We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  “I got it,” Connell said as casually as possible, failing to hide the tremor in his voice.

  • • •

  He would have to wait for the right moment to leave. His mother would be leaning on him for help. She had outdone herself this year: new strings of lights, new boxes of ornaments, a second crèche, a new star for the tree, expensive-looking wreaths.

  A different level of intensity attended this year’s preparations. While Sergei did a last-minute grocery run, Connell hauled the last boxes down from the attic. He added a final platoon to the small army of Santa Clauses, wooden soldiers, and snowmen that already occupied the first floor. Artificial holly hung from every wall, bedecked by bows, with wreaths affixed to every door. The tree was heavy with ornaments, strings of lights, and tinsel clumped thick as cooked spinach. Rivulets of lights ran along the fireplace and the baseboard molding, around the doorframes, up the banister. Plugged-in candles sat on end tables and the breakfront, and illuminated manger scenes fought for space with ceramic Christmas trees. Everything seemed to have a light in it or on it or behind it. Somehow, despite the overwhelming number of individual pieces, the house still felt underdecorated once everything was plugged in and turned on, as if the dark spaces were more apparent than the lit ones.

  The amount of food in the kitchen suggested a team of cooks and not a single determined individual. Plates, pots, and pans took up every countertop and the island. The dining room table, at full extension with all its leaves in, was covered in white lace atop red linen. A smaller table pushed against it spilled into the living room. Drummer-boy napkin holders topped the place settings. Even on that sprawling surface, there wasn’t much room to set a drink down.

  • • •

  The guests started arriving, and Connell carried their coats down to the rack in the basement. They amassed in the kitchen, mugs of eggnog in their hands, glasses of wine, cheese cubes, butter cookies, chocolate truffles, nuts from bowls, Swedish meatballs on toothpick spears, crackers plucked from dwindling rows, boughs of grapes snapped off a larger bunch, chips dunked in chunky dips, bread wedges spread with baked brie, gourmet pigs in handmade blankets, slices of cured imported meat—the orchestral tune-up for the symphony to follow. There would be leftovers for a week.

  He watched his mother slide through the kitchen to kid Tom about saving room for dinner, as she cleared plates of toothpicks and crumbs and swept back into conversation with Marie. She was her best self at parties. She had a gift for putting people at ease. She always said she’d have made a first-rate diplomat or politician, but Connell knew she’d have been content with his becoming one in her place.

  Incandescence and bodies combined to heat the den quickly. He opened the patio door, but it brought a violent chill into the room, and he had to close it again. The living room’s wing chairs, folding chairs, and couch were packed with people balancing plates of appetizers on their knees. By the bar in the atrium, Jack Coakley and a man from up the block had planted themselves, guests weaving between them to refresh their drinks. The door to the front porch was cracked for air. Connell opened it fully and saw the team of wooden reindeer Jack had made one year in his garage workshop, and the lights that fringed the fence and lined the walkway and festooned the shrubs.

  He went outside, closing the door behind him, and unplugged a strand of lights, throwing the right side of the house into darkness. He went back inside and told his mother that a light string was broken and that he was going to the store for a replacement. He knew that she wouldn’t be able to tolerate such a prominent blemish on the evening’s perfection. He got in the car and headed for the nursing home, pausing in front of the house to look at the dark patch he had created there. He could see her point in worrying over details like this, because it filled him with a vague foreboding to look at it. He found a Christmas radio station and set off into the rapidly darkening evening.

  • • •

  He parked in the lot and waited to be buzzed in. As the vestibule gave way to the hall, a red canvas band spanned the width of the hallway at waist height, secured at either end by Velcro. It looked like an oversized winner’s tape, but in fact it was an effective deterrent against escape. Connell removed one end, passed through and felt a creeping sadness as he matched the furry strip in his hand up to its rougher twin.

  He found his father in the Crow’s Nest, a small room overlooking the front lawn where the noisier residents took their meals in sequestration so as not to disturb the others, and where they spent the better part of their afternoons. A dozen or so other residents were there. With the meal over and the orderlies somewhere else, wheelchairs abutted each other like bumper cars. His father was moaning a low moan. He registered a small change of expression when he saw Connell standing there, but he hardly seemed to stir out of his hazy state. It was past his bedtime; they had left him there for Connell. The television on the wall was set to the evening news.

  Connell wheeled him out. When they reached the canvas band, he stopped.

  “I’m going to punch in the code,” he said. “I can tell you what it is, if you don’t tell anyone I told you.”

  He waited to see if his father’s eyes would light up to indicate that he’d been longing for this key to liberty, but his father didn’t seem to notice what he’d said. The low, keening hum persisted. He punched in the code and replaced the strip and wheeled him out. He had a feeling of springing his father from jail. After they had been outside for a few moments, his father stopped moaning.

  “That’s what you wanted?” Connell bent down to ask. “To go outside?”

  His father’s silence seemed to confirm it.

  “If only I’d known! It’s a little too cold to stay out long. Besides, we’re going someplace I think you’re going to be happy to see.”

  He got to the car and opened the door and got both arms under his father’s armpits to get him standing. He got him seated in the car and secured the belt and put the folded wheelchair in the trunk.

  It was the first time his father had been off the grounds in months, and Connell wondered how it felt to him to be driven down the long driveway. The trees were bereft of leaves, and strong winds whipped the denuded branches, which in the reflected glow of the headlights looked like guards reaching their elongated arms out to stop his father’s escape. They made their way down the road, his father slumped against the window, silent, his hands in his lap, his neck at an uncomfortable angle.

  “Sit up straight, Dad,” Connell said, but his father didn’t move. He reached over and pulled him upright and turned the radio on. He wanted him to look out the window and see the lights strung on fences in front yards, the candles in the windows, the lawn ornaments, and, in a larger sense, the world outside the confines of the nursing home, the fact of its being Christmas, the fact that such a thing as Christmas existed at all, but it was as if his father hadn’t noticed he’d left the Crow’s Nest. It didn’t matter; when they got home, he would see the house done up for Christmas and be recalled to the seasonal cheer. He would be brought back to his life. It would make Dad happy, but the bigger consequence would be his mother’s joy at having everyone together for one last Christmas at home. She’d mentioned it so many times before his father had gone into the nursing home, and it must have been bitter for her to watch that possibility die. For his father, nothing hung on this trip, but that was because he didn’t know where he was going. Once there, he would understand that Connell had spared him a lonely drifting off in a room whose sole concession to the holiday was a drugstore-purchased Santa Claus sign taped to the door. For the night to pass without any observance, for his father to slip into an ignorant slumber, was too much for Connell to take.

  Traffic was light, and they arrived quickly enough that he might almost have been gone that long had he set out in search of a string of lights. The block had filled up with cars and he had to park a little distance away from the house. He had been intending just to walk his father in and guide him to a seat on the couc
h, but instead he retrieved the wheelchair and wheeled him. As he neared the driveway he saw Ruth McGuire hitting the button on her keychain to lock her car. She must have left Frank at home. Her eyes widened as he approached. She met them at the foot of the driveway.

  “What’s this?”

  “Merry Christmas,” Connell said, leaning in for a hug, though Ruth was strangely stiff.

  “Hi there,” she said to his father, bending down to kiss him. She stood back up. “What’s the deal?”

  “I thought the whole family should be together for the holidays.”

  Ruth put down the bags of gifts she was carrying. “Your mother doesn’t know about this?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not a good idea. She doesn’t know he’s coming at all?”

  “It’s all me,” he said.

  “Oh, God.” She seemed to be thinking quickly. She picked up the bags again, made a quick circle, and put them back down. “What to do. What to do?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s good. We’re going to have a nice night. She wanted this.”

  “Your mother is under a lot of strain right now,” Ruth said. “She’s not having an easy time of it, and the holidays make everything harder. Believe me, I know.” She gestured toward the passenger seat her husband would have occupied. “I left Frank home with the nurse because it’s just too hard to make it work with nights like this, and I didn’t want to upset your mother. She just wants to get through the night and move on.”

  “She’s in a good mood. She’s going to be happy to see him.”

  Ruth walked a little distance away and motioned him away from the wheelchair. He locked it in place and headed over to her.

  “Believe me,” Ruth said, “she’s doing whatever she has to do to get through it. She’s doing the best she can. Why don’t you take him back to the home?”

  “I brought him all this way,” he said. “I don’t want to upset him.”

  She gave him a hard look. “You will not be upsetting him. He won’t know the difference. Why don’t you take him back? We don’t have to mention anything to your mother.”

  “She’ll be angry at me for disappearing for that long.”

  Ruth threw up her hands in exasperation. “Let her be. Don’t make it harder for her than it has to be.”

  “But it’s Christmas. She’s going to be happy to be spending it with him.”

  “At least go in and tell her what you’re thinking. I’ll stay with your father. Tell her your plan and give her a chance to decide. Don’t spring this on her.”

  Ruth went to the wheelchair, put her hand on his father’s shoulder, and patted it.

  “I want her to see him in the kitchen,” Connell said. “I want to see the look on her face. I want to see his face.”

  He took the handles of the wheelchair and released the wheel lock.

  “Would you listen to me? I’ve known your mother for decades.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “Connell.” She glared at him.

  “I can’t take him back now.”

  “You can.”

  “It’s cold out here,” he said. “I want to bring him in.”

  “At least give me a chance to go explain this to her.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he said, but she had already picked up her bags and was heading up the driveway ahead of him. He wheeled his father between the cars to the house. He pulled his father to his feet and they started up the stairs. There was no handrail, so he had to push against the wall with a stiff arm while the other wrapped around his father’s waist as he dragged him up a step at a time. An anxious expectancy rose in his chest. Again his father was emitting that low moan. They advanced slowly toward what felt like a climactic moment, though he hoped it would be more of a prelude to a memorable night and a conclusion on his mother’s part that the holiday had turned out perfect. He felt suddenly queasy. He tugged the screen door open, hoping to catch it with an elbow, but it swung back with a bang as he secured his grip on his father. Then the door behind it opened and Jack Coakley smiled warmly until Jack saw Connell’s father and his expression changed and he held the screen door open and made way for Connell to bring him in, which he did just as Ruth came in from the vestibule with his mother, the two of them moving in a brisk conference punctuated by restive hands, neither looking up as they walked swiftly, and then his mother raised her eyes and saw the two of them there and stopped, and everyone gathered in the kitchen was turned toward him with either confusion or gravity on their faces, and it was only then that he realized that he had made a costly error in judgment. His mother didn’t rush over as he’d expected her to but stood there with her mouth moving silently for what was surely only a moment but felt like a lifetime and would surely last that long in the slow-exposure image his mind was capturing of it. Sergei shifted on his buttocks in his habitual seat, and glasses of punch dangled from fingers as if arrested in their journey upward, and then a quick, throaty sob emerged from his mother as she said, “Oh, Ed,” once with a falling cadence and put her hand to her mouth. He turned to consider his father for the first time since he’d arrived at the home to pick him up, his hurrying having prevented it, though he was starting to feel now that he wouldn’t have seen him even if he’d paused to look. A thick rope of drool hung from his father’s mouth, indecorously refusing to break off and fall to the floor. Connell wiped it off and stood there in an agony of regret as the gathered crowd, led by his mother, converged on his father to pull him back toward the fireplace in the den with purposeful seriousness. The party was over before it had begun. Sergei rose and left the kitchen as if compelled by the heat of wordless gazes. Connell would have to wait for another day, perhaps another life, to feel redeemed. He had never felt so far from his father, who disappeared behind a wall of backs as his mother approached him to deliver the rebuke he knew he deserved.

  “Help me with the coats,” she said with a quiet urgency that had no time for rancor. She had spent a lifetime adjusting hopes downward and knew what order to handle things in. “Get some drinks going. We have to make the best of this.”

  • • •

  When he was done, he went out to the front porch and picked up the string he had disconnected from the others and plugged it in. The lights came on at once, completing the outline around the railed fence that his mother had drawn for passing cars and those making the turn into the driveway. It made a neat picture, and he stood taking it in, trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.

  89

  She had worried that the party would last late into the night, everyone frozen by Ed’s presence, unsure when they could leave, if they could leave, but then one by one they started to go. Before everyone had departed—because she knew it would be impossibly painful for her to get him out of there once they had—she announced that she was going to take Ed back to the home, and she had Jack and Connell get him down the stairs, said some quick good-byes and asked Ruth to handle everyone’s coats. Connell wanted to drive Ed himself, or go with her, but she insisted on doing it alone.

  When she got to the home, she parked by the front door, even though she wasn’t supposed to stop there. She left the wheelchair in the trunk, helped Ed out of the seat in a bear hug and shuffled him over, as if she was dancing with a passed-out man and trying to keep him up. Everything inside was dark except for a single light in the entry to the foyer. She rang the bell and held Ed up with both arms, regretting that she hadn’t just left him in the car while she waited, or stopped to get the wheelchair out of the trunk, but she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She rang again. He was shivering, and she rang again and she thought of bringing him back to the car, wondering whether they were going to come at all, but then an attendant came to the door and Eileen asked for a wheelchair. She’d return the other one another time. She whe
eled him in, got him into bed, kissed him good night, and left before she could feel what was starting to well up in her, which she whisked away by shaking her head quickly from side to side and throwing her hands out like she was trying to dry them off.

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to let Ed stay in the house that night, because it would have broken her heart to have him there one more time only to have him have to leave again, and there was also the matter of Sergei. She hadn’t been intimate with him since that night she’d gone into his room and let what was happening happen, the first spark catching the kindling and sending flames up quickly, and she had almost gotten to the point where she’d convinced herself it hadn’t occurred. Lately, though, they had fallen into a habit. He would come into her bed after she’d turned in and hold her for a while. At some point in the night he would get up and go to his own bed, but there had been mornings she’d woken up and found him there, and once she’d even woken up in his arms. She couldn’t have had Ed sleep in the bed, because it didn’t feel like her bed with him anymore. It wasn’t hers with Sergei, either, and it felt less and less like her bed, period. She could hardly sleep in it. She had been thinking of getting a new bed for years, and now she saw that she would have to do so right away—tomorrow, even. Now that Ed had been back in the house, it couldn’t continue the way it had been.

  She was glad Connell had slept in late. Sergei was waiting for her in the kitchen when she came down. He made it easier on her by stopping her quickly into her speech and making a gesture that showed he understood. She got the feeling she might not have had to say anything to him at all, that he would have figured it out on his own. He always made things easier on her. He had gone up to his room the night before as soon as Ed came in, and he hadn’t come back down, and Ed’s presence had caused such a distraction that she was sure no one had drawn any conclusions from Sergei’s departure, and she had been grateful because leaving the room had been the perfect thing for him to do and she hadn’t had to ask.