The Great Perhaps (7 page)

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” her father replies, no longer whispering either. “I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”

Thisbe turns to stare out the window, her brown eyes starting to burn with tears. Her heart feels invisible and soft and fluttery and she is having a hard time breathing. But she does not go for the white plastic asthma inhaler in her purse. She can hear herself wheezing and at first hopes her parents will turn around in the front seat and ask if she is okay, and when they don’t, she decides she is going to let herself suffocate if it means shutting them up. She will be Joan of Arc. She will be a blood-smeared figure in a Renaissance painting. Her prayer will be her own silent death. Her lungs feel as if they will explode, the blood in her ears pounding. Her hands are grasping at her knees, the fingers momentarily awkward and empty, now tugging at the hem of her skirt for something to hold. She places her hands in between her legs and, when she notices she is still fidgeting, she then places them beneath her thighs. She is barely breathing at all now, her heart pounding fast and faster. She opens her eyes wide to stop herself from crying, her heart beating louder now, louder than her parents’ voices. Beside her, her sister is reading her stupid book, uninterested, the music from her headphones vibrating. The air around Thisbe’s head becomes anxious with electricity. She sucks in a breath to prevent herself from sobbing, the air filling her thin chest. Suddenly she is lighter than the air itself, like one of the clouds drifting in the sky. It is as if she has begun to float, imperceptibly at first, her legs feeling almost weightless, the vinyl stickiness of the car seat tugging at the back of her bare thighs, her head rising toward the roof of the station wagon, like a bubble or balloon. She feels as if she is rising for a second in the air, floating, hovering, flying, and then, letting go of the breath, she falls, dropping back into her seat, her heart beating more quietly now, her hands folded beneath the back of her thighs, her eardrums throbbing with panic, her knees tingling, then she is gone, then she is nothing. A few seconds later, she realizes she has almost caused herself to suffocate. When the blood stops thrumming in her ears, she hears her mother and father still growling angry, silent words at each other, she sees her older sister still shielding herself with her book, and none of her family has noticed anything.

T
HISBE IS LYING
in bed that evening, saying her prayers, when her father knocks on her bedroom door. At once she realizes he has come to tell her that he and her mother are getting a divorce. Thisbe stops at her forty-fifth Hail Mary of the night, speeding through the final lines,
Now and at the hour of our deaths, amen
. Thisbe says one hundred and ten Hail Marys every evening, an activity she began last year, when her grandmother, a devout Catholic, died while visiting from St. Louis; Thisbe had been helping her wash the dishes when a white serving plate slipped from Grandmother Violet’s soapy, wrinkled hands. A few moments later, her grandmother was dead. Thisbe now says a prayer for each year of her father, mother, and older sister’s lives, thus secretly, and without their knowledge, keeping them alive. Her arithmetic looks like this:

Thisbe does not say a prayer for her grandfather Henry. She does not see him all that often—only on Sundays—and that’s really only since Grandma Violet died and he had to move into a nursing home here in Chicago. Also, she does not actually know how old he is. Thisbe says the number forty-five aloud to remind herself where she left off as her father knocks again. She is sure it is him. His knock is so soft, so unobtrusive. She feels her father standing outside the door there, holding his breath, listening for her response.

“Yeah, Dad?” she says.

“Thisbe? Hey, kiddo, are you sleeping?”

“No.”

He opens the door and peeks his head in. “I think we might need to talk for a few minutes,” her father says. He looks so nervous now, sitting on the corner of the bed, careful with his weight, as if she is made of glass. His face is hard to see, just the shape of his poorly kept beard, his left ear, his blue eye. She remembers when she thought he was the most handsome man in the world, when he used to wear the red T-shirt she made with the iron-on that said
BEST DAD EVER
. She remembers helping her mother attach it, the sound of the steam escaping from the iron, the shape of her mother’s smile. She knows why he is standing there in the dark now, what he is going to say, duh. They are both so obvious. Why can’t they just say it? Suddenly Thisbe is thrilled by the terrible drama of it, the sense that something is over and something else is beginning, that her world, as lame and awkward as it has been, is about to change. But then she is trembling with sadness and the tears are beginning to fill her eyes once again.

“I wanted to apologize to you for what happened tonight,” her father said. “I misheard your mother and I…I wanted to apologize for missing your recital.”

“It was really stupid anyway. I messed up pretty bad.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, you can come see me next time.”

Her father smiles, nodding, rubbing his hands on the knees of his pants.

“Okay. I’ll be there, I promise.”

Thisbe can hear the music from her sister’s room next door. It is “Marie-douceur, Marie-colère” by Marie Laforêt, the same stupid French song she’s been playing for days now. Duh. She is probably in there getting stoned. Thisbe hates her sister for not being as thoughtful as she is. She hates that she will have to remember this moment for the rest of her life with her stupid sister’s French music playing in the background.

“Thisbe?” Her father hesitates now, wondering if he should put his hand on his daughter’s arm before he says it. No. She watches him struggle, unsure what words to use, what tone of voice, his hand finally resting on her foot, which is curled up under her leg. When his hand touches her, she knows, and her heart goes totally blank.

“You guys are getting divorced,” Thisbe blurts out. “I knew it.”

“What?” he asks, startled. “No, no, of course not. Did Mom tell you that?”

“No.”

“No. No, we are just having a hard time right now is all.”

“But you’re not getting a divorce?”

“No, we’re just going to spend some time apart.”

“What?”

“A separation, so we can figure things out.”

“Again.”

“Yes, again.”

“Dad, that’s so stupid. Didn’t you guys do that already?”

“It’s not stupid. We want to try and work this out.”

“But why?”

“
Why?
What do you mean
why?
”

“I mean why not just get it over with?”

“Because we still love each other. It’s just difficult right now.”

“Okay.”

Thisbe lowers her head, staring down at her father’s slippers. They are dark blue and sad-looking. In fact, everything about him is sad-looking, his ruffled blond beard, his haircut, his blue eyes.

“Thisbe?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to talk about this?”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“Well, do you want to say anything to me?”

“I’d like to think about it awhile,” she says.

“It’s okay to be angry, hon. It’s okay to be sad.”

“I’m not angry, I just want to think about it.”

“Okay,” he says.

She scratches her nose and then asks, “Are you both going to live here still?”

“We don’t know how that’s going to work yet. For now we will. Any other questions like that?” her father asks.

“No.”

“No?”

Thisbe shrugs her shoulders, then asks, “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think God thinks about this?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you think He’s going to punish you and Mom for doing this?”

“I don’t think it’s any of His business.”

“I don’t think God believes in divorce,” Thisbe whispers. “I think it goes against the Bible.”

“I think God has other things to worry about. Like war and endangered species and things like that.”

“God worries about all of us.”

“We aren’t Christians, Thisbe. You’ve only been to church twice in your life. And both times that was for funerals.”

“Well, maybe we could start going now.”

“I don’t think that’s going to help, honey.”

“Maybe it would.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t,” her father says, pinching the space between his eyes.

“When does the separation start?” Thisbe asks.

“What do you mean, hon?”

“When does it start?”

“It starts tonight. Right now, I guess.”

“Right now?”

“I’m afraid so, honey.”

“We didn’t even get a last meal together.”

“We’ll still eat together, if you want.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“I guess not. I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but I’m sorry. Your mother and I, we, we always promised we would never put you guys through this again.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” her father says. “But it’ll be okay, I promise.”

“Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

“I don’t know. In the den.”

“It gets cold in there with the air-conditioning.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight.”

He touches her foot again, counting each of her toes.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Did you tell Amelia yet?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Your mother is talking to her right now. We decided we’d tell you guys at the same time. Your mom’ll be coming in here to talk to you in a minute or two.”

Thisbe smiles unexpectedly, surprisingly happy, the thought of them, her parents, coming up with this fair solution. Her father leans over and kisses her forehead, then quietly departs, gently closing the door behind him. Thisbe lies in bed, wondering what’s going to happen to all of them. She decides she will accept whatever God wants, even if it is something she does not like, like her mother and father getting divorced and her having to share a room with Amelia. Even then, she will not complain, if that is His will. Thisbe stares up into the dark, continuing her bedtime prayers, the silence of her room interrupted by the soft muttering and movement of her own lips until a familiar howl echoes from the dark, moonlit backyard below. It is her neighbor’s cat, Snowball, crying to be let in. Thisbe decides she will get up early tomorrow morning to capture the animal. Tomorrow she will finally make it understand God’s love once and for all.

A
GE SEVENTY-SIX,
H
ENRY
C
ASPER, FORMER AIRCRAFT
engineer, widower, father, and grandfather, does what he can to make himself disappear. Resting his silver transistor radio in his lap—the noise and melody of which announces his looming, watchful presence—he wheels himself down the blue-toned hallways of the South Shore Nursing Home, warily observing the second-floor security doors, noting the times when the desk attendant leaves them unguarded. Secretly, he keeps a list of when the staff dispenses medicine to other residents, noticing the precise moments when the glass doors must be propped open in order to accommodate the plastic trays of lukewarm meals that appear on rolling silver carts three times a day. In his yellow notebook, which he quietly retrieves from the breast pocket of his faded robe, Henry writes down any new useful information, detailing the odd hours with a few additional sketches, planning another escape. By now the notebook is almost completely filled with these furtive observations, along with a number of impracticable drawings of heretofore unrecognized aeronautical shapes—airplanes as thin as sheets of metal, jets as long and narrow as needles, helicopters as small as children’s bicycles. When one of the nurses finally notices the quiet buzz of Henry’s radio, when the muscular security guard looms directly above the old man to ask what it is he thinks he is doing, when, at last, the squeaky left wheel of his chair gives him away, Henry, overcome with fear, finds he is unable to speak. Henry suffers from a neurological condition known as verbal apraxia, a disorder that has afflicted him since childhood. His mouth becomes peaked and rigid, his remaining teeth chatter together without a sound, and his words simply fade away.

Each day, Henry does what he can to make himself vanish, removing any fingerprint, any trace of life that may have been left in the semiprivate room, in the recreation center, in the cafeteria, in the dull, looping conversations of the other unfortunate residents chattering around him. Each day, he uses one less word, counting down the remaining days until the moment he won’t speak to anyone again, the moment when he has absented himself once and for all from the dreary hallways of the retirement facility. Each day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Henry eats one slightly smaller portion of the dreadful beige turkey, the sadly yellowed mashed potatoes, the irregularly green mashed peas, leaving the rest among the divided sections of his plastic tray. Each day, he gives away another article of clothing, offering to his fellow residents another moth-eaten sweater, another pair of old black socks, another unworn undershirt. Out of sight, hidden behind the white radiator in his room, are the few things Henry has not been able to abandon—a single color Polaroid photograph of his wife and son, Violet and Jonathan, a number of smudged and faded letters from acquaintances and family members now long gone, an old metal toy airplane, and a few other curious objects from a childhood that he can almost no longer recall—a decoder badge from a science fiction radio program he listened to when he was eight, a paper flower he was given when he was fourteen, a drawing of an imaginary aircraft he made in his forties—these small, unnameable things, the only evidence of a man whose existence has now become a complete blank, the sum total of a life now lived anonymously.

And soon, in only a few days, Henry will slip through the front glass doors of the South Shore Nursing Home, flag down a taxi, ask the driver to please hurry, speeding off toward O’Hare International Airport, where, among the lines of weary-looking people, among the badly damaged suitcases and the stewardesses in grim uniforms and the little children timidly holding their mothers’ hands, he will buy a single one-way ticket, then board an unassuming plane, asking for assistance with his wheelchair only when he really needs it, and then, when the airplane’s engines begin to roar and the disagreeable force of gravity shakes the cloth seat beneath him, when the plane has departed from the ground, hurtling itself through the blue and white sky, Henry will once again be happy, the aircraft becoming lost somewhere just over the cloudy horizon, and who he once was, who he might have been, or who he has failed to be, will have all but vanished.

At the moment, Henry is as tricky to spot as a ghost. His transistor radio switched off, the squeaky left wheel of his chair now silent, he wheels himself past the nurses to the far end of the cafeteria, and stops in front of the enormous window in the recreation room, gazing out at the boundless blue sky, completely unnoticed. Once, only a few months before, Henry managed to follow a nurse named Leticia through the glass security doors, into an empty elevator, through the ground-floor lobby, and out onto the street, before being chased down by a bullnecked security guard, just as a taxicab had finally pulled up. A second time, only three weeks ago, Henry made it as far as the cab ride. But when answering the cabbie’s questions he found he had said too much, and the cabdriver immediately pulled over on the side of the expressway to radio the police.

In the afternoons, when he is not busy counting his remaining words, Henry does away with his memories, disposing of them all, scribbling down his few remembrances. Once they are written down and sealed within a white paper envelope, once he has mailed them off, he considers these memories to be gone for good, one less thing to keep him from disappearing. With his right hand cramped from arthritis, having found a secluded spot in the rec room of the South Shore Nursing Home, as far as he can get from the other residents staring up at the droning television, drowsy with their anti-Parkinson’s medication and their willy-nilly arts and crafts, he begins writing another short letter addressed to himself:

Or:

Or:

Or:

Henry will then date the letter, slip it inside a plain envelope, write the address of the South Shore Nursing Home on the envelope, fumble for a stamp somewhere within the breast pocket of his shabby red robe, and hand the letter to a nurse to be sent out later that afternoon. When the mail arrives, he does not open the letters he has written to himself. Instead, he carefully places them in a box of personal effects he intends to leave to his son, checking the postmark on each envelope, filing each one in order by date. When evening comes, and his right hand has grown sore from writing, Henry will wheel himself back to his room and stare out the tiny window—the empty, regretful branches of a single oak tree the only sight he ever sees—trying to ignore the inevitable appearance of night, a vague reminder of the approaching certainty of his most unimportant death.

By the time midnight arrives, the moon settling outside Henry’s small window, the old man has become lonesome, the oak branches etching odd-looking shadows along the tile floor; he feels afraid. He has always disliked the silence, the dreadful soundlessness of night. So when the shadows have crept to the middle of his room, to the edge of his wheelchair where his feet rest, Henry looks about his room for his silver radio and switches it on, searching among the AM stations for an old standard by Benny Goodman or a rebroadcast of a Lawrence Welk show, or maybe an episode of
Inner Sanctum Mysteries
or
The Airship Brigade
or
The Shadow
. He wheels himself to the room across the hall, where Mr. Bradley, eighty-seven years old, lies in bed, his papery skin covering a sunken-looking face, eyes taciturn and fully resigned. He is too weak to even smile, but his thin gray eyebrows move slightly, this small gesture the only sign that the older man has noticed Henry sitting beside him. Together, the two elderly residents will listen to the worn-out jokes, the worn-out radio stories, the worn-out ballads. And when the static begins to clear, when an excited voice hurriedly calls out from beyond time and space, Henry recognizes it as the brave tenor and pitch of Alexander Lightning, teenage commander of the adventurous
Airship Brigade
, a science fiction show Henry loved more than anything else as a boy:

W
HEN THE ADVENTURES
of that particular episode are over, and the clarinets and saxophones have played their final tune, Henry wheels himself across the hallway back to his room, glancing up through his window at the cloudy silver moon, the stars looking like pinholes poked in the dark fabric of night. He stares up at the sky and murmurs,
Enough, enough, enough
, and then he begins counting on his fingers the number of hours and days that remain until he will have made himself vanish.
Eleven more days
, he whispers.
Only eleven more days. Can’t you wait that long? Can’t you? No?

No.

No.

No.

O
NLY ELEVEN DAYS LEFT,
and yet today, Monday the eighteenth, Henry has decided he will wait no more and that he must try to escape this very morning. He has written down the appropriate numbers in his notebook to help him remember. There. Just above a drawing of an elliptical zeppelin:
11-3-5
. At approximately 11:35 a.m., when Jeff, the tall, bearded orderly, props open the glass security doors to deliver the rolling metal racks of preheated lunch, Henry, only eleven days away from being completely invisible, will quietly sneak past, wheeling himself to the first bank of elevators as quickly as he can. Arriving at the ground floor, he will hurry through the front lobby with a dignity and confidence he has very nearly forgotten, proudly wheeling himself outside, where he will hail himself a cab, and then, speeding toward the airport, he will disappear once and for all.

At the moment, Henry looks up and sees the clock above the television set: 11:33. He nods, gathering what little courage he has left, wheeling himself as quickly as he can toward the glass security doors. In the next moment, Jeff, pushing a large silver cart stacked high with tray after tray of prepared food, whistles past, running his plastic security card through the electronic card reader, swinging the heavy doors wide, propping them open with the small plastic doorstop. Sitting there, just before the glass divider, unnoticeable to almost everyone, Henry wheels himself forward, hitting his elbow against the doorframe, his bony fingers grasping the rubber wheels with all his might. Holding his breath, he wheels past Jeff and the racks of food, then forces the glass door closed behind him, trapping Jeff on the other side of the locked door. He pushes himself toward the elevators, his heart beating like a tin drum in his chest. Without thinking, already terrified and exhausted, Henry presses both elevator buttons, up and down, glancing over his shoulder, hissing to himself as he waits for the heavy elevator doors to slide open. Finally, the elevator on the right gives an electric
ding!
and Henry’s heart begins to beat wildly, rebelling out of cowardice, out of fear, out of panic. His hands suddenly feel too tired, too weak. He gives himself one final shove, catching a wheel on the metal threshold, almost tumbling out of his wheelchair. He begins to hit all of the glowing yellow buttons, finally managing to get the elevator doors closed just as Jeff begins to bang on the glass.