by Kate Ledger
“It’s downstairs,” Jamie said coolly.
“What’s downstairs?”
“The smell. It’s in the basement.”
“How would you know?” But she could tell then that her daughter was right. The smell seemed to be rising through the floorboards. Even as she turned toward the basement door, the stench grew more pronounced. “What have you done down there?”
“Why do you always think it’s me?”
“What’s down there, Jamie?” Her voice became more threatening.
“You think I’m the problem. Don’t deny it ’cause I know it’s true.”
“I don’t know what problem you’re talking about.”
“You do,” Jamie replied.
“Keep your voice down. Your father still has patients downstairs.”
“ ‘Keep your voice down,’ ” Jamie taunted in a high, nasal voice. Her head waggled. Her shoulders jutted up and down, mockingly, like a marionette.
“Don’t be obnoxious.”
“ ‘Don’t you have friends around?’ ”
“Enough!” Emily snarled. “That’s it, or you’re grounded.” She’d never hit her daughter, but the sensation that flooded her felt like she’d touched a live wire, and she wanted to lash out at the small features, the straight-cut bangs, that taunting face. The anger rose right into her tooth pulp so that she could feel it, pulsating under the enamel of gritted teeth.
“ ‘Should I be worried about you?’ Hard to be worried when you aren’t even ever here.”
“That’s it! To your room,” Emily shouted, a rigid, wavering index pointing up the stairs.
Jamie glared, and then ran out of the room. Emily turned back to the kitchen, the open cabinet, the sponge on the floor, the bottle of bleach. She smoothed back a piece of hair that had fallen into her face, braced herself and reached for the door to the basement.
Of all sensory assaults, Emily most detested strong smells. She could not abide glaring lights, overly loud music, those cars with their woofers turned up so that you could feel the bass of their music in the small of your back, people who stood too close and couldn’t modulate their voices. Eighteen inches of personal space, it was only fair. All of the senses, it was true, had limits. Beyond that limit, the input became offensive, uncomfortable. But above all, offensive smells were untenable.
As she stepped down the stairs to the basement, the smell accosted her. It seemed as though it reached through her nasal passages all the way into the back of her head. What had seemed sour in the air was cloyingly sweet as she descended into it, and dense, a confusing wave of sensations. On its tail was undeniable rot, a pungent smell with the cider of body odor. It was not healthy.
She held her breath as she passed through the basement, stepping past all of the shelves and their tidy Tupperwares. She didn’t need to look to know that the bin marked “Baby” still sat on the shelf among all the other random bins. It made her cringe to remember it. Simon had packed it shortly after Caleb died, and only once in all the years since had she allowed herself into the basement to look at its contents. She’d been pregnant with Jamie at the time, and something—must have been hormones, she decided later—made her want to peek at Caleb’s things again. But how miserable it had been, prying off the lid, catching sight of a few clothes she had once dressed him in and stuffed toys that had once nestled in his crib. There was his birth certificate with its tiny inked footprints, and there, a short rubber-banded pile of the few photos they’d managed to take in six weeks. She had thumbed through the pictures, Caleb in her arms at the hospital, and then in Simon’s arms. She realized she no longer recognized Caleb’s face, which flooded her with guilt. Gone! She couldn’t even find in his features whatever she’d once found reminiscent of Aileen. Something made her pick up a little onesie jumpsuit and sniff it to see if a familiar baby scent was still in the threads. It didn’t smell like anything, but suddenly—she remembered this distinctly—there was the kick in her belly, a resounding, insistent thump, as if the one on the way would not let itself be overlooked. She pressed her hand against the kick to quell it. Truly there was no point in rummaging through the past. Even the baby in her belly was telling her: It was her duty to move on with life. She had snapped the lid back in place and had never poked into the box again.
Now she did not look at the shelves, moving quickly past them. All at once she noticed the large, tarp-covered mounds lined against the far wall. One hand over her mouth and nose, she stood in front of the caterpillar-shaped mass. Lifting one corner of the drop cloth, she saw what looked like a wine barrel, round, bulbous, slatted, rose-colored wood. She lifted the cloth a little further, and she could see three of them. Another Simon adventure, she recognized immediately. Mere history could inform her, whatever the smell was, that she had encountered another one of his egregious hobbies gone awry. She was offended by the smell but the surprise angered her. She unlocked the door to the medical practice and walked into his office.
Simon was in the hallway, a syringe in his hand as he prepared a tray set up with several injections. There were still patients in the office, and he was wearing his white coat. Gabi stood next to him in scrubs and purple gloves as he adjusted the syringes.
“Hey!” His eyes were shining, a look as tender and energized as sex’s afterglow. “You’re back. You’re not going to believe—it’s amazing—there aren’t even words to describe what we’re seeing.”
Between clenched teeth, she said, “What’s rotting in our basement?”
“Oh, that. We were supposed to get everything started first. Fermenting, and all. Before you found out. They came all the way from Italy, actually, but I haven’t had time.”
“It reeks.”
He peeled off the latex gloves. They made a quick, dismissive snap. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s coming up through the floor. All of upstairs.”
“It’s only grapes, and they’re only a little outdated, and we can always order more. Emily, the most incredible thing’s happened—”
“It makes me want to gag.”
“C’mon, it’s not so strong. They came a little while ago, and I haven’t been able to get to them.”
“I don’t understand how you could do this to our house. It’s like being mauled.” Emily looked at Gabi, demanding corroboration. “How can you stand it?”
“We’re just busy,” Simon said. Was that a sheepish look on his face? “Emily, you’d never believe it. We’re doing it. We’ve got a treatment. It’s working.”
“We done five this week,” Gabi chimed in. “Two today. Two yesterday. One on Tuesday.”
Emily looked into the waiting room. The two patients sitting near the koi pond each looked about as miserable as two human beings could look. One was an older woman with a walker, her face pinched. At her side sat a younger woman, possibly her daughter, who kept looking down the hallway with anticipation. Every few seconds the older woman emitted a soft moan, and the younger woman turned and adjusted something of her mother’s clothes. The other was a man in his midforties, who sat with his head bowed, looking into his lap, or maybe at his shoes, breathing slowly and deliberately like a bellows for a fire. Emily was suddenly eager to get out of the office.
Simon followed her down the hallway into his office. “Wait.” He caught her by the arm, a little too roughly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I meant to. I should have.”
“Get rid of the smell, Simon,” she said slowly, “or I can’t stay here tonight.”
“Emily, you’re not going to believe this.” He was done apologizing. His eyes sparkled with some other fire. “I’ve come across something extraordinary. Remember when we were in Florida, and you and Jamie came back—”
“I’m just asking one thing of you. One thing.”
“I can’t do anything about it right now. I have two more patients I promised to see. I’ll take care of it as soon as I’m done.”
“Smells like that stick to the furniture,” Emily said. “The
y get in the carpets. It’ll never be gone.”
“I’ll get rid of it. Don’t worry.”
Emily put her hand on the door to the basement and hesitated for a split second as she considered her options: reentering the folds of the smell or walking through the waiting room to come through the front of the house—what a choice. She buried her face in the crook of her elbow, breathing into her sleeve, and strode as quickly as she could back through the basement.
The more convinced she became of the deeply buried seeds of Simon’s unkindness, the more justified she felt about being with Will. She’d intended to pass when she was invited to present at a college seminar the following weekend in New Brunswick, New Jersey, because she was concerned her many absences might begin to raise eyebrows at work. But at home the air in the house still stank, and now Jamie was walking around refusing to look at her. Even at the breakfast table, Jamie hunched behind the cereal box, and she responded to Emily in grunts. Emily could have fretted, but something new inside her had locked into gear and hummed with self-determination. She refused to think about how she might explain herself later. She made quick arrangements to be part of the seminar at Rutgers.
The hotel was plain on the outside, concrete blocks and steel, a vestige of ’60s architecture. Her room on the fourth floor contained multiple tones of beige, as if its human inhabitants were intended to be the only spots of color. She sat and waited for Will. She had been moderately surprised that he was willing to drive all the way to New Brunswick at last-minute’s notice to meet her. She was pleased, of course, and flattered, but it also occurred to her she knew no other adult who was less busy. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. When he rapped on the door, two hours had passed, and she had dozed off on the bed. He arrived holding flowers, a bouquet of bright yarrow and proud daisies, and she almost laughed because they seemed as unsophisticated as if they’d come from a hardware store, but she also recognized that that particular pure, jubilant yellow was the kind that could save a life.
She kissed him and she held a daisy under his chin, the way children do with buttercups, pretending to study the petals’ effects. “Let’s go out to eat,” she announced.
“What about—don’t you want to be careful—weren’t you concerned about—?”
“I’m reconsidering.”
“Oh?” he said, looking not sure whether to be pleased.
She told him about the stink that crept up through the floor, the fetid grapes abandoned to their slow wasting. It had taken her a day to figure out from Simon that he was clamoring about a great breakthrough in the clinic, and that was the reason he hadn’t been able to begin making wine as he’d planned. There were three handmade barrels sitting under a tarp and there were more than four hundred pounds of grapes from somewhere in Italy, but all of it was going to rot because at the same moment he’d come across some new medicine for his patients, he said, and he had to see what would happen. Four hundred pounds of grapes! Simon had apologized she’d found out the way she had about the wine-making. He’d wanted that to be a surprise and he still had every intention of following through the next season as soon as that particular varietal came available again. He was roundly apologetic for the smell, but also he kept saying sorry he hadn’t told her about the new nurse he’d hired at the beginning of July and then had to fire—it was a gut thing, he said. He’d wanted to help her with the first step of her career, and he’d thought her youth, her inquisitiveness, would bring new energy to the office. Apologies on the backs of other apologies, and the smell of rotting fruit was still lingering in Emily’s nose.
“Also,” she said, “I’ll meet your daughter. I’d be delighted. Before she leaves.”
Will regarded her curiously.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. About me. That I’m watching and waiting. I don’t want that.” Too much caution. She could see now how all of the rationalizing, the planning, the careful evaluating was a kind of fetter. “I can be in Philly next Thursday afternoon. And I can stay over. Will that work?”
“I’ll ask her.” He nodded. “We’ll make it work.”
They went to lunch in the hotel restaurant downstairs, and they would have looked just like friends or colleagues having lunch, she thought, except for the sparkle of admiration that was constant in Will’s eyes. Then she departed to speak at the seminar, several blocks away. When she came back to the hotel room, Will was watching television, a reality show that followed a man who was trekking solo into the desert without provisions and had to eat scorched bugs and drink the evaporated condensation from urine to keep himself alive. How little she had in common with him—it was really a marvel.
“Next Thursday, with Anne,” Will announced, clicking off the set. “Drinks and dinner.”
“Drinks,” Emily corrected.
“I’m her father. I can’t not take her to dinner. We’ll go to the Franklin Inn in Center City. You’ll like it, it’s swank. Good place to introduce my girlfriend.”
She felt her heart skip. She put her bag on the desk. “I’m your girlfriend?”
“You prefer sex toy?” He reached out and pulled her down onto the bed. “Or maybe wench?”
She hesitated, wanting to make sure he was clear. “I’m not ready to tell Simon,” she stated. “He’ll be devastated.”
“You’re not ready to see the devastation is what you mean.”
He made the comment flippantly, but he was right, of course. The damage was already done. But the thought of confronting Simon sickened her. She didn’t answer. Instead, she saw Simon in her mind, the way he had paced in their bedroom like someone hyped up on caffeine. She said, “He believes he’s onto something. At work. Some big breakthrough, and he wants my help.”
She hadn’t even been listening closely to Simon, who continued to gush about connections in the limbic system and receptor specificity and endogenous chemicals, wondering whether he should be promoting the therapy with some kind of campaign. He wanted to write an article for a medical journal but he was concerned how readers would receive a series of case studies if he had too few patients involved. “I need your expertise,” he insisted.
“Campaign?” she had asked, confused. “What therapy?”
“I should give it a name, shouldn’t I? I pretty much discovered it. Sulmenamine infusion therapy. S.I.T.?” he pondered. “I don’t know, I kind of hate when they abbreviate everything. What do you think?”
Another one of his ridiculous projects? “What are you talking about? You discovered it?”
“It’s been incredible so far. This one woman, Maxi Bailey”—he was talking so loudly she thought he might wake Jamie down the hall—“calls me a miracle worker. A month ago, she couldn’t get off her couch because her back was killing her. Might’ve too, because she was practically suicidal. Two rounds of therapy with me, and now, no pain.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, and she couldn’t help thinking how distant she felt from him, how they seemed to have no language in common anymore. She felt a heaviness in her stomach knowing that changes were coming, and that there were things she needed to tell him, but she wasn’t ready to find sentences to explain them. “I think I’m really onto something, Emily.” And Ted had said the mechanism was plausible (Ted Ebberly knows about this?), but wouldn’t be able to conduct laboratory experiments for a while. But the hard science wasn’t essential because the proof was in the pudding and now patients were calling him about the treatment, asking whether it was available, how soon they—or their husbands, or their mothers, or their friends—could make an appointment.
“I want to make sure the information that’s out there is controlled, though,” Simon went on. “I don’t want people thinking that I’m compounding a drug in the basement, like I have some crystal meth factory down there. Can you imagine?” And he wanted to make sure that patients knew that it was still in experimental stages. He couldn’t charge for the experimental treatment because he couldn’t promise it as a cure. “Can’t promise, of course, but
I want people to know that I believe in it. Because I do. I think it’s the most promising thing that’s come along in years,” he said. “For people who are truly suffering, this could be the medical breakthrough of our times.” She knew she was supposed to provide some kind of enthusiastic reaction, that he was waiting for wifely support, but she had just stared at him, unable to say a thing.
Will looked amazed as she described it all. He had unbuttoned her blouse, and he paused in his nibbling along the ridge of her shoulder to ask, “What’s the discovery? Is he for real?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I assume it’s real. He’s not someone who’d knowingly hurt people. He’s very serious about his patients. They really look up to him.”
“How’d he find it?”
“Who knows.”
“Are you going to help him promote it?” Will asked with such sincerity she had to smile. “Because I don’t mind. If you need time. I promise to do everything I can not to be jealous.”
“You? Jealous?” The idea delighted her. She rolled over on top of him, wrestling him to his back as she lost herself in the kisses she was giving.
She’d seen his daughters in pictures. One photo he’d showed her was tucked in a fold of his wallet and the other sat alone in a silver frame on the mantel of his new apartment. The framed photograph portrayed an entire group of maybe twelve people sitting on, and standing behind, a couch, and all the faces were small, so it was hard to discern anything about them. The one who was Rachel, she could tell, looked somewhat like him, the shape of her chin and her mouth, though her hair was wavy. Anne, who was younger, was darker, more pointed.
“Tiny change of plans,” Will said, when he picked Emily up the following week after her meeting with foundation trustees at a building on Market Street. It was dark, and she slipped into the front seat of his little Tercel. She’d taken the train straight from D.C., not even looking out the window as she passed the cityscape of Baltimore on the northbound trip. The gestures for the meeting were rote; she knew that world by heart. But for the rest of that Thursday night—she was nervous for the first time in what seemed like years.
