Acts of Love (2 page)

“Has it been difficult going back to work?” Dr. Neal Frederickson asked.

“I thought it would be harder than it is. Of course, there have been an awful lot of changes in nursing since I left.” She remembered her earlier stint, fresh out of school, starched, pristine, how all the nurses would stand the moment a doctor entered the room. Her first day back she had stood, while the newer, younger nurses on duty stared at her in incomprehension. She hadn't repeated that mistake.

“It must be hard to get used to the hours again.”

“I don't mind. The younger nurses hate it, but I kind of enjoy working weekends. Ted has the kids, and the house is just so…empty.” She took a sip of the wine he had ordered with seemingly great discernment from the embossed list. “I need the money, of course. It was silly of me not to go back to work a long time ago. I can't remember what I did all day.”

“How long have you been divorced?”

“I'm not.”

“You're not divorced?”

“I mean, I will be. In a couple of weeks. Maybe three, they said. When the papers come.” She looked about the room, then back to him.

“It's been five years for me.”

In fact, Ann had watched his ex-wife, Dina Frederickson, with some fascination as she cut through town in her Jeep, organizing Red Cross blood drives, going to aerobics classes in her turquoise sweat suit, and, most lately, running for town council. She was a wiry, frenetically cheerful woman staring out from black-and-white posters wrapped around trees on Main Street and in the hardware-store window, and Ann studied the image closely, wondering where divorce lay in the wide open-mouthed smile and the tightly permed hair and the lines about her eyes.

“It gets easier,” he added.

“Does it?”

“Yes.”

She smiled politely. She was a tourist in another country now, where everyone spoke a foreign language, a language she had never bothered to learn. No one had told her she would need it.

“You'll see,” he promised. “It's the little things. Eating when you want. Arranging books exactly how you want them. Even time itself seems to change when you don't have to account for it to someone else. You rediscover your own prejudices. It's really quite exciting.” A tiny bubble of spittle dangled from the corner of his mouth, and he blotted it gently with the tip of his linen napkin.

The waiter came to clear away their dinner plates and returned in a moment with dessert menus.

“What made you want to become a doctor?” she asked, anxious to change the subject. She remembered that somewhere, in some long-ago women's magazine, she had read that it was best to ask questions, to appear interested, to be a listener.

Afterward, he drove her home to the two-story white wooden house and walked up the small stone path to her front door. It was a cold night for October, and she could see her breath snake before her. She thought of her girls, up on Fletcher's Mountain, thought of them as literally sitting above her, looking down, shivering. “Thank you. It was a lovely dinner.”

“I have two tickets to the symphony in Albany next Friday. Would you like to go?”

“Oh. I don't know. I mean, with the kids and all.”

“You just told me that your husband has the kids on weekends.”

“He does. Of course he does. I'd have to check on my schedule at the hospital.”

“Why don't you call me on Monday?”

“Okay. Yes.”

They fumbled over whether to kiss goodnight or not and ended up patting each other's forearms, and then she slipped inside.

 

A
NN LAY IN THE QUEEN-SIZED BED
in the dark, unable to sleep. She rearranged the pillows, pulling them against her torso so that she would not feel quite so alone, rearranged her legs, tried to rearrange her thoughts. Unable to, she turned on the light, and picked up the receiver of the telephone on her night table, slowly punching in the numbers.

She had always been happy to let others believe that she had originally quit nursing because of Ted, and that she hadn't gone back sooner because of the girls. She had even adorned the myth with scattered barbs of resentment that he did little to dispute; it was one of the smaller prevarications of the marriage that was simpler for them both to accept. But the truth was, she had never been very good at it, and had felt a great secret relief when she left, for she lacked the one skill that was perhaps most important, the ability to forget, the talent of distance. Her first years, she would wake almost every night, haunted by patients she had been caring for, unable to sleep for worry, wondering if they had gotten through the night, or, as sometimes happened, she would return to find an empty bed, or, worse, a new face entirely. On particularly bad nights, she would sneak downstairs while Ted slept and, imitating the voice of a relative, the aunt who had spent the day weeping in the visitors' waiting area, the sister who had argued with the attending physician for more pain medication, would call the hospital for patient information. Sometimes she would find Ted in the doorway, glowering at her, and she would promise to stop; but she couldn't.

She had hoped that the intervening years had made a difference, and, in fact, in the eight months since she had returned to the hospital she had seemed able to sustain the precarious balance between caring and forgetting with, if not ease, at least a certain conscious wobbly mastery. Until yesterday, and the eighty-three-year-old man who had fallen down two flights of stairs and landed in bed number seven of the ICU, one of her three beds for the shift. The malnourished old man whose fragile arm, its skin hanging in sheets, she had watched from across the room rising in slow motion, creeping up inch by inch until the other nurses could not help watching it, too, this act of will, this arm reaching for the ceiling, for God. Ann went to him and bent over to hear his cracking whisper. “I have to pee.” She managed to get his shrunken gray penis into the plastic bottle, which he filled with a half inch of urine and then clutched to his chest, his one true possession. “I haven't eaten in days,” he told her plaintively. “Please, can I have some food?”

“Hardison General. How may I direct your call? Hello? Hardison General.”

She hung up the telephone, turned off the light, and sank back into the night.

 

T
HE SUN ROSE
in ever-widening bands of pink and gray over Fletcher's Mountain, illuminating the rise of dense pines behind them and the vast carpet of fields, gridded by dairy farms, below. Ted stretched his knotted arms up to the sky, savoring the cold wet air against his unshaven face. A few feet away, Ali struggled with outspread fingers to gather her heavy deep-blond hair into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. There was something about the effort that was so private, so achingly feminine, that Ted, watching, wanted only to gather her up in his arms and shield her from all the men waiting in her future who, watching too, would be filled with desire. To keep her unmaimed. He remained still.

Julia studied him.

“C'mon, Sleeping Beauty,” he called to her when he felt her gaze planted, fixed, on him. “Time to get up.”

“Don't call me that.”

“My, my, aren't we touchy this morning. C'mon, Miss Waring, what do you think this is, some goddamned spa?”

“You and Ali go. I'll meet you back here.”

“No. It's going to be the three of us.”

“It used to be the four of us.”

“That's right. And maybe it will be again. But right now, I count three on my fingers. So rise and shine, kiddo.”

He left Julia to climb sullenly from her sleeping bag while he picked up the rifle he had left by his pack and ran his hands down the cool steel choke, the smooth walnut stock. He had rarely used it since his father, an avid huntsman, had given it to him in a singular fit of generosity and affection when he was eleven. It had been his father's favorite gun, and in his first days of possession, Ted had oiled and polished it each evening, vowing to live up to the trust that had inspired the gift. Ten months later, though, when his father succumbed to the cancer he had kept secret until he had to be rushed to the hospital, his liver, his kidneys shot, Ted put the gun away in the deepest recesses of his closet. He knew in his heart that his father would never have given him the gun if he had thought he would be able to use it himself next season. Ted, unable to grieve, thought only of this lie of love. He spit on a fingerprint and wiped it with his sleeve.

“Okay, girls,” Ted began. “I want you to pay close attention.”

They looked from him to the Winchester 30–06, which stood upright between them, its front sight just reaching Ali's chin.

“This is the same gun my father taught me to shoot with.”

“Big deal,” Julia muttered.

Ted glared at her, and Julia, pitched forward, held his eyes, unflinching.

He looked away first. “There's nothing to be scared of,” he went on, “but there are certain rules. The first is that you never aim a gun at anything you don't intend to shoot. You got that? Okay. Now, I want each of you to hold it, just to get the feel.”

He passed the gun first to Ali, who could not quite lift it to her chest but settled for running her hands down the length of the rifle and back up, waiting for a sign that she had accorded it the proper respect. She handed it reverently to Julia only when she saw Ted smile. Julia grazed her hands quickly over the barrel and thrust it back at Ted.

With the Winchester balanced across his knees, Ted handed the girls three bullets, their brass casings matte in the morning light. He showed them how to load the bullets in the action, how to pull back the safety bolt and how to cock it forward to fire, and how to line the rear and front sights until they were one, and he told them how, when you fire, it was like a jolt of thunder ratcheting through your neck. He stood up. “Once you get the hang of it, it won't seem so strange. Well, kids, let's hit the trail. Go get your daypacks.”

He waited until they were absorbed with the stuffing, reorganizing, and zipping of the small nylon packs he had bought them for the weekend, their heads bent in concentration, granting him a brief cache of privacy, and he carefully slid a flat silver flask from his own pack, took a long swallow of whiskey, and stashed it as the heat rolled down his throat and into his gut.

Julia, looking up, saw her father, his eyes closed, the flask at his mouth, and knew that this was, if not trouble, surely another sign of betrayal, and she inscribed it onto the tablet where she kept such careful score.

“Ready?” Ted called out happily.

“Ready,” Ali answered.

The three of them set off on the narrow trail that encircled the mountain, rising gradually about its craggy girth, Ali close behind Ted, Julia a few feet back, as the sun continued to step up into the sky, softening the last shards of cold.

“I'll tell you what happened the very first time I went hunting,” Ted said, loudly enough for Julia to hear. “Would you like that?”

“I don't care,” Julia muttered. Nevertheless, because Ted rarely alluded to his own childhood, she leaned into it, into him, panning for evidence.

“Well,” Ted went on, ignoring Julia's sarcasm, as he had been attempting to ignore it all year, believing that it would eventually have to run its course, “it was on a mountain in Pennsylvania not unlike this one. And on that very first weekend, I tracked a bear.”

“A real bear?” Ali asked, always his best, his easiest audience.

“There are no bears up here,” Julia countered. “Or in Pennsylvania, either. Why do you listen to him, Ali? You know he always lies.”

“I'm not lying. I got up real early that morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise, and I wandered off by myself. Just me and this very Winchester. About a mile from our campsite, I saw these huge paw prints in the dirt. Big as your rear end, Ali.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

Ted felt Julia stepping up behind him, drawing closer despite herself.

“The very same thing you'd do. I followed them. Thought we'd have some bear meat for dinner.”

“People don't eat bears,” Julia stated firmly, lagging back a little, pleased that she had found Ted out once more.

“You've never heard of bear burgers? A little ketchup, there's nothing like them. Anyway, I kept following the tracks, my hand on the trigger, until I came to a clearing, and do you know what I found? A whole goddamned bear family, having Sunday brunch.”

“What were they eating?”

“Well, Ali, they had red-and-white-checked napkins tucked under their chins, and they were eating little campers, just like you. Dunking them headfirst into a vat of honey and chomping merrily away.” Ted laughed, an acidy, victorious laugh that echoed down the path.

“Dad,” Ali moaned.

“I told you, he always lies,” Julia reminded her sternly.

“That's not lying, that's telling tall tales. If you're going to hunt, you're going to have to tell tales. Now the next person is supposed to top that. Julia?”