Be Mine (31 page)

"I have to go," the head nurse said. Her face had flushed. She'd turned away. She said, without looking at us, "The physician's assistant is at a conference. He'll be back on Monday, and you can speak to him then."

But I had spoken to the physician's assistant only a few days ago, hadn't I? Then, the physician's assistant had been a woman. I said, "I just spoke to her. She said my father was better, that he'd been making Easter baskets, that—"

"These things progress and change quickly, ma'am," the nurse said, still walking away from us. "I'm going now," she said.

And then she
was
gone—a white blank in the corridor, and then just an absence.

M
OSTLY
we were silent on the drive home. Chad said he wanted, himself, to call the physician's assistant on Monday, and that if he didn't get a satisfactory response, he would call the director of Summerbrook.

I tried to assume the parental role again, to say that I would do it, but he said no. "You can't, Mom. You don't stand up to these people. You never have."

I didn't ask him what he meant. I said, "Well, maybe your father—"

"
Dad?
" He practically laughed. "You've got to be kidding, Mom.
I'll
handle it."

He fell asleep then for an hour—eyes closed, mouth open, the steady rhythm of his breath.

I fiddled with the radio for a while, and, finding nothing to listen to, turned it off and listened to the silence, to the sound of the road rolling under us, the other cars with their own passengers passing us. Occasionally, I looked over and locked gazes with some other driver, or a woman beside the driver, or the child in their backseat—but it happened too fast to even bother to raise a hand, to wave.

We were almost home when Chad woke, looking like a child again—eyes heavily lidded, the muscles in his face slack. He looked out the car window for a long time, without seeming to be seeing anything, and then he sat up fast, as if he'd glimpsed something that had surprised him traveling on the other side of the freeway.

"What?" I asked.

He still seemed groggy, confused. He said, "I thought I saw Garrett's red Thunderbird."

No.
"Mustang," I said, quietly.

"Yeah. Right," Chad said, and let his head drop backward on the back of the car seat again, and closed his eyes.

I
T WAS
late afternoon when we pulled in the driveway—too early for Jon to have gone to work and come back, but his car was there, parked, and he was standing in the backyard with his rifle, pointing it at the roof of the house. When he noticed us, he put it down. He turned.

When we stepped out of the car he said, "I had to do it," looking from me to Chad, and back to me. "I had to get the whole nest of them," he apologized. "They were moving in. They were going to be living in the attic, chewing up the wiring, living in our house before we knew it if I didn't do something."

They were there, on the ground between the driveway and the house, the fur and blood of them.

I looked at the roof.

Somewhere up there the nest was empty now.

I looked at Jon.

His face was haggard, pale.

"Why aren't you at work?" I asked.

"I called in sick," he said. "I couldn't sleep a wink last night."

S
ATURDAY.

Chad took Jon's car to visit Ophelia in Kalamazoo again. I spent a few hours in the garden, despite a light and steady rain. My garden gloves, gone from the hook on the back porch where I'd always kept them, could not be found, so I dug in the dirt with my hands. I packed the earth around a geranium I'd bought last week but hadn't gotten around to planting yet, and when I was done, my knuckles were bleeding. My fingernails had dirt under them.

They were the hands of an old woman, I thought, looking at them.

Unfamiliar, but undeniably mine.

It began to rain harder. In the distance, a very low rumble of thunder. Jon was in the backyard, putting golf balls across the grass. He had no hat on, and the rain had turned his dark hair silver. When he saw me standing in the driveway, watching, he turned and called out, but I pretended I didn't hear him. I went back into the house—not ready to talk to Jon.

Since we'd come home on Wednesday, I'd said nothing to him except that one sentence,
Why aren't you at work?
And I'd answered the few questions he'd asked ("Are you going to bed now?") by shaking my head, nodding it, or shrugging, and slept so close to the edge of the bed that I kept waking up startled from dreams that I was falling.

Once, Jon must have felt me spasm in my sleep. He reached over and touched my shoulder.

Still mostly asleep, I rolled away from him, and he took his hand back.

In the morning, despite the silence between us, we'd had breakfast with Chad, who seemed so jovial and well-rested that I thought, crazily, for a moment,
He's forgotten—all of it, forgotten.
Jon complimented the pancakes so extravagantly and repeatedly that Chad finally laughed and said, "Dad, are you trying to get Mom to sleep with you or something?"

Jon didn't laugh. He gave Chad a disapproving look. He said, "I just appreciate your mother's cooking, and it wouldn't hurt for you to do the same."

"Point taken," Chad said. "The pancakes are fantastic, Mom."

The subject between them changed to the weather. Rain. All day. Thunderstorms by evening. And, yes, Chad could take the car, but be careful driving home, especially if it was dark, and if there was a storm. Chad said not to worry. He'd be home early. Ophelia had to work.

"Where does she work?" I asked.

"She's a stripper," Chad said. And then he laughed. "No, really, Mom," he said, "she's a waitress at a nice place." He stood up from the table, carried his plate to the sink, kissed me on the cheek, and said good-bye.

I went upstairs, and made the bed.

I heard the Explorer drive away, Chad at the wheel.

Also, outside, a mourning dove, close by, was singing its hollow, throaty song—sounding dry and breathy and underwater all at the same time.

Jon had gone to the garage. He'd tried to talk to me in the kitchen as I rinsed the dishes at the sink to put them in the dishwasher, but when he put his hands on my shoulders, I felt a cold weight settle there with them, and I shivered, and he stepped away, his hands still hovering in the air. He said something under his breath, turning out of the kitchen, but I couldn't hear it, and didn't ask him what it was.

I looked out the bedroom window.

The morning was perfect.

I would never have guessed that in only a few hours it would rain. The air was warm, but light. The lilacs had sagged on their branches, but they had not yet browned. The blossoming trees had begun to drop their petals, but it was beautiful. It left the road and the grass shredded with pearl and pink, as if bridesmaids had wrestled with angels in the night, as if spring itself had been passed through the blades of a fan.

In the scrubbrush, Kujo was back. Or had never left. He'd been there constantly for the last few days, and he'd whimpered out there all evening and late into the night. Now, he'd quit whimpering, but was still pawing around and making circles in the scrubbrush, his nose to the ground, relentless in his longing for—what? What terrible appetite was it that could not be satisfied? Back at the Henslins', a bowl of water and leftovers were surely waiting. There would be a corner with an old blanket for him to sleep on. Mrs. Henslin would put down her dishrag, scratch his ears, when he came in the door. There was, I felt sure, some old rubber ball there for him. A discarded boot that was all his, which he could chew to his heart's content.

But here he was, instead, in the scrubbrush behind our house, still on the trail of whatever it was (deer, rabbit, another raccoon?) and would not give it up to go home, to rest.

Long after the light rain had turned to a deluge, he was still out there.

C
HAD
came home later than he'd said he would. I could hear him downstairs in the kitchen. The clatter of silverware. He was humming, opening the refrigerator door, closing it again. I'd left him a pork chop there, some fried potatoes, three spears of asparagus on a plate covered with waxed paper in the refrigerator. I'd made an identical dinner for Jon, and also left it there, but when I went downstairs for a glass of water and an aspirin at nine o'clock and looked in the refrigerator, Jon's dinner was still there, untouched.

It didn't thunderstorm, as they'd said it would. Just that distant threat of thunder, and then torrents of rain. I listened to it from my study, where, for many hours after I was done gardening I lay on my back, listening to that rhythmless pummeling, and then I took them out—the photo albums.

The wedding album first—all those miniaturized smiles, the tiny people, pressed onto paper, kissing one another, arms flung over one another's shoulders. In the background of every photograph, the long shimmering black serpent of the Thornapple River. In the foreground, always a dropped napkin or a flower that had fallen from someone's hair or bouquet. In one, a swan was drifting down the river. In another, Jon's sister (was she ever so young?) was leaning toward the swan, offering it a piece of bread. In another, my father in his tuxedo was toasting what appeared to be the air. He looked stifled in his tuxedo, but also ruddy with good health.

And Sue, in another, with those flowers in her hair, in her low-cut bridesmaid dress, the blond gloss of her. She was talking in this photograph to a man I couldn't recall, a guest I didn't recognize, someone I couldn't remember having invited to my wedding—a man I'd never noticed while he was there, and had never seen since.

And, in another, the cake.

The brilliant frosted tiers of it. Its layers and layers of sweetness. The bride and groom were knee-deep in that sweetness. Behind the cake, there was the blinding white blur of me passing by it, on my way somewhere, or just returned.

Then, I took out the other albums.

Chad's birth. Chad, in the hospital, wrapped in a blanket. Chad at my breast. Chad in Jon's arms—that terrible, beautiful, new-father smile on Jon's face.

And all the years that followed. The red ball, so large in Chad's small arms he could barely hold it. The sandbox. The enormous, stuffed horse. Chad on its back, wearing a cowboy hat. The first day of kindergarten. The zoo. The beach. The park. The swings. The kiddie pool. The county fair.

Chad on the carousel, holding the reins of a lacquered blue stallion with a flowing white mane, looking worried.

A few of the photographs had yellowed or faded despite the protective plastic sheaths they were in.

Some of the pages were stuck together.

The weight of the albums on my knees grew painful. I piled them on the floor at my feet.

Later, I heard Chad in the bathroom. The shower doors opening and closing.

I heard Jon come up the stairs. He came to the closed door of my study. From the other side, he asked, "Do you still love me?"

"Yes," I said, but did not go to the door.

C
HAD
was rested, happy, talkative in the car on the drive to Fred's Landscaping Monday morning. I'd forgotten to wash his landscaping crew T-shirt, and he had to fish it out of the laundry basket and wear it anyway. "Do I stink?" he asked, coming down the stairs in it as I was putting the eggs on his plate.

I stepped close to him, inhaled—sweat, grass, summer. "No," I said. "You smell good."

"You're just being nice," he said. "I stink."

When we pulled up to the garage, Fred was standing outside it, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing shorts, and I could see that his knees were enormous, deformed. Knees the size of soccer balls. Was it something that had happened to make the bones grow, I wondered, or had fluid accumulated there?

Arthritis? Kidney failure?

Were they painful? How did he manage to walk?

He waved to me as Chad stepped out of the car. I waved back and pulled out into the road. I drove to the freeway ramp, and headed into the city, to the efficiency.

I'd called to cancel my lease, and the woman in the office asked that I have my belongings out of it within the week. Jon said he would do it for me, but I'd said no. I didn't want him to go there. I wanted to be the one to go.

But I felt afraid as I opened the door to it. I hesitated at the threshold. I could feel, I thought, something still in there. I could smell it—his body. The scent of his flesh on his shirts, on my sheets—machinery, tools, the warm suggestion of combustible fuel. I stayed where I was, listening, ‹in the doorway. I said, "Bram?"

There was no answer.

I stepped in and looked around.

Nothing.

A towel on the floor in the bathroom.

A cup in the kitchen sink.

The sheets and blanket had been pulled off the futon and were bunched at the foot of it. I went to it. I lay down.

For a long time, I lay there, smelling him—in the futon, on the pillows. I pulled the sheet and the blanket up over me, and the smell of him, of
us,
was on those, too. I rolled onto my side, and closed my eyes, and a terrible emptiness entered me—
it was over, the affair, this was my life now, altered forever, but also unchanged—
and I fell into a dreamless sleep, swiftly, like stepping through a door, oblivion on the other side. But a familiar oblivion. A place I'd been before. I must have slept for at least an hour because when I woke, it was gone—the scent of him in that nest we'd made. Now, all I could smell was the garbage can under the sink, which hadn't been emptied for over a week—the sweet rotten remnants of our last meal together.

I stood up, folded the sheets, and began the first of several trips to the car.

W
E ATE
dinner late because Jon got stuck in traffic on the way home. It was already dark, but we hadn't pulled the curtains yet, and, watching my son and husband eat the chicken and rice I'd cooked for them, I imagined the scene from outside the house, what someone would see if he were at the window, looking in: