by Lynne Hugo
He’s there before me, which I didn’t want to happen, positioned with his back to the wall in a far corner in the nonsmoking section. A cup is in front of him, and another one opposite him, as though someone else were sitting in the booth. He stands up when he sees me, his old politeness training that I’d found so charming, the remnant of a rich or cultured childhood, one, or, I was guessing, both. Neither of us says anything at first. He leans to kiss me on the cheek, and though I want to let him and even to hug him, I pull back as if I didn’t know what he was going to do, and slide into the seat across from him. Then I see that the extra cup has a piece of lemon and a tea bag neatly laid on its plastic top, and I know it’s his way of saying he remembers everything.
“This is as far away as I could get from the smoking section,” he says. I used to complain about the smoke in Kathy’s. He catches me looking, and runs the palm of his hand over his head ruefully. “Not so much, huh?”
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say. I cannot do this, exchange pleasantries as if this were another kind of reunion. I am undone, seeing Claire’s rich deep eyes on John’s face. I’ve come to think of them as Claire’s, instead of John’s, as though a trait that distinctive could be a genetic accident.
“I saw your nephew’s obituary in the paper. I’m so sorry,” he says, and I realize that he thinks Brian is why I called him. Did he see the write-up of the accident, too?
“I didn’t know you even knew Maddie’s name.”
“I knew Madalaine,” he says. “It’s an unusual spelling.”
“It makes Maddie so mad,” I say. “Mama just didn’t know how to spell.”
“Do you—or she—need help with something?” For some utterly unfair reason, it makes me angry to hear him imply that I’d called him for some professional service. John picked up his coffee and gestured at the tea he’d bought me. “That’s for you. Is that still what you like?”
“Yes. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that….” I sound stiff, too formal. In spite of the too-high air-conditioning, my face burns beneath my skin. I fidget with the lid of the cup, then with the tea-bag string.
“Lydia. It’s a cup of tea. Please. What is it? You don’t need to be so…polite. It’s me, you know, just less hair. Is it Charles, then, or Ellie?” He reaches across the table and touches my hand, but when I don’t move a muscle, he withdraws it as if he’d planned to all along.
I cannot believe that he has brought up my dead nephew, my retarded brother and my crazy sister, but not what should have been the first thing on his mind and out of his mouth.
“I’m sorry I had to call you,” I begin formally. “If there were any other way…”
“You haven’t forgiven me.” His tone sounds like he wants to say, I knew it. “I’ve wanted to call you hundreds of times, but I couldn’t convince myself that it was fair. Please don’t be sorry you called.”
“If there were any other way,” I begin again. He starts to protest, but I hold my hand up. “Please. Just let me talk. I’ll never get it out if…” I feel tears stir behind my eyes, and will them to stillness. He is so much the same, still smooth and tailored like no man I’ve known except Dr. Hays. His voice, a rich, warm baritone, is exactly the same. He’s aged in small ways; it’s mostly that the wave over his forehead is diminished, falling higher, thinner and lightened by a little gray, but not much. Not much. I’ve changed much more than he has; I must be seven or eight pounds heavier, and anyone can see the lines that fan out from my eyes above the deeper ones that run like a set of parentheses between my nose and mouth. Here it is, the old magnetic pull of him so that even while I’m burning with fear, worry and the irritation he’s added like a dash of pepper to the mix, I’m feeling the old draw, the desire.
John has caught the tears or something else, though. Within an instant, he switches channels in a way that Wayne never once has, and gets it right: something terrible has brought us to this, something about which he has absolutely no notion. “Lydia. Lydie.” He repeats my name the way he used to, to order me to look at him. “Tell me, now,” he says, in a voice I wholly recognize as having existed between us alone. Suddenly time has lifted enormous wings and flown off our shoulders, and we are as we were.
“Tell me now,” he ordered. We were at a motel we’d been to several times, a good hour from Maysfield, a nice one where we went when we’d squirreled a half day instead of an hour or two. The colors of the room were a soft blue and green, pleasing, elegant and warm at once, and I could imagine the room as one in a home we’d have. Early afternoon sun streamed through the window. We’d not pulled the drapes yet; we were still sitting in chairs, John drinking coffee and I tea, both of us working on the last of the morning’s doughnuts from the coffee shop next door. John had taken off his sports coat and loosened his tie that had been tucked neatly under a vest. He slid his hand across the little round table and picked up mine with a solid pressure. “Come on. I won’t have you keeping something from me. What’s the matter?”
I was fidgeting. “Nothing, honey. Well, actually, I mean, I’m…late. Very.”
“I thought we had all afternoon,” he said, his brow furrowing in confusion but not irritation.
“No. I mean, it is late, I am late. It should have been two weeks ago.”
A silence white and blank settled between us while he figured out what I was talking about.
“We’ve used…caution,” he finally said, looking at his coffee instead of me.
“I know. Of course we have. It’s probably nothing. I…I bought one of those new do-it-yourself tests, I thought we could…”
“You really think…?”
“I really think,” I answered, and I remembered that I smiled and waited for his joy to blossom. “I really think that we are really and truly joined forever.”
Joined was the word I used for it almost twenty years ago, in the long era of loving John. Of course it was about making love, but the strange thing was that the physical joining was separate from what I felt. What I felt resembled recognition more than discovery. John and I were wooden jigsaw pieces sliding into spaces that had been stamped Reserved but left unoccupied all our lives. We fit each other. That’s the only way to say it. Once we’d taken our places in one another’s lives, it was unthinkable that we’d not stay there.
“I love you,” I used to say, lying naked in his arms in a motel in some little town east, west, north or south of Maysfield.
“I know,” was what he would answer, and hold me so tightly that the cells of our skin couldn’t have told themselves apart. “I know. It’s the same for me.” That was it. We did know, and we knew we knew. That much I’m sure of.
We’d discussed the marriage we’d have, gazing skyward instead of at the structures and shadows of two existing marriages that marred the horizon if we looked straight out. We dreamed on and invented life together, as if there really were a life other than the lives we’d already created of our own free and ignorant wills.
“It says to test the first time you go in the morning, but I can’t do that. Not at home, I mean I couldn’t do the test, but I…brought it, and I thought I’d just do it here in the bathroom. I got the little bottle from the office….” I was babbling, looking to John to tell me it was okay, that this might accelerate our plans, but it certainly wouldn’t change them. I actually opened my purse then and took out a little urine specimen container, which I’d carefully filled at six-thirty that morning behind a locked bathroom door.
“Lydie, I have two children, I mean, I have to…” is what he said instead, as if I didn’t know it, and he was still looking at his coffee instead of at me when he spoke. His left hand was around the cardboard cup, his wedding ring, heavy, faceted gold, apparently weighing it down there instead of allowing him to reach across the table to touch me.
“I’m aware of that,” I said, scrupulous not to allow a tinge of sarcasm to tint the edge of the words. I’d worn what I thought was a beautiful outfit, a dress with pastel spring flowers f
or the season, but I saw then, in the untimely way I have of noticing unrelated things, that it was all wrong. The day was colder than had been predicted. John had worn a light tan vest of what must have been cashmere under his sports coat.
And that was the end of it. Oh, of course, it wasn’t that simple, not at all. It’s just that when I look back, I see that it could have been. Really, from the time I answered that first tell me now, and took in his reaction, I should have known and let go. I didn’t. I clung to what I knew was true between us instead of seeing that people aren’t always as brave as their visions.
“Tell me now,” he says, and I feel as if a too-big piece of ice is shivering its way through my body toward my two useless kidneys. The words make me light-headed with fear.
“I had a girl,” I begin. “I mean I have a daughter.” I had intended to say we have a daughter, but I am so rattled by the double meaning of the past tense that I only correct the one word.
“Did you think I didn’t know that?” he says.
“Well, you’ve not mentioned it yet, so yes, I guess I thought you didn’t know that,” I say. I am taken aback, but try not to show it.
“Then you didn’t know me very well.”
“No,” I say quietly. “I discovered that.” I am immediately ashamed that I’ve taken this shot at him, but worse, I am afraid of angering him.
But he sits back in the booth and takes it in. “I deserved that,” he observes and looks down. “I’m sorry. Just so you know, I kept checking the birth records at the courthouse. October 20. Five pounds four ounces. Seventeen and a quarter inches. Anna Claire. Thank you for the Anna—I can’t tell you how much that would have meant to my mother. How much it meant to me. I sort of took it as a sign…that you…um, understood. Was something wrong that she was so early?”
“She goes by Claire now. Is your mother still living?” I can’t bring myself to satisfy his curiosity just then. I want to tell him only the thinnest, pencil edges of Claire’s and my life, nothing of what is inside, at the same time I want to erase every line that has ever divided the three of us.
“No. Eight years ago the twenty-ninth of last month.”
“I’m sorry.” I am postponing it. I take a swallow of tea. “And how are your boys?” My voice sounds like Emily Post.
“They’re fine. Both married. Mark went to law school. They had a rough time of it for a while. Barb and I divorced six years ago. But they’ve come through it. Nathan actually became an elementary school teacher, fourth grade. Mark is working in the prosecutor’s office over in Cincinnati.”
How was it that this can hurt so much, this glimpse of his family, the life he’s lived without me? I find no satisfaction in his divorce except that it removes an obstacle. I do what I so often do then, just push myself over the cliff. My heart thumps like something caged, wild, icy, burning.
I do it on one long exhalation. “Claire was in the accident that killed my nephew. Maybe you saw it in the paper? She’s on dialysis now, she needs a kidney transplant and I’m not a match. I had a transfusion when I had my gallbladder out and there are some antibodies. I want you to be tested and if you match, I want you to give her a kidney.”
CHAPTER 18
“I’ll talk to her, Wayne.” Madalaine is sitting across from him at the kitchen table, a cup of cold coffee dregs in front of each. Leaf shadows dance on the shaft of sunlight that enters on a diagonal above the brass rod for the white café curtains. Jennifer is within eye-and earshot, in front of the television in the family room. They’d planned for her to return to school today, but she’s not ready for it yet, she says. Madalaine is thinking that Bill’s leaving last night set her back. It set Madalaine back, too. Last night in bed she felt his absence as palpably as she felt his presence the night before. On the other hand, maybe Jen’s just caught the obvious wind that there’s something up with Wayne and Lydia and didn’t want to miss out on a different disaster than the one she’s living with. Madalaine amazes herself with the cynicism that pops up like an internal jack-in-the-box since Brian died. She sighs and looks directly at Wayne to make eye contact and draw a precise, small box around a precise small promise. “That’s all I can say. I’ll talk to her,” she says and sighs again. He has been at her all morning. “Where is she?”
“Don’t know. But she won’t miss a day at the hospital. They might send Claire home, with portable dialysis, something where she puts stuff into her stomach and then drains it out again. They were going to teach her and Lydia how to do it.”
“Aren’t you going to learn it, too?”
“I was, but…”
Madalaine tenses for another round. The problem is that she is of entirely two minds about this. Lydia does not deserve anything she has, that much Madalaine is sure of, but nothing else. She gets up and begins clearing their few dishes to the sink. “So are you going to work today, or what?” Wayne is in his denim coveralls, his cap with the plant logo on the table next to him. “Aren’t you going to be late?”
“I called in before you got up,” he says. “Thought I should wait to see if you get anywhere with Lydie.”
Madalaine doesn’t like this at all. Somehow this is falling to her and she doesn’t even know what she really thinks. Last night, she stared at the ceiling in the dark and weighed it out: her own anger at Lydia, what Lydia does and doesn’t deserve, against saving Claire. On a spreadsheet like that, it came out clearly enough, but damn, she could see Wayne’s point anyway.
“Don’t count on anything,” she tells Wayne. “Lydie and I aren’t on the best of terms. Don’t put this on me.”
In the shower, she cries the first of her daily mourning for Brian, and now, again, for Bill. The running water absorbs her sobs, mixes her tears into itself. When she towels herself dry, she thinks she has lost weight and steps on the scale. Down seven pounds. There was a time when this would have made her very happy. In spite of the gray in her hair, she’s still a sleek woman, her flesh unmottled and shapely. Bill has left a few things in the bathroom—the soap he likes, a kind that dries out Madalaine’s skin too much, a stick of deodorant, a straight razor. She arranges them neatly in the medicine cabinet, refusing to allow herself any interpretation of the gesture. No hoping, that is her rule.
What is she going to do with Wayne? He’s sticking like peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. As she dresses in a denim skirt and black scoop-necked shirt, she contemplates what to say to Lydia, if, indeed, anything. She tosses the wet towel on her unmade bed, exactly something that she’d have fussed mightily about, back in another lifetime.
Heat has intensified as the day blooms toward noon. By mid-June, there will be days well into the nineties; what will keep the dust down and the vegetation by the roadsides green until well into July is the rain. July and August so often bring drought that people don’t complain much about the rain in June, not that it’s excessive, but enough. Madalaine begins the drive to the hospital with the driver’s window down, letting the wind whip her hair back and forth until it resembles her mission, whatever it is. Maybe she won’t have to say anything, she thinks, maybe Lydie won’t be there and she’ll just visit Claire, which she ought to do anyway. She’d as soon keep the upper hand, not give anyone reason to criticize her. But why hadn’t she just said no to Wayne? He can hardly expect her to drive all over town and county looking for Lydia, whom she really has no desire to see.
But Wayne was right. Lydie is in Claire’s room, fussing with the pink carnations and sweetheart roses on her nightstand. She looks terrible, Madalaine notices, her face grayish, lipstick already mostly eaten off, white cotton blouse wrinkled.
“Hello, Lydia. Hello, Claire. How’re you feeling?” Madalaine says, too formally, a strange bile wetting the words against her will.
“Maddie!” Lydia says and comes at her with arms extending into a hug.
It is a moment before Lydia senses that Madalaine is not going to hug her back, and retreats from the one-sided embrace. “How are you doing? You’ve been
on my mind all the time.”
“Really.” A flat statement, no question to it, extra emphasis on the first syllable, tone like unbuttered cold toast, a direct stare into Lydia’s eyes, but then it’s Madalaine who averts hers first.
“Really. I’ve felt so torn, like I need to be here with Claire, and I need to be with you at the same time.”
“I’m doing all right.”
“Come, sit,” Lydia says, drawing her into the small room, which is additionally crowded by a recliner-type chair and various machinery, at the same time Claire chimes in, her voice innocent as choir bells. Even Madalaine can feel that much.
“Aunt Maddie, I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t be at Brian’s funeral. They wouldn’t let me out, even though I thought I could do it, in a wheelchair, but Dr. Douglas said no, it was too soon, with whatever…starting dialysis and all, I guess. I’m so sorry.”
Madalaine sets her purse on a chair, then sits on the edge in front of it. “It’s quite all right, please, don’t worry about it.” The words are too distinct, as if she’d snipped each one off her tongue with nail clippers, but Madalaine doesn’t know how to fix it.
Lydia goes back to the head of Claire’s bed, as if for support. “We’re just waiting for the dialysis nurse and technician to come. And Ellie’s coming. We’re going to be trained how to do peritoneal dialysis at home, until Claire gets a transplant, that is. Right, honey?” She directs the rhetorical question to Claire, who nods assent, but looks a little embarrassed.
“Ellie?” is all Madalaine says.
“They, uh, they recommend that two people be trained to help with it, because, well, if I were sick or held up somehow, or something, it’s good to have a backup. Mostly, Claire can do it by herself. We wanted to ask you, but…I…wasn’t sure, well, I didn’t want to add anything that you’d have to think about.”