The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  When I settle myself into the remaining chair at the table, Gloria flicks a glance in my direction, her magnified eyes unreadable, and then looks away. An attendant rolls a cart up to us and reads from the diet sheets Scotch-taped to the tray covers.

  “Kidney diet.”

  Mrs. Barlow raises her hand and gestures to her husband, who may or may not be awake beside her. “He’s kidney, I’m diabetes,” she says. When the trays are placed in front of them, she attends to her husband’s first, gathering up the cutlery and putting it in reach of his age-spotted, trembling hand, opening a napkin over his chest and tucking it into his collar.

  “Low sodium, low fat, jeez, low everything,” says the attendant, setting a tray in front of Gloria. “Yum.”

  My tray is the one remaining, no dietary restrictions.

  “Bon appétit,” says the attendant, mangling the language of my childhood and lifting the cover, releasing a limp waft of steam. I sneak a peek at Gloria’s tray: she has vegetable lasagna and a bowl of carrot coins.

  “Not carrots again,” says Mr. Barlow. Not asleep after all.

  “What?” says his wife.

  “We had carrots last night.”

  “No, we didn’t,” she says.

  “What did we have then?”

  “I don’t remember, but it wasn’t carrots.”

  “All I’m saying is why not a nice bread pudding?”

  “Bread pudding isn’t a vegetable. Oh I remember, we had string beans last night.”

  “Well, that’s no better,” he says. “I don’t like string beans either.”

  “But they’re not carrots.”

  “Of course they’re not carrots,” he says.

  I watch Gloria picking out the lima beans from her square of lasagna, winkling them out one by one with her fork and scooting them over to a small growing hill on her plate. I know what she is doing—she’s hoarding them for a full mouthful. I have always liked lima beans myself, and they can’t be properly tasted in dispersal.

  “How is it?” I say.

  She takes her time chewing, swallowing.

  “Like damp toilet paper,” she says.

  “Mine’s not too bad,” I say, suppressing a reflexive wince at the word toilet at the table.

  “They left the food in yours.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll make another trip to the mall soon.” I inject some heartiness into my voice. “You can acquire some more contraband.”

  She swallows, then sets her fork down.

  “All right, what is it, why are you talking to me?”

  “Just being pleasant.”

  “Why now? You took such pains to be unpleasant before.”

  “You’re very direct.”

  “Neither of us has a lot of time to beat around the bush.”

  “I’m feeling cheerful today.” Maybe my idea isn’t such a good one after all. I lie: “Nothing more than that.”

  She lifts her fork again, puts the last bite of lasagna into her mouth, and chews suspiciously, her eyes on me.

  “Aw, you don’t like lima beans?” the attendant says, appearing at Gloria’s elbow and reaching for her plate.

  “I—” starts Gloria, but the food in her mouth goes down the wrong way and she starts coughing. The attendant doesn’t notice; not even looking at Gloria, she has the plate and is drawing it away. I reach out quickly with my fork. The attendant cries ow and the plate clatters back onto the table.

  “She’s saving those lima beans,” I say.

  The attendant leaves, her hand in her mouth, mumbling around it crazy old bat.

  “Are you all right?” I ask Gloria.

  “Drink some water,” orders Mrs. Barlow.

  “Water’s no good if she’s choking,” corrects her husband. “Raise your arms over your head, that’s good for choking.”

  “She’s not choking,” says Mrs. Barlow, and then to Gloria she says, “Are you choking?”

  Gloria, coughing, shakes her head no.

  “Drinking water’s about the worst thing you could do if you’re choking,” says Mr. Barlow.

  “How is it the worst thing you could do?” argues Mrs. Barlow. “The worst thing you could do is choke.”

  And they’re off again, drawn away from us into the current of their bickering.

  Gloria’s coughing subsides, finally.

  “That was impressive,” she says. “You’ve got reflexes like lightning.”

  “I learned from the best,” I say. “I got my own knuckles rapped a great deal as a child.”

  “Me too.”

  We say it together: nuns.

  Her laughter catches in her throat and dwindles into a cough, a burbling leftover of the previous fit.

  “Uh-oh,” I say, and deadpan: “Quick, drink some water.”

  She fixes her cartoon eyes on me.

  “That’s about the worst thing I could do,” she says. Then she lifts her eyebrows and rounds her mouth into an O of exaggerated surprise. “Why, Miss Clare, I did not know you were capable of a smile.”

  For a moment we sit there grinning at each other, and then her expression frosts over again.

  “So tell me: What do you want?” The no-nonsense voice is back.

  “All right, I do want something. Two things.” It’s the beginning of the speech I have been preparing. “First, I want to apologize. I was very rude.”

  “Well, that’s true,” she says. “Although the etiquette books might say it’s rude of me to point that out. So we’re even, and we’re forgiven. What else?”

  “I wanted to ask a favor of you.”

  She raises her eyebrows, but her expression otherwise doesn’t change. She waits, neither encouraging nor hostile.

  I open my mouth and the words push out of me in a chaotic rush. Nothing like I’d planned. “I want to tell you my story. It’s not just mine. You’ll see. I mean, if you agree.” I’ve never sounded so awkward. “There’s a tape recorder here we can use. They used it for Ellie Schlosser. You didn’t know her. A student recorded her talking. She died, but. They still have the tapes.”

  Gloria listens very seriously.

  Finally, finally I stop babbling, and there’s a beat of silence.

  “I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you asked for something,” says Gloria.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  Lucy

  THE KEY TURNS. A MILD surprise: he hasn’t changed the locks. That doesn’t mean anything, except that he hasn’t bothered. He doesn’t expect me to come back. Or maybe he just doesn’t care if I do.

  I push the door open with a guilty frisson, although I’m not officially trespassing; my name is on the lease along with his. But of course nothing about this has been official. We’re not officially anything. He’s here, I’m there, we’re halved, or at least halving.

  Was the entryway always this dingy? The beige paint is chipped along the molding. The air smells different too—something missing. Had I contributed some personal chemistry to the household? I stand on the threshold and close my eyes, breathe it in—the smell of my marriage, minus me. Cooking odors from the downstairs neighbors who seem always to be poaching onions, plus Joe’s deodorant, coffee, a hint of cigar. Cigar? He quit smoking years ago—or maybe he hadn’t. There was a lot I hadn’t known about what he’d been doing while I had been at work.

  The apartment is neat; he’s a tidy person. There’s a spoon on the drain board and beside it, a coffee cup rinsed and upside down. Not the coffee cup I gave him, but one of the set of anonymous white mugs from the cupboard. The spoon is cheap flatware from the drawer. They’ve recently touched his lips; it seems almost unbelievable that they look so ordinary.

  He might be back anytime; I want to be gone before then. I’m here with a purpose, to get the things I left behind, to drag every bit of myself out of here. I go first to the hall closet and slip my letterman jacket from the hanger. Joe had ordered it in secret from his high school and sewed his varsity letters onto it during even
ings while I was at work. There were a lot of letters: lacrosse, baseball, football. He’d been captain of his football team, MVP twice; the black-and-white photos in his yearbooks show him more often than any other player, flying through the air in a tackle or standing on the field postgame, helmet under his arm and hair soaked with sweat, the muscles in his neck so thick he was barely recognizable as the same person I married a dozen years later. He’d dated cheerleaders then, of course, the popular girls. If we’d gone to the same high school, we never would have spoken.

  “Now you’ve always been my girl,” he said when I opened the Christmas box.

  There had been men before him—I’d even been in love before him—but he was forever for me, and I knew it fairly soon after we’d started dating. So the jacket was perfect, rewriting history, marking the beginning of a shared path, the rest of our lives. I wore it everywhere, although its boiled wool was scratchy and raised hives on my skin.

  I carry it with me now as I go around the apartment, gathering the meaningful and the mundane into the shopping bags I’ve brought. The carved rose soap I store with the linens to perfume the bedsheets; my hairbands; my favorite travel mug. I strip scarves from hangers, pluck shoes from the back of the closet. It all goes into the bags. Thus far it’s rote and pangless, a preamble to what I really came back for.

  In the bedroom, the bed is neatly made with a blanket we’d gotten as a wedding present. I’d never used it—it had always been on the shelf at the top of the closet in a crackly zipper bag, too nice for everyday use. Did he think fuck you when he’d taken it down and shaken it out of its folds, tucking the soft clouds around the mattress? Has he slept with her under that blanket? I go around the bed to the far side, trying not to look too closely. I don’t want to see a dent from her head on the pillow. My pillow.

  A lone navy-blue men’s sock lies curled on the floor. I gather it into my hand. I don’t know how long I’ve stood there, clutching the empty cotton shape of his foot, my mind an aching blank, when the landline rings from Joe’s nightstand. Its shrill sound is startling. I’m unsure what to do. It’s my phone too; the bill is actually in my name. But who would be calling me here? Everyone who wants to reach me uses my cell. The ringing stops and voice mail picks up. I lay the sock on the floor again and turn toward the nightstand on my side of the bed. Finally, what I really came here for.

  For the last few years, Joe and I have been keeping opposite hours—I’d leave for a shift at the hospital before he came home, and when I got back he’d be sleeping; then he’d be gone to work before I woke the next day. Often I’d find a chain of Post-it notes making a paper trail in his distinctive half-capitalized handwriting, cartoons and short notes leading me with love through my morning routine. He knew me so well. Bedside table, bathroom mirror, kettle, teacup, tea canister, milk carton. A note curled into the hole of a pumpernickel bagel in the bag in the pantry: I hope you slept well, sweetie; another under the cardboard lid of the box holding the cream cheese brick in the fridge: I’ll miss you all day. When I’d had to travel out of town to clinical rotations at other hospitals, he’d sent me actual mail—postcards, greeting cards, an origami package folded around a white pebble in the shape of a heart. I kept them all: every note, every card and letter, every silly doodle. Nine years of love crammed into an overflowing envelope, brought along with each move and put into my bedside drawer in the new place as part of making it home. It’s what I’ve come back to get, the only really irreplaceable thing I left behind. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the collection now. Stuff it into a bigger envelope and keep it just in case this is all going to blow over and become something in the rearview, a rough patch that we’ll mention with a rueful smile in years to come? Burn it, a ritual to give closure to our ending? Cherish it, as evidence that I was loved once, in case love never comes to me again? I don’t know, but I want it. I want to take charge of the history of us.

  When I pull open the bedside drawer, it’s empty.

  At first I am so shocked I doubt my vision. I put my hand in, touch the naked wood of the drawer. Had I taken the envelope with me on the day I left?

  It had been a Sunday. A rare weekend off. Since I’d been on overnight that Friday and would need to sleep much of Saturday, it would really work out to a day and a half off. But we had dinner plans on Saturday evening that could turn into a late night, maybe even wine, maybe even sex, since I wouldn’t have to go to work the next day. Joe wasn’t home when I got home; probably at the gym, I figured. He’d be home soon but I went to bed, determined to get in a solid block of sleep so that I could for once be well groomed and alert, fully present at the impending social occasion. When my alarm went off at 3 p.m. he wasn’t back yet. I texted, but got no answer. I showered, then checked my phone; still no answer. Texted again. We’ve got dinner at Nelson and Millie’s where are you The notation Delivered appeared below each text but not Read. I phoned; voice mail. Was his phone off? Maybe he was jamming with the band that kept breaking up and re-forming, renaming itself so often that I couldn’t keep up. They called it rehearsal, although there was no performance in the offing.

  By six, near the time we’d need to leave for dinner, I phoned our friends to tell them we’d be late. That’s all I meant to say, but I don’t know where Joe is spilled out. He’s not answering his phone. Nelson was remarkably calm, told me not to worry, you know Joe, he always lets his battery die. He’d poured soothing words over my anxiety: no need to panic, he’ll be home, you two can come on over whenever, we’re totally casual over here. And an afterthought, probably prompted by the feminine murmuring I could hear in the background of the call: you’re welcome to come over by yourself if you like. I’ll just wait for Joe, I said. Thanks.

  Later I realized that he must have known. Everyone knew everything, it seemed, but me.

  By 10 p.m. I was pacing the apartment, jumping every time I heard the click of the downstairs entryway door echoing up through the building. But it was always a false alarm, footsteps going by our apartment door and on upstairs while my heart rate decelerated. I told myself that the explanation would turn out to be simple: Joe had forgotten our Saturday plans, he’d mixed up this weekend with another and thought I’d be sleeping and then working, so he’d made plans of his own, with other friends. At midnight I realized that that excuse was losing validity. Even if he had been out with friends, even if they’d gone on to a club after dinner, he should be coming home by now.

  I wondered if I should call the police. Could he be considered officially missing? I hadn’t seen him since the previous evening, when I’d left for work. Just about twenty-six hours before. An involuntary slide show played in my mind’s eye: his truck wrecked against a barricade on I-95, the EMTs cutting into the cab to extract him. I surrendered to that vision, let it play itself out. EMS would get him into the ambulance, boarded and collared, and then go through his wallet for ID. They’d find the card I’d put there long ago, grim benefit of my experience, “Next of kin:” printed on it and my mobile number. Now they’ll call me, I thought, lying on the bed and holding the phone. Now. I tried to replace the car-crash reel with others: Joe at a downtown club, standing right in front of the speaker the way he’d do, his head down, listening to the music intently as if straining to hear a subliminal message. I could almost see it, but then the red and blue lights of police and rescue would wash over the scenario and take me back to the roadside, looking at a twisted hulk of metal and a sweep of shattered glass.

  After three phone messages, I confined myself to texting. Texts of one word or two, some magical-thinking attempt to jolt the preceding ones out of a clogged virtual pipeline. They all said Delivered but never Read. Had his phone run out of charge? But even if it had, where would he be at two in the morning? The thing I simply didn’t have an answer for: Where was he?

  Seeing Joe unconscious behind a spiderweb-cracked windshield for the hundredth time, I went to the bedside landline, holding the mobile like a talisman in my other hand.

>   “Hi, Sue,” I said to the secretary who answered. “It’s Lucy.”

  “Hey, Dr. Cole. You joining us tonight?”

  “No, I’m not on. How is it there?”

  “Knock on frickin wood, we just ordered out. Don’t say it.” She didn’t want me to utter any of the verboten words: quiet, calm, slow.

  “Any traumas tonight? I’m—” I swallowed. “My husband’s truck is gone. He’s not answering his phone. And it’s raining.”

  “I’ll check.” Snapping out of her social languor, voice crisping up, computer keys clacking. “Nothing since I got here at eleven. We had an MVA earlier—oh, that was a motorcycle.” Tap tap tap. “A COPD exacerbation, an MI, an overdose.” Her voice lingered on the last word. Then she added, “Okay, the overdose was female.” More typing. “Nothing under Cole.”

  “I kept my name,” I said, and spelled Joe’s for her, R-E-I-D-Y. “I last saw him Friday evening around ten.”

  “Nothing,” she said after some more clacking. “I checked all the traumas and admissions since Friday, including all the Does. He’s not here. Did you check Pawtucket? Or could he be down at Newport for any reason?”

  I phoned all the hospitals, and in between texted him, an anguished digital shout, Where are you I’m really worried

  The rest of that night was a sleepless tunnel clutching my phone, opening my eyes to every notification that flared light through my eyelids: Instagram: jb16v liked your photo and MicroWeather: rain stopping in six minutes!

  Finally, finally, at dawn Sunday morning I went hunting. First his desk and the drawers of hanging file folders. I looked at the joint credit card statements he had neatly filed, the ones that I had paid each month without even looking. Fanning the papers out, scanning the itemized charges, I found restaurant names I didn’t recognize, concert tickets for a show I hadn’t heard about. Those were not clearly damning: he could have told me about the concert and I’d forgotten, and the restaurants could have been innocent outings with coworkers.