The Behavior of Love

by Virginia Reeves

  She hadn’t wanted to go, so she sabotaged herself in order to get back.

  “I’m leaving now.” Ed hangs up, grabs Penelope’s file from the cabinet, tells Martha there’s an emergency, and rushes to the parking lot. Laura’s car is there, and he realizes—faintly, briefly, a wisp of cottonwood seed on the breeze—that she’s teaching up in her classroom. There isn’t time to tell her he’s leaving.

  — —

  He drives too fast through the canyon.

  Anthony meets him in the hallway of the hospital, and Ed gives him the thick folder of Penelope’s history at Boulder. They agree to grab a drink when Anthony’s done with his rounds. And then Ed goes to Penelope’s room.

  A nurse is tending to her IV. “Family?” she asks over her shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  “Poor thing. She’s had a rough go.” The nurse hangs a new saline bag, taps the line, makes a note on her clipboard, then bustles past Ed toward the door. He closes it after her and walks to the bed.

  Penelope’s head is covered with sensors. Wires run to machines. Ed listens to her heartbeat through the beeping of the monitor. He takes comfort in the green blips on the screen.

  “I’m here,” he says. “Pen, I’m here.” They are alone in the room, and he lets himself take one of her hands. “What the hell were you thinking?” He wants to be angry with her, but he is angry only at himself. He knew Penelope’s willfulness and determination. He should’ve predicted this possibility, should’ve put safeguards in place. But he was too fixated on his own salvation.

  He lets go of her hand and pulls up a chair. The nurse brings him a cup of coffee, and he starts talking, telling Penelope any story he can think of. Anything to keep his voice in the air for her to hear. He talks about his mother and father, his brothers, his grandparents. “My mother was always old. My oldest brother is dead. My second oldest brother is thinking about becoming a priest.” His mouth talks, and his mind rambles, and his mother stands before him, asking, What are you doing, Edmund?

  Trying to wake her up.

  She is not yours to wake.

  He has always needed the stern comfort of his Polish mother, a strong woman with a wizened face dug by lines. Even in the photos from her childhood, a wooden pull-horse crafted by her grandfather trailing behind her, she wore an expression of worry. She appeared immune to the joys of childhood, in both her own life and her children’s. Ed can feel the quick silencing that his mother elicits. He can feel it there in the hospital room. He is a boy again, laughing wildly with his brothers, pretend cowboys in their yard with cap guns and holsters, fearless and loud until their mother appears behind the screen door on the back porch. They could all sense her before she spoke, hands clasped at her waist, mouth a thin line, eyes squinting against the day. As soon as she said the word dinner, holsters and guns were immediately dropped in the bin on the porch, shoes plucked off and lined up neatly on the mat, and single-file, they’d walk to the bathroom, where they waited in birth order for a turn at the tap—water so hot it pinked their hands, soap so thick it took a full minute to wash away.

  “I am a religious hand-washer,” he tells Penelope. He stares at the leather restraints cutting lines into her wrists.

  You’re being sentimental, he hears his mother say. You’re doing no good.

  But that voice has to be wrong. Ed stays and talks.

  At eight, Wong comes, and they drive together to the Sip ’n’ Dip, where ladies in seashell bras swim in a huge tank of water behind the bar. Ed has been to several bachelor parties at the Dip, including Wong’s own. They order shots of whiskey and pints of beer.

  “There’s some good news,” Wong ventures.

  “Oh?”

  “We’re starting to be able to pinpoint the exact origin of seizures in the brains of epileptics. You’ve probably seen some of the recent literature. If we can identify the problem area, we can go in and remove it. There are complications, of course, and it’s brain surgery, so we’re exploring it only in the most severe cases.”

  “You want to remove part of her brain?”

  “If it’s a part she can live without, yes.” Wong shoots his whiskey. “Listen, Ed, I’ve performed both the tests and the surgery on three patients so far, and they’ve all shown a complete elimination of seizures. There’s a significant recovery period, but I swear to you, their lives are far better now than they were before.”

  The field knows so little about the brain in relation to the rest of the body. Who was to say the part they identified wasn’t necessary? What if it was the part that made her write lyrics to the muffled sounds of Boulder’s hallways? Or the part that loved poetry?

  “She’s a brilliant kid, Anthony.”

  “She’ll still be brilliant,” Wong says. “The tests we’ve done so far suggest the seizures are originating in the left temporal lobe. We’re going to back those up with an intracranial EEG that’ll monitor her brain over a series of days, and if we get the results we’re hoping for, we’ll just go ahead and whisk her right into surgery.”

  “Her parents okayed this?”

  “Are you kidding me? They didn’t even let me finish my spiel. ‘Wait—you’re saying she can have a surgery that will fix her? Where do we sign?’ ”

  Fix her. As though she were a broken toy, a car with a flat tire, a chipped plate.

  Ed shouldn’t be surprised. Her parents are interested only in eradicating her seizures. If part of their daughter is permanently erased in the process, it would be worth it.

  He wants to go back to that day by the river. He wants to follow every craving and let the consequences come.

  Or he wants never to take the walk in the first place, never to suggest she leave. He wants to go back to his office and play a hand of poker with pistachios as chips and talk about the great work she’s doing with the reading group. Watch her continued improvement, see fewer seizures every week. And when it was time for her to leave the institution, they would both agree it was for the best. She’d go directly to college—live in a dormitory with other young people and attend fascinating classes—and she wouldn’t have anything to do with her parents. She would be an adult, and the Gatsons would have no say in the treatment of her brain.

  “It’s all set, then?”

  “We’ll start the intracranial EEG tomorrow,” Wong says. “You’re welcome to stay and observe.”

  Ed watches a blond mermaid press against the glass, then turn to the surface for a breath. He tells himself he wants to scoop her out of the water and take her to the cheap hotel next door. The fantasy won’t hold, though. Not even a sexy wet woman in a seashell bra can take his mind off Penelope.

  “I’ll go sit with her tonight,” he tells Wong, “and then see about tomorrow.”

  They say their goodbyes, and Ed uses the payphone in the back to call Laura. She doesn’t pick up, and Ed leaves a message. “I’m so sorry, love. There was an emergency with one of my patients, and he was transferred to the hospital in Great Falls. I’m up here working with the doctors. I’ll probably be home tomorrow, but I’ll call in the morning to check in. Hope you’re sleeping soundly. Pat that belly for me. Love you.”

  He should’ve been lying about Penelope from the start. Maybe if he hadn’t talked about her so much when they first moved, Laura wouldn’t have developed her suspicions, and the whole situation could’ve remained benign.

  Back at the hospital, he pours himself a cup of coffee and returns to Penelope’s bedside, where he tells her more stories in the quiet spells and helps the nurses hold her down during the bouts of seizing that overtake her three different times.

  All her progress is gone.

  And tomorrow, Anthony Wong will cut open her skull.

  — —

  Ed is staring at the wires pouring from the opening in Penelope’s head when a nurse comes into the room. “Edmund Malinowski?”

  He wipes his eyes, blurry and fatigued, in order to focus on the nurse’s face. He’s been in Great Falls over
forty-eight hours, and he knows he needs to go home, but he’s terrified to leave Penelope’s side. It’s irrational, but part of him believes he can protect her. That if he stays, the girl he knows can’t disappear.

  He hopes the tests will be inconclusive—no point of origin—so her brain will be left alone.

  The nurse has a piece of paper in her hand, notes to read. He doesn’t understand her hesitation. “A friend of yours called—someone named Peter? He wanted to get you a message.”

  “Yes?”

  Ed’s imagination isn’t working. There is only the present—this room with Penelope, her health, her recovery. Pete will be telling him to get back to Boulder. That’s all.

  The nurse swallows and blinks. She looks at the paper as she speaks. “Boy. Six pounds, two ounces.”

  Penelope whimpers in her bed.

  The nurse congratulates him and leaves the room.

  It takes Ed a minute to understand.

  He hears his babcia say, Co było, nie wróci, and then his mother: “What was, won’t come back. You hear me, Eddy? You cannot take again what has already been taken.”

  The baby is early.

  He is a father, father to a son, like his own father and grandfather before him. Their surname means dweller by raspberries, which Ed’s father perpetuated, planting the barbed plants around his home, as his mother had, and his babcia, and his babcia-babcia, and on and on until the beginning of time.

  Why is the baby early?

  Penelope’s eyes open, but she isn’t fully conscious.

  “Hey there, Pen. The baby came, and I need to go.” He thinks he can see a faint smile on her lips. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He kisses her on the cheek.

  — —

  Once he leaves Penelope’s room, Ed can’t move fast enough. The hospital corridors are too full, the parking lot too big, his car too slow. He speeds through the canyon like he did on his drive up, but even the quick curves seem long and unending. He feels days slipping by, maybe even years.

  Helena’s hospital parking lot is much smaller than the one in Great Falls, and sparsely filled. Ed is quick to get inside. Still, he is too late. The receptionist tells him Laura and the baby checked out earlier in the day. “Lucky to go home so soon,” she says.

  He is sure Laura will never forgive him, and he thinks about heading back to Great Falls. He could pull up that chair next to Penelope and pretend there is no other life. No wife and baby. No house on Third Street. Penelope is eighteen now, and she is no longer directly under his care. Their relationship wouldn’t be celebrated, but it wouldn’t be illegal, either.

  He thinks of her hands on him, her mouth.

  But he drives to the store for flowers and champagne.

  — —

  Through the back French doors, Ed can see Laura sitting in the rocking chair, the baby in her arms. She should look tired, but she looks radiant, more awake than he’s ever seen her. The fantasy of Penelope vanishes. This is where he belongs, here in this house with Laura and their son. There are holes in the perfect life he envisioned for them, but he can patch them. He can be the husband Laura needs him to be—present and attentive. He can be a father to this boy, a great father. And they will have more children, and Laura will look at him again like she did early on, when she believed he was the greatest man she’d ever known.

  He walks in.

  “Who was it?” she demands the moment he closes the door. “Who had the emergency?”

  He crosses through the kitchen and into the living room, where he kneels in front of her. “Is he okay? He was early.”

  She pulls the baby closer to her chest. “Who was it?”

  Ed can see the baby’s ear, a tiny shell, his nose, his lips. Thick black hair like Ed’s own.

  “One of our low-functioning patients,” he says, setting his hand on the baby’s head. “You don’t know her.”

  Laura scoffs. “Really, Ed?” She pushes him aside and walks to the answering machine, already adept at moving with a baby in her arms. How has she learned so quickly? She pushes a button and Ed’s voice speaks to them loudly. “I’m so sorry, love. There was an emergency with one of my patients, and he was transferred to the hospital in Great Falls.” Laura pushes pause, then rewind. Play. “I’m so sorry, love. There was an emergency with one of my patients, and he was transferred to the hospital in Great Falls.”

  She looks at him. “He was transferred to Great Falls. So, let me ask again: Who’s the patient?”

  So many mistakes, and the one to ruin him a misplaced pronoun. Laughably small. He knows better than anyone that the best lies are those closest to the truth. He should’ve made the fake patient a woman. “You know who it is.”

  Laura nods. It’s so hard to look at her with their baby in her arms. He doesn’t even know the child’s name.

  “Am I still a fool for thinking your relationship with her was inappropriate?”

  He sees Penelope in her bed in Great Falls, all those wires.

  He sent her away so he could save his marriage. And here she is, ruining it again.

  Ed imagines saying, I promise never to see her again.

  She is nothing to me.

  But he knows Laura won’t believe him any more than he does.

  “She got worse, Laura. I discharged her, and she got worse, and now a neurologist in Great Falls is going to cut part of her brain out, and she may never recover.”

  The baby whimpers and Laura bounces him gently in her arms. Ed wouldn’t know to calm him that way, and he wonders whether Laura’s skills as a parent are innate or whether they came with the baby, Laura a day ahead. Either way, Ed recognizes his disadvantage. He is afraid he’ll never catch up.

  Laura moves back to the rocking chair, and Ed watches her settle the baby onto her breast. “I have tried to have compassion for her, Ed. I know her life is unfair. I know it’s tragic. But ultimately, I don’t care. I don’t care if her brain gets cut into and she never recovers. I don’t care if her parents are awful. I don’t care if her seizures get worse.” She repositions the baby’s mouth. “You made her my rival, Ed. This child. This patient of yours. And I don’t know what all has happened between you two, but I know it’s more than you’ve said, and now we have a baby, and I don’t know what to do.” She looks at him. “What should I do, Ed?”

  “You should let me fix things.”

  “I’ve tried that, too.”

  “Once more.” He kneels down again, his hands on the arms of the rocking chair. “I will be here for you and our son, Laura. I promise.”

  “What was that quote you loved so much, Ed? That one by Skinner, maybe. Or Watson. One of your great fathers of behaviorism. ‘Words fail. Only actions matter.’ Was that it, Doctor?” She has never looked at him more coldly, but it lasts only a moment.

  Then her eyes are back on their son.

  Chapter 17

  — Laura —

  Ed has brought me a puppy. A tiny thing, black and soft with enormous ears. Ed swears it’s a pure black Labrador, but I suspect there’s some hound mixed in.

  He brings it home in a box, along with a collar and leash, a bed, dog food, toys. When he walks in, I’m cooking dinner, a box of noodles and a jar of red sauce. He leaves the box on the table, and I don’t even notice it at first. My brain doesn’t work these days.

  The baby begins to whine from the bassinet in the dining room. I named him Benjamin at the hospital and agreed to give him Edmund’s name in the middle because of its family history. Benjamin Edmund Malinowski. I’m calling him Benjy.

  “I’ll get him,” Ed says.

  I hear more whimpering and ask, “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise?” I hear Ed talking to our son: “It’s all right, little guy. Nothing to be sad about.” He returns to the kitchen with Benjy against his shoulder, and I see the box now.

  “Oh!” I lift the little dog out and hold it eye-level. “Hello there.” I cradle it in my arms and look at Ed. “Pretty low, Docto
r.”

  “At least you’re looking at me.”

  I look away.

  Benjy’s nearly two months old, and Ed has been getting home in time for dinner nearly every night. He takes the baby for walks so I can rest. Most of the time, I go directly to bed, but just yesterday, when Ed took Benjy, I went to my easel instead.

  “You’re painting again,” Ed said, coming to stand behind me. The canvas was small, the image simple at first glance—dried seeds on the branch of a box elder tree, crisp gold and bean-shaped. The lines were intricate and precise, not like anything I’ve painted before.

  “Laura, I love it.”

  “Thank you” was all I volunteered in response, but over dinner, I admitted how I’m drawn to the tidiness of detail work right now, order, every line and color in its place. “Life with a newborn is all chaos and mess. Benjy and I are dirty and smelly and covered in shit or milk or piss or all three, given the right moment. It’s nice to make something clean.”

  This all feels like progress, but I still don’t know what I’m going to do.

  Now I hold the dog away from me, its tiny hind legs dangling in the air, its naked belly exposed. I turn it one way, then the other, inspecting. “You’re disgusting,” I say. “Ugly and disgusting, but I suppose you can stay. Add to the mess.” I bring the little beast to my chest, snuggling its face against my neck like I do with Benjy. Over its silky head, I say, “I wanted a dog when the house was empty.” I put it back in its box so I can finish with dinner.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “One thing at a time, Ed. You can’t walk in the door one night, suddenly the perfect man.” I give him a smile, though, and our dinner feels nearly perfect—me there nursing the baby, Ed cutting my food and feeding it to me, our new dog asleep in his box—nearly the life I imagined us having.

  — —

  I do not sleep. There is Benjy, always hungry, and now there is the puppy. I’m calling him Beau because it’s a sound Benjy almost makes, a near-consonant-vowel combination, a near-word. When I get up at night to nurse the baby, I step in a puddle of dog piss, sometimes a pile of shit. Ed, meanwhile, can sleep through anything.