Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  He is okay. The children are okay.

  He sends me a video. I press play. Henry throws the Frisbee and yells, “In your nuts!” His voice echoes across the empty playground.

  I put down the phone. The electric kettle is warming and the table is scattered with my coffee grounds and some other artist’s dried paint. The light is paling in the tall windows above the desk. There is a long winter ahead of us, but now December is young, the woods brown and gray, and there has been little snow yet.

  IRONY 4

  A person who brings others such joy finds his own joy so elusive.

  BOMB CYCLONE

  The bomb cyclone, the first storm of 2018, has covered the Northeast in snow. Ithaca is just on the edge of it, but here it is always cold. We send the kids to school on January 4th, bundled, waxed in lip balm, but on the 5th the wind chill is below zero, and school is canceled. In two weeks, we’ll move to the house down the road. We stay home and pack boxes and watch Naked and Afraid, and the kids build a box fort that would provide expert-level shelter on any croc-infested island. They hunker down in it and do Mad Libs by the light of Aaron’s camping flashlight, then fall asleep in it, bundled in his sleeping bag.

  Upstairs in bed, Aaron swipes between two pictures—one of Henry in his room in front of his massive grown-up shadow, and one of his own leg in the shower, snapped earlier that day, gushing clotty blood into the drain. “Stop looking at that,” I suggest.

  Both pictures bring him to the edge of crying. He swipes back to Henry, his shy smile, two teeth lost last week.

  “I have such a good life,” he says. “It kills me that I can’t enjoy it.”

  On Naked and Afraid, there is always a survivalist who’s too tough to cry, until he isn’t anymore. Then his partner tells him it’s okay to show emotion.

  “Hell yeah it is,” Aaron says to our young survivalists. “I cry at least once a day.”

  This is not news to our kids, who are mostly interested in the blurred, bug-bitten backsides of the contestants.

  That night, at one in the morning, I wake up to Aaron chewing what sounds like pretzels in the dark. He is chewing, and then he is snoring. I nudge him. “Honey, finish your food.”

  He laughs, chews some more, then he’s snoring again.

  I poke him. “Honey.”

  He laughs, finishes his pretzel, snores again.

  I poke him. “Can you turn over please?”

  “Turn over? Why would I turn over?”

  “Not all the way. Like on your side.”

  He turns on his side. Still he snores.

  I take my pillow down the hall to Henry’s bedroom, closing the door so his snores won’t follow me. I sleep on the bottom bunk.

  At three A.M., I hear his struggled shuffling in the hall. “I need help I need help I need help.”

  I bolt up, go to him, hold him up by the shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  “My leg. My leg.” He is writhing while standing up. He is incoherent, irritable, breathing deeply. I don’t understand what’s happened—is it his wound? Is his leg swollen? Is he trying to go downstairs for more pretzels?

  “Cramp,” he says, “in the back of my knee,” but as he says it, it seems to be easing. He’s wincing, he’s hopping, but he’s quieting.

  “You almost killed me,” he says.

  “I almost killed you?”

  “I was calling for you. I was calling and calling.”

  I tell him I’m sorry. I didn’t hear.

  Now he is shivering. “I’m cold,” he says, and I see that his teeth are chattering.

  “You probably have an infection,” I say, walking him back to our bed. He lies down, still writhing, and I cover him with the duvet. I try rubbing his arms to warm him up, but he says, “Careful of my skin.”

  For a few seconds I watch him struggle under the sheets. We’re both helpless. Then carefully, sitting beside him, I cover the top of his body with the top of my body, offering him my warmth. The air goes out of his lungs, and on his next breath, he is snoring.

  * * *

  We do move into the new house. We do, on a mild day in late January. We write the movers a check. It’s taken them two loads of their giant truck. We have twice as much stuff as we thought we did.

  The first night, I climb on to the kitchen island and lie facedown on the Caesarstone counter. I kiss it. “I’m gonna sleep here,” I tell Aaron.

  The kids, they still aren’t thrilled. They miss the old house, down the road.

  “But it’s so much bigger!” we say.

  In February, my dad moves in. It was part of the plan: in the new house, we’ll have room for my dad. It’s our turn to take him, after many years of his living with Sam’s family outside D.C. Sam has moved to a new house, too, and my dad’s room was in the basement: no windows, steep stairs, a furnace that makes all kinds of noises in the night. Each time a visitor asks him how he likes it here, he says, “So quiet! Except for two of the loudest grandchildren in the world.” He ruffles Henry’s hair. The room is small, a converted foyer, big enough only for a couch and a TV. But he is easy to please. He likes the light that comes in the tall windows, the proximity to the bathroom and the coffee machine.

  The only thing that feels off: he doesn’t smoke anymore. Sam and Keri convinced him to quit when he moved into their new house. His pipes are gone. Every once in a while, he makes a joke about going to the tobacco shop, and I say, “Sorry, Dad.” He has a ten-year-old heart bypass, and I want to keep his heart pumping.

  A few days after my dad arrives, Aaron and I are back at urgent care, the one with the Pac-Man arcade game in the waiting room. The kids are sad they can’t come with us. We leave them home with my dad.

  We fear it’s the flu. The flu is bad this year. Kids and grandparents are dying of the flu. Last week Aaron reconnected with an old friend from Florida on Facebook. They thought they both had the flu. How long does it last? the friend asked. Couple weeks, Aaron said. Within a week the friend was dead. The year before he’d nearly died from years of drinking. His immune system was shot.

  Now Aaron is thinking about his own liver, what he’s done to it. The scale has tipped 200 again. He has the bloated neck, the barrel belly, of the Bad Time, the months he looked like he’d drowned in gin. This time it’s vodka. I know, he says before I can say it, I know. On the new season of Stranger Things, a character extolled the healing virtues of vodka, and Aaron raised his eyebrows. See? Sometimes whiskey, sometimes gin, but always vodka. “I don’t care what anyone says,” Aaron says. “I know myself. It’s the one thing that works.”

  But the flu. That’s what it must be now. For weeks he’s been drained, throwing up, short of breath. Yesterday he tried to climb the hill behind our new house to explore the graveyard with our kids—Aaron, a little drunk, told Nico about the graveyard, and he wasn’t scared—and he could barely make it. Today, late on a Friday afternoon, he spiked a fever. So: urgent care, the one in the plaza between the Chipotle and the Supercuts. Aaron jokes with the nurse that he needs a frequent-user punch card: every tenth copay should be free.

  The doctor, who looks a little like Aaron’s mother—the same firm, flat mouth; the sharp, slim nose; the makeup that looks painted on—does not swab Aaron for a flu test. She takes one listen to his chest and calls for a chest X-ray. “Could be bronchitis or pneumonia,” she says. Aaron goes back for the X-ray, returns to the exam room. On the little TV above the sink, Couples Retreat is playing mutely.

  We peck away at our phones. We read the news. The Winter Olympics. The Parkland shooting. Trump’s playmate affairs. Aaron is feeling better after the Tylenol the nurse has given him, and sheepish: maybe all he needed was a Tylenol. He hates nothing more than looking stupid, of asking for help when he doesn’t need it.

  After half an hour, I go out to the desk to check on the results. The doctor is squinting at her computer. “The tech still has the chart locked,” she says, confusion in her voice. That means the remote technician is reading th
e X-ray. “He should be done by now.” She’ll try to call him.

  Fifteen more minutes pass before she returns to the room. I’m sitting on her rolling stool so she stands against the door, far from Aaron, as though she might want to make a quick exit. “How long ago did you quit smoking?” she asks.

  “Six years,” Aaron says, not hesitating. This month is six years since my mother died of lung cancer, after a dozen years with COPD. His mother, too, has died of COPD, less than a year ago.

  “Your lungs show significant changes,” she says. I wonder how she knows how they’ve changed, what they looked like before. “They show emphysema. That’s why the tech took so long.”

  Aaron looks at me, eyebrows raised—is this a big deal?

  “Fuck,” I say.

  He looks back to the doctor. “Fuck,” he says.

  “You also have bronchitis,” the doctor says.

  I picture the X-ray tech alone in a room somewhere peering at the gray sacks of my husband’s forty-five-year-old lungs. What did he see, in those ink clouds and smudges? The twenty years of cigarettes, give or take? The two packs a day of Marlboro Reds?

  “And all that pot,” Aaron says from the passenger seat on the way home, staring at the windshield in disbelief. He will call his doctor for a referral to a pulmonologist. It’s good they caught it now, the doctor says, while he is young. She’s prescribed steroids and antibiotics until then, and we say thank you, thank you so much.

  We’re sitting at a red light behind Chipotle when he says, “And that’s not all. I smoked heroin.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I didn’t know that,” I say.

  “What’d you think? You know I didn’t shoot it up.”

  “I thought you snorted it.”

  “I did that, too.”

  The blinker ticks. We are waiting to turn left, the day turning to night in the moment before the light changes.

  “It would have been really nice if you hadn’t spent so many years trying to destroy your body,” I point out.

  We are not arguing. We are both sitting there, strapped into our seats.

  “Well, for a long time I did want to kill myself,” he says matter-of-factly. “Now I don’t.”

  * * *

  In March, Dad slips on the bathmat, falls, and breaks two ribs. I’m at a birthday party with Henry while he lies on the bathroom floor, calling out for help. Aaron is downstairs sleeping. Nico is in his room on the other side of the wall with his headphones on. When he finally goes into the bathroom, Dad has been lying there for thirty minutes.

  “Not a great welcome, Dad.” He’s in his regular warm spirits, but I feel terrible. I have underestimated, it seems, what it will mean to have another body, a brittle body, in this house.

  When my dad gets out of the hospital, we buy Nico a Gizmo watch. The three of them, it occurs to me, all need the same amount of looking-after: the eighty-six-year-old, the nine-year-old, the forty-five-year-old. Together, they look after each other. I’ll feel better leaving them alone if I can reach Nico. The watch is red; he wears it gleefully. He can call five programmed numbers. He can text nine programmed messages: On the way. Where are you? We can program custom messages, too. I program two:

  You are a badass mom.

  Dad needs you.

  * * *

  It takes weeks to get an appointment with the pulmonologist. When we do, she looks at Aaron’s chest X-ray and confirms it: the spot of emphysema on his lung. She orders another, to be safe.

  On the second X-ray, the spot is gone. You don’t have emphysema at all, she tells Aaron.

  We are relieved. But confused. What do you mean, he doesn’t have emphysema?

  The pulmonologist cannot explain it. It was there, and now it’s gone.

  * * *

  I wake to the slamming open of the pocket door. Aaron is yelling. He is yelling at me to get out of bed and take him to the hospital.

  It’s the middle of the night: 2:00 A.M.

  “You have to look at this! You have to look at this!”

  The lights are turned on. An arm is thrust in my face.

  “Aaron, please!”

  “You have to look at this. You have to look!”

  “Aaron,” I whisper. “You have to be quiet.”

  “Fuck quiet! You have to see this NOW.”

  I fumble for my glasses. I put them on. Aaron is in a gray T-shirt and underwear. I say, “What is it?”

  “Shit is coming out of me. Parasites!”

  His arm is a bloody mess. He is rubbing the skin, trying to force something out.

  “I can’t see when you’re doing that.”

  He needs me to follow him to the family room, to see better. He shoves his arm under the lamp on the speaker, spattering blood on the white wall of our new house, and I see that there is already blood on the wall, and sweat, a steamy, bloody shower, and I understand that he has been standing under this lamp all night, staring at his arm, rubbing it unceasingly, there is blood on his T-shirt, and a hole in its hem. I fixate on this hole; it is the only thing that seems real.

  In the corner, the dog stands from his bed. His collar jingles. “You’re scaring Zabby,” I say. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Nell, you don’t understand! You need to take me to the hospital!”

  “I’m not taking you to the hospital!”

  “I’ll drive then.”

  “You can’t drive like this!”

  “I’ll take a cab!”

  “You’re not going to the hospital! You’re a mess. They’ll send you to the psych ward, Aaron.”

  “They won’t! They’ll see I have parasites. They have to see them.”

  “I can’t see them, honey.”

  “How can you not see them? Are you fucking crazy?”

  He laughs maniacally. Maniacally is the word in my head.

  “Drink some water,” I say helplessly, handing him the Nalgene bottle from the coffee table.

  He bats it away. “Look at this look at this look at this.”

  “Aaron. Sweetie. You have to calm down.”

  “Please please please take me. Help me!”

  “Please please please calm down.”

  He is pacing, sweating, swearing, begging. I stand in the center of the room while he circles around me, knocking into things. Any minute the boys will be awake. They will come down the stairs and see their father, raving mad. Raving mad are the words in my head, this is what raving mad looks like. I am both in my body and out of it, looking down from above, he has passed into a new state and so have I, when I take the Nalgene bottle and dump it over his head.

  He collapses on the floor, back against the couch.

  “What are you doing! What have you done! You’ll wash them away! You’ll wash them away! They can’t see them if you wash them away!”

  Then I too am collapsed on the floor, and I am crying. My husband looks like a doll who has been dropped by a fickle child, his limbs bent grotesquely. Lost his shit, are the words I hear, in his voice.

  “Okay,” I say quietly. “I will take you. I will take you to the hospital, but we’re going to the psych ward.”

  He is unreachable now, mumbling to himself, crying.

  In a daze I walk up the stairs to my dad. Somehow the children have managed to sleep through it, but my dad is sitting there on the couch, waiting for me.

  “I’m taking Aaron to the hospital. He’s seeing things. He thinks he’s covered in parasites!”

  “Oh, honey.” He holds me while I cry.

  Downstairs, though, Aaron says, “I’m not going to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to the psych ward! I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re seeing things, Aaron. You’re not yourself.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Please. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You’re very sick.”

  “You’re going to take me to the p
sych ward.”

  I realize I am very tired and do not actually want to drive to the hospital. I don’t want to deal with any of this.

  “Fine,” I say. “We’ll go in the morning.”

  Somehow, he lets me bring him to bed and accepts a Seroquel. His body is heavy beside me, steaming with sweat. Slowly his breathing eases into sleep. And I am envious, so envious, of those 600 milligrams of oblivion. I want to sleep until it’s over.

  MANHATTAN AVENUE

  2001

  Three days after I graduated from college, I took a bus to New York City and moved in with a very tall and very handsome gay stranger named Phillip. For a month I lived in his studio apartment on Madison Avenue, watching the beautiful pastel city through the giant window above my downy white guest bed. Everything in the apartment was white. It was a work of minimalist art—no couch, no television, no microwave. “Where’s the garbage?” I asked Phillip, holding a pitiful fistful of trash.

  “Oh, I don’t have one,” he apologized. “I just bring it out to the street.”

  He was the executive assistant to the editor-in-chief at a glossy lifestyle magazine, a friend of a friend, and I was to take over his afternoon shifts while he studied for the MCAT. I was living with him until Aaron moved to New York and our lease started.

  Aaron and I knew we wanted to move to New York when I finished college. At first I’d planned to apply to grad schools there. Then I decided to put grad school off. Get some life experience first, every single professor advised. I felt that every year of being Aaron’s girlfriend was worth seven years of real-life experience, and I was proud of this, this is what I’d wanted, but I didn’t tell my professors this. “Are you married?” one of them asked before workshop one evening, as we waited for the classroom before us to empty. She pointed to the silver band on my ring finger. I was proud of this, too, that my professor would assume I was the kind of nineteen-year-old who would be serious enough to get married. “It’s just kind of a promise ring,” I told her. Aaron had a matching one. He’d been saying we should get married since we’d moved in together, and when I told him not yet, and he asked, “Why?” and I said, “I’m eighteen,” he looked at me as though this was a ridiculous reason.