I'm Glad About You

by Theresa Rebeck

  “I meant to tell you, your friend Alison called.” This was tossed over her shoulder as Van fetched dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets.

  “Alison called?” Kyle’s voice took on a quiver, the slightest of strains. I knew it, Van thought. The girls, at the table, were coloring wildly. They didn’t even look up.

  “She’s in town, her mom is in the hospital, she was having some problem. I’m not sure . . . Maggie, come on, sweetie, we’re setting the table now.”

  “What did she say?” Kyle asked steadily. “Did she want me to call her?”

  Honestly, he was trying so hard to be cool.

  “I think she did.”

  For the next three hours everyone pretended that everything was normal. Kyle helped feed the girls, then he and Van had dinner, then the baby woke up, and while Van fed him, Kyle did the dishes, and then he took the girls upstairs and gave them a bath, and then he changed the baby and rocked him while Van put the girls to bed. And then, while she took the baby back for his nine o’clock feeding, she looked up at Kyle and smiled with a friendly, helpful encouragement.

  “Aren’t you going to call Alison?” she asked. “She sounded like she really needed to talk to you, about her mom. I think she said she was ill.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “Of course! Kyle. I think that you should be allowed to talk to your ex-girlfriend on the phone.” She smiled at him, as if he were being silly. How she was pulling this off, she didn’t know, but it felt good, even virtuous.

  “Did she leave a number?”

  “Actually, she didn’t,” Van acknowledged. “You probably should try her parents’ house.”

  Kyle nodded and reached for the phone by the side of the bed. Yes, okay, you’re going to do it in front of me so you can prove that you don’t have anything to hide, Van thought. But you still know the phone number by heart.

  Kyle waited patiently, listening to the burr of the phone ring across town. His wife was sitting on the bed, breastfeeding their baby; his daughters were sleeping down the hall. Alison had called him. He could call her back.

  “Hello,” she said. In high school, in that household of millions, she always had seemed to be the one to pick up the phone.

  “Alison, yes, hello,” he said. “Hi, it’s Kyle.”

  “Kyle,” she said. “Hello, Kyle.”

  They could still say hello to each other. The past and the present started to merge.

  “I heard you called, that your mother was ill?” he said. “How is she doing?”

  “She died,” said Alison.

  twenty-seven

  YOU COULDN’T BLAME KYLE. He was such a relentlessly decent guy, he had come to the funeral. There he was, at the back of the church, braving his way all the way up to the side of the coffin to say good-bye, expressing his condolences to her thousands of relatives. She managed to avoid talking to him at the visitation and the Mass—there was a lot going on, after all—but when he showed up at the graveside, she knew she wasn’t going to get out of this. And she wanted to get out of it. She didn’t want to talk to him, she really didn’t; having a talk with Kyle at this point in time wasn’t going to help anybody. But there he was.

  He was still so good looking. And sad. Why would a successful doctor with three beautiful children look so sad? Well, it was a funeral, so everyone looked pretty sad. Except for Alison, who was just pissed off. They had all somehow managed to move through the shock of Rose’s sudden illness and death with courage and humility, but Alison was the one who had been there, that long horrible day, and she still hadn’t released the terrible sense that more could have been done, that people weren’t paying attention, mistakes were being made not because those doctors and nurses were incompetent, but because they didn’t understand that Rose was young, it wasn’t time for her to die.

  Of course by now her death was inevitable, that was all that anyone could see. You couldn’t go back in time and say, put her on a different antibiotic, that infection should have been brought under control faster. Or, the surgery didn’t have to be done on an emergency basis, it released too much bacteria into the body from the cutting, which is why the sepsis set in, if they had waited they could have prepared her, made sure her intestines were empty. Or, maybe they could have been more cautious in how much of the intestine they took out. There was too little prep time and yes of course the doctor didn’t want to leave dead tissue in there but taking out as much as he did undermined her whole system. If they had just waited a day.

  That last bit she couldn’t say out loud because Megan had been there, she was the one who had told Rose she should go ahead with this. It wasn’t Megan’s fault, there was no way she could have known that there were other ways to approach this situation and Mom might not be dead now. And no one of course would even whisper that Alison hadn’t been proactive enough, she should have gotten more attention faster from the hospital staff and maybe she could have stopped Mom’s whole system from going into arrest. No one would ever ever suggest the hospital had been incompetent and Alison hadn’t done enough. People would do that in New York. In Cincinnati it would be rude, to accuse a hospital of laziness or ineptitude or anything, those people worked hard, death is a part of life, you accept that and don’t blame anybody. But Alison felt the full weight of it. Her mother was dead, and nobody had really done anything to stop it. It was her fault. She couldn’t get them to save her. And now there they were, on a cool wet day, standing around a hole in the ground, listening to yet another priest read exhausted verses out of the Bible, reassuring them that Rose’s spirit had drifted upward and crossed some sea and now was sitting at the right hand of God.

  “It’s not your fault,” Megan informed her.

  “I know,” Alison said.

  “Nobody thinks it’s your fault.”

  “She’s dead, though, she died and now she’s dead and I didn’t stop it.”

  “Alison.” Everybody knew she thought it was her fault and it gave them an excuse, for once, to stop teasing her and to just take care of her. Jeff, back from Hong Kong with a Chinese wife, cornered her in the kitchen and explained in no uncertain terms that the hospital did what it could but that Rose’s colon had been compromised far too thoroughly and far too quickly, even before Alison arrived. Andrew hugged her in passing and handed her a beer. Lianne ignored her, which was as close as she could get to asking how she was doing. Paul smiled at her sadly and asked if she wanted to ride to the funeral in his car.

  And now here they were, a sea of Moores, everywhere the eye could see. Dad up front, looking completely lost. “I don’t know what he’s going to do without her.” Megan sighed.

  “I could never tell what he did with her,” Alison observed. “Even when he was retired he was never there.”

  “Well, he’s going to miss her now,” Megan said.

  “We all will,” said Alison, the tears starting up again. It had been a terrible, long week. “I can’t stop crying,” she muttered. “I feel like I’ve been crying for a week.”

  “It’s okay, Alison, at least you were there,” said Megan. “Maybe you have to cry for all of us.”

  Maybe that’s what artists did; maybe they cried for everybody who couldn’t. Certainly the rest of her family had fallen into a sort of dull sobriety. Her father up front, unable to move. Paul endlessly making sure that everyone had a ride. Jeff almost single-mindedly focused on his Chinese wife. And now, in the middle of this, there was Kyle.

  “Don’t you think you should talk to him?” Megan said. “It’s nice that he came.”

  Was it nice that Kyle came? Alison wasn’t so sure. But she really didn’t need much of a push. She corralled her grief, and drifted through the mourners who were now drifting away. He looked up. He knew she was there.

  “Hey, Kyle.”

  “Hey,” he said. His greeting was husky, heartfelt and simple, and tragically, you could see he was better looking than ever, once you were within five or six feet of him. His hair had gott
en darker, which made those gray eyes even more startling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She knew he was talking about her mother, but for a moment she allowed the sentiment to float over her. Sorry we never got it together, sorry I let you go so easily, sorry sorry.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of a big shock,” she said. “She wasn’t even sick, so nobody, you know. Nobody thought this could happen.”

  “I wish there was something I could have done,” he said. This was actually so aggravating it was better. Better to be on antagonistic footing. It made more sense, honestly, to just stick with the facts, and to express some of what she had been feeling for five days, while everyone mourned the fact that there was “nothing to be done.”

  “I wish that too. When I called you I was really in the soup. Those stupid hospitals, they act like everybody’s just going to die anyway, so what’s the point. I could have used some help, because she didn’t, actually. She didn’t have to die. She didn’t.” Okay, crying had not been in her plan, but what are you going to do. Her mother was dead.

  “It was her time.”

  Did he actually say that? “It wasn’t her time,” she informed him. “It, there were a lot of things that were—that’s why I called you, because I couldn’t get anyone at the hospital to help me. I tried, but I, and no one would help me.” Her face was a mess now, she knew it. She had really been careful with her makeup, too; she wanted to look beautiful for Mom, so she had also gone out and bought the chicest black dress she could find in Cincinnati. And now her makeup was running all over and as far as she could tell, there was snot dripping down her face, and of course not a Kleenex in sight. Her utter failure to be a good daughter to Rose hung over her like a curse.

  Kyle fortunately had a handkerchief, which he handed over silently while she sobbed. She blew her nose like a ten-year-old, and tried to use the corners to blot the mascara carefully but without a mirror it was impossible to tell if this operation was even remotely successful.

  The funeral party was nearly gone and all that was left was a bewildered little wave of people in black trudging to their cars. Kyle glanced behind her, taking note of the retreating mourners. She considered handing his handkerchief back to him, but that would surely be the end of the whole conversation and she didn’t want to let him go yet. There he was, right in front of her. He was still there. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened, the strangeness of her journey, the years of floating in the demimonde, the hurtling upward to a place where she was no one, and what it felt like to be no one, to be a no one who everyone could see, the collapse of the dreams that she had never dreamed for herself, the recognition that she had betrayed herself more than anyone, the hunger to be whole and at peace. She wanted to take his hand and go to his car with him, drive back to Mom and Dad’s, sit around the family room with Andrew and Megan and Jeff and even Lianne, snuggle under his shoulder, feel the earth firm under her feet.

  “But by the time you called, she was gone,” Kyle said.

  It was so incongruous and strange it took her a moment; she didn’t know what he was talking about. He continued, an urgency growing in his explanation. “I called you back as soon as I got your call. Well, a couple hours, it did take me a few hours.” She could see that those few hours smote him—he had probably needed those few hours to get up the nerve to call her, and he felt bad about it. But what he was saying other than that didn’t make sense. “I should have called back immediately, I’m sorry about that,” he said, “but Van didn’t tell me there was any urgency. And your mother was already gone, wasn’t she? She must have been gone, even, when you called.”

  “I called—I called—” Alison started. The words were on her lips I called five days ago. I actually did call when you could have done something. I told your wife. You never called back. My mother was dying, and your wife didn’t give you the message.

  The puzzlement in his face stopped her. And then something else, a breath of understanding, as he figured it out for himself. He flushed. And she rushed in to save him.

  “I’m just upset,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything. I know you did what you could.”

  “When did you call?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He was struggling, she could see, to put that genie back in the bottle. “I’m just upset, Kyle, seriously. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I really didn’t.”

  He nodded, looked away. After a moment, there was nothing else to do but plunge ahead. “You think they made mistakes, at the hospital?” he asked.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it, Kyle. It won’t bring her back.”

  “I would hate to think that.” He sounded so lonely; he always had. It was so easy for him to fall into himself; she’d always had to work so hard to get him to stay in the world. He hid in his head, and it wasn’t good for him, he was always so much happier when she would coax him out of there. He still has a beautiful soul, she thought, there’s so much light in him. She wondered if the two of them would have been less lonely together.

  “I heard you had another baby! Congratulations.”

  “Yes, a boy,” he said. “Gabe.”

  “Gabe. That’s a great name,” she said. A flush of pride passed over his face. It was charming, a whisper of youth and vulnerability. She remembered the moment she first saw him, in a parking lot of some dumb football game.

  “I heard you were in a big movie, some Hollywood blockbuster,” he offered.

  “Oh, the movie kind of fizzled. I mean, I did it, it was cool, it was kind of a nightmare—but parts of it were cool,” she admitted.

  “Are you going to do any more Chekhov? Maybe Shakespeare?” He smiled at her, remembering their last fight. She remembered the hours she spent practicing scenes for high school plays, lying in his arms, memorizing the lines. Beatrice in Much Ado. Helena in Midsummer, those were her parts, the feisty funny ones. Her resolve started to flag. Don’t fall in love with the past, she thought. You don’t live there. Now is when you live.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a brilliant actress.”

  Being brilliant doesn’t matter, she thought. What she said was, “How’s the baby business?”

  “Fine, fine,” he said.

  “You’ll start that clinic someday,” she said. “Maybe when your kids are bigger.”

  “Maybe.”

  Another silence. Perhaps they were finished, finally. She looked down, took a breath, thinking about saying good-bye.

  “Are you happy?” Kyle asked. He seemed to really want to know the answer to that one. He seemed to hope that she was.

  “Well,” she said. And then, “My mother just died.”

  “She’s with God now,” he told her, as a comfort.

  “Yeah, that’s what the priest said, at the funeral.”

  “Do you not—believe that?”

  “It’s what she believed, so I guess I will believe it for her,” Alison replied, careful.

  “I will too.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled at him for a moment. “You know what, Kyle?” she said. “I’m glad about you.”

  He blinked. Appeared before her. Not so lost that she couldn’t still find him in there.

  “I’m glad about you too,” he said.

  “I’ll see you, okay?” she added, although she knew that she would not. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek, and felt grateful that he still felt like himself. As he turned and walked away from her, she dreamed for him a journey to South America, mountain villages, people in need. She dreamed of the lives he would save, and the gratitude of a simpler tribe who might call forth his best self. She dreamed children who would jump up and down with glee upon his return from his adventures, and a son who would grow into a partner for him, someone he could teach to be a good man, and in so doing become the better man he had always dreamed of being.

  She dreamed for herself a play in a small theater, something dark and original, which would call upon her forgotten talents
and demand that she make them real. She dreamed a Shakespearean stage, plain and promising, a heroine of wit and courage, someone who demanded height. Rosalind, she thought. I wonder if Ryan knows anybody who would see me for Rosalind. She dreamed of constructing entire worlds out of thin air, planets where girls were allowed to eat, and men weren’t driven by power.

  When she looked up, Kyle was gone. There were a few workmen hovering nearby waiting for her to finish her prayers, or her farewells. They were already bored with how long this was taking. She really needed to go. There would be a giant feast back at Mom and Dad’s, lots of food with mayonnaise in it, brothers and sisters who were worn down and punchy in their grief, others too, good-natured neighbors and relatives who would express their sorrow and then try to pump her for stories about show business. She would be nice to them all, and diplomatic; she wouldn’t tell the whole story, which no one would believe anyway. And then she would sneak off into one of the back bedrooms, call Ryan and let him know that in a few days she would be back, available for auditions by the end of next week. Maybe she’d call Seth and make him have a drink with her; they could drive out to Montauk and howl at the moon. Make out in his backseat. Life had to be more fun than being a movie star made it out to be.

  How old am I? she wondered. For a moment, she couldn’t quite remember. The last time she’d talked to Ryan, there was some discussion of shaving a few years off. You turn thirty, no one wants to know about it. What did it matter? Surely starting over was something that life would insist on, one time or another. She dug into her bag for the keys to her rental car. In spite of everything, the world was still new.

  acknowledgments

  For the support of my wonderful agent Loretta Barrett, I thank the stars. This novel could not have been written without her unfailing confidence in it and me. When she succumbed to cancer, Nick Mullendore, her second in command, stepped forward and his wisdom and coolheaded nerve have informed all aspects of this book. Thanks to him and also to Laura Van Wormer for reminding me not to give up five minutes before the miracle.