I hold him against me with my free arm, and the baby starts crying, and Tim arrives with a burger and fries, Pete and Bonnie and their boys behind him—“Look who I found wandering around downstairs!”—and am I not all right because Ed isn’t here?
The thought is quick, and I dismiss it quicker still.
I quiet Charlie with nursing and let Tim feed me fries, then the burger. We laugh at the mess I make of my face, the mustard we drop on the baby. I accept a shot glass from Pete, and I raise it with my free hand, like I did when Benjy was born, and then Justin, and now Charlie.
“We welcome you!” Pete shouts, and we drink and refill. It is warm and comforting, and it is incomplete. Maybe this is what the mammoth tells her inquisitive child. Listen, little one, you have more people to love you, and that is a wonderful thing, but nothing in your life will ever be whole. Understand me: You will live a life of pieces.
Chapter 28
It’s a mess. The entire state. Patients being discharged who have no business leaving their institutions, others rightly discharged but abandoned to families ill-equipped to deal with their illnesses and disabilities. The group homes Ed promised haven’t materialized in great enough numbers. Former patients are walking the streets, committing crimes, facing criminal charges.
His secretary is wary when she brings in the morning’s paper. Her name is Eleanor, and she is young and attractive, and efficient and smart, but nothing compared to Martha.
“There’s an angry editorial on page two. You’d better just get it over with.”
Ed reads: “Close your eyes and imagine a prisoner of war coming out of isolation after being locked up for months on end. Now imagine a person in the final stages of Alzheimer’s—confused, mumbling, hands shaking. Now put those two images together into one person. That person is my son, my son who suffers a severely disabling mental illness, coming out of months of isolation at the Montana State Prison. Mentally ill people often leave prison sicker than when they entered, as my son did. Zookeepers are not allowed to keep animals like this. Why do we allow our prisons to keep inmates in such conditions? My son is not a criminal. He is sick. He should be in an institution that can serve him.”
At least there isn’t another news article today. There have been too many headlines already: “Deinstitutionalization: Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences”; “Prison, the State’s New Mental Institution”; “State Criminalizes the Mentally Ill”; “Mentally Ill and Disabled Populations Outpace Available Services”; “Local Services Assume State’s Responsibilities.” It goes on. Ed’s office floods with letters and phone calls from parents, providers, patients themselves. A few days ago, the paper printed an op-ed by a local psychiatrist: “There is a limit to society’s tolerance of mentally disordered behavior. If we impede the entry of persons exhibiting that behavior into the mental health system, community pressure will force those people into the criminal justice system instead. This is a by-product of social control. We are trading one institution for another, in this case a qualified institution for an unqualified one.”
Ed looks out his window across the capitol grounds. Everything is gray. Gray trees against gray buildings against the gray sky. Montana clings to its monotones in the winter months, varying degrees of a black-and-white scale, and spring usually holds to its word—a surprise no one sees coming. His head hurts, and he takes two more Tylenols even though it’s been only an hour since his last dose. The headaches are chronic these days. He keeps meaning to get to the doctor, but there isn’t time. Every moment not spent with Benjamin is spent in this office. He has his staff working all hours.
Eleanor buzzes in. “Call for you. It’s Laura.” Laura is his most frequent caller, their conversations mostly short and businesslike, working through plans around Benjamin, schedules, extra time with one of them to cover for a conference or a trip. Occasionally, one of them will slip. “Where are you going?” Ed might say when Laura asks him to switch a weekend. “Paradise Valley, huh?” And he will remember all the times he meant to take her there. He made reservations once, but something came up, and they never went, and now she goes with Tim.
Sometimes she slips, too. “Still dating Kathy?” or “Bonnie saw you with someone she could only classify as a child. You dating teenagers now?” He hears what he hopes is jealousy behind the playful judgment.
Mostly, they keep to business, though, and Ed welcomes it now, a distraction from the shit on his desk. Also: He makes a point to answer Laura’s calls every time he’s in his office, even if he’s in the middle of something important. Eleanor has clear orders. It is an apology, a penance. Too late, he knows, but something nonetheless.
“Patch her through,” and then the silence of an open line. “Laura?”
“Hi, Ed.” His name in her mouth again, still not on the last things list. “Sorry to bother you. I know you’re swamped.”
“Nonsense.” He also makes a point of acting available every time they talk, as though he’s been sitting at his desk waiting for her call. This isn’t an act, actually. He is constantly doing other things, but he is also always waiting for Laura.
“It’s ridiculous, but— I left my keys in the ignition and locked myself out of my car. I don’t think I ever got the spare from your place. Do you mind if I run over there and check? Or do you want to check for me? I’m downtown by the library.”
The library. He has made it not exist. The gulch goes no farther south than Dorothy’s.
Ed tries to remember the state of his house—definitely dirty, but how dirty? He tries to gauge what effect it’ll have on Laura, how much it would put her off, because he wants to meet her there, and he has to assume she wants to meet him there, too, to see him in person somewhere private. Why else come to him with this request that’s so obviously an excuse? How could she not have made a copy of the key sometime in the past couple years? The thought of her creating a reason to see him makes him giddy. He hasn’t seen Laura alone since their last lunch at Dorothy’s.
“Want to just meet me there and we can both look? Or I can come get you?” Maybe Penelope will be outside to witness him picking up his ex-wife. See, Pen? Not all bad.
Laura agrees to the meeting, declines the ride. “It’ll be a nice walk.”
He rushes home to tidy up what he can. He’s sweeping crumbs into his palm when she knocks on the back door. She has never knocked before. He adds: Last time she walked into the house without knocking. He hollers her in.
She is remarkably older, he realizes. As in him, her age is beginning to write itself across her face in lines, through her hair in white. He was supposed to be next to her as it happened, the changes so subtle he wouldn’t have noticed them from day to day. But he has missed whole years, and he finds himself wanting this new version of her even more than the one he married. He lets himself hope that the last lunch at Dorothy’s wasn’t the last time we made love. Let there be just one more.
“You look amazing.”
She laughs and looks down at her clothes—jeans, a sweater under the winter coat she’s been wearing since Michigan, old snow boots. “You’ve always been loose with flattery.” Her expression changes, grows contemplative. “You look good, too.” Her eyes flick toward the bedroom as though she’s heard his thoughts. “Do you have a cigarette?”
He pulls his pack from his pocket, grateful for a reason to cross the room and stand in front of her, close, and light the cigarette she places between her lips. “I thought you quit.”
She sighs through the smoke she exhales, and he imagines the exquisite taste of tobacco after a dry spell. He’s halfheartedly attempted to quit a few times. It never sticks.
He loves to watch Laura smoke.
“I’m tired of the quitting,” she says, inhaling again.
He lights his own cigarette, suddenly nervous, unsure what to do with his hands or the rest of his body, whether he should step away or move closer.
She is sexier than she ever was when they were married. There is a rawne
ss to her now, something frayed, something rough. And strength—she is so much stronger.
He’s trying not to look at her when she says, “I didn’t lock my keys in the car.”
He goes to the fridge and gets a couple beers. She sits down across from him at the kitchen table.
“Why are you here, then?”
She takes a sip of beer, a drag off her cigarette. “The problem is—” She interrupts herself with a long, hovering silence. Then she laughs bitterly and says, “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
He hears the heater kick on, warm air in the vents, blowing against their legs. Laura stares at him, and his eyes go to her new wedding ring with its big diamond, gaudy in comparison to the simple bands they exchanged. Ed’s wedding ring is in a box in his top dresser drawer.
She can’t stop thinking about him? She’s concocted a bullshit excuse to get him to meet her here at the house they once shared because she can’t stop thinking about him?
Anger supplants his desire. “And you want me to help you with that? Me. Your ex-husband. The one you left.”
“You didn’t give me a choice, Ed.”
“Oh, I know, Laura. You’ve made it painfully clear that I was the one who failed us.”
“I loved you so much.” Past tense.
“And now you don’t. Now you love your attentive little builder and your clean new house.” Ed is tired, he realizes—tired of interrogating himself, tired of regret, tired of loss. “You should go, Laura.”
“Ed—”
He shakes his head.
Snow is starting outside, giant flakes, and evening is coming, the days so short in winter. The anger dissipates as quickly as it came, and he feels the headache return, throbbing in his right temple. He holds his head in his hands, eyes closed. He hears Laura stand and walk to the door. He hears her leave, and it feels more permanent this time than any other. He will move on, too, completely this time, embrace his bachelorhood, fully embody this new version of his life. He has had these thoughts before, but he begs them to stick this time. Let it really be over.
He goes to the bathroom for more Tylenol, then drives back to the office. He stays late, writing more letters, demanding more money. The situation is a mess, but it’s been a mess before. This mess is at least moving toward something better. Progress is messy, like all great things—the blood of childbirth, the mud of spring. Marriage and divorce.
Third and Chaucer
* * *
MARCH 15, 1977
Chapter 29
Ed is alone with his dog when the headache in his right temple switches from throbbing to gnawing, a chisel in his brain. It will stay with him, this chipping and churning. Later, he will talk to a woman who will tell him, “Our lives are like giant wood lathes, our bodies the spun spindle, the bowl, the table leg, things carved and whittled down.”
When the chisel starts, he stands from his chair. He touches the side of his face as if checking for blood and then reaches for his cigarette, its ash growing long. His hand moves fitfully, a box attached to a crane. His fingers knock ashes and butts to the floor, but the lit cigarette holds tight to the cover of his book. He knows to flick it away, his right arm replacing the clumsy club that has become his left. He stomps the smoke into the carpet. He can’t handle a fire with this whirling in his head.
“Outside,” he says to Beau. “Gotta get outside, get some fresh air.” He says these words, but they don’t come from his mouth. Other noises do, feral and stray, something from the mountains where he camps with his son, a winter-den noise, he thinks, a brooding clutch. He doesn’t know what a clutch is. Or brooding. What are these words in his mind that don’t match their sounds?
Walking is difficult, slow. His left leg is like his left arm, clubbed, unformed. The lathe that whittles away his brain works in reverse on his limbs, turning them back to clay and stone, lumps to be molded by a creator’s hands. God? he asks, but as usual, God doesn’t respond.
Beau whines, his tongue on his master’s right palm, a lick, a nudge. These gestures ask, Okay?
Ed puts his hand on the dog’s head, sloppy, a bit too rough.
Together, they make it through the dining room and kitchen, into the mudroom, to the back door, its knob a mystery he knows he could solve if concentration would come, if the damn knocking would stop. Somehow he makes his right hand turn the doorknob, and then they are outside in the sun. The trees are still bare from winter, the air chilled, though it is technically spring. Frost clings to the rock garden beds in the shade, patches of snow around the corners of the deck and yard. Paths of ice run to the garage and driveway, formed from the days he was too lazy to shovel. He is talking to his dog, telling him to close the door and get the mail, to call Laura, see what Ben’s doing. It’s nearly time for their first spring camping trip, and there are fish to catch. He has a date tonight—don’t let him forget.
Ed’s nonword noises make Beau bark, concerned, and then Ed falls, his head to a mound of old snow, no softer than the wood of the deck, but somewhat softer than the ice where his shoulder and hip hit. A small cut begins to bleed on his forehead, a slightly bigger one on his right arm. Beau licks them both. He pokes his snout into his master’s face, into his armpits, his stomach, his groin, but Ed doesn’t move. Beau whines and nudges, then turns circles before curling against Ed’s ribs, a small ball of warmth.
Patient
* * *
MAY 1977–MAY 1978
Chapter 30
Ed will remember waking up for the first time nearly a month after the aneurysm felled him. Doctors will tell him he’s been lucid several times before, but Ed will remember only the one time. Pete is in the room, his old pal Pete.
“Gave us a scare, you son of a bitch.”
Ed laughs, the left side of his face heavy and numb. “Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea why I’m here?”
Pete grimaces. There is no other word for it. “Didn’t catch that, Ed. Maybe try talking a little slower?”
Ed hasn’t yet recovered words. His mouth and tongue are waiting to be taught their functions, impatient children. He knows the words. He says them in his head. He just can’t transfer them to his body.
He tries to sit up taller in his hospital bed and finds his whole left side as heavy and numb as his face. He looks at Pete, and Pete looks away.
“What’s wrong, pal?”
“Maybe you should rest,” Pete replies.
Ed’s head hurts, and he doesn’t know why Pete won’t answer him. He doesn’t know why Pete looks so damn sad, and as he thinks it, the word sad balloons in his mind into a great white swatch of fabric, a gauzy blanket coating the room. It quiets the beeping monitor and the heaviness in his legs, the pain in his head, the face of his friend. Quiet, rippling white.
His next memory will come nearly a month later.
— —
“When is your family visiting next, Edmund?”
“Tue. Sss. Day. Come.”
He hears the therapists tell him about his progress. He hears language rehabilitation. He sees words in his brain, though they don’t look like the words on the pages of books. His therapists tell him these are words—these jumbled nonsensical characters—but he knows the therapists are lying. Words are objects, like the objects in the bag he carries: pencil, paper, toilet paper, spoon (for hunger), cup (for thirst), a photo of Benjamin, a photo of Laura. Words are textured and colored, bright and vivid. They walk across his thoughts. Sometimes they speak. The word Laura pausing in her stroll to say, Hello there, handsome. Where have you been? The word Edmund (self) saying, Right here, my love. He remembers his wife and son. He remembers his friends Pete and Bonnie. The word-object Penelope comes often, and he tries to move it to his mouth, out into the room where he can make it real, but his therapists just hand him pens of varying colors, more and more pens.
The left side of his body is heavy, always, and he can’t walk, though he forgets every morning, swinging himself out of his bed onto legs th
at don’t stand. He sees and feels anger at his physical therapists. He needs no object for the word no.
Benjamin comes sometimes, and Laura, and a new word, Tim, who doesn’t stay.
“Tim is my husband,” Laura says. “You and I aren’t married anymore, Edmund. I am married to Tim.”
“No.”
With his good hand, he reaches for her, and when he feels her soft fingers in his, the word Tim disappears again.
Chapter 31
— Laura —
We’ve been going to Great Falls every weekend, me and Ben and Charlie and Tim. This is the first time I’ve gotten Tim to agree to stay home with Charlie. “Please, Tim. It’s so confusing for him, and Charlie really doesn’t need to be a part of this.”
When Tim conceded, he made me promise not to let Ed believe he’s my husband again. “I know the man’s in a rough place, Laura, but letting him believe something that’s not true isn’t going to help him get back to where he was.”
I was angry at the insinuation, but mostly because he’d foreseen a realistic possibility. Ed just needs something to grasp, something to ground himself. More of his memory returns every time we visit, and the doctors assure us this is a great sign, an indicator that he could get nearly all of it back at some point, but he is years behind: Benjamin is small and I am his wife. He is working out in Boulder. He’s trying out a new behavioral model for Penelope. He is speaking in clear if broken words, and concise, vivid sentences that have no articles or conjunctions, just the meat. His doctors say he’s starting to read again, slowly, like a child. The cat sat. The dog ran.
I hear myself say, “I can’t stop thinking about you,” the last time I was in our old house. I feel his anger, the finality of it. We were done then, in a way we hadn’t been before.
In the car, I tell Benjy, “I’m going to pretend your dad and I are still married today. He seems to think we are, and I think it might help him find more memories if I play along. Is that all right?”
The Behavior of Love Page 17
