Ten Days

by Janet Gilsdorf

  Later that afternoon, rain pelts the back of her jacket as she helps Eddie into her car. She pulls on his sleeve and signs, “Wait.” She needs to clear her students’ papers from the passenger side. He can’t manage both getting himself into the seat and moving whatever may be in the way. He’s a one-maneuver kind of guy, she had decided long ago. She tosses the papers into the rear and stands back while Eddie grabs the door frame, lifts his left foot, sets it on the floor mat and slowly lowers his bottom to the cushion. He’s awkward, his limbs are stiff. His nerves and muscles betray him, don’t follow his ardent commands. Slowly, he pulls his right leg into the car.

  “Scoot in a little more,” she signs to him and then pats his thigh. He wiggles, inching his butt about a half inch farther inside. Then he turns his rain-streaked face toward her and grins. He’s amazingly good natured, contented most of the time, and she’s grateful for that. She wants to kiss his cheek, but that would embarrass him.

  This is the last day she’ll pick him up from school.

  “But what if he falls?” she said last week. Jake thought Eddie should ride the school bus.

  “He’s fourteen,” he said.

  “Yes, but he’s not like other fourteen-year-olds who rattle around on those buses. He’s . . . unsteady.”

  “You’re selling him short. Everyone has challenges and should be given the opportunity to conquer them.”

  “He won’t be able to hear the road noise. He might walk in front of a truck that’s barreling down the street.”

  Over and over they pleaded their cases. Jake pointed out that Eddie’s friends looked out for him. Anna said his friends weren’t always with him. She reminded him that Eddie was “intellectually a little slow.” Jake said he was certainly sharp enough to ride a school bus.

  Finally Jake said, “He needs to walk more, otherwise he’ll have trouble marching down the aisle after his wedding.”

  Anna shuddered. Eddie’s wedding? “I’ve thought a lot about Chris’s wedding, especially with all the Emmy talk. Never Eddie’s.” Would he find a woman to love him? At least, as the groom, he wouldn’t have to lurch up the aisle all alone toward the altar. Instead, he’d wait there for his bride, flanked by the minister and his groomsman brother. Later, Eddie and his brand-new wife would stroll together down the aisle. As she recalled, the bride always leaned against the groom during that walk. She knows she did. But there was no reason the groom couldn’t lean against the bride. They needed to be able to lean on each other.

  In the end, they agreed. Ed—Jake insisted they call him Ed and she kept forgetting to do that—would ride the bus for three days and then they’d reevaluate.

  At home, Anna stabs the power button on the television remote and a soccer game flashes on the screen. She glances at Eddie seated on the couch, stares into his sweet, angelic, not quite yet adolescent face. “What should we make for dinner?” she asks in sign. His smoky blue eyes, the same color and shape as Jake’s, stare back at her. He tilts his head, doesn’t seem to understand.

  “Hey, lovey,” she says, louder, even though she knows he can’t understand her, no matter how loud she shouts. Sound is a smear of faint warbles to him. She tries it again, signs, “Hey, lovey,” making her fingers, her arms, her body glide into the words. “What do you want for dinner?”

  His eyes narrow with a smile. His fingers, thin and finely tapered like her own, fly through the air. She’s thankful for his fairly nimble fingers.

  “Did you say chicken Kiev?” She signs each letter. K. I. E. V.

  He nods and utters one of his snorty, burpy sounds—an Eddie chuckle, as Jake calls it. “Chicken, it is,” she tells him. “Tonight it’s just the two of us. Dad has a big case.”

  While the chicken simmers in the oven, Anna watches the last of the sun’s rays drop behind the dreary clouds that hang like woolen roving beyond the backyard. A budding branch of the hydrangea bush raps against the kitchen window.

  The cribbage board is still on the table, beside the deck of cards. She and Chris had played several times during his visit home. They giggled, joked, teased, and, in the end, she won the majority of the games. Now, she sets the board and cards back in the desk drawer. Why does Chris’s moving away have to be so hard? she wonders. Hard on her. Not hard on him.

  During one of the cribbage games, Chris suddenly announced, “I’m taking a course called Deviance,” and then laughed at the look on her face. He explained, his voice growing progressively louder as his enthusiasm ballooned, “It’s a soc. course. The social underpinnings of criminal behavior, how economic inequality feeds criminality and domestic violence. . . stuff like that.”

  She was surprised at his newfound maturity. His world was moving further and further away from hers. He described trips with his new friends through the redwoods of Pescadero Creek Park and to the beach at Año Nuevo to watch the elephant seals; their trips to Half Moon Bay and to the top of the Pinnacles.

  “It’s best to go up the west slope in the morning, or you fry in the afternoon sun,” he said with confidence and authority. In great detail, he explained the thrill of rounding the last pile of stones and spotting the summit ahead and told of his tumble into a pool of muddy water inside an ink-dark cave. Neither she nor Jake had been to any of those places. They seemed as foreign and far away as a swirling nebula, beyond the far reaches of the universe and rolling onward toward infinity. She couldn’t sleep that night, tossing over and over in her head his continuing, inevitable, heartbreaking, completely appropriate journey away from her.

  In the silence of the family room, she takes a sip of her chardonnay. This is her favorite season, with lengthening days that gently fade into silky nights. Lilac blooms. Tulip blossoms. It’s been fourteen years this month but still the fresh spring air ferries back all the memories of that night. “The fork in the road,” as the hospital chaplain had said. She remembers Eddie’s whimper when she found him. Mostly she remembers the dark. As she looks back, everything seems very dark.

  She remembers laying Eddie in his crib and begging him not to wake up. And he didn’t. Not through the whole night. Not for a week. He followed her orders and almost died.

  The scene scrolls over and over through her mind, as it has a million times. Two million times. It’s fainter, now, bubbles up less frequently. But, she can’t make it go away completely.

  Their wedding picture sits on the desk beside the phone. Jake was handsome, with his sculpted nose, strong chin, thick curly hair the color of walnuts, now highlighted with streaks of gray. Unlike his static eyes in the picture, his real eyes are in constant motion, darting around, searching for things. Assessing, measuring, comparing, calculating.

  And, he’s successful. Their beautiful home sits on two and a half acres. It’s surrounded by trees and there’s a pond out back. They have a lot. They don’t have all they had hoped for.

  She doesn’t think of Jake as handsome or successful or rich. Rather, he’s the man who snores softly when he sleeps on his back, who spills foot powder on the bathroom floor, who eats the core with the apple. He’s Chris’s father. Eddie’s father. Her husband.

  It was also fourteen years ago—a week or two after Eddie had come home from the hospital—that he’d confessed his secret. She was furious, hurt, frightened, vengeful. She felt disconnected from everything she knew. He said he’d been terribly wrong about Monica from the start and that “nothing happened” during their meeting in the hotel. For too long she was unsure she could trust him.

  The days went by. Then the months and the years. They laughed, disagreed, worried together, and, during the tender times, confided their longings to each other. They found great joy in the boys.

  It was about six or seven years ago—she’s lost track of the exact year but it was in the fall, when the evenings were getting cooler—that Jake walked into their bedroom as she was changing the sheets on their bed.

  “Here, let me help you with that,” he said, grabbing one corner of the clean bottom sheet and pulli
ng it over the edge of the mattress.

  She watched as he tugged the fitted sheet over the other corner on his side. He tucked one end of the top sheet under the foot of the mattress and folded a cuff into the other end, pulled pillow slips over two of the pillows and fluffed them with his fist, smoothed the wrinkles out of first the woolen blanket and then the bedspread. He looked unbelievably earnest as he worked, completely committed to the ritual of neatly putting the linens on their bed. Something stirred in her, something good as if a gear, long out of sync, had finally slipped into place. She started to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, sounding mystified, concerned, staring at the bedspread, wondering if he’d put it on wrong.

  “Nothing. Actually, everything’s very right.” She wiped her tears and chuckled. “For a surgeon, you’re very good at making a bed.”

  The back door slams.

  “Anna, I’m home,” Jake calls. The coat closet door squeaks open, and then squeaks closed.

  He’s in the kitchen when he yells, “Where is everyone?”

  “I’m in the family room,” she says, evenly, quietly.

  He bursts through the archway and stops beside her chair. “Ed in bed?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “It’s late.”

  He sets his hand on her head and bends to kiss her. His lips are soft. She feels the heat of his breath, smells the antiseptic odor of the operating room.

  “You must be tired,” she says. “It was a long case.”

  “I’m fine.” He squats beside her. “It was a bad comminuted fracture. The poor guy had had an extensive burn on his leg as a kid. I had to cut through his huge scar. That thick, fibrosed skin didn’t stretch one damn bit. I hope we ended up with everything put together right.”

  She leans her forehead against his cheek. It’s warm. And comforting. Solid ground in another complicated day.

  Please turn the page for a very special

  Q&A with Janet Gilsdorf!

  What motivated you to write this book?

  In my professional life, I’m in awe of the ability of parents to accurately recognize illness in their children and to seek medical attention quickly. But, what if they don’t? And what if one of the parents is a physician? Parents are hardwired to protect their children, and an ill child brings out the best and the worst in them. I find these reactions fascinating and wished to illuminate them.

  Are the characters real people?

  Even though the book is fiction and the characters emerged from my imagination, they represent the many parents, physicians, and others I have encountered during my work. Like real people, the characters are imperfect and their limitations make them unpredictable and intriguing. Yet, they are also resilient. While they are not actual human beings, their motivations, reactions, fears, frustrations, and joys are very real.

  How can you stand to work with—and write about—sick children?

  All children are beautiful and their parents are devoted to them. Working with them—observing their interactions, their worries, their triumphs and failures, their idiosyncrasies—and writing about them is very rewarding. I emphasize over and over to my students, “There are no bad children. Bad things happen to children and they react.”

  When do you find the time to write in your busy life?

  Nights and weekends and vacations. Whatever I’m writing is always on my mind, so I jot down ideas when they come to me at odd times and in unexpected places. I keep a notebook beside my bed and in my car. I jot my thoughts on those flyaway cards from magazines, on white space in the New York Times.

  What is your next book?

  It’s a novel about a young woman who defies the cultural norms of North Dakota in the 1960s and goes to medical school. Although my life followed that trajectory, the book isn’t about me, but rather a fictional character surrounded by people, places, and circumstances very familiar to me.

  How did you start as a creative writer?

  After years of clinical practice, I yearned for a way to express my wonder of the parents and children I work with, the interesting—sometimes adaptive, sometimes maladaptive—coping strategies they employ, the lessons in living I have learned from them. About that time, in a stroke of luck (or maybe fate), I was asked to join a writing group. For years I won the most-improved award in the group, because I had such a long way to go. I’ve attended many summer writing workshops and have come away from all of them with newfound inspiration, commitment, and ideas.

  Do you have any advice for a fledging writer?

  Follow your heart. Write.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  TEN DAYS

  Janet Gilsdorf

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included

  to enhance your group’s reading

  of Janet Gilsdorf’s Ten Days.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Are either Jake or Anna, or both, bad parents? Why?

  2. Who is to blame for Eddie’s serious illness?

  3. Is Rose Marie wrong to worry about the future of her day care, seemingly ahead of the health of the children?

  4. In the throes of Eddie’s illness, Jake turns to Monica, his old girlfriend. Why? What does this action do for him? Was he right to tell Anna?

  5. Chris, a spunky child, regresses to misbehavior in the face of his brother’s illness. Is this realistic? Is it handled well by his parents?

  6. Why did the Campbell marriage survive? What might have happened, but didn’t, to drive them irretrievably apart? What is the state of the marriage at the end of the book?

  7. Should Rose Marie feed her dog zinfandel every night?

  8. What is Anna’s relationship with her parents? Are they useful to her? To Jake? To Chris?

  9. What happens to Anna’s reasoning ability? Is she mentally ill? Why does she hear the angel in the elevator?

  10. Rose Marie blows up at the fellow from the health department. Is she a mean-spirited person? Is she being unreasonable?

  11. The events in the novel occur over less than three weeks. How does time get distorted during this story?

  12. Why does the story start with the wedding in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? What would be gained, or lost, by starting at the time Eddie gets sick?

  13. Why is the story told from three points of view? What would be gained, or lost, by telling the story from only Jake’s view? From only Anna’s? From the perspective of an omniscient narrator?

  14. What does the epilogue add to the novel?

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2012 by Janet Gilsdorf

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7582-7990-3