This apartment only ever served as a place for me to convalesce. I moved out of L.A. as soon as my disease started to show, as soon as the people around me began to back away. People could tolerate a lot in that city, but a beautiful woman’s descent into the grotesque was not acceptable, at least not in the industry. And people were still a bit afraid of my particular strain, which had developed a resistance to nearly all of the standard medical treatments. So I retreated back to Chicago, abandoning the sea air and the mountains and the sunshine for a tiny studio apartment in Uptown that seemed like a good place to die. And this was the apartment I’d chosen, because it was cheap enough to be covered by my Social Security checks and nothing about it reminded me of California.
It has a smell, like dying flowers, like something sweet rotting. I never really noticed it before. Now, with all of my senses sharp and new, it assails me in the doorway and has me trying to force open my windows, a futile endeavor, as they’ve been painted shut since before I lived here. I’d never cared much what my apartment looked like. But now everything around me, from my threadbare couch to the yellowing tile in my kitchen to my leaky, moldering bathtub, seems to be suffused with disease. It never occurred to me before how dim my apartment is. My bed is unmade and my sheets smell sour. I strip it down to the mattress and haul the bedding to the first floor laundry room, throwing it into the washer with a few capfuls of bleach, enough to make my nostrils sting from the fumes, but at least it’s better than the other smell.
Upstairs, I root around under my sink until I find a soft cardboard box full of trash bags. I’d left a half-full can of garbage in my kitchen before I checked into the hospital, and now it’s teeming with fruit flies and reeks so badly it makes my eyes water as I bag it up and rush to the trash chute in the hallway. Another survey of the space under my sink produces a bottle of kitchen spray and a can of Ajax, and even though it’s three in the morning I begin to tear into my apartment with the fury of a meth addict in an after-school special. This place is unsuitable I think, again and again, unsuitable for the person I am now. I should be back in L.A., where I could open the window and smell hot wind and desert flowers. I should live in a place decorated with silk curtains and ornate mirrors, with a wrought-iron bed frame and huge photographs hanging on the walls. It was what I told myself again and again as a child, sleeping in the stagnant air of my mother’s trailer, listening to motorcycle engines and angry voices drifting in through my window. I told myself I belonged somewhere beautiful, that God had made a mistake when I was born there. That was back when I believed in God.
I sleep on my couch when I’m finally exhausted, too drained to retrieve my sheets from the laundry room. I hope they’ll still be there in the morning, though I doubt it. At least the place smells better now, the odor of rot beaten away by the sharp, acrid scent of ammonia and the treacly lavender of my kitchen cleaner. Everything is still dingy, though, battered away by years of activity. I think of all the hours I’ve spent here, all the endless days shuffling around, wearing down the cushions of my couch, eating out of delivery containers and not seeing the sun for weeks at a time. How easy it was to remove myself, almost completely, from the world around me. I chose to be absent, when even Dr. Grath had been finding his way around the city without his eyes. What a coward I was, I think. How weak.
I don’t sleep well. It’s a terribly uncomfortable couch. Things don’t really look better in the morning, there’s just a haze of natural light added to accentuate the ugly details of the place. I wonder if I should move, leave everything and start over somewhere else. It’s a fleeting thought. The only person in the world who knows me lives right across the hall. And, no matter how much I’ve changed, I’m not prepared to give that up yet.
David
David Jr. looks like a young bird in the light of his computer, making his skin a pale blue and his black eye look even bigger. His soft, fair hair is mussed, and he can’t keep his hands out of it. It makes him seem nervous, the way he plays with his hair, digging his fingers through it, twisting tufts until they stick out from his head like thorns. I wonder if he is nervous, talking to this man who resembles his father in only shadowy, utilitarian ways.
He has always been small for his age, my son. He was born nearly six weeks premature, and even after he outgrew the delicate, alien visage of those first weeks he never quite caught up to the other kids his age. I think of how he must look to the other boys in his class, like he’s made of china, like he could break if you handled him just a bit too roughly.
The image of his split lip is glaring magenta on the computer screen. It makes me furious to see this sort of damage to my son’s face, first at the little fucker who hit him and then, irrationally, at my son for being such an easy target. For being too much like me, at his age, with a father too disinterested to teach me how to avoid getting my ass kicked. It’s a shameful feeling, being angry with my son because he got hurt, because I haven’t been around enough to teach him all of the things I was forced to learn for myself.
“Mom said it was you who started it,” I say, trying to coax some sort of satisfactory explanation from him. He nods, fingers curling into the hair above his right ear.
“They were laughing at me.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I ask.
“Jimmy and Bradley Simmons. A few others,” he replies. I know those little shits. They look like they could be in high school, though they have the intellect of second graders. Their father owns a company that manufactures tractors, one of those unlikeliest of success stories, in which someone with very few valuable faculties makes millions by accident alone. The sort of success story that makes me wild, burns in me like chemical waste, goring holes in my stomach when I think of the way my grandmother toiled for so little. Or my mother, who could read books in Russian, who knew the names of the constellations, whose sadness seemed born of knowing what she could have been if she hadn’t been saddled with a farm and a son and a worthless husband. My mother, who didn’t live to fifty, who didn’t live to see me start high school.
“Jimmy and Bradley Simmons are bigger than you. Why would you try to go after them yourself?” I ask, feeling the sting of my own hypocrisy. I would be riotously proud of my son if he’d had the brawn to go after them and come out on top. David Jr. shrugs. “Come on, you can do better than that. Tell me, why would you start a fight with boys who are twice your size? It’s not a smart move, buddy. You shouldn’t be starting fights you can’t finish.”
“They had a cartoon from the Internet. You were wearing a sheet like a dress, and they were laughing at you,” he says. I know the cartoon he means. The New York Times ran it the week after my rehab story broke. It shows me as an overgrown frat boy, showing up to a vote in a toga with a bottle of whiskey taped to each hand.
“Look, buddy, there are going to be plenty of people who will say mean things about me. That’s what it is to be a leader. People need someone to ridicule, and it’s always the person who steps up. Understand?” I ask. He nods, though his expression borders on vacant, like I’ve awakened him from a deep sleep. “Tell me that you understand.”
“I understand,” he says, the split in his lip bobbing as he speaks. Maybe I’ll have one of my buddies in the IRS run an audit on Simmons Tractor and Freight. Maybe I’ll reroute the new highway in my district so it runs right through the Simmons’ family home.
“When I get home, I’m going to teach you how to fight, okay? I’m going to teach you how to throw a punch and mean it.”
“I did mean it,” he replies. A baby bird, I think. Or maybe a baby mouse. It makes me a little angry, that he doesn’t have the sense to know he’s too damn small to be picking fights.
“You don’t have to fight my battles for me, understand? I can do that myself. I don’t need a little kid to stand up for me,” I say, and watch him deflate in front of me. Shit. This is not what it means to be a better father. “I just don’t want you getting hurt on my account, buddy. It’s not worth you getting hu
rt, all right?” He nods, but he doesn’t look at me. “All right. Are you surviving grandma’s cooking?”
“She made me eat goat cheese.”
“Did you like it?” I ask.
“No, it was gross,” he says.
“Well, listen, Mom is going to be back with you in a few weeks, and then it’ll be just a few more months until I’m home too. And hey, I’ll take you to a Brewers game, how about that? We can get those seats behind the dugout again, would you like that?” I ask, painfully aware that I’m pandering to my son, giving him whatever he wants so he won’t be so damn sad anymore. I’m just as bad as Beth, I think. Every time I try to toughen him up a little, I end up coddling him.
“Yeah, sure, Dad,” he says.
“You keep your chin up okay?”
He nods, and we sign off. I sit back in my chair, my fingers at my temples, trying to resolve the mix of pity and guilt and shameful disdain that always curls through me when I speak to my son. The unqualified optimism I felt that first day in the hospital room feels like a shrunken, petrified memory now. A better man, I think. Yeah, I’m fucking father of the year.
Linda
It’s the same house. That’s all I can think when I follow Tom inside. He didn’t sell it after all, which I know had been a consideration when money started getting tight after my accident. I’m grateful that it’s still here, this house on Hinman Street in Evanston, because it is so achingly familiar even though it’s been eight years since I’ve run my hand over the smooth wood of its banisters or felt the floors echo under my feet.
Jack and Katie stand at the foot of the stairs when we enter, Katie with her hands behind her back while Jack stands on the bottom step, twisting himself back and forth from the end of the banister. They both look a little frightened of me. In truth, I’m a little frightened of them.
“Mom’s home,” Tom says, with an almost sing-song exuberance to his voice, then moves to pay the babysitter, a wisp of a girl who doesn’t look much older than Katie, and usher her out. She looks like she might prefer to hang around and watch the family drama that’s about to unfold, but she finally ducks out the front door when Tom thanks her for the third time. The door shuts behind her with the firm insistence of the lid of a pressure-cooker. There is nothing left to do now but to meet my children.
Jack moves first, with a grin that is all pink gums and empty spaces, launching himself at me and gripping me around the waist with such force that I nearly topple. “Mommy!” he says into my side, and I’m sure if I were a real mother I would know exactly how to match this display of emotional hunger. If I were not a woman living inside herself, if I had not been separated from my children so viciously and for so long, I would know what to do. But my hands do not seem to work. I cannot quite figure out how to hold this small creature who has attached himself to me, so all I manage is to pat the black silk of his hair. Tom lets the moment go on for longer than I would prefer, before he rubs the boy’s back, taking him by the arm and releasing his grip on me.
“Okay, Jack,” he says. “Okay.” Jack is still grinning as Tom gathers him up with an arm around his shoulders, kissing him on the top of the head. I think maybe I haven’t done so badly after all, but then Katie bursts into tears, clapping both hands over her face, and runs up the stairs. I can hear a door slam at the end of the hall. “Shit,” Tom mutters.
“Daddy,” Jack chides, his tongue a pink protrusion between the gap in his front teeth.
“I know, buddy,” Tom says, glancing up at me with more than a little naked frustration. It reminds me of the look he started giving me in college when I got pregnant, a look that says, Couldn’t you have done better? I give him a little shrug, and that seems to make things worse. “How about you go upstairs and check on your sister, okay?” Tom says, nudging a reluctant Jack toward the stairs.
“Fine,” Jack says, his footfalls landing on the steps with a little more force than necessary. I take a breath once he’s out of sight. It never used to be difficult to breathe around my children, but this new body is proving more difficult to navigate than the old one was.
Tom watches me openly as I take in the house. It’s as if he still thinks I can’t see him when he’s doing it, after all those years when he watched me from just beyond the periphery of my vision. I walk from room to room, biding my time before I go upstairs to the one room I want to see. I have to pretend that I care about it all, the kitchen and the bathroom and the dining room and the den, instead of just wanting to see my little room at the top of the stairs. I take the steps slowly, remembering just how they creak under my weight.
I hold my breath as I open the door, expecting to see my bed with its armchair drawn close, the TV on the dresser across from it. Instead, it’s an office. I don’t want to let out my held breath, as if this room is a mirage that may still shimmer away and transform itself into what I remember. But no, it remains. Bookshelves, a desk with a computer on it. A calendar tacked to the wall. A heavy shade over the window. My memory stirs, shaking forth a familiar image. This room was Tom’s office before the accident. Of course he would revert it back to its former use once I was safely moved into a nursing home. Of course, it’s only logical. But it seems Tom’s logic has served no purpose but to hurt me in these past eight years.
I take a few steps in, standing where I used to lie, listening to the sounds of my house, remembering the melodic tones of Cora’s voice, watching clouds and blue sky and birds from the window. This room, which had been my whole world for a while, looks like I’ve never been here at all.
Tom follows me into our bedroom, a room I haven’t entered in eight years, and it’s a different color from the one we picked together when we moved in. I wonder if he still sleeps on the same side of the bed, but when I glance at the side tables there’s an equal amount of clutter on each. Books, mostly. How long has it been since I read a book?
The curtains on the windows are different, and that strikes me as probably the oddest thing of all, because what the hell does Tom know about curtains? He’d lived alone in an apartment before we moved in together, and when I first saw his place I’d been appalled to see that he’d stapled a sheet over his window to keep the sunlight at bay. But these curtains are mounted on ornate, heavy rods. They’re cut perfectly to the size of the window. The fabric looks expensive. I’m baffled, absolutely baffled, at how these curtains came to pass without my orchestration. I wander into the bathroom.
“Honey,” he says, as I’m reaching for my closet door. My hand freezes. He looks like he’s steeling himself against something, the way he used to look when we’d drive down to his parents’ house in Iowa for Christmas. I imagine his father’s gray crew cut and his booming voice. Could I possibly be so fearsome?
I open the closet, and then I understand Tom’s hesitance. The ironing board rests against one wall of the little walk-in space. Boxes labeled “Christmas Decorations—Upstairs” are stacked in the corner. My clothes are gone. I step inside. All my things are gone. My shoes. Even the tall, thin dresser that held my belts and scarves and underthings, it’s gone too.
“Where . . .” is all I can manage. My vocal chords have wound themselves into a tight little knot at the base of my throat. I’m wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt that Tom bought me at the Target on State Street before I left the hospital, and it occurs to me that this is all I have. My clothes are gone.
“We sold some of it. And donated some of it,” Tom says. “But honey, this was years ago. You have to understand, we had no idea.” He doesn’t finish, but I know what he’s going to say. There’s no way he could possibly have known that I would be cured. It would be illogical to keep my things, especially when the closet could so easily be used to store an ironing board and Christmas decorations. Why keep around reminders of a wife who might as well be dead?
“Who is ‘we’?” I ask.
“Me and the kids.”
“Oh.” My family. My traitorous little family, ganging up against me. The question swings ba
ck at me again, the one I asked Dr. Bernard at the first support group meeting.
“We didn’t get rid of all of it. Some of your things are up in the attic.” He pauses, waiting for something. Gratitude, maybe? When he doesn’t get it, he continues. “We’ll get you new things, of course. Tomorrow, we can go out and get you a whole closet of new clothes.”
“Sure.” After all, what is the loss of my belongings when I’ve already faced the loss of eight years of my life? I imagine this is what it must be like for families whose houses have burned down, leaving them nothing familiar to call their own. I remember stories of refugees who would not give up their deteriorating shoes because they were the only things remaining from their old lives. That is what I am, I think. A refugee. A woman who has been so cast out of her life that she will forever be a stranger in it.
“I don’t want,” Tom begins, and then he gets choked up, wipes at his eyes. Tom has always been the one of us who was quickest to cry. It’s amusing in a dark way, how some things never change. “I don’t want you to think we didn’t miss you,” he says, his voice an octave higher than usual because of the strain of his tears. I used to find it endearing, his wealth of emotion and his willingness to display it openly. But I’ve seen him cry one too many times during the past eight years to see it as anything but useless. Pathetic, even. “We missed you every single day. If I had thought there was any chance at all that you could come back, I would have saved every single thing. But baby, they told me there was no chance. Zero. They told me there was no point in believing in miracles.”
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