What Remains

by Radziwill, Carole

  John calls me at the apartment the next morning early, while Anthony is still in the hospital.

  “Hey, sorry to wake you. I need to talk.”

  “Is everything okay?” I ask. Wondering what he possibly has to talk about that can’t wait until seven.

  “We need to talk about Anthony. He’s in denial, and he needs to come to terms with this.”

  He starts reading to me from a book, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. He thinks, suddenly, he has an answer. To get Anthony through the “Five Stages of Death.” He reads them to me: anger, denial, fear, acceptance, peace.

  He is oddly formal with me, rehearsed. “I wanted Carolyn to talk to you about it, but she was afraid to. She was afraid you’d get angry. But, Carole, he can’t go on like he is. He needs to accept that he is going to die.” His voice cracks.

  It’s too early in the morning for this conversation, and I take a deep breath. “I’m not telling him.”

  “He thinks you’re holding on to hope,” he says. “You have to tell him it’s okay.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a conversation I’ve wanted to have with him for months? Years?”

  He is silent for a moment, and then says quietly, “No, I don’t.” This stings, because I know he’s right. I made my pact with Anthony long ago. I never wanted a husband with cancer. And I don’t want to be the one to tell him he’s dying.

  It is too late at this point to talk about death. To shake Anthony by the shoulders until we are convinced he knows. It is too late to have everyone start saying it out loud. John is desperate and mad and trying to handle this, to pull us out. He knows this is his role, and he is stumbling. We are all a little frantic and too aware of the clock and looking at each other terrified.

  It’s a terrible thing to watch someone die. We are angry and desolate, consumed with hate for this disease. It doesn’t help that we have silently sworn to keep up appearances. Things are about to change and never be the same, and it isn’t a quick flick of fate’s wrist but a slow, wrenching turn, as if the power steering has gone out.

  Carolyn does talk to me about it later that morning in a cab on the way to the hospital. “We had an argument,” she says, “because I told him I wouldn’t talk to you about it. I couldn’t.”

  “I know it’s over. I know that he’s going to die,” I tell her. “Please don’t worry about me.” She starts to cry in the back of the cab. I know what she is feeling. The ambiguous space between saying it and then accepting it and thinking that maybe you’ll be able to go on, yet not wanting to.

  Sitting beside me in the back of the yellow cab with her face in her hands. Crying enough that the driver glances into his mirror, curious about the beautiful, white-haired girl. I shut the divider.

  When we pull up to the hospital, she doesn’t get out. “I forgot something at the apartment,” she says. “I’ll meet you back here.” I know she is lying. There is nothing to forget at the apartment. She can’t face this anymore. She can’t see Anthony. “Okay,” I say, and watch the cab pull away.

  You can see the cracks, but not until after. She doesn’t come back to the hospital. She comes to my apartment late that night. The doorman calls up and I buzz her in. “I’m sorry, Lamb. I locked myself out.” I know this, too, is a lie.

  It is three in the morning. She takes off her black dress without a word, crawls into bed, and falls asleep.

  3

  When we return to the Vineyard after the heart surgery there are glimpses of the Anthony I knew, the one I fell in love with. And there are glimpses of a future. There is a shift, a lightness, undetectable to everyone but me. As though by saying it out loud Dr. Girardi has given me permission to think beyond the present.

  On the third of July we move from Mike and Diane’s house to John and Carolyn’s. John wants to spend more time with Anthony. I make no more excuses. He has put a bed in a downstairs room off the patio so Anthony won’t have to climb the stairs. He has arranged to have Effie stay on to cook and manage the house. Anthony seems happy about the move. He finds a trainer from the gym in Vineyard Haven who will come to the house.

  Later that week I am in line at the post office, daydreaming of an afternoon three weeks earlier. Anthony had gone for a swim in the ocean and come back to the house full of energy. He was playful, winking, making fun of his own skinny legs, their weakened state. He believes the ocean restores him. “Look, Nut!” he called to me, marching around the kitchen on his beautiful, clumsy legs. We watched the sunset and had a cocktail, and I sat on his lap with my arms around his neck. For a few hours he was my husband, the one I feel sometimes I’ve barely begun to know. For a few hours he was someone from my past—handsome and strong with a sly smile, a cocked eyebrow. He was looking out toward the water, at the sunset. I burrowed a little closer, into his neck. He was holding me, and everything was going to be fine.

  I replay this—the sunset and the marching—and I take a long, deep breath. I have finished the invitations for Anthony’s birthday party on August 7 and Tina’s bridal shower August 10, and I’m waiting in line to buy stamps. I feel fortunate. I have an unexpected rush of happiness. The kind of rush you feel when the sun is out and someone loves you and the grass is freshly cut and you can smell clean air. It’s why we struggle to live, I suppose, for these fleeting and unpredictable moments.

  I have a husband who loves me. We’ve gone through all of this, and there are still days like this one. I did it, I am thinking; I did this. I didn’t do all the right things, and I was selfish sometimes, but I did the best I could. For a brief, elusive second, with Anthony waiting for me at the house and the sun shining in here through the glass doors, with the party invitations in my hand, I feel proud.

  “That’s a lot of mail,” the man behind me says, nodding his head toward the bundle in my arms. He has a key chain in one hand, a package in the other. He is wearing shorts and a casual buttoned shirt, sunglasses pushed back on his head.

  “Invitations,” I say. “For a bridal shower.”

  “Not yours, I hope,” he says, smiling. I am a little startled. I hear myself say, “No, just a friend’s.” The sun is out, and I’m running errands around town like any other young woman, flirting with the man in line behind me.

  Once we’re settled at John and Carolyn’s, we pick up our routine. We go to the hospital three times a week for dialysis. Sometimes I drive him; sometimes he drives himself. There is a house we pass on the way, a Cape Cod with a long gravel driveway and a gold Mustang convertible parked out in front. It has a “For Sale” sign in the window. A 1965, like the one my father used to own. The car that pulled into the driveway when I was nine.

  When I go to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, I pass by it. I pass by it on my way to Bunch of Grapes Bookstore. I become obsessed with this car.

  I look for excuses to drive into town, to drive past it. I have flashes, and I feel guilty for them, of driving away in it. On an unfamiliar road, and I don’t know where it goes. Driving with the top down, the radio blaring, far away from everyone. I steal glances, every time we go by, and it feels like a lover, this car.

  “Wait,” I say to Carolyn one afternoon. We are on our way to Midnight Farm, a general store, and we pass the car. I back up the road. “What are you doing?” she asks. I pull into the driveway and walk over to the car. What am I doing?

  No one is home, but there’s a phone number and I write it down.

  “We’ll drive cross-country, take a road trip,” I tell her, giggling, when I get back in the car. “How much fun would that be?”

  “It’s very Thelma and Louise,” she says, smiling. “Okay,” she agrees, “but I’m Louise, the one in charge.”

  “I knew you were going to say that. Fine, be in charge. I get to sleep with Brad Pitt.” I’m grinning big, and she’s trying not to but can’t help herself. She gets caught up in it.

  “Oh, I have an idea. We’ll pick up hitchhikers along the way and interview them,” she says, excited. “We’
ll get them to tell us all their weird stories.”

  “We’ll make our first documentary, Hitching Across America.”

  “We’ll stop at every Wendy’s.” She looks dead serious, and I start laughing, and then she starts laughing, too. “We can bring Friday for protection!”

  “Fine,” I groan, “but he sits in back.”

  I call the number after Anthony has gone to bed. The man on the phone tells me he has just rebuilt the engine and most of the detail is original. “It purrs like a kitty,” he says. “I’m selling it for ten grand. It needs some minor body work, but a friend of mine works at the Pit Stop and he can do it real cheap.”

  “I want it,” I tell him. “Finish the work and I’ll come by next week with a check.”

  Kissy and Jamie fly up on Friday. It is a welcome distraction, guests on the weekend to divert our attention. We spend the day on the beach and go waterskiing. John and Carolyn go with them into town after dinner, and I stay behind with Anthony. I like them here with their different stories, temporarily putting everything else aside. On Sunday everyone scatters separate ways. Jamie and Kissy fly back to New York, and John sets out early on a business trip to Canada.

  The following morning Carolyn is getting ready to leave. She’d rather stay, but there are things she needs to do in New York. She and Holly and I are in the bathroom upstairs, and she is blow-drying her hair. I am sitting on the edge of the bathtub, looking up at her, and she turns the blow-dryer off suddenly.

  “Here, try this on,” she says, grabbing a pale-green sari out of her closet. “You’ll look great in it.” I put it on and sit back on the edge of the tub. “It looks fantastic,” she says, pleased with herself.

  She turns to Holly, who is waiting to drive her to the airport. “Okay, listen, Sweetie, let me just tell you straight-out. You need a major fashion overhaul.” We all start laughing. Holly, I know, is thrilled with this sudden attention. “You need to sex it up a little.” Carolyn hands her a leopard-print sarong. “Here, this too.” She gives her a gold ankle bracelet from the vanity.

  “And that straw hat with the blue ribbon—out,” she says, laughing, “or I’ll have to ban you from the house.”

  Then Holly takes Carolyn’s bag to the car, and Carolyn grabs two more sarongs out of a drawer. “They look so good on you. Keep them.” She looks quickly around the room and then gives me a hug.

  The car horn beeps. You can’t leave yet! I think. We run downstairs. She says good-bye and kisses me at the door. Friday is lying on the porch, and she scoops him up in her arms like a baby, kisses him on the mouth, puts him down, and runs toward the car. She stops suddenly, then turns around and runs back. “Here, take this, it gets cold at night. I love you.” She takes the peach pashmina scarf she is wearing and wraps it around me and squeezes me tight. “I’ll call you later. Remember, it’s all about me.”

  I watch the car disappear down the dirt driveway. I whistle for Friday and walk back into the house, shutting the door behind me. And then the terrifying quiet.

  4

  Friday, July 16, 1999

  I had prepared for an approaching sorrow, but not, as it turned out, for the one that was nearest.

  There is an imperceptible shift of a life in the moment of time between the event and the knowing. After the thing has happened, but before someone has said it.

  It’s the moment before you pick up the phone and something is announced. They’re not here yet and I was just wondering, are they there? With you? When the thing is still yours to lose. It’s not real until you say it out loud. This is what it feels like, the click between one life and another. This is the blink of time between the way things are, and then never the same again. Like changing the channel on a television. It’s this way—click—and now it’s this. This, and then this. Fate. Fortune.

  John has been calling me late at night all week, and it is annoying Anthony. He knows we are talking about him, and he doesn’t want anyone doing anything out of the ordinary. John calling so late every night is not ordinary.

  The calls are all the same. About life and love and how to manage it all. “I’m really proud of you,” he says in one. “Everything you’ve done—ABC and then going to school and then all of this.” He is quiet and sad, all winking humor gone. And he is trying to make a point about careers, accomplishments, and respect. “Carole, you’ve been amaz—”

  “No, don’t. Don’t say that, please. I’m really not.”

  I don’t want to be amazing. I am trying to figure it out. I am weak. I am scared. I am suffocating. I want it to be over.

  We are having the types of grand conversations you have around endings. He is searching and reflecting and trying to find the thing that means something, to mark this moment in our lives. He tells me he has started to write Anthony’s eulogy. I know it is breaking his heart.

  Carolyn and John are both in the city today, Friday. They’re coming up tonight for a cousin’s wedding in Hyannis—a ten-minute flight from the Vineyard. We plan to see them tomorrow night.

  Anthony wakes up early and goes for dialysis. When he gets back, Effie packs a basket with sandwiches and fruit, and we head to the beach in the Jeep. We get stuck in the sand dunes on the way and have to radio on the walkie-talkie for help. Effie is a quiet man, but I can tell by his look he’s not happy with me, taking Anthony to the beach, having him sit here in the hot sun. He wedges wooden planks under the back wheels, and I gun the engine to get enough traction to move forward. We zigzag up over the dune.

  When we get back, I have a phone appointment with my therapist. I consider not calling, but he charges me either way. So I call, and I talk about nothing for forty-five minutes and am glad when it’s over.

  I call my sister-in-law to tell her we won’t make the christening for my nephew. I give her my sound bite, that we’re away, relaxing for the summer. Anthony has had a difficult surgery, and we’re just trying to recoup, you understand.

  I call the man who is selling the Mustang to remind him I’m bringing the check in the morning. Then I sit out on the patio and watch Anthony and Stephan, his trainer, work with the large blue medicine ball until I fall asleep on the chaise.

  Effie makes an early dinner, and we eat quietly. The only sound in the house is the dishwasher running in the kitchen. We take a short walk after dinner down to the pond, turn around before we reach it, go back to the house, and settle in. Anthony turns on the television; I pick up my book. We are watching a movie in the living room, Papillon, with Steve McQueen, when Carolyn calls from the airport. “We’re getting a late start,” she says. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  The phone rings at midnight, and I’m sleeping so soundly I think it’s in my dream.

  Anthony picks it up and hands it to me without a word. I had meant to move it that afternoon so it wouldn’t wake him. I take the phone into the bathroom and shut the door before I put it to my ear.

  “Hi,” I whisper. I think it’s John. “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, hi, Carole. I’m sorry to wake you. It’s Pinky.”

  Pinky is a friend of John’s. He is calling from Hyannis.

  “Listen, I was supposed to pick John up at the airport, and they’re not here yet and I was just wondering, are they there? With you?”

  A simple question, Are they there? A door slamming shut on your life.

  I feel my heart beating when I hear this voice. It is midnight, past the time when people call. It is the wrong voice, and I know everything now. I want to hang up before the noises form words. Before sounds and then words can push their way out of my throat. I want to hang up on this voice that’s all wrong, go back to bed next to my husband, have a few more hours of my life.

  “Pinky, what are you talking about?”

  “I know, it’s late. I’m really sorry. Maybe I’m confused, but I think I was supposed to pick John up at the airport at ten o’clock, and he’s not here yet.”

  Maybe a few seconds pass, or a minute, when I don’t say anything
.

  Pinky forces a nervous laugh. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You know John, he probably just changed his plans and didn’t call anyone.”

  “They’re in Hyannis, Pinky,” I tell him. “Carolyn called me before they left. You must be mistaken.”

  “I know. You’re right. I thought maybe he changed his mind and stayed in the Vineyard after dropping Lauren off.”

  I try to picture Pinky—is he in his car outside the airport? Is he watching the sky? Is there anyone on the tarmac? Are there any planes at all coming in? “No. No, Pinky, John’s not here.”

  I hang up the phone and walk quietly out of the bathroom, but Anthony hears me. The way you hear panic, no matter how low it’s whispered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “That was Pinky, looking for John. They didn’t get to Hyannis yet.”

  “Oh. Well, you know John.”

  “I know. I’m just going to make a few calls and make sure everything is okay. Go back to sleep. Everything’s fine.”

  I walk down the long hall carefully, afraid to disturb anything. It is dark and still. Friday was sleeping under a chair, and he trots behind me through the dining room where we sat for dinner only a few hours ago. I flip on the lights in the kitchen and they startle me. I wonder, briefly, if I might prevent a horrible thing from happening, if it is in my power to stop it if I simply do not move.

  I have walked through this kitchen, past the wall of photos, a hundred times. A wet suit is still on the chair in the corner where Carolyn left it last weekend when Kissy and Jamie were here. There is a small wooden table by the window and a butcher block in the center of the room, and this is where I put the pieces together. I write the information I collect onto yellow Post-it notes and stick them to the wall, above the black phone and the faded list of emergency numbers written carefully in elegant script: the pediatrician, Burt the caretaker who lives at the end of the long driveway, the movie theater in Vineyard Haven. There is nothing in the faded handwriting that can help me now.