by Sue Miller
Nathan had his arms around her again, he'd pushed his book aside. His breath, his voice were in her ear. “Shhh, love. Shhh, Meri. Please. Please.”
But Meri was beyond consolation. Her voice soared in its grief. In his bassinet by the bed, Asa woke and added his song to hers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Delia, June 1994
DELIA HAD BEEN in a state of controlled excitement since the moment she woke, around five this morning—woke, thinking this is the day, the day he comes home. Now in the car, he'd fallen asleep. She looked over at him from time to time as they drove along. His mouth sagged open. He looked like an old, old man, hardly recognizable as her Tom, the Tom who had always appeared to be years younger than he was, so that sometimes in Washington, people had been confused about what her relationship to him might be: “You're his wife?” She'd occasionally been prickly in response.
How strange life was, she thought, that she should be the strong one now, the young one, and he the old man. She pulled into the driveway. She turned off the ignition and looked over at him once more. He was white, his face was sunken. It was so suddenly silent without the noise of the engine. Didn't he hear the difference?
It seemed not.
She got out and opened the back door, pulled the walker out from the backseat and unfolded it. She came around to Tom's door and opened it. She leaned in, she gently pulled on his arm, saying his name, and then she was frightened for a moment. Was he there? Had he had another stroke?
But he opened his eyes and saw her, standing above him, holding his walker. “Deeehl,” he croaked.
“Yes,” she said. “When you're ready.”
He moaned, and sat still for a full minute, breathing heavily, regularly, as though to locate himself, as though to gather strength. Then in one long effort, he hurled his body back against the seat and turned it, swinging his bad leg along with his hands.
He was sitting sideways now, facing out of the car, his feet on the ground. He looked around him, at the oak tree, at the lawn, at the old brick house. “Home,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered. “Finally.”
Delia waited a minute or two for him to catch his breath, and then she pushed the walker up to him, around his legs. He leaned forward and put his hands on the top bar. He sat like that for a moment.
“You're tired today,” she said.
“Mmmmh.” He nodded his head. He tilted it a little to look up at her.
“There's no rush,” she said. “We can take forever, if we like. We've got forever, you know.”
He smiled at her. They waited, not talking. The breeze shook the trees, a door banged somewhere, and she thought she could hear the baby next door cry in that creaky, halfhearted newborn way, but it stopped quickly.
His grip tightened and he started to pull himself up. His body moved, his arms tensed, he came forward, but he seemed unable to get beyond the halfway point. Delia reached for his upper arms and pulled too, pulled him toward her. He was heavy. For a moment it seemed they would fall back into the car, both of them and the walker between them—they were in a ridiculous state of equipoise, their startled eyes looking fully at each other: can we make it?
But then the balance shifted, they teetered slightly Delia's way, and he was up, resting his weight heavily on the walker. They were nearly embracing. He was panting a little, and Delia realized she was too.
She laughed then, in relief, and at the comedy of it. “Graceful, aren't we?” she asked.
He nodded. He was smiling. “Dhans,” he blurted. Dance.
“You say it's a dance,” she answered. “Thousands wouldn't.”
When they had recovered, he rolled slowly up the walk, and then she helped him carefully ascend the stone steps. She was grateful for their wasteful width and depth.
Inside the house he moved down the front hall and then paused, as though awaiting instructions.
Delia pointed the way: to the lavatory. “You need to pee, and then you can lie down for a bit. I'll show you your room.”
He stopped and looked at her, as though startled, or offended. At what? Perhaps he didn't like her playing the nurse.
Too bad, she thought. Too bad for both of us. “Those are the rules, I'm afraid,” she said firmly. “You pee on a schedule now. And it's time.”
He turned away. He wheeled slowly to the lav and went in. This was a triumph, she'd been told, that he was continent, that he could manage this on his own—though they'd also told her that some of this was keeping to a regular schedule. That would be part of her job, and Matt's.
When he came out, she was standing in the doorway to the dining room.
“Come see,” she said. She couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice.
She stood aside as he rolled in. “We set it all up for you,” she said.
He sat down at the edge of the bed, resting his arms on the walker, while she moved slowly around the room, pointing everything out. He watched her steadily. She wasn't sure how much he was taking in. She talked slowly, keeping her vocabulary simple, gesturing—at the bed, the bureau, the rocker, the pictures she'd hung on the wall, the radio on the bedside table. She tapped it. “This is a very fancy number, I'll have you know,” she said. “Much more expensive, and, we hope, much better than the one I have in the kitchen.”
He nodded, a kind of thanks.
“Do you like it?” she asked. She was nervous about this, she realized.
“Unnh,” he said. “Yessh.”
“Good. I had two young men as my slaves for hours getting it just so. I enjoyed it, actually.”
He smiled at her, but he looked tired. Exhausted, really.
“Do you want to eat in here?” she asked. “I've got a tray I can bring things in on if you want to stay here. Or we can eat in the kitchen.”
“Here,” he said.
Delia helped him swing his legs up on the bed, and propped him up with pillows. She took his shoes off.
“Do you want the radio on?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Music? Or the news?” she asked.
“Nhooos,” he said.
She turned it on, adjusted the volume down, and found the news station. Before she left the room, she kissed him. He reached up and touched her face. “Stay,” he said clearly.
“I'll be right back,” she said. “I'm going to get us something to eat.”
In the kitchen Delia moved around rapidly. She'd boiled eggs early this morning and made egg salad. She'd brewed tea and put it in the refrigerator. She'd mashed strawberries and sprinkled sugar on them. Now it took her only a few minutes to assemble sandwiches and pour iced tea for them both. She set out the ice cream to soften.
After she'd served him, she brought the tray table for herself into the room so she could eat with him. The radio was still on, and she and Tom talked only occasionally. He commented on the news with grunts, with monosyllables. The Clintons had been questioned at the White House about Vincent Foster's death, about Whitewater. The wife of O. J. Simpson had been murdered, and he was a suspect. Two more candidates had announced they would run in the Virginia primary along with Chuck Robb and Ollie North. His head swung in apparent disbelief, and she laughed.
The news was over, and the jazz program came on. When they'd finished eating, she moved his tray to the bureau, and he lay back again. He fell asleep nearly instantly.
She sat for a while in the rocker, watching him. Slowly the room got fully dark. She knew she should wake him, that she needed to get him into his pajamas, to have him go to the bathroom one last time. Then she would go upstairs to her own bathroom, to wash her face and brush her teeth, to change out of her dress.
But just let me sit here for a while longer, she thought.
There was no danger of her falling asleep. She was excited and alert. She was thinking about waking up tomorrow and coming downstairs to find Tom, to greet him, to have breakfast with him. She was thinking about Matt, who would be coming over to meet Tom in the afternoon
. She was thinking about the days spooling out from now on, with Tom always at their center.
Finally she got up, she turned the lamp on, she reached over and gently moved his shoulder, said his name.
He turned to her, and his voice was surprised and tender. “Delia!” he said.
“Yes. You're home, darling. And we need to get you ready for bed.”
Slowly, laboriously, he stood up. He let her do the work of removing his clothes—he seemed more incapacitated than usual in his fatigue. She wouldn't again let him fall asleep without getting him ready, she thought.
She was moved to see him naked—his skinny old body with the drooping dusky genitals, the pouches at his breasts. She kept whispering slow encouragement, explaining each step. His damaged limbs were heavy and awkward, and he seemed unable to help lift them as she pulled his pajamas on. She minded none of this, though she supposed there would be times to come when she would.
After he'd used the bathroom, after she'd helped him brush his teeth and lie down again, after she'd pulled the sheet and light blanket over him and kissed him just as she used to do for the children each night—after all this, she went upstairs. She wandered the rooms on the second floor as though she were a stranger in her own house, seeing everything for the first time. She looked at her own bedroom, made so comfortable for one person to live in, to grow old in. She went into the guest rooms, peering closely at the pictures of her grandchildren at various stages, at the wedding photos of the kids, all of them so happy to be recklessly hurtling forward into their versions of marriage. She went into her own study and examined the pictures there. The little framed prints of Rodin's erotic watercolors which she'd bought in Paris to discipline herself about Tom's affair with Carolee and the ones after it. The photo on her desk of herself at a family reunion with the kids and their families, as though Tom, the old progenitor, didn't exist.
From next door she heard the faint catlike mewling of the baby, and she thought of Meri. How strange that their lives should be so seemingly parallel in this moment. She remembered calling it mired, but she hadn't meant that, not really. Neither of them was mired, though surely it would feel that way every now and then. But Meri would fall in love with her little boy in her own time; and she, of course, had never stopped loving Tom.
After she'd gotten ready for bed, she still felt wakeful. She tried to read, but she was too excited. She looked at the clock. It was only ten-thirty. Perhaps not too late. She dialed Madeleine Dexter's number.
Madeleine said she was in bed, but not asleep yet, which Delia knew was likely a lie. But she needed to talk. She told Madeleine about Tom's arrival home. She summarized his progress, the therapies to come, “among them what they call ‘alternate forms of communication,’ whatever that may mean.”
“But what does it mean?” Madeleine asked.
“Oh, who knows?” Delia said. “I just feel—I guess I need to feel, that he will talk normally again.” She could imagine it, that they would one day sit again at the kitchen table and talk as they had in the past. He would make her laugh, he would laugh at himself.
“But perhaps what they're saying is that maybe that's not going to happen.”
Delia didn't answer.
“Am I right, do you think?” Madeleine's voice was gentle, careful.
“I suppose,” Delia said. “I suppose that's what they mean. But what could they be talking about? Notes?”
“I like notes,” Madeleine said. “I have notes from Dan and sometimes when I'm lonely, I read through them. It's comforting.”
“That's different.”
“Of course it's different. But it's real. It's real too.”
“But Tom is alive.”
“But he's been changed, Delia. It's not going to be as it was.”
“They say he's making great strides,” Delia said. “His progress is very, very good.”
“But there may be some limits on that. It sounds like they're saying that too.” Delia was silent, and Madeleine waited for a long moment before she went on. “Sweetie,” she said. “I think you feel as though you've waited all these years, and now it's somehow going to have to work. He's safe, you're getting him back, so it has to be as it was. But the reason it's safe, my darling, the reason you're getting him back, is that it's not as it was.”
Delia was silent. She knew Maddy was right. She wanted her not to be.
Maddy's voice was soft, loving, when she spoke again. “You're just a little crazy right now, I think.”
CRAZY INDEED.
The next day at the Apthorp house, which was at its busiest time of year right now—the alumni in town for reunions, the tourist season just starting—Delia came into the gift shop to gather the small crowd waiting for the four o'clock tour. It was her second week back at work.
As Delia introduced herself, they turned to her from the books for sale, from the case of Anne Apthorp's letters, from the postcard racks. It was a mixed group of ten or twelve people, including two men her own age wearing straw boaters, striped blazers, and badges that said “Class of 44.” They looked like elderly twins, carefully dressed by some demented mother, Delia thought. There were also a family with teenage kids, a couple of women who seemed to be together, and—her breath stopped for a moment—there was Billy Gustafson, Delia would have known him anywhere, her first true love in high school.
“Oh!” she cried, delighted, and crossed the room to him. He was the same—the same silky black hair, the dark eyebrows that almost met over his nose, the same wide, amused mouth—though as she approached him eagerly she could see a look of increasing perplexity, almost fear, cross his face.
And then, just as she was reaching out to touch his sleeve, to claim him, she remembered: of course this wasn't Billy! Billy was her age, gray or white, transformed, withered—if he was alive at all. Her hand flew up, her mouth opened. This young man—this boy, really—was too young by fifty years, sixty years.
“Oh, I'm so sorry,” Delia said.
Her quickened breath was audible to everyone, she was sure. She needed to talk, to say something to make him more comfortable, to make them all more comfortable. “I thought you were someone else, but now, up close, I see you're not.” She laughed, carelessly, she hoped, though her heart seemed to be pounding. “You're you, of course!Please forgive me.”
She turned away from him to the group, which was watching her curiously. “I'm Delia Naughton,” she said, trying to calm her own voice. “I'm here to lead you through the Apthorp house and to answer any questions you have about it. Please,” she gestured at the doorway, “let's begin.”
She could feel herself settling down as she led them through. She started, as always, in the living room, with the family portraits, talking about their provenance and the questions about their accuracy.
As the tour went on, she monitored herself. She thought she was performing adequately, if not well. As soon as they left, she felt swept with exhaustion. She was grateful they'd been the last group of the day, so that she could go home. Though she remembered now that she had to stop at the supermarket on the way.
The accident was entirely her fault, which is what she said to the woman driving the other car, and to the policeman when he arrived. It occurred at that stretch of mall outside Williston where all the signs and ads made the traffic lights on the side of the road a little hard to spot, though Delia had successfully managed to stop at them hundreds of times before. No, she was inattentive today, lost in thought when she went through the red; and the truth was that if the other driver—Heidi Rosenberg was her name—hadn't been as quick to swerve and brake as she was, it could have been even worse. As it was, Heidi had damage to her fender and right front headlight. Delia's car was worse off—the back door and rear panel were stove in, crumpled.
Both cars were drivable, though, and so after the young policeman had given Delia a ticket, after the little crowd that collected had dispersed, after Delia had sat for a while and gathered herself, as she thought of it, she drov
e very slowly and carefully home, going over it again and again, the feeling of the moment it happened—that everything had suddenly exploded, become senseless and unreal. Each time she thought of it, it made her breathless again.
Matt and Tom, the wide and the skinny, were walking down the sidewalk—she could see them almost all the way to the Sternes’ house as she turned in the driveway. When they got back, she didn't mention the accident to either of them. She and Matt helped Tom make his way upstairs. While Tom showered, Delia waited, resting on her bed, and Matt went outside to mow the front lawn. When Tom was done, he called Delia and she helped him dress; and then she called Matt and they got him back downstairs and settled in his room to watch the Red Sox.
Matt left. Delia made a pasta salad for supper. She set up tray tables and they ate in the living room. They didn't talk much, but the silence felt companionable to Delia. It wasn't until Tom was in bed and she was upstairs that she let herself think about the accident again.
She had been absolutely in dreamland. She was paying no attention. She shook her head, and her lips tightened. What would become of them if she couldn't drive safely anymore? She realized that this was what had frightened her most, the notion of their joint helplessness, what that would do to this thing she'd made of their lives. She wouldn't let it happen. She couldn't.
THE SUN WAS still high, slanting through the moving leaves, strobing Delia's face as she walked slowly over the uneven brick sidewalks. They had heaved and cracked here and there under pressure from the root systems of the old trees, whose branches arched out and met in the middle of the wide street. It was July 1, the night of the party her neighbors, the Sternes, threw every year before they went away to their summer house on Cape Cod. They were careful to invite everyone on the street, and Delia always looked forward to this gathering as a way to continue to know the younger and younger families who had laid claim to its houses.
