Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  The man had his hand pressed into the middle of his wife’s tiny back as they exited, and Murray felt for the watch, the number at 383:13:29. He did not know how long it could run for.

  TWELVE

  July 2002, two years and seven months after Jean’s death, Nancy woke to the hum of Richard’s air-conditioning unit. He lived in a small apartment, not far from the New Haven train station. Richard had already awoken; she heard him in the bathroom. He suffered from postnasal drip at night, and a good portion of his morning routine was spent clearing his throat. He sounded like some combination of a dog barking and a cat hissing. Worse was that he didn’t use a tissue to wipe any leftover phlegm from the sink.

  Nancy lit a cigarette. At least running water muffled sound. But it had to compete with the air-conditioning machine, its thirsty thrum. She knew Richard would want her to open a window, even if it wasn’t energy efficient—his favorite term for being cheap. Nancy let smoke burn her throat and circle her lungs. When she closed her eyes, she felt some tears there. For months, she’d been waking up to the same nightmare: Jean’s body slipping through her fingers, face suffocated against her breasts, head caught between crib bars. She realized her right hand, the one not holding the cigarette, rested over nipples that no longer felt tender.

  Richard opened the bathroom door.

  “You’re up,” he said. Nancy nodded and blew out more smoke. Black hair covered Richard’s head, and his large stomach testified to the Italian wine he drank weekly while editing student papers.

  “Are you hungry?” He used the end of his towel to clean an ear. Nancy turned away from him, choosing to stare into the heavy maroon curtains Richard used to cover his windows. Then he said it: “Open the window at least.”

  “The air conditioner,” she said. She felt her left wrist quiver and closed her eyes as Richard stopped the machine’s power. She lingered over the long beep, then the way it gurgled and moaned, swallowing its last breaths. When Richard pulled back the curtains, he wiped a film of dust from the sill. She watched empty particles float into filtered sunlight.

  “How about some eggs?”

  “Coffee’s plenty.” She would not look at him.

  Richard was recently hired as an assistant professor of French, and for the past nine years, he’d been trying to publish a book on poet Francis Ponge’s fixation with simple objects, such as a candle or blade of grass. At the age of forty-six, it was clear: Richard had no prospect of tenure.

  Nancy stepped out of bed naked. She asked Richard for an old T-shirt, since his were worn thin and soft and smelled freshly of laundry detergent. Richard was compulsive about going to the laundromat every week. He liked to work there sometimes. At the local one in East Rock. But that’s not where she’d first seen him after Marjorie’s party. She hadn’t seen him again until over a year after Jean died, that day he’d appeared in her office in June, still wondering about the notes on Beauford Delaney, the unpublished ones from Baldwin’s archive.

  “How about a hike?” he asked her in the kitchen. “Or we could splurge. What about Sunday brunch at the Omni? Have you been?” He ran both hands through his hair, these dark clusters around his neck.

  “Come on,” said Nancy. She was slouched over a copy of the Times Richard had left open on the table. “Of course I have. Remember my presentation on Eliot’s letters. In their ballroom. Twenty-second floor.”

  “She must have been desperate,” said Richard.

  “What?”

  “George Eliot. Pretending to write a book as a man. Would you do that?”

  “That’s not a fair question. I don’t desire to write a book.”

  “What about Jean—that’s not a gender-specific name?”

  Nancy was gripping a full cup of coffee, eyes fixed on oily black because she no longer added a dash of cream and a half tablespoon of sugar. When she lifted the mug to her lips and slammed it down again, liquid splashed the paper. “What’s wrong with you?” Weakness flooded her body as she stood up. In the bedroom, she found the pair of blue jeans she’d shown up in last night. Her brown leather purse.

  Richard came up behind her. He grabbed her wrist. “Darling,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “Help?”

  “You said you were trying to talk more openly. I thought that was what Katherine said about moving forward.”

  “Don’t mention my therapist,” she said. “Fuck you.”

  Richard, like a lot of people, Nancy’s coworkers especially, was eager for her to get over her loss, to get back to her old self, as Holly had put it at the last holiday party, a glass of bourbon in her hands. As if only knowing Jean seven months made her pain less than if she’d lost a child who could walk or speak or understand, but that was the point: Nancy would never have those memories, only the constant shadow of what could have been.

  Just last week, Richard had proposed she leave Murray and that they move to West Haven for a change of scenery. He thought it would give them at least some privacy, a break from all the rumors about the kind of wife she was, the mother she had been.

  Nancy asked for some water. She had her head tucked in her arms. Richard had been boiling eggs, steam now steadily rising from the small saucepan he used for everything. She listened to the eggshells clattering against metal. She smelled toast burning.

  Richard’s hand was pressed between her sharp shoulder blades, caressing a little square of space. “Forget it!” He waved away the smoke. “Let me grab a shirt.” He popped the toast and dropped it on a plate. “The alarm won’t go off. Let’s get out of here.”

  Neither of them had ever been to Laurel Beach in Milford, but Richard had heard good things about the clamming. Murray was in New Hampshire with the team for preseason training, so there was no chance of being seen, and Richard owned all of the necessary supplies. Richard always drove because Nancy no longer knew how to stay focused on a task. Images of Jean flooded her brain, or she’d hear the sound of her breathing, the break in breaths through the monitor, sounds she should have heard.

  Richard drove a 1984 Subaru hatchback. Today he’d cranked the windows down. Even on rainy days, Nancy wore sunglasses to hide her tears, but today, a sunny day when she needed them, she’d forgotten them at home. She tried to use her hand as a visor, but her shoulders felt heavy, her neck strained. On a shadier strip of road, she let her hand fall. She noticed red specks of nail polish. She did not remember painting her nails, or even going to a salon, letting the polish fade away. When Richard told her to stop scratching, she did not realize this either. She clamped her fists and looked out the window. They were approaching water already, sunlit and sparkling, and she worked to see that in the landscape, the realness of it, the beauty and order of nature.

  The laws in Connecticut had required an autopsy after they’d received official word at the hospital. Detectives had taken pictures of the setup of Jean’s room. Nancy had lain in their bedroom during the investigation. Murray was somewhere in the house answering questions—while she had heaved in the bedroom; she had felt herself bleeding, the phantom sensation of knives kicking her ribs.

  “I packed sandwiches,” Richard said.

  “How many times do I have to say I’m not hungry?”

  “Everyone has to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said again, this same quiet resignation in her voice he’d learned not to disrupt any further.

  In the parking area, Richard squeezed between two cars. The process was long, as he backed in and out, sputtering gravel.

  They followed a woodsy path to the beach. Nancy paused to roll up her jeans. Lately she was never in sync with the weather, often dressing for autumn in July. She carried the cooler, while Richard balanced empty buckets and clam rakes. She watched him struggle around rocks. He wondered openly about poison ivy and snakes.

  But Nancy was more concerned about her spider veins. One on her right side, started duri
ng pregnancy, had spread vehemently up her calf and into the adjoining crease of knee.

  “What do you think? Should we cool off first?” Richard had already removed his T-shirt. His belly sagged over red swimming trunks.

  “It’s so calm,” Nancy said, after fixing her eyes on the seaweed color of the water.

  “Which means yes or no?” His hand brushed her back, then moved to the edge of her earlobe. He kissed there. “I’m very sorry,” he said, aware of the anger she had held on to since breakfast.

  Unlike Murray, who’d always avoided conflict like the plague, made himself blind to her feelings. And then when she couldn’t contain those feelings anymore—by the time they exploded—she was crazy, or his favorite term: overreacting.

  A seagull squawked as it lowered toward the water, circling for fish.

  Nancy stopped and opened the cooler for an ice cube, then let it rest on her tongue. After Jean, there had been days of subsisting on ice. Now she used ice for the pure chill of it, as proof of her ability to feel—sliding an ice cube along her inner wrist while reading or in front of the television at night. She held the ice by the blue vein of her wrist, the one that beat with her pulse, and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she saw Richard holding the crusts of his peanut butter sandwich. Like a child, he never ate that part. He dropped the crusts on the beach.

  “You’ll attract a swarm,” she said. Above she saw more of them circling, like they’d been waiting behind the clouds all along.

  But Richard didn’t care about their screeches. He left the crusts and picked up the buckets and rakes and moved on, as if this was how the world worked. One left one’s ugliness behind and never thought about it again.

  Murray was that way too; the day after they came home from the hospital, he’d disassembled Jean’s crib and changing table. Scraped off with a cake knife the daisy border they’d added to her room and emptied the dishwasher of bottles and pacifiers. Jean’s ashen lips whitewashed from his brain, that last moment they’d held her at the hospital, behind the curtain of the grieving room.

  She had screamed at him—FUCK YOU—screaming to no one when she saw the room emptied before she’d had a chance to say goodbye to Jean’s things. She had cried there on the floor alone, while Murray was at work—at a meet somewhere, forgetting her—she had cried over all the boxes he’d packed up without her, one day while she’d been in the bedroom, a day she’d slept through, the days into weeks, only to find Jean’s vacant, borderless room. She’d wept on the floor, crying into the phone, until the neighbors came, Walt and Lauren Peters, to help her regain herself, because she had not known if she would—if she hadn’t called someone, the only two people near enough—she might have died there in that room.

  She and Richard were nearing the water’s edge now, each wave threatening to spread, in shallow undulations, over their footprints.

  Katherine claimed she’d entered the third stage of grief, known as bargaining: I hear you saying a lot of if-onlys and what-ifs. That’s normal . . . The important thing is that you feel less angry.

  Katherine said recovery was not possible. She would not heal; she’d only adapt, learn to live with her loss.

  When Nancy did simple things, like open a jar of mustard or type a short note at her desk, lift one foot after the other into the shower, her wrists and ankles ached. When she took showers, she often shut her eyes and wept. Before she went to bed each night, she tried reading into oblivion—romance and fantasy fiction—whatever it took for other images to fill her brain. Sometimes she drank wine with sleeping pills. And then, upon waking, she’d consider how many days she could pass in bed without losing her job or Richard. How many days without food or water. She was staring at Richard, who’d already reached a sandbar, where there was only one other person, a frail elderly man, digging.

  “Aren’t you going to help me?” Richard called. He held the two buckets, his shorts rolled up and squeezing his meaty thighs.

  Nancy sighed. She did not answer him, just kept her hand where it was, shielding her face. She felt a trickle of sweat along her forehead.

  Richard made it back to shore with a clam that was far too small, one he’d have to toss back. He rubbed his thumb over its thick gray shell and handed it to her.

  “I’m going to get the ingredients for a bake,” Richard said.

  The day they’d met again, Richard had knocked on her office door boldly. She had stopped wearing makeup, papers everywhere on her desk, but he hadn’t said anything. He’d just waited as she wrote down the box number, 7, and then the folder, 280; he’d commented on the neatness of her script over a Post-it.

  “We should try again,” Richard said, still gripping his bucket.

  Katherine said the stages of grief didn’t follow a particular order. Some days might seem like she’d reverted to an earlier stage. Katherine claimed grief wasn’t linear, that it worked in circles she wanted Nancy to imagine around her, shrouded in a soft blue light.

  Richard was wading out again. These long, heroic strides, though he wasn’t the least bit athletic. Sometimes she thought she liked this about him best—that he didn’t suggest she exercise, like Murray had, like it would have changed the outcome.

  It took time to reach Richard at the sandbar. Her pants felt heavy, but she felt she should try to sift through the weight, the resistance of the water.

  According to Katherine, there was chronological time and “Kairos” time—the years it would take for trauma to integrate itself into her body—so she could stop seeing time in terms of what could have been, but time as it was. In time, Katherine claimed, she’d learn to accept her understanding of the world, her relationships to others, her ability to relate to others, as irrevocably changed.

  One hour later, Richard dug his second clam. Nancy observed—she was closer to him now, yet he still felt far away, like she was observing him and herself at the same time. Somewhere, outside them, she watched his excitement, and his disappointment, in discovering another undersized clam, and then she watched herself, too, trying to laugh as Richard cursed the sizing ring. She felt guilty about this forced laughter, but if she made it a habit, she thought maybe she could relearn the feeling, rediscover it as spontaneous and pure.

  At least Richard always promised her a physical presence, that comfort, she thought.

  She thought of how he’d called her—after he’d stopped by her office that first time in June—he’d called to make sure everything was alright. She’d said she was fine, but he’d continued to check on her, bringing her coffee. In time, she opened up to him; she told him about Jean, and he had held her in a way Murray was unable to. Richard showed her she could still feel in her body the sensations she’d assumed had fallen dead, numb.

  When Richard returned, he asked if she thought anyone would inspect them. He handed her another tiny clam.

  “How should I know?” she said. “Just leave it.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  “It is too hot for me,” she said. “I’ll meet you back by the car whenever you’re ready.”

  “I see how it is,” he said. He used the top of his hand to wipe his forehead. How easily he sweat—and so much of it—even in bed, she always woke to his sweat, the heavy smell of it, as if he were the one having nightmares, but he claimed it was genetic. He said that in fact he slept like a baby, that he never remembered his dreams.

  Nancy followed a small boarded path after she passed the parking lot. The boards kept her bare feet from burning. It took her about twenty minutes to notice the first beach umbrella, green-and-yellow striped. She took stock of a few obsessive sunbathers, too, brown and oiled up over towels and lounge chairs.

  Nancy was never sure how she felt about sex with Richard, whether it was love—but the act of lovemaking filled her somehow. Somehow it shadowed the emptiness and let her detach. When they were first together, he’d let her cry as long as she needed to. Murray was always at work, or on the road, running.

 
She’d wanted him to come with her to therapy, had wanted to believe they could touch each other again, without the image of Jean—her rigid body, her bluing lips—inside their own bodies; any touch, even the slightest brush of their hands, felt as selfish as taking a full breath or bite of food, or finding easy sleep. The things everyone else seemed to do so easily—so uninterrupted and unfazed—and she loathed the world for that, all the people who took their children for granted, who’d neglected to love their children enough, as she felt her own parents had, because they assumed they’d leave this earth before she did.

  Nancy kept an extra set of sheets and towels hidden among sweaters at home. She washed Richard’s dusty, slept-in scent away as often as possible. She supposed it reminded her of the nightmare she wanted and didn’t want to forget. It would always be easier sleeping with a man who’d never fully understand her grief than one who should have been able to.

  It had been the last day of December, Jean’s funeral. Not so cold they’d needed thick gloves, but there’d been a light rain, too, and Nancy had not been able to separate the constant thrum of her body heaving from her own shivering.

  Murray had helped the pallbearers lower Jean’s tiny casket into the earth. Not once had he looked over at her weeping. The dull-colored grass, the gray sky, collapsing in and out of itself, so that Nancy did not know what was up, what was down, and she’d wanted to hurl herself into the hole with her child, had watched herself screaming for Murray to push her in, into the nightmare of that disembodied silence, that cold.

  Marjorie had come, along with a few other coaches, and a few of Murray’s girls—a fact that enraged her, too, this visible evidence that he’d been able to resume his training with the team afterward—that he didn’t love her or their child enough to suffer the way she did now.

  The week after the funeral, Murray had resumed his schedule. He’d wake at 4:00 or 5:00 to run, sometimes earlier, depending on how early he was meeting Sarah; he’d shower while Nancy was still in bed, and then there’d be the steady sounds of him pouring coffee and spooning cereal, the clink of metal against ceramic, hammering at Nancy’s eardrums. He went on with his rhythms while she was too weak to rise from bed or steady one foot before the other and reach the bathroom, unable to separate the difference between the hot and cold shower knobs.