“Get out of here!”
“For God’s—”
“Get out!” Jane reached for the lamp and clicked it on. She and Eric stared at each other.
He had a bloodshot, rumpled look, as if he’d already been asleep and then awakened. The light made him squint.
“What are you doing in here?” Attempting a reasonable, exasperated tone. But he was still furious. And perhaps frightened, as she was.
“I’m trying to sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“No, you’re trying to make some goddamn point, because you think, I don’t even know what you think.” He shook his head, disgusted. Pretending now to be disgusted. He was trying to get her to say what she knew, what he had done to give himself away. She knew him that well. As he knew her. Nothing in their knowledge of each other made them happy.
Jane said, “You want me to just go along, go along with everything you do. Act like I don’t notice.”
He might have said, Notice what, but that would have given too much away, and neither did Jane wish to say what she knew, or suspected, and so they both held back. Watching him, she was aware that he had drawn into himself, relaxed for the moment, as if reassured, as if he had gotten away with something and was congratulating himself. “Don’t bet on it,” Jane said, which startled him back into wariness.
She could see him visibly coming to some decision. “All right,” he said. “I can see I’m never going to talk you out of your suspicions. You’re going to think the worst of me because you can’t follow me around all the time making sure I’m behaving. So go ahead and assume whatever you want. I can’t control that.”
She purely hated him then. He must have seen it in her face because he took a step back and seemed to lose some of his swagger. “Bastard,” she said, without heat, but meaning it.
“Please come back to bed. This is childish.”
“How about, you sleep where you want and I sleep where I want.”
She watched him trying to decide how he might still turn everything into an argument he could win, then she watched him give up. She’d been right. She’d been right from the very start. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really.” And then they both waited to see what would come next.
After a minute Jane said, “I suppose there’s some way that it’s my fault.” She felt calmer now, less inclined to react, but also more deeply shaken.
“No. Of course it’s not.”
“Who is she? Somebody at work?”
“Yes.”
Jane waited. Eric said, “It isn’t anything. Wasn’t. It was an impulse. A bad idea. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think I want to hear any details.”
“Of course not.” He seemed aware that he might have agreed too quickly. “I mean, that’s up to you.”
“No more lying.”
“All right.”
He was still standing there, taking up too much space in the small room. “Are you moving out?” Jane asked. And watched him look thrown off balance.
“No, why would I? Where would I go? What about the kids?” When Jane didn’t answer, he said, “Unless that’s really what you think ought to happen.”
“I don’t know yet. What I think ought to happen.”
“Well please don’t . . . Let’s give it a little time to settle, OK? I know this is all new, and hurtful, and confusing, and I think we ought to, if only for the kids’ sake, not decide anything right away.”
Jane said, “It just amazes me, that as soon as there’s any opportunity to talk your way out of something, you jump on it.”
He said something under his breath, a quick, fast swearing, and pushed his way from the room.
Jane stayed where she was. Her armpits were damp. She heard sounds from down the hall, Eric moving around, opening, closing things. Then he was back. He’d put on clothes, a pullover shirt and jeans, and a fleece jacket. He had his keys and he thrust them into a pocket. “You win. I’m going. You don’t have to hide in here anymore.”
Jane raised a hand: Go.
“I said I’m sorry and I am. We could work this out. Other people do. Maybe we still can. We could talk about it. But not until you’re ready. You decide.”
Jane said, “You’re mad because you didn’t get away with it.”
“Oh, now you want to talk.”
“Because you just about always do, right? You’re so used to being the smartest kid in the class. The guy with all the answers. The Miracle Doc.”
“This is all about your own frustration and self-hatred, Jane.”
“Because you are so gifted. So hardworking. I mean, why shouldn’t you be entitled to a little extra on the side? Who would begrudge you that?”
“Does it make you feel better about yourself to attack me? That’s sad, Jane. Really.”
“This marriage thing, this family thing is just so much harder for you. I’ve seen you struggle with it. You need a checklist, or a manual. Something.”
“I’ve kept this family going while you had your little mental incapacity holiday. Remember that? Huh? I’m pretty sure you milked that for all it was worth.”
“And I’m pretty sure you made everybody feel sorry for you.” It was as if she and Eric stood on opposite sides of a canyon, little stick figures throwing stones at each other. Nothing had to be entirely true, just close enough to land and do damage.
Eric let his hands fall to his sides, the giving-up gesture. “You’re the one I feel sorry for. How can you hang on to all those resentments? What did I or anybody else ever do to you that was so terrible?”
“I thought you were leaving.”
He made a particularly ugly face then, a half-sneer that distorted his mouth like a gargoyle’s.
“Mom?”
Robbie had left his bed and was standing outside the door, small, hunched over in his pajamas.
“Honey, what are you doing up? Does your hand hurt?” Jane got out of bed and shoved her way past Eric. “Let’s see.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, sweetheart, why would we be?”
“Because of the water.”
“Nobody’s mad. It was an accident.”
“You were yelling.”
Jane, kneeling in front of Robbie, looked up at Eric, waiting. Yours.
“Hey, buddy. I’m sorry we woke you up. We should have gone downstairs to talk.”
“Are you going away?” The codeine, maybe, gave Robbie’s eyes a bleared, half-shut look.
“I have to go to the hospital and take care of some people,” Eric explained, and Jane thought how easily he came up with a serviceable lie. Silently, she telegraphed this. Eric didn’t look at her but his mouth tightened. “How about I look at your hand before I leave, huh? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“Mom? Are you mad?”
“It’s nothing you have to worry about. Go with your Dad, let him help you.”
“Come on, Rob. Can you be a big boy for me?” Eric tended to get exasperated when the kids were what he thought of as clingy. It was one of the things they went round and round about.
Grace was still asleep. Jane listened at her door for a time, then retreated to the center of the hallway. She heard Robbie’s piping voice, water running in the bathroom. All normal, at least, normal for the kind of kid crisis they went through at least once every few weeks. Not normal, the detonation of their marriage. Was that what it was, the end? How did you know? They’d never had a fight like this before, and Jane had the giddy sense that she could push it as far as she wished.
But for the moment they were like one of those blown-up buildings where the upper floors hung, suspended on nothing, while the foundation pancaked in a heap of steel and rubble.
Jane went back into the bedroom, hers and Eric’s, and looked in on them. Robbie was saying his hand still hur
t and Eric said it was going to hurt for a while, there wasn’t any way around that. “You have to be brave, buddy. Show me what a big brave boy you can be.”
The back of Robbie’s hand now had a line of small blisters. “OK, try not to rub it. I’m going to put some medicine on it and give you a new bandage.”
For Jane’s benefit he said, “Maybe they could spare me at the hospital so I can stay here and take care of that old burn.”
“No, I think you should go. Stick with the plan.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Eric told Robbie. “It’s just going to take some time to heal.”
“Can I sleep in your bed?” Robbie asked. “Please?”
It wasn’t anything they liked to encourage. Children should have their own beds, they were agreed on that. Jane and Eric traded a helpless, irritated look. “Maybe just this once,” Eric said. “You could hop in bed with your mom while I’m at the hospital.”
Screw you, Jane said silently, another telegraphed message. “All right,” she told Robbie. “But I want you to try and go to sleep. Then you’ll wake up in the morning and everything’ll be better.”
“Sure it will,” Eric said, full of encouragement.
“Come on, hop into bed,” Jane told Robbie. “Let’s get comfortable.” She lifted up her side of the covers and got Robbie settled. Eric was standing in the door, looking like the chickenshit he was, not wanting to go now but also not willing to back down. “He can’t have any more of the codeine yet. There’s nothing to do but wait it out.”
“Bye,” Jane said. “Careful driving.”
He went down the stairs and she heard the sound of the back door opening and closing and then the car starting up and the noise of it pulling out of the driveway, then receding down the street.
Maybe he’d go to his girlfriend’s. Maybe he’d stay there.
Robbie had made himself a throne out of the pillows, and given his bandaged hand a pillow of its own. “Can we turn off the lights and watch television?”
“No, it’s late and you have to go to sleep.”
“Will my hand hurt when I’m asleep?”
“No, silly. Nothing hurts while you’re asleep.”
He was already yawning. Jane switched off the lamp and kissed him on top of his head. Sleep, she told herself. Nothing will hurt.
But sleep didn’t come. Robbie had dropped back into some motionless dream, the solid weight of him resting against her legs so that Jane had to reposition herself a few cautious inches at a time.
And then again. By now it was well after midnight—she had tried to keep herself from looking at the clock, but that proved to be even more agitating—and her heart still beat like a drum, and one bad thought after another dragged its chain on its way through her head. She would say to Eric this or that haughty or scarifying thing, and he would answer back in some infuriating way that made her go after him all over again, making him pay for his smugness and dishonesty and selfishness, oh help.
Careful not to disturb Robbie, Jane got out of bed and closed herself in the bathroom. Eric kept his stockpile of prescription medicine on the top shelf of the linen closet, in a satchel with a combination lock that was designed to keep out the children but not, certainly, Jane. She lifted the satchel down, spun the lock open, and sat on the toilet to see what she could use. You weren’t supposed to combine certain things with her antidepressant—Ambien, Xanax—but there was another one that was supposed to be all right. It started with an R and she was sure she’d know it when she saw it, here it was. Little yellow pills. She swallowed one, locked the satchel and replaced it, and went back in to lie down again next to Robbie.
There were glowing patches behind her eyelids, light blue, like a neon sky, and bars of pink-violet. It was a curious kind of sleep but Jane followed where it led her, because she was so very grateful to have put her head to bed. But her eyes itched. It didn’t seem right that your eyes could itch in your sleep. A phone rang, a dream phone you didn’t have to answer. The sky was upside down. She fell into it and paddled around.
And then she was awake again, her eyes wide open but something urgent pressing in on her, so that she was out of bed with her feet on the floor before she was aware she’d done so. What? she said, although not out loud. It seemed that she had woken up an entirely different person. Ah, she said, nodding. She felt energized, impatient, quite wonderful.
“Do you feel like talking?” she asked the boy in the bed, but he wouldn’t wake up. She went out into the hallway and listened to the night sounds, the house sailing through the dark. It was an ordinary house. Ordinary people lived here. She wanted to lift the roof and let the sky and windy stars in. Why were they asleep? This new, important person she had become was ready to make herself known. So much waiting to be seen, to be saved, to be seized!
“Wake up,” she told the little girl, sitting next to her on the bed and stroking her hair. The child whimpered and buried herself in her pillow. “You’re the one with the questions, right?”
The girl blinked and opened one eye to give her a fuzzy look. “Mommy?”
“No, silly.” Smiling at the mistake. Nobody here by that name.
“Mommy, you’re sitting on me.”
She moved aside. “Ask me anything you want. Because I know everything.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Well I guess I don’t know that.” She tried to turn it into a joke. “Daddy must be in outer space.”
“No he’s not.”
“OK, he’s not.” She was distracted by a new sound: Whoosh and whoosh. It was outer space, listening in. Perhaps the roof was off after all. The hurry came back to her then, the certainty that if she did not explain everything, the everything of everything, it would be an opportunity lost forever. “Dying is only a one-two-three jump off the end of the pier. Here we go! Last one in’s a rotten egg! Dying is the body fighting back and not wanting to be not itself. And who could blame it?” she asked, which was one of those questions you came up with when you already knew the answer. “Because we only know what we know. We are dust to dust. Do you know that this is Day One of the year Eternity? Why are you crying?” she asked, annoyed.
“Stop it.”
“Oh you’re a silly little thing,” she said, wanting to coax and jolly the girl out of it, although it was aggravating, it truly was, to be treated with such disregard and inattention. So she held the child tightly round her middle and put her mouth against her ear so that there would be no chance of her not hearing. She told her that although not everyone could see it, there was a realm of being where the world fell away and the spirit flew upward like a bird and left behind all greed and fear. And this place, which was familiar to her from so many blissful, floating visits, was called love.
Love! Which she had only come to understand right that very moment, was not what you thought it was, what your old constrained and tiny self thought it was. It had nothing to do with attaching yourself to this or that man, or even mother father child. That was not love. No more so than heaven was about angels and harps and halos handed out like ribbons at a school spelling bee. No, love was free and vast and limitless, and our own knowledge of it was only a slice, a speck, a single chip of colored glass in a huge kaleidoscope, the kind that shifted into new and unimaginably beautiful patterns with every turn. Everything that dazzled and sustained us, everything that saved us. It was all love! Love! she said, and then kept saying it, love! and love! wanting the word to mean everything that might be thought or said because she was reaching the limits of language like a bird bird too high in whoosh whoosh outer space—
“Mom? What’s the matter with Grace?” The boy had gotten out of bed and was staring in at them.
“Nothing,” she said, falling back down into language once more. “She’s fine.”
“Why is she hollering?”
“Is she?” She looked down at the ch
ild, who was weeping in a violent, noisy manner, her breath drawn in and in, forgetting to breathe out again. “You should stop that,” she told the child, uselessly, since she seemed quite intent on screaming and you had to wait until she ran down like a clock, and in the meantime a horrible horrible idea was canceling out everything else in her head, and this was the possibility that she had gotten everything wrong.
“Mom? Are you going to answer the phone?”
The noise drilled into her. What had she done? These poor children! They had been left on their own and now she had endangered them with her reckless and forbidden knowledge or was that wrong also? Finally the drilling stopped. She said, “We have to hide in the basement,” and the children, both of them, looked at her as if she had spoken in a different language. The girl ceased her crying for long enough to stare up at her.
“Hide from what?” the boy said. “I don’t want to go to the basement.”
“Hurry,” she told them. She picked up the girl, who was heavier than she looked, and who kicked a little, uselessly, in protest. “Go.” She herded the boy in front of her, all the way down the stairs and through the kitchen until they stood at the landing to the basement steps. Here she let the girl slide out of her grip until she was standing on her own feet. “You have to walk now, I can’t keep carrying you.”
“The basement’s yucky,” the boy said, but once she had turned on the stair light he started down; the girl more reluctant, taking her time with every step.
The basement was where all the lost and unloved household items ended up, the broken lawn furniture and underused kitchen appliances and outgrown toys. It was low-ceilinged and bulging with wires and piping, cement-floored and chilly. “Now then,” she told them, once they had all reached the bottom. “Find someplace to sit and be quiet.” There was nowhere to sit. They stared at her, lifting up first one, then another bare foot to rub against their legs, trying to warm them.
“When is Daddy coming home?”
Starbursts of light went off in the corners of her vision, confusing her. “I don’t think he lives here,” she said, vaguely, since she was no longer certain of anything. She felt sick, sweaty. The children kept silent. “Mommy is having a bad dream,” she told them. The boy picked at his bandaged hand. It came to her then, how he had injured it and what had come of it and all the unhappiness bound up in it. She sank to the floor so that she was sitting with her back to the wall, looking up at them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m at something of a loss to explain myself.”
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 25