We're in Trouble

by Christopher Coake

  She nods.

  I won’t ask you to help me, he says. But I’ll want you to be there. If you can’t I’ll understand, but . . . but Elise, if I have to die—he shakes his head—let me die with your arms around me. If you love me you can do this.

  She manages, barely, to turn the heat off beneath the soup. She goes to her husband, and, for the ten thousandth time—the hundred thousandth?—she pledges to him, as fervently as she can, clutching at his shoulders and his arms (they’re thinner now; she can feel it) her love.

  THEY HOLD the dinner party that weekend. Elise cooks a roast and red potatoes: Albert’s favorite. Their children come (but not the grandchildren), and two of Albert’s old friends, fellow engineers, and their wives. The engineers have brought cigars and a preposterously expensive bottle of scotch, and seem to have agreed amongst themselves to be cheerful. The children sit, tight-mouthed and pale, shocked at their father’s happy mood. He and Elise have agreed that they must not know what he has planned. But his friends don’t have to be told; they are old men as well, and believe, as Albert does, in dignity, and even if they can’t guess exactly what he aims to do, they will have guessed that this party will be the last time they’ll ever see him. Albert stands with them out on the back deck after dinner, all of them holding tumblers of the good scotch, and the lit cigars, and after a lull in their talk, Albert tells them, Gentlemen, it has been my pleasure. I hope you know how I think of you.

  The two men, misty-eyed, dutch at his shoulders.

  Please look in on Elise, Albert says. I know your wives will—but you, too. Make sure nothing needs fixing; she’s no good with tools. But you must—please don’t let her be alone. She hates to be alone. This will be more difficult for her than she’s letting on.

  How could it be easy? one of his friends says, husky-voiced.

  That woman’s been a fool for you for fifty years, the other says. Since the very first.

  Albert sighs and takes a drink. This will hurt his stomach, but not unbearably; he has loved his friends too much not to drink their scotch now.

  The first friend starts to chuckle, and behind it is the same nervous shake with which they’ve all been speaking.

  What is it? Albert asks.

  I was about to tell you how lucky you are, the man says.

  They laugh, and it is as Albert had hoped. Laughter! He’s a dead man, but on this night, with these men, he drinks in eagerly one of the last laughs he’ll ever have, savors it as the rare and fine thing it is, and above it the rareness and fineness of them all.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, he and Elise lie together in their wide, soft bed. He aches; the ache is everywhere now, not just in his belly, and he can start to feel pain in the bones of his hips and thighs. Even the simple act of sitting has become difficult. Soon, if he lets it happen, he will be unable to sit still, and he will have to call the hospital for stronger meds. It’s not bad now, but in a day, or two, he will surely have to pick up the phone.

  Sometimes he tries to convince himself that the hospital and the doctors have made a horrible mistake, that he will, in the end, be well. He was tempted into thinking it again tonight, out on the deck with his friends. But in a moment of quiet and repose, like this one, he can feel the cancer inside of him with a still certainty, can almost trace its outlines under the soft loose skin of his belly. On other nights he has felt fear, but tonight, Elise warm and soft next to him, lovemaking done—they could not finish, but he managed, heart racing, to fit himself inside her, for a while, and thank God, thank God for that—he feels no fear.

  He spends a moment alone, in his head, where he makes a brief statement, informing the Lord of his plans. When he says a prayer afterward, it is for Elise.

  My love, he says, it’s time.

  She takes a breath.

  I knew you’d say it now, she says.

  She kisses his forehead and sits up, and looks at him. Her face is bleary, her hair a silvery mist.

  Please, she says. Wait a day.

  He touches her face. No, he says. It should be now. I have everything I wanted. It won’t get any better.

  He tries to stand, swinging his knees off the edge of the bed, but when he sits up the pain in his belly catches fire, and he moans.

  Settle back, she says. I’ll get you a pill.

  They’re here, he says. On the nightstand.

  She takes the bottle, quickly, and walks into the bathroom. She fills a glass with water from the tap and shakes out a morphine tablet into her palm. She returns to the bedroom. Albert switches on the bedside lamp.

  Here, she says. Take this.

  Not yet, he says. I’ll take them all at the same time. I can bear it. Honey? Could I trouble you for milk?

  She sucks in a breath. Albert has always loved milk—when he sets down an empty glass at the table his eyes are as satisfied as a sleepy cat’s. She walks down the hallway to the kitchen and pours him a tall glass. She’ll never see his eyes look like that again. Her father’s were glassy—turned up, slightly, to show the whites. In a few minutes Albert’s will look that way, too.

  She returns to the bedroom. He takes a sip, and sighs, and says, May I have the pills, love?

  The bottle is in the pocket of her robe. She takes it out and holds it.

  Albert, please, she says. Another day. Give me one more day.

  He stares at her, his mouth tight.

  Elise, I can’t. No.

  Please.

  We both know this is better.

  I can’t—I can’t watch you do this.

  You’d prefer the alternative?

  She shakes her head. She knows there’s nothing she can argue. Of course she doesn’t want to see him lessened, suffering. But this? This? She holds in her hands the instrument of his death. She can’t be expected to . . . to just hand it to him, can she?

  She kneels in front of the bed. Albert, she says.

  He puts the glass of milk on the bedside table. He takes her hands, with the bottle of morphine enclosed between them.

  He says, You can keep the lights off until . . . until it’s over. It won’t take long. Just hold on to me, and when it’s done, call Mark and tell him something’s wrong. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes. I have written a letter. It’s on the desk in the hallway, right now, with your name on it. Pretend you don’t know about it. No one will ever know you helped me.

  Al, I can’t.

  He tries to pry the bottle of pills from her hands, his broad fingers jimmying open her thin, cold ones. He tries to do this slowly, persuasively, while he talks. When she realizes what he’s doing, she doesn’t even think—she pulls quickly away. Her hands slip from his, and his elbow strikes the bedside table. The glass of milk wobbles and then falls. They both watch it fall. It strikes the dark hardwood floor and shatters. Glass and milk and froth slide coldly past Elise’s knees.

  Damn it all! Albert says, sharply.

  I’ll clean it, she says, rising.

  Elise—the glass—

  She steps away from the bed, still holding the bottle of pills, stepping over the milk. She puts on a pair of flat shoes from the closet. In the bathroom she takes a towel from the rack, and picks up the wastebasket. Then she returns and begins to clean up the mess, kneeling carefully again.

  I’m sorry, she says thickly.

  This is what I didn’t want, he tells her. His voice creaks a little. This is what I mean. See what it does to us?

  And as she kneels, swabbing at milk and shards of glass, her knees aching, her throat aching, she thinks, It? It? All he’s done is ask her to help him . . . to help him kill himself. And when she can’t, when all she can do is tell him she cannot bear it, when all she can do is ask for one more day, one span of hours, for mercy, for another hour in the dark without having to worry about his next breath, or the one after it—this is what it does to us? Not once did he ask her what she thought of this. Not once did he give her a say in how things between them are to end. And this—this is all he can think to say?
>
  She scrubs harder at the floor.

  Albert’s stomach hurts. He leans back against the headboard and kneads his belly. He’s sorry he shouted. His poor wife sops up the spilled milk. He sees a shard of glass near her hand, and points to it, and he is ready to tell her about it when she sees it herself, and plucks it from the milk. The tenderness of the gesture, the delicacy of her hands, makes him want to pick her up. If only he could! To clutch her to him and explain. Can’t she understand? He knows his love for her. This—this end—is the only gift he has left to give her. He wants to tell her the sentences he’s prepared. He wants to tell her the last things he’ll ever say, for her, only for her. If she’d just look up at him.

  He puts a hand on her shoulder.

  How dare you, she thinks, biting her lip, scrubbing.

  He repeats the words, carefully, in his head, waiting for her to raise her eyes:

  Elise, I am a lucky man. I have never loved you more. You are my life.

  Cross Country

  THIS IS THE EVIDENCE:

  I was nine, traveling cross-country with my father from Colorado back to Illinois. My family had lived in Colorado for all of my childhood, and our move to the Midwest was fraught and unhappy—what would turn out to be my father’s last concession to my mother, a return to her home in Chicago. A love of the mountains was one of the only things my father and I had in common; when he learned he’d have to stay a week longer in Colorado to complete the sale of our cabin, he allowed me to stay with him. My father was a distant and silent man, but during that last week we hiked and fished companionably, never mentioning the city. Then, reluctantly, we headed east.

  My father didn’t like to stop at hotels, so we were on the interstate late at night, late in the way that it can be only on the road, far away from any home—as though we were separate from real things and real time. And it was then, while we ate at a truck stop in Kansas, that I saw them: a boy and a man.

  The boy was my age, or a little younger. We looked at each other from booths across the diner while my father napped, head on his arms. The boy seemed odd, somehow: pale, upset. The man with him—large and unshaven—sat with his arm stretched out across the seat behind the boy’s shoulders. He smoked cigarettes and watched the boy eat. They left before us.

  As my father drove us out of the truck stop, our headlights flashed on a pickup truck in the parking lot. Inside, his face glowing in the bright light, was the boy. He looked, to me, as if he had just finished crying, or was just beginning. He looked frightened. The man was in shadow next to him, with his hand on the boy’s neck. I thought—and I thought it more, the more I thought—that I saw the man’s head pulling back from the boy’s. Then they slipped into darkness. Their truck pulled onto the road behind us, and vanished down the westbound ramp, while we headed east. My father seemed to have seen nothing out of the ordinary, yet I didn’t tell him what I saw. What could I have said? I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen, and my father did not have the patience for my imaginative leaps.

  But as we drove on to Chicago and home, I tried to imagine where the little boy could be going, and what was between him and the man. I knew it could have been nothing. I’d been yelled at by my father plenty of times, with tears as a result; all boys have. But I couldn’t shake my dread. I was nine, given to nervous flights of fancy, nightmares. I began to imagine I’d witnessed something awful. What if the man wasn’t the boy’s father? Throughout the rest of the trip, my mind returned to that truck, to the man and the boy driving away from us. With every mile I was sure the boy traveled into danger. Or did he? It seemed to me a puzzle I ought to be able to solve, and yet the more I turned it over in my head, the less certain I was of what I’d seen.

  My parents divorced a year later, and my father moved away. As I’d feared—as I’d known—he receded from us, until he became a stranger, nothing more than terse notes at holidays. I spent the rest of my boyhood self-absorbed, dreamy, lost. But the boy’s face, shocked, frightened in the headlights—that bit of the real world had reached me. That meant something. I looked at milk cartons and wondered if the boys’ faces were that boy’s face. But I couldn’t remember his features with any certainty. He could have been any boy. The man could have been any man. They could have been going anywhere, doing anything. I saw the boy’s body at the side of a mountain stream, white as a snowbank, facedown. Then he sat next to me, doodling, in algebra.

  Maybe, I thought, I could help him. Maybe I could take him someplace. Maybe I could get him out of my head. But I’ve been hesitant. Would it be better to know? Or better not to?

  I keep thinking and thinking: My boy. What’s happening to my boy?

  I.

  The boy is excited at first, leaving Chicago; he chatters for a solid hour. The man smokes cigarettes and drives the pickup one-handed, smiling, listening to the boy’s voice. The boy lives in a suburb to the north, and doesn’t get to see the buildings downtown much; he cranes his head out the window to see the Sears Tower as they pass it.

  It’s one thousand four hundred feet, the boy says. He has pale circles around his eyes; his cheeks are burned a bright red. Last weekend he and his mother went to the beach. The boy is towheaded and pale, and on the lakeshore his skin burned badly enough to blister. The man can almost see him at the beach: Looking at the lake for a while, though it’s not rare enough to hold his interest. Staring at people while he staggers across the sand—the boy’s inexhaustibly curious, and less tactful than most kids. Tripping, probably, once or twice, and sprawling onto his chest. (He’s grown a lot in the last year, and his coordination’s left him; the man guesses it won’t come back until the poor kid’s in his teens. That’s the way it was for him, anyway.) He can picture the boy swimming: dog-paddling a bit, holding his chin high out of the water, pleased and terrified all at once.

  The kid doesn’t quite fit, wherever he goes. The man loves him for that, for the ease with which these little pictures suggest themselves. The boy stays in the man’s mind.

  The man puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder, then quickly removes it: almost a tap. The boy turns, looks at him, says, What? When the man just smiles and shrugs, the boy goes back to his sightseeing.

  The man keeps smiling at the back of the boy’s head, the way the wind lifts his hair, light and inconsequential as a bird’s down. About as irresistible, too. The man wants to twine his fingers into it. He puts his hands on the wheel and tells himself to be calm, to keep his eyes on his driving. They have a long way to go. They have time.

  ARE YOU SURE it’s okay? the boy asks.

  They’re out of town now, moving southwest past late-summer corn. The city vanishes quickly here; everything recedes. A Midwestern haze rubs out every sign of the world beyond two miles’ distance; the sunlight comes from nowhere. A few cars float along ahead of them. No police, either—the interstate rushes along at eighty.

  The man turns down the radio and pretends not to have heard the boy’s question. This worked a half hour earlier; the boy lost interest. The boy’s mother thinks the little guy has attention-deficit disorder, but the man disputes it—the boy’s smart and wide-eyed, and his mind always looks to the next thing, but to say that’s a disorder seems to do the boy no favors. Still, the man is never sure what questions to anticipate from him. He’s a little afraid of what the boy might do—but he looks forward, in a way, to whatever it is the kid will throw at him.

  He thinks, not for the first time, how the boy is wasted on his mother.

  Is it? the boy insists.

  Is what?

  This trip, the boy says. I’m sort of thirsty.

  A little while more. We’ll need gas, then we can stop. There’s pop under the seat, I told you—

  It’s kind of warm. I mean the last one was.

  No problem, cold pop at the next stop. The man thinks about playing further with the rhyme, but that’s not the boy’s sense of humor.

  What are those? the boy asks.

  They’re passing a small pastur
e fenced by split-wood rails. Behind the fence two llamas graze. A third watches the traffic, dewy-eyed and bemused.

  Can you tell me? the man says. I bet you know.

  They look familiar. The boy pronounces it fer-mill-yer.

  Here’s a hint. They don’t usually live in this country.

  I remember the word. It’s got two L’s.

  Yeah.

  Llavas?

  Close. Llamas.

  The boy turns his head for a last look.

  They’re pretty, don’t you think? the man asks.

  Yeah, the boy says. I wish I brought my dictionary.

  I bet we can find you one.

  Mine’s got my notes in it.

  The boy annotates things he reads with a weird mix of symbols and codes: stars and wavy lines and exclamation points. The man has asked what they mean, but the boy won’t tell him.

  At the next exit the man pulls the truck into a busy tangle of off-ramp fast-food restaurants and truck stops. The largest truck stop advertises itself as a “stopping center,” and at least a hundred cars are parked in a lot which can hold many more. He asks the boy if he needs to go to the bathroom; the boy says no. The man asks if he wants to go inside, and the boy says no again. He seems sleepy. The man tells him to keep the truck locked.

  The man walks across the baking blacktop, pulling his shirt away from his chest, and into the little convenience store attached to the gas station and diner. No one looks at him. He knows he’s not much to look at, and here on the side of the road the men who come and go around him seem, to his eyes, rougher than him, more worthy of notice. Heavy-bellied truckers, dead-eyed cross-country travelers. A couple of college-aged kids with unwashed hair and tie-dyed shirts play video games, swaying and ducking. The man takes two bottles of cold pop from a cooler, and then sees a rack displaying magazines and a few books. There he finds a small paperback dictionary, next to stacked collections of crossword puzzles. He picks up the dictionary and several of the crossword books—they seem like something the boy might like. He takes a package of pens and a blank pad, too. The clerk is a teenaged girl, stationed on her own, away from the staff at the diner; she seems bored and disinterested, and sure enough, when he checks through she doesn’t glance up. He pays cash.