by Tom Kakonis
“Now that’s quite a ball, goes that high.”
“Here’s where they cried,” he said solemnly, indicating another of his creations, three small figures centered in a square, either upright and suspended in air or reclining against some flat surface, impossible, in single dimension, to tell.
“Cried?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who cried, Davie?”
“Kids.”
“What kids?”
He turned over his hands, a gestured confusion.
“Where did it happen?”
“In the bed.”
“What made them cry?” she asked, not really wanting to know.
“When the mean man came.”
“Oh,” was all Norma could think to say. She had the slightly queasy sensation of peering over the cragged edge of a deep pit, a child herself, engaged in forbidden explorations and stumbling upon some dark, forbidden place. When Della had asked, just the other day, what Davie remembered of the past, she had murmured, eyes averted, Nothing, he remembers nothing. Which was the truth, or as much of the truth as she cared to uncover. And the way she wanted it to stay. She had no desire to probe the darkness of that time before he came to them. Whatever it might have held, however terrible (and terrible it must have been—why else would he be so skittish, so wary of the world?), it was behind them, over. He was their child now, hers and Dale’s, as surely as if they had conceived and she had carried and birthed him, linked by an urgency of love as mysterious and inviolate as blood itself, maybe even more so, in small requital for all the suffering their blood child had endured.
Dale was right. Nothing served by following such thoughts too far. Rising, stiffly smiling, she said brightly, “Let’s go have a look at the garden, shall we?”
Hands joined, they crossed the sun-hammered lawn and inspected the plot of baked soil and withered vegetation that was all that remained of the Buckley garden. “Dried up,” he said, a child’s blunt assessment of the hard and inescapable truth.
As artless omen, in this present context, it was not cheering, but Norma, drawing from her bottomless well of hope, declared, “Next year will be better.”
Later, tucking him into bed, still mindful of that shadowed context, not quite able to shake it, she felt compelled to say, “This bed is safe, Davie. There’s no mean man anymore. Just Mom and Dad, who love you very much.”
He looked at her solemnly. “You won’t go away?”
“Of course I won’t. Why would you think that?”
“My other mom did.”
“I’m your mom now, Davie. And I’ll never leave you or go away. I promise.”
He made no reply. Merely watched her gravely, this grave little man, with eyes remote and clouded, whether from drowsiness or disbelief she couldn’t be sure, and the vague anxiety she’d experienced earlier, at the earnest interpretation of his fanciful drawings, returned to her now like a muffled thrumming in a distant chamber of her head.
And so, after the patio table was cleared and the kitchen restored to order, Norma found herself gravitating naturally toward the neatly stacked photo albums on the living room shelf. Whenever the steady current of melancholy that coursed beneath her placid features chanced to surface (as now it did), she took solace in those frozen winks of time gone by. She carried the albums over to the couch and began thumbing through them. Several were devoted exclusively to Sara, and certain shots, randomly selected, she lingered over, trying to recover their exact instants, the widening universe outside these narrow clips of space and circumstance and time. Here was the infant Sara, a tiny rubbery bundle of distressed flesh, but where were the cooing, soothing voices that surely must have been in the air? There stood the wobbly toddler, but what sly mischief, achieved or contemplated, had inspired that impish grin? And here she was hunkered down on the seat of a Big Wheel, convulsed in mirth by something done or said, long forgotten, graduated now to bold, pliant-limbed adventuress showered with affection and delighted by the ripening possibilities of a bounteous new world, her perfect trust in that world beaming in the sunny gaze given back to the camera’s eye. A trust misplaced, as things turned out.
She laid the Sara albums on the cushion beside her and began paging through others, their chronologies inverted, paging backward in time. Watching herself and Dale grow steadily, magically younger. Seeing again her parents, and his, the four of them gone now, snuffed out by malignancies, assorted versions of the same plague that lay in blood ambush of their granddaughter, whom none of them lived to see. Some of these older photos were Polaroids, colors paled by the passage of years, the way life had been leached from their departed subjects, smiling their benign, camera-conscious smiles, blissfully unaware of the private catastrophes ahead.
Norma, her griefs and remembered joys a curious enchanted alloy, felt the presence of a strange assembly in the empty room, as though it were peopled suddenly by the departed spirits of the dead, returned to summon from the sorrowed silence of her heart a simple truth: Life is a miraculous gift, all too fleeting and so all the more to be treasured while it remained; and the reminder of that truth kindled in her a wordless pledge to her husband, herself, but most of all to the child sleeping soundly and, she hoped, dreamlessly upstairs.
“Doctor will see you now, Mrs. Quinn,” said the beckoning nurse, voice a peculiar clash of neutrality and uneasy pity that lately seemed to inform the voices of everyone, acquaintance or stranger, who addressed her. Lori put aside the magazine held purely as shield against any unsolicited stabs at conversation, rose with the severe formality of a terminal patient, and followed the starched white uniform down a corridor, conscious, at the announcement of her name, of every eye in the crowded waiting room trailing her. The sly, prying, better thee than me nature of a small town.
For Naperville, despite all its noisy, Watch Us Grow boosterism, was still a small town, and Lori, for all her by now accustomed daze of loss, was keen enough yet to recognize she had been elevated to instant celebrity status, inspiring curious glances and whispered appraisals whenever she ventured outside the house. Which anymore was rarely. And with good cause. Once, in a supermarket, a corpulent woman, utterly unknown to her, came waddling over to exclaim, “Oh, Mrs. Quinn, I want you to know we’re all praying for you. We feel your pain.” As though that pious sentiment, by the simple act of utterance, somehow ennobled its speaker. Pain? What could that lardy, churchy face comprehend of pain? And what were prayers, those monotone mumblings flung at an insentient sky, worth? Less than nothing was the power of prayer, a revelation akin to blasphemy for Lori Quinn, herself a preacher’s daughter, but illuminating all the same, a liberation from the cruel jest of hope. So in response to that unwelcome gush of condolence she had merely turned her back on the woman and, without a word, walked away. And after that she left the grocery shopping to Marsh (what there was remained of it, the consumption of food a spiritless obligation anymore, an annoyance, near to abandoned, the way their lovemaking had been, gross appetites both, emptied of relevance in the wreckage of their lives).
Doctor received her in his consultation office, an austere, windowless room reserved exclusively for the delivery of medical tidings, whether bad, good, or inconclusive. He was seated at an imposing mahogany desk, his framed diplomas and certificates of achievement suspended like halos on the lime green wall behind him, testament to a prescience that, even as with God, canceled the need for article tacked to his title. Grace by grammar. Smiling, professionally cheery, he motioned her to a chair and inquired, “And how’s Lori today?”
“About the same,” she answered truthfully, thinking how cavalierly they appropriate your given name, how insolently. Craig was his. Craig Horton, M.D., a fiftyish man, studiedly avuncular, ruddy and fit himself, presumably as role model for his charges: do as I say and as I do. Same physician who had ministered to her that first terrible night, generously (or perhaps calculatedly, to maintain and reinforce his connection with the college, passport to Naperville’s select frat
ernity of intellectual elite) responded to anachronistic house call.
“Appetite improving?”
“A bit,” she said, not quite so forthcoming.
“Are we sleeping any better?”
She wondered why they had to do that, doctors, affect the plural as though they’d somehow insinuated themselves under your skin, shared your symptoms and experienced your miseries. She wondered, but she said, back in truthful mode, “Seems that’s all I’m capable of anymore, sleep.”
“Still no pep?”
“No,” she replied coldly, put off by his slangy vernacular, conjuring as it did images of some adolescent cheerleader tragically drained of vigor on the eve of the homecoming game. “No pep.”
“Could be the medication,” he conceded. “Tranquilizers can have that side effect, you know.”
“Perhaps I should discontinue them.”
“I don’t believe that’s indicated,” he said, frowning slightly at the presumption of a patient tolerably well educated, yes, but certainly a far distance from the Everest of his own omniscience. “Not at this time.”
“Then what do you recommend?”
Doctor cleared his throat in diagnostic preface. “Well,” he allowed, tapping a file on the desk, “the results of your tests are in, and I’m happy to report everything looks remarkably good. Blood work, X rays—all top drawer. Physically we’re in excellent shape, Lori.”
“Fit as the proverbial fiddle, am I?” Years of living with Marsh and associating with prickly academicians had honed her capacity for irony.
Wasted on him, it appeared, for he replied soberly, “That would be fair to say.”
“So it really is all in my head?”
“This, ah, lassitude you’re experiencing is not of any organic origin. None, that is, we’ve been able to isolate.”
You had to admire it, the way they sidestepped, hedged their bets. Reminded her of her father, nimbly glossing over all the world’s unprovoked and unpunished evil in a twenty-minute sermon. Job’s mystery resolved in a finger snap. Too bad he was gone now, dead less than a year; she’d be interested to hear just how that sanctimonious sophistry explained away the absence of a cherished grandson. To this healer of the flesh she said, “Then I take it there is no remedy.”
Doctor delivered up an indulgent little chuckle. “Well, I shouldn’t think our condition is all that bad. Medically speaking.”
“Then what do you advise?”
He leaned back in the cushioned chair, fixed her with a vaguely benevolent gaze, signal, she supposed, of some thoughtful counsel about to issue from those pursed, bloodless lips. “Tell me, Lori, have you, ah, consulted with Dr. Weiss, as I suggested?”
It had the ring of a trick question, and so she answered evasively, “I saw him.”
“But only once, I understand.”
“You’ve spoken with him?”
“We keep in touch. Professionally.”
“And what did he tell you? Professionally?”
“Only that he hadn’t seen you again. After your initial session.”
“That’s true.”
“May I ask why you’ve chosen not to follow up with him? Dr. Weiss is a very capable man.”
That single “session” returned to her now like an aftertaste of swallowed soured cream, a repugnant memory consciously suppressed. Dr. Aaron Weiss (string out the surname vowels and you got wise: wise Weiss), mender of bruised psyches. So smooth he was, so—what was the word?—oleaginous, this owl-eyed, buttery-voiced shaman, tugging wisely (Weissly?) at a recessive goateed chin, poor man’s Freud, inviting her to disburden herself of distant traumas that conceivably bore on this present one (“The key to all our current woes—” Weiss liked the plural too—“is invariably to be discovered in the past”), concluding unremarkably and after fifty minutes’ wandering exploration of her childhood she had indeed “suffered a personal disaster of truly catastrophic proportions.” That’s how he talked, Dr. Weiss. Semitic throwback to her father, glib abstracters, both of them, of other people’s pain. As if she needed his particular brand of voodoo to tell her that which she already knew. As if any of these doctors, with their magic elixirs and their hollow words, could miraculously materialize a vanished child, undo what was done. She felt a sudden urgent need, near to panic, to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here. “I don’t think he’s what I need just now,” she said. “So if we’re finished…”
“Surely you realize, Lori, there’s no stigma attached to consulting a psychiatrist,” Doctor gently persisted. “Dr. Weiss could be of considerable help in this time of, ah, emotional distress.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not discuss it any further.”
“As you wish,” he said, hale features settled into an attitude of resignation, the mournful look of prophet scorned. He scribbled a renewal of her prescription, fresh supply of the soporific capsules, time-released tickets to a numbed forgetfulness. “Let’s stay with these for another couple of weeks,” he advised. “See how we’re feeling then.”
Still infirm was how, she could have predicted for him but didn’t, feeble as an octogenarian, limp as a narcoleptic, consumed by an ache that defied simile and for which there was no vocabulary (a self-diagnosis with a pronounced whine to it, she recognized, she who had never, in that other life, untouched by serious ailment, been given to whimpery complaint). The way she felt now, exhausted by brief dialogue with Dr. Craig (never knew a Craig, it occurred to her whimsically, who wasn’t something of a prig, this one not excepted—must be the name), worn out by short walk from clinic to blessed silent sanctuary of home (she who had once, another person altogether, thought nothing of a mile-long swim or an hour’s sweaty aerobic jiggle). Home was a misnomer, though, no longer accurate. Call it house, or walled enclosure, empty anymore of the familiar resonances of home.
Such reflections came to her unbidden, sagging in a chair in the house’s living room (also misnamed) darkened against the sun’s slanting light by drawn drapes. First thing on arrival she’d gone straight to the kitchen and swallowed two of the red Nirvana pellets. Only then did she realize Marsh was nowhere in evidence. Just as well. Spared her the effort of speech. Probably still off on his noble quest, Sherlockian pursuit of his fugitive clue. Worse than futile, all that manic scheming, frantic scurrying, doubtless a product of the same guilt that was knotting him, behind all that nervous energy, into a shape twisted and grotesque. The hunchback of guilt. Better to have listened to that policeman who, she had come to believe, had it right the first time: enough spite in this world, enough motiveless malice, for the whole episode on the highway to be nothing more than the wicked prank it surely was.
She had no stamina for it, playing listless Watson to his intense, inept Holmes. Not tonight. Too long a day, crowded with too many faces and voices (well, only one actually, crowd enough anymore). Tomorrow maybe she’d unearth a reserve of buried strength to encourage him on his hopeless mission, be a better helpmate. Maybe tomorrow. But for now she was aware only of a comforting drowsiness settling in, the pills taking hold, slackening her limbs and scrambling her vagrant thoughts, floating her off in the transient charity of sleep.
Marshall, sweltering in his immobile box of a Volvo, its air conditioner undependable in these conditions, cursed loudly and ineffectually and with all the creative flair of a blasphemer new to the art, all restraints waived, all stops out. He had lingered too long (he realized now, too late) on the grass outside the planetarium, lulled by the rhythmic lap of waves on the shore and the gentle touch of a breeze lifting off the lake and the procession of fanciful reveries that tranquil setting evoked, almost a kind of forgotten peace, as though time and trouble were somehow eclipsed, exacted no reckoning. Or arrested by his own baffled impotence, bottled inertia. Whatever the cause, he was paying the price now, stalled on an expressway in a snarl of Friday night rush-hour traffic brought to a dead halt by some collision signaled by whirl of crimson lights in the far distance.
Eventually
, wearying of inventive vilification of mischance and bad judgment and worse luck hurled at the muggy, monoxidal air, he switched on the radio and swept the dial through a dissonance of rock music (quaint oxymoron) till he found a traffic report, chirpy female voice announcing a “serious accident on the Eisenhower at Mannheim.” Yeah yeah yeah, tell us something we don’t already know, bitch. She obliged: “Sorry about that, folks, but that’s Chicago for ya. Try not to let it or the weather—gonna be another scorcher, we’re told—spoil your weekend. And now—”
Marshall cut her off mid-chirp and settled in to wait it out. He glanced absently at the figures behind the wheels, either side of him. To his right a scowling, fashionably tailored fellow, executive on the rise, no doubt, or brilliant young attorney, piloting success statement of a BMW; to the left a power-dressed, pinch-browed woman irritably drumming the dash of a flashy Corvette. Both of them looked to be about his own age, both clearly take-charge types, overachievers, fuming at a circumstance outside their manipulation zones. Tough fucking titty, Marshall thought sourly, wedged in tacky Volvo wagon between these two masters of their destinies. Served them right, traffic tie-ups being fate’s great leveler in this anthill of a city spinning in its dizzying dance of predation. Welcome to fortune’s randomly dispensed ambushes, however trifling in their respective cases (late for the chic cocktail party or the carnal tryst?—horrors!—the world topples!). You want adversity, vicissitude, upended programs, and swamped dreams, ask me, Marshall Quinn, professor of personal cataclysm.
Better yet, ask those dazed, bloodied victims they passed, forty-five minutes later, funneled by flagging cop (another take-charger) into a single lane opposite two collapsed, steaming husks of metal penned in by bustling squads of medics and mechanics and police, methodical salvagers of order. Ask them. Like himself, they were the ones, those glassy-eyed walking wounded, could interpret the mystery of plans shattered as suddenly and effortlessly as glass or steel or bone. Go on, ask.