Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  The license plate reads MAC 6. Every Lincoln Town Car Patrick McLaughlin bought had that same license plate, the only difference being which number car it was. When he died, MAC 5 had been parked in the garage. I prepare to wave to my mother-in-law as soon as she is close enough. I figure she’s on her way home from Ryan’s. Her youngest son lives just over the railroad tracks, in a run-down building across from Finch Park.

  As the car draws close enough for me to see Catharine’s gray curls and her silver-rimmed glasses, I think she has caught sight of me as well, because she’s slowing down. But almost immediately I realize she’s slowing down too rapidly. She’s driving down the center of a busy road where cars regularly exceed the speed limit. A minivan is gaining on her from behind; I can’t tell if the driver has noticed the Lincoln’s deceleration. And then, unbelievably, Catharine comes to a stop. She parks the car right where it is.

  It’s all over in a second. I watch Catharine take her hands off the wheel as if she has decided she is done driving, and then the minivan is on top of her. The driver tries to swerve at the last moment, but he isn’t able to clear her completely, he clips the fender of the Lincoln.

  I am running across the street before the minivan makes contact, afraid Catharine is going to step out of the car into the traffic that is now passing the Lincoln on either side. I put up my hands, palms out, to signal the other drivers to stop. I pull the car door open and lean in. Catharine is sitting neatly in front of the steering wheel, as tiny as a child, her purse gathered on her lap. There is blood trickling down her forehead.

  “Louis,” she says. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  I DRIVE FAST, but paying close attention to the road, while glancing over to make sure Catharine is still conscious, is not enough to distract me from where we’re headed. The last time I was at Valley Hospital was two months earlier, and on that occasion I arrived in an ambulance with a young man who was already dead. It is not a place or a memory I want to revisit, and unfortunately I am now speeding toward both.

  When we turn into the hospital’s parking lot, I pull over to let an ambulance wail past, red lights flashing. I help Catharine into the emergency room and immediately see the orderly, a chubby red-haired boy, who helped carry Eddie into the hospital. I notice the round scuffed clock above the reception desk that seemed to be stuck at three-thirty that afternoon.

  When Eddie was carried into the ER, doctors and nurses surrounded us. People shouted into my ear, across the body. His wife was there, too, in her white uniform, standing on the edge of the fray, although I didn’t know until later that it was his wife. That she was a nurse at the hospital who was on duty and had heard the call about the accident, and the name of the victim.

  Today I have to stand at the reception desk for ten minutes before I can get anyone to even speak to me. Catharine and I then have to sit on the orange plastic chairs they allot to people who aren’t bleeding copiously or in some other way being obvious about dying. Catharine’s forehead has a rudimentary bandage on it now and the cut has stopped bleeding, which makes me feel a little better about the situation. She selects a magazine and holds it in her lap. I look down and count the floor tiles. There are sixty-eight tiles in the half of the room we are sitting in.

  “You’re walking slower than me,” Catharine says once they direct us to an exam room.

  I look down at her. Despite her resistance, the nurse insisted she be pushed to the room in a wheelchair. “You’re not walking,” I say.

  “You know what I mean,” she says. “You’re moving like an old man. And why are you screwing your head around like that? Are you looking for someone?”

  I almost say, I am an old man, but this would just provoke her to argue and there’s no point in that. She’s annoyed at me for bringing her here, so she’s looking for a fight. I stay out of her way by wandering in and out of the exam room until Lila shows up and Catharine kicks me out for good.

  I leave the room feeling stronger for the sight of my daughter in her white coat. My beautiful daughter, the future doctor. She makes the hospital look safer to me, more manageable. I feel well enough now to wander the halls. I stop an orderly and ask for directions, trying to ignore the fact that my heart jumps a little every time a nurse turns toward me. I blur my vision as I walk, not looking at faces. What would I do, what would I say, if I ran into Eddie’s wife? Maybe if I had known I would end up here this afternoon I would have prepared something, but as it stands now I am not prepared. All I am prepared to do right now is to find the goddamn chapel. I move through the halls—a left, a right, and two more lefts—quickly, trying to look purposeful and collected.

  But any composure I have shatters when I turn into the chapel and see the oversized wooden crucifix hung over the tiny altar. I have spent my lifetime attending church, and every crucifix looks different. On some, Jesus has the look of a sweet boy; on others, he is an emaciated man in his sixties. In the church I attended growing up, Jesus had a face as jolly as Santa Claus. The crucifix in the hospital chapel is one I haven’t seen before. In this one Jesus has the facial expression and the posture of Eddie Ortiz on the last day of his life.

  Right there on the wall is the figure of Eddie lying in a patch of tall grass, curled up on his side as if he has gone to sleep. His flannel shirt tucked into his jeans. His tool belt still fastened around his waist. His dark hair cut short. I can see part of his young man’s face. His expression is relaxed. He clearly has no idea what he just lost. On the contrary, his face appears wide open, bared toward a bright future.

  My crew had been replacing a roof on a medium-sized Colonial. It was a simple, straightforward job. A couple weeks in duration, tops. Three men on the roof, me checking in a few times a day from the ground. The work was going according to schedule, with no significant hold-ups. Eddie Ortiz had been working for me for six months. He was really good with his hands, and smart, too, a rare combination in a construction worker. He was only Gracie’s age, but he had a wife and two little kids, and I knew he had ambitions to move up and gain more responsibility. I’d decided that when this job was finished, I’d give him a raise and he could help me do some supervising. There was too much work for just me to handle by then; Eddie had come along at the perfect time.

  But on that cloudless, dry Wednesday afternoon I decided to climb up on the roof to check the men’s work. Eddie was showing me a small flaw in the roof’s structure when he took a step toward the edge and lost his footing. It happened so quickly that none of us even had a chance to throw an arm out, or yell for help. I will never get over how fast it happened. One minute I was sitting on my heels eating a sandwich and listening to Eddie. The next minute I was standing on the edge of the roof, looking down at the young man lying in a patch of tall grass. His voice still rang in the air.

  I am on my knees in one of the pews, but I have not yet uttered a prayer. Eddie is dead on the cross in front of me, Catharine is hurt down the hall. I don’t know why I continue to try to fix things. There’s no point, but I can’t seem to get that through my thick head. It was because I tried to help Vince that the foolish man sabotaged the town council meeting this afternoon and made everyone in the room uncomfortable. I guess you could call Vince and me friends, but it’s the kind of friendship that grows out of shared history rather than mutual respect. I’ve been keeping an eye out for him this past year, since his wife, Cynthia, passed away. Several times, in a wine-induced fog, he has yelled at me about the fact that I am buying up all the land in sight and trying to take this town of Ramsey away from him. After each blowup Vince is embarrassed, and we go through a few awkward weeks, like this one. He probably ran right from the meeting to his barbershop on Main Street, where he will sit with the down-and-out group of guys who are his regulars and who firmly believe the mayor can do no wrong, even if that means him drinking himself into oblivion.

  I can’t entirely blame Vince for his behavior. I don’t know how I would react, or what kind of life I would lead, if I
lost Kelly. And yet the truth is that I am in danger of finding out. My wife is barely speaking to me, and I can’t blame her. She tried to help me after Eddie’s funeral, but I pushed her away. I’ve continued to push her away. Lately, I have taken to sleeping on the couch in the den, though neither one of us has mentioned that fact out loud. I feel safer there, in the small dark room with the flickering light of television, than I do in our master bedroom. I don’t fit well on the couch, but I am able to sleep L-shaped with my legs on the coffee table. It’s actually fairly comfortable. I keep the news on all night, the volume low. With the muffled noise in my ears I seem to dream less often and fall asleep more easily. The television keeps me from making up pictures in my head. From hearing voices I don’t want to hear. From replaying over and over the afternoon Eddie died.

  There is a light pressure on my shoulder, and I jump. I am on my feet and face-to-face with the person before I recognize the nurse who checked Catharine in.

  “Is she okay?” I ask. I wonder how long I’ve been in here. Ten minutes? An hour?

  “Mrs. McLaughlin’s been checked out. You can both go.”

  I follow the nurse down the hall. She is a large woman, rectangular-shaped. A white hat perches on her curls like a boat trying to hold on amid treacherous waves. I pose a question to her back. “Do you know if Nurse Ortiz is on duty?”

  She doesn’t turn around. “No nurse by that name in this hospital.”

  “Are you sure? I know she works here.”

  “Not under that name. Is she married?”

  “She was.” The words are lodged deep in my throat. It takes a cough to get them out. “She was married.”

  “Maybe she works under her maiden name. Know that?”

  I know where she lives. I know that she is bringing up two small children on her own. I know that she appears to be doing all right, from what I’ve been able to see. “No.”

  The nurse shrugs with her entire upper body, but the hat still stays in place and I realize I am done following her. I am in the room with Catharine and my daughter, who looks as pale and tired as I feel.

  ON THE WAY home from the hospital, I say, in as casual a tone as I can muster, “How are we going to deal with this? Will you make an appointment with a specialist, or should I?”

  “There’s nothing to deal with, Louis. The doctor said I’m fine. I have a bump on my head, that’s all.”

  I like my mother-in-law, and for over thirty years I’ve made it a policy not to argue with her. But today seems like as good a day as any to break that rule. I say, “Lila saw your chart. She said the doctor thinks you might have had a tiny stroke.”

  A minute goes by with me looking at the road and Catharine looking out the window.

  “Might have,” she says finally. “I’ve never set any stock by ‘might haves.’ I might have become a nun. You might have grown up someplace else and never met my daughter. There’s no point to that kind of talk.”

  I glance over at her. “Well, I think you should go back for tests, just to be on the safe side.”

  “I’ll see my doctor.”

  “O’Malley? That old coot? For God’s sake, Catharine, the man’s practically blind and deaf. I know Kelly has a doctor she likes. We’ll make you an appointment with her. What’s important is that we take care of this.”

  Catharine’s voice slams down. “No, Louis. I will take care of this. I don’t want to discuss it. Tell Kelly what you must, but whatever happens from here on in will be my decision. Now, believe it or not, I have a headache. I’d like to ride in silence.”

  Her face as expressionless as a slab of Sheetrock, Catharine refuses to say another word.

  MY MOTHER-IN-LAW scared the hell out of me the first time I met her. I learned that day that there was no influencing her, and little point in arguing with her.

  Kelly had invited me to her parents’ house for a Sunday lunch, but it seemed more like she had invited me into a train station. Young adults scattered with a few teenagers seemed to be everywhere at once. Pat and Johnny clapped me on the back and looked me up and down. Meggy came into the living room with a short skirt on, and her father sent her back to her room to change. Ryan and Theresa, the shy ones, each shook my hand and offered me a soda or lemonade. Kelly was shy in those days, too, though less retiring. She stayed close to my side while she made introductions; I could feel how physically anxious she was for them to like me. We were having an early lunch so Patrick could head out to the golf course. Everyone except me had just come from Mass.

  “Louis, did you attend church this morning?” Kelly’s mother asked. She was a small woman, amazingly trim for having given birth to so many children. I looked at her with some measure of awe. My own mother had given birth only once. She was always talking about how painful that experience had been and what havoc it had wreaked on her body. “Look what you did,” she would say, and point to her plump stomach.

  Everyone at the table turned polite faces toward me. This was clearly an important question. “I went to five o’clock Mass last night,” I said.

  “Do you go to Mass every week?”

  “Yes, ma’am. With my parents.”

  Catharine had nodded, and I had been relieved. I planned to ask Kelly to marry me, and I knew that as a suitor I did not have Patrick McLaughlin’s approval. Kelly had warned me that he’d written me off because I didn’t come from money and though I did have Irish in me, I wasn’t one hundred percent. Clearly, I couldn’t make up for these lacks, but I was determined to succeed. I’d met Kelly at Bloomingdale’s, where she was working at the time, and since then I hadn’t been able to think of anything but her. She was so sweet, she laughed at all my jokes, and I suddenly wanted nothing more in life than to take the sadness out of her blue eyes. It seemed clear that she was meant to be my wife. So I thought that if my cause could get some support from Kelly’s mother, perhaps she could reason with her husband and I would have a chance. If I only had the opportunity, I was confident I could run with it.

  Kelly held my hand under the table during the meal, and that helped me survive the strange, uncomfortable experience. Since Patrick was in charge of leading the conversation from the head of the table, and my presence had rendered him silent above his plate of sliced turkey and his glass of scotch, everyone had to stay quiet. He was a very stubborn man, and even though I believe he grew to like me, it would be nearly a year before he spoke directly to me.

  However, there was a wordless current that traveled above and below the table. I was aware of Kelly’s legs swinging, kicking at Johnny, who was on her right. There was a shuffling of feet over by Meggy, too, and at one point somebody took a shot that brushed the hem of my pants. Meggy was making eyes at me, her aim more to annoy Kelly than to flirt with me, as far as I could tell. I didn’t know who to look at, or whether it was more appropriate to smile or appear expressionless. I felt like I had walked in on a high-level card game for which no one had told me the rules. In many ways, I was to realize as the years went by, I had been right. The McLaughlin family has their own means of communication, secret ways of attack, and fierce allegiances that are unreadable to outsiders. And I have always remained an outsider.

  What I did not realize then was that by that point it was fairly rare for all of the McLaughlins to be under one roof at one time. It was school break time—Johnny was only a few weeks from dropping out of high school to enlist in the army, Meggy was home from her Catholic boarding school, and Pat from graduate school. Kelly, Theresa, and Ryan still lived in the stately house in Ridgewood. When the McLaughlins were all together, Catharine was on guard, her eyes moving from her husband to her children’s faces and back again. The children, Kelly included, were a bundle of nervous energy, crackling from time to time in a sharp comment, a kick under the table, a pass at a visiting boyfriend. Ryan laughed hopefully at anything even resembling a joke. Theresa pet the small dog under her chair. She had just found the mutt on the street, and it would be promptly evicted by Patrick after lunch. Kel
ly held on to my hand as if she were a kite in danger of taking off and I was the sturdy post she happened to grab hold of at the last minute.

  My own family rarely ate together. My father, who was going to die of a swift, severe attack of pneumonia in two months’ time, always ate at his office. My mother, a flighty woman who a few years after my father’s death descended into the murky grasp of Alzheimer’s disease, served me dinner each night and hovered while I ate, asking if I needed any extra salt, pepper, or ketchup. It didn’t matter what I was eating— she always eagerly offered those same condiments. I never saw her sit down and eat a proper meal. She liked to pick at food, she said, and she picked all day long in the kitchen.

  In any case, due to my unfamiliarity with the experience of a family meal—much less with a family this big and uneasy—and my unpopular aspiration to take Kelly away from this family to live a different, happier life at my side, I was relieved when Patrick pushed back his chair and the meal officially ended. I stayed at the table with Johnny, Pat, and Ryan while the women cleared the dishes. We fiddled with the silverware until it was taken away, and awkwardly chatted about Jack Kennedy and the Dodgers. Then Catharine called me into the kitchen.

  This summons seemed fortuitous, since I had been hoping to have a private word with her. The first thing that struck me as I walked through the swinging door was how clean the kitchen was. We had finished eating a big meal no more than ten minutes earlier, and the counters, the floor, the stove, everything was spotless. All the McLaughlin girls had disappeared.

  “Thank you for the delicious meal, Mrs. McLaughlin,” I said. “I really enjoyed it.”

  Catharine held up her hand. “I realize that you have serious intentions toward my daughter, Mr. Leary. I know about your engineering degree, and your position with the architectural firm. I know that you can provide for my daughter. But I saw you looking to me for approval or assistance during the meal, and I wanted to address that. You need to know that my husband makes the decisions for this family. He cannot be gotten at through Kelly or through me. I will not be able to help you.”