Shelter Me

by Juliette Fay

  There were sweet pictures and funny pictures of various groupings, and one last picture of Tug coming in the door. He was looking at Dylan, who was prepared to engage him in battle, the two of them facing each other with an unlikely combination of aggression and warmth.

  That’s right, thought Janie, his shirt was plaid. It was a button down, with pale tracings of green and tan intersecting each other in pleasing combinations. And it smelled good, she remembered from standing next to him on countless doorsteps, as she held Carly, and Dylan practiced his trick-or-treat manners. He must use laundry detergent with a nice scent.

  It took a moment for Janie to realize that she was in the picture, too, standing to the side and a little behind Tug, her gaze directed toward him. She was smiling, but there was more than that. There was a look of…what? She remembered feeling happy, almost relieved, when he arrived. His enthusiasm for the kids’ costumes had been very sweet. And he wasn’t intrusive with them, the way so many adults were with other people’s children. He didn’t force interaction. Dylan talked to Tug if he felt like it, and if he didn’t, Tug let him be.

  It was easy, Janie realized, looking at that picture. Tug’s cautious but steady march toward further involvement in their lives had mostly been easy, save for the occasional minor skirmish between the two of them. Not so minor, really, but over now, and each one had served to clarify their relationship, to make further contact easier.

  Gratitude, she realized, studying the picture. That’s me being grateful.

  IT STARTED OUT WITH a headache, the kind that made Janie momentarily wonder if she was experiencing some sort of rapid-onset blindness. Her eyelashes hurt. It was painful to turn her head. As heavily caffeine-dependent as she was, however, the feeling was not completely unknown to her. It was the kind of headache she’d had a couple of times before when, for various reasons, she’d neglected to drink her usual three or four cups of coffee.

  One time, she and Robby had been camping, and the coffee grounds had been “forgotten.” Robby thought it was a good opportunity for her to “detox.” Janie responded by climbing back into the tent, dosing herself with the emergency Benadryl from the first-aid kit, and sleeping for six hours. That was after she broke up with him and hit him in the back of the head with her hiking boot.

  This time, Janie had had her coffee. But she drank another two cups just to be sure, and took some Tylenol. The headache got worse and spread to her back and arms. By the time she got the kids off to bed, she was shivering and pale. Her dreams that night came in snapshots: the kids and her on a rotting raft at night in the middle of a river; pellets of rain beating down on their unprotected heads; Dylan’s horrified face, beads of sweat exploding from his pores; Carly biting her own arm.

  As the sun began to blare through her bedroom window, Janie roused, wrapped her comforter around her and reached for the phone. “Aunt Jude.” Her voice sounded as if she had recently been dug from a glacier and defrosted.

  “Janie? Janie? Is everything alright? Are the children—?”

  Janie winced and held the phone away from her ear. “I’m sick.”

  Aunt Jude began a relentless litany of her sick friends, the illnesses she’d heard about, and the illnesses her sick friends had heard about. “Do you want me to come over? I could get the children dressed, feed them some breakfast, do you have any milk, I could bring some—”

  “Just come.”

  Some time later, she had no idea how much later, Janie heard the snap of the screen door on the porch. Some time after that she heard voices on the landing outside her bedroom. “Mommy’s sick, honey, she needs her rest.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “We don’t want to wake her.”

  “But can I just SEE her? With my EYES?” Her bedroom door opened slowly, and Janie squinted across the room at them: Aunt Jude holding Carly in her little pink Easter dress; Dylan with his black curls wet-combed across his head from a newly made side part.

  “Hi, Mom,” Dylan whispered loudly. “You’re sick, right?”

  “Yes, sweetie,” she croaked.

  “I’ll take him to school, and Carly can come home with me,” said Aunt Jude. “I’ve got the car seats and the diaper bag. Are you okay?”

  “Probably just a twenty-four-hour thing,” Janie murmured, though neither of them really believed that.

  After they’d gone, Janie wished she’d asked for a glass of water. Then she was rafting again with the kids, who were tied to a mast without a sail. The rotting wood was slippery and Janie kept losing her balance and sliding to the edge of the logs, the swirling water black as tar by her feet.

  Later, a man’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs, and Janie thought, Thank God.

  “Tug,” she said, trying to raise her voice, knowing she hadn’t.

  His work boots made hushed thuds on the stairs. “You alright?” he said from the doorway.

  “I feel like hell,” she said.

  He came forward into the room, moving across it tentatively, as if crossing the border of an unknown country. Stopping by the bed, hands in his pockets, he asked, “Fever?”

  “Can’t find the thermometer.”

  She saw him hesitate for a moment, then decide to sit on the edge of her bed. He reached out a hand and placed it gently on her forehead. It was cool and leathery, and she could feel her own heat seeping into it. Then he had both hands on her cheeks. Again the coolness, the momentary relief. He reached under the blankets, searching for something, and took her hand. His fingers pressed on her wrist while he studied his battered watch. “Janie, girl,” he said shaking his head at her, “you are in tough shape. Your pulse is racing and you’re putting out enough BTUs to melt your hair.”

  “Just put your hands on my face again,” she murmured. He smiled as he reached for her cheeks.

  He asked her about her symptoms, if she’d taken any medication, was she drinking water, did she have any ibuprofen, where exactly would it be? He left and returned. Ice water, a cool wet washcloth, little reddish-brown coated pills. As she struggled to sit up, he arranged her pillows behind her so she could lean back and still be sufficiently upright to drink.

  “These blankets have to go,” he said. “You’re cooking yourself.” One by one he pulled them off, folded them neatly and laid them on the chair, which was still covered with all the clothing and undergarments she’d peeled off the night before. He left her only the top sheet.

  “Freezing,” she said from under the cold damp of the washcloth.

  “Sorry. It’ll be okay once the ibuprofen kicks in.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “Sue was a nurse.”

  A few of her languid brain cells began to spark. “Was?” It was easier to ask from beneath this wet cloak of pseudo-anonymity.

  “Her license was revoked. Drink some more.” He handed her the cup. “Can you sleep?”

  “No,” she lied. “Bring your lunch up here and keep me company.”

  “I didn’t bring anything this time,” he said. “I’ll eat later.”

  “There’s turkey and cheese and peppers in the fridge. That rye bread you like is in the freezer.” Janie could feel her body starting to cool, and the piercing pain in her back and arms becoming blunted and dull. Tug didn’t respond, so she lifted a corner of the washcloth to peek at him. “What?” she asked. “Oh, you don’t want to get sick.”

  “No, I don’t worry about germs. It’s just nice,” he gave a little shrug, “you keeping that stuff on hand for me.”

  “You’re my best lunch customer,” she said, and put the washcloth over her eyes again.

  He went downstairs and Janie pressed the washcloth across her face and around her neck. She rummaged in the drawer of her bedside table for a hairbrush and organized her curls into a topknot. It felt good to spruce up a little.

  She fell into an easy doze, comforted by the far-off sounds of the refrigerator door thumping closed, the ding of the toaster oven, the clack of a knife on a pla
te. He brought her toast and encouraged her to try and eat a little so the ibuprofen wouldn’t bother her stomach. He asked about the kids. It was tiring to talk, she wanted only to listen. She wanted him to talk a lot so he would stay longer. And she wanted to know about Sue.

  “How’d her license get revoked?” Janie asked. It seemed like a non sequitur, yet the question had been hanging there between them since he’d mentioned it.

  He didn’t answer at first, then he said, “That’s kind of a long one.”

  “Oh,” she said, nibbling at the toast. “You probably have to get back to work. How’s the Pelham Heights house coming?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he said. “I’m just not sure how much you want to know.”

  That was a fair statement, she had to admit to herself. She’d been nothing if not tentative with him. But he knew so much about her. He had the details on the beginning, ending, and a good deal of the middle of the most meaningful relationship she’d ever had. And he’d been witness to half the major events of her life over the last six months.

  And…well, it was clear that he’d wanted to tell her for some time now, dropping little hints like hookless bait. Somehow his wanting her to know had become important to her, too. “All of it,” she said. “Tell me.”

  BECOMING A NURSE HAD been Sue’s plan since she was old enough to pin her mother’s nursing cap into her baby-fine blond hair. Her older sister had gone to nursing school at Fitchburg State. The goal, it became apparent to Tug, had been to go to a better nursing school than either of them. When she got accepted at Boston College, he and Sue celebrated with a trip to Canobie Lake Park to ride the big roller coaster. “Not the new twisty one they have now that turns you upside down. Back then the biggie was that one on the huge rickety lattice of white two-by-fours.”

  “The Yankee Cannonball,” said Janie.

  “That’s the one. She liked to sit up front, first car. Had to get there faster than everyone else.”

  Janie knew the type. “Did you go to college, too, when she did?”

  “That’s a whole ’nother story.”

  “So?”

  Sue had encouraged him to go to business school. He was ambivalent, having worked on his friend’s father’s construction crew for several summers. He liked being outside, and he liked building things, making something grow from a hole in the ground into a building that sheltered people as they went about their lives, working, sleeping, eating lunch. His only problem was that he was too slow, and the foreman would hassle him to do things faster. “I liked the process too much.”

  He applied to only one school, University of Massachusetts–Boston, and got in. For two and a half years he commuted to classes, spending a good deal of his time at Boston College with Sue. But then his mother died right after Christmas of his junior year. “Dad kind of fell apart. Things weren’t getting done.” He looked at Janie. “You know how that goes, right?”

  “You know how well I know.”

  So he took the semester off, much to Sue’s everlasting disappointment. He picked up hours with the construction crew again. And he became the one to buy the groceries and pay the bills and empty the mousetraps. When he didn’t register for classes in the fall, Sue was furious. “It was the first time I said a big, honking ‘No’ to her, and she wasn’t used to that.”

  “You didn’t want to go back?”

  “I didn’t really see the point. I had learned some things about business, which has definitely helped me along the way, don’t get me wrong. But I knew I was never going to go corporate, like all those other guys were. I had what I needed, so why waste the money?”

  “Sue wanted you to have the degree.”

  “In a big, bad way.” He stopped for a moment, ran his hand over the scar on his arm, a private little smile edging in around his jaw.

  Janie laughed. “You did it to piss her off!”

  “A little, I guess,” he grinned. “It was about time, you know. I was twenty-one years old. I had to stop living for her approval.”

  As expected, she dumped him. And while it wasn’t the happiest time of his life, it was important for him to see that he could live without her. He dated other girls, got serious with one or two, but then backed out. He bumped into Sue at a Christmas party in Natick, and they talked. There was no mention of getting back together, but it felt important to be on good terms again. She asked him to come see her graduate from Boston College in the spring. She thought she had a shot at valedictorian.

  With the best grades in the whole School of Nursing, Sue won the coveted roll of class speaker. But she got edged out for valedictorian by a communications major. Tug learned all of this from her at a party she took him to afterward, where she got as drunk as he’d ever seen her. He half carried her back to her apartment, and held her hair while she threw up. He put her in the shower, helped her brush her teeth, and guided her to her bed. “I know it’s crazy, and I probably need years of therapy to figure this one out, but I always liked her better when she was low.”

  “Sounds like she was more human. You slept with her?”

  “Nah, she wanted me to, but it seemed too…”

  “Opportunistic?”

  “Yeah, and kind of disgusting. Hard to get excited when you’ve just watched a girl puke.”

  “Good point. But you wanted to be with her again.”

  “Like a moth loves a flame.”

  Within a year they were married. Sue got a job at UMass Medical Center in Worcester and Tug built them a house in Northboro. With all the construction going on in the late ’80s, he decided to set up his own company. It was a good time for them, their happiest. Sue moved up the ladder, eventually becoming known as the best nurse in the cardiac care unit.

  “Any thought of kids?” asked Janie.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  Sue always wanted kids “someday”—but not until after she got out of internal medicine and into cardiology. Then she wanted to wait until after she got off the outpatient floor and into surgery. Then it was after she graduated from bypasses to electro-physiology. Or after Dr. Esteberg, the most respected, demanding cardiologist in the department started regularly requesting her for his surgeries. “She liked kids. We always had a great time when we babysat for my nieces. But she was never quite ready for her own.”

  “You were ready.”

  “We were in our late thirties. I was to the point of begging.” He felt himself slipping away from her, thinking about other women. He started going to bars with the guys from his crew when Sue was working the evening shift, which seemed to be pretty often. He would dance with a woman if he was asked. He would slow dance. It felt good to have someone in his arms, someone pliable, who let him lead. He kissed one once when he walked her to her car. His eyes flicked to Janie. “I shouldn’t have told you all that.”

  She shrugged, hoping to seem unfazed. “It’s not cheating, exactly.”

  “Yeah, it kind of was. Sex isn’t the only way to cheat.”

  “Were you thinking about leaving her?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. Things just seemed to happen. Time passes and then you’re forty.” Sue’s goal—she promised him, the last—was to become nurse manager of the cardiac care unit. The current nurse manager was due to retire in less than a year, and Sue was certain she was most qualified to take the position, even though others were more senior. Then she hurt her back lifting a patient. She could barely move, but she insisted on finishing her shift. An MRI showed a herniated disc in her spine, requiring weeks of rest to heal.

  Tug anticipated a battle to make her stay still that long, but once she was on the pain medication, she almost seemed to enjoy the time off. It was a relief, she told him. A relief from working so hard and caring so much what others thought of her performance. A relief from being her, he realized.

  He stopped going out—had to be home to take care of her. He went by the house when he could during the day to check in, see if she needed anything. When he wasn’t wi
th her, he found himself thinking about what he could get for her or do for her that would make the waiting more bearable. They passed the evenings stretched out on the bed together, talking. It was the last good time.

  Once she was better, she went back to work with a vengeance. Had to make up for lost time. Had to show everyone she was the most knowledgeable, most dedicated, most reliable. The nurse manager gave notice, as expected, and Sue applied for the job.

  “I knew she didn’t get it when I got home one night and she was already there, having a glass of wine.” When Sue told the hiring administrator she planned to challenge the decision, the woman gave it to her straight. She was highly competent, yes, and completely dedicated. But none of the other nurses liked her. She was too intent on showing them up. How could Sue manage the nurses when she was so unconcerned with their feelings? She was a good nurse, but she was no leader.

  “Looking back,” Tug said, “I think she got depressed. It wasn’t real obvious, and I think I was just so happy about finally trying to start a family, that I wasn’t looking too hard. But the signs were there.” After a while she seemed better, more relaxed, even kind of silly sometimes. But it wasn’t like when she was confined to her bed, with her goals still intact. She could be scatterbrained and annoying. This new Sue was not a better Sue, just different.

  On their way to his brother Dave’s house for Christmas one year, they had to turn back twice for things that Sue had forgotten to put in the car. When they finally arrived, Sue helped the girls open their presents and sat on the floor with them, intently dressing and redressing their Barbie dolls with the new outfits she and Tug had brought them.

  Dave’s wife, Christa, a social worker, took Tug into the spare bedroom and asked him what the hell Sue was on. Tug was shocked, told Christa she was crazy. Christa wasn’t buying it. “Go out there and look at her—she’s lying on the floor with her hair all askew, playing with dolls! That is not Sue!”

  It took Tug a while to be sure, but the time came when it was undeniable. Nonetheless, when he confronted Sue, she denied it. She straightened up after that, and he hoped (more than believed) that she had stopped. But one day, it all caught up with her. Postsurgical patients in her care seemed to be experiencing a surprising amount of residual pain. The new nurse manager, a longtime co-worker of Sue’s, set up a sting, and other nurses were happy to assist. They caught her in the act of pocketing a patient’s pain medication. A careful chart review determined she’d likely been doing it for over a year. “My wife, who prided herself on competence and correctness above all things, had left hundreds of patients with chest wounds in horrible pain so she could get a buzz on.”