A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  “I . . . guess. There’s some stuff I don’t want to know,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to know if . . .” I can hear her breathing into the phone, taking deep breaths. She taps on something nearby, tap tap tap. “I don’t want to know . . . if I’m going to have to go back to live with my mum.”

  “Oh, honey,” I say, and I close my eyes. How can I possibly protect her from heartbreak? I can’t, is the truth of it. She’s not mine, and Patrick is not mine, and despite the fact that I fall asleep every night thinking of him and wishing things were different, nothing has changed.

  One day he sends a photo of him and Fritzie smiling into the camera, and I see that she has hardly any hair. Just a fuzz of brown on her head.

  What happened to her hair? I text him.

  He types: #DIYHaircut. #Holymoly #GodHelpUs #HairArt #DontBeMadAtMe #IDidntKnow.

  I type back: What the actual freaking hell is going on there?

  He sends an emoji of a man shrugging. She says she “arted” her hair. Resembles POW. #GoodTimes #NeverADullMoment.

  And then . . . well, that’s it.

  No declarations of love, of missing me, of the hole in their lives without me. Because he is not my destiny. Because absence is not making his heart grow fonder. Someday his name won’t make me smile, and the memories won’t make me cry anymore, and I will heal up.

  Because it’s over.

  One night, unable to sleep, I can’t help myself, and I call Patrick up when I know Fritzie won’t be the one to intercept the phone.

  “I just want to ask you a question,” I say when he answers.

  “Um, okay.”

  “Why, if you knew that you couldn’t father a child, were we using condoms all that time, for years?”

  He sighs. “The reason we were using condoms is because I didn’t know. After the fire, whether or not I could have a kid was the last thing on my mind, if you want to know the truth. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to live.”

  “But you said the doctor told you.”

  “He says he did. But I don’t remember it. It wasn’t until I went to him recently and was telling him that you and I were trying—”

  “Wait a minute. Were you trying? Because it didn’t feel to me that you were. It felt like to me you were going along under duress, and you never even wanted to have sex anyway, so it was a moot point.”

  He’s silent for a moment. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “Patrick,” I say after letting the silence between us grow heavier and heavier, almost unbearably heavy. “I have wanted a baby for a long time. I told you that I wanted a baby, and you built up a whole wall of nonsensical jokey excuses about school meetings and report card conferences. You did not once look me in the eye and say the truth, which was, ‘You know something? I’m most likely infertile.’”

  “Because I didn’t remember being told that. What part of that are you not getting? And this is exactly why we can’t be together anymore. Because you are always going to see this as my failure. You are always going to wish for that other life.”

  “Why can’t I be the one to decide how important that is? There are other solutions, you know.”

  “Are there, though?”

  “Well, at least we could have talked about it. You could have been honest about what was going on. You just let everything fall apart. Stopped loving me. Like, suddenly. Just stopped.”

  “Marnie, it’s been a really rough few months. But you know that I loved you. I’ll always love you.”

  “It’s just not the kind of love that does anybody any good—is that it?” I say. “You said you didn’t want to be a parent. Your whole argument was that you’d have to go in public, you’d have to talk to teachers and other parents, people would be thinking about your scars, on and on and on—and now look at you, Patrick, handling all that just fine.”

  He’s silent.

  “And it’s doable, isn’t it? And here’s what I’m left with: the great love of your life turns out to be Anneliese, and even though she’s dead, she’s the woman who’s been soaking up all your attention and love all these months—”

  “I—”

  “And the child you couldn’t even consider having with me—it turns out you already had her! What do you know? She’s here. Another woman shows up with her! And so now you’re being a dad—a temporary, one-year dad! Hooray for you! You get to have this whole experience and then, ohhh, you’ll get to miss her when she’s gone just like you missed Anneliese when she was gone. But as for me: I’m the real-life woman standing right in front of you, yet I’m invisible to you.”

  “I cannot get you pregnant,” he tells me in a steely voice I’ve never heard from him before. “You can get mad about that all you want to, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Well, you certainly acted like you could and just didn’t want to,” I say. “It sounds to me like it’s terribly convenient that now there’s a medical reason that shows up. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Well, me too. It’s actually kind of soul-crushingly sad. And by the way, I do not happen to believe you love me. Nobody acts like this to a person they love.”

  And then, because I can’t stand hearing him say again that he loves me, but in this teeny tiny way that can’t exist except in some rarefied air that only Patrick can appreciate and cultivate, I hang up. I want love that you can see and feel and touch and eat dinner with and sleep in the bed next to. I want love that shines through everything—all the doubt and uncertainty. I want love that says, “So if we can’t make a baby together, what can we do to have a family?” And that is not something Patrick can ever even imagine.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PATRICK

  One morning, Patrick wakes up to find Fritzie standing beside his bed. Staring at him. She has her phone flashlight on and is beaming it—not at his eyes directly, but around and around in circles close to his eyes. It hits his chest, head, and the wall behind his bed. Close enough to his eyeballs that they fly open, ready to usher in a full-body freak-out mode, if that’s what’s needed here. And it seems to be.

  “WHA—what?” he says and sits bolt upright in the bed.

  “I threw up.”

  “You threw up? Where?”

  “In my bed.”

  He turns on the light. Thinks of swearing, then doesn’t.

  He’s heard of this kind of thing—vomit in the middle of the night—and he knows that outside of drug arrests, sharp sticks in the eye, or car crashes, this is the bane of parenting. It’s 3:22, according to the red numerals on his bedside clock, and he has no option but to get up. She smells horrible. Dealing with this situation cannot be put off.

  “Okay,” he says. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. She’s standing there, looking decidedly unfresh. Perhaps even with a shade of green to her face, although that could simply be the bad lighting. He sees that she’ll need new pajamas.

  Okay.

  So . . . what he will need to do . . . go to the bed where the stuff is, strip the sheets off the bed, then throw them into the washing machine, find new sheets (oh please, oh please let them be washed and dried in the linen closet) and remake the bed. (Possibly he will have to keep himself from . . . also . . . hurling, due to the sight and the smell.) There will be a need for new pajamas, toothpaste, assurances, resettlement. He looks over at her, slumped now against the wall. Poor little kid. He knows that look. She looks like someone who is possibly going to have to have another go-round . . . or maybe twelve more go-rounds. Depends on which nightmare scenario they are in.

  An indeterminate amount of time later—the sun has come up, gone away again, snow fell then turned to sleet and then rain, continents formed and were swallowed by the Earth’s oceans—he can report with some confidence that they have entered the dreaded “twelve more go-rounds” nightmare. Great. Every hour throughout the day it happens again. She has a f
ever, too, and when he looks into her sad little face, he thinks that her eyes are hollowed out, that she’s possibly a zombie, and that if it wouldn’t make her even sicker, she would probably be intent on eating his brains.

  She sleeps in fits and starts, tossing back and forth in her bed, moaning, and then she lifts her head up, leans over the side of the bed for the trash can he’s provided for her deposits, makes terrible noises, and flops back down. Groans.

  The doctor’s office says to give her small sips of sugar water. Or ginger ale. Popsicles. And no, they don’t wish to see her. It’s a virus. The flu. It’s going around. He should wash his hands a lot and drink plenty of fluids himself. And good luck to him. Call if her temperature goes over 105 or if she goes into convulsions.

  Convulsions!

  Thanks, he says. Thanks loads.

  She is unwilling to take a sip of anything, which is bad. He decides she is baking from the inside out. If she drank water, it would probably boil inside her. She’s that hot. So he figures out ways to coax her.

  “You know who would be so silly not to drink anything when she’s sick?” he says. “Ariel the Little Mermaid. Anybody who would give their voice away would think it was a great idea not to drink anything! Luckily you’re smarter than that.”

  She looks at him through hollow eyes. Not going to buy it.

  Bedford and Roy seem to be of the opinion that death is imminent. Bedford deals by staying close by the bed, watching intently, while Roy begs to be allowed to go back and live in the studio. They both look at Patrick with expressions of disgust. Are you just going to let this happen, man? Come to your senses and stop this! And also, I need to be fed.

  It goes on like this for three miserable days, which he wouldn’t have thought even possible. She gets up for only minutes each day, leaning on him to hobble to the bathroom and then to hobble her way back. Her little arms feel like sticks to him, and when he helps her change her pajamas, he feels heartbroken at the sight of those sharp little shoulder blades. Did they always stick up so much? How do children make it through life when they have so little meat on their bones?

  He should ask for help. Ariana, maybe. Or Emily Turner. Marnie might even know what to do. But the truth is: he knows what to do. He was the goddamned medical writer; he knows every symptom and what it means. Fluids, sleep, bites of food. Keep the fever down.

  Be vigilant, says his brain.

  He feeds her minuscule pieces of crackers and holds a cup of ginger ale to her lips and urges her to sip, only sip, don’t gulp. But drink the whole cupful. He sends out for popsicles and brings those to her like an offering. He and Bedford take their place beside her bed for hours at a time. After day two, Patrick brings in his laptop and stretches out next to her on the bed and shows her movies. They watch everything Pixar ever thought about. Then he shows her Forrest Gump, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Heidi, The Three Stooges. He cries when Forrest Gump’s mother dies. And when the Titanic sinks. When he even cries over Moe getting hit on the head, he has to go into the bathroom and splash water on his face and have a talk with himself.

  He brings cloths for her head. He holds her hand. He sings, at her insistence, “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor,” and she gazes at him with those enormous, red-rimmed eyes, and she says, “Thank you, Patwick.” It breaks him.

  He falls asleep on the floor beside her bed at night, after dragging in his comforter and pillow. Lying on the floor this way, he thinks he can hear the thumping of drums or the low thrum of a bass from downstairs. The hordes of teenagers are playing music. He concentrates on watching the moon through her window.

  He’d forgotten about the moon and the sky. It seems he needs to keep track of them so he doesn’t forget them again.

  And then, five days after it started, it’s over. One morning at five o’clock, he is startled awake by her voice. “Patrick! Patrick! Hey, Art Man! Ricky! Wake up! What the heck are you doing sleeping on the floor? Let’s go have some ice cream.”

  Ice cream? Ice cream?

  He looks at her through his bleary eyes. She’s perfectly fine, as if the last five days had been a figment of his imagination, as if she hadn’t looked for days like she might die. She has come roaring back to life. Wants to take a shower, go outside, walk to Paco’s. Can they go to Best Buds, see their old friends? What if they went in his studio and did an art project? Maybe he could make some more of those things he was making, the sculptures that everybody liked so much. She was dreaming of how to make them. She could probably make them, too. She’s bouncing on the bed. Her eyes are bright. He thinks that haircut, radical as it was, actually looks cute on her. Brings out her eyes.

  He gets up off the floor. His body is stiff and sore, but for the first time in forever, he can’t stop smiling.

  The return of health—who knew it could be like the end of the apocalypse, when the zombies return to their graves and the sun shines and people turn out to be not out to eat your brains after all? That you could go from hating food and drink and even light bulbs and televisions to thinking that something as mundane as cleaning the bathtub is truly a miracle.

  He buys doughnuts and flowers at Paco’s. The day Fritzie goes back to school, he goes into his studio—a major test of the will, something he couldn’t have done even as recently as three days ago—and yes, there is a huge mess, there are the vestiges of sculpture, paints, canvases, wires, scalpels, and blowtorches, but he can look at all of it and not want to jump out of the window.

  Anneliese doesn’t seem to be in there.

  How can he explain that? Maybe he loaded her up when he loaded up all the artwork and took it to the Pierpont Gallery. Maybe when he came home that night after the opening, she didn’t come back with him. She may be still there in the gallery, greeting art patrons and keeping Pierpont company.

  He starts putting things away, but then he stops. It’s all different in here somehow. Like there’s more air and space. He takes off the sheets and folds up the futon.

  Then he looks at all the paints and clay and rags and canvases. There are things he wants to make. He grabs some clay and a putty knife. The sun is shining through the window, and he turns on music, and he lets the studio fill up with the Motown stylings of Marvin Gaye.

  And then he just puts his brain aside and lets his hands take over and he makes stuff.

  “Okay, so I have some questions for you,” Fritzie says. He’s washing the dishes, and she’s wandering around in a circle in the kitchen, making herself dizzy. This is how you know somebody’s well, he thinks. They don’t mind getting dizzy once again.

  “Is this an interview?” he says.

  “Nope. Just questions.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  She is spinning around with her arms out, faster and faster, punctuating each spin with a word. “What. Happens. To. Kids. Who. Are. Really. Really. Bad. And. Nobody. Wants. Them?”

  “I don’t know any kids like that,” he says.

  “What if a kid ran away, would that be a really bad kid, do you think?”

  “Wow. That’s a tough one. I guess I’d have to know why the kid ran away. Do you know a kid who’s done that?”

  “Okay, another question then. Why is Marnie still gone for so long when her dad is better?”

  “Um, because she . . . is helping her mom and dad get settled again, I think.” Because she’s furious with me.

  “It’s March, Patrick. Is she coming back here?”

  “She is.”

  “When? I said when is she coming back here?”

  “That I’m not sure about.”

  “Is it tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “The next day?”

  “No.”

  “The day after that?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t ask her?”

  “I, um, try to let her make her own decisions, and not pressure her.”

  “Ah. You don’t want to pressure her.”

  “Yep. I’m nice that
way.”

  “Patrick, we have to get Marnie to come back,” she says. “Here, I’m going to help you dry the dishes.” She gets a dish towel out and stands on her tiptoes and gets one of the plates out of the dish drainer and very carefully dries it. “This isn’t all that good here with her gone.”

  “What? We’re doing okay, aren’t we?”

  She laughs. “Patrick! We are not doing okay!”

  “Wait. I’m hurt. We eat good meals, we play games sometimes, we keep the house pretty clean.”

  “Nope, nope, nope,” she says. “We are not that good without Marnie. I think you should beg her to come back. Have you even asked her?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s up to her.”

  “Oh, Patrick.”

  “You don’t know how it works,” he says.

  “Okay, my last question,” she says. “This is a tough one, I gotta warn you.”

  “I’m warned.”

  “If my mum doesn’t want to come back, what’s going to happen to me?” She puts the dried plate very carefully on the kitchen table, centering it so it’s not too near the edge. He is touched by the fact that she won’t look at him and the precision with which she places the plate just so.

  “Listen,” he says. He turns off the water. His voice might be shaking a little. “The adults in your life are going to figure things out. You don’t have to worry. It’s going to be okay. We’re all talking about what to do.”

  “Okay,” she says, and her voice is quivering a bit, too. “Because when my mum called, you know, she said she’s not ready . . . she wants me to stay longer . . .”

  “I know,” he says. He might be growling when he says it.

  “Richard doesn’t really like me, you know. It’s okay and all that, but he doesn’t.”

  “He’s an idiot then,” says Patrick, and then he’s shocked at himself. But he means it. She laughs a little bit and trots off to play with Bedford.

  Later, after she’s gone to bed, he goes in and sits down next to her bed the way he did for so many nights when she was sick. God, what is wrong with him? The sight of her eyelashes on her cheeks makes him feel like crying.