“You don’t get to tell your mother how to live her life,” Bethany snapped. “If she’s discovered something you can’t understand, it’s not your place to stand in its way.”
Eileen bristled. “Take it easy, Bethany.”
Rachelle put her hand up in a pacific gesture. “You’re a bright young man,” she said calmly. “Are you willing to consider that there might be a reality beyond the comprehension of your senses? That all might not be as it seems?”
“Mom!” he said, exasperated.
“Why don’t you ask her what she wants?” Bethany strode over to stand behind her. Eileen felt Bethany’s fingertips on her back urging her into the loveseat, and she sat, surprising herself. “She’s had a lifetime of males telling her how to behave, and she’s not about to start taking orders from her own son.”
Connell fell back against the wall, looking spent. Sergei remained standing with his arms folded across his chest. She knew it must have seemed to Connell that she was under Rachelle’s spell. She wished Connell could see the granite vein of skepticism that ran through her, which Rachelle could never mine clean, no matter how long she chipped away.
“I want you to know something,” Rachelle said to him. “Your mother is in good hands here.”
“Can we get out of here, Mom?”
“I’m fine,” Eileen said. “I don’t want you to think anything weird is going on.”
“How much money have you given them?”
“He’s only concerned about his inheritance,” Bethany said. “Typical.”
“That’s not fair to the boy,” Eileen said.
Rachelle took a step toward Connell. “I’m saddened to hear you speak in such simplistic terms about the relationship your mother has formed to the truth of the universe. I may draw a modest fee for facilitating her enlightenment, but it’s only to cover basic administrative costs, nothing more.”
“You’re preying on her in a time of weakness. You should be ashamed.”
“Mind your manners,” Bethany warned.
“Leave my mother alone.”
“You’re nothing but a punk,” Bethany said.
“And you’re a crazy cult lady.” He pointed at Bethany and Rachelle. “You and you.”
Eileen knew she should step in, but she couldn’t make her mouth form any words.
“I’ve tolerated you here out of deference to your mother,” Rachelle said. “You’re no longer welcome. Please leave now.”
Bethany stepped forward; Sergei did as well.
“Mom,” Connell said, simply, plaintively.
“You’ve offended me,” Rachelle said. “I’ve asked you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to call the police.”
“I’m not leaving without my mother.”
“I’m quite sure that’s not your decision to make,” Rachelle said. “Why don’t you go peacefully and let us get back to trying to do some good for your mother, instead of causing her needless anxiety.”
Connell didn’t move.
“Now,” Rachelle said.
“Mom!”
“It’s okay,” Eileen said.
“You heard your mother.” Bethany stepped toward Connell. “Now go. If Rachelle doesn’t call the police, I will.”
Sergei was pleading with her through the dark pools of his eyes. She sensed a controlled fury in him; she could imagine it erupting if anyone so much as grazed Connell with a finger.
“You’re just going to stay here with these people? That’s it?”
She wanted to say, I’ll be home later, but the words still wouldn’t come.
“You’re ignorant,” Bethany said. “You’re an ignorant kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about. I feel sorry for you.”
“Don’t talk to my son like that,” Eileen heard herself say, and the room grew still and quiet. She rose. “He’s not ignorant. He means well. And I’m sorry if he offended you. I’m sure he’s sorry too. Yes?”
“Sure,” Connell said, evidently trying to seize the momentum. “Sorry.”
“I’m going to go home.” Before she knew it, she was paces from the door. “I’m tired. I want to thank you for everything.”
“You don’t have to let guilt rule over you like this,” Rachelle said. “You’re on the verge of a major breakthrough.”
“You’ve helped me,” she said. “You’ve made a great difference.”
“You still have a long way to go,” Rachelle said. “Don’t fool yourself.”
“I’m sure I do.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t let him influence you,” Bethany said. “He’s no better than your husband.”
Eileen got very still. “You don’t know the first thing about him.” She dug into her pocketbook for the check and extended it toward Rachelle.
“Don’t be silly.” Rachelle tried to reach for her wrist. Eileen shook her off and left the check on the table. “You’re always welcome here. Take some time to think it over.”
She must have stood there too long, because Connell was calling her over. She walked toward the door. Bethany moved to head her off, but Sergei slid in front of Bethany like a gravestone rolling into place, blocking her with his massive body as Eileen continued out to the street.
“It’s going to be okay,” Bethany called after her, but Eileen didn’t turn around. Connell raced ahead while Sergei led her down the stairs and up the stretch of the block to where the car waited. He opened the door for her in the back. Connell took the streets with the grim purposefulness of a getaway driver.
In the silence that prevailed in the car, she wondered how her son had plotted this thing, how many people knew, how he had explained it to Sergei.
They pulled into the garage and went upstairs. Sergei headed to his room. She and Connell stood in the kitchen, eyeing each other warily.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
“Yes, I did.”
“I wish I could explain this to you. I know it sounds like I’m making excuses. But I was never in any kind of danger. I was in control the whole time.”
He just looked at his feet. She wondered when exactly he had gotten so big. She was having one of those moments she hadn’t had in years, where he seemed to grow before her eyes. It occurred to her that he might have seen her as being as out of control as his father was. Maybe he thought both of them were losing their minds.
“Anyway, I want to thank you for caring. I was fine, but still.”
“No problem,” he said.
“I mean it. You’re a good kid.”
“Come on. You’re my mother.”
She wanted him to hug her, but he just stood there dubious of the way she was looking at him.
“Come here.” She put her arms around him. She felt his breathing against her chest and was reminded of holding him when he was a baby, his laundered pajamas soft and fresh as he was, the whole of him fitting in her two hands, his little behind on her palm. He’d looked at her then as the source and giver of love. She hadn’t had to hide anything from him, and she hadn’t needed anything from him but his presence. And it was that way again now, for at least this day, this moment. His presence at Rachelle’s had meant everything, and his presence now in her arms meant everything too.
When they were done hugging, he looked at her strangely.
“What?”
“Maybe those crazy ladies helped you after all.”
“What do you mean?”
“That was the first time you ever did that.”
“Did what?”
“Hugged me first.”
She shook her head. “That’s not possible,” she said.
“In my memory, anyway.”
She shook it again. “There’s more that’s happened than what’s in your memory.”
• • •
When she got to the top of the stairs she ran into Sergei leaving the bathroom. He gave her a diffident wave, as though they
were schoolchildren passing in the hallway during the change of classes. She stood in the antechamber to the bedroom for a while, hearing Ed’s labored breathing under the sheet.
She walked to the bed and found him lying awake in a spooky silence, looking right at her.
“Where?” he asked, sounding as if he were half dreaming. “Where were?”
“With Bethany.”
“Who?”
“Someone I used to work with. It’s not important.”
Ed had always had quick and accurate instincts about people. She crawled in and lay beside him. He drifted off. She lay awake listening to the unified murmur of televisions, her own, Sergei’s, and the one in the den. She pictured Sergei awake, keeping a solitary vigil like herself.
85
Ed had lost faith in the physical properties of things. On the way up the stairs that night, he stopped on every step. She had to follow closely behind him and tap a leg to indicate which one was next, then lift it for him. He was frantic when his foot was in the air. They proceeded at a glacial pace, and then he stopped and simply wouldn’t budge, despite how hard she pushed his leg, which still had considerable strength in it, the atrophy notwithstanding. She couldn’t get him to let go of the banister. This was one of those moments—they had been coming more frequently lately—when she wished Sergei didn’t go home on the weekends.
By the time they reached the top, they were both exhausted. She steered him into the bathroom, where she undressed him with great difficulty. Getting one leg over the high lip of the bathtub was no mean feat; getting the other over seemed an impossibility. He straddled the bathtub wall like a rodeo performer athwart two prancing horses. She upset his balance enough to get his other leg in, but then her troubles started. Laying him down was out of the question: she would never get him up again. Showering him, though, presented the risk of his slipping and cracking his head open. A visit to the hospital for something so severe almost certainly meant he would be taken from her care. While the tub was dry, her anxiety was contained; when the water came on, she began fretting in earnest. Whatever purchase he had on the tacky mat was tenuous, and there was nothing for him to grab on to but her body if he started falling. She turned the shower on and cleaned him, but when the time came to emerge, his anxiety spiked. He simply wouldn’t step over the lip of the tub. She tried coaxing him, forcing his leg up, making feints at him, but nothing budged him. His legs shook from standing so long in that fixed intensity of opposition, and his body quivered under a dew of cold droplets. She decided to turn the water back on to warm him up. He stood wordless in that superfluous rinse until she shut it off. They could not go on like this. She thought to get the cordless phone and call for help, but she didn’t want to leave him alone for even the several seconds it would take her to retrieve it, and besides, she didn’t know whom to call, and she didn’t want an ambulance to come for fear of his never returning. She could shout for help, but no one would hear.
She attempted a few more times to tap and lift his leg, exhorting him to cooperate and be a man about this. She tried luring him into a sense of ease and then going after his leg when he wasn’t expecting it, but he stiffened as soon as she wrapped her arms around his calf. She wished she’d bought the goddamned shower chair. He was in a kind of agony of fatigue now. He didn’t want to resist her, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to sit and he couldn’t sit; he wanted to leave and he couldn’t leave. He somehow had the strength to stand, though she knew he couldn’t do it forever; he would eventually fall like a felled tree. She sat on the tile floor and looked at him in his nakedness.
“Please, God, tell me what to do,” she said aloud.
Something in her aspect of defeat might have triggered some atavistic impulse to protect his mate from suffering, because he motioned to step out of the tub. She leapt up to offer a steadying hand. He lifted the leg with a vigorous thrust, as if it had come unstuck from mud after a struggle. She walked him into the bedroom and saw that it had been two hours since they’d started up the stairs. It felt like an augury: his brain was freezing up. Their time left together in the house seemed precariously little.
She dressed him with deliberateness and care. He sat on the bed in the bright white of his underwear and T-shirt and she felt tenderness for him and a yearning that she almost couldn’t bear. She laid him beneath the sheet and tucked it up under his arms. She curled up to him, clinging to his side, trying to memorize the feeling of his corporal presence in the bed with her. She did not sleep. She lay listening to his breathing, watching his chest rise and fall, staring at his face in the moonlight coming through the window. Sometime in the middle of the night she felt his erection and pulled his underwear off. He did not startle awake but rather came to gently and with tender murmurings and she climbed atop him and took him inside her. She looked into his eyes as she used to when they were first married and he did not look away. Despite his incapacity in almost every area of his physical life, he was still able to climax, and she was startled into a giggling joy at the wide-eyed surprise that overtook him as he did so. She lay in his arms for a while afterward, and in the drift of her thoughts she was brought around to her parents. This unlikely coupling with Ed tonight was proof that what was visible to others was only a sliver of the spectrum of a couple’s intimate life. A hunger for contact could overcome intractable impediments. She began to reconceive of her parents’ lives, to imagine that a shadow passion overtook them when they might least have expected it to.
She had to get some distance if she wanted any hope of falling asleep, but she wanted to be close to him, so for the first time in years she attempted to sleep facing him. She didn’t think she would actually drift off, but the next thing she knew the room was flooded in light.
• • •
That morning, a Saturday, she wanted to pay a visit to Cindy, who’d had her gall bladder out, but she didn’t want to bring Ed. She left him with Connell and drove to Nassau University Medical Center.
When she walked in that night, she found all the lights out except for a cabinet lamp in the kitchen, and Ed lying on the cold bricks of the vestibule. She cursed herself as much as she did Connell, because she’d had a strange intimation of disaster when she’d left. She knew she couldn’t trust him, and she’d left Ed with him anyway. She called his name and got no answer.
She couldn’t lift Ed, couldn’t even get him to sit up. It was as if rigor mortis had set in while he was still alive. She rushed to the cordless phone and saw a note that said that Connell had gone to the city to meet some friends. Rage coursed through her. She brought the phone back with her to Ed and set it down. She didn’t want to call anyone until she absolutely had to. She tried to get under him and wedge him up under her thighs, but she couldn’t get a purchase on him. She tried to roll him onto the rug, but he was raving, and she gave up and tried to soothe him, to no avail. He was making his clicking noise. His body was seizing up. He had never felt heavier. She wondered whether she could manage the situation until Connell got home, but most likely he would take the last train out of Grand Central.
The ambulance arrived in minutes. Two guys strapped him to a gurney and she rode with them to Lawrence, where he was admitted. The trip in the ambulance must have revived him, because he walked in with assistance, but in the ER he went wild, screaming, flailing his arms and striking one of the orderlies. They used restraints to tie him down.
“Why?” he kept asking. “Why? Why?”
He looked less healthy than he had even a few days before. It amazed her how quickly catabolic processes could take over a body once they’d begun. She hadn’t noticed how skinny he’d gotten, how bad his teeth were, how much he needed a haircut.
She stayed as late as she was allowed. At home she couldn’t bring herself to go up to the bedroom, so she just sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t consciously intended to wait up for Connell, but after a while she realized that was what she was doing. She tried to watch television in the den, but she couldn�
��t concentrate on any of the shows. The only thing that made any sense to her was to sit in the silence of the kitchen. She chewed her rage, grinding her teeth.
He walked in at two fifteen. She sat silently looking at him.
“What are you doing up?” he said, throwing a canvas bag down on the island.
“I asked you to stay with your father. Why did you leave him alone?”
“It was only for a little while.”
“What made you think it was okay to leave him alone?”
She had shouted. She saw the boy flinch, his eyes widen with fear. He picked the bag off the counter and put it across his chest as if he might make a run for it.
“He was asleep in bed when I left. He wasn’t going anywhere, and you were coming home in an hour.”
“Well,” she said. “He went somewhere.”
• • •
She went upstairs to put her head down for a moment. The next thing she knew, the room was bright and Sergei’s throaty greeting was booming up at her from the bottom of the staircase. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. She remembered that Ed was in the hospital.
She went to the banister and looked down the landing. “I should have called you,” she said. “With everything that was going on, I forgot. I didn’t need you to come.”
He stood in the vestibule holding his hat against his chest. “You not go to church today?”
Lately he had taken to coming earlier on Sundays, to be there when they returned from twelve o’clock Mass.
“Something’s happened with Ed,” she said. “He had some kind of collapse. He’s in the hospital.”
“I stay here with you,” he said.
“I’m leaving soon.”
“I stay anyway.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I stay with you,” he said again, this time more decisively.
Connell wasn’t in his room. She called downstairs to him, but he didn’t answer there either. She dressed without showering, not because of the late hour but because with Ed’s absence it felt like Sergei was a guest in the house, and even though Sergei had passed many hours there sitting and doing nothing, she had a strange feeling of having to attend to him.
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