“I’m not sure. Maybe some small ones.”
Noel pulled a couple of towels from the rack and set them next to her. Then she began trying to pull my sweats off without pulling me off my toilet perch. My underwear came off with them, but got hung up at my knees. It hurt trying to stay upright, but the absurdity of it all made me giggle, and Noel grinned. There were some small bandages on my calves, and my legs were covered with nasty bruises. I thought she’d say something, but after her initial outburst, Noel had given no sign of surprise.
She draped the bath towel on my lap while she undid my buttons, then pulled the towel up over my chest as she removed my shirt. Whether for the sake of her modesty or my own I didn’t know, but I appreciated it. I was never one of those women at the gym who felt comfortable flashing my breasts and furriness at everyone in the locker room until I’d sufficiently aired out and felt like dressing. Maybe if I’d gone to the gym more than half a dozen times in my life, I’d feel differently, but I doubted it.
One of the men called out from the kitchen, and Noel went to check on the crisis, telling me not to move until she got back. I was starting to chill and took the opportunity to wrap the other towel around me. When she returned, she got me sitting on the edge of the bath and asked me if I needed any more help. I assured her I could handle it. She nodded and flipped the switch on the bathroom fan.
“I’ll be back in about 15 minutes to help you out. Don’t worry about your hair. We’ll wash it under the tap after you bathe. If you need anything, just let me know.”
A wicked grin touched her mouth. “We Southern Baptists aren’t much on nudity, but if you fall in I think I can help you out without endangering my immortal soul.”
After Noel left, I slid awkwardly into the warm bath water. I could hear laughing in the kitchen. Had that been a sarcastic remark, Noel’s first joke? People really were loosening up around here. Nothing like a helpless, nasty-looking friend to unleash one’s goodwill and sense of humor.
I tried to resent them all, resent their intrusive presence and condescending helpfulness, their apparent wholeness. I’d turned my back on my own family years ago, or rather I’d returned their favor. I had my reasons—good reasons—and I hadn’t regretted it for a moment. Well, I hadn’t seriously regretted it. I also hadn’t regretted being wholly independent. In case you’re wondering, yes, wholly independent does look an awful lot like alone. At least from the outside. You get used to it, and you get territorial. The presence of other people in your life is annoying. It scrapes on raw nerves and taxes social muscles that are content to be atrophied.
Now my kitchen was full of people laughing, fixing food, making themselves at home. They’d never asked if they could come in, and I tried to be angry about that too. I tried, but I couldn’t. If they’d asked, I’d have turned them away, like I do everyone. And I was glad they were here. I was glad. There, I said it, to myself if no one else. It didn’t even hurt that much. In fact, it was nice to be taken care of. Just for an evening.
I got out of the tub carefully, dried off and wrapped myself in a towel. Sitting on the fuzzy toilet lid, I looked down at the stopper in the tub and wondered if I’d pitch in headfirst if I tried to take it out. Noel came in and saved me the trouble. She’d found a shirt with a zipper for me, and after washing my hair I carefully dressed myself in clean clothes. Progress.
The five of us spent the evening hanging out and eating pizza from paper plates I didn’t know I had. Maybe they’d arrived with the groceries. I kept dozing off in my armchair, and occasionally I’d catch scraps of conversation out of context. The synaptic dislocation was almost enough to wake me up, but not quite. Instead the sound of familiar voices was reassuring. Mike and Richard left first. They still had to drive home to the Panhandle, but said they’d be checking in periodically. Ben left soon after, and Noel got me settled in for the night, preparatory to leaving.
She actually tucked me in, or the adult version of such a procedure. She left a glass of water and a bottle of pills on the nightstand by my bed, just in case.
“There’s a chart on the fridge that tells you when to take your medication. Richard and I filled the prescriptions, and they’re on the counter by the fridge. There should be plenty of food, but if we missed something, I’ll be over tomorrow after work. I left my work number in case of emergency, and Ben’s next door if you need something. I think he finishes school this week, and he gets home early pretty early. Of course, you know that.”
Noel smiled. “Richard and I had an interesting talk when we went shopping. He’s a good man. You know, he really cares about you.”
“He’s married.”
“True.” She shook her head and started to rise. “True.”
The discussion of Richard’s marital status cleared my head enough to make me realize what had been nagging me all evening.
“Noel, does Richard know who you are?”
“You mean, does he know I’m your client, or does know he defended my father for murdering my mother?”
She smiled. “It hasn’t come up yet. And I only told him my first name.”
For a while after Noel left, I thought I’d finally had my fill of sleep. A short while. I couldn’t get my head around what was going on, and I couldn’t make myself care. My head got wooly again. I didn’t think about tomorrow. I didn’t think about anything. I just lay there until sleep came, and with it, dreams.
Pain woke me once, probably the result of an ill-advised sudden move in my sleep. I was still breathing hard with a vague recollection of being chased in the darkness. Once I’d stopped flailing around the pain left, and with the pain and the memory of the dream gone, I was able to get back to sleep pretty easily. Then I dreamed of Allan.
It had been 18 years since my brother died, and for the first few years, I dreamed of him often. Sometimes I relived real moments from our past, actual conversations with him. In those dreams, I knew he was dead, and there were so many things I wanted to tell him, but our past scripts constrained me. I was trapped in the same words and couldn’t change anything, except by the end tears would be streaming from my eyes as I said my lines. Eventually I started to think he knew what was coming too, that he was trapped in the script, and his chocolate eyes looked like they were melting.
In other dreams, I’d create new memories. I’d remember while dreaming that Allan was supposed to be dead, but think my greatest wish had been fulfilled. The waking world where he was dead became the dream, the nightmare. We never lived very dramatic moments, just the everyday things we used to take for granted. When I woke from those dreams, I’d have a few cruel moments of happiness, thinking Allan really was alive and my years of grief the dream. Then the truth would creep in again, and the emptiness would return.
I hadn’t dreamed of Allan for a while, and I don’t know what triggered this one. In my previous dreams, he’d looked as I remembered him, a beautiful 19-year-old with his whole life ahead of him. This time he looked closer to the age he would be had he lived—37. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, if he had a family, but I don’t remember either of us speaking. I don’t think we could. We just looked at each other, smiling, and in the way of dreams we did that for a fraction of a second that was forever. At the end of forever, both our faces were wet with tears. We embraced. His arms were strong, lifting me up onto my toes. It lasted forever, and forever ended again. I fought to stay asleep, to stay with him, but I couldn’t. My eyes opened to see the red numbers of my alarm clock. 2:14 a.m. My pillow was damp and my face itched with tears.
It hurt to move, but I got up to splash water on my face anyway, only to discover that task was too complex for my feeble left hand. I settled for a damp washcloth instead. The coolness was reassuring, and I took the cloth with me to the living room to sit in front of the TV. Even manipulating the remote was painful enough to take the fun from channel-surfing infomercials. I flipped the television off and set the remote on the end table next to me. A bit of pale blue on the other side of
my hula girl lamp caught my eye.
That damn letter. How many days had it been since I’d brought it home? I couldn’t remember any more. It was still unopened. Why not? I was feeling masochistic. I reached for it and spent a good half minute fumbling to get it open with one sore hand.
Dear Sydney,
You know I’m not much of a writer, but you’ve never seen fit to grace me with your phone number. God, why do we bring out the worst in each other? I was angry before I even finished that first sentence, angry just at the thought of you, at the sight of your chosen name. And I know your blood pressure will rise at the sight of my handwriting, if you still recognize it. Believe it or not, it wasn’t my intention to batter you with dysfunction right out of the gate. For some reason, I’m a fully functioning adult in every other aspect of my life, but when it comes to you I’m still a bitchy teenager. I’m married now. Did you know that? His name is Britt. He’s a wonderful man, and I’m sure I don’t deserve him, but there you are. I’m happier with him than I have any right to be. We’re coming up on our fourth anniversary.
Dad is still dad, but less so, if that makes sense. He’s even less present than he used to be, more in his own world, or just totally out of it. I can’t tell the difference. I’m worried about him. He’s retired now, and he’s out in the Lab at all hours, doing whatever it is he does, with no phone and no one to check on him. He doesn’t eat right, when he bothers to eat at all. I think he sleeps out there. Sometimes I drop by and I’m not sure that he even knows who I am. Ten years without speaking, and I can still read your mind. “Not that he ever did.” Know us, any of us. And you’re right. He didn’t. Poor misbegotten us. Whoops, slipping into dysfunction again.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m writing to you. Maybe I’m maturing, or at least aspiring to. I still feel like you betrayed us, but I’m starting to understand now that you thought we’d betrayed you. I’m not saying that I can ever forgive you, or that I expect you to forgive me, but I can’t imagine mom or Allan would want it this way. It’s been far too long already.
Call me. There are things we need to talk about. Current things, like dad, not the past, since we know we can’t speak reasonably about what’s gone before. Just call me, sis.
Lisa
My left hand strayed involuntarily to my forehead. I only became aware of its movement when my fingers felt the unexpected texture of a bandage. I couldn’t remember why the bandage was there. Then I found myself looking at my trembling hand, wondering how something so pained and pathetic could have moved of its own accord.
I went to the kitchen and inspected the row of pill bottles on the counter. The ones I wanted were in my bedroom, where Noel had left them. She’d left the cap loosened for me. Unable to use both hands, I dumped a couple of pills on my nightstand, then picked them up and downed them with a sip of slightly stale-tasting water. I had no more dreams that night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I spent the rest of the week convalescing, or as Ben said, being lazy. I slept a lot and watched videos. My brain didn’t feel up to reading yet, but toward the end of the week Ben brought a computer video game over, and that occupied a little of my time. It was one of those slow-paced strategy games, something I could actually play left-handed without getting carpal tunnel syndrome. Ben came over after school, and by mid-week we’d finished off Mrs. Waters’ brownies while picking apart the last of the day-time soaps. After that, I’d have my daily excursion to the mailbox. My feet still caused me a lot of pain when I walked, but it no longer felt like the pain was a harbinger of something horribly wrong. It was just pain.
Noel often arrived before we made it back to the house. She’d drop by after work, and we’d play rummy until Noel had completely slaughtered us. By the end of the week, I could use the fingers of my right hand to pluck individual cards from my left. Ben’s fingers never got any more dexterous in his clumsy attempts to cheat.
We also ate dinner together every night. Noel cooked, with some assistance from Ben. How she coaxed a teenager addicted to pizza and junk food into the kitchen I’ll never know, but they made a pretty good team. Their chatter and the steaming smells always lulled me into a doze.
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? In a way it was, while they were there. If I picked at my food, I still ate enough to allay any concerns. If I slept a lot, seemed a little fuzzy or grumpy sometimes, needed sunglasses to get the mail, who could blame me? I was healing. And I was chafing at the inactivity. But most of all, I was taking a lot of pills. A lot for me, anyway. I don’t shun western medicine when I need it, but my need threshold is probably a little higher than most. I was never a recreational drug user, even in college. It wasn’t a matter of morality or legality. Again, I guess I just never felt the need. But I felt the need now.
Once Noel and Ben left in the evenings, my mind would wander where I wasn’t ready to go—back to the clearing in the woods, back to the moments before or the years after my brother’s death. So I’d go to bed. I’d have my nightly dose of narcotics and go to sleep. That worked for a day or two. Then I found that the silence of the day was too much for me to bear, and I started my morning dose.
For the first couple of hours, I’d watch the drugs take effect, like an intellectual exercise. There, there it is—the bit of vertigo in my brain, like I’m falling but only stepping a few feet off the edge of a deck before hitting the ground. It’s controlled falling, trying to find the next step on the stairs in the dark, a step you know is there but your brain thinks disappeared forever when you turned the light off. Amazing. Feel my blood accelerate briefly through my body, then slow down. And the pain isn’t as close. It’s still there, but doesn’t make me claustrophobic, doesn’t feel as if it’s sitting on that same next step down, waiting for my tentative foot to smother me again.
Then I’d sleep, or pretend to myself I was sleeping. It was such a fine line, after a while I didn’t know if I was asleep or not, but it didn’t matter. Not as long as I didn’t have dreams. I found as the days wore on I couldn’t play Ben’s computer game. It was too frustrating, perversely getting more difficult rather than easier. And the sun in the living room was too bright for my eyes, so I started going back to bed. Or not leaving the bed. Most days I remembered to clean up, or at least move to the living room, before Ben showed up after school. The presence of him and later Noel began to be less of a comfort and more something intrusive that kept me from my sleepy haze. Part of me knew that was a problem, but I didn’t care. The most I could do was try not to let my irritation show while Ben and Noel were there.
One evening I was jolted from what may have been a fake doze by a variation on the cocktail party syndrome. I’d call it the “I’m a Lying Bastard” syndrome. I wasn’t awakened by the sound of my name, but instead by the knowledge that a lie I’d told was being passed along to someone else.
Ben was saying, “Sydney doesn’t have any family.”
“None at all?” from Noel.
“I don’t think so,” Ben responded. “She said she’s an only child.”
I’d been trying not to think about my family since dreaming of Allan and reading Lisa’s letter, which of course mean on some level I’d been thinking of them the whole time. That’s probably why the conversation caught my ear, not because of my impressive polygraphic abilities. And because Lisa’s pale blue envelope, now lying on the floor beneath the end table, suddenly seemed fluorescent, pulsing like a paper telltale heart.
I didn’t even remember telling Ben the lie, but I must have done. For years I’d told anyone bold enough to ask that I was an only child. I always rationalized the lie by telling myself that in a way it’s true. The three of us may be related by blood, but we haven’t been a family for a long time. When my brother Allan died 18 years ago, he pretty much took the idea of family with him. Now for the first time, my “partial truth” felt wrong. I was unable to call it anything but a lie.
My sister Lisa and I haven’t spoken since our mother�
��s funeral. In her letter, Lisa said it had been 10 years, but it’s more like eleven. We hadn’t spoken for years before that either. Lisa and I never got along very well. I always thought she was a bitch, and she always knew I was right. I’m not in contact with our father either, so when I got Lisa’s letter I thought he might have died. You’d think she would have called for something like that, let me know about the funeral, but with Lisa you never knew. Of course, as she said, apparently I hadn’t given her my phone number. And I hadn’t opened the letter for days, knowing it could contain the news of father’s death. Guess the bitchiness gene is common to the entire female line.
I wanted to say something, to stop Noel and Ben and explain all this and more, but there was so much to tell, and I was so tired. It took too much effort to care. I couldn’t face it, couldn’t face them, and feigned sleep. Again, rationalization, excuses, for taking the coward’s way out and not telling them when I had the chance. If I had, I could have saved us all a lot of grief. Maybe. Maybe not.
That night I took the last of the vicodin—only one, and my sleep was fitful. I got out of bed the next morning, feeling raw, and thought a little food might take the edge off. When I tried to heat a mug of water in the microwave for some instant oatmeal, I found myself staring at the microwave uncomprehendingly. I pushed every variation of the buttons I could think of, with no response. Then I realized the damn thing was unplugged. It must have gone unused all week. Had I eaten at all when Ben and Noel weren’t here?
The microwave stand was too heavy and awkward for me to move to get to the outlet, so I struggled with a kettle of water on the stove instead. The whistle of hot water pierced me between the eyes and probably contributed to my lack of control as I sloshed water into my bowl and made apple cinnamon soup. I forced myself to eat it anyway and felt I was on the road to recovery until I dropped the bowl while trying to rinse it and splashed myself with oatmeal water.
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