Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  “You said this was just the beginning,” Anna said. “You were muttering something about her recovery.”

  He hadn’t, he thought. He wasn’t one to make those assumptions, not without facts, proof. His lips were quivering. They were hard to feel.

  Suddenly Anna moved to open the door, then turned to look right at him and said, “You think because she’s Becky, it won’t be hard for her?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You think she’s just going to get back to her life?” She’d started crying. “We don’t even know how bad it is. What if she can’t speak? Write her name?”

  “That’s enough,” Murray said, feeling his father’s voice rise in him, his father averting his gaze.

  “What if she has to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair?”

  “I said that’s enough!”

  “I’ve seen her break,” she said.

  “What?” He tried to block him out again, his father slamming the door, his father leaving while his mother had cried about the broken glass, the beads of milk he’d helped her clean.

  “I’ve seen her stooped over off the trail before a race, vomiting.” Anna had become hysterical. “I always meet her at the end too. Did you know that? She always asks me to meet her. But she told me not to tell anyone. Made me swear.”

  A fighter risked everything. Murray had not needed his father to tell him that: his own college coach had. Murray had raced with the flu before, shingles. He’d thrown up dozens of times, more than that, had been there when his teammates did too.

  Anna turned away, small, clear beads still steady along the window. “You’re obsessed with her,” she said. “We all know it. We—”

  He reached for her arm, but she was already outside in the pouring rain. She sank into a puddle. He heard the water splash, heard her whimper.

  “Be careful.” He’d restrained himself from shouting.

  She wobbled over to the curb and fell. She barely regained herself. Mud had splattered her white-and-blue jacket. He set the car in park, got out; he tried to steady her, but she kept saying she wanted to be left alone. She called him insane, her wet hair plastered scarlet, eyes blinking through the water. Even raised her arm to push him away like Nancy had done when she’d wanted him to feel. She’d been in her bathrobe that day, too, the anniversary of, he couldn’t finish the thought, only Nancy’s words consumed that space: Feel something! she’d practically screamed.

  Now Murray had fallen and scraped his hands. He called to her, “Anna,” urging her back. But it was too late. She’d closed the door to Silliman.

  Anna had left her bag in the car, the melted ice an expanding splotch on the seat. There’d been the ice chips Murray brought Nancy in the delivery room—and later, the ice packs she’d pressed to her chest, leaning over the hot bath water, suspending her breasts over it, the absence of his hand on her back, steadying her.

  The door to Silliman was locked, he repeated in his mind. Key card only.

  FOURTEEN

  One Friday in October when Nancy was living with Richard—already four years of being together—she’d made plans to surprise him that night with an early birthday dinner for his fiftieth. She was standing in Shaw’s Supermarket, examining the shapes of sweet potatoes. She ran her fingers over their divots, the coarse sprouts that marked eyes.

  Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. It took time to register the woman dressed in blue jeans and a peach sweater. Her hair was blonder than she remembered, and she had the same sinewy limbs.

  “Hi, Sarah,” Nancy said, putting the potatoes back. Sarah must have been twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. Her cart held a car seat with a child inside. Sarah was still so young.

  “This is Taylor,” Sarah said.

  A soft sheen covered the baby’s head, just as Sarah must have looked as a child. Nancy had kept hoping Jean’s hair might show some ginger, or even turn a deeper red, but she’d maintained Murray’s blonde until the end. It still devastated Nancy to never know how Jean might have looked or acted at one year.

  “You know, I saw you,” Sarah said. “And I thought, What are the odds? We actually live in Greenwich now but decided to visit a friend today. Didn’t we?” Sarah smiled and stroked the baby’s ear. Nancy wasn’t sure whether Taylor was a boy or girl, and she didn’t ask. She guessed thirteen, maybe fourteen months, old enough to walk—the baby had sneakers on. Nancy’s lips trembled. She sucked in her cheeks to make saliva.

  “My friend just started her second year at the law school.” Sarah was looking at the fresh fruit and vegetables crowding the car seat in the middle of the cart. The baby kicked its legs. “She’s been on a peanut butter diet. I’m restocking the essentials.”

  The cart didn’t seem safe. A jar of food, something even heavier, might topple on her child.

  “I’m sure your friend appreciates it,” Nancy said, cringing at the forced sound of her voice. She tried to distract herself by thinking of what she still needed for Richard’s birthday, but there was the silence to fill. “You look great,” she managed. “And congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” Sarah’s skin was more lustrous than Nancy remembered it. She’d left Murray when Sarah was a junior. Just after that, she’d seen a photograph of Sarah in the paper during the fall cross-country season. In the photo, Sarah’s tight ponytail accented her hollow cheeks, her small, tight eyes—the article had been printed before Sarah’s cycle of injuries began her senior year, the multiple stress fractures Nancy had heard about from someone in her office who followed sports—Sarah unable to continue running after college like she knew Murray had been planning for.

  “What else have you been up to?” Nancy asked, trying to sound curious. “Are you working?” She felt her eyes twitch as she looked down at her cart, finding it empty; she hadn’t even chosen the potatoes yet.

  “I’m really . . . lucky.” Sarah hesitated. “My husband Paul and I agreed that it makes most sense for me to stay at home.”

  The last time Nancy had seen Sarah in person was at an awards banquet, eleven months after Jean; she thought of how Sarah had sat warming her hands by a glass candle at the center of the table, her shoulders hunched as Murray lauded her times, their successes, before everyone, and Nancy had wanted to run out, make a scene right there, show everyone how incapable her husband was of grieving.

  “How are you?” Sarah asked, though she seemed distracted, her eyes focused on something else, someone else maybe, in the store.

  “I’m still at the library.” Nancy felt herself rub the empty space where her ring had been. “Murray and I—”

  “Oh,” Sarah said. “I didn’t realize.” Sarah’s voice almost sounded cold, but Nancy wondered if she was reading into things, projecting that onto her.

  Nancy changed the topic, because most people waited for that, for the conversation to circle back to the present, to what was positive and life-affirming. “Taylor is beautiful,” she said, but uttering those words made Nancy’s throat tighten. She thought of tummy time, Jean straining to lift up her head, smiling. She and Murray had started at five minutes, when Jean was still a newborn, then worked their way to thirty, forty-five, gradually reaching two hours by Jean’s seventh month—she and Murray had been so proud, so elated the first time Jean sat up, held her head up, entirely on her own.

  Sarah had said something else, something about the park or what else she’d planned to do with her friend over the weekend, but all Nancy could focus on were Taylor’s shoes, the mini Converses the baby wore.

  Jean would have just started first grade this year, old enough to run down the aisles, picking out her favorite cereal. Nancy tried to breathe, to fill her lungs with air.

  “I haven’t spoken to Murray. Not for a while,” Sarah said suddenly, tugging Taylor’s shoe. And Taylor smiled, kicking two little feet. “But I guess send my hello.”

  “No, I don’t—” Nancy felt herself snap. “I don’t talk to him.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. She looked at
her watch. “I better get back,” she said. “My friend will be home soon. It was nice running into you.”

  Nancy nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Take care.”

  She could not risk seeing this woman again at checkout, so she went to the express lane after she’d gathered a bare minimum of items.

  Was it Nancy, or had Sarah been acting strangely? As she unloaded her cart, she decided she was reading into things again, always looking for something wrong, something off. Because she was uncomfortable making daily conversation, all the inane things she said to make others feel comfortable, safe from the words of what she’d lost; she allowed them that delusion, that forgetting.

  Just outside, as she was returning her cart, holding back tears, she noticed a barrel full of pumpkins and gourds. Nancy unconsciously walked toward them. She reached in and ran her fingers over the bumps of a gourd, one lichen green and white speckled. Then she lifted a tiny pumpkin, one she could set on the table in the foyer, or the dining room table, but both were crowded with mail she hadn’t answered, bills she hadn’t totaled. She put them back and reached for a larger pumpkin and held it to her chest. She felt her heart, first dim, then heavy, throbbing.

  After Jean, Nancy’s breasts had become too full to sustain. For months, she’d had to pump them to relieve tiny amounts of pressure. Just enough so that gradually they’d stop producing milk. She’d hid leakages with extra-large cardigans, clutching them tight in her cold, overly air-conditioned office. She’d wept nearly every day in the bathroom, over aching muscles and joints, this image of Jean pressed close, her suckling sounds, fist balled around her pinky. She’d suppressed cries each time someone entered the next stall. Lingering over the sound of the latch securing itself, she had waited for the rumble of toilet paper from its roll, the kind one inevitably had to keep tugging at, because the paper, too thin, always tore easily. There was never enough.

  Now, moisture clung to the air, and farther down the parking lot, she watched an attendant return an empty cart.

  She listened to its wheels roll, its empty clamoring.

  Later, and already two hours behind schedule, Nancy peeled potatoes, and when Richard walked in from work, she said nothing of the encounter. She let him go on about the essay he’d finished and his plans for submission. Words dampened by the rapid clinking of her peeler. He continued over running water, after she’d turned the knob to full blast to rinse her hands.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Plan sounds good,” she said.

  “I almost forgot,” he said, looping arms around her belly. “Strawberries for dessert.”

  “You went to the grocery store too?”

  “No, passed a stand on my way home from work.”

  “They can’t be local.”

  “They were cheap,” he said. He was growing a beard again, after she’d finally convinced him to shave it.

  “I guess I can’t argue with fruit.” Nancy smiled dimly at Richard now that he’d squeezed in beside her, kissing her neck. As he rinsed strawberries, she wondered, as she sometimes did, on bad days—like this one—about questionable bacteria, slips during her pregnancy. A picnic on the campus green with Murray one Sunday in May. He’d bought a container of nonorganic grapes. Had hand-fed them to her, unwashed.

  Nancy still made lists in her head of all the times they could have been more careful—Murray especially. He was a coach; wasn’t he supposed to plan ahead? Prevent injuries?

  Painting the nursery. She thought of how she hadn’t worn a face mask that afternoon. She’d stayed away from the toxins, but still, Murray could have thought of that—the mask she could have worn for those hours—and keeping the door closed; had it been closed as they waited between coats, or had they kept the door open to ventilate, to speed up the process?

  Nancy’s hands shook as she filled a pot with water to boil the potatoes. The chicken, she reminded herself, had another ten minutes in the oven.

  “This weekend I thought we should go to the movies,” Richard said. “I’m not working Saturday night.” He smiled, waiting for her to acknowledge his birthday tomorrow. But she couldn’t, not yet—the dinner, the effort she was putting in—she hoped it was clear.

  “Anything you want to see?” he persisted.

  Richard was across from her now, gripping the edges of their small kitchen table spread with today’s newspaper. Sarah’s cart had contained at least ten jars of pureed apricot, she remembered, and several others: peas, applesauce.

  Nancy told Richard she wanted to see the sports section. When he didn’t hear her, she leaned over him, flipping pages to find it.

  “Where is it?”

  “Relax,” he said, cupping her clenched hand. “It’s probably on my desk. I’ll get it for you—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, counting silently to ten. Katherine’s formula for controlling her reactions, for letting air into the panic room.

  She began wiping the sink of potato skins stuck to its edges and reorganized the condiments in the refrigerator, which Richard was always messing up from his addiction to whipped cream, spraying it directly into his mouth in the middle of the night; sometimes the sound woke her up, and her heart quickened, wondering if the dishwasher had started on its own—but no, she’d realize, he wasn’t beside her in bed or in the bathroom. He was flooding his mouth with sugar.

  When they’d first started seeing each other, she’d liked this about Richard best, his readiness to indulge in pleasures Murray wouldn’t. Richard used to take her out for ice cream often, and when they’d gone to New London that day, she’d thought they’d driven out far enough not to be seen. Somehow she had forgotten Murray’s habit of taking his top runners to the trails around Connecticut College for summer training. And now that would be Murray’s last memory of her, this image of her casually eating ice cream with a French professor, as if she’d ceased to grieve. He had no way of knowing it was the oppositeness that Richard had always represented for her that let her compartmentalize, let her escape temporarily.

  She couldn’t admit that to him—not after he told her what he’d seen when she got home. You were in the car with Sarah, weren’t you? She’d yelled it through the kitchen, refusing to answer his questions, calm and still as he always was, a fact that had enraged her more. She had run out the front door and walked the whole way to town, waiting for Richard at the diner to pick her up there. She and Murray never spoke of it again, not as she packed up her things the next week and clung to her side of the story—Murray had started his affair first—all through the months that led to a settlement.

  Sarah would have seen it, too, she thought, her August ice cream cone, and that was why Sarah had acted so strangely in the grocery store. Sarah had seen the end of everything.

  The water had begun to boil, so Nancy lowered the temperature and added the potatoes. She breathed steam, her favorite part about cooking, the only part that relaxed her.

  “So what movie?” His finger poised over a listing for the one he wanted to see, his asking a mere formality. The kind he liked were always Sundance or Cannes finalists at the Criterion Theater on Temple Street.

  They never used to plan weekends in advance. It used to be about surprise, secrets. If Murray asked who was on the phone, she’d say it was a coworker about a project.

  “How about this one? A documentary on the Occupation. You never mind subtitles.”

  “Sounds fine.” Nancy chose to speak softly. She slipped on a red oven mitt, half of it scorched from a small kitchen fire in college.

  It was Richard’s birthday tomorrow. Couldn’t she just indulge him that? She could have at least remembered candles at the grocery store, a mix for his favorite chocolate cake.

  “Do you want to read the review?”

  “I trust your judgment.” She removed the chicken breasts from the oven and cut into one, finding it pink, slick with life. “Another ten,” she said.

  Eight months after they lost Jean, Murray started a habit of watch
ing form videos of Sarah in his home office for hours on end. Sometimes late into the night, rewinding and rewatching. He drew diagrams and ate Ritz crackers. Sarah had just started her freshman cross-country season; Nancy assumed it was porn for him, the kind he could get away with when he wasn’t training her, wasn’t sleeping with her, as Nancy was sure he had been. A book she’d read about grief said that most men desired sex more after the loss of a child. Said it was their way of healing, but they hadn’t been able to touch each other, and Nancy had been left to believe Sarah fulfilled his needs.

  Nancy drained, patted dry, and cut the potatoes. She regretted rushing out of the store and not buying another vegetable, like green beans or broccoli. She didn’t have time to make or dress a simple spinach salad, because Richard was already lighting candles on the dining table, the one they’d purchased together last year at a garage sale. They only ate over it on rare occasions, in a small nook they’d carved out by the living room.

  The kitchen smelled of tender meat and olive oil, the dried rosemary she’d sprinkled over the breasts, which would have been a better way to cook the potatoes. She added sea salt and freshly ground pepper, diced them into quarters, and piled them into a half-moon along each plate.

  When they sat down to eat, she thanked Richard for the candles. She heard Katherine remind her: Gratitude, Nancy. It’s the hardest but most important thing to focus on. Katherine had her logging moments like these in a small journal, but this habit, like so many others, easily slipped.

  Soft candlelight flickered over the table as they began to eat. Murray never liked candles, the way you had to blow them out so abruptly—or else worry about a fire if one had been left going, long after you’d left the house, with no easy way of returning after you remembered its burning.

  “How is your work coming along?” Richard asked. The orange of a sweet potato clung to his fork, which reminded Nancy of the pumpkins in the bin at the supermarket, and she regretted not buying plain white potatoes instead—a fact that caused her eyes to linger over Richard’s fork longer—remembering that Murray had insisted she take all the dinnerware, all the things they’d bought in sets the week they’d moved to New Haven. They’d driven to the mall in Milford, and she hadn’t been able to wait to unpack it all once they were home, to find a place for each piece that would be easy enough to recall, reach for in a pinch; she had been glad for such facility with Jean at her hip, especially, stirring noodles or oatmeal. Potatoes.