Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  William was surprised to notice that he had consumed about a third of the scotch. He was never certain how he was going to respond to alcohol, but even so he was feeling remarkably strange—not drunk exactly, but oddly detached. A breeze had sprung up to roughen the surface of the lake, chasing the mist away, and the light was now so pure that everything seemed almost too sharply defined. He felt he could perceive every needle on the shoreline pine trees, and yet they seemed to inhabit another dimension, as if he were dreaming them. He knew what those trees looked like stripped of bark, could smell their sticky resin. He loved wood, a reverence he had shared with his grandfather—his grandfather who had, in fact, founded the furniture company that supported the town in which William had grown up, the town in which he still lived. His mother had given him a box of Lincoln Logs once, but he found them inelegant and built his own model house from scratch, with a roof fashioned from tiny slate shingles and a pebble chimney. If only his grandfather had lived a little longer, he and William might have preserved the quality of workmanship at the factory. But his father was as indifferent to the grace of a finely crafted chair as he was to the company’s history. It was all about money to him. Down to the very end, before he died, he sold the business to a national conglomerate. William now functioned as little more than window dressing.

  He raised the bottle to his lips, noting the strange numbness of his hand. His fingers seemed the size of bananas. He fumbled briefly with the lure he had chosen for his rod, then gave up and took another deep swallow. He dozed off until nausea woke him. Still, his hands felt steadier. Trying to ignore the sickness in the back of his throat, he forced himself to sit up and tie his fly onto the leader. He stood, and with practiced skill, whipped the rod using his wrist, then watched as the line and feathered lure settled light as a whisper.

  Harris had taken William fishing once when he was around five. It had been a momentous event for the boy to spend time alone with his father. William had gone worm hunting the night before to fill an empty coffee tin with wet dirt and night crawlers. Charged up by the same anticipatory thrill of Christmas morning, he woke long before dawn and lay waiting.

  After they finally pushed off from the dock and reached their first fishing spot, William sat jabbering away in the bow with his line in the water. His father ignored the chatter at first, then remonstrated, and finally, unable to silence the rapturous boy, grabbed a night crawler and popped it straight into William’s mouth. It occurred to William now that his father had been stuffing worms in there ever since, most notably during board meetings when William had had the temerity to offer a new idea.

  He took a sip of scotch against the phantom taste and noticed with irritation the distant purr of a motor in the distance. It was the mail boat, making its morning run down the lake. He had slept longer than he thought. Though the water appeared flat as a plate to his eyes, the boat seemed to be riding swells beneath his feet. He saw little explosions of light as if a flash camera was popping too close to his face. The nausea kept rising and falling in his throat. There was a sharp tug on the line. Dizzy, William’s legs gave way and he sat abruptly. He struggled against the weight of his catch—this was no rainbow trout. A snag, maybe. And then a jagged pain ripped through his chest, sending him sprawling into the bottom of the boat. He vomited, blacked out, came to and blacked out again. Through it all, he clung to the rod, clutching it to him as he lay fading in and out. Somehow it seemed important to hang on, as if the line at least might tether him to the reality—he was simply a middle-aged man fishing on a beautiful morning.

  Suddenly, the line snapped and William himself split in two. Half of him lay senseless in an agony too fierce to bear, while the other was catapulted up into the air, and then back above the family campground on shore where he hovered like a hummingbird. He could hear the moaning of the person in the bottom of the boat, a muted accompaniment to the more captivating scenario unspooling below.

  There was a party underway. People carrying cocktails and hotdogs strolled along the soft pine-needled paths that knit together the collection of rustic buildings scattered through the woods. There was a gathering around the barbeque pit and another one down on the dock, which held a bar and a buffet table. William realized, from his aerial perspective, that it was the company’s annual summer outing. He recognized certain people—Grandfather in his fishing hat, his mother sitting on the edge of the dock with her women friends, dangling her bare feet in the water. She looked young, maybe thirty.

  He zoomed in on the front stoop of one of the cabins, the one they called Blackbird, where his parents always stayed. William had often slept there on a cot when he was a toddler. It smelled of the wood fire that burned in the Franklin stove on chilly Adirondack nights. Just then, a boy wearing William’s favorite cowboy shirt came up the path and let himself into the cabin through the screen door. William followed him in and saw him stop short beside the bureau. His face registered first bewilderment and then what looked like horror. William gazed now at what the boy saw: Harris, lying in the bed, naked from the waist down. Straddling him was Mrs. Hewitt, their neighbor from Baldwin Road, breasts bare, denim skirt hiked up over her thighs. They were moving together in some strange rhythm that was kind of like dancing. There was something very wrong in that room. The boy knew it, though he couldn’t have said what it was. He made a sound, and the two froze.

  “Get out of here, William!” Harris shouted, registering the boy now. “Get the hell out.”

  “Mother wants you,” the boy said.

  “Oh my God,” Mrs. Hewitt said. She yanked at a blanket to cover herself, but not before the boy had seen one of her large brown nipples. Something about it disgusted him.

  The boy turned on his heels now, and William watched him run, stumbling over roots along the path. Tears streaked his face. He was fast, and reached the dock in no time. William wanted to stop him, but knew it was impossible. The boy ran straight to his mother, who was standing now with a drink in her hand. William saw him tell her, saw him point back at the cabin. Everyone on the dock heard him and turned to listen. Now the guests backed away from his mother, as if she were contaminated. She remained alone, rigid, her eyes closed, until two of her friends remembered themselves and went to support her. William could no longer see the boy. It was as if he had simply disintegrated.

  The man in the bottom of the boat cried out, and William slipped back inside him, inside the pain, which was almost a relief, and so he remained until he woke up in the hospital.

  He was sedated, but even so, he understood that he was at St. Timothy’s. There were tubes and wires attached to him, and a machine emitted the reassuringly monotonous chirp of his pulse. The pain was more manageable now, merely a dull ache across his chest. He turned his head carefully to either side, looking for her, but she was not there.

  His eyes drooped, and suddenly he was curled in the backseat of his parents’ Ford. He wore a jacket over the cowboy shirt, and it was dark all around him except for the erratic beam of the headlights on the trees as the car hurtled along the pitted road. His mother was in the passenger seat. She was crying. William had never heard that sound before. In fact, he had only once seen a grown woman weep, but that was in a movie, and it hadn’t been nearly as terrible as this. His mother could barely get the words out between her sobs. “How could you?” she was saying, over and over again. “With all those people there. With your child there. How could you?” William supposed that he must have been the “child.” It hurt him that she did not use his name. He had known right away that down on the dock he had done an unforgivable thing. There had been the stricken look on his mother’s face when he told her, the color sliding visibly from her cheeks, and she had swayed as if she might fall right into the water. And the sudden hush of the guests, staring at him with their mouths open. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he whimpered from the backseat of the Ford, but she didn’t hear him, or maybe she did.

  “I’m sorry, Lily,” he said to no one, a
loud in the hospital room. Sorry for all of his transgressions, one in particular. He was so thoroughly, desperately sorry.

  He slept a little. Then a nurse came to check on him. She had a pleasant square face and a competent manner. “Do you have pain?” she asked.

  He nodded. “My wife?” he said. He had to squeeze the words out between dry, swollen lips. His throat felt raw.

  “She’ll be here soon,” the nurse said, and then she did something to his IV bag to set him adrift again.

  The sensation confused him, floated him as if he were back on that boat again. Each time he docked into consciousness, he looked for Lily but she never came. Only the nurse showed up, again and again. As it was always light in the room, it was impossible to discern the hour. Days seemed to pass, maybe weeks. “Don’t you ever get to go home?” he asked the nurse.

  “Never,” she said with a smile.

  “Where’s my wife?” he asked.

  “On her way,” she assured him.

  But in his morphine dreams, Lily was being interviewed on the television affixed to the wall opposite his bed. “And will you be going back to your husband then?” the newscaster asked. He had a British accent.

  “No, I’m afraid not.” Lily was young, and dressed in her wedding gown.

  “Why is that?” the man asked. “You know he’s most terribly sorry.”

  “I tried to get beyond it,” Lily said. “I just couldn’t, that’s all. My own weakness.”

  How typical of Lily to blame herself, William thought, as the dream screen faded to black.

  A year ago, on the day he turned fifty, William had been at a trade show in Chicago. He had complained to Lily that hanging around with a bunch of furniture executives was hardly his idea of how to celebrate. Wouldn’t she please take the sting out of it by coming with him this time? He could tell she was torn. Her childhood friend in England was in a bad way as she approached the anniversary of her son’s death. William pointed out that it had been more than five years since the tragedy, but Lily just looked at him and said, “I know, Will, but think of Stella.” Stella, their funny, difficult, loving, precious daughter. What if they were to lose her? He understood and told Lily to make her reservations.

  William found trouble on his very first night in Chicago. Even though he no longer drank, he still enjoyed hanging out at hotel bars when he was on business trips. Often there was a heightened camaraderie at such places, people gathering far from home to shed the tension of travel, gear themselves up for professional functions, or simply chase away their loneliness for an hour or two. William still remembered the man’s name—Frank Marshall, from some little town in South Carolina. He was built like a linebacker, with a thick neck and huge paws. He was an encyclopedia about orchids, of all things. Somehow over the course of the conversation William let it slip that it was his birthday. Afterwards, William would look back and obsessively attempt to reconstruct every word, every nuance, to explain what happened next. After all, he had stood at countless bars over the years, had made it through barbeques and cocktail parties and weddings, and managed to survive them all cold sober.

  He remembered that Frank had ordered William a drink to celebrate the half-century mark. A general fuss had been made. The song had been sung. Had William ever protested? He could not recall. In any event, he had succumbed, and soon felt himself dropping once again like a stone through a vacuum, flailing with nothing to grasp at, nothing to slow his descent, no way to save himself, getting high by falling down—and down he plummeted, with more drinks after the first, toasts exchanged with his new best friends, and an hour later, he was in his room, drinking steadily from a bottle he’d purchased from the bartender.

  William stood in the dark at the hotel window, watching a dramatic thunderstorm play out over the black vastness of Lake Michigan. Through the alcoholic haze, he contemplated the magnitude of attaining the half-century mark. What had he achieved, really, in all those years? His occupational goals had been modest enough: to improve and expand upon the accomplishments of his grandfather. William’s ideas were sound, even inspired, yet they had been obstructed by his father each and every time. It took William a decade of frustration to figure out that his suggestions were far more likely to be implemented if they emerged from someone other than himself. Ultimately, the profitable rustic furniture line was established, and the cost-cutting computer system was installed, with others receiving the credit and the raises, while William told himself that it was his contribution that counted, not the paternal acknowledgement. Bastard.

  As for his marriage—Lily had been a part of his life for more than half of his fifty years. Shouldn’t the jagged panorama of his early passion have worn down by now, by the thousands of passing days into a softer, more forgiving landscape? It was, after all, what he noticed in other couples: that gentle domestication. But for Lily, he still yearned. Seethed. Raged. Adored. In return, she was unfailingly kind and ever thoughtful, but how could it be that in all these years, Lily had never once told him that she loved him? He had delivered the declaration to her on any number of occasions, moments when it just spilled out, partly from the joy of releasing the admission when his heart was so full, and partly in the dim hope that perhaps this time she might respond in kind. But it was always the same.

  “I love you, Lily, so much,” he would say.

  “I know you do, Will,” she would reply with a tender smile.

  What the hell was that, anyway? he wondered at that hotel window, bottle in hand. She made him feel like a favorite old sweater you’ve worn until the elbows wear through. The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. The fuse lit, he felt the familiar heat rise in his chest. God damn it, anyway. He knew he was going to throw something. Sometimes he had enough self-control to reach for a pillow instead of a lamp, sometimes not. Pitiful how half the time he couldn’t even remember what set him off. A couple of months ago, he had slammed his fist into the kitchen wall, then simply stood there staring at the dent. That was going to be a nuisance to fix. He wished he’d chosen a painted surface rather than wallpaper.

  Memory surfaced now, and with it the shame. It had been the laundry. One of Stella’s red socks had gotten into the white load, staining one of his favorite golf shirts an uneven pink. He had thrust it at Lily, shouting like the fool he was, before stuffing it into the garbage along with the melon rinds and discarded eggshells. He thought of Lily’s face, and the alarm in her eyes—even fear. She would go to her room after those explosions and stay there a long time. He dropped his head into his hands. His palms were still hot now and pulsing with the need to strike out, but he remained very still, breathing carefully until he was calm enough to reach again for the bottle. It was a quarter empty. At least he hadn’t broken anything.

  The wind was howling outside the hotel now. Rain swept sideways against the window as if William, sheltered in his room, were traveling through the fierce night on a high-speed train. Where could he be bound for in such a hurry? His head was aching and he began to feel a little sleepy. He thought about forcing himself to pour out the rest of the whiskey and put himself to bed. But there was a sound, a knocking barely audible over the violence of the storm. If only he had ignored it, but how was he supposed to anticipate that one tiny sliver of time was going to alter his life forever? There should have been bolts of lightening crashing into the room. Thundering tympani. Something to alert him that he was standing on the brink. Certainly not this hesitant little tap.

  He went to the door. A young woman stood there trembling, drenched. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I heard your TV on and thought … thought I wouldn’t be waking you.”

  His TV was not in fact on, but no matter. “You’re soaking,” he said. She was pretty, but more than that, she was giving off a live current, as if her body had somehow harnessed the storm. He wondered if he’d get a shock if he touched her.

  “I think my lock is broken next door. If I could just call housekeeping for someone to come
…? I can’t get in and I’m so cold.” At this, she broke into sobs.

  William felt a lump form in his throat and reminded himself that he was pretty drunk. But this girl was breaking his heart. He drew her into the room and sat her down on the couch. He fetched some towels, wrapped one around her shoulders and gave her the other to dry her hair. Gradually, her weeping quieted.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “What a display. I should have gone to reception. I guess I felt paralyzed or something.”

  “Would you like some of this?” William asked, holding up the bottle.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  He poured generously, and as she drank, the story came out. Of course, it was all about a man.

  “I guess I thought if I walked out in the storm,” she said finally, “the rain would just wash him away.”

  She was shivering and William could see goose bumps wherever her flesh was exposed. The bath towels were too damp to be of any use now. He sat on the cocktail table opposite her, brought her closer and rubbed her arms to warm them. She leaned forward and kissed him. Her mouth was soft. It was not Lily’s mouth. After all these years. Oh, Lily.

  “It’s my birthday,” William said. What he meant was, despite everything, that kiss had felt like a gift.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  Out of vanity, he was reluctant to tell her. “Fifty,” he admitted after a second. The shock in her face disarmed him. She must have been in her thirties.

  “Do you feel different,” she asked, “turning fifty?”

  “Besides drunk, you mean?”

  “You don’t act drunk.”

  “Sometimes that happens,” he said, remembering times when he had behaved like a cartoon wino, stumbling and lurching and howling at the moon. No predicting. “Yes, a little different, maybe,” he said.

  Getting up that morning, he had checked himself out in the mirror to see if anything had changed. But all he saw was the same bony face, deep-set hazel eyes, a beat-up nose from years on the playing fields, thinning gray hair, which he kept cropped short. He could never understand what it was about that face that women found appealing, but for some reason they did. Over the years, he had developed a ritual around any overly flirtatious woman of making repeated references to his wife. But he didn’t seem to be doing that tonight.