“I do, too,” Martin said. What was it about talking to old English people that turned him into such a smarm?
“When do you think you’ll go home?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at his socks—he’d been wearing the same crusty pair the last few days. He hoped no one could smell them. Maybe they didn’t smell.
“And your wife is …”
“Hanging in there,” he said.
“I believe your mother might come over if she finds something to do with your father.”
Martin laughed. “That’s always the trick.”
“Is he … progressing?”
“He’s hanging in there.”
“You Americans like to hang in there,” Richard’s father said.
“Justin!”
They laughed. She stood, smoothing her dress as if she were wearing an apron. “I suppose I could make some tea. Or perhaps something stronger?”
“Stronger,” Justin said.
In the kitchen, as Martin poured a drink for Justin, who’d been unwilling to come in from the warmth of the living room, Richard’s mother readied tea.
“Lemon?” she said.
“Yes, please.”
“Then you put it in there, like that,” she said under her breath. “Just so. Yes.”
And he strangled back a laugh.
“What is it?” She looked frightened.
“I think I’m a bit on edge,” he said.
“Of course. Of course.”
They went together into the living room, carrying tea and scotch. Richard’s father was dozing in the big leather chair.
“Drink?” she said softly.
“Hmm?” He opened his eyes. “Well, maybe not. Martin, would you do the honors?”
He’d thought he’d just have tea, for once. He looked at the amber single malt, the way he’d poured it to fill the glass just so. He sat across from them on the sofa, and set the scotch neutrally on the coffee table, like an ornament.
“I’ll get you some tea.” Richard’s mother went off back into the kitchen.
Martin waited. Justin looked at him, smiling.
“This is some pickle,” he said. “You’d call this a pickle, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s been a pickle for a long time,” Martin said.
“Eighteen months,” Justin said.
Martin was surprised by the exactness with which he knew it.
“We love your sister very much,” Justin said.
“I know,” Martin said quietly.
“They are a wonderful couple.”
“Yes.”
“So.” Richard’s mother returned with a fresh cup of tea. “Where were we?”
“Here,” Justin said.
“I think what I’ll do,” Richard’s mother said, “is call Emma and let her know where things stand.”
“I was going to call her,” Martin said.
“Of course you were. But it’s better, isn’t it, coming from her mother?”
Martin picked up the scotch and sipped it. It was the thirty-year-old that Elizabeth had let him open after Richard had vanished. It was incredibly smooth, and then as sharp as an ice pick. He sipped it again.
“Good, is it?” Justin said.
Martin nodded in midswallow.
“They have such a lovely home,” Richard’s mother said. “I’m sure they’ll come back.”
“Quite sure,” Justin said. He raked his thick moustache with an index finger. “Quite so.”
Hmm, Martin thought he heard himself say. He took another sip of the scotch and waited for it to occupy his head.
When evening came they sat at the table in the kitchen and ate buttered bread and presliced meats rimmed with jelled fat and little pickles and some very mayonnaisy potato salad. Justin and Paula drank cold water. Martin worked slowly on the scotch. Their baggage—they’d flown in from Ireland, where they had retired to—hadn’t moved from the front hall, as if they were awaiting an invitation. He wanted to say something gracious. On the flight up to see them not long after her diagnosis, Elizabeth had later admitted to him, all she wanted, all she really wanted, was for the plane to crash. Then they just sat around all weekend and stared at me, she’d said. Like they were waiting for me to die right there. Later she decided that they were sweet and attentive. It was hard to figure them out. Anything could be true about them.
“I’m sleeping in the study,” he blurted out.
“Oh good,” Paula said. “Then we’ll take the guest room.”
While she and Justin saw to the dishes, he cleared himself out of the guest room and made the bed to look new. There was a room next to the guest room with an exercise mat and a futon mattress on the floor, but he certainly didn’t want to be that close. He brought his bag down to the study. He was feeling better. Maybe it was true what they said about really excellent single malt—maybe he wouldn’t get a hangover.
He took their bags up all in the same trip—heavy, boxy buggers from the midsixties, he guessed. The luggage felt like it held weeks’ worth of clothing. He knew they didn’t like to be uprooted. They liked everything just so, but they wouldn’t complain.
“So you’re all set,” he told them as they dried dishes in the kitchen.
“Thank you so much, Martin,” Paula said.
“Cheers,” Justin said.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night,” they said.
He lay on the built-in bed in the study, beside the shelves of books about getting pregnant and getting even. He never slept well without Lauren next to him and the kids near. He’d either turn in relatively sober and wake intermittently and for prolonged periods, or he’d try it blasted out of his mind and have one bolt of sleep and be up for two hours trying to cut up the hangover and then sleep for a last hour. He was now more into the latter sequence, even though he felt quite helplessly clear, that sense of distance between him and Lauren and the kids beginning to overwhelm him, as if he’d have to swim the ocean himself just to get back to them. What was it that he was always trying to escape?
As if there was a single answer—a force that could push him into another way of life. It was more complicated than that, more typical. Sometimes he felt a serenity, or not exactly that, but the possibility of it. But what or where was it? Was it death? Was it Lauren? Was it the children? Was it the past? Over the last eighteen months, at odd moments he’d be looking at a particular spot—the empty, wind-sheltered deck at the top of a battlefield observation tower, a patch of green grass on a remote soccer field, a pristine, hilly apple orchard right as the trees bloomed white in spring or flamed out in fall—and it hit him that he was looking for a suitable place to die. A place of isolation and comfort. A place on both a grand and a small scale, where the infinitesimal quality of his own life relative to all others could be enveloped in something not unlike a womb.
Where was she?
Nothing Sparks told him was news. He knew about the three new spots on the liver, the growing lesions on the spine and sacrum. He knew they wanted to zap her ovaries and she wouldn’t let them. There wasn’t a thing he didn’t know.
“It’s sad, really,” Sparks said, not smiling, combing a loose strand of gray-blond hair out of her eyes. “We can offer her comfort. We can offer her quality of life. But she feels we’re falling short, because we can’t offer her a cure. Do you know what she told me last week? That she wasn’t going to be one of those young women who die on Taxol. Sometimes I think she thinks that because we can’t cure her, we’re just trying to kill her. That we just want her out of the way.”
Martin nodded, unwilling to contradict her.
“Of course, I’m not surprised she’s left. She’ll come back, though. She has to.”
He shook his head. “My mother always thought she’d have to come back to the States. She’s very strong. She doesn’t have to come back to anywhere.”
“Well.” She checked her watch. “I don’t know about that. I’m afraid I have another appoint
ment.”
“I’m grateful for your time.”
“It’s always hardest on the family,” she said.
On his way to the tube, he tried to remember what he’d liked about Sparks from their other meetings. That she spoke directly to Elizabeth and never to him. That she was older than he’d expected. That she had a slyly frontal and yet reassuring delivery of the news. The disease was easing out of control, but she could live with very little liver. Lines like these, when he recalled them, made him laugh out loud. But when he first heard them, he was just writing them down to share with everyone else and even with Elizabeth, who tried so hard to listen that sometimes she couldn’t remember anything. He’d read back his notes like a transcriptionist, and in Sparks’s syntax they could find both the facts and even some comfort, if not exactly hope. From Sparks’s view there had never been any hope. She hadn’t been supposed to make it to New Year’s. Now New Year’s was in the rearview mirror, just another date. She was still alive. What did Sparks know?
But he’d felt his sister’s humiliation. She didn’t want to return to Baltimore because it would be a form of surrender. She didn’t want to give up her breasts or her ovaries. And how sick she must have been of everyone’s second-guessing—she hadn’t pursued the right career, married the right man, chosen the right treatment, lived the right life. Their mother had once told her that if she died, it would be her own fault. Their mother was kind of like Vince Lombardi, and she easily forgot the harsh, exhortative things she said. It was important to find blame in someone else’s dying because that meant it couldn’t happen to you. But someday, he knew, he’d wake to find a lump or rise from the toilet to the evidence of a blood-black stool or feel a strike in his brain or at his heart that would be the last thing he ever felt. Everybody got a turn. There should be no sense of humiliation about it.
As he stuck his key in the door of Elizabeth and Richard’s home, it opened and there stood his mother.
“Hello,” she said evenly.
“Hey,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Every time he saw her she seemed leaner and more muscular.
“You still love your old mother?” she said.
“Of course!”
He moved past her to hang up his coat, and there was his father, standing like something being propped up from behind, his belly lapping over his waist, his face puffy and yet drawn.
“Dad!” Martin said.
“Hey there.”
They hugged. It was impossible not to love hugging his father, who was sweet and warm and soft. When Martin felt him begin to sob, he pushed gently from him and finished hanging up his coat on the tree. The tree was nearly full now. There were a lot of people in the house. He didn’t feel oppressed by it.
“So?” he said, turning to them. “I can’t believe you came.”
“Of course we came,” Martin’s mother said. “Why wouldn’t we come?”
“Your mother insisted,” his father said.
“You insisted, too,” his mother said.
“It’s great you’re here,” Martin said.
Then the air seemed to go out of everything, and he was stuck with the fact that they were there and there were two more old people in the kitchen.
“What happened to your hand?” his mother said.
“Nothing. I had to break in to get in.” He was gratefully surprised that Lauren hadn’t told them.
“We had a key,” his mother said.
“So did we,” Paula called from the kitchen.
He shook his head and kept his mouth shut.
“So what did the doctor say?” his mother asked.
“Not much.” He walked into the kitchen and they followed. Now they were all in the seventy-thousand-dollar kitchen. That’s what he thought every time he saw it. Seventy thousand dollars. “She said she was sure they’d come back.”
“Of course,” Paula said. “I think they’re having kind of a holiday, really.”
“I got out of Richard’s boss that three months of that compassionate leave are with salary.”
“Three months?” Martin’s mother said.
“I thought we’d agreed we wouldn’t trouble his work,” Paula said.
“It was just a chat,” Martin said.
“A chat?” Justin laughed. “Calling his chief to have a chat? I don’t think so.”
“I hope you didn’t make them too concerned,” Paula said.
“I didn’t,” Martin lied.
“Anything else?” his mother said.
He poured himself a glass of water from the sink while they looked at him. “No.”
“I think we could all go on back home then,” Paula said quietly.
“Right,” Justin said.
“Sitting in their house and waiting for them like this is wrong,” Martin’s mother said.
“Exactly,” Paula said.
“You’ve done what you could,” his father said.
“Right,” Justin said.
They were all still looking at him, they hadn’t stopped looking at him.
What the hell was he doing here? He’d even failed to ask Sparks the one question that he should have. Did she have three months? Elizabeth never asked that kind of question; it was a betrayal for him to. Though Sparks had left any mode of inquiry open: It’s hardest on the family.
“Does she have three months?” he asked them.
“Martin!” Paula said.
“As long as she’s alive,” his mother said, “I have hope. That’s what I believe.”
“Me, too,” his father said.
“Absolutely,” Paula said.
“Right,” Justin said. It was all he seemed to be saying lately, but he was eighty.
“I don’t know if what they’re doing is wrong,” Martin said, looking at each of them. “But it doesn’t feel right.”
“You don’t feel it’s right.” Paula seemed to be talking to a dish towel she was folding. “That’s a judgment you’re making, dear.”
“I don’t know what to feel,” he said.
“There is hope,” his mother said. “I have hope.”
“That’s not enough,” he said.
“Why?” Paula asked, still folding the small dish towel. “Is there something else? Something, perhaps, that you think we’re missing? Do tell us, dear.”
At dinner, at a shabby Indian restaurant near the tube station, he drank beer steadily and barely spoke. The chicken vindaloo was all thigh meat, and the peas were gray, and the potatoes so soft they collapsed into a puddle whenever he tried to fork them. What were they talking about? It was the weather or a vacation one pair of them was thinking of taking or the expense of living in one city or another. It was what people had to talk about when they were just getting started after something tender, delicate, and unspeakable had passed among them. Before this whole awful year, in the previous whole awful year, he had once confessed to Elizabeth that he and Lauren divided their life into the before and after of her diagnosis. Oh, she’d said, I wish you wouldn’t think of it that way. I don’t think of it that way. It’s a journey, it’s not a division. But he hadn’t gotten beyond that yet. He was thirty-eight, and he wanted to look at all of this squarely, and sometimes it made him feel like he was twelve and sometimes it made him feel like he was seventy, and perhaps he would never feel that he was getting it all the way he needed to get it to get through it.
“It’s not terribly good, is it?” he heard Paula ask him through his wretched self-absorption, and he looked up to see her nodding at his plate.
“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “It’ll get better.”
The others laughed at this, an apparent joke, and he laughed, too, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was he was supposed to be laughing at.
They split the check and began their way back slowly, as if trudging through snow, and he wondered if getting to be old and being old were like always having some kind of weather that you h
ad to make it through, even when there was no weather at all. He walked at his father’s elbow, and soon the others were far enough ahead so that he felt like it was just the two of them, his father panting at each step. He walked with a limp. The clouds seemed suddenly to be descending, and Martin worried they’d be caught in the rain.
“It’ll hold off,” his father said. “You can go on ahead, if you want.”
“I don’t mind being rained on.”
“It won’t rain,” his father said. “I can smell it when it’s going to rain, and I can’t smell it, so it won’t.”
It began to rain.
“Shit,” his father said.
They both laughed.
“It’s only rain,” Martin said. They didn’t bother walking any faster; his father couldn’t. The rain was falling more frequently. Soon they wouldn’t be able to feel each individual drop, there’d be so many.
“I have the key,” his father said.
“Maybe Paula or Justin took theirs.”
“I don’t think so. Could you run ahead?”
“They’ll be all right.”
“Okay.”
It was a furious downpour, and he had nothing to cover his father with, and there was no shelter from it anywhere.
“Lots of big puddles!” his father shouted.
“I know!” he said.
“Do you think we should swim for it?”
When they arrived they were both soaked, and everyone else was standing dryly under the short roof over the front door.
“You have the key,” Martin’s mother said.
“I know,” his father said. He wrestled it from his sopping pants pocket and with a trembling hand gave it to her.
“Hot baths for you two,” Paula said as they dripped into the front hall.
“You’ve got him?” Martin asked his mother.
“Of course.” She was already mopping his father’s head dry, and then she kissed him softly on the lips. He seemed to be shaking all over. “You go on up.”
On the steps Martin stood looking down at them. From the kitchen came the chime and clatter of Paula readying tea and Justin trying to help her. His mother kissed his father again while he shivered and couldn’t seem to say anything. Martin went up the rest of the stairs and threw down a bath sheet.
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