Mercury (8 page)

“I'm hungry,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

Somehow we got through the evening. We both drank too much; Viv told stupid jokes and insisted we play serial Ping-Pong. No one else, I thought, noticed her frantic edge. At last Merrie and her daughters left; the children went to bed. I stood in the kitchen doorway, watching Viv scrub a saucepan, wondering if she was about to drive to Windy Hill.

“I'll be up in ten minutes,” she said, not raising her eyes from the sink.

Dutifully I climbed the stairs and prepared for bed. I was sure she regretted her earlier outburst and everything else: keeping the break-in secret, paying for the alarm without consulting me. It never crossed my mind that I too was in the wrong. She had tried to tell me about Mercury; she had given me my chance; I had failed her. When she came upstairs, I closed my book, still hoping for an apology, but she only reached for me.

I
LLNESS SAVED US FROM
further argument. Viv awoke the next morning complaining that her skull was too tight. Her temperature rose to 103. For two days she lay in bed. We celebrated New Year's Eve at home, watching DVDs, and were asleep by eleven. Not until January 2, when Marcus needed a lift to a friend's house, did I have a chance to visit Windy Hill. As I got out of the car, Charlie and another girl were pushing wheelbarrows of hay towards the little barn. We exchanged Happy New Years.

Claudia was in the tack room, standing at the table, sorting bridles and halters. “Donald,” she said.

I knew at once that she was not pleased to see me. Despite everything, there was never any question who she would save from a burning house. “Happy New Year,” I said. “I heard your message. I'm sorry about all this stuff with Viv.”

Her gloved hand tightened around the bridle she was holding. “I was so mad I didn't realize I'd called your home phone. By ‘stuff,' I take it you mean not telling me about the first burglary, and not telling me why we were suddenly going overboard on security, and not allowing me to tell Hilary what's going on, and probably a few other things that I'll find out about months from now.”

This time the burglars had borrowed the ladder they used to replace lightbulbs in the arena and come in through the hayloft.

“But why break in and not take anything?” I said. “It's a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“That's what the police said.” She held up a bridle, testing the strap. “They think it must be someone who knows the stables, but we have so many people coming and going.”

Nearby I heard Charlie's hearty laugh. I dropped my voice to ask about Hilary.

“You mean, have I told her?” Claudia gave me a quick glance. “The answer is, not yet. I mean to every day, but I haven't seen her since before Christmas, and I know Viv will kill me.”

“You could,” I spoke hesitantly, “insist she move Mercury.”

Her face grew still. “I'd love nothing more than to see the back of him, but it wouldn't do any good. Viv would just hate me and follow him to a new stable. He's the horse she's been waiting for.”

Two walls of the small room were lined with saddles, including presumably the one I had just given Viv. “Have you ever seen her like this before?” I said. “So obsessed?”

Claudia set down the halter she was holding and sat on the edge of the table. “I was asking myself that yesterday, and the answer is yes. As long as I've known her, Viv's been ambitious. She ruined her favorite horse, overtraining him. Then she was determined to be a CEO by the time she was thirty. When she decided not to have an abortion, I knew she was in love with you.”

One of my most cherished memories was of the night Viv told me she was pregnant. Now, in response to my broken question, Claudia described how the two of them, over margaritas, had listed the pros and cons: abortion versus baby. Viv had phoned Planned Parenthood the next day. “But the night before
the appointment”—Claudia was smiling—“she had a dream. She and the baby were having a picnic by a river, paddling. He was so happy, Viv said.”

My first reaction was neither sorrow nor anger but a kind of astonishment that my past life, which I had thought safely stowed away, could change so radically. All the milestones on the journey to my present self—a father, a husband—were suddenly up for negotiation. “I didn't know any of this,” I said. At the time I did not stop to wonder why Claudia was, at last, telling me this long-ago story. Later I would understand.

She stood up and turned her smile on me. “Viv loves you, Donald,” she said. “I've never seen her happier than with you and the kids, but Mercury has started something in her. Or maybe he's reminded her of something that never entirely went away. In Ann Arbor we used to daydream about a horse that could jump anything, like in
National Velvet
. Most people grow out of those dreams. Not Viv.”

She went to check on the stable girls, and I made my way to the rows of stalls. Samson came over to the bars and lost interest as soon as he saw I was empty-handed. Mercury was standing at the back of his stall, wearing a red blanket, swishing his tail. I said his name softly and he looked at me, ears pricked.

“You're causing a hell of a lot of trouble,” I said.

My family was founded on a dream, a dream of a baby paddling in a river. As Mercury whinnied, it came to me: we should buy Viv her own horse, a good horse she could ride in local shows. Ever since her failure with Dow Jones, she had been complaining about the horses at Windy Hill—how hard it was to train them above a certain level—but I hadn't taken her seriously. Now, I told myself, she wanted more. But the more didn't have to be Mercury, with his huge talents and demands.

S
O THIS WAS HOW
we started 2011. My father's African grey sad. Claudia and Viv at odds. Viv training Mercury every minute she could, convinced he was her last great chance. Marcus's swimming team enjoying a winning streak. Trina, her mother's daughter, obsessed with drawing and elephants. Hilary and Jack making their way unsteadily from day to day. My mother, as she liked to joke, happy as Larry. And me, still deep in grief, worried about our finances and how seldom Viv turned to me in bed, or talked to me on the sofa.

On the first Monday of the year I drove Marcus and Trina to school and returned to the house. Leaving the engine running, I covered Nabokov's cage and whisked him into the car. When he was safely strapped in the seat beside me, I removed the blanket.

“We're going to work,” I told him.

“Hey ho, hey ho,” he chanted.

For the next fifteen minutes he kept up a cheerful commentary, including a recital of a railway timetable—the eleven o'clock for Inverness will depart at eleven oh six—that perfectly captured my father's intonation. At the office Merrie had set up a table in a brightly lit corner with a large cage and two ficus plants. As I arranged his perch, a fresh maple branch, she appeared, coffeepot in hand.

“Welcome, Nabokov. Do you remember me? I'm Merrie. You must be sure to tell me what I can do to make you a happier bird. Does he peck?”

“No, he's mostly very affectionate. He likes conversation and sunflower seeds.”

I showed her how to approach him from the side, not the front, and the place behind his head where he liked to be scratched. When I returned from hanging up my coat, Leah had joined the conversation. Then Jo showed up. How this would have tickled my father, I thought: three intelligent women giving Nabokov their complete attention.

On his third day at the office, Bonnie Dawson, the patient with a door in her head, finally returned. She had made a follow-up appointment, canceled it, rescheduled: kids, she said, work. But the shadow was still there, still growing. “It's scary,” she said. I put in drops to dilate her eyes and sent her out to the waiting room. Three patients later, when I called her back to the chair, she said, “Your parrot kept saying ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'”

“He belonged to my father, who taught him poetry. Put your chin here.”

Looking into the eye is like looking into a room where, ideally, all the furniture is in the same place. In Bonnie's left eye the furniture had moved. A tear in the retina had allowed fluid to accumulate; now the retina was becoming detached. I turned on the lights and broke the news: she needed surgery. In the meantime she had to be as careful as possible—no lifting, no bending or stretching, no running after children.

“It looks,” I added, “as if you had surgery as a child, perhaps more than once.”

“Are you sure? Wouldn't I remember?”

The idea of a past operation seemed to alarm her almost as much as the prospect of one. I said not to worry. The main thing was, she needed surgery now.

“But I'm not in pain. What about wearing a patch again? Or new glasses?”

“Bonnie, you said yourself the shadow is getting bigger. New glasses can't stop that. If it gets too big, you won't have any vision to improve.”

She stood up and took a step towards me, her eyes fixed on my face. “And if I let someone mess around in my eyeball with a knife, what then?”

“We don't use knives. If all goes well, your vision should stabilize. You should be able to continue with your normal life.”

“‘Should'? What does ‘should' mean? Will I be okay?”

She was looking at me so fiercely I had to turn away. “‘Should' means there's every reason to think the surgery will be successful, but no one can give you a hundred-percent guarantee.”

“I'm out of here.” She seized her bag and headed for the door.

“You ought not to drive. You might hurt someone—your daughters, a friend of your daughters.”

My last remark stopped her. “Shit,” she said. She sat down on the edge of my desk, glaring as if this too were my fault. I was reaching to touch her shoulder when I recalled Merrie's warning. I let my hand fall and suggested she phone her husband.

Greg arrived twenty minutes later, straight from his job unloading trucks at a supermarket. He had the build of a linebacker, tall, short necked, and thick thighed. His bulky presence made my office seem instantly smaller, but as soon as he spoke, his fundamental niceness was apparent. I again explained the need for immediate surgery and how careful Bonnie must be.

“Treat her like a princess,” he said. “Got it.”

I escorted them to Merrie's desk, and was almost back at my office when I heard footsteps.

“Doctor,” Greg said. “Are you saying Bonnie could go blind? You can tell me straight.”

He was standing a few yards away, his uniform stretched tight across his chest, his muscular arms flexed, ready to pick up whatever burden I handed him. Remembering Jack's mockery of my circumlocutions, I said, “That is the very, very worst case scenario.”

“Thank you. That's what I needed to know. Bonnie's stubborn. We'll get home, and she'll start charging around, but I'll tie her to the bed sooner than let her do one bad thing.”

Before I could respond, he was hurrying back to Bonnie. I gazed after him with a feeling that, at the time, I did not understand. Now I suspect it was envy.

E
ITHER THAT WEEK OR
the next, Viv began to drive up to New Hampshire to observe the master classes at a riding school. At the time I paid this new activity no heed; it was just more of her endless busyness around horses. Only later, in what I have come to think of as my afterlife, did I understand that on these trips she crossed much more than a state line. The new university term had begun and the day after Bonnie's appointment, Jack asked if I could pick him up at his office. I left work early, took Nabokov home, and drove to the campus. As I approached his second-floor office, a student was leaving.

“Thank you so much, Professor Brennan,” she said.

As soon as her footsteps faded, he turned to me. “Is she attractive?” he said.

What I'd noticed was the young woman's gratitude, not her appearance. “Moderately. She was beaming as she thanked you.”

“Makeup?”

“Not much. Maybe some mascara. How did you picture her?”

“Nice looking, but not in a slutty way.” He reached for his backpack and began to gather his possessions. “It's one of the things I've always despised about myself: I care so much how women look. In grad school I shared an office with this woman Sandra. She was smart, funny, kind, and I knew she liked me. But I couldn't imagine going out with her because she was so homely. Sometimes I think I deserved to go blind.”

“If everyone who misused their eyesight lost it, we'd all have white canes,” I said. “Hilary is attractive, in case you're wondering.”

“I can tell from the way waiters speak to her.” He picked up a stack of CDs. “God, I'm such a pig. Even now, when I ought to be grateful that any woman will give me the time of day, I still want to have a pretty girlfriend. It's the opposite of every value I hold dear, yet I can't fucking change.”

I thought of Bonnie's hazel eyes; of the shadow only she could see. “So what happened to the brilliant, homely Sandra?”

“She married a millionaire who worships the ground she walks on—I wish.” He smiled and zipped up his pack. “She's a single parent, teaching high school in Syracuse. Friends report she works too hard and is happy.”

On the short drive to his apartment he made me describe the journey. It was Hilary's idea; if he learned that the bad pothole was by the post office, the long traffic light was at School Street, then, even in a car, he would always know where he was. When we were settled in his living room, he told me she had taken him to meet Mercury.

“Beforehand I was thinking all horses are the same to a blind
man. But then I held out my hand, and he gave a big, warm snort. His breath smelled of grass, and summer.”

“You could ride,” I said. “Helen Keller did.”

“Are you suggesting I climb onto a tall animal, over which I have zero control, and allow it to carry me around? No thanks. So what's this about a security issue at Windy Hill?”

Hilary had noticed the new alarm, and Claudia, in response to her question, had used this vague phrase. Which is worse: breaking a promise or telling a lie? As ten-year-olds, Robert and I had debated this choice and voted for the former. A few months before, when I asked Marcus and Trina, they had said the same. Now, in response to Jack's question, I followed Claudia's example, lying to keep my promise. I mentioned the break-ins at the nearby businesses, how the police had advised updating the alarms.

“Hilary would go ballistic,” he said, “if anything happened to Mercury.”

“But she never rides him nowadays.” I was not sure if I was asking, or telling him.

“And there's the rub.” Gradually he had begun to understand that behind her grief about Michael lay a more complicated narrative. For nearly a decade brother and sister had scarcely seen each other. He disapproved of her husband; she disapproved of his feckless lifestyle, his living like a stable rat in his forties.

The room was growing dark when I said, “I had this patient yesterday. She made me feel I owe you an apology. You were so calm about losing your sight, I never said how sorry I was. I must have seemed like an unsympathetic oaf.”

“Actually you seemed like a Hippocratic oaf.” He gave the glint of a smile. “Your stoicism was easier to deal with than the hysteria of friends. You helped me understand that nothing—
shouting, praying, smashing every glass in the house—was going to change things. I take it she's attractive?”

“She has beautiful eyes, and she works in the cafeteria at the middle school.”

I would have said then, and I still say now, that I was not in love with Bonnie, but some emotional gear had shifted. Otherwise I would not have copied her number into my phone, and I would not have dialed it the following morning. Fortunately I called her landline, where no missed call would register. Fortunately she did not answer.