If You Lived Here (20 page)

side of the bed to pick up the phone. “Hello? Marino and Sons.” “Oh, hey. This must be Shelley?”

“Right.” It’s 5:17. So dark. The universe seems hollow. “This is Frank Deleon from the hospice.”

“Hey, Frank.” I’ve been taking Martin’s off-hour calls for a month now. People are still surprised that they don’t hear his voice, but neither of us has rushed to announce that the Marino marriage is foundering. I sit up, switch on the light, fumble in the drawer for a pen. I’ve gotten so disorganized. “What can I do for you?”

“We’ve got an MS patient just passed away. Marina Eleosoros.

E-L-E-O-S-O-R-O-S.”

I pull out an old issue of
Harper’s
and see the familiar lump of a pen stuck inside it. I open it and write “Eleosoros” across the top of the page. “I’ll have Albert there within the hour. Anything I need to know?”

“No family to speak of. She left a detailed plan for the memorial service and cremation. We’ll send it over.”

I scrawl the details around the margin of the magazine. “Albert’ll see you in a little while. You take care, Frank.”

I call Albert. He picks up on the first ring. “Hey, Shelley.” “Do you ever sleep?”

“Catnaps,” he says.

“I need you out at the hospice. An MS named Marina Eleosoros.

Cremation.”

“Bennet will be glad for that.”

He’s right. For multiple sclerosis, cremation makes sense. The disease demands a lot from an embalmer. Sometimes, the limbs are so severely clenched that you have to break a bone to straighten them. Many families demand an open casket anyway. They don’t want to remember their loved ones as they were in those last years, trapped inside a twisted body. They want all the limbs in the proper places. We can do that, but never easily. Usually, I’m all for open caskets, but in cases like these I’d like to say, “Could you rely on memories instead?”

When I get off the phone with Albert, I turn out the lamp and roll back over to my side of the bed. The yellow glow from Seventeenth Street throws dim light across the room and I can make out my clothes in a heap on the floor. I consider the previous evening, those hours stalled by the side of the road, the tone of Mai’s voice while she told me her story, like someone slogging through mud, weary and miserable but persistent. And, then, her decision to come with me to Vietnam.

What would a soul look like, I wonder, if we had to embalm it? Would Mai’s soul be clenched and disfigured? Would Bennet have to break one of her fragile limbs to straighten it? And what of mine?

I get to the office before seven, make some coffee, and carry a mug down to the preparation room for Bennet. Later this morning, I remind myself, I’ll have to call my mother and tell her that she doesn’t have to come with me to Vietnam.

“Good morning!” I say, trying my best to sound perky.

I find him sitting on a rolling stool, filling out paperwork. As always, the room is surgically clean, gleaming. People would imagine an embalming room smelling of formaldehyde or, worse, dead bodies, but we’ve got chemicals to mask decomposition and chemicals to mask the chemicals that mask decomposition. As a result, it doesn’t smell like anything, really. That’s why we call it mortuary
science.
Bennet looks up at me and grins. “You’re here early,” he says.

I glance at the preparation table. A form lies curled up fetuslike beneath a sheet. “Is that the MS?” I ask. She looks no bigger than a child. It’s a wicked disease.

Bennet nods, making a couple of notes on his clipboard, then puts the pencil down and takes the mug. “Hey, go look in my office.”

He follows me down the hall. Through the open door of his office, I see a long figure stretched out under a jacket on the couch. I take a couple of steps inside and lean over to get a closer look. “Abe? What are you doing here?” He should be in Chapel Hill.

He opens his eyes and grins at me. “Hey, Shelley.” He sits up, massag-ing his arm.

“You’re out of your sling,” I say. “How does it feel?” He yawns. “Just a little sore.”

I bend over and give him a kiss, as much to hide my hurt as anything else. When Abe comes home, I’m the one who takes care of him. I’m the one who cooks the fettuccini Alfredo, buys the hazelnut French roast, calls his high school friends to tell them he’s coming. In normal times, I would have discussed with him, three times at least, the plan for getting that sling off his arm. And now I don’t even know when he’s coming to Wilmington? “How long have you been in town?” I ask, trying to sound neutral about it.

He rubs his face with his hands, then looks at his watch. “God. I just went to sleep three hours ago.”

Bennet laughs. “You’re a sleep wimp. You shouldn’t have stayed out so late.” He’s been teasing Abe on this point since high school. Bennet needs maybe three hours a night. Abe needs ten, plus naps, and the disparity between himself and his friend makes him crabby and phlegmatic.

I sit down next to Abe on the couch. “Why don’t you go upstairs and go back to bed?” I’m talking about my house, our house, across the parking lot, and he knows it, but he shakes his head as if I’m an overzealous hostess offering too much to her guest.

“I’ll be fine.” We haven’t seen each other since Keely’s birthday party and now he scrutinizes my face like it’s been years. “You want to go get coffee?” he asks.

I had planned to catch up, finally, on work I haven’t done in weeks. “Sure,” I tell him.

We decide to walk to the café a few blocks down Market Street. I usually cover this stretch of road by car, and the mansions, surrounded by high walls and lawns and oaks, seem larger and more forbidding from this angle. Twigs and old leaves crunch under our feet on the sidewalk, evidence that pedestrians rarely pass here. To our right, the cars flash by like missiles that might hit us.

“Theo won’t talk to me,” I tell Abe. “Your dad won’t really talk to me, either.” Martin has been staying in Jim and Mave Daltry’s carriage house for nearly a month. Eventually, of course, I’ll be the one to move out, but we haven’t worked out the details yet.

“Have you tried to talk to him?” Abe asks.

“I guess there’s not that much to say,” I admit. Then I add, “It’s my fault, but it’s not entirely my fault.”

Abe keeps his hands in his pockets. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

I’m surprised, and grateful, that he would say such a thing. He’s a very smart boy, and fair, but not always so perceptive. Once, after a girl jilted him in junior high, he said, “She really liked me. She let me do her math homework every day,” as if that proved his point.

“What did your dad tell you?” I ask.

We pass the gates of the National Cemetery. A gardener wanders through the gravestones with a leaf blower, making little tornados fly between the bare white crosses. I’m anxious to hear which reasons Martin has offered to explain our crisis—my stubbornness, Vietnam, his refusal to have more children. Or maybe something less obvious: our sex life. Or some vague “moving in different directions.”

We reach the café parking lot and thread through the cars that, even at this hour, already fill the spaces near the door. “Abe? What did he tell you?” Abe stares at his shoes. “He said he doesn’t think he loves you anymore.”

I stop. He stops. I look at him, then turn and keep walking. “Oh.”

He follows me, jogging to keep up. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”

I reach the door to the café, but then I turn around, making a big loop back out toward the shrieking cars on Market Street. Abe calls, “Shelley? The coffee?”

“Go ahead.” I walk back the way we came, then veer off the road again, up through the gates of the cemetery. The guy with the leaf blower glances up as I rush past. I head to the top of a hill, then down past a small circle of trees toward the back exit. I don’t know what my body would do if it stopped moving. Isn’t anything sacred? I still love him. This is a case of missed opportunities, unfortunate timing, bad luck. We can get divorced. Fine. But does he have to stop loving me?

The first time I asked Martin for a date, he pretended I hadn’t. The campers had spent the day at the beach and he had shown up, as usual, to sit in the sand. The fact that his kids didn’t go near the water that afternoon seemed to relax him and he focused on me in a way he never had before. We talked about the Trans-Siberian Railroad and how, when I went on my great adventure, I might have to spend twelve nights on a bench. That evening, I somehow got up the nerve to call him. “I was wondering if you wanted to go see a movie,” I said. And then, “This is Shelley.”

He didn’t answer immediately.

I was so nervous. “From the beach. From camp. You know,” I said. “Shelley.”

“I know,” he finally said and during the next long pause that followed, I told myself that I didn’t care about him because I was leaving soon for Africa. “Is it a camp outing?” he asked.

The rushes of embarrassment that he produced in me had begun to feel familiar. “Well, no. I just thought it would be fun,” I said. “Fun” sounded like it had six syllables.

Two nights later, Martin, Theo, Abe, and I went to see
Return of the

Jedi
at the College Road Cinemas. Martin paid for all of us. He bought each person popcorn and a Coke and we shared a supersize box of Junior Mints. The boys insisted that I sit between them and Martin treated me like a friend of his kids. Halfway through the movie, his pager went off and he went out into the lobby. Theo tugged at my arm and whispered, “Someone died.”

After the movie, we found Martin waiting by the video games. Theo dragged me over to him. “Someone died, right, Dad?” he asked.

Martin smiled at me and nodded. “Sorry about that.”

Theo looked up at me and said authoritatively. “See, I told you.” Abe said, “Who died, Dad?”

Martin said, “An old man died. You don’t know him.”

Theo looked up at me. “It was just an old man who died. You don’t know him.”

The boys sang camp songs all the way out to Wrightsville Beach. By the time they got to my house, they had reached seventy-seven bottles of beer on the wall, and, because I didn’t want to interrupt them, I just got out of the car, waved, and closed the door. Martin gave me a friendly wave and drove away.

It took him so long to love me, and he throws it away over this? I stop beneath the trees. I feel a hand on my elbow, then Abe’s arms go around me. I start to cry.

He leads me to a bench overlooking the World War I monument. For long minutes, he leaves me alone. I need a Kleenex. His hand rests gently on my knee. I’m not so distracted by heartbreak to miss the fact that he’s grown up. If I wasn’t sobbing, I would compliment him on it.

“I just never expected this,” I finally say. “Are you sure?”

He shrugs. “I know this law student up at Duke. He brags about how no one has ever broken up with him. I’m curious, you know, because girls always break up with me.” He pauses, waiting for me to acknowledge his own tragic past.

“You go out with jerks,” I tell him.

“Whatever. So I said, ‘Man, how come nobody ever breaks up with you?’ And he goes, ‘It’s a question of timing. If I sense that the girl is getting tired of me, I break up with her.’ He said there’s a major difference in the way it feels. Maybe Dad’s doing that. He’s just saying, ‘Well, then, Shelley,
I
break up with
you
!’ ”

“You’re sweet, Abe,” I say. I have to use the hem of my shirt as a tissue.

“No, really. It works. I’m going to try it next time.” He nods like someone at a turning point. “Heidi, I break up with you!” “Cheryl, I break up with you!” “Vanessa, scram!” With each sentence, he holds his finger out like a magic wand, and the girls disappear: Poof! Poof! Poof!

Even though Martin treated me like his children’s buddy, I believed that, deep down, he felt something more. On beach days, we would talk for hours, almost completely about my trip. Other than Vietnam and his stopovers in Japan on the way there and back, he’d hardly been anywhere. He read about the world with the serious attention of someone who expected to visit every place himself, but he also told me, without any obvious regrets, that he had kids and a business in Wilmington, and no intention of leaving. I couldn’t figure him out. Every few days, I’d throw out some new idea about my itinerary—Bali or Lombok? Costa Rica or Brazil?—and he’d go home and look at maps, then come back with definite opinions on the subject. Sometimes, all this interest gave me absolute confidence in his affections. But, on the other hand, it also showed a serious commitment to my leaving the country.

The day after camp ended, I called him again. “Do you want to go out to dinner with me?” I asked. “Just me?”

He took forever to answer. “I guess so,” he said.

That Friday night, we met in the bar of the Pilot House downtown. He wore a pale blue button-down, khakis, and a tie. I had on a sleeveless green sundress with sandals and a purse that matched. I’d pulled my hair back into a loose bun that made my hair frame my face like Meryl Streep’s in
The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
an effect that seemed both attractive and grown-up. Martin smiled when I came in, but he didn’t say anything.

We had to stand by the bar to wait for our table. Without much more than a hello, he launched into a description of an article he’d been reading about the Mayan pyramids in
Smithsonian
. I nodded, pretending to listen. Outside, the sky was turning pink and by the time we sat down at our table, the river had gone dark and the lights on the bridge had begun to twinkle. I tried to remember how good I had felt sitting next to him on the beach, watching the children play in the water. I felt so rigid now, and I couldn’t judge his mood at all, except that he seemed determined to wring enough material out of the Maya to carry us through the night. He talked nonstop, barely pausing to look at me or take a bite, as if he’d spent the whole day burrowing into the magazine, trying to memorize it. His behavior might have convinced me that he really didn’t care at all, but once, when I looked up more suddenly than he probably expected, I caught him gazing at me so intently that I had to look away.

After dinner, we ordered coffee. I went to the bathroom, where I stared at myself in the mirror, daring myself not to blink. Camp had ended, and if I didn’t say something now, I would never see this man again. I turned on the water in the sink, scooped up a handful, and drank as if I were thirsty. Then I left the bathroom and walked back to the table. I felt myself shaking. When I sat down, I looked at Martin and said, “I think I’m in love with you.”