Annie and set her in front of the bedroom door. But maybe Annie had run away. Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d opened the door and she’d dashed out. Meredith looked at the hook by the door. There was no leash there. There was a baseball hat hanging on it. She went and sat down on the couch. She licked her index finger and dragged it along the brown suede cushions. Crumbs. Ashes. No fur.
He hadn’t given her away. She hadn’t run off. Annie wasn’t just gone. It was way worse than that. It was this: there was no Annie.
There never had been any Annie.
Meredith opened her eyes. She was in her own family room. Outside the window it was dark. The dishwasher was running in the kitchen. On television a bride and groom were sprinting away from a church. Her brother was next to her on the couch. He was smiling at the movie.
“There’s no dog,” she said. At first she wasn’t sure if she’d said it aloud, but he looked over at her.
“What?” he said, still smiling. Then he saw her face and he stopped smiling. “What?”
It felt like someone had taken hold of her lungs, one in each huge hand, and was squeezing.
“There’s no dog,” she said.
10
“There’s no dog?” Mark asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means we need to call the psychiatrist,” Claire said.
They were standing in the kitchen, Claire and Mark and Evan. Meredith had gone to bed. According to Evan, she’d stood up from the couch after making the comment about the dog and gone upstairs without another word. By the time Evan had reported what she’d said—it took him a few minutes, he explained, because he wasn’t sure if it was “reportable behavior”—and Claire had gone upstairs to check on her, she was asleep.
“I think it’s obviously reportable,” Claire said. “Since we’ve never had a dog.”
“I don’t even know if it was about us,” Evan said. He was sitting backward on the kitchen chair. Claire realized that, darkened lens aside, he looked more like his old self than he had in months. Something had changed in him in the past week. Maybe all he’d needed was distraction. Maybe this was her son, again, still. Maybe his own tragedy had come to an end, replaced by his sister’s.
“It was like the thought had just occurred to her,” he continued. “Like it was something she’d just figured out, like a math problem or something.”
“A math problem with a dog?” Claire asked.
“Maybe it was one of those logic problems,” Mark said. “Like a boy and his father are horribly injured in a car crash, and when they get to the emergency room the doctor comes in and takes one look at the boy and says, ‘I can’t treat this boy—he’s my son!’ And, you know, you have to figure out how this could possibly be.”
“Because the doctor’s his mother?” Claire asked.
“Okay,” Mark said. “That’s obviously an outdated example. My point is that maybe it’s one of those.”
“Right,” Evan said. “So in this case the doctor comes into the emergency room and says, ‘I can’t treat this boy—there’s no dog!’ ”
“Not every single thing is joke worthy,” Mark said.
“You’re telling me?” Evan said. “Almost nothing is joke worthy, okay? Lesson learned. But you’re not even listening to me. I said it was like a math problem.”
“Fine,” Mark said. “Just, let’s . . . just let’s figure this out.”
Claire could see Mark trying to hold himself together. It was a whole new thing this week, this fatherhood. He had crossed some line; his old standbys were failing him. Even after Evan’s injury, he’d held it together, but now something in him had cracked. Maybe it was the invisibility of the damage. Mark liked to see damage. He liked it obvious. This was true even with mouths; he preferred patients coming in with chipped teeth, oozing abscesses.
Evan stood up. “Do you want my help or not? Mom asked me to help. I’m trying to help.”
Mark turned to Claire. “You asked him to help?”
“I’d ask everyone in the world to help if I could,” Claire said. “Don’t make it sound like—”
“So I’m basically the same as everyone in the world?” Evan asked.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m trying to—” Handle your father is what she wanted to say. There was no way she could win the battle on both fronts simultaneously, and no way she could ally herself with either faction without ruining her chances with the other. (Faction? What was wrong with her? This was her husband. This was her son. She didn’t even know what they were arguing about.)
“Everybody just calm down,” she said.
“You’re the one freaking out,” Evan said. He stood up from the table and went to the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, then pulled a short, wide glass from the cabinet. “Maybe she was just dreaming, you know? Maybe she was trying to break into a junkyard and she was happy because there was no dog.”
Slowly, very slowly, he filled his glass with milk and then returned the carton to the fridge. She watched him do this curious thing but, somehow, in the moment, could not figure out why it was so curious.
“Evan . . . ” she started.
“Was she upset?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know!” he exploded. “I wasn’t even looking at her. We were just watching TV. Where were you guys anyway? Maybe if you’d been there you might have done a better job than I did.”
“Nobody said you did a bad job,” Mark said. “But you’re right. It’s not your job. You are not her parent.”
He looked at Claire when he said this, not too subtly. Claire felt Mark was getting a little liberal with his expressions of displeasure in front of Evan. He really was coming unglued. It seemed to her as if the adrenaline of the last five days was wearing off and the reality setting in, the what-ifs, the images Mark had somehow managed to slyly dodge over the weekend were suddenly filling his mind. He’d been a wreck at work that day, useless, and finally Claire had sent him home, but first sent him to pick up Meredith from school. They had planned to do that together, but Mark had fallen so far behind schedule and someone had to pick up the slack, didn’t someone?
“So there was no dog,” Mark said. “Where does that leave us?”
“With the psychiatrist,” Claire said. She steeled herself. More doctors. More appointments. More paperwork. “Have you ever suffered from . . . ? Has anyone in your family ever suffered from . . . ? Has anyone in your family ever suffered, period?” Unbelievably, there’d been this question on Evan’s neurologist’s form: “Has anyone in your family ever died for no apparent reason?” And she’d sat there in the waiting room with Evan slumped in the chair beside her, thinking, Good Christ, who hasn’t died for no apparent reason? Yes, more waiting rooms. More distant, inoffensive music. More weathered magazines. More sliding windows, more cheerful receptionists, more informational videos on TVs you couldn’t turn off. These things didn’t bother her when she was the doctor. They didn’t even particularly bother her when she was the patient. But when she was the mother . . .
“Dr. Moon,” Mark said.
“Tell me that’s not really his name,” Evan said.
“He’s an expert,” Mark said. “A trauma expert.”
“Trauma is his thing,” Claire said wryly.
“No fair,” Evan said. “Trauma is our thing.”
•
Claire loved her office. She loved every room, every chair, every tray, every instrument. Some mornings she arrived before anyone else and would walk through, turning on the lights and loving the office and the things in it like she loved a person. All of these things were hers, and they were beautiful.
She loved her office less when it was populated by patients. That was just the fact, and one she had reconciled herself to long ago. Patients disrupted the order, although most were on their best behavior, polite with simmering anxiety. There was polite and there was crying. There was not much in between.
Mark chatted nonstop with his patients. He could talk about absolutely anything with enthusiasm, keep up both ends of a conversation with someone whose full mouth prevented much more than a few grunts and nods. Claire had made herself a weather expert. She had thirty conversations a day about weather.
“Lunch?” he asked, surprising her in the small office where they wrote up their notes. He had a hand on either side of the doorway and leaned in over her, hovering inches from her head, like a horsefly.
“I’m behind,” she said. “We’re behind.”
He looked at his watch. “I don’t think so. It’s just—”
“In general,” she said. “I need to go over some—”
“Did you call Dr. Moon?”
“Yes,” she said. “He can see her Friday.”
He sat down on a wheely stool in front of her. “You okay?” he said.
“Sure, yes, no. I mean, are you okay?”
“Maybe we should take some time off,” he said. “Maybe they should, too. Maybe we should all take some time off and go somewhere.”
“I’m not sure a vacation is—”
“I don’t even mean a vacation,” he said. “More like a break. We could go an hour away and stay at a hotel and just chill out. Just have some time for us.”
It sounded awful. The four of them in a hotel? Doing what, exactly? Maybe if the children were ten years old and the hotel had a swimming pool? It was a terrible idea.
“I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea,” she said. “I’m just wondering what we would do.”
“We could go for walks. We could find a place that’s pretty.”
No one wanted to go for walks. Why did he persist in the notion that they were a family that went for walks, despite all evidence to the contrary? Even he didn’t want to go for walks.
“We can ask the kids,” she said. She knew this was a safe bet. “Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
•
There was little chance to introduce the topic of the fake-cation. Five minutes into the meal, Meredith excused herself and went upstairs.
“Someone should talk to her,” Claire said. “Did she say anything about school today?”
“She said it was fine,” Mark said.
“Well, there you have it,” Evan said. “All’s well.”
“Evan, will you?” Claire asked. “She’ll talk to you.”
Evan pushed his chair back and went upstairs. A moment later he returned.
“It sounds like she’s throwing up,” he said.
And this, obviously, was a mother’s job. She had seen Mark literally run from vomit, both at work and at home. He’d drive a thousand miles for a bottle of ginger ale but was unable to put a barf-soaked towel into the washing machine.
She went upstairs. Meredith was in her bedroom. She knocked softly and pushed the door open. Meredith was in bed. She had not undressed.
“You okay?” Claire asked.
“I threw up,” Meredith said quietly, not opening her eyes. “But I think it’s over.”
“You stay home tomorrow.” Already Claire was racking her brain, thinking of all the cancellations. She could work faster than Mark. “Your father can stay with you.”
“Okay,” Meredith said. Still, she did not open her eyes. Claire stood beside the bed, uncertain if she should stay or go. If Meredith had been younger, much younger, Claire would have put her lips to her daughter’s forehead to check for fever. But Meredith and Evan had vetoed this method long ago. Maybe she should get a thermometer from the bathroom. Maybe she should get some medicine of some kind. But she did not want to be a bother. She wasn’t sure if Meredith was even still awake.
“Meredith,” she whispered.
Meredith opened her eyes.
After her mother’s first round of chemo, Claire had visited and found her mother sitting on the couch, eyes closed, with three comforters on top of her. Claire had sat down gently on the chair beside the couch and her mother opened her eyes and Claire knew at once that her mother had seen someth
ing previously unseeable, witnessed something that clarified in very real terms precisely what was to come. Her mother knew she was going to die. Her mother knew that death was simply a bodily function, the result of her cancer, no more remarkable or mysterious or dramatic than tears being a result of chopping onions.
Those eyes, her mother’s eyes, were Meredith’s now.
Her mother’s eyes had held that look for two days, and then they lost it, and it never returned, not even at the very end. So maybe the look only came once, only the first time you understood. Or maybe you could only bear to see it once in someone else’s eyes, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.
But also maybe she was overanalyzing this. These eyes—Meredith’s eyes—were the eyes of someone who had just thrown up. Her mother, too, had of course been horribly ill from the chemo. Maybe it was not death they’d faced but simply the grueling act of vomiting.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No.”
“Sweetheart, I think—”
She stopped herself, for it seemed Meredith’s eyes were already returning to normal, her face once again the flat face of the mountain, impenetrable.
“What?” Meredith asked.
Claire made herself smile. “Call me if you need me?”
“Okay,” Meredith said.
•
She called Dr. Moon.
“I know you’re talking to her at the end of the week,” she said, “but we’re at a loss. We have no idea what to do.”
“She’ll find ways to comfort herself,” he said. “Those ways might not make any sense to you or me. But that doesn’t mean they’re not working.”
“Working?” she asked. “What does that even mean? What’s she working toward?”
“She has to process what’s happened,” Dr. Moon said. “She has to figure out a way to fold it into her life. It’s part of her now. She has to find a place for it. That’s what she’s trying to do. She just doesn’t know it.”
“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?”