Alone With You

by Marisa Silver

  “Can she still have kids?” Colin said, shyly.

  “Let’s see how she does,” the doctor said, and left the room.

  Why had he asked that question? Was he seeking some kind of justification? A doctor’s note like the ones the kids forged in school to get out of PE? But she knew Colin was not capable of such cruelty, and that he was asking for her sake, because he knew that a child was something she wanted, even though, together, they had not managed it.

  Colin was constant during her recovery. Sometimes she expressed dismay, her discomfort and bedridden boredom compelling her to pick at the scab of his infidelity. She brought up moral relativism, which she knew was unkind. She remembered when Trudy had taken it upon herself to teach Sheila vocabulary as if three-syllable words were the armor Sheila needed to get by in the world. “Quixotic!” Trudy would scream and Sheila would have three seconds in which to give a definition. Colin withstood Sheila’s petulance with calm, implacable smiles, something she imagined he’d learned from his job. His size came in handy as she needed to be carried up and down the stairs of their house until she was strong enough to do so on her own. He brought her food and washed her hair. They sat in bed together night after night and watched infomercials. He traced his hand down the vertical scar that bisected her torso and, two months after the surgery, he made love to her carefully. They did not talk about the woman in Seattle. The tension of the unspoken caused Sheila and Colin to become familiar to one another in a new way, as if they were prisoners of war, sharing a cell and a meager bowl of rice, listening for the footfalls that might seal their fates. When she began dating Colin, she announced to him that if he ever cheated on her, she would leave. But it turned out this was not true. Hurt was not such an obvious thing, and happiness was still more obscure. Her marriage had become perilous and strange, and she felt as she had as a younger woman, when the roommates passed through the room where she and her boyfriend made love. Colin’s adultery exposed her desire, turned it into something both pornographic and banal, private and essential.

  For the first two weeks after Patsy’s surgery, the dog could not move. Still, she tried, starting at the hysterical yips of the neighborhood dogs greeting passing trucks or the sound of the mailbox squeaking open and closed, her instinct trumping the pain of her broken body. Patsy could do nothing for herself, and Sheila had to lift her and carry her outside to do her business. The process was awkward and messy, but Sheila didn’t mind. In the afternoons, when she came home from the school, she sat on the floor next to the dog bed and stared into Patsy’s large, wet eyes, wondering what had drawn Patsy toward nothingness.

  By the third week, Sheila resumed working full-time. On Monday, she sat in her school office across from Morton Washburn. He was a long, angular boy who wore his hair across one eye like a slash of black felt pen marking a grammatical error. Having shed the previous year’s gothic persona complete with black fingernails and white-powdered face, he now affected a prep-school style completely out of place in his inner-city high school—deck shoes and square black-framed glasses, collared shirts peeking up above sherbet-colored crewneck sweaters. The burden of his name was so great that he had to work with extra ingenuity in order to turn it from blight into irony. Sheila noted that he insisted on being called Morton rather than Morty, an affectation she thought shrewd. Morton came to speak to her nearly once a week. He was doing well in school and had not gotten into any trouble. He came from an intact home and his parents always showed up for conferences and signed his report cards. He never had much to say at their sessions, but Sheila felt he was working his way up to telling her he was gay. There were times when she wanted to give him a nudge so that they could get on with it, but instead she sat patiently each week while he tried to manufacture problems that needed her attention. This week, he was having a failure of imagination and they stared across her desk at one another in silence.

  “My dog tried to kill herself,” she said, finally.

  “But why?” he asked. “Was she sad?”

  “Define your terms,” she said.

  Morton sucked in a breath of air. Sheila saw the spark that students got when they matched what they knew to what was being demanded of them and found themselves equal to it. “Despondent, rueful, sorrowful.”

  “Someone’s been studying for his SATs,” she said.

  He shrugged off an embarrassed smile. “Are you sure she didn’t just fall?”

  “No. It was intentional. I was there.”

  “God,” Morton said. “Poor baby.”

  “Do you ever think of hurting yourself, Morton?” she asked. She was supposed to ask such questions when a student expressed anxiety or depression in order to estimate the element of risk. If a student didn’t want to discuss such things with her directly, there was a computerized phone intake they could access. A recorded voice asked: Are you taking any drugs? Press 1 for “yes,” 2 for “no.” Have you considered suicide? Press 1 for “yes,” 2 for “no.”

  “No,” Morton said, wearily, as if even that option would not solve things for him. She believed him. It was the ones who proclaimed the impossibility of such an idea whom she worried about.

  “Anything else you want to tell me today?” she asked.

  “Not really. I feel a lot better, though. I’m glad your dog is okay.”

  She started to question his assertion but stopped herself. Morton was hesitantly searching for a single answer to the complicated question of himself. Perhaps it would frighten him to know that it was possible to be okay and not okay at the same time, that a thing—a dog, say, or yearning—could only exist alongside the possibility of its absence.

  “I like your colors,” she said, waving generally at his shirt and sweater as they both stood.

  “I just can’t wear what everybody else wears,” he said, looking down at his chest with anguish.

  “It’s hard to be a style icon,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, relieved.

  In February, winter settled in decisively. The afternoon sun was low, and the lights in the houses on the street shone with a kind of menace, as if to say that warmth was locked away. Sheila and Colin unloaded grocery bags from the car while Patsy gamboled in the hedges by the side of the driveway. Sheila watched as her husband hoisted two bags and settled them into his arms like twins. She thought about the man at the lemonade stand, about the secret hidden inside his wrinkled bag. She realized that he could not have had interview clothes in the bag because they would have been wrinkled too. She had not thought of that when she was younger. She had not fully understood the danger of his desire. She stared at Colin.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “What?” Colin said. “Are you okay?”

  “You’re going to hurt me, aren’t you? You’re going to leave.”

  Colin looked pained. “I love her. I’m sorry.”

  His clarity rendered her speechless. How could she have known that the bad thing she would never recover from would be love?

  The vet was right. Patsy returned to her normal self. Bouncing and happy. Her hair had grown back in the places where she’d been shaved for the surgery. Sheila took her for a long walk, along the steady path of the same development they’d gone to that autumn day. Now the two of them benefited from the smoothness of paved walkways, the gentle ups and downs, Patsy with her gimpy leg, Sheila with her heart. It was April now, but there had been a spring snow the night before. The sun splashed on the white so that Sheila had to avert her watering eyes. She walked Patsy to the embankment and watched the stream below, which moved quickly, hastened by the snowmelt. Patsy put her nose to the ground to sniff at the tough, determined growth that poked through the winter-hardened crust of earth. Sheila had not put Patsy on a leash; she was not worried the dog would jump. Patsy had already taken her leap.

  Earlier that day during school Sheila had seen Morton in the hallway. He was talking to Vanessa LaConte. Vanessa carried the flesh of her late childhood with her into adolescenc
e just in case, as though she had overpacked, not knowing what she would need. Sheila remembered her ridiculous fantasy about Vanessa discovering the beaker full of acid. All she wanted now was for the girl to emerge from her childhood unscathed, for no one to hurt her, or even try. She was pleased to see her talking to Morton. But when he leaned down to kiss her on the mouth, Sheila had to stop herself from calling out, “No! No!” as if they had stepped into the path of a bullet. She walked past them, careful not to embarrass them by acknowledging that she had seen them or that she knew Morton in any particular way. And did she know him? She had been certain he would not want to kiss girls. But maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she would eventually be right. She turned a corner feeling suddenly happy, her heart full of a radiant possibility. There was so much time between now and eventually. There was so much trouble yet to come.

  The Visitor

  THE NEW BOY WAS THREE-QUARTERS GONE. BOTH LEGS FROM below the knee and the left arm at the shoulder. Candy spent her lunch hour lying on the lawn outside the VA hospital, sending nicotine clouds into the cloudless sky, wondering whether it would be better to have one leg and no arms—or, if you were lucky enough to have an arm and a leg left, whether it would be better to have them on opposite sides for balance. In her six months as a nurse’s aide, she had become thoughtful about the subtle hierarchy of human disintegration. Blind versus deaf—that was a no-brainer, no brain being perhaps the one wound in her personal calculus that could not be traded in for something worse.

  It was sad. Of course it was sad. But she didn’t feel sad. Sad was what people said they were in the face of tragedies as serious as suicide bombings or as minor as a lost earring. It was a word that people used to tidy up and put the problem out of sight.

  The grass was making needle-like pricks through the thin material of her maroon scrubs, and she sat up, smoothing her matching V-neck over her chest and belly, feeling the familiar stab of self-consciousness as her hand rode over the unfashionable lumps. In photographs, Candy’s mother, Sylvie, was as skinny as dripping water at age twenty-two, but that could have been a result of the drugs. Candy had her grandmother’s build, and she knew that as the years passed her shape would settle into the short, hale block that was Marjorie, less body than space-saver.

  Candy glanced at her watch. She still had ten minutes left until the end of her break.

  She wasn’t sure when she had last felt sad. She knew that she must have been sad when she was eleven and her mother had gone into the hospital for the last time. But she couldn’t actually recall the feeling. She did remember being happy afterward, sitting at her grandmother’s kitchen table picking walnuts out of their shells with the tines of a fork while Marjorie made phone calls to let people know that Sylvie had landed on her final and terminal addiction: death. She listened to Marjorie say, “My baby diiihd,” the last vestiges of her Texas accent breathing so much air into the word that Candy could almost see it flying up toward the ceiling of the kitchen like a helium balloon. Sylvie’s presence in Candy’s life had been birdlike. She would swoop into Marjorie’s apartment from time to time to drop a Big Mac into Candy’s waiting mouth, but the enthusiasm that she’d carried with her usually dissipated quickly, smothered as much by Marjorie’s insistence on behaving as if nothing were out of the ordinary as by Candy’s abject need.

  Candy recalled feeling another sort of happiness, too, when she had crawled over the railing of the hospital bed in order to lie next to her mother one last time. Marjorie had forced Candy to wear a new party dress she’d sewn the day before. Made with leftover material from the flower-girl frock that Marjorie had been working on, it was an embarrassing pink affair that grabbed at the tender buds of Candy’s breasts with tight smocking. What was the point, Candy had whined, as Marjorie finished off the hem, breathing heavily through her nose, her mouth a cactus of pins. But in the hospital, lying beside her mother, Candy had understood why she was so dressed up: she was there to act out the role of daughter in the hope that Sylvie would wake and finally take up her own part in the charade of parenting that Marjorie had insisted on whenever Sylvie showed up at the apartment—as if Sylvie had come back not for food or a shower or money but to French-braid Candy’s hair or to explain menstruation to her. The metal guardrails on the bed had felt cold against Candy’s thighs. The sensation was shocking in a pleasurable way that she couldn’t name then, but it wasn’t long before she discovered that the faucet in her grandmother’s bathtub could be angled to hit her between the legs just so.

  When Candy first started working at the VA, the other aides had said that it would take her a long time to get “used to it.” They’d told her to look away from the wounds, to focus on the soldiers’ faces as a way to protect the boys from embarrassment and herself from disgust. But she was not disgusted, even when she had to rewrap stumps or sponge gashes that were sewn up like shark bites. She found these molestations frankly interesting, the body deconstructed so that you could see what it really was: just bits and pieces, no different from the snatches of fabric that Marjorie wrestled into dresses for Mr. Victor of Paris, the tailor in Burbank who had employed her for thirty-seven years. The nurses praised Candy’s bravery, but when she passed by a group of aides taking their break in the cafeteria one afternoon, she knew from their covert glances that they found her strange. She once overheard a girl say that she had no heart.

  Well, no heart was better than no brain, Candy thought, as she sucked on the last of her cigarette and stubbed it out in the grass, dismissing the notion that she might cause a brushfire in this hottest of seasons. She knew that hers was not a singular life, that she would not be the cause of anything monumental. Recently the thermometer had topped out at a hundred and nine in the valley. The power had failed in her grandmother’s apartment complex, where Candy had lived all her life. Marjorie, excited by the idea of a disaster that she might have some control over, had instructed Candy to gather her important papers, as if she expected the apartment to burst into spontaneous flames. Candy scanned the top of her dresser, where her community college diploma sat in its Plexiglas frame alongside assorted gift-with-purchase tubes of lipstick and miniature eyeshadow compacts. In a gesture that even at the time she regarded as TV-movie maudlin, she put her mother’s Communion cross around her neck and lay down on her bed. When she was woken by the sudden snap of lights turning on and the sound of her window fan whirring to life, she took off the necklace and placed it back in her dresser drawer. She showered and went to bed naked, letting the fan blow its slow, oscillating wind across her body.

  The new boy’s name was Gregorio Villalobos. Juana, the admitting nurse, told Candy that lobo meant “wolf” in Spanish. Down the hall lay a Putter and a Shooter, boys who clung to their jaunty monikers as though they were one day going to walk out of the hospital and back onto the golf course or the basketball court where they had earned those nicknames. Candy wondered if the new boy had been called El Lobo in the service. She could ask him, but he wouldn’t answer her. He had not yet spoken. He watched her as she moved around the room, his eyes tracking her as if she were a fly and he was waiting for the right moment to bring down his swatter. Most of the boys looked at her when she brought them food or checked IV bags, but their gazes were like those of old dogs: hope combined with the absence of hope. The nurses chattered at the boys as they went about their work, talking about the weather or whatever sports trivia they had picked up from their husbands. In general, the boys went along with this, and Candy often felt as if she were watching a play in which all the actors had agreed to pretend that someone onstage had not just taken a huge shit. Candy knew that the nurses were scared of silence, and perhaps the boys were, too.

  Before she left the room, she looked at El Lobo’s chart. It wasn’t her business to read charts, simply to mark down what he did and didn’t eat, did and didn’t expel. She’d received minimal training, most of which had to do with things that anyone who’d ever cleaned a house would know and she couldn’t understand much
of what was written on the chart. But she did understand the phrase “elective muteness.” She stared at El Lobo, feeling words crawling up inside her, pushing to get past her closed lips—that pathetic human need to communicate when there was nothing to say. She had been this way when her mother was alive. On the occasions when Sylvie was home, Candy had told her anything she could think of to say: what had happened at school that day, what clothing the popular girls were wearing, how pretty she thought Sylvie looked, with her dark hair parted down the center and hanging on either side of her narrow face like a magician’s cape. She’d talk and talk, and the more she suspected that her mother didn’t care what she was saying, the more she’d fill the apartment with her desperate noise.

  She replaced the chart on the hook at the foot of the bed and glanced at El Lobo once more before leaving the room. She could be silent longer than he could. He had no idea who he was dealing with.

  That night she woke to the sound of her grandmother yelling at the ghost. “Get outta here rii-ght this minute!” Marjorie said, her accent always thicker when she was torn from her dreams, as if her unconscious resided in Beaumont, Texas, while the rest of her kept pace in L.A. Water splashed noisily against the porcelain sink in the bathroom between Candy’s and Marjorie’s bedrooms.

  Candy lay in her bed, which had been her mother’s childhood bed, the headboard still bearing the Day-Glo flower stickers her mother had affixed to it. Candy tried to imagine Sylvie as a naïve girl who liked stickers, but it was impossible. What she remembered most about her mother was the patchouli scent of her skin, underneath which hid a more elusive, dirty smell, an odor that Candy yearned to excavate whenever Sylvie was near. But Sylvie did not often let her daughter get that close. Even during the times when she was living at home, when she swore to Marjorie that she was clean, and Marjorie decided, all pinny-eyed, fidgety evidence to the contrary, to believe her, Sylvie kept herself apart. She’d take over her old room, leaving Candy to the sofa in the living room, and Candy would spend the early-evening hours inventing reasons to walk past the bedroom door, hoping that it might open, that she might be invited in.