Here & There (62 page)

Reidier interprets her silence as advantage. He presses forward. “I won’t lose you, Eve.”

Eve still doesn’t respond.

“You’ll still be you.”

“Just like Ecco.”

Reidier pulls his hands off his wife’s back as if they had been burned by dry ice.

Eve turns and faces him. She shrugs, completing her thought before speaking it. “It doesn’t matter. I’m dead either way.”

Eve kisses her husband on the lips. Her eyes glisten with tears that she holds back, refusing to let them loose, denying the inevitable, inexorable pull of gravity. She has shed enough tears for several lifetimes, even with this one cut short. These tears are hers, and she’s not relinquishing them to their sad descent. She has no interest in the salty trails they leave behind, like slugs on a sidewalk.
*

*
So, what, Hilary’s trying to write like Eve now? Internal monologues, observational similes, and all?

Eve takes her hand off Reidier’s cheek. “It’s ok. I won’t ask you again. I don’t want you to give up who you are anymore than I want to lose my own identity.”

She walks out of the kitchen.

Quarks could cross the universe . . . You can’t affect the state of one without affecting the other.

Reidier listens to her footsteps pad down the hall, up the stairs, and into their bedroom. He stares at her glass of water, at her lip prints on the rim. Reidier picks up the glass, rinses it in the sink, and puts it in the dishwasher.

He peers out the window into the darkness again. Nothing but his reflection in the glass. He watches it start. The tremor in his bottom lip. A fault line delineating the tectonic shifts below. He watches it break free and spread, like ripples in a pond, until his entire body is shuddering, spasming with silent, violent sobs.

And then it passes. Reidier catches his breath. He sniffs in and pinches off the mucus from his nose. He rinses his hands in the sink, and then walks out into the hall and turns off the light. Reidier makes his way to the stairs in a daze. He turns off the hall light without even looking and heads up. His feet thump against the stairs in rhythm to the ticks of the grandfather clock. At the top of the stairs, he turns away from their bedroom and heads down the hall. It’s a mechanical trajectory at this point. He spends most nights in the boys’ room. Ecco’s room, technically. Eve insisted on separate rooms. But that doesn’t stop Otto from sneaking into Ecco’s after bedtime. The moon is rising, and silver light pours in through the window at the end of the hallway.

Reidier gazes down through the floor ahead of him as he shuffles down the hall. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that the door to Ecco’s room is almost completely open. Otto must have already snuck in. Dim moonlight fills the dark room. Reidier heads in.

The
SLAM
seems to come from inside of him. It doesn’t make sense, though, a noise that loud thundering out through his skull. Nor does he understand how he ended up sitting on the floor in the middle of the hall. He’s been knocked out of his stupor only to find himself in a daze. The
THUD
still echoes around his inner ear. He
keeps squeezing his eyes shut and opening them trying to focus, but his perspective still makes no sense to him. Reidier presses his thumb and forefinger hard against the bridge of his nose and scrunches his eyes shut. He finally pulls back and blinks down the hall at the moonlight. And that’s when he sees it.

A second door.

There are two identical doors to Ecco’s room.

Reidier shakes his head and refocuses. The twin doors are still there. As he rolls onto all fours, the hall spins around him and then snaps back to where it should be. Reidier presses one hand onto the floor and the other against the wall, and struggles to get upright.

Halfway through his ascent, after he lifts his hand off the floor, he finally realizes his other hand is leaning hard against thin air. The gap between the doorframe to Ecco’s room. He’s leaning against the empty space of a threshold for balance. Pushing against moonlight. Reidier, overwhelmed with curiosity, leans in closer to inspect the phenomenon.

His nose realizes it before his brain. The faint smell of paint gives it away.
This is not a door.
*

*
And this is not a report, Hilary. Nor a transcript of some secret QuAI video. You’ve Psynar’d your way ‘round the bend and into a narrative of historical fiction. Not that I blame you, mama. Who among us hasn’t taken some liberties on this journey?

Reidier is perched against a nearly picture-perfect nightscape. It’s a portrait of a portal. It is practically identical to the real door only a few feet further down the hall. Especially, lit up by the moon, the painting itself seems to glow with an inner light.

“Where . . .” Reidier whispers to himself, petting the painting with his fingertips. The detail. The verisimilitude. It would’ve taken a painstaking focus, an unrelenting compulsion to the minutiae.

The answer echoes back at him from out of the dining room.

“No. I had her babysit. The boys fingerpainted today, did you see?”

“Ecco.”
*

*
OCD huffing paint fumes.

For the second time in barely five minutes, Reidier yanks back his fingers from the searing sensation of frostbite. He retreats from the door, from the painting of the door. He’s breathing heavily now. He’s shaking his head and muttering indecipherable denials to himself.

Finally, Reidier tucks his hands into the pockets of his tweed sport coat and shuffles to the stairs. He casts a quick glance down the hall to Eve’s, to their room.

Reidier descends the stairs, stepping in time with inevitable ticks from the grandfather clock below. He walks down the front hall toward the kitchen, stops in front of the bathroom where Eve had sat recovering from her regurgitations, turns, and heads down into the basement.

Several minutes later, the soft murmur of his and QuAI’s voices dance up the stairs.

ECCO II

Eve’s diagnosis demarcated a drastic shift in the Reidiers’ relationship. Whether it was Eve’s

?

?

?

Her habits were her undoing. Not the habits in and of themselves, but rather the surrendering to a
modus operandi
, her resignation and assimilation of the way of things. Eve still had her reservations,
dissatisfactions, and repulsions; she just worked around them, like an inexperienced tennis player running around her backhand.

Humans are adept at adapting. The seesaw of life balances on the fulcrum of circumstance. Somewhere along the way, life kicks the fulcrum out from under us. We fall, we hurt, and then we push the seesaw down to where the fulcrum waits, and rebalance, until the next kick. It’s the journey of living. Whether it’s a changing environment, an emotional loss, a damning diagnosis—we accept, we endure, we normalize. However, this act of preservation is also an act of destruction, old parts of ourselves must be excised, amputated, calcified, or calloused over. After the molting, scar tissue becomes our new skin.

Ecco, her issues with Reidier, her tumor: it became routine, commonplace.

Eve’s assuetude is her assassin.

A

NB Footage: Providence, 8:01 p.m., May 24, 2008—

The boys sit on porch stairs, staring out at the backyard. They sit side by side, practically leaning against each other. Like twin radars, their heads shift back and forth watching. The sun has slipped past the horizon and shadows dash around the gloaming. “Twelve!” Otto whispers excitedly.

Ecco nods and scans the twilight, while Otto keeps staring off at where he was pointing.

The sounds of Kerek, Bertram, and Clyde watching a Red Sox game filter out through a screened window. Clyde yells in disgust as the A’s score in the bottom of the second. Kerek and Bertram laugh at their friend’s dismay.

Ecco taps his brother’s shoulder lightly and points off toward the garage. “Thirteen.”

Otto nods, his eyes wide, almost all pupils in the dim light.

The porch door squeals loudly. The boys turn in unison. Eve stops midpush, realizing she has unsettled the magic hour.

She struggles to slide out between the door and jamb without any more creaking. Once out, she slowly closes the screen door behind her. The boys have returned to their scanning.

“Fourteen?” Otto points.

Ecco shakes his head no.

“It’s an old one?”

Ecco nods.

Eve crouches down behind Otto. “What are you doing?” she whispers.

“Counting bunnies. They’re everywhere. We’ve counted thirteen so far.”

“Your
grand-père
hates rabbits. He shoots at them with an air rifle.”

“He does . . . ?” Otto asks in a tone heavy with horror.

Eve laughs. “Don’t worry, he never hits them. He curses too loudly while rushing to get his gun and always scares them all away.”

Otto nods, clearly happier about his grandfather’s poor hunting hygiene. A thought strikes him, “Why does he hate bunnies?”

“Because they eat the vegetables out of his garden.”

“Oh,” Otto says. “Like Bugs Bunny?”

“
Oui
, exactly like Bugs. Come on, bath time.” Eve stands and picks up Otto.

“Five more minutes.”

“No. You said that ten minutes ago.” Eve heads for the door.

“But—”

“The only butt I care to discuss is yours simmering in a bath.”

The door screeches open and claps shut with a patter of afterclaps.

From inside, Otto’s voice trails out. “Maybe we should go visit
grand-père
at his garden.”

Outside, the shadows have melted into the gloaming. Cricket chirps dot the dark. Stridulations rise and fall along Arrhenius’s tempo. A rabbit flinches out of the bushes and freezes into its rock impression. Keeping its body still, it nibbles on some grass. “Fourteen,” Ecco murmurs to himself, still sitting on the step.

Ecco appears nonplussed. A few minutes later, he wanders into the dark kitchen and retrieves an object from a drawer (footage is unclear as to what object due to poor lighting, possibly a flashlight), goes back outside, and out into the yard, seeking out more bunnies to catalog.

NB Footage: Providence, May 24, 2008, 10:45 p.m.—

The porch light turns on. The screen door squeals in protest as Reidier backs open the door with his rear end. One arm carries a full, tied-closed garbage bag. The other is wrapped around two six-packs full of empty bottles.

As Reidier clears the radius of the door’s reach, he catches it with his foot before it impatiently slams shut. In a practiced movement, he eases the door closed.

Reidier tromps down the steps and heads across the lawn toward the garbage bins next to the garage. Halfway there, an automatic floodlight casts its beam out to meet him. Reidier slows as he approaches. He scrunches up his nose and pulls his chin back. The closer he gets to the garbage, the more severe his expression becomes, and he turns his head away in reflex.

Reidier puts the garbage bag down and lifts the lid off of the first bin. He peers in and takes a precautionary sniff. Reidier shakes his head and tosses the bag in and replaces the lid. Still holding the
empty six-packs, Reidier goes down the line of bins, lifting each lid and sniffing. None of them appears to be the culprit; however, judging from his cringing behavior, the odor seems to have intensified.

Standing back from the bins, Reidier holds his free forearm across his nose. He takes them in and looks around. Something behind the garage catches his eye, when the floodlight goes out. Reidier takes a step toward it, triggering the motion sensor. He tilts his head to the right and takes several more steps toward the back of the garage and then stops dead in his tracks for a moment, clearly struggling to make sense of whatever it is he is looking at. Suddenly, Reidier leaps back, dropping the empty beer bottles to the ground.

The CLINKs and SHATTERING of glass almost mask his first retch. His second wave of nausea heaves up with an aggressive spasm. Reidier rushes to the closest bin, rips off the lid, and violently vomits into it. Once the first torrent wanes, Reidier crouches down next to the bin, his hands still clutching its rim for stability. He tries to catch his breath, but in doing so inhales another blast of fetor. Reidier yanks himself up and vomits again.

In a brief pause between seizures, Reidier half collapses, half retreats his way back across the lawn, gasping for breath, struggling to flee beyond the circumference of the stench. Exhausted and convulsing, Reidier clutches at the grass, as if he were afraid he would fall off the ground itself.