by Alix Ohlin
I could see how much he hated me. For being a doctor, for fucking his sister. For having both my feet, for waking each day without pain. “I don’t have anything,” I said, and left.
Steph kept inviting him over for dinner. I think she hoped that the more time he spent with her, in her calm, organized orbit, the more it would rub off on him. Or maybe she was just hoping to keep him decently fed. When invited, he always showed up, always toting that backpack, mostly sober, sometimes not. Once I woke up at midnight and went to the bathroom only to find him passed out next to the sink. I poured cold water over his head to wake him up. He came around slowly, shaking his head, and grabbed at me. He’d lost weight, and he was scrawny, but his arms were strong and ropy with muscle. I went through his backpack. He had five different medications in there but all the vials were empty. Other than the meds, there was nothing in the backpack except a dog-eared copy of Sports Illustrated and wallet with a Costco card in it.
“Please get the fuck off me,” he said, pushing me away.
“How much did you take?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Did you throw up?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do it now.”
“I’m sleepy now, man.”
“Do it now, or I’ll have to take you in and pump your stomach.”
“Okay,” he said, “Okay.” He stuck his fingers down his throat until he gagged. He seemed practiced at it. I sat with him for an hour or so, leaning next to him against the wall and making him drink water, until I felt like he was all right.
Midnight, Tuesday. It was February, an icy night with the roads as slick as rinks, when we got the call from St. Luke’s. Someone had found Alan behind a bar. It seemed possible he’d been there an entire day and night before he was discovered. The temperature hadn’t been above freezing for a week. By the time we got to the hospital, he was awake. The skin on his face was peeling, his lips cracked and bloody.
“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said. As she leaned over him, covering his hand with hers, he bared his teeth at her like an animal.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” he said.
Stephanie had just worked a double shift. Exhausted, she started to cry. “Alan,” she said.
I touched her arm. “Why don’t you take a minute?”
She hung her head. She didn’t want to leave him, but she was about to lose it. She nodded, resigned. “I’m going to call Mom and Dad,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”
As soon as she was gone his mood seemed to clear, and he grinned at me. The dimple in his cheek was still there when he smiled, incongruous against the chapped skin. I’d never seen him like this, his moods so all over the place.
“I only got frostbite in one foot,” he said. “So that’s an upside.”
“It’s good to stay positive,” I said.
Just as quickly as it had arrived, his manic mood left and his grin evaporated. His green eyes were steady. “You could really do me a favor, you know,” he said. “Man to man.” He didn’t say anything else. He cocked his head in the direction of his backpack.
I knew he probably had a whole pharmacy in there. He’d been at the VA hospital in Wilkes-Barre, and they were trying out some new meds, seeing if they could control his pain any better. Stephanie had told me she was hopeful it was going to work, but she said this every time, about each new treatment and every fresh promise from Alan. At work, I’d seen her treat patients with cool professionalism, helpful as she could be, distant as she needed to be. With her brother, it was always going to be different.
“Help me out, Doctor Tom,” he said.
He had that deadpan expression, but it wasn’t disguising some flash of humor. It was just dead. “Please,” he said.
I picked up his backpack and placed it on his bed. It was heavy, and I didn’t ask what was in it. I brought him some water, then turned off the light and closed the door behind me. The hallway was deserted, and I found Stephanie and took her down to the lobby and made her drink a cup of coffee, keeping her down there as long as I could. The nurses went to check on him, but not in time.
I’d been a doctor for less than a year.
I wouldn’t say he looked peaceful. I would say he looked shrunken, and ill-used, and older than his age, which was twenty-six.
I held Stephanie in my arms while she cried. I knew then, feeling her lean into me, feeling my own sadness catch fire from hers, that I loved her, and wanted to marry her, and I stored this feeling away in my heart for a happier day, assuming that we would get to one eventually.
There was a small service, at which Alan and Stephanie’s mother cried dryly, hopelessly, and Ludo gave the eulogy. He said Alan had saved his life by walking in front of him one day, that otherwise, he would have been the one who got injured. “It sucks,” he said.
After the first week, Stephanie didn’t cry all that much. She threw herself into work, double and even triple shifts; she would have worked even more if rules hadn’t forbidden it. In the evenings she cooked for me and ate very little herself, and I tried to be there for her, to listen if she wanted to talk, to hold her at night when she turned to me. On weekends we went on walks, and to the movies. Once, we went to Atlantic City and drank too much and gambled and slept together, and when she smiled for what seemed like the first time in months, I began to feel the clouds parting around us.
Then one night I came home at six and Stephanie was lying on the couch sobbing violently, her shoulders shaking with the force of it. I got her a tissue and she blew her nose into it, honkingly.
She sat up, her knees pulled up to her chin like a child. “It just sort of hit me,” she said, “that he’s never coming back.”
There was nothing I could do to comfort her. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I wondered if on some level she knew, or suspected, what I’d done. “Leave me alone,” she kept saying, and she sounded just like her brother. I left the house, drove around for a while, stopped at a bar. I started thinking about my old life in Philadelphia, the friends I had there, and the women I’d known, and it seemed like I’d been under some kind of spell, living an unreal life. I had these thoughts, but when I got back to the condo, Stephanie had composed herself. She fixed us each a drink. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just so hard.”
“I know,” I said.
I put my arms around her, and we sat together on the couch. She leaned against my shoulder, her hair brushing my chin. I looked out the window at the half-empty subdivision. No lights showed in the houses nearby, and the blackness of the street blended into the inky night. There was no horizon. It reminded me of the story Alan had told me, about not being able to tell the difference between sand and sky. It sounded almost beautiful to me, to be lost for a moment like that, with no one to tell you which way was up.
Robbing the Cradle
They were making a baby. They were going about it in the traditional way. In a ceremonial moment, Lisette put her birth-control pills away in a shoe box that she then buried in the back of the bedroom closet, underneath the silver pumps she wore only to weddings. She had loved Dan for five years, two of them as his wife, and would have said, if asked, that she couldn’t possibly love him any more than she already did. But this turned out to be false; what had come before was only a beginning, a small green bud. Now that they were planning a family, a new tenderness grew between them, sweet but not spineless, because it was also taut with possibility. When he held her, when he lingered on top, inside her, his light sweat sticking to her belly, when he came, sex itself seemed entirely different. It was wonderful and terrible and holy, to be in love and to know there will soon be a person in the world embodying that love. Half of each of you, combined.
Fueled by this intense, thrilling notion, they had sex all the time. In the supermarket, they held hands. In the evenings, when Lisette was at work with the youth orchestra, running the teenagers through Tchaikovsky, she ached for her husband, for his hair and smell and skin. Thinking abou
t him, wanting him, she found a sensual component, if not sexual, in the stroke of a bow across a cello’s wide flank, a kiss to the lip of a flute. Everything was a body, everything seemed ripe. The kids, who were between fifteen and eighteen, braced, head-geared, rippled with acne and coltish energy, used to both annoy and entertain her. They’d gotten along well, joking and teasing and even liking one another. But now she felt maternal. She was nicer, more patient, and physical, too—a little pat on the shoulder or brush of the arm letting them know how special they were. There was nothing inappropriate in it. Her energy was all for Dan, and what brimmed over was just extra caring and love. Sensing this, the kids responded. Instead of complaining about the Tchaikovsky being too hard, or hating the modern pieces (which is what they usually did at the start of the season, so that by the time the Christmas concert came around they’d be sure to score major victories in technique and sophistication), they bent their heads and practiced, practiced, practiced.
When Dan came home from work each afternoon—he taught math at the same high school where she rehearsed—they made love before dinner, in between his day and hers. It was like being newlyweds all over again. Sometimes, Lisette thought back to their wedding day, when she’d felt a squeeze in her chest so strong she’d almost thought it might be a heart attack. She and Dan had exchanged vows in front of all their friends and family, then leaned close and whispered a private vow just to each other, something no one else could hear. These days were like that moment all over again: they moved inside a rosy cloud, a bubble of promise, the family-to-be.
This went on for a year.
Each month she expected to get pregnant, and each month she didn’t. She couldn’t understand it. She was young, healthy, ready. By the sixth month, she started to think of her period using her grandmother’s antiquated term. The curse. She paid more and more attention to the slightest shifts in her body’s chemistry, its devious ecosystem of hormones and blood, tending to it even as it steadily let her down. She took vitamins, supplements, evening primrose, folic acid. She became an expert in ovulation and cervical mucus. She gauged, with a scientist’s exactitude, the swell of her breasts, the frequency of her tears, all the symptoms that presaged another failed attempt. When the curse came, relentlessly punctual every month, she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry.
Those nights, once she returned to the bedroom, Dan would hold her. He never cried. He always had hope. He said, “It hasn’t been that long.” He said this for six months, seven months, eight.
At the year mark, they made doctors’ appointments. Lisette’s results were normal. When Dan’s came back, he was very pale. He looked as sick as she’d ever seen him; even his bushy brown beard seemed to have wilted like some underwatered plant.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m the one letting you down.”
The test was conclusive. His sperm—the doctor, with ill-advised jocularity, kept calling them his guys—were unlikely to ever produce a child. He didn’t have very many, and the ones he did have were not highly motivated. His guys were underachievers. They wouldn’t get their lazy asses off the couch. If they were a sports team they’d be in last place, with no possibility of a turnaround, even with the best coaching.
So that was that. No treatment existed. Nothing could be done.
They didn’t make love for the next two weeks. When Dan came home from work he’d go out for a long run, snaking through the curving streets of their town, and after that he’d make dinner or eat what she’d made and immediately afterward go upstairs to his office, pleading homework to correct, lesson plans to revise. On rehearsal nights, instead of waiting up for her, as he usually did, he’d be in bed by the time she got home, feigning sleep. On the weekends he went for marathon runs, returning soaked with sweat and aggravation, no tension having been released. He’d been a track star in high school, won a scholarship to college, graduated with honors. He offered free math tutoring after school to kids whose families couldn’t afford it. He’d never cheated, taken a shortcut, or quit a job because it was too hard. This was the first time he’d failed to meet his own standards.
As for Lisette, there were things she had to jettison. The vision of their children, their genetic cocktail, his brown eyes and her ash-blond hair. Of course she had already named them, kissed them, rocked them to sleep. In her mind—knowing it was dangerous, but unable and unwilling to stop—she’d dressed them up for Halloween, celebrated Christmas with them, watched them graduate from high school, wept as they left for college. She’d had months to embroider their beautiful, complicated lives. But now she had to bury them, erase their memories, throw away the notebook in which she’d kept the list of names: Evan, Veronica, Nicole, Jacob. Good-bye to their futures, good-bye to all of them whose faces she had seen so clearly.
So this is heartbreak, she thought. Something cracked beyond repair.
It was sad. She cried in the night, and first thing in the morning, and cried again when she gently laid the notebook in the kitchen trash and ferried the bag out to the curb. But Dan’s white, lightly freckled back turned away from her in sleep, the blank fragility of it, was the saddest thing she’d ever seen.
At a certain point, she just couldn’t take it anymore. Losing him, his touch, their closeness, was more than she could handle, especially on top of all the other grief. So in the middle of the night she reached over, his body wakelessly responding, and by the time he opened his eyes she was on top of him, moving, kissing his neck. Also crying a little. And it was weird, but he put his hands on her, and it seemed to help.
“I’m ashamed,” he said afterward. “I can’t believe I can’t do this.”
“It’s going to be okay,” she told him, and knew as she spoke the words that it was her job to make them come true.
After that night, they discussed some possibilities. They were chastened, serious, calm, as if they’d aged twenty years between the conversation in which they’d decided to start trying and this one. Lisette, her resolve firm in spite of her heartbreak, told him that she wanted to raise a child with him, to have a family, and there were other ways of doing it. Did he still want a family? He nodded, with the same grim look on his face as when he caught a student cheating: the situation was bad, and there were no excuses, but a good teacher moved past blame to look for root causes and better solutions.
This is when they started talking about other men’s sperm. They talked about adoption too, but Lisette couldn’t get excited about this option. She wanted to have a baby inside her, to feel the link of flesh and blood, the umbilical cord, the kick of tiny feet. Yet at the fertility specialist’s office, she balked. Looking over the sperm donor files, she couldn’t imagine this scenario, either. There just wasn’t enough information. It was like shopping online for the least returnable of all items. The data given—weight, height, education level—was wholly inadequate. She needed touch and texture, the expression in a man’s eye, the specificity of gesture. How he sits in a chair, or holds a glass in his hand.
Though she knew she had to be the strong one, to pull Dan along toward their future, she broke down after the afternoon with the donor files.
“I can’t make a baby this way,” she said to him, tears streaking hotly down her cheeks. “I couldn’t even buy pants this way.”
If her baby was not to be a stranger, she needed so much more than this.
At work, things shifted once again. Whereas she’d once seen the kids with their instruments as sensual embodiments of a bright future, she now saw each and every one as a reproach, as something she might not be able to have. Everything youthful about them—their braces, their high-pitched giggles, their stupid, stammering in-jokes—made her angry. She’d always hated window-shopping, because there’s no point in looking at things you can’t buy. She snapped at them, telling them they had no talent.
“You’re lazy,” she said. “You think you can coast, but you can’t. You’re going to embarrass me, and yourselves.”
They were surpris
ed, but rolled with it. They were used to mercurial adults. They knew that it wasn’t the people around them but the activities in which they were relentlessly enrolled—swim team, orchestra, driver’s ed—that gave their lives structure, on which they could rely.
Packing up her bag one day after class she heard two boys talking around the corner in the hallway.
“What was up with Ms. Gilson today? She’s so bitchy. I think she hates me.”
“I bet she’s on the rag. You know how women are.”
Lisette stood there, shaking for a moment, then lost it. She dropped her stuff, her legs pulsing with adrenaline, and hurried down the hall after them. When they saw her—it was Tyler, violin, and Mark, French horn—they turned and blushed so hard that in another mood, she would’ve been compassionate. Instead she grabbed Tyler’s forearm and clenched it, hard, feeling the flesh give. If she’d been bigger and stronger, she might have broken it and flung his whole body against the wall.
“You think you know how women are? You think you know?”
“Sorry,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Do not let me hear you talking like that ever again. Either of you. Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“Get out of my sight.”
They weren’t going anywhere—why wouldn’t they go?—because, she realized, her hand was still on Tyler’s arm, her nails digging into his skin. She released him, feeling her fingers cramp. “Go,” she said.
Once they left the building she stood in the hallway with tears running down her cheeks. Angry at no one more than herself, for losing control, for embarrassing herself, for not having the life she thought she was going to. Then the janitor came, swishing his mop over the tiles, and she wiped her face and went out to the car.
Mark was gone but Tyler was still there, fiddling with his bike at the rack, his violin packed into a wire case mounted on the back. His dad had made the case for him, and when he first started with the orchestra, three years earlier, he’d asked her to come out and see it, assuring her that it secured the violin safely, with no chance of damage. Seeing him there, Lisette felt terrible. Tyler was a gentle, sensitive boy with a dry sense of humor he’d probably inherited, along with his looks, from his father, an engineer. When they first met he’d been stick-thin and given to striped polo shirts, with a strange habit of plucking the front of those shirts nervously, over and over, fraying the fabric just above his right nipple. He’d grown out of this, and filled out in general; he was a young man now, affecting a vaguely punkish look, skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors and a wallet attached by a thick silver chain to his black studded belt. She wanted to tell him that you couldn’t be punk and play in a New Jersey youth orchestra. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry.
