The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  He knows he has no right to promise her a cure, but he has to believe that he can make her better. She is the one patient in the whole institution whom he can actually heal.

  Laura’s paintings hang on the wall behind Penelope’s head.

  “We’ll try everything we can until something works. That’s the process.”

  He watches Penelope’s lips, chapped on the bottom, a couple flaps of dried skin. She whispers, “I want to believe you.”

  He can feel every point where their bodies touch—knees, hands, the underbellies of her forearms on the tops of his thighs—and when he pulls back and stands, he feels a severing, like a bandage ripped from skin. He drops her hands as quickly as he can and steps to the side of his chair, then back another few feet. Distance. They need distance between them.

  “You all right, Dr. Ed?”

  She smiles at him, and he’s thankful for her ability to normalize, to shift back into their roles. Nothing happened. There was no impropriety. He merely comforted a sad patient.

  He digs his hands into his pockets and returns to the safety behind his desk. His fingers close around the latest stone, smooth from all his worrying. He will be normal, too. “You all right?”

  “I asked you first.”

  He laughs. Playful banter is part of their routine. Handholding isn’t. “I’m just fine, Pen.” He feigns a look at his watch. “Ah! Our time’s up.”

  She looks at the wall clock opposite Laura’s paintings. Then she stands and scoops up the pistachios, dissolving the lines as she stashes them in her pocket. She keeps one out, cracks it open. “Our time’s been up for half an hour,” she says.

  — —

  Laura is asleep again when Ed gets home. He’s late but not asleep-already late: nine o’clock. He can still feel the touch of Penelope, and he tries to dispel it on his own in the shower. But it’s still there when he’s done, too strong.

  He presses against Laura in bed. “Hey there, beautiful. I know you’re not really asleep.”

  She mumbles, “Stop it, Ed,” and scoots away.

  The desire is too much—the need—and so he takes himself down the hill to the rooms over Dorothy’s, where he’s lucky enough to find Delilah between customers.

  “I remember you,” she says.

  She is a professional, and she gives him exactly what he craves: simple pleasures and anonymity.

  Afterward, Ed goes downstairs to the saloon for a beer and a shot—a good excuse, should Laura wake to find him gone. Just needed some fresh air, he’ll tell her, and a drink. Didn’t want to wake you. He’ll give her the latest stone in his pocket, red-gold and flat as a coin.

  Chapter 7

  — Laura —

  Ed has filled most of the summer with excuses for why I’m not ready for students, but the classroom is clean, the cupboards stocked. I even have a folder of lesson plans I’ve put together. The fall is coming, and he has finally folded.

  “They’re a handful,” Ed repeats continuously. “Not like anyone you’ve ever worked with.”

  I’ve never worked with students of any kind, so there’s nothing to compare.

  I wish he were here to greet them with me, but he’s away trying to put out the most recent fire. “Boulder River School and Hospital Hires Rapist” ran on the front page of the paper this morning. Ed swears he didn’t hire the man, but the paper interviewed him as if he were responsible anyway.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I asked on the drive.

  He was quiet, as he so often is. “It’s hard,” he finally said. “It’s hard to talk about.”

  When we got here, he rushed to his office with only a hurried “Good luck” over his shoulder.

  I can hear my students coming, their feet heavy on the stairs, their voices loud, an aide hushing them, angry. All the employees seem angry, all but Nurse Sheila.

  “In here. Eva, stop touching Jimmy. Everyone, STOP.”

  The footsteps stop, but the babble continues, a few hollering voices. Then Penelope’s face pops into the doorway. “You ready for us, Mrs. Dr. Ed?”

  “Laura,” I say through the shock. “Call me Laura.”

  Ed has put her in my class, so I’ll be forced to stare at her pretty face for hours. I’m sure he thinks I’ll become as smitten with her as he is. She’ll become the daughter I never had, or some such bullshit, and I’ll welcome her name at the dinner table.

  He’s an idiot.

  “Penelope,” the aide’s voice hisses, ghosting in from the hall. “Get in line.”

  The girl ducks out, and another face replaces hers—this one gone to wrinkles before its time, pickled and salty, lips like leather. “This the art class?”

  I nod, and the aide leads in her wards, ordering them to sit down. One boy has already wandered toward the windows. “Jimmy!” the aide shouts, reaching for the club in her belt.

  “No, no.” I cut her off, my hand to the boy’s elbow, gentle like Ed taught me. “Jimmy, come with me.” His head droops, and it seems to take considerable effort for him to raise it, but he brings his gaze level, giant brown eyes blinking in a fragile face. He makes an unintelligible noise, familiar only in tone—excitement—and lets me lead him to a chair at the front.

  “All yours,” the aide says. “Bring ’em to the yard when you’re done.”

  There are seven of them, Penelope sitting alongside six others who are clearly not her intellectual peers. “I can tell you everyone’s names,” she volunteers. “I’m Penelope, in case you don’t remember. This is Eva, and Janet. That’s George. You’ve met Jimmy. Over there are Raymond and Lilly.” At their names, each person perks up, smiles. Raymond waves and begins chanting, “Ray-mond. Ray-mond. Ray-mond.”

  “Hello, Raymond. It’s nice to meet you.” The repetition stops when I touch his hand, which is filthy. I resist the urge to wipe my fingers on my pants.

  They vary in size and shape, in their faces, but they are all similar in their movements and temperament. They are clumsy and thick, even Jimmy, whose hands are long and graceful as a pianist’s. Eva is clearly reluctant to unclench her fists. George drums his pinkies and thumbs on the table, teeter-tottering his hands. Raymond rocks in his chair. Janet has a piece of her hair in her mouth, sucking. Lilly flutters her lips, a buzz in the back of her mouth, a small motorboat. And then there is Penelope.

  I hate that she’ll be useful to me.

  “Teach us some art, Mrs. Dr. Ed.”

  “Laura,” I repeat. “My name is Laura. We are going to draw today.”

  Most of them nod. Many of them bounce in their seats.

  The lesson is simple. I’ve arranged a still-life on the small table at the front of the room. An apple, an empty vase, a tied bunch of dry tufted grass. “Start with the outlines,” I say, drawing an oversize apple on the chalkboard, then the vase, the straight lines of the grass. “Then we’ll shade to add depth.” I demonstrate on the apple, light and dark, its shape growing underneath my hand, rounding, realizing itself. My students clap, all but Penelope. “Your turn,” I say, passing out wide, blunt pencils and thick paper. Raymond stops rocking, eyes pinched as he peers at the scene, deep concentration. Jimmy’s long fingers wrap around his pencil as if he’s holding a baseball bat. Lilly shifts the pencil from one hand to the other with no seeming preference. Their marks are hard and dark. Eva tears her paper and begins to cry, but I succeed in soothing her, replacing the paper, lifting her hand, setting it down, my own hand over hers, coaxing a softer line. “See? Don’t push so hard.”

  “Do me!”

  “Me!”

  “Uh!”

  They all want my hand on theirs. I dismiss the grime of their nails and the dirt on their skin, and I go from Eva to Janet to George to Jimmy to Raymond to Lilly, returning to Penelope, who says, “I’ve got it.” She lifts her hand to show her progress, the stilled moment emerging in perfect proportion, an artist’s sketch, as good as anything I could do.

  “Have you had lessons?”

 
; “Yeah, we get private art lessons out here all the time.”

  Eva elbows her. “Pen. Show. Off.” The jab makes Penelope smile, and I try for a moment to soften toward her. What would it be like to face adolescence trapped in this place? I can feel those years, the weight of my body one I can conjure on command. I can feel the hairs on my arms rise when Robert Gault walks by, the most handsome boy I’d ever seen, the first I let touch the body I was so aware of—first under my shirt and months later, my pants, making him swear, promise on everything sacred, that he’d tell no one. And the Monday morning afterward, when he’d not only told but exaggerated. I feel that morning, those eyes on me in the halls, my virginity gone without the act to show for it.

  There’s no one here spreading rumors about Penelope, but I wonder if that is worse. Would it have been better to be isolated, away from all the Robert Gaults of the world, my body my own?

  This is the closest I can come to compassion for this girl—grieving the lies she’ll never have spread about her.

  My students draw for an hour, Penelope on her one masterpiece, the others on many. George draws one item at a time—the apple, then the vase, then the grasses over and over, lines with seeds scattered at their ends. Some of their work is loose swoops and lines that somehow still convey form. Other marks are tight and controlled—all detail and precision. The range is extraordinary, and I am disappointed when our time is up.

  “Write your names on your papers,” I tell them. Most of them are able, and Penelope helps those who can’t.

  “J-A-N-E-T,” she says. “Janet. That’s right.”

  They are reluctant to give me their papers. “How about just one, then? I want to watch your progress.” I don’t think they understand. “It’s all very pretty,” I say instead. “I like your drawings.”

  This makes them smile, and Janet gives over all of hers, Eva and Jimmy, too. George gives his vase and apple and one of his grass pieces. Lilly gives two of her five, Raymond just one. Penelope hands over her single perfect drawing.

  “You keep it,” I say.

  “What am I going to do with it?”

  “Hang it in your room? Give it to one of your doctors?” I am acting like a petty teenager.

  She takes the drawing back and gets in line with the others at the door. They are easy and compliant, nothing like Ed said. Penelope is at the rear, and I lead them through the dusty hallway, down the dark stairs, another hall, and then out the front doors into the devastating sunshine. The day is bright, and I watch my students move slowly into it, cautious, timid. Soon they are absorbed into other groups, and I feel as though I’ll never see them again. They will all drown in rivers and bathtubs before I can return. Except Penelope. There is no doubt she will survive.

  — —

  It’s dark already when we start the drive home.

  “You sent me Penelope, huh?” I light a cigarette and look outside. Black cows stand stark against their golden grasses, the sky lit orange in the west, a great fire descending into the sea. I have never seen the ocean, but I have always yearned for it, and here I am—so close. I could be at the shore in twelve hours. There is an imagined town on the Oregon coast where I have always lived. I build fires in a wood stove when the storms knock out the power. I drink coffee in the clear mornings on my deck that overlooks the sea. I am an orphan, and I have chosen to marry no one.

  “She needs the stimulation more than any of them.”

  “That’s not why you sent her. She can get art lessons on her own from books.”

  “So that means she shouldn’t get lessons in person? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  I can’t fight with him about this girl anymore. I pass him my cigarette to finish and lean my head against the window. “I won’t have her in class, Ed.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you won’t have her in class? You can’t kick her out because you’re jealous—which is ridiculous, Laura. You’re offering your services to this institution, and Penelope has just as much a right to participate as anyone else.” He says more: I am acting petty and stupid and small. I am misguided. I am misreading. Finally, he says, “If you don’t keep her in class, you can’t teach.”

  It seems so easy for him to make this choice—patient over wife.

  I wonder how he’d respond if I had a Penelope of my own. Someone I spent every day with and mentioned at every meal. Someone I chose over him, again and again.

  Wards

  * * *

  DECEMBER 1972–JUNE 1973

  Chapter 8

  Laura has been teaching at the institution for over a year, but her presence still feels new and foreign. Ed can’t shake the feeling that she doesn’t belong—too much mixing of his worlds, too many demands on his time. He can’t focus on her when he’s at work, can’t make her his priority every Tuesday. He has the whole damn institution to run, patients to treat, staff to supervise, policy to write. The next legislative session is just around the corner, and he needs to be ready.

  He bought her a car six months ago in an attempt to fix the situation. “This way you won’t have to get up so early, and you won’t have to wait around for me all day. You can just drive over for your class.”

  He was sure she’d stop coming. Laura hates to drive—avoids it whenever she can—but she has driven herself to the institution every week since he got the car, more resolved than he’s ever seen her.

  His last hope is pregnancy. She has to quit when she gets pregnant.

  But she’s not pregnant.

  “Maybe you’re too stressed,” he said recently. “Maybe teaching is too much.”

  “You think I haven’t gotten pregnant because I’m teaching two hours a week?”

  “There’s the drive, too—you hate to drive.”

  “If you think the once-a-week drive to Boulder is causing my body so much stress that it can’t grow a baby, then maybe you should start giving me rides again.”

  He’s dropped it for now. There’s too much else to worry about, starting with a thing both simple and indomitable—Montana’s seasons.

  Winter is back, the institution’s hardest months. The patients get anxious cooped up inside, their rhythms thrown off by the short days and long nights. There’s a melancholy that takes hold, a new tone to the music of the hallways. Sad. Hopeless.

  Ed remembers a photo from one of the old annual reports: a two-story Christmas tree in one of the former sitting rooms, a fire burning in the nearby hearth. He knows it’s too grand, and ultimately probably meaningless compared to all the other things that need to be done, but he has to do something to brighten the place. Plus, he loves Christmas, loves it with the full weight of history and myth that holidays rightfully conjure. He is a lapsed Polish Catholic. He doesn’t believe in God, but he damn well believes in celebrations.

  “We’re going Christmas-tree hunting,” he tells his staff. “I’ll lead the hike myself, and I’ll take as many patients as I can handle.”

  “I’ll go with you, Ed.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Hell, I could use some fresh air. Count me in.”

  They take thirty-eight residents, roughly ten each—Ed and Pete and Sheila and Donovan Brady O’Connor, a long-timer like Sheila and the only aide Ed has any respect for. Freckled and fair, he comes from old Irish stock in Butte. No one knows why he goes by all three of his names, but it’s common practice by patients and staff alike. He’s never just Donovan or O’Connor.

  They bundle up the group, giving the more capable ones the task of buttoning the others.

  “A Christmas-tree hunt, huh?” Penelope smiles.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “If I didn’t approve, I wouldn’t be coming. You think we can handle it?”

  “If I didn’t think you could handle it, you wouldn’t be going.”

  She laughs an easy laugh, which her fellow hikers mimic. Lilly grabs Penelope’s arm. “Fun-ny Pen. So fun-ny.” Penelope pats the girl’s mittened hand. She is gentle and kind, and Ed curse
s the flash in his stomach.

  The group sets off, Ed at the front with Penelope. Sheila and Pete are in the middle and Donovan Brady O’Connor at the end, shepherding the stragglers. They walk along the two-track lane cut through the snow by one of the school’s trucks, feet kicking clumps of ice, pine cones, rocks. The pack lets out great whoops of joy, and Chip announces, “I love trees best of all that grows.” Then he barks loudly, a seal in the sun, his face to the sky.

  Penelope falls back, and Ed hears Dale sputtering: “Pen. Pen. Pen.”

  Penelope stands still as the others shuffle past. Her right hand opens and closes, her eyes gaze straight. She makes a rhythmic ticking noise between her tongue and teeth, a beat that matches the clenching and unclenching of her hand. A petit mal, her brain not completely shrouded. She isn’t conscious, but she isn’t entirely gone. Ed has brought her out of these before.

  He grips her upper arms, squeezes hard, and shouts her name. Pete passes with a nod and takes over at the front of the line, corralling the residents who’ve started off on their own, a few wandering into the woods.

  “Penelope!” Ed’s job is to interrupt the interruption, jump-start her brain back to its regular rhythm. Or just keep her from falling. In reality, his actions might not be doing anything. Petit mals are short by nature.

  She blinks, smiles. “Hey, Dr. Ed.” Clear and bright. Unlike her all-encompassing grand mals, the small ones have no aftereffects. She is gone, and just as quickly, she is back. “Petit mal?”

  “Real short. You okay to keep going?”

  She is, but Ed makes sure to stay close to her.

  “You’re hovering,” she chides.

  “You could have a big one. They often follow.”