by Serra, D. A.
Alison looks up. She is on her back porch stoop breathing heavily. How did I get home? Wait. She doesn’t remember. I ran? Did I run all the way home? She looks down at her feet. They’re filthy and bleeding from numerous cuts and stubs. Her toes are numb and white from the cold. Oh, god. What’s happening to me? She raps on the back kitchen door. Jimmy opens the door and looks warily at his mom.
“Mom?”
She forces normal, “Hi, honey.”
“What are you doing?”
“Left my keys by accident.”
“You don’t have any shoes on?”
“Oh, ah, yeah, stubbed my toe and I just…my shoe didn’t. Enough questions young man.” She pushes past him and goes upstairs.
In the bathroom, she turns on the hot water faucet for her sink. As it fills with steaming water she closes the connecting pocket door that leads to Jimmy’s bedroom, leaving the door to her room opened so she can hear. Pulling off her shredded stockings she tosses them in the little bathroom trash pail. She pulls a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the vanity cabinet and pours a bit into the hot water. Sliding up onto the bathroom counter she plunges her feet into the sink to soak. I know what I saw. The hot water hits her toes and they feel like she is walking on fire! She scrunches up her face, vigorously shakes her feet and leaves them to soak. She knows this happens when one is close to frostbite. I know what I saw. She massages the toes encouraging circulation. God, did I look like a crazy woman running barefoot down Hilldale? Who saw me? She drops her forehead to rest on her bent knees and allows the hot water to do its job, to coax life back to her damaged and frozen toes. I know what I saw. The hydrogen peroxide will be an adequate disinfectant because the street was so cold it is unlikely any kind of infection can result from these cuts. I know. Over and over in her head like a line from a song she cannot let go of: I know what I saw. It repeats without her thinking it. It repeats in time with her heartbeat.
Jimmy watches his mom all through dinner with trepidation. His conversation stutters around in aimless fits and he feels no subject is the right one. Clearly, school did not go so well for his mom, but she is resistant to discuss it. He thinks it could be because her car broke down, but he doesn’t believe that is what it is. It feels like more of that other stuff, when she’s here but she’s not here, he thinks. He keeps looking at her and hoping he will see her like she was this morning. He desperately wants to see his mom again.
Jimmy answers his dad, “No I went home with Alan because we had a project. Mom stayed after for work.”
“Oh.” Hank senses her slipping away just like Jimmy does.
“So…” Jimmy shrugs, “I guess I’ll go do my homework.”
“Okay, son, always a good plan.”
Jimmy carries his plate to the sink and goes to do his homework.
“So you walked home then?” Hank asks her as casually as he can manage.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you call Triple A?”
“I just didn’t.”
“Did the engine turn over?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of? Alison, did it seem like the battery or something else? I can go over and take a look tonight at the school. Give me your keys.”
“No, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
“Honey, I’m happy to go and -”
“I’ve got it!” she snaps at him. She can’t tell Hank what happened. This is an impossible situation for them, they are too close to hide things from each other, but she knows she must stay quiet. She realizes some people think she’s becoming unbalanced. And I suppose, she thinks, I’m not altogether certain they aren’t right. I suppose there is a scintilla of doubt there. How can I not have doubts when what I see and hear is inconsistent with what everyone around me thinks and says? How do I rectify these contradictions? She holds her husband’s eyes and Hank sees the confusion, he recognizes the distant look, and they both know she is lying. Hank had believed they were making progress and so he swallows the disappointment and he looks away. He wants to be patient, but he is beginning to feel like Alison isn’t fighting to come back to them. His impatience is becoming unwieldy and he wants their life back. He can’t persist in ignoring the consequences of her continued detachment on their son. It perpetuates Jimmy’s injury and lengthens his recovery time. The impenetrable mask that seemed gone for good this morning is still there. It separates his son from the mother he urgently needs and the threads of Hank’s compassion are fraying as he saw unequivocally the loss on Jimmy’s face at dinner. Alison picks up the dinner plates and carries them to the sink. She peers out the kitchen window into the pitch black of the backyard. Get spotlights, she thinks. She scrapes the leftovers into the disposal. Hank wipes the counters. As he passes the controls, he switches on the music system and Ray Charles enters the room. Hank sings along “Georgia…” At least there is solace in the music. Alison lifts her head from the sink. She walks over and switches off the music.
“No Ray Charles? Feel like someone else?”
“No music.”
Hank looks at her as if she is speaking gibberish. “What do you mean?’
“No more music. We can’t have music.”
“All night?”
“No music for a while.”
“Why not?” He’s been patching the family back together by himself, trying to be everything for both her and Jimmy, but now the nightmare is over. He does not have any more energy left for this. His music is not negotiable. It is his identity. He feels his temper rise up and his face turns red. She knows me, he thinks! She knows about music and me. She knows this if she knows anything.
“This is a little like telling me to stop breathing.”
“It’s too loud,” she says.
“So I’ll turn it down.”
“No. We can’t hear.”
“Can’t hear what?”
“Anything.”
Hank raises his voice as he eggs her on, “Like what?” He whips down the kitchen towel and turns to her taking it on. The vein on his forehead is pulsing. She stops scraping the dish, carefully puts it down, and turns to face him.
“We need to hear if someone is around.”
“Someone who?”
She grits her teeth, “We can’t get sloppy!”
The scab is ripped off between them.
“He’s dead, Alison!”
“On the contrary, he is loving this! The squirming, the fear, the game of us wondering.”
“We’re not wondering.”
“Yes.”
“Alison! For god’s sake, wake up! This isn’t a game it’s our lives! You’ve got to pull it together. I’ll do whatever I can to help, but you’ve got to try!”
Jimmy innocently opens the swinging kitchen door.
“Hey, Dad, I need robot batteries.”
“End table in the foyer.”
“Okay.” Jimmy turns and exits.
Alison remembers that is where she keeps the handgun. She goes after him. “No! Wait. I’ll get…”
Hank grabs her arm. “It’s not in there.”
“What?”
“The gun isn’t in there.”
Angrily, “Where is it?”
“I got rid of it.”
Furious, she yells, “Have you lost your mind?”
For a sour moment, they stand like that: Hank with his fingers harshly gripping her arm and Alison half-turned toward the door. The words she just spoke bang around the room. She knows what he is thinking. He thinks she has lost her mind. That is what he thinks. That is what everyone thinks. Too bad, I know what I know. I know it’s not over. I can feel he’s around.
“Hank, something strange happened out there between us.”
“No, we’re still the same.”
“Not you and me - me and him.”
“You and him! Now there’s a you and him? There is no you and him.”
“Something…some kind of animal thing passed between us and I’m trying to protect us.”
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nbsp; “You want to protect us? To protect our family? Give me back my wife! Give Jimmy back his mother!” They are squeezed in a fist of conflict. It is all so wrong. They know it is wrong, and they both want it to end, but they cannot see through the fog of the storm between them. They are both certain they are right and being so certain makes compromise untenable.
“I wish you understood.” She pulls her arm away. “But I can’t pretend it is not happening.” She walks toward the swinging door.
“Alison!” She stops never having heard that tone from her husband. There is danger in it; it feels like a tipping point. “It is not happening.” She does not feel quite as defiant as she looks when she spins around and pushes through the swinging door. Hank pushes his way out the back kitchen door. He shoves his hands into his pockets and walks around the frozen backyard in circles crunching the rigid blades of grass under fuming feet.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
The following morning the pacing continues unabated inside Doctor Cartwell’s office. Hank walks around with such concentrated power he has created an oblong-shaped discernible path in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Inside the office, with its cushy armchairs and dark linen drapes, Hank feels it is allowable to let go. A candle burns on the shelf of the bookcase soothingly scenting the air with lavender heightening the sensation of being in a meditative space, a place where it is okay to lift the burden from his shoulders and stash it by the door until he can pick it up on the way out. Hank oscillates between anxiety and wrenching sadness, but his most pressing emotion is his mounting anger, an anger that has begun to bleed through the reinforced borders of his façade His goodness is leaking.
Doctor Cartwell says, “I want to talk about you, Hank. What you’re feeling.”
“What I’m feeling? Okay. Sure. Let’s see. I feel infuriated beyond reason. The blood in my veins is angry, the hairs on my head are angry, my skin is cracked and itching because the anger has dried me out.” His voice grows louder as he rants. “I’m mad at the streetlights, at the clock on the stove. I’m mad at the food on my plate. I’m mad at a god I don’t even believe in! I feel like shaking someone to death! Yes, to death, that’s it! That’s how I feel like I want to shake and shake until I shake the life out of something and after all that shaking I know I will still be the same joke of a man I was before all the shaking.”
“You think you’re a joke?”
“The whole time, from the first moment at the camp, I’ve been worthless as a father, as a husband, as a man. I couldn’t protect my son. I couldn’t help my wife. I can’t control anything. I can’t fix anything. I’m useless.”
“You were tied up.”
“I’m not tied up now! She’s losing it and I still can’t help. I thought after a little time things would return to normal. The guy is dead. We have proof he’s dead. I thought she would feel safe again, safe with me, but the truth is she isn’t safe with me and now she knows that - she knows that for sure.” He is shattered. “And that really hurts, you know, for the woman you love to see you in that way. Isn’t there some kind of tacit social contract, or maybe it’s a basic instinct thing that the female is protected by the male? We’ve upset some kind of natural order.”
“I don’t think she’d feel safe with anyone right now. This is really not a reflection on you, Hank.”
“I wanted to save my family. I still want to save my family. Maybe another husband, another man, could’ve done something dramatic, or heroic, or at least mildly effective.”
“You’re confusing real life for any number of fictional Bruce Willis characters. If you would have been the one left out in the cold that night at the camp you would have done as much or more than Alison.”
“I don’t know that. You didn’t see what she did.” Hank stops pacing and leans against the large desk. His voice becomes distant. Doctor Cartwell listens with great focus and lets Hank’s thoughts wander aloud. “Even though we are aware on some practical level from hearing the news every day that there is no such thing as “fair” we still function as though there is. I guess we have to. We live in this pathetic illusion that if we are good people then life will be fair. Maybe that’s the only thing that keeps us civilized. The bottom line for us all is the belief that being good will lead to some kind of cosmic fairness, maybe we all believe in that kind of karma. Maybe that’s why religions invented an afterlife: how else could you explain the unfairness except to believe there had to be more, that there must be a payoff later? And even when people say all the time, well you know life isn’t fair, of course you know that,” Hank throws up his hands, “we all know that, but we still live every day as though it is fair, and we still act surprised when it isn’t. When Mike hit the floor dead at my feet, I knew that fair thing was over for me. Life is random. Death is random. Goodness is a choice with no predictive value. Any one of us good or bad can die face down in the gutter tonight. I remember reading about this woman who had been a foster mother to like fifty kids, and who was a revered and loved woman in this poor neighborhood, and she was murdered one day on her front lawn for the four dollars in her purse. There is no balance. The lady holding the scales of justice isn’t blind so she can be fair, she’s blind so it is random, she’s blind because the facts don’t matter, the circumstances don’t matter, she’s blind because it’s a game to her, she’s like a little kid with her hands over her eyes playing fucking hide ‘n seek with all of our lives! And, you know what, Doctor, knowing all of this is not particularly comforting.”
Cartwell waits before he speaks as a show of respect. Hank’s words have been heartfelt and revealing. Then, he says gently, “Perhaps goodness is its own payoff.”
“Resorting to platitudes, Doctor? What if people start to actually believe, believe every day the real truth, the truth that life isn’t fair, does civilized society fall apart?”
“I don’t know. But it is not that life isn’t fair all the time, it is that sometimes it’s not fair.”
“Fair is an all or nothing thing. How do I explain that to a regular guy sitting here in his expensive office playing by the rules and watching the days go by with seeming predictability, and believing that people are civilized, believing you are in control of your life, and that there’s some rationale behind things. How do I explain how helpless you actually are, how everything you’ve learned in one moment can mean nothing the next, how the person you are is completely irrelevant? You look at your life and you see you’ve been kind and lived considerately and you think that matters, and then some guy points a gun at your little boy’s face and your little boy looks to you for help and all you can do is screech like a rodent in a glue trap. I can’t explain to you what it is to be that kind of powerless. Turns out you are not a man like everyone has told you. You are worthless. This is a world full of monsters and predators and without the biggest weapon, you are just so much meat. And when you understand that then the screaming starts inside of you and it doesn’t stop. I don’t know who I am supposed to be right now. I surely don’t know who Alison is. There is no reason on earth why she should remain mentally stuck back at that camp. Maybe the screaming inside of her is too loud to get over. Maybe that’s why I can’t reach her because she can’t hear me over all the fucking screaming?”
Doctor Cartwell is silenced by the naked despair finally flowing from Hank. He waits. A long silence rolls out between them because there are no words, because there is no answer. Hank walks to the window and looks out to the parking lot. He calms himself by looking at the parking spaces, all of those symmetrical white lines on the blacktop. There is a comforting orderliness to them, all perfectly angled, in their place, exactly the same distance apart, lines being lines, simply, plainly, not trying to be anything else, neatly placed next to each other. He begins to count them.
After a minute Doctor Cartwell says, “Hank, I am duty-bound to tell you that there are genuine risks to not getting Alison some professional help.”
“She won’t go.”
“I’m not sure she should be making that decision for herself right now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means when people need real help they are not always the ones who see that clearly. Sometimes they need to rely on the people around them, those who love them, to step in and assist.”
“You are not suggesting I commit her?”
“A residential facility may be the perfect place for her to feel safe, get rest, and get the help she needs.”
“Is that what they call it now? A residential facility? Is that the euphemism?”
“They aren’t the horror places that folklore suggests.”
“I don’t believe in taking away her rights to herself.”
“If she hurts someone that won’t be your decision any longer.”
“She won’t.”
“I know you aren’t sure of that.”
“She would be helpless and alone in the hands of who knows who. Forget it.”