Mostly, it took him into the yard, where he gardened, some light weeding and heavy deadheading of the roses. She wondered why he couldn’t get through the day like that. He was so much more agreeable asleep than awake. She hadn’t married him because he was easy, but because she’d found him infinitely interesting, yet interesting, like love, as she’d come to learn, faded over the years. She wished someone had warned her beforehand, but that was old news, old and yellow and tied up with string in the attic.
But how interesting he had once been. He could finish her sentences and she thought this the most magical thing in the world—a man who could read her mind! It was straight out of a fairy tale, if a fairy tale existed in which a Jewish postdoc from Dallas meets a Catholic typist from Little Neck and after a few dates invites her to a Seder, her first. At this Seder he asks her probingly about her family, he’s interested in her. She tells him about her parents, her childhood, how wonderful it had been to grow up so close to the city, how she’d always dreamed of being a Rockette but had to settle for a secretarial job, “which I love, don’t get me wrong, but only because I don’t have legs for days and was born with two left feet.”
“They’d be crazy to turn away those legs, at least that’s what it looks like from where I’m sitting,” he said, which made her blush and lean in closer to him, feeling as if she’d met HIM—Her Incredible Man, she told her friends later, after she got home from the Seder, after she’d had a chance to think about that other thing he asked her, which she kept wanting to bring up with her parents but was having trouble inserting it into their conversations. Why had Julian asked if she was Jewish? How could he have simply looked at her and surmised that she might be? It didn’t make any sense to her. But in the end, he had been right and she wondered what other things such a man could tell her about herself, what he’d see in her that she could not.
But it wasn’t Julian standing over her now, for when she finally cracked open an eye, she saw one of the triplets instead, though she had no idea which one. Oh, she knew that Brendan didn’t like peanut butter, that Brandon only ate pistachio ice cream, and that Bronson had an allergy to chocolate, bless his little heart, but as far as keeping their names straight she was as bad at it as Julian was good. Her inability to recognize which triplet was which drove him insane. Julian, who was perfect in every way, never had a problem differentiating them and often let Roz know how much better he was at it, at everything. She’d married a know-it-all, yet she’d had no idea just how little he actually knew. The worst kind of know-it-all, she thought, rising on her elbow and removing the oxygen from her nose, the one who knows nothing.
“Did you have a bad dream, baby?” she asked, not wanting the child to realize she didn’t know his name.
“It’s okay. I’m Bronson,” he said, whispering. “Daddy said they named me after the brontosaurus, but that dinosaur was slow and stupid and had a tiny head. I prefer to think it was after Charles Bronson.”
“Or Bronson Pinchot,” she said. When he screwed up his face, she added, “He was in one of your dad’s favorite movies when he was your age—Beverly Hills Cop. He must have seen it a hundred times. He used to enlist your aunt and uncle to play Beverly Hills Cop with him. He was always the good guy and he always got his man.” The boy was silent, a strung-out look of concern and consternation on his tired face. His big blue eyes sparkled in the light of the digital clock, which told her it was 2:39 in the morning. “What can I do you for, Bronson?” she asked.
“Paw-Paw’s in my bed,” he explained. “Well, he was in my bed, but now he’s playing Wii.”
“Shall we go have a talk with Paw-Paw?” she asked, switching on the light and standing up without much effort, a minor miracle.
She felt most like herself in the wee hours of the night, like the woman she used to be before the onset of this horrible illness. All of those abominable horse pills she had to swallow each day! All the fuss and pother people made over her! She hated it. But the pills—the medication, Roz—were keeping her alive and supposedly slowing the disease down, though they also gave her ferocious diarrhea and horrible muscle cramps and headaches the likes of which she’d never experienced before. Was it any way to live? Yes. And no. Yet this was her life, and she was sticking to it, for now at least.
She followed the boy upstairs, having to pause on each one to catch her breath, but ascending anyway, which she couldn’t do in the afternoon or evening, when her lungs were in full revolution, inflamed and angry at her for having dared use them throughout the day. She held on to the banister, feeling woozy but refusing to give in to the feeling of helplessness that accompanied her so often these days. She’d been alive for seventy-two long, difficult, beautiful, rapturous, overwrought years, nearly two-thirds of them tied to Julian, and she wasn’t about to let this condition get the best of her, not when she was going on an around-the-world cruise for three months, then docking in Los Angeles again to attend the triplets’ bar mitzvahs in October. True, she’d never get better, only worse, but hell if she weren’t going to make the most out of her final few months. She had not told Julian about her last doctor’s appointment, when she’d gotten this terminal time line, wanting to keep it secret, though in a moment of absolute weakness, she had told Pandora.
Bronson took her hand and together they crossed the catwalk to the playroom and there he was, her seventy-year-old husband, playing Wii Tennis in his pajamas. And she recalled how vigorous he used to be, playing squash three times a week for years, trim and athletic, and oh, how fantastic their sex life had once been, when they were younger and thinner and still cared about the taste and texture of each other’s skin, back when he was still Jules Jacobson, grad student at Rutgers University in Camden. They’d met by accident in a stairwell in Yorktown, on Eighty-first Street and First Avenue, in a crummy fifth-floor walkup, where Julian had gone to pick up a different woman, Roz’s roommate, as it turned out. A week later, Julian was back, only this time to take Roz on a first date to a hamburger joint around the corner—New York City in the late ’70s. Pure heaven. And that was that. A splendid, fairy-tale courtship of flowers and chocolate, and oh, what a gentleman he’d been, laying his jacket down in a puddle for her to step on. Who would believe this about him today? Not his poor children, who loathed him.
He really had been lovely at one time. She supposed he still loved her, though the reasons had grown grubby and tarnished with age, and she was pretty sure that if she asked him why he’d married her, he wouldn’t be able to tell her the truth anymore—he’d just smile slyly and say, “For your money, of course, Roz. For your money.” Which at this point wasn’t far from the truth, was it? Yes, she knew. Of course she did. She knew things, felt things—she was the antidote to Julian in every way, but she hadn’t always needed to be.
“Let’s put you back to bed,” she whispered to Bronson, leading him into his room, where his brothers were sleeping soundly. The smell of boys, she thought, and she suddenly missed her own, although they were only a few feet away. Her sons. Had she let them down the way Julian had? She hated to think so. She’d done her best, after all. Once Bronson was safely tucked up under the covers, she leaned over and kissed him good night, noticing so much of Moses in his face, so much of Julian there as well. How had it come to this? Well, it had, and that’s what she had to focus on now or else she’d be lost. “You sleep well,” she whispered into his ear, but he was already asleep. The magic and mystery of children, to renounce the world the moment they shut their eyes. She wished for Julian’s sake that he still possessed some childlike magic, yet he didn’t. Slowly but surely, he’d turned into his nasty, spiteful mother right before her eyes, her mother-in-law who once told her that she was an uppity Yankee whom no one in the family could stand. That was Roz’s world for a time, until she had Moses, who had nearly killed her in childbirth and had nearly died himself.
When he was sleepwalking, Julian was pliable, suggestible, and she now whispered into his ear that it was time for him to stop
playing tennis, he’d beaten Ivan Lendl again, and he had to go to the locker room to speak to the reporters. For a moment, she thought he hadn’t heard her, or that he was ignoring her, as he did when he was awake much of the time, but then he was putting down the pretend racket and wiping his brow with the imaginary towel she handed him (oh, how she indulged him, even in sleep).
It was closing in on 3:00 A.M., which meant she didn’t have much time. Moses would be getting up soon to go to the gym, as he always did, except of course he wasn’t planning to go to the gym this morning. Roz had sensed it during that unexpected, unfortunate argument in the guest room, the three of them turning on Julian like that, and it frightened her, because the last thing she wanted was for them to pay the price for her mistake. A plot was afoot, though she had no idea what it contained or how it would happen, or even if it would. This was her disaster, hers alone, and it was high time she took responsibility for it, for hadn’t she had a hand in creating the monster and setting it loose upon them?
She had Dietrich to thank for cluing her in—Dietrich who’d told her on Thursday when they’d only just met about what Jacob had inadvertently revealed in the car. She suspected his confession had less to do with Julian, whom Dietrich hadn’t even met, and everything to do with Jacob, whom he loved ferociously. Roz recognized love when she saw it. If Dietrich hadn’t woken up and heard what he had, she might never have known about the plan—why they had all gathered in L.A. in the first place. How absolutely lovely it was of them to want to kill him for her. And how stupid and naive of them to think they would ever get away with it. She loved her kids dearly, but they were all rash and impulsive, and there was no telling how they might screw the whole thing up. Three of them meant three times the noise, six hands meant six times the mishaps, and thirty fingers meant thirty times the accidental smudges and leftover DNA. Unless they wear gloves, she thought, but do they really have that kind of foresight? They weren’t murderers, these kids of hers, they were absolutely unprepared for such felonious acts. It would destroy them, their hearts and consciences. Hadn’t Julian put them through enough already? She would not have his blood on their hands.
He floated down the stairs much more quickly than she did, and she lost sight of him in the dark. After making it down the last step, she paused to catch her breath, just for a moment. When she saw that the guest room door was open, she worried that he’d gone back to bed. She checked. He wasn’t in bed or anywhere in the room. She grabbed her tank of oxygen, for all of this upstairs and downstairs and chasing after Julian business was tiring her out much faster than she’d imagined it would, and she wheeled it behind her out of the room to go look for him. But then she heard movement coming from the garage, a familiar rattling, and she knew, because he was nothing if not predictable, that he was off to mow the grass again.
She opened the front door and sure enough there he was, pushing the lawn mower through the yard. She was afraid he’d wake the entire household, so she went after him, but he was too fast for her. She was breathing heavily now, puffing for dear life, the sweat running down her scalp and into her eyes. When he rounded the corner of the house, Roz turned and headed toward the wall of glass, the oxygen tank bumping along the floor, clanging as she pushed through the door to meet Julian, this obstinate, bastard husband of hers. For my brood, she thought, and she charged down the steps and out into the yard, the sky teeming with the faint buzz of helicopters, six or seven of them hovering above the canyon, one of them right above them, so close that if she angled her face toward it, she could feel the rotation of wind on her cheeks and in her hair, cooling the sweat and fanning the flames of her certainty that this was the right thing, the only thing to do. She took careful steps toward Julian just as the yard lit up with errant light, the helicopter’s spotlight, striking the blue water of the pool and the dark green of the grass, her husband in his faded pajamas and her in her nightgown and slippers, and then it fell on two coyotes in the far corner of the yard. They were ripping apart an opossum, a possible relative of the one Mo had scooped out of the pool. Well, it certainly wasn’t Nieves, she thought, as Julian, perhaps sensing danger, angled the lawn mower away from them and toward her, where she was standing in the middle of the yard, but then the lawn mower hit one of the uneven flagstones by the pool and would go no farther, and Julian let his arms drop to his sides, the lawn mower giving out and going silent. The coyotes glanced up from their midnight snack, lifting their bloody snouts into the air, and oh, how she hoped they would lunge at Julian and rip his throat out, for then everything would end. But instead they turned their ragged faces to her, keenly aware of and able to sniff out weakness of any kind, these vagabond scavengers of the animal kingdom. When one of the coyotes took a step toward her, she took a step toward the pool, where Julian was standing over the water. She thought, How perfect, and she thought, Jump, although the water might wake him up and then where would she be?
Her heart was pounding with everything it had, but she was nearly there, nearly beside him, and when the coyote finally lunged, she went perfectly still and held her breath for as long as she could, which wasn’t that long, but this seemed to do the trick, for the coyote swerved and pounced at Julian, knocking him into the water, the force of his fall sending up sprays of water against which Roz shut her eyes. When she opened them again, Julian was awake, splashing around in the pool and calling her name, the coyotes and the helicopter gone, the backyard once again shrouded in darkness.
“Julian, are you okay?” she asked, shuffling to the edge of the pool and looking down at him bobbing there, his glasses askew and one of the lenses gone, his pajamas bunched up around him, and the sight of him caused her to laugh.
“That’s right, just go ahead and laugh,” he said, rubbing at his face, still dazed. When he pulled his hand away, Roz saw something dark running down his chin and throat.
“Oh, Julian, I think you cut yourself,” she said.
Julian brought his hand to his chin. “I must have scraped it on the bottom,” he said, making his way to the side, toward her. “Well, don’t just stand there. Go and get me a towel before I bleed to death.” She looked down at this husband of hers, at the years of their lives together etched into his face and how the pajamas clung to his saggy flesh, and she couldn’t stand the sight of him any more than he could stand the sight of her. “Roz, come on, I’m bleeding here,” he said, touching the spot on his chin and wincing.
“Yes,” she said but didn’t move. “You are bleeding, Julian. It’s true. It’s probably the truest thing you’ve ever said.”
“What? What are you talking about?” he asked, grabbing onto the side of the pool but lacking the strength to hoist himself up. “Just get me a towel, for crying out loud,” he ordered.
“Get it yourself,” she said.
He looked up at her, the blood trickling from the gash and falling daintily down his neck to land in the water. One drop, two, ten, twenty. “Are you looking forward to our cruise?” he asked suddenly. “I hope you are, Roz, because when we’re out in the middle of the ocean, I’m going to throw your sorry, burdensome ass overboard.”
“Yes, Julian, I figured,” she said patiently. “It would have been a good plan except for one small detail.”
“Oh, yeah, and what’s that?” he asked belligerently.
“You’re not coming with me,” she said, drawing the oxygen tank up and over her head. And with all of her heart and with all of the might still left in her, she brought it down on him, listening to the crack of his skull and his nose, which smashed against the side of the pool. She was about to raise it above her head again but paused. She’d been Mrs. Julian Jacobson for so long she was unsure of how to be anyone else, especially around her children, who’d scold her for referring to herself like this and not simply as Rosalyn Jacobson, or just plain Roz. She gazed upon him with her tender smile and all the love she could still muster, because that’s who she was—Mrs. Julian Jacobson, for forty-four years.
She loo
ked down searchingly, expecting Julian to lift his head and scream at her. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear another single word from this man who’d kept her in relative comfort this past year, ever since her life-changing diagnosis, yet who’d also stopped her from living what little life she had left. He’d been waiting for her to take her last breath. In the beginning, Julian’s brand of love had been his own—neither demonstrative nor tender—but she’d thought as time went on, as they grew closer and she gave him children, that this might change. It hadn’t. In fact, she never could have imagined what it would eventually become, perverting even that first year, the best year they had, in her recollection, and all but erasing the sweet intimacy that had come before. Well, now it was way too late, she thought, raising the tank above her head at last and bringing it down on Julian again, until his fingers slackened and he finally let go, sinking beneath the surface, the water blooming with his blood.
As Roz collapsed now on one of the lounge chairs, she surprised herself by crying. Rather than the tears of relief she had expected, however, she felt sorrow and anguish for the life she’d just taken, a life that had been wedded to hers for more than four decades. A life she had cared for and nurtured and, yes, had even loved. Julian was spinning in slow arcs through the water, his arms outstretched as if reaching for Roz, but Roz, lying back and shutting her eyes, was feeling more alive than she had in ages. The hairs on her arms stood on end, her skin prickled with goose bumps, and the cool night breeze slipped over her, whispering, Julian is dead. Live your life.
When she was breathing normally again, Roz got up and looked down into the pool, where Julian floated faceup, his nose smashed and pulpy, the pajama top puffed up with air like a life jacket. Dead jacket is more like it, she thought. Gallows humor, she thought. She kneeled down to clean his hair and skin from the bottom of the dented tank, rinsing it in the water that she herself had stolen from the neighbors next door—the pool hadn’t actually featured in her plan; she’d filled it merely to thank Dietrich, who loved to swim, for alerting her to her kids’ scheme, and besides, the Rothmans could go fuck themselves. No one mistreated her grandsons and got away with it.
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