I Wish You Happy: A Novel

by Kerry Anne King

  “One might wonder how I survived my childhood,” Mason mutters.

  “I was a good mother. You have no idea . . .”

  My head has begun to ache, my body crawling with the complex web of love and guilt and anger that spins between the two of them. Fortunately I have work to do, and a valid excuse to leave them to their bickering.

  But when I leave the room, I feel like I carry a contagion with me. I taste bitterness in my throat. There’s a sensation in my chest that is simultaneously emptiness and a crushing weight. Restless irritability drives me, but at the same time I want only to lie down, right in the middle of the hallway, and rest.

  Giving myself a brisk mental shake, like a dog coming in out of the rain, I knock on Elizabeth’s door and push it open. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for me. Her cotton dress hangs off her bony shoulders like a coat hanger, her frail body collapsed in upon itself, spine hunched in a perpetual curve, fingers contracted into claws.

  Unlike the rest of her body, which is all bones and skin, her lower legs and feet look like overfilled water balloons, about to burst. There’s a spot on her right ankle that is open and weeping fluid, a result of the swelling and the venous insufficiency that causes it.

  Elizabeth has always been nonresponsive. She follows simple commands for the most part, helping us get her dressed or out of bed, moving a spoon or fork to her mouth when a plate is set in front of her. But she’s never spoken a word to me.

  She doesn’t speak now, but something has shifted, either in her or in me.

  I feel her awareness as if it is a solid thing I could reach out and touch, something made out of misery and pain and a bleak despair. Mixed in with what I’m already carrying around with me from my encounter with Nancy and Mason, it’s more than I can handle. The emotions foam up like baking soda in vinegar, and I can’t keep them in.

  Tears blur my vision. I’ve got gloves on to manage her sterile dressing, and I blot my eyes on my shoulders so I can see, so that tears don’t fall on the wound. Otherwise, this seems a safe enough place to break down. Elizabeth isn’t going to tell or even notice. The staff will never know.

  But just as I finish smoothing a clear, breathable dressing over the wound, before I can take off my gloves, I feel a touch on my shoulder. Her hand feels like a leaf, dry and trembling and with so little weight that a breeze could blow it away. I look up from where I’m kneeling at her feet, and she wipes the tears from my cheeks with gnarled and bony fingers. Looking into her eyes, I see the essence of her looking back at me.

  She nods, as if we’ve spoken words and come to some sort of agreement. Moved by impulse, I kiss her hand. The skin is cool and soft, lotion scented. Love and grief and feelings I have no name for fill me to the brim. I’m going to burst if I don’t do something, and I can’t afford a meltdown, so I start in nattering some sort of running patter about her foot and the unit and the kittens. I talk to her about Oscar and the Event, about dinner. About Kat. Words bleed off the energy, leaving me still intact but so weary I can barely get to my feet and drag myself out of the room.

  Checking in on Nancy and the kittens, I find three of them asleep in the carrier, sprawled across each other for comfort and warmth. The last two are being fed. Mother and son are not talking, but they aren’t sniping at each other either.

  In the hallway, staff are herding residents toward the dining room for dinner.

  Telling myself they can manage without me for once, I retreat to the office, collapse into a chair, and close my gritty eyes.

  Just for a minute.

  Tia’s voice jolts me out of oblivion.

  My neck hurts. My back hurts. The pillow is ridiculously hard. I can’t think why Tia is in my room waking me up. Something about Nancy and kittens. I blink, twice, and the room comes into focus. Not my place, but the office. I’m sitting in a chair with my head down on the desk.

  Tia’s face blurs in front of my eyes, and she seems to have grown a third eye and two noses. “Sorry,” she says, “you’re obviously wiped out, but we need a skin check on Jack, and the insulins need to be given.”

  “Coming,” I say, or mean to say, but all that comes out is a croak.

  Tia vanishes from the doorway, and I let my eyes drift shut again, telling myself all the while to stand up and get moving. A touch on my shoulder, a joggling of my elbow, and the acrid aroma of burnt coffee interrupt a fragment of dream.

  “Come on,” Tia says. “Drink up. Did you take meds or something?”

  My hands feel stiff and strange, but they obediently take a mug from Tia and manage to hold it without spilling. The first mouthful burns my tongue. This brew could serve as paint remover. Between that and my aching body, my brain begins to function.

  “This is terrible coffee,” I mutter.

  “I know. They don’t want residents drinking too much of it, probably. Are you awake now?”

  “Yeah.” I cling to the mug, shivering with a chill born of bone-deep fatigue.

  “Good. I’ve got to go. We’re trying to take up slack for you, but we can’t sign off on skin checks, and Cindy doesn’t have time to do all the meds plus insulin.”

  “I know, I know.”

  One more swallow of coffee that threatens to peel the skin off the roof of my mouth, and I’m able to get onto my feet. I know I’m not safe, so I triple- and quadruple-check all of the insulin doses to compensate, and it takes me forever. The evening crawls along, with me feeling like I’m running in slow motion to catch a bus that’s moving in real time.

  “God, woman, you have got to get some sleep,” Andrea says when she comes on at eleven. “You can’t function like this.”

  I’m not about to argue. I just don’t know what to do.

  It’s not a long drive to my place, but the danger of nodding off is real. I drive with all the windows open and the stereo on, keeping myself awake by trying to figure out how to navigate the morning.

  Kat has two appointments. Cole will be over to take a shift with the kittens. My parents are slated to hit Colville sometime tomorrow evening. When I see them Friday morning, my mother will go into full medical alert if she sees me looking like an extra for the Walking Dead, so I need to try to fit a nap in somewhere. The fragmented sleep I’ll get between now and tomorrow morning’s alarm is not going to cut it.

  When I get home all of the desperate planning goes for nothing. There’s a blue Prius parked in my driveway, a rental car with Washington plates, and that can only mean one thing—my parents have taken their new philosophy so thoroughly to heart they have showed up early. Which means they are at this very moment engaged in an unchaperoned encounter with my new roommate.

  Chapter Ten

  When I open the front door, Mom and Dad are ensconced on my couch. Kat sits across from them in my one and only armchair. My father, silver-haired but erect and distinguished in a dark suit and tie, holds my pillow on his knees. My mother, whose image could have been lifted straight off the cover of AARP, is engaged in folding my bedding into precise geometric squares I could never match if I worked at it for a lifetime.

  A warm light from my floor lamp illuminates all three of them while leaving the corners of the small room in shadow. They look cozy and confidential, a picture-perfect family engaged in an intimate conversation.

  “Hey,” I say. “You’re early!” This sounds better than What the hell are you doing here? and it’s a good thing I thought of it, because in the time it takes me to set the kitten carrier next to an outlet and plug in the heating pad, I realize the full implications of YOLO for Seniors and understand that from now on, I can count on my parents to embrace the unexpected with the same fervor given to the scheduled days of my childhood and youth.

  “Elizabeth,” Dad says. “You look pale.”

  “It’s Leila,” Mom counters. “Have you been sick, dear? Come here and let me look at you.”

  “My name is Rae, and I’m fine. Just tired.”

  They look older than I remember. Close-u
p, Mother looks thin, the lines in her face visible despite a layer of flawless makeup. My father’s salt-and-pepper hair has gone completely gray, and there’s a bald spot on top of his head with a suspicious mole at center stage, waiting to be biopsied. I’m surprised my mother hasn’t done it herself at home.

  Neither one of them gets up to greet me. Grateful for the autopilot that tells my body what to do when my brain has given up and stalked off in exasperation, I cross the space between us and bend down to give them hugs.

  Dad was tall, dark, and handsome when he met my mother fifty years ago. He’s still tall, although the encroachments of age have stooped his shoulders despite a rigid resistance program involving exercise, diet, and positive thinking. His face has fallen into stern lines that make him formidable. Sharp eyes shadowed under a jutting brow, an aquiline nose turned blade sharp, lips thinned and pale.

  When he hugs me he’s all bone and sinew, no softness anywhere, but when I look into his face I’m surprised to see moisture in his eyes.

  Age, I tell myself. My father never cries. It’s late. He’s tired. Maybe there are allergens in Colville that are new to him.

  “It’s been too long,” he says. “How are you? You look exhausted.”

  “What a ridiculous shift you’re working,” Mom says. “You have enough seniority by now you should at least be able to get days.”

  “I like graveyard.” When I stoop to put my arms around her shoulders and kiss her cheek, she smells of perfume and hair spray. Her hair is a perfect ruddy auburn without a thread of gray. A linen pantsuit drapes her in graceful folds that suggest she still has plenty of curves if she’d care to reveal them.

  She holds my cheeks between her hands, talking while she looks me over. It’s a distraction technique that works great on toddlers. Years of experience have taught me that she’s taking the opportunity to screen the whites of my eyes for any trace of yellow, to check my lips for dehydration, to sniff my breath for indigestion or the ketones that might indicate I’m becoming diabetic.

  “Days are where the opportunities are. Although, what would be wrong with a hospital job I don’t see. Room for advancement. You’d make a capable charge nurse, I’m sure. Some hospitals have programs for further education and—”

  “Mom.”

  “Get yourself a drink of water, honey. Your body is thirsty. We’ve been getting acquainted with your roommate.”

  Too tired to argue, I go to the sink and fill a glass, irritated to realize that Mom is right, as usual. My body sucks that water in like a plant in the desert, and I resist a second glass out of pure stubbornness.

  I stay by the sink, using distance as both safety and support, leaning my butt against the counter and observing the three of them. Kat looks more animated and relaxed than I’ve ever seen her, and both Mom and Dad lean in toward her like sunflowers following the sun.

  A shaft of jealousy thuds into my heart. I’ve never felt a close connection to my parents. They love me; I love them. I’ve never been neglected or abused. But I’m a misfit. Despite all of their careful plans, I have somehow gone awry.

  They charted my birth from conception to delivery, beginning with the optimal time of the month, week, and day for the healthiest sperm to encounter the premium egg. Mom went to yoga classes and took special vitamins and perfected her Lamaze breathing. I was delivered by my father, not intimately at home, and not because they believed in some sort of super mother-baby bonding, but because of every extra IQ point that could be garnered by the healthiest pregnancy and the most natural delivery.

  Their plans worked out all the way through the textbook-perfect birth, and then they were stuck with alien me. Mom diligently applied all of her best theories on structure and routine, but to no avail. I persisted in waking in the middle of the night, having meltdowns at the most inopportune moments, and draining the battery of every watch procured to help me keep track of elusive time.

  When I was eight, I stumbled across a book about a changeling, and for the first time my world made sense. I carried that book with me. Slept with it under my pillow. My belief that fairies had slipped me into the Chatworth family as a mischievous joke lasted for nearly a year before my mother shattered it with a concise lecture on DNA and a photo album containing pictures of my grandmother.

  Kat looks more like the child my parents should have had. Her hair and eyes, shades of cinnamon and amber, form a perfect link between Mom’s auburn and Dad’s dark. She’s tall like them, and graceful. As for me, recessive genes played tricks with my construction, painting me in watercolors, with pale-blonde hair and eyes that shift from green to blue and back again, depending on the light.

  “You could have told us,” Mom says, drawing me back to the moment. Her voice sounds affectionate and almost light, as if there’s a joke in the room that I’m missing. “We’re perfectly fine with it.”

  “Good?”

  I’m not sure why they wouldn’t be fine with me having a roommate. Unless Kat told them how and why she came to be here. But that can’t be right. My mother would never be fine with a suicide attempt, or with me sheltering an unstable stranger. Incompetence behind the steering wheel—especially of the kind that almost kills a bicyclist—would be even worse.

  “I didn’t want to talk about it,” I say, buying time. “Besides, she’s only just moved in—”

  “Oh, honey,” my mother says. “These things are not so uncommon. I think it’s wonderful.”

  I look to Kat for enlightenment, but she shrugs and raises her eyebrows.

  “It’s a common trait,” my father begins, in his lecturing voice. “Much more common than the general population realizes. Even in the animal kingdom there are multiple instances of same-sex relationships. I’ve been working on a hypothesis that we are seeing an increase in the human population due to overcrowding. Natural selection may be kicking in with the signal that we need to slow the birthrate . . .”

  He’s off on a tangent and I let him go, looking at Kat to signal my embarrassment and apology. She doesn’t notice me. Her eyes are intent on my father’s face, and she leans forward a little, listening.

  “That’s an interesting theory,” she says. “I’d been thinking that people are just more open about it now, not that the incidence of same-sex attraction has increased. I mean, we know it’s been present for thousands of years. The Greeks, the Romans, the biblical texts.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, this is partly what I’m saying. It is a normal and natural variant of human sexuality. But I believe it is increasing. Of course, there is no way to scientifically document this as we have no reliable numbers throughout history. We could begin now, though.” He turns to me. “You never gave any indication in your teenage years, Elizabeth. I find this fascinating. When did you realize?”

  “Richard,” Mom protests. “Our Leila is tired. Look at her, about to drop on her feet.” Mom moves over on the couch to make room for me, patting the open space beside her. I’m unable to resist what I know I’m going to regret. Zombielike, I cross the room and sink down between them.

  My father bends his gaze on me, and any inner strength I have left wilts under his examination. I know this look. He feels deeply, but intellectual curiosity always wins out, and here I am, a perfect specimen to pick apart.

  “I speculate that the energy required to hold on to this secret might contribute to your inertia,” he says. “I understand the difficulty of self-analysis, and the Johari Window effect, but do you think it’s possible that if you’d been able to come out sooner, you might have been freer to use your intellectual gifts?”

  “I’m not out now.” He won’t hear me, but I say it anyway. My skin prickles like an oncoming heat rash.

  Mother pats my hand again. “Coming out of the closet is an event, not a thesis, Richard. We should celebrate. How about tomorrow night? We could take you both out to dinner.”

  Something else is happening tomorrow night, but for the moment I can’t think what. My brain, squashed between the t
wo of them, spasms like an upside-down beetle, kicking its legs in a futile attempt to turn right side up. Again I glance at Kat, hoping for rescue, but she says nothing, and I can’t even begin to read the expression on her face. As usual, I take refuge in evasion.

  “This is such a surprise, seeing you tonight.”

  “We changed the plane tickets,” Mom says. “We couldn’t wait to see you! Plus, we thought this way we’d have more time to enjoy the drive to Seattle.”

  “But, the hotel.” I’m still floundering in the cognitive dissonance created by the YOLO thing.

  Dad beams at me. “The hotel was very accommodating. We got all settled in, and then we thought we’d take a drive—see Colville, and find your house. And then we saw the lights in the window and thought, Why not? You only live once, after all.”

  A vague resentment crawls into my belly. How dare they shake things up? I’ve spent most of my life rebelling against a bulwark of regimentation that apparently no longer exists, just because of some late-life existential crisis.

  “So, maybe dinner tomorrow, instead of breakfast on Friday?” Mom is asking. “That way Leila and Katya can sleep in the morning.”

  I drop my head into my hands and rub my temples. “I have to work. As for breakfast on Friday, we couldn’t be there before at least nine a.m. And you have a workshop. In Seattle. On Saturday. It’s a long drive. You’ll need to rest when you get there.”

  “We’re not that old yet,” Mom says, and she actually laughs. “Well, maybe your father is, but I can drive. All the time in the world.”

  “We only have one daughter,” Dad adds. “Part of YOLO is never missing an opportunity to celebrate something wonderful.”

  I want to point out years of missed celebrations. Birthdays that didn’t fit into the schedule. Inconvenient school concerts. The way my high school graduation party had to be held a week before the ceremony so Mom could start her summer lecture tour. I keep my mouth shut.

  “I know what,” Mom says. “We can come back through Colville on our way home—fly out of Spokane instead of Seattle, as we’d planned. We could have our celebratory dinner then. How does that sound? Can you get an evening off work, Leila?”