Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  Dinner at the cabin is lovely and slow. It comes together in stages, on the one or two burners that work, mixing whatever we bring with whatever we find in the pantry, in cookware schlepped up the hill from other kitchens and epochs each summer, alongside mattresses and dressers sent across on the rowboat. In the late 1980s, when the fridge went on the fritz, Cait’s grandfather hired movers to bring a new model. With bungee cords and plywood they bound the white trunk to the center of the rowboat and swam alongside. The local newspaper ran a photograph the next week. The accompanying article is tacked to a beam on the door, next to a wall stickered with photographs of family and friends at various angles of repose on the decks, down at the lake, along most of the nearby trails into the mountains, and beyond that, the hundreds of square miles of federal wilderness with lakes named for islands, women, toys, birds.

  There is a photo on that wall that I always spot first. In a sea of family, branching into one decade with an aunt, across the next and into the past with a great-cousin, Cait’s lovely, young face turns easily past the camera. She is seventeen or eighteen, lounging with her siblings at a cocktail party, in a green evening gown with pearls. It is one in a series, from the same roll of film. Her mother and father are dressed to the nines. Someone is dancing out of focus, waist high. Her brother has more hair, and his cuffs are too long, but otherwise, everyone has aged well some twenty years later. My first visit to the cabin, I wondered, was this Cait’s louche period? Her years of living dangerously? A storybook world of privilege seems to curl past the edges of the photo, a whole family history eager for discovery. “Oh,” Cait said, “those were the braces years. I’m not smiling in any of the pictures.” And then I saw the pattern, nearly a jigsaw across the wall, between vistas and shaggy outcrops, next to uncles holding trays of the day’s cooked catch and nieces and nephews playing at the edge of the creek: Cait smiling, smiling, not smiling, smiling.

  *

  Would our dream’s swim have earned a spot on the wall?

  After dinner, Katie and I take sleeping bags onto the porch. The sky is bright. The air smells of smoke and dirt. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep again, and nothing encroaches them, or thinks to encroach our happy interloping: no bears, and also, no rockslides, thunderstorms, or wildfires in late season brightening the ridge. In the dream, unlike the waking life, I am not anxious there. I fear neither the cabin nor the woods nor the lake.

  The back deck is clean and lined with sleeping bags on benches. Whoever arrives at any moment can swaddle into a good and easy place to sleep, a restful spot. Across the lake, a neighbor burns paper in the stove. He walks over the next morning to say hello and to discuss the water pressure: low this time of year, at the end of the snowmelt. Or, he invites us for dinner the next night. Sometimes, the neighbors at a different cabin will rally everyone to sit on their porch and play music. I can imagine that stretch of days and our place in it: pie at the Kennedys, drinks at the Botsfords, and a potluck at Sheila Nielsen’s place. Sheila Nielsen, who owns the house in Giverny. She bought it a little less than a year after her husband, Chris, died. Fallen Leaf Lake borders Lake Tahoe to the south, near the state line, where Cait’s grandfather bought a cabin on federal land in the early 1960s. She grew up hiking the Desolation Wilderness with cousins, packing family picnics to the beach, taking the rowboat across the smaller lake, and every few years, climbing the giant rocks to jump two, maybe three stories into deep glacial waters.

  Every summer, Cait and I swim in the lake. We dig in the beach with our boys and hike to the natural spring or over the hill to drink lemonade at the store. At night, we sit by the stove, filling it with sticks and logs. We sleep under heavy blankets. And when there is bear scat on the trail, or if someone tells a story just back from a hike, I hole up in the car and drive to town. I wander the box stores for most of the day and get back early enough to see the path clearly around the lake and back to the cabin. But in the dream, I never think to fear the lake; the life I imagine is distinct from that fear and all of its distinctions. Absent a past I can think to remember, I enjoy the lake.

  And then, before I know it, I am awake again. The distinctions clarify instantly. I pull the comforter over my shoulders and wobble toward the window, where it’s too soon yet for everyone to come back. Instead, I watch a world I do not recognize slowly sync with one I remember: silent machines, an overgrown garden, mighty and ambient scavenger birds. Beyond the wall, I can see what Sheila Nielsen explained that afternoon was the Seine, gray and flat against copper hills, filled at the far end with barges coming in and out of view. Words painted across shipping containers assemble into Cyrillic—or is it Turkish?—with the inverted consonants and doubled vowels, bobbing the waterline on red and blue and gray boxes that will be off-loaded, emptied, and filled again with whatever is missing on the other side of the world.

  *

  I spend that morning in an emergency room at the public hospital near Versailles. On a television in the corner of the waiting area, two talking heads make a detailed analysis of the World Cup. The Americans have blown a sure thing against Portugal, which either does or does not help France’s chances to advance. The Americans have lost. That is the important thing.

  In video highlights, a player tucks his nose into his jersey and shakes his head. Another player celebrates. The segment repeats on the quarter hour. I watch it nine times before a clerk at the receiving desk mispronounces my name and snaps a white wristband across my forearm. My name on the wristband is printed in reverse. My case is assigned the lowest priority of patient, a mere “bleu.” The clerk points to a chart on the wall. Bleu means “wait.” Red and yellow cases arrive at the hospital in ambulances and homemade splints, or carting oxygen tanks and talking on cheap flip phones, passing my place in the queue. I smile weakly and return to my seat. I want someone to understand that I am sick, and likely to get sicker, that it is a good thing I have been so proactive and arrived to the hospital first thing, at the first sign of symptoms, at the beginning of the infection. And yet, in such terms, the facts are plain and hard to make urgent. I am whining. I am stout and lucid, making my case. My ear will survive a day’s wait. My meager bleu will not heat up and change color. I am no one’s occasion for pity.

  I wait for hours, watching the television, trying to calculate how many kilobytes of roaming data I lose each time I call Cait, check my email, or look online at the roster of the French national soccer team. Still more children from soccer matches, wheezing adults, and the obviously infirm arrive by ambulance with family members. They quickly disappear down one of the hallways. Their tags flash traffic lights on their wrists: red, yellow, red, red, yellow. Health service cards are laminated and printed on blue paper, with photographs in the top right corner. My wristband is paper and scrawled in cursive. It looks homemade, unofficial. Surely, they have no intention of actually treating me. They misspelled my name on purpose.

  Back at the hotel, Cait chases the boys across our wing of the hotel, corralling their healthiest worst-case selves, post croissants and sausages, jam smeared, first to the pool, then into the television lounge, and finally, back to the free hotel breakfast. Where is her husband, the staff must surely whisper, that he leaves a pregnant woman to work like that? My god, he must be selfish. I feel stupid and self-important as I wait at the hospital. I check my status at the desk: still bleu. I have no more time in the day to be sick. We need to check out of the hotel, get our directions, and drive to Giverny. We need the boys to nap on the trip to prevent a total meltdown that evening. Who are these doctors to delay my getting well? Untreated, eager for a fight, I snap my wristband at the desk. It has no weight. It flits in the air like a maple seed and whirls across the floor, near the feet of a nurse who is talking to a doctor.

  In the parking lot, I try to retrace my steps. I walk in circles, shaking my head at an angle, trying and failing to unclog the congestion. The clerk in the parking booth waves vaguely at a gate on the other side of the building. I cross a me
ditation garden with a walking path, large stones, hyacinths, French poppies swathing the grass in dark purples, oranges, greens, whites. I watch the rows of bumpers as I press the key, again and again, until finally a pair of headlights flash a dull yellow.

  *

  The night that Walt was born, it took exactly four minutes and eleven seconds to drive from the house to the hospital, the length of “Peace Train,” start to finish. At that hour, there were no cars on the road. The radio DJ played one Cat Stevens song right into the next. To hear “Peace Train,” one of Katie’s favorite songs, on the way to the hospital, I told myself, was clearly a blessing. Katie was clearing the roads and the classic rock airwaves to wish us well. Our boy would be born that afternoon, maybe that night, no later than the next morning. The simplest line between two points was Cat Stevens.

  In Receiving, a nurse took our driver’s licenses and handed back two stickers with photos printed in the top right corner, black and white. I could enter this part of the hospital because I was listed on Cait’s form. It wasn’t enough, the nurse stressed, to be merely the father or the husband. The next night, through a translator, the patient who shared Cait’s room kept telling a social worker that the form was wrong, things were fine, she wouldn’t press charges, her husband sometimes lost his temper, but he could come any time he liked. We could see in the digital wash of the monitor two legs, two arms, a fist even, what might very well resemble a face. The nurse suggested we walk laps around the hospital and come back in a few hours. Or, the doctor would write a prescription for Cait to sleep a few hours, at home, until things really picked up. Either way, Cait was admitted now. They would hold her room.

  We walked down one hallway, across the courtyard, past the emergency room, and into the basement. We counted stops for a toy train outside the pediatric oncology ward. Every time we entered a new wing, two security guards checked our stickers against their records on a laptop computer. The cafeteria was closed, but there was juice in the vending machines and large photos of student-athletes printed on neon blocks hanging on the far wall. “I knew him in high school,” Cait said, nodding at a muscular boy in a tank top, “he was a really good swimmer but kind of a jerk.” We backtracked to the entrance, turned down a different hallway, and found our way out a different exit. On one staircase, the sunrise split the hanging shades to make shadows on the floor. Where we crossed the shadows, our feet turned blue. Doctors and nurses changed shifts. A first wave of patients walked their IVs and rolled wheelchairs between the larger hospital and the smaller children’s ward. We weaved between and through them, smiling at whoever made eye contact. Whenever Cait paused to lean against the hospital wall, closing her eyes and counting through her breaths, I put my hand on the small of her back and counted too. Back at the desk, we claimed our room. The nurse set the IV. An overtired anesthesiologist taped a needle to Cait’s back to run the epidural. Cait felt better. She felt nothing. It wouldn’t be too long now, another nurse said. We should try to get some rest.

  I have never dreamt about Walt’s birth. I remember it all perfectly, I think, especially the green and red fuzz stuck on our son’s bald head, and the sock-puppet scrunch of his face at the middle, his eyes shining with antibacterial goop. An attending nurse stuck him under a heat lamp and covered his head in a blue-and-white cap. Our boy, our beautiful baby we liked so well that we rushed to have another one, and another quickly after that, seemed, at first, hardly real.

  That night, while we were in the hospital, raccoons snuck through the side door of the house and ransacked the bathroom. I came home for a change of clothes and shower to discover muddy prints on the tile, muddy paper and towels in the sink, the cat hiding under bed, mewing hysterically. It took hours to bleach the bathroom and set everything back into place. I climbed into bed and slept through the afternoon. I knew I was awake because Cait had sent a photograph of our baby boy, just waking, wearing his cap. He was smiling, though of course, he couldn’t smile yet, not really. My phone buzzed every few minutes on the nightstand. I could hardly hold my head up to look at it. “We become fathers all at once,” a friend warned. “You don’t really get ten months to prepare for it.” I had a son. His name was Walt. The bathroom was clean. I took the Cat Stevens as my sign and climbed into bed, exhausted. The raccoon was a coincidence.

  *

  After we read the boys their bedtime stories, Sheila Nielsen makes us dessert, full-fat yogurt with dried cherries and bitter chocolate squares. We toss handfuls of the good stuff into the bowl and pour the yogurt over it. There is an espresso machine next to the sink and a drawer just below filled with different-colored cartridges. One color means triple strength, another decaffeinated, still another that the beans were harvested in a particular region of Kenya, organic and fair trade.

  Sheila explains how, flush with insurance money at the start of a recession, she traced her lineage to a village south of Paris where her grandfather had practiced medicine and, on weekends, painted his neighbors by commission. The house was for sale at a discount, in need of work, and perhaps, the agent she contacted explained, a tad remote for an American vacationer. Within a few years, the house became a site of legend and pilgrimage for Sheila’s friends. Word spread quickly of the roses in the cubby library cut fresh from the garden, the gardens down the street more or less unchanged from the famous paintings, the good books and framed photographs of rural France down every hallway, with men in bowler caps and women discussing the vote. “You will never live here,” the house told its many visitors, “but what does that matter? You have visited. Stay as long as you’d like.” In two rooms catty-corner to a long staircase, facing a portrait of a smirking woman wearing a white silk evening gown and heavy pearls, guests sleep under comforters, listening for crickets and the sigh of trees, and the ghost that Walt insists, right until he falls asleep, is waiting at the bottom of the staircase, next to the portrait, to eat us.

  “Chris,” Sheila says, “would never have let me buy this place. He worried too much about money.”

  The bowls are shallow and heavy. They rattle whenever we set them back on the stone countertop to make a fresh dish.

  “A friend, he got sick at exactly the same time. His prognosis was grim. Chris was supposed to live longer, but Chris was always sick. His stomach thing—that probably didn’t help.”

  That afternoon, Sheila offers me a blister packet of British pain medication, some mix of fever reducer and mild narcotic. Now, we are drinking wine. Cait asks a couple of times if I am feeling better, am I feeling okay, and I keep worrying, Have I missed some important part of the conversation? Do I look especially unwell? The thought of where I might possibly find emergency medical attention in rural France at the late hour becomes my nagging paranoia. I tell Cait that I am feeling great. I can’t hear a thing out one side of my head and I am sweating like crazy with the fever, but I am not in pain. Only later do I realize that she is asking about the day: Katie. She worries about me while I listen to Sheila talk about Chris. For the moment, at least, I have forgotten all about the death anniversary.

  “Now,” Sheila says, “Chris is dead, and the friend is still in remission, which is good. I hear his charts look really good.”

  Before we head off to bed, Sheila tells the story of how she and Chris met. She was twenty and making her first trip to the lake with a boyfriend. Her boyfriend’s family knew Chris’s family. Chris invited everyone to the beach that afternoon. He was standing at the lake and passing out shovels, organizing a group dig to China. There were drinks, a barbecue. Someone made a fire. It went on for years like that, every summer, before he made his move, but that night, back at the cabin, Sheila decided she’d wait a few weeks and then break up with her boyfriend. Chris was magnificent: handsome, robust, charismatic, and so cheerful. The poor boy she was dating simply paled in comparison.

  *

  Last year, it was vertigo. The year before that, bronchitis. The first year after Katie died, I woke in a fever with full nausea, hardly able
to walk from the car to the nature preserve where we had spread Katie’s ashes. I don’t mean to get sick. A minor catch in my throat gums into place, however I hack and sniff. A ringing muffles to silence. There is a shooting pain down the right arm, or was it the left, near my back? Is that copper I taste? Am I bleeding? I know to be on guard for the month, right up to the day—that the day will approach with harbingers of illness and some minor but necessary treatment that passes quickly. When I left the nature preserve that first year, the fever was gone. The nausea cleared up that night. The next morning, I woke early and went for a run. A minor flu resolves itself in such a way. A twenty-four-hour bug runs its course. I know that these injuries, like a dream, are in some way self-conjured, but they are no less acute for their predictability, and I have no sense of their indication. That morning, in France, I pointed to my ear as the hospital nurse took my blood pressure. “Antibiotic. Airplane tomorrow.” He shrugged. In broken English: “Medicine does not work this way.”

  Of course, it did. Or, I paid for it to work that way. The ear was bright red. The hotel doctor said the throat looked bad too. So, I had my diagnosis, my gift: my bauble with a bauble hidden inside of it and more baubles to swallow three times a day, for seven days, with food or a glass of milk. I was sick! I would get better! A quick stop at the chemist, and we were off to Giverny, following directions from a dashboard computer that took us along the most scenic route. Who was I still to be a widower that afternoon when my life continued so beautifully through sunflower fields and small towns with hand-painted signs? When I loved it so much, and felt, for all my easy susceptibility to viruses and infections, the buildup of a different antibody, one that perhaps accumulated also to something beyond a fever pitch, if just as impermanent? What was that gap in time I burned across, and across which I refused to look, that I felt in my bones such eager forgetting?