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The Big Door Prize

Page 34

by M. O. Walsh


  Cherilyn turned toward him on the table and was surprised that he didn’t approach her. He instead was looking at the far wall, above her head, and Cherilyn realized he was holding his body in an odd way. He stood up on his heels as if making his back as straight as it could be, and Cherilyn recognized this from the times she had seen Douglas speak in public. From toasts he’d given at weddings to little impromptu speeches at school fundraisers. The way he looked at himself in the mirror that very morning. His face was so serious.

  Douglas, she realized, was in teacher mode.

  “First, Cherilyn,” he said. “Please know that I am sorry you are not feeling well and that I acted the way I did, but before we can get into any of that you need to know that I have a few questions.”

  Cherilyn put her hands on her thighs. “Okay,” she said.

  Douglas was as grave as she had ever seen him. His hand, beneath his blazer, looked like it was shaking.

  “What I need to know, Cherilyn, I suppose,” he said, still looking at the wall, “is if all of my nightmares are coming true. I need to know, I guess, if I should be preparing myself for every awful thing I’ve ever imagined.”

  “Oh, Douglas,” she said. “No. Not at all. Your nightmares are not coming true. Are mine?”

  Douglas shuffled his feet as if he was not the one who was supposed to be answering questions. He paced to the side to try it again from a new spot in the room.

  “Let me rephrase the question,” he said. “What I need to know, Cherilyn Hubbard, is if you have been running around with my mortal enemy.”

  Cherilyn smiled at the phrasing.

  “I’m not laughing, Mrs. Hubbard,” Douglas said, and she could see that she had indeed hurt him. Here was her own personal king, she thought, afraid an enemy had infiltrated his castle.

  “No, sir,” Cherilyn said, though she had no idea why she said sir. She wanted to speak clearly, she supposed, to make sure there was no confusion. “I am not running around with anyone. I am as in love with my husband as I have ever been.”

  Douglas paced back and forth as if taking the information in, sorting through the many ways that he could yet again clarify what it was he needed to assure himself of.

  “All right, then,” he said. “That is good. Very good indeed. Then, what I need to know now, I suppose,” he said, “is what the hell is going on with your hands.”

  “Oh, Douglas,” she said, and held out her arms. “Come here.”

  Before she could pull him in, though, and before she could even tell if he would let her, the door opened, and Dr. Granger walked inside looking down at his phone. Douglas shuffled to the back of the room as if hiding. She heard him rearrange the coat in his arms and take in a few deep Douglas breaths.

  Dr. Granger lifted up his nice tortoiseshell glasses to take a closer look at his phone and squinted his eyes at the screen.

  “I’m telling you,” he said. “That man is lucky to still have his toe.”

  He then sat down in his little rolling chair and scooted up to Cherilyn. He put the phone in his breast pocket and looked up at Douglas.

  “Douglas,” he said. “You may want to have a seat.”

  “I’ll stand,” Douglas said.

  “Well,” Dr. Granger said. “Come stand by your wife, then.”

  Cherilyn did not like, at all, the gravity of the doctor’s voice and looked back at Douglas, who did indeed come stand beside her. He stepped forward and placed his hand on her shoulder and, with this, it was as if the whole of her life clicked back in place.

  Cherilyn felt that she could read through her skin everything that Douglas wanted to tell her, even more so than if she had tried to read his face. The pressure from his palm as it had been through so many years that he had comforted her about both enormous and minor difficulties. The way he moved his thumb back and forth on her back as if imprinting a code to let her know that ­although he was still thinking about all of this, although there was still a lot to clear up, everything would be okay. The pressure and beat of his thumb to let her know that no matter what they were about to hear from the doctor, it was nothing compared to the conversation they had not yet finished, nothing compared to what they both still needed to know, to sanctify, which was that they, the two of them, their hearts together, were still all right. That their lives did not have to change from something they cherished to something they never wanted. All of this communication as clear to her through his thumb as if he had spoken the words but yet invisible, Cherilyn knew, to everyone else on the earth.

  And with this hand on her shoulder, with this constant communication, Cherilyn looked at the doctor and thought, Let’s do this. Tell me everything. Douglas is with me now. I can handle it.

  In love, Cherilyn knew, there is no fooling the skin.

  37

  . . . I Know One

  What Douglas needed her to know was this:

  All that mattered to him was her. No matter what the doctor said, no matter what she still needed to tell him, all that mattered was their future together.

  He wanted so desperately to tell her this but, before he could, had to step aside for the doctor. When it seemed as if the news he was delivering would be bad, Douglas came forward and put his hand on Cherilyn’s back. If only he could tell her, he thought, and moved his thumb back and forth across her skin.

  Dr. Granger shined a little light into Cherilyn’s eyes.

  “Your body,” he told Cherilyn, “has been busy.”

  Douglas did not like the sound of this at all. He rubbed her back a bit faster and began to prepare himself to argue against nearly anything this doctor would say that might suggest there was something not perfect about his wife. “What does that mean?” he heard Cherilyn ask.

  “Well,” he said. “Do you want the definite good news or the possible bad news?”

  Douglas recognized that he was still in teacher mode as this question struck him as the most asinine thing he had ever heard. Who in their right mind, he thought, would ever favor possible bad news over definite good news? The question was not, for him, even a question at all.

  “We want them both,” Cherilyn said. “I can take it.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Granger said. “The passing out is not good, nor is the loss of sensation in your hands and arms. Especially with a pregnancy.”

  Even the supposition, Douglas thought, that the chance of bad news, no matter how minor it might be, could ever compare to the comfort, could come close to the definite good news one already had in their pocket, was outrageous.

  “What are you saying?” he heard Cherilyn ask. “Are you saying we’re pregnant?”

  “What I am saying,” Dr. Granger told her, “is that you, Cherilyn Hubbard, contain multitudes. And, according to your urine, one of these multitudes is a baby.”

  Douglas took his hand off Cherilyn’s back as if he had decided something. He crossed his arms and took a quick breath through his nose.

  “I want the definite good news,” he said. “That is what I always want.”

  Both Cherilyn and Dr. Granger looked at Douglas in a way that let him know he had said something confusing, and when Cherilyn reached out and took his arm into her own, it was like the living world clarified. Time then did its funny thing to a man in love and rewound the last few minutes for him to review again.

  “A child?” Douglas said. “Did you say a child?”

  He felt Cherilyn squeeze him. He had not yet looked at her and was, for some reason, afraid to.

  “How does that happen?” Cherilyn said. “I mean, we sort of thought that ship had sailed.”

  “Bodies are weird,” Dr. Granger said. He held out his hand and made a little bulb like a flower. “Sometimes they just ­sort of . . .” He made his fingers pop open. “Wake up.”

  Douglas scrambled in many different mental directions, only a few of which pointed to t
he future. He instead went back to the past, to his own personal history, to try and figure out how they had arrived here. In his calculations he was first brought back to the scene only two nights before, when he had been asked for an encore. Yet in this memory he did not feel the shame he had felt on that night but instead the press of his wife’s ankles against his back, the way she drew shapes along his shoulders when they had finished. These shapes led him to the shape of their living room couch, of all places, where they’d made love just months before. If this was the one that did it, after all those years of trying, if that was the one that stuck, their impromptu session that seemed to have no plan behind it all, then what did it mean? Hooray for the living room couch?

  Is that enough for something to mean?

  What Douglas’s mind did not do, however, did not even consider doing, was wonder if the child were not his own. Douglas was lucky in this way. If his mind were like the minds of many men and had gone in that direction, if he would have thought instead of felt and asked the question, even suggested it, then his would be a life he could never get back. And so, as if to protect him, his heart took his mind by the hand and led it down the proper hall.

  As it did, Douglas recalled other times on their living room couch. The way Cherilyn had sat next to him and read that book about kings and queens, perhaps wishing she could be somewhere else entirely. The way he had seen her sitting at the table so often, lately, with her head in her hands, rubbing her thumb against the pad of her palm. The way she had unscrewed aspirin bottles that seemed to be lying all over the house. The way she had stopped working around town, had seemed so exhausted. His mind turned up an array of these scenes, and where had Douglas been in them? he wondered. How was she alone in each of these memories that he could only have access to if he was there with her? Why didn’t he see himself beside her?

  All of this reminded him that there was no such thing as only positive news and so Douglas asked the question he felt he needed to ask.

  “What’s the possible bad news?” he said. “What else is going on?”

  “Is the baby okay?” Cherilyn said.

  “I’m sure it is,” Dr. Granger said. “All I have is the test. It’s probably no bigger than a red bean right now. Just a little ball of DNA. We’ll have plenty of time to see what it’s up to, and you’ll be seeing plenty of me, so don’t worry about that right now.”

  “I’m confused,” Douglas said. “What are we supposed to be worried about?”

  “Well,” Dr. Granger said. “The neurological stuff is worrisome. I don’t like the dizziness, although that could be on account of the baby stuff, and I don’t like the passing out or headaches, although that could possibly be from the baby stuff, too.”

  Douglas put his hand on Cherilyn’s back. He got his thumb going again.

  Dr. Granger stood up and placed his hands in his pockets. “What worries me,” he said, “is the loss of feeling.”

  He then turned toward the desk behind them and took out a stack of brochures.

  “I’m going to order some tests,” he said. “I’d love to tell you that they’re all precautionary but, you know, any doctor who tells a patient he knows what’s coming is, how to say ­it . . .”

  “Full of shit?” Douglas said.

  Dr. Granger smiled and set down a little stack of papers that Douglas saw had headlines such as “What Is MS?” and “What Is Neuropathy?” and, last, “When a Tingle Is More Than a Tingle.”

  “Let me put it this way, Mr. Hubbard,” he said. “No matter what, I think you and your wife are off on a ­brand-­new adventure.”

  He then patted Cherilyn on the knee and left the room and Douglas watched him go.

  Douglas set his jacket down on the bed beside Cherilyn. He walked around her to the stool Dr. Granger had just sat upon and did not say a word. He smoothed his hair on his head, set his elbows on his knees, and did what he had not done in far too long. He looked at her.

  The two of them sat looking into each other’s eyes for so long that, to anyone out in the hallway, they may have appeared frozen. But what Douglas was doing, and what he knew Cherilyn was doing, was the opposite of freezing. They were instead melting into each other. They were checking in. They were studying each other’s face, reminding themselves of the other’s physical presence. They did not smile or frown but simply stared until each felt it okay to move their vision beyond their physical presence and into the invisible places of this person that they knew better than anyone else.

  And whenever Douglas had seen all that he needed to see inside of her, whenever he affirmed all that he wanted to affirm, he bent forward in the chair and put his head on Cherilyn’s lap. She placed her warm hands on his head and stroked his thin hair and they sat together not knowing what they would say when the time came but knowing only that it would come, and they stayed that way until they heard a knock on the door.

  “Hey, Hubbard,” a man said.

  Douglas picked his head off Cherilyn’s lap and looked to the doorway. Pete was standing there in his work clothes, a huge bandage across his forehead. He had his arm around Hank, who had on his hat, one good boot, and a cast the size of a special delivery.

  “We were just curious,” Hank said. “Have you heard the one about us?”

  38

  In Spite of Ourselves

  Too many people don’t understand the nighttime.

  They close their curtains and head to bed as if what they have done is complete. What they don’t understand, of course, is that the night holds all the same possibilities as the day.

  With Father Pete, for example, it held the possibility of accepting a ride from Tipsy out to Natchez, where the police had found his truck and were holding Trina at the station.

  “It’s just a few hours,” Tipsy said. “I don’t mind at all. Plus, I was kind of worried about tomorrow, to be honest. So many people already asking me for rides. There’s no way I can please them all. So, I figure, why not just please the one who most needs it? I can come back and feed your dog, too. It’s not a problem. I could even take her for a ride. Show her the town.”

  And so the night was not a time of endings of any sort for Pete as he sat in the cool and comfortable car and cruised the dark highways of Louisiana, his hand near the crack of the open window, palm up, as if holding an invisible glass. No light nor drink to admire at this moment, but only the idea of what he could possibly lift now, a person in need, a soul that had never been given the love that a soul desires, that it demands to reach its full potential. And so, looking at his empty palm, he whispered again to himself, though it was way past five o’clock, “One day closer to you.”

  Jacob knew, as well, that this night did not mean the end of this day.

  They had released him, yes, with his father, but there would be more trouble to come. A lifetime, perhaps, of being thought of in a certain way, of being compared to other people, of being tied to a past or a lineage that did not accurately reflect him because there is no lineage or past that accurately reflects who anyone is in the moment. And so all of those times Jacob had wondered how people might remember him took a back seat to the new question he had, which was: How did he want to remember himself?

  And in these ways, with all the nighttime visions we become open to, the night does not even have to look like the night.

  After Tipsy left with Pete and both Hank and the Hubbards realized they had no cars to take them home, Hank even acted as if it was still the day. He got on his phone and called the fire department. He gave them all a little wink, put his arm around his son, and said, “You fellers need a lift? You know, being the mayor has its perks.”

  And so the lights on the night they all climbed into the back of the firetruck and stood among the ladders and hoses were even lit up like the day.

  Cherilyn stood in her sari with Douglas’s coat wrapped around her shoulders, his arm around her waist, as
they made their way through the town square, which was, for the first time in its history, also taking advantage of the nighttime. All the little booths and stages, ready to present the budding dreams of everyone that lived in Deerfield sat glowing beneath the bulbs as if they had always been there. And, reminded of other things that glow, Cherilyn had pictures of a child at her feet at the craft store, Douglas of a child playing beneath his new desk in the principal’s office. Douglas had pictures of himself taking care of Cherilyn if the bad news was true, and Cherilyn of taking care of Douglas if her bad news was true. Of both of them, of all three of them, taking care of her mother. Of everyone taking care of one another. What did the reason for caring, the specifics of caring, matter, if they were together? And as the firetruck turned around the courthouse they saw only one last artisan in attendance. A man they all knew as Bill, who worked at the bank, standing over an upturned bucket and practicing one final routine, it appeared, with a marionette.

  He looked up to wave at the small parade coming through the lit square, invisible strings hanging from his fingers, and they all waved back.

  And although, in their homes, many did sleep, there were others like Deuce Newman who also saw the night as the day as he sat hunched in front of his computer, clicking from image to image and loading them into a database as he had been doing those past weeks. Faces standing in front of a curtain in the DNAMIX booth, waiting to learn whatever future he gave them, faces grumpy and put out in front of a broken window, faces old and disappointed sitting by an ancient kitchen table. He now entered them all into a collage that made up what he thought was the greatest picture, the silhouette of a woman whose arms were stretched out to her sides in a field. An image, he thought, of a person finally getting what they deserved from the world, which was all of it in its entirety. And so, once he was done, he shut down the computer and webcam he had spent so many hours documenting as people stepped in the booth and he typed out whatever struck his fancy, having his fun with them, before finally just putting the thing on random. And, with this project complete, he knew that this night meant his next day was finally here, and that it might launch him into a thousand new directions. That it might finally take him out of Deerfield and into the larger world, which was a fate he felt was long overdue. He had so many ideas for the future that he could not sleep, so many possibilities of what he could do with his little invention. There were so many ways to change his life that it felt to him now that only one thing was impossible: Cherilyn. But he had tried for that thing. There was a comfort in that. He had tried for her and he had failed, so he would move on. He would set out on new missions. All he needed, he figured, was water and light.

 

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