by Sue Miller
“I’m sorry. It never occurred to me …”
“Clearly,” he said, dryly.
She extracted her arm from his hand. “I’m not really dizzy,” she said.
“I just want to keep an eye on you.” They were in their room now. Her bedroom. She turned on the bureau lamp, and he was instantly shocked at how unchanged the room was. As though his absence should have made a difference, especially here. But everything was just as she’d arranged it years before. He looked at the family portraits on the wall. Even the members of his own family in these pictures seemed part of her world, not his, claimed by her arrangement, by her very wish to include them. When he’d lived here, he’d completely stopped looking at any of them. They were as familiar and unseen as the pale paisley wallpaper—which he noticed now was peeling away over a brown spot close to the ceiling. There were stacks of books on the bedside table and floor. Several empty glasses cluttered the bureau.
She had turned back to him. “Well, I’m going to get ready for bed.” She gestured helplessly in mock modesty.
“Okay. I’ll come back in a few minutes. Can I get you anything from downstairs?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I’ll have a drink, I think. Bourbon. Rocks.”
“Okay.” He started out.
“And get yourself one too, if you want one,” she called out.
When he came back with their drinks she was propped up among the pillows, wearing a nightgown, a white one like Nina’s. She’d brushed her hair, he noticed—and felt a moment’s worry about the gauze bandage. He sat down at the foot of the bed.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the glass. She drank two quick long swallows. “Lord!” she said, and leaned her head back.
He lifted his glass and drank too.
“Are the girls okay?” she asked after a moment’s silence.
“They’re fine. They’re watching TV. Some late-night thing.”
“Oh. ‘Creature Feature.’”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“They aren’t too upset?”
“Seemingly not.” He slid back against the footboard. “I’ll go down and sit with them in a while.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that. You should be getting home, probably. We probably interrupted your evening.”
“Not at all. I was reading.” He sat for a minute, remembering the stillness of his apartment, the shattering call of the telephone. It was the time on a Saturday evening when a single person without plans might suddenly feel the impossibility of getting through the night alone; a time of night when David had occasionally found himself trying to imagine whom he might telephone. He had thought he knew who it was the moment he picked up the receiver—a younger woman he’d been seeing up until a few months earlier, a woman who’d often called him late at night, drunk or stoned. Sarah’s slow, small voice itself had startled him, and he’d been ready to be frightened, alerted by his quickened pulse for what followed. “God, it’s a good thing I was there.”
“I know.” She took another swallow and set her glass on the bedside table next to the pile of books. From the side, her bandage looked absurd, like a beanie set low on the back of her head. She looked at him and frowned. “It’s worrisome, isn’t it? And it isn’t good for the girls. Seeing all this. I mean, at least when Mack was still here … Then there was someone normal—I mean, a boy.”
“Well,” he said. “Of course, there’s Bob.”
“Oh well, Bob.” She shrugged.
“He seems perfectly nice to me,” David offered.
“He’s nice enough. It’s just that he’s kind of … well … eunuchy.”
“Eunuchy, Lainey?” He laughed. “Eunuchy? It sounds like a flavor of fudge.”
She smiled. Then said soberly, “But you know what I mean.”
“Maybe I do,” he said.
“It’s just that I hate to think that their sense of what’s masculine, of what’s male, is shaped by seeing Randall. And he’s more sexual now too. They’ve had to learn to cope with that.”
“Well, they’re tough cookies,” David said.
“Poor things.” She grimaced and then’ relaxed back among the pillows. Her hair pushed forward in a dark, soft frame around her face, making her young momentarily.
“I’ll spend the night, I think,” David said.
She flushed quickly. She looked almost frightened.
“I’ll sleep downstairs. Or Mack’s room.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she said firmly.
“I want to. I’m concerned about you. And Randall may wake. I didn’t ever take him to the bathroom, because I wanted to get him to bed fast.”
“Oh.” She reached for her glass and drank from it again. “So you think this bump might be some kind of a problem?”
He lifted his shoulders. “It bears watching for twenty-four hours. It was a hard whack, and anytime you lose consciousness, it’s a troubling thing.”
Her eyes were unreadable dark in the low, yellow light. Finally she said, “Mack’s bed is made up, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. I’ll find a way to get comfortable.” They sat in silence, each lost in thought, for several minutes. David wondered if she had the sense he did of the deep confusion of everything that stayed unarticulated between them.
But when he spoke again, it wasn’t about any of that. He asked her where Mary was.
“Oh, she’s on a sleepover,” Lainey said. “She’s suddenly very popular in school. It’s hard on Nina, actually.”
“Nina’s not?” he asked.
“Nowhere near as much, no.”
Suddenly Sarah appeared in the doorway.
“Hi, Poops,” Lainey said. Then, with a touch of concern in her voice, “What’s up, lovey?”
Sarah looked shyly at David as she came in and stood by the bed. “Can I sleep with you, Mom?”
David felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. For what? For their intimacy, for the way Sarah turned so quickly from him to Lainey?
“Was it too scary on ‘Creature Feature’?” Lainey asked.
Sarah’s eyes shifted quickly to David again, and then she nodded.
“Okay,” Lainey said, and patted the bed next to her. Sarah climbed in, flashing her long legs momentarily, her too-big feet. He saw that her toenails were painted a bright pinky-red. “But you know the story. I’ll take you to your room in the night, right?”
Sarah slid down. Only her face was visible.
“I’ll do that when the time comes,” David said. He had stood up now and moved over by the bureau. He was uncomfortable and almost unable to look at the two of them. Sarah was lying close to Lainey’s body, and her face on the pillow looked younger than her age, blissful and shy.
Now they could hear Nina coming up the stairs and down the hall to Lainey’s room. His eyes met hers at she stood in the doorway—hers were cool, assessing—and then she turned to her mother and sister. “Did she say I teased her?” Nina asked Lainey.
“I did not!” Sarah said, propping herself up.
“I didn’t,” Nina said. “She’s just not old enough to watch that stuff.”
“But you did go ‘Whoooooo,’” Sarah said.
Nina had come in and sat at the foot of the bed on Sarah’s side. Now she made her hands into claws and did it again.
Sarah shrieked and flipped the covers over her face.
David turned away and watched them in the bureau mirror. Nina was bent over Sarah, tickling the wiggling form under the covers. Lainey, laughing, held her glass out away from the commotion.
“Don’t!” Sarah shrieked. “Don’t! You’re killing me!”
When she thrashed too hard against Lainey, Lainey tickled her also with her free hand.
He had a feeling they were doing this for him, all of them. But he couldn’t understand—and maybe they wouldn’t have known either—whether they were trying to pull him in or push him away. It made him nervous and sorrowful, simultaneously. He felt the chilli
ness of his own personality as if it were weather. When he had lived here, been part of them, they had needed him, and he had been aware of what he gave them—some coolness or perspective in the hot glare of Lainey’s emotionality.
Now he wasn’t sure. He knew he hadn’t been a good father to them in these years away, concentrating too much of his attention on Mack. On Mack, because he resisted so. On Mack, because he was the boy. On Mack. Because the little girls seemed all right, happy, and Mack didn’t.
And now here they were, giggling and wrestling, showing him what he’d missed.
“Careful, girls,” he said. “Remember Mom’s head.”
They sat still, panting. Sarah emerged from the covers, her hair mussed and wild. They all looked at his reflection in the mirror.
He turned to face them. “I’m getting another drink,” he said. He held up his glass. It was only half empty, he noted with surprise. “You, Lainey?”
“No. Bedtime. Bedtime for me and Sarey-Berry.” She set her glass down and slid farther under the covers, throwing several pillows onto the floor. “But if you’d get the light, please?”
“I will.”
He picked up the dirty glasses from the bureau and went to the door. Nina had stood up too. “I’m watching the second half,” she said as she pushed past him. A pulse of perfumed heat from her exertions enveloped him. He was startled to realize how tall she was. As tall as Lainey, almost. Her eyes stared into his, nearly level with his own, and then she ran down the hall, down the stairs, her hair like a broad dark ribbon waving across her back.
He flicked the light switch off and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back. “I’ll come get you in a while, Sarah,” he said.
“Okay.” Her voice was dreamy already.
“Good night, David,” Lainey called, as he started down the hall.
He hadn’t been alone in the kitchen for three years, he realized. The yellowed paper shade on the lamp allowed light only over the table. He looked up at the wall around it. The picture of Freud with his family in the garden was still there, spotted and browned with age. There was a clipping of JFK laughing, a photograph Nina must have taken of Randall and Mack together. There were three art postcards, two of annunciations, David saw, moving close to them, and one of Paul as a Harlequin, by Picasso. Underneath all of this someone had taped a three-by-five card with a recipe for Rice Krispies Treat.
David looked again at the Picasso and realized that it was there because someone must have thought it could have been a portrait of Randall at an earlier age. He stared at it—the pretty, otherworldly face, the dark empty eyes. Randall. David thought of how he’d looked this evening, huddled in fear and misery in the corner of the front hall. Had he recognized somehow that he’d hurt Lainey? David suddenly imagined that moment, the frantic push, and Lainey stumbling back, the sharp sickening noise as her head struck. He saw her lying crumpled, as she must have lain, the blood beginning to pulse out under her head in a dark pool.
What if she had died?
What if?
David tried to imagine himself returning to this house, supervising the children, helping them with homework, insisting on chores. Abruptly he recalled a time, years earlier, when he was telling Liddie what to do in what he thought of as a calm, businesslike way—a way he congratulated himself on for being so different from Lainey’s way. Liddie had turned to him in fury and said, “Why do you always have to preside over us? Why can’t you just live with us, like Mother does?”
David added more bourbon to his glass. He stood for a while at the kitchen sink. The plates and glasses from supper were recklessly heaped in it. The potted plants on the windowsill—geraniums—were leggy and brown from underwatering. Dried leaves were sprinkled all along the ledge around them. He was thinking of a patient he’d terminated with recently. She was an older woman who reminded him vaguely of Lainey’s mother. She’d been in therapy for two years for depression. In one of their last sessions together she’d said, “I know you have great theories about why I’m better, but you’re wrong. It’s not because of any of your theories. The reason I’m better is on account of you. On account of the way you are.”
He had been moved by this, touched. But he had said quickly, “Well, that would fit the theories rather nicely too, you know.” She had laughed and said she should have known it would.
But he kept coming back to it later, as he did now. It had made him confront, finally, the growing sense he’d had for, he supposed, years that in the end, all his training, all his ideas about psychiatry, probably mattered less than the fact that somehow he had a gift, a way of hearing, of responding, that helped his patients. Nothing he could congratulate himself on then. Just luck. He had worked with it, to be sure. He had honed it. But it was, at its root, luck. He felt a sudden sense of emptiness, recalling this, and he turned back to the lighted table, to the cluttered images on the wall above it.
When David came into the living room, carrying his freshened drink, Nina, who had been lying stretched out on the couch, tucked her legs under her nightie and shifted to the side to make room for him. “I’m warning you, Dad, you’re not going to like this stuff,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and unwavering on the set—“two burned holes in a blanket,” Lainey would have said.
He sat down and looked at the screen. A man with a boar’s snout and tusks clutched a struggling woman, his human hand over her mouth. Her arched eyebrows rose in anguish, and when his hand slipped, she uttered a series of piercing shrieks from immaculately painted dark lips.
“Wrong,” he said. “There’s nothing I like better than when the hairy beast carries off another nubile maid.” He chuckled theatrically.
“Oh, Dad,” she said, and shifted again, away from him slightly, so that he was looking at the rise of her butt in her white nightgown. They watched together in what David hoped was a companionable silence as the sad tale unfolded—the misunderstood monster, the finally sympathetic beauty, the terrible death. Each time a commercial came on, David went upstairs to listen outside Randall’s room for sounds of his waking, at Lainey’s to be sure she was all right. There was only a steady silence behind Randall’s door and, in Lainey’s room, the twinned slow rhythms of her breathing and Sarah’s.
When the movie was over and Nina had stood up to turn off the television, David asked her abruptly, “Was it scary, Neen?”
She turned around to face him. “Dad! I’m fourteen years old.”
“I don’t mean the movie. I mean when your mother passed out.”
“Well, I didn’t know it right away.” Her voice was bored.
“Did you find her?”
“No. Sarah did We were upstairs, and she came down to see what was on.” Silence. These were not events she wanted to talk about with David.
He cleared his throat. “Well, I just wanted to tell you how well you handled everything. You did just the right things—and in a very grownup way.”
She was swinging nervously, just slightly, from side to side. Her nightie billowed gently with her motion. “Thanks,” she said, in a small, embarrassed voice.
“It must have made you angry with Randall, though, in some sense.”
Her voice tightened. “There’s no point getting angry at Randall,” she said quickly.
“Occasionally, though, people have been known to get angry when there is no point to it.”
She didn’t answer. She had lifted the dark rope of her hair from her back and now was twisting it, pushing the coil against her head as her mother had pressed the bloody towel to her head earlier. She was beautiful suddenly, dark and grave, like a younger Lainey.
“Of course, these occasions are rare indeed. Only a few documented cases in the entire history of Western man. Statistically insignificant …”
She sighed dramatically, impatiently. “I know what you’re trying to get me to say, Dad.”
He smiled at her. “Well, then say it, dammit!”
She laughed suddenly, dropping her heavy hair, and
David felt she’d offered him a gift of great value. “No way, LBJ,” she said, grinning. “Anyhow, I’m sleepy. It’s like, one in the morning or something.” She started out of the living room.
David pushed himself off the couch. “I’m headed up too. I have to check on everyone.” He switched off the living room lights and followed her up the creaking stairs. At the top, Nina opened the door to the third-floor stairwell. The light from above fell across her straight flat hair, her face was in its looping shadow. David reached out, saw her tighten, but touched her anyway, her silky hair, her narrow shoulders.
“Night, Neenee,” he whispered.
She relaxed a little. “Night, Dads,” she said, and stepped up and pulled the door shut behind her.
Sarah woke at his touch, but her eyes stayed blank, without recognition; and then she moaned and turned away. He held her arm, shook it gently. She whined and jerked her shoulder forward. Lainey stirred on her side of the bed.
David decided to carry Sarah. She fussed a little when he slid his arms under her, but her weight was dead as he swung it up, she was utterly limp against his shoulder. His hands touched the bare flesh of her thigh and bottom under her nightgown, where her skin was damp and warm. She smelled of sweat and soap. He shifted her and felt the dry wadding of a bandage, a cotton pad between her legs. Sarah. His heart lurched abruptly for her, for all he didn’t know about her, about any of them.
When he laid her down in her own bed, she curled immediately away from him, whimpered once, and was quiet. He yanked the covers out from under her, then pulled them up again to her chin, patted them close around her huddled form.
He was heading downstairs when he heard Lainey’s faint call. His name. He went back down the dark hall to her room. “Hi,” he whispered.
“Hi,” she said. “Everyone’s asleep?”
“On the way, anyhow,” he said. “How are you?”
“Fine, I think.”
“No headache? No nausea?” He’d crossed to the bed, stood by it. He couldn’t really see her, just the darkness of her hair against the pillows.
“No,” she said. There was a silence. Then she asked, “Randall hasn’t waked?”