Hope and Other Luxuries (67 page)

With a lump in my throat, I went back into the filthy kitchen and started unloading the dishwasher. “I'm sorry, Momma,” Valerie said,
following me. “Dad and I did our best, we really did. I went out and sat with Simon every day.”

I nodded briskly. “I know that, honey.”

But her comment reminded me of Dylan, my ailing fish. He needed to be my next priority. So I abandoned the dishwasher only partly emptied, grabbed my purse, and drove to the pet store.

Fifty dollars' worth of fin rot drugs, an aquarium vacuum, and filter inserts later, I was cleaning up Dylan's home as well as I could while the little guy huddled under his favorite plant.

Poor pale sad little fish! He was so changed from the lovely and confident creature I had left behind two months ago. Back then, he would swim onto my hand and perch there like a bird. Now, I wasn't sure he could even swim.

When everything was as clean as I could make it and the water values were right again, I poured in the fin rot treatment—the maximum dose since this was such a drastic case.

Poor Dylan didn't even have fins left to rot.

As I worked, I tried not to look anywhere but at the aquarium. The bathroom was unspeakable, too: empty toilet paper rolls, dust and dog hair in the corners, and a layer of cast-off clothing underfoot. The bathtub was gray, and the sink was so crusted with fallen makeup and dried toothpaste that it had lost its original color.

I can't stand a lot of different kinds of dirty, but a dirty bathroom is the worst. A filthy house gives me a sense of physical desperation akin to claustrophobia. It feels as if chaos is raining down on me, as if I'm drowning under piles of trash—as if the earth itself has vomited all over me. So, as I cleaned Dylan's aquarium, I had to pause every now and then and take deep breaths.

Priorities!
I reminded myself firmly.
It'll be all right in a couple of days. Just hit one thing after another—one thing after another
.

Then I walked into the media room, where Valerie and Clint were playing with Gemma. And my grandbaby was happy and beautiful. She was blooming with health.

I picked her up, and my arms wrapped around her, and my whole body relaxed. Gemma and her immaculate clothes and her pink, perfect skin positively glowed with care and loving attention. The chaos in the house hadn't touched her at all.

My imagination pulled up memories for me of another baby being carried through a dusty, gray-tinged house: baby Valerie at this same age, also pink and perfect and blooming with health, with dirty dishes and dirty clothes piled up all around us.

Yes
, I thought.
Yes, I remember
.

Valerie had done the right thing. This was what had needed to happen during the months when I was gone. And she and Clint didn't have much time together, either. In another week, he would be in basic training, getting yelled at and stressed. I could leave them alone to have a few happy days.

I'll get to it
, I thought.
It's not a big problem. Dirt isn't fatal
.

Next morning, I got up early with Joe. While he ate his bowl of cereal in preparation for another long workday, I told him about my worries at Clove House.

“Elena never got traction,” I said. “She was a zombie more or less the entire time.”

“I thought things were going badly,” Joe said. “You weren't telling me much. You try just to tell me the good stuff.”

“In that case,” I sighed, “it's a wonder I told you anything at all.”

Joe frowned. “Maybe the sleep is a kind of dissociation. Maybe she's avoiding the stuff that makes her uncomfortable.”

“That wouldn't explain why she nods off during movies, too,” I said. “She begged me to take her to see this one ballet. Then she got so sleepy that we ended up having to leave halfway through.”

“I guess they were trying to get her to the point where she wasn't angry all the time.”

I thought about that last day, when Elena had called me up, absolutely fuming over something Brenda had told her.

“Well, if that was the plan, it didn't really work.”

After Joe left, I spent a while in the smelly garage with Simon. I took off his cone and held him to keep him from scratching. “Sorry, big boy,” I whispered to him as he rolled back and forth across my lap. “We would fix you if we could, but we don't know how to fix you.” Then I pondered that statement, dreary and dejected.

Wasn't that the story of my life?

With a
crack
, the door to the house pushed open. “Momma,” Valerie said. “You need to come see this.”

It was Dylan. A clear sheet of skin had peeled off his side and was hanging down loose.

“Oh, my God!” I said.

“It's got to hurt,” Valerie agreed mournfully. “Fish may not feel much, but they're bound to feel
that
.”

She was right. Of
course
she was right! It was appalling—appalling!—that a creature in my house should be in so much pain. Poor little Dylan, my dragon boy! He had to be put out of his misery right away.

With trembling fingers, I searched “fish euthanasia” on the Internet. Thank God for thoughtful hobbyists everywhere.

“Okay, clove oil,” I told Valerie. “And vodka. I'll be back.”

I found the clove oil in a tooth repair kit at our neighborhood drugstore, along with cotton balls, a dental mirror, and some temporary cement. I was surprised to find a liquor store open at eight thirty in the morning, and they were probably surprised to find that I desperately needed a bottle of vodka.

Then again, maybe they weren't.

I sped home and snagged the poor betta in a measuring cup. He didn't do any of the things fish normally do to escape. He probably couldn't imagine that his life could get any worse. Then I cleared off a few square inches of counter space in the unholy mess of my kitchen and dumped him out into a cereal bowl.

Elena was up by this time, nursing a cup of green tea. Clint came wandering into the kitchen.

“Mom's killing Dylan with vodka,” Valerie informed him.

“Oh!” Clint said amiably. “I guess if you've gotta go . . .”

Meanwhile, I was busy dismantling the tooth kit. Two drops of the clove oil were supposed to put Dylan to sleep. But how would I know if he was asleep? It's not like fish have eyelids.

I knew, all right. The two drops of clove oil laid poor Dylan out flat on his side. I poked my finger into the water and stirred him around gently, but he didn't move. He was probably already dead.

I remembered the day when I had picked him out in the pet store, the handsomest, strongest betta there, and my heart broke for the beautiful little life that had floated so gracefully through mine.

Valerie came up behind me. “Is it time to flush him?”

“He doesn't get flushed,” I said. “We wait another”—I looked at the clock—“five minutes. Then we replace part of his water with the vodka.”

And I followed my painless-death recipe to the letter, even though I felt sure he was already gone.

Deep breath. Time to take Simon to the vet. No negative thoughts or feelings, now. It wouldn't be fair to pass along bad vibes to a helpless animal.

“We're so sorry, Mrs. Dunkle,” the receptionist said soberly when I came staggering through the door with Simon's heavy cage. “Room 2 is all ready for you. You can go right in.” And I was grateful that the vet and technician came in at once and didn't keep us waiting.

Simon strolled about impatiently and bumped our hands with his head while we once again went over our lack of options. The sight of the big cat, so strong, apparently so healthy, set up an odd cognitive dissonance within me. I couldn't see how it could possibly be true that this big bruiser of a cat needed to die. But in the short car ride, Simon had already scratched his neck bloody again, and I had to hold his back foot to stop him from doing more harm.

Nerve damage. Joe had taken pictures of the savage bite into the black cat's neck, down to the shiny gristle-covered bones.

“Are you ready?” asked the vet.

And just like that, Simon's broad-shouldered, brawling days were over.

I drove home with my hand resting on his white cardboard coffin. They had barely managed to wedge him inside. When Simon had first come home with me as a kitten, his family had found him a white cardboard box for the ride. That had been only a few years before Valerie's overdose and the Summer from Hell.

It seemed to me in those sad moments as if my family's collective life had been contracting ever since those grim years, like lifeboat survivors throwing the weaklings overboard. First I had thrown overboard my story characters, who still tried to visit me from time to time, but I couldn't clear my mind enough to deal with them anymore. Then Dylan had gone, and now Simon.

They had been too demanding and too delicate. They had taken risks. They had asked too much of my strained abilities: attention, protection, loving care.

I brought the coffin into the jumbled, trash-strewn living room. It joined the rest of the debris from our fractured lives. “Clint,” I said, waving vaguely at the box, “I need to ask a favor.”

He stood up at once. “Sure thing.”

Gemma was awake. I claimed her from Valerie, and while Clint was out back digging a hole large enough to hold a cat and a fish, I sat down with my grandbaby to get reacquainted.

This isn't a contraction of our lives
, I reminded myself.
This is a wonderful addition to our lives. Gemma and Clint are both wonderful additions
.

But then again, that was Valerie's doing, not mine.

Gemma had grown so much in the two months I'd been gone that she was already bored with just lying in my arms. Now she wanted to wriggle around and pull up on things. She stiffened her little body and tried to stand up on my lap.

“Hey, Elena!” Valerie said, poking her sister, who had curled up in one of the armchairs. “Crib! Move it! Let's go!”

Elena muttered something inaudible, but she opened her eyes and got to her feet, and the two of them headed off down the hall.

I stayed behind with my granddaughter on the dusty, hair-covered couch, and looked into her wide blue-gray eyes.
“A, B, C, D, E, F, G,”
I
crooned, bouncing her in time with the letters. But around
Q
, my voice turned husky, and by
S
, I had to stop.

It's perfectly ridiculous
, I told myself,
to cry in the middle of the ABCs. Think of the vet: he has to put down animals all day long
.

Valerie emerged from the hallway and balanced a long slab of slatted crib against the cluttered piano. “Gotta put it out here while we move Elena's mattress.”

I stroked Gemma's fine flyaway curls. Her hair had lightened up. I, too, was a blond baby. Was it just wishful thinking, or did Gemma look a little bit like me?

Elena came out with another piece of crib to stack against the first.

My phone rang. I propped up Gemma with one hand while I swiped the answer button with the other. The gentle voice of my sister-in-law was on the line.

“Hi, Godmother,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “I was supposed to call you last week—
but
 . . .”

My brother and sister-in-law had been talking about coming down for a visit, something they do a time or two a year. It isn't the easiest thing for him to leave the produce farm, or for her to pull their four children away from homeschooling. So, since they hadn't chosen firm dates—and since I'd been dealing with everything else—I hadn't paid too much attention. That was all their vacation planning had been so far: just talk.

Up to this point, at least.

“We're about halfway there,” my sister-in-law told me, and I could hear the happiness in her voice. A vacation—getting away from the farm and the stacks of papers to grade—the chance to visit people she was fond of . . . “I'm sorry we're not giving you much warning, but you don't need to feed us. I've got things for supper right here in the motor home. Is it all right if we stay in your driveway tonight?”

Even while making these apologies, my sister-in-law's voice didn't lose its happy warmth. She knew what the answer would be. If there's a person on this planet I adore, it's my sister-in-law. She's my godchild, too. I would do anything in the world for her happiness, she knows that. Anything in the world.

I cast a frantic eye around my chaotic living room. Clint came walking in the back door, having propped the dirty shovel outside, to take the cardboard coffin with him and see if it would fit. Valerie and Elena sidled by me, lugging an armchair between them. The flat-screen teetered in the middle of the coffee table, along with half-empty soda cans and the remains of Subway sandwiches. A pile of dirty laundry was spilling out of Elena's suitcase on the floor by the cluttered piano bench.

It was horrible. It was unspeakable! And, once again, I fought down that feeling of claustrophobia, as if I were being crushed alive in a loaded garbage truck.

“I—I—you know I just got home yesterday,” I heard myself babble. “I—we—I haven't—I don't know—”

For the first time, my sister-in-law sensed that something was wrong.

“You know it doesn't matter how the place looks,” she assured me. “We're just looking forward to seeing you.”

That was true. That was absolutely one hundred percent true. I could welcome my brother and sister-in-law in my pajamas, and they wouldn't mind. They love me as sincerely as two humans possibly can.

And yet—and yet—

A strong odor of urine curled around me from the open garage door. That stain on the floor—was that Big Red? Was it going to come out?

When my brothers and their families come to see me, I do my very best to spoil them. I cook big meals and every dessert I know they like. It matters to me what my big brothers think of us. I want them to feel proud of us, to feel that we're doing well.