“It’s normal what she’s going through,” Sherry said quiedy. An image of crazy Brad came to her, gold-rimmed glasses, a pouch of magic pebbles about his neck. “I was a romantic when I was younger. I had a few dates in high school with nobody special. But I knew that somewhere in the world, the perfect guy waited for me.”
“And did you find him?” Lovely Conner. Already the skepticism was there that’d anchor him later in life.
“Yes. A guy named Brad, two years older than me and living off-campus in an all-wood, sunlit loft. I saw him at a concert, placed an ad identifying him, and he called me. He was in the process of ditching another girlfriend and he took me in and loved me and said so. I went nutso over him. And I surrendered myself to him—because after all this was the perfect guy, and there was nothing worth rocking that particular boat for.”
“Sounds like you wimped out over him.”
“You got it. I emptied myself out and filled my life with Brad. So the upshot is I became boring and I suppose dishonest to him, and he dumped me like a shot after a few weeks of heaven. Let me tell you something. It took me a year to get over him, and in some ways, I’m still not over him even now. Your mom’s begun her grieving process early is all. She’s losing a dear man, and she’s feeling a void inside her as he goes.”
Conner glanced at her. He still held half his cookie in a pouched upturned hand, Saran Wrap bunched down around his palm. His eyes were opaque, unreadable.
“You sure you’re all right?” she said.
His glance passed lighdy over her face, almost as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know how I am. This stuff just keeps rolling in and I watch it roll in and change every-
thing all the time, and I don’t feel much like a kid anymore, ya know?”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?”
His words overlapped hers. “It’s almost like he died a week ago and what’s upstairs isn’t him. But it is, it’s him all right, so I don’t want to be there but I sometimes drift by anyway and open the door a crack and look in. My mind goes away when I do that. It’s just too much.”
“Yes, I see what you’re saying.” She could picture it as he spoke, the look on his face, the sorrow of his voice transporting her into that hallway, peering in at the thin shell of a man on the bed. Somewhere behind the house but hidden from view, a small squadron of Canadian geese moved honking by in the sky.
And then the front doorknob clicked and the door came open like a soft vacuum equalizing, and there stood Katt, a look on her face whose message was unmistakable.
The world shuddered down around him.
Conner would not allow himself to be touched all week long. Sherry came by a few times and sat with him, mostly talking about all the bad things in her life, more of that ugly-mother stuff and lots about the crazy husband she had once had. She wouldn’t let him see her brand or even feel it through her clothes. And all that time, he sat much of the time with his mouth shut, lots of thoughts flying past but not a one of them feeling like it was worth the energy to put into words.
His mom he had to push away. That didn’t feel so hot but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Whenever some well-meaning person, anyone, not even necessarily his mom, reached for him, it felt like torch-flame and he’d cry out and yank away from them—real brief, not some stupid scene but just enough that they knew not to try it again. Uncle Henry at the funeral, for example, his dad’s brother. God knows why he’d come. Some dumb family duty thing or other was Conner’s best guess. Flew in from Minneapolis, stayed at the Marriott. No one liked him but there he was at the funeral home and the cemetery and dropping by this or that gift at the house, expecting to be invited in, but Mom was too smart for that. At the funeral, early on, he’d sidled up to Conner to make somber small talk, trying to hug him, then flinching back at Conner’s reaction. At the ceremony around Dad’s grave, he stood way apart from the family, an odd shadow on his face, an averting, and it felt to Conner as if he wanted to check his watch all that time to see if it was time to catch his return flight.
But on the Saturday of the funeral, Dad’s department head and some of Mom’s work friends filling out the party, Conner’s numbness gradually lifted. It was like the final letting go of Novocain unpuffing your jaw, the tingle-fizz of flesh regaining sensation. The gravesite ceremony went on for days, a droning of words reduced to nonsense in his ears. All he could see was the spit-polished sheen of the coffin. All he could sense was the comforting presence of his mom on his left and Sherry on his right.
And the emotions coming out from under, the unmasking of his pain: He could feel that too.
There was the grief, of course. His mind floated back over a lifetime of doing things with his father, the homework help, hearing his low loving voice read bedtime stories to him and sometimes set aside the books and make one up right then, the humming in the car, letting him help set up a surprise party for Mom. But mixed in with the joy of those times was an unbearable ache, a he’s-gone, but how could he be gone? He’d been at their sides just an eyeblink before. It was unnatural, an unacceptable disappearance, and Conner understood that the clash of memory with he’s-gone and, worse, those-were-all-the-moments-ive 'll-ever-have, produced grief. Whatever lay in that coffin, a stretch of sky reflected in its metallic brown lid-curve, embodied nothing more than that. Not his father’s spirit nor even his body, though that was crudely there. Just grief, solid as blocks of bitter chocolate.
There was one other mass of emotions Conner felt, but he doubted he’d ever share it with anyone. Nobody seemed, in his recollection, ever to talk about feeling good about the death of a loved one. But he did feel an odd sense of relief and even happiness and on the whole—although guilt cropped up a little along the sides—they seemed like okay things to be feeling. Sherry had helped. Her talking him out of his obsession with an early death, there beside his chair, steady, steady, really pushing it, had, he now saw, planted the seed of relief. Robin Williams had chosen his house in that Garp movie cuz a plane crashed into it. His father in one sense had shown Conner a possible future but he had been the one to die. He’d intercepted the blow and blocked it from hitting his son. That surely bought time. It was absurd, childish even, to worry about HD developing in him anydme soon. If it developed at all, chances were he’d have a good thirty years of normal life before then.
So, mingled in with grief, he also felt relief and an unholy joy, standing there not hearing the drone of somber words and obliquely taking in his uncle not-looking at his watch. Once, he felt a grin rise. He had to stifle it by biting down hard on the inside of his cheeks, both to keep his lip muscles from stretching upward and to give himself enough pain to dilute the impulse. The droner, an old guy in robes, had wisps of thin gray hair that lifted slighdy at the least breeze. His face was a squeezed oval. While watching him blather on, Conner became aware of his mother brushing against his coat sleeve, staying there, warm next to him. But he didn’t flinch away from her. In fact, she had not, he discovered on closer inspection, moved at all. He had leaned toward her. The distance between Sherry and himself had widened ever so slighdy. Now he felt his mom respond, and lay a hand lighdy on his right shoulder, and pat him reassuringly, then leave it there.
He let her do it.
It felt good, like the first drop of water after huge thirst.
Savoring it, he leaned closer for support.
Later, that afternoon, fresh sheets on the bed but an ache and aroma of Marcus still in the room, Katt had taken a nap, or at least rested there on the spot where she had, stifle the thought, where her Marcus had died. She’d been sleeping in the guest room, but she was determined tonight to reclaim this bedroom. She’d alter the feel of it, fill its vacancy with her own presence as the days wore on.
Strangely calm, she rose and refreshed herself. How, she wondered, could she be planning this? She knew beyond doubt that her love for,her son had not diminished, not in the slightest. And yet, at this mo
ment, she could feel no love nor hate nor any emotion at all, but just the going forward of perverse desire.
Downstairs, Conner sat on the great room couch, still dressed in his suit. He had one arm on the right armrest. He was staring out the picture window, a slant of sunlight falling across his chest and two-toning the cushion beside him. He half-glanced at her as she approached, peripheral to him, but his unfixed gaze remained forward.
Katt sank onto the cushion next to him and put an arm around him. He melted into her, his whole torso and head turning as a unit, his body a sawdust body, listless, heavy. Kissing his brow, she brought her left hand to his temple, her fingertips touching the expanse of forehead at his right eye. “There, there,” she said. “We’ll be fine. We’ll be okay.” Conner wasn’t crying. He was simply sack heavy, not resisting, not responding at all.
She gently rocked him. As she rocked, she closed her eyes and probed her son’s brain. I should feel more guilt or hesitancy or something, she thought. This should be an impossible thing to do. But the flat opaque funereal mood that had come over her
at the gravesite had stayed to dull her, to cast an inevitability over her desires. They laid the track, mile by mile, of her future and she swung along blithely clacking away, no one at the throttle, no choices as to path, just a steady forward motion.
When she deepened to the caudate nucleus, the shape a slighdy different one but the morphology the same, it was almost a replay of her first probe of Marcus. A readiness to crumble, right there under her virtual fingertips. She could shore it up, or she could set it off.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?” She lost it, found it again.
“Do you think it’ll be like that for me?”
“Not at all,” Katt said. She idled over it, felt how it could be set right, how a slight urging in the opposite direction would activate it. “You’re going to live a long healthy life and die of old age when you’re a hundred plus years old. Same as me.” She was starting to feel a hold, a restraint. The old bookstore feeling. Now was the time to do it, now when he lay passive in her arms and her hand rested on his brow. The paralysis held her, finger on the button, no downward pressure, no upward.
“You think so?”
“Yes.” That same warring struggle she’d felt so many years before was suddenly present in her. What a delicate mechanism the human body was. A dull dead tranquility one moment, an unbearable upsurge of tension the next. All in the service of one slender choice and the indecision which kept it from being made. Decide. Decide. “We’ll live in this house.” Eyes still closed, her insight held the spot in view. The tightening in her belly had returned but she tried to kept it out of her voice. “And then you’ll go to college, maybe grad school, get a job.” She had that nub, she owned it, feeling a mother’s intimacy with it. Inside her, Conner’s body had formed, cell by cell, this dreadful malformation known as Huntington’s, and the brain in which it waited, and the body she now lightly cradled. “Meet an amazingly wonderful girl, have kids.” She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t! But she had to. The moment would pass, and she would wimp out, and he’d be there for five unendurable years. Maybe she’d try again. Tomorrow, or the next day. Or the next. “Make me proud. Even prouder than I already am, which is saying quite a lot.”
He made to ease away. Not saying anything, but maybe getting ready to, once he righted himself. She moved with his body in gradual tandem. But any moment now she’d have to release him, let him fall away and not have done it. A fraction of a second’s choice lay before her. And just as her hold readied to slip from him, she made that choice or it was made for her, almost without willing it—but no, it was a cop-out to remove herself from it. The impulse came to her, and however hesitantly after much struggle and the suffering of great uncertainty, she seized it.
The instant it was out, she wanted to recall it.
There was a dry ache inside her, an oh-no, the puffed damned diminution of her soul. This was her son, this was Conner. She had to reverse it. She had to.
“Thanks, Mom.” He relaxed back into the couch,
eased his right arm onto the armrest, wrist-bend where the cuff, white as rice, stuck out of his coat sleeve.
“Together we’ll get through this,” she said. “I know it.” Her hand hung in the air. A reach forward now after his departing form would never do. She flexed her fingers and brought the hand down upon her lap. Maybe it wouldn’t take. Each body was different. Maybe her talents weren’t sufficiently developed, at least in her son’s case. She’d monitor him, watch him closely, take the next opportunity, delve inside and right things.
Her heart pounded. Do it now, she told herself; heal him now.
But part of her eased back, even beneath her anxiety, looking on, detached, sure, the cold fixed gaze of a snake waiting for its struck victim to die.
And that evil impulse chilled her heart.
The next afternoon, Sherry called and convinced Katt to meet her for lunch at the Student Center. It would be a chance to get out of the house and to allow Conner time alone. To her relief, Katt agreed.
It being Sunday, she found easy parking north of the building and climbed the umpteen steps to the plaza. The sunlight seemed more brilliant for the breezes that blew. She knew Katt would walk from home, and she anticipated a sense of healing from this lovely weather, something Katt desperately needed, given how she’d looked Saturday.
The small eatery, near the yogurt shop on the ground floor, was sparsely crowded. Scatters of students, books open beside cheeseburgers, sat randomly, ones and twos, a table too of fratboys who gave her the usual once over as she came in. Fortunately Katt, having arrived early, had chosen a table almost as far from them as possible. Katt hadn’t ordered anything, but sat with folded hands, hunched over the table.
“Weight of the world, eh?” Sherry said.
Her friend, startled, looked up. “Oh, hi. What?” Sherry placed her hand on Katt’s shoulder, felt the tension there. “Nothing. It’s good to see you.” Three tall girls came idling in, striking young things, headed for the counter with short stacks of books and notebooks hugged to their breasts. “I’m going to have a BLT. How about you?”
“Nothing I guess. Just a Coke.”
“Oh, come on.”
Katt looked distracted. “Uh, the same I guess.” “Good, I’ll get ’em. You stay right here.” Sherry threaded through the tables, pushing in chairs that were shoved out. A grad student type, good-looking guy, trim and nicely muscled, wandered in holding a thick textbook crammed with folds of paper. Some spark passed between them, but she turned her attention to placing the order. Bold men sooner or later rusded up the courage to hit on her with no need for her to do a thing, and the shy ones she had no use for.
When she returned to the table, the grad guy in his soft green Lands’ End shirt, had seated himself with his back to Katt at the next table. She knew all the ploys. He’d obviously seen her through the glass talking to her friend. Now he’d sit there with his book and his bag of potato chips, giving her a pro-
file on occasion by seeing some fake something over yonder, pretending to read. On another day, after lunch she’d have told Katt she wanted to stay behind, then let him turn about to make his move and see where (she knew where) it led. But today, there were more important things on the table than lust. Katt needed her, and by God, Katt would get her full attention.
“Thanks,” Katt said when Sherry placed the sandwich before her, but she made no move to touch it.
Sherry slid into place across from her. “So, how’s our brave boy doing?”
A flit of startlement, then nothing. “Fine. Still numb from how fast it happened. I don’t think the grief has fully hit him yet. Me neither, for that matter.”
“He’s a great kid. A survivor. I can tell.” Wilt of lettuce around the edges and the bacon was burnt, but it passed for food.
“Thanks for hanging out with him, by the way.” She took a tentative sip at her soft drink. “It helped him,
it’s helping me, cope.”
Even in the early throes of grieving, Katt, with her short brown cut of hair, was lovely. Sherry wanted to be in bed with her, holding her, body-to-body intimacy, just a closeness and no thought of sex. Katt would speak of a lost love and maybe she would break with sobs at the word “love,” a mourning tide rippling through her, Sherry with an embrace and words of comfort. Instead she reached out and took her friend’s hand, gripped it, then relaxed back again. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s a great day lor the lake. How about, after we’re done here, we grab some loaves of day-old white bread, hustle Conner into my car, and go feed the ducks at City Park?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Katt, you don’t know anything today, but there’s no reason you ought to know anything, given what you’ve been through. So let me do the deciding for you, okay?”
“I suppose.” You’d think senility had set in. “That’s clearly the best I can hope for today. So I say So be it, and know that I’m here for you. And try to eat a little of that sandwich, all right?”
And Katt said she would, and she did. And the grad, flaunting his profile as she knew he would, couldn’t even find the courage, when they got up and left, to glance at her his disappointment at the turn of events, no trace of humor there, a hunk who carried himself not quite lightly enough for her tastes, someone with clearly a little more growing to do before she’d even consider bedding him.
He’d seen the redhead sashaying around campus before, the air of “faculty” surrounding her. Killer bitch of the sort that drove men crazy with heat. He bet—nope he knew for a fact—that she was the type to snag some poor idiot, fuck him until he was stupid in the groin and raving about love and shacking up with her, then dump him and leave him blubbering in the dust with grief and bewilderment. Today was the first time he’d seen her up close, heard that sexy voice. The drill would sound lovely harmonizing with her, urging those low tones ever higher. Through the many tiny holes he’d spiral into her—residues of steel in punctures of blood forming antennae in her—her pain would broadcast out to the others of her sex planetwide, would dwindle the bitches, make them lose their appetite for breeding.
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