“You okay, lady?” Bill Clinton asked, tugging up the bottom half of his mask. “You good?”
Anne nodded, stepped around him so that she wouldn’t lose track of Kate and Peter. This wasn’t what she’d pictured. Maybe they only ran into each other an hour earlier. Maybe it was all one great coincidence. Maybe there was a St. Bart’s reunion in the city and they’d included Peter. But behind these thin possibilities, she felt a great turbine moving. Anne waited for him to turn and see her, too, and when he did and despite Kate, she’d make herself say what she wanted to say and he could take it or leave it, but the point was to have come and if he wanted to see her again or not was totally up to him, but she hoped he’d want to, that was the point, after all, not just to check on him but to talk with him, to be in his life again, no matter what, she was so much better now, and they had time to make up, yes, but it wasn’t impossible, nothing was impossible. If she had to she’d apologize to the girl, too, for hurting her father like that. It was an accident. He’d accidentally come to their door at the worst possible time.
But when Kate turned her gaze away she didn’t signal Peter, like Anne expected her to. She just stepped through the door behind him and together they walked off into the falling night.
* * *
Two hours later, going eighty miles per hour, almost back in Saratoga after having made a series of blind turns and somehow finding the highway, she realized two things: first, that Peter’s costume might not have been a costume, and second, that she was clutching between her thighs a filthy Ping-Pong paddle, a bathroom key.
thirteen
HERE WAS THE THING he couldn’t say to Lena but that he knew was true, that thing leading men say to their long-suffering women while the audience sits in a dark theater, thinking, This asshole, don’t you fall for that bullshit, honey. You’re too good for him.
But it was true, Francis thought now. Whatever happened between him and Joan had nothing to do with Lena, and it meant nothing to him. He’d started it, he knew, if he was really being honest. There’d been that morning after Kate’s party, holding her sandals like a teenager, a moment like a live wire he’d touched and then couldn’t let go. He thought about it for weeks after, almost nonstop, the surprise of it coming then of all times in his life, after the wreck of his face, the certainty of what had been exchanged between them without either of them saying a word. But he didn’t see her for months and months and months, and there was no harm in thinking about a thing as long as he didn’t act.
Once, around Halloween that same year, Joan’s name was listed along with several others as one of the women who’d collected signatures for a new candidate running for county executive, and seeing her name had given him a charge like she was standing in the room.
And then he saw her at the Christmas carnival. Lena was working a baked goods booth to raise money for St. Bart’s and had asked him twice if he was okay to wander, if he was okay with a late supper since she’d probably need to help pack up the booth at the end, if he was okay without his walking stick. He’d spotted his stick leaning by the door when they left the house, but he hadn’t had any dizzy spells in several months so he ignored it. He knew she was dying to suggest he take it, just in case, dark would come quickly, after all, and the leaves on the ground were slick, but she was sensitive to everything he felt and knew he didn’t like using it, didn’t even like when she suggested he needed it. Once Lena was settled in her booth, he walked up the road and watched for a few minutes as the Dance Academy students filed out of the studio to do a routine on the street, the little ones with tummies pushing out their leotards, their baby skin goosefleshed in the cold, and he thought they should have jackets on. He sampled four Dixie cups of chili and then wrote his vote on an index card and dropped it in a box. He stopped by one of the contractor booths, chatted with a retired cop who sold and installed vinyl siding now and was there trying to drum up new business. Francis got caught up on every shared acquaintance from the Four-One, the Two-Six.
“You don’t see anybody?” the other cop asked Francis tentatively. “I thought, with everything, wasn’t there a group from the Four-One who visited regular?”
There were three guys who came to the hospital a few times, and then a few times after he came home. Lena had set him up on the couch for these visits because he didn’t want them in his bedroom. They stood around in their sport coats having no idea what to do or say.
“Yeah, they do, of course, they’re great about that. Everyone’s busy, you know?”
The other man told a long story about his kids, varsity baseball, a controversy about who got picked to start. “You have girls!” the other man concluded. “You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with this stuff.”
Francis agreed because it was easy, but thought: My Kate is a better athlete than all of your boys combined.
Close to the firehouse, where Santa was giving out coloring books on fire safety, he saw her. She was sipping a drink she was holding between mittened hands. She saw him just a second later and glanced over her shoulder as if looking for a place to hide.
When he got closer, instead of saying hello, she just began talking. “Right now, you’re thinking, there’s a woman who should not be drinking.”
“I’m not!” he said, hearing once again that thing in his voice that had made him self-conscious at Kate’s party. Warm. Full of fun. He wasn’t always.
He blew into his cupped hands, said it was good to see her, and then could think of absolutely nothing else to say, so he blew into his hands again.
“You’re freezing,” she said. “You want to go in?” They were in front of a new bar, two bartenders outside ladling mulled wine out of a Crock-Pot and selling it for three dollars per Styrofoam cup.
Inside, no one took notice of Francis Gleeson taking a barstool with a woman who was not his wife because that was the sort of day it was, and people knew him, they knew Joan, if there were anything amiss, they wouldn’t be having a drink in the middle of town with Lena Gleeson just a hundred yards up the road. It was very crowded inside thanks to the unexpected cold of the day, but there were two barstools near the back, as if waiting for them.
Later, Francis thought of all the things that would have stopped him, would have been too much. If he’d seen Oscar Maldonado, who mentioned several days later that he’d seen him there, asked what he thought of the place. Or, if Joan had told him that her ex-husband had finally signed the divorce papers earlier that week, that the warmed wine she’d been sipping outside was the first chance she’d had to celebrate. But she didn’t tell him that until later. If Lena had told him before they parted ways that she didn’t feel great, thought she might have a low-grade fever, had taken an aspirin before walking with him into town, that it just didn’t seem to be working. It was unlike Lena to not feel well and had he known before the festival instead of after, he probably would have stayed with her at her booth, to help.
What did they talk about for that hour and a half? They were so warmed up after just a few minutes that they had to take off their coats and scarves, pile them on their laps because the stools didn’t have backs. Lena would never let him sit on a stool without a back. What if he lost his balance? Francis noticed how close Joan’s knee was to his, the line of her clavicle where her blouse was a little askew. He asked about her work, and when he asked the same question twice, she laughed, dipping her chin to her chest like she was trying to hide it from him, and when she looked at him again it was as if she knew every thought he’d ever had.
It was easy, and that surprised him. He felt young and strong and completely unconnected to the person Lena had been fussing over for so many years. Joan was frank about it, which helped, at first. Later, it was her frankness that made him most disgusted with himself.
“I live in the Hilltop apartments now,” she said. “Renting until my settlement.”
She touched his elbow. She tapped her index finger on his forearm, just once, so quickly he thought he might have imagi
ned it except that he could feel his pulse beating there. But then she was gathering her coat, her mittens. A short walk. A turn. Another short walk. His heart was beating so loudly he thought surely she would hear. The noise of the festival disguised the direction of their footsteps. Mid-December, the gloaming came early, the sky going orange and then a bruised purple and then dark gray. She pushed through the front door to the lobby, and they stood side by side without looking at each other, without speaking, until the elevator arrived.
“What are we doing?” he asked, once they were inside, but Joan only looked at him and smiled, opened her cabinets to find glasses. She switched on the TV and turned the volume low. No point pretending now, though he was shaking like a schoolboy. His hand passed over his eye—he had a new prosthetic as of that month, hand painted by a ludicrously expensive ocular artist in Connecticut, and the girls were floored by how good, how real, it looked. Worth every penny, Lena had said, though they hadn’t paid all the pennies yet; the day they paid off this one single eyeball would be the day he decided whether it had been worth it. But he did like talking to people again like he once had, not having to pretend he didn’t notice them studying his face, their eyes darting back and forth as they tried not to stare at his old prosthesis, which had been so uncomfortable and so false in appearance that Kate told him the patch looked better. He’d gotten so used to the patch that his face felt naked now.
She put her hands on either side of his neck, cold despite the mittens, running them in perfect symmetry across his shoulders, down his arms. He shivered and fitted his hands on either side of her waist like he had early that morning in May, seven months before.
* * *
It had nothing to do with Lena, whom he loved as much as he did the day they married. It only had to do with him, and the things he wanted, and the things he missed about himself, the things he missed feeling. Whatever had happened with Joan, whatever would happen, again, he hoped, could exist entirely apart from his life with Lena, couldn’t it? And yet, just an hour after stepping over the threshold to Joan’s apartment, when he hurried back down to the sidewalk and approached the festival from the southern end, as if he’d only taken a little walk over to the duck pond, and saw Lena waiting for him on the double yellow, the detritus of the festival scattered around her, the naked fear on her face, he wondered if, in fact, it did have something to do with her. He’d been a good cop, a good husband, a good father. He’d been great, actually, at all of those things, and it didn’t feel immodest for him to think so. But then, through no fault of his own, because he was good, because he was responsible and dependable, he’d gone to his neighbors’ front door and been blasted into a new reality, one where he wasn’t a cop at all, wasn’t a good husband, apparently. Was he still a good father? He hoped so, but as of the last hour he had his doubts.
“People said there’s black ice near the firehouse,” Lena said. “They said someone slipped and fell.” She delivered her worry like an accusation.
“I’m fine,” he said, taking her bags from her. Her tablecloth, the trays she’d taken from home for the displays.
“People spill drinks, they don’t realize how quickly it freezes up, weather like this.”
And then, “Are you okay?”
“Lena, for the love of God, please stop asking me if I’m okay. Just stop.” He sounded angrier than he felt. “I went to the new bar. I ran into a lot of people.”
“Sorry,” Lena said, chastened. She touched her fingertips to her temples. “I just don’t feel very well. I thought it was a cold but maybe it’s the flu.”
* * *
Francis met Joan twice more after that. Twice more over the course of ten days. They met at her apartment again. And the last time was at a park a little upstate where Lena didn’t like to bring him because she thought the walking path wasn’t even enough, that he risked tripping on a cracked paver or a root. He took the bus to a strip mall in Riverside and from there Joan picked him up. He pressed her slim body against the concrete wall of the park’s restroom, closed for the season. She suggested they go to the Holiday Inn on Route 12, stay for a couple of hours, and then she made fun of him for seeming shocked. “What?” she laughed. “My treat. It’s not the Plaza.”
But at the front desk he waved her money away, mortified. He put down his credit card.
“Do you want me to drive?” he asked later, when they got back to her car, and just like that she handed over the keys. He drove to her place, and from there he walked to Jefferson. At that point, he hadn’t driven a car in over four years. Just sliding behind the wheel made him feel younger, more like himself than he’d been since the accident. And Joan didn’t seem the least bit worried about being his passenger. Merging onto the thruway, glancing left over his shoulder, he got disoriented for a second, but almost as soon as he looked straight ahead again it was fine.
On the day he was planning to see Joan for a fourth time, Lena stayed home from work because she couldn’t shake that same cold she’d felt coming on the day of the fair, made a doctor’s appointment, asked Francis if he wanted to come along. She didn’t need him in the room with her, nothing like that, it was just that the doctor’s office was near the hardware store, and maybe he wanted to browse. They hadn’t been down that way in a little while. There was no opportunity to call Joan, so he hoped when he didn’t show up that she’d figure it out.
That day, just after Lena’s appointment, they were sitting at a window booth at the Gillam Diner when Lena asked if it was possible a person could give herself cancer. The doctor took a chest X-ray, diagnosed bronchitis, said she needed rest. “Can a person give herself cancer just from worrying about things? Stress?” She looked off toward some distant point out the window. She’d read a book about it, she said.
Francis couldn’t remember how he’d responded, but when he thought back on that moment, the sun on the window, the film of oil floating on top of their coffee cups, the bustle of the waitstaff and customers all around them, he imagined a small, dry seed falling through Lena’s body and landing somewhere near her left lung. He imagined the seed growing fat on Lena’s warm center, a sprout pushing through soft tissue, wrapping itself around and around. He imagined all of this happening while he stared at his plate and thought about Joan Kavanagh, the way her long red hair looked against the white of her narrow back.
“You knew already,” he said when she finally told him. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.” He was angry with her. He was angry with himself. He wanted to comfort her but instead he crossed his arms and stepped away. The doctor had diagnosed bronchitis, yes, but he’d also noticed something else, and had ordered more tests.
She apologized when she gave him the news, and he couldn’t get himself to say what he was supposed to say, which was of course it wasn’t her fault, and they’d get through it, and it would all be okay. But was it her fault? When had she first had an odd feeling in her chest? According to the doctor it could have been several months earlier. When she said she had no symptoms, the doctor said it was just that she hadn’t noticed them. Some people are more tuned into their bodies than others. When Francis caught her coughing on her way to their bedroom, her hand on the wall to steady herself, he stood at the bottom of the stairs and told her he thought she was smarter than that, why in the world had she waited so long to go to the doctor? And even when she sat down on the step and cried, he found he could not go to her or say any of the things that would make her feel better.
“You’re going to be fine, Lena,” he said eventually, her at the top of the stairs, him at the bottom. It was an order. He once had a dozen men in his command.
The girls came home the night before her surgery, to help her get ready. “Lena,” he whispered into her hair that morning, the house still sound asleep. She’d set her alarm for 6:00 a.m. but it hadn’t gone off, and now they’d need to rush. “Lena, love,” he said, and drew her closer to him, told her he was sorry about the way he’d been acting, he was just so shocked, and he co
uldn’t lose her, it was something that absolutely could not happen. She reached behind and found his hip, squeezed, told him she knew all that, of course, that it was all going to be okay, that he would see.
He got dressed quickly, and while the girls bustled around—Sara and Natalie cross-checked the contents of Lena’s bag with the list the doctor’s assistant had provided them; Kate offered to go into the shower with her, to help wash her with the special surgical soap (Lena had laughed. “Oh, honey,” she’d said)—he realized he had a little time to kill before they had to leave for the hospital. Without telling any of them that he was stepping out, he walked down to the deli like he did most mornings for his coffee and a paper. Something about sticking to his routine was soothing, and as he watched his breath in the cold air, he began to feel for the first time that all would be well. His face hurt. His body was not in synchrony. But it felt temporary. The doctors would do their mysterious work and she’d suffer, no doubt, but she was strong and in the end it would be fine.
And when he turned the corner onto Main Street, there was Joan Kavanagh in her blue coat, her long hair brassy in the sunlight, looking at him coming like she’d known him long enough for him to hurt her. But she hadn’t known him long enough to earn that look, and he hadn’t known her long enough to feel anything other than shame. He thought of his mother for the first time in a very long time. He thought of his father. The two of them dead and buried, gone twenty-five years. Neither of them able to fathom America beyond the little bit of it they’d seen together, when Francis was an infant. Neither of them capable even of half-baked promises to visit, one day, like other old-timers sometimes said to make it all easier. Neither of them capable of lying in any way, not even when a lie would be merciful. “Sure I’ll be back to visit in no time,” Francis had said that day when they clutched him in the threshold of the cottage, and his mother pressed her dry cheek to his over and over again.
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