Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  How many fingers am I holding up? Two.

  Do you know what day of the week it is? Wednesday.

  Are you hurt? Yes.

  KELLY

  My heart has been heavy since I found out that my oldest daughter has ruined her life and embarrassed herself. Since hearing the news, everything has been shuffled up and dark. My life feels like a teenager’s bedroom—everything a mess, in its wrong place and noisy.

  My own bedroom is pristine. It has been months since Louis and I slept side by side. A situation I’d thought could only get better has gotten worse. I no longer have the energy necessary to run our marriage for the two of us. I’m having enough trouble finding a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I suppose I’m depressed.

  Being around me makes Louis feel guilty, I know. I rarely see him, but strawberry frozen yogurt is in the freezer at all times. My favorite brand of pretzels is in the cabinet above the bar. The gas tank in my BMW is perpetually full. I never have to take out the recycling or bring in the mail. It is always done, everything is done, before I have the chance. I’m not sure when it happens. When I am out or asleep, I suppose. I give my husband plenty of opportunity to play phantom provider. I sleep the sleep of the drugged. Long and deep. Sleeping pills are my new best friend. And when I’m not asleep I am either at the office or in my room at the motel.

  At the motel I try to pass time reading magazines. Occasionally I switch on the television, only to switch it off a moment later. I reorder the money in my wallet. I make sure the high-school photographs of Lila and Gracie are straight in their plastic covers. I file my credit cards in the order of which ones I use the most. I make sure my mobile phone is switched off. I check my To Do list in my Filofax. There are fewer items checked off these days. I have been too distracted to run the errands that need to be run. I have too many responsibilities.

  Mostly what I do in the motel room is hide. I hide from phone calls from my mother and sisters. From the phone calls I am not getting from my daughters. I hide from what is left of my marriage. I know that it is only luck that Gracie or Lila or my mother hasn’t realized the truth of our situation. Louis and I probably won’t be able to keep it a secret much longer. Something will have to give. The elephant in the room is getting too fat to walk around, much less to pretend it isn’t there. And I hide from the reality that I often find myself thinking about Vince Carrelli. I have gone back to him for two more haircuts since the first.

  Initially I didn’t like my new hairstyle, thought it was too short, but when a few days passed of simply showering and running my hands through my hair and not needing to use a blow dryer, I loved it. My new style is truthful and simple and right out there. What you see is what you get. And I have come to appreciate the fact that no one commented on the change. The haircut, and my time with Vince in the barbershop, is all mine.

  I had one conversation with Gracie when I tried to reach out to her, to really understand her, and she pushed me away. The worst thing was that she basically stated that my mother was her confidante and the person she turned to. Also, over the last few weeks I have asked Lila to lunch several times only to hear that she is too busy. She was apologetic and very nice about it, but the message remains the same. My brothers and sisters call me only when they need something: money or advice. The gulf that lies between us is based on the fact that I have more than each of them. I have more money than Meggy and Theresa, and more family than Pat and Johnny. I don’t look down on them because they have less than me, but nonetheless that reality sits between us and keeps us from being equals. And my mother . . . I admit I haven’t tried to reach out to my mother. My mother is seventy-nine and I know better than to try to convince her to change her ways.

  No one is prepared to deal with me as directly as Vince Carrelli. Whenever I am bored at work, or at home preparing a baked potato for myself for dinner, my hands drift to my short hair, and my mind drifts to Vince. I picture him standing in the barbershop, framed by the big window and Main Street behind it. I see his deep brown eyes, his square fingers, his uncertainty. Apart from his hands, Vince is a smaller man than Louis. He is less confident, less indomitable. I have always liked the look of Italian men. There is a warmth to them, to their eyes and to their skin, that is very different from the pallor and the fair eyes of the Irish.

  You need a friend, I tell myself at the end of two hours lying on the motel bed staring at the ceiling. It’s all right to need something. It’s okay. You deserve this.

  I pick the phone up off the bedside table and lay it on my flat stomach. I call information first and ask for the barbershop phone number. I ask the operator to connect me, and almost immediately the line begins to ring.

  I hold my breath to block out the noise. What are you doing? I wonder. Who are you?

  “Hello? Barbershop?” Vince says.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” I say. “I thought you might be gone for the day. I’ll call you tomorrow. Go back to whatever you were doing.”

  “Kelly? Is that you? No—it’s not—I was just about to close up. I have a planning board meeting. With Louis. You’re not calling for an appointment, are you? I told you to walk in anytime.”

  Foolish, I think. I am foolish. I am a fifty-six-year-old woman lying on a bed in a motel room calling a strange man. “I don’t need an appointment,” I say. “That’s not why I called.”

  I hear him hesitate for a moment on the other end of the line. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I say. “Perfectly fine.”

  “You don’t sound perfectly fine.”

  “Well,” I say.

  “I’m glad you called,” he says.

  “Are you?” I hear my voice, as hard as nails, and shudder.

  “Yes, this is like a dream, Kelly—it makes me happy. Please tell me why you called.”

  This is not like a dream. This is nothing like a dream. This is my life, my blunder. I can only block his question. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

  “This is a strange conversation,” he says. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  I put my hand over my eyes, as if I am approaching a car wreck and don’t want to look. “Yes.”

  “I’ve wanted to tell you that I have feelings for you.”

  My heart threatens to leave my chest, it is beating so hard and crazily. I think that it is my good luck that women have a lower risk of heart attacks or I might have one now. I have wondered, when I thought about Vince and our meetings, if my memory exaggerated his intensity, his remarkable ability to say only what matters. But I’d remembered correctly. I had both dreaded and hoped this phone call would lead to this. I am alive in this moment. I am living.

  “Let me explain,” he says. “I don’t want to scare you.”

  My body is shaking on top of the green bedspread. I think, Maybe he means gratitude, or friendship, or fondness. Those are feelings.

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since you came into the barbershop. I’ve come this close to calling you every day. I’ve tried to put my finger on what it was, what element of our conversation made this happen, but . . . I talk to people all the time. As a mayor, that’s three-quarters of my job. And here as well, that’s why people go to barbershops, so they can talk and make sure someone is listening. Men either go to bars and unload their problems on the bartender, or they talk to their barber while having a centimeter shaved off a head of hair that doesn’t need cutting.”

  A car honks loudly outside my room. A lover is waiting for his mistress to join him. Or an angry father is trying to get the attention of a wayward teenager in the kind of trouble that only takes place in motels.

  “Where are you, Kelly?” Vince asks. “What is all that noise?”

  “You talk to a lot of people,” I remind him. I like to hear Vince describe his life, his world. It is hard to believe he lives in the same town and the same time as I do. He makes everything sound so much simpler than I have ever found it
to be.

  “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he says. “I don’t want to say too much.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  I feel like I did when I was a little kid, standing at the edge of the high dive at the pool. The board quivering under my weight, sending chills of terror up my spine. My mother giving me a look from her lawn chair that said, Just jump, Kelly. Don’t keep everyone behind you waiting. And Theresa or Ryan yelling from the side of the pool, “Be careful!”

  “You can say whatever you want,” I say.

  “I’ve fallen in love with you.” His voice wavers like a teenage boy’s. “I know this is completely inappropriate. I know you’re married to one of my oldest friends, who is a wonderful man. I know this means nothing to you—”

  “Not nothing,” I say.

  “This . . . this sensation hasn’t happened to me in over thirty years. At first I decided to keep my feelings to myself, to avoid you, to leave you in peace, but I’m not that strong. I told myself we could have just one more conversation, that I would tell you how I feel, and I would back away. And then you called tonight.”

  My cell phone rings in my purse. I forgot to turn it off when I came into the room.

  “I’ve upset you.”

  I unzip my purse and pull out the ringing cell phone. I lay the real phone next to me on the bed. “Hello,” I say, still a mix of quivering and blankness. Still waiting at the edge of the diving board. Still not responding.

  Louis says, “Your mother just broke her hip. She’s on her way to Valley Hospital.”

  When I turn off the power on my cell phone and Louis’s voice dies away, all I can think to say to Vince is, “Can I call you back later?”

  LOUIS IS waiting at the entrance to the emergency room when I arrive. He takes my coat from me, which I am carrying balled against my chest like a bag of groceries. I don’t know how I drove here. I don’t remember one road sign I passed or one turn I took. All I could think during the short drive was that my mother had known what I was doing and had decided to punish me.

  “She fell in her room,” Louis says. “Apparently she lay there without calling for help for hours. The doctors think she might have had a stroke.”

  “Why did they bring her to Valley instead of Hackensack Hospital?”

  “That was my call,” Louis says. “Valley’s closer, and I thought that since it’s Lila’s training hospital, we might get special treatment.” We walk in through the automatic doors. He says, “She’s very tough, Kelly. Don’t worry.”

  “I know she’s tough. Can I see her?”

  “She’s with the doctor now. The nurse said the doctor would come out as soon as he was done with the examination.”

  “I should be with her,” I say.

  The waiting room is almost empty. There is a young man reading to a small girl, and an old man dozing in the corner. Louis takes my elbow and leads me to one of the neon green chairs by the door.

  I say, “I thought you had a planning board meeting tonight.”

  He gives me a sharp look. “Listen, I’ll call your brothers and sisters for you. And the girls should know.”

  I shake my head. “No phone calls. There’s no point in the entire family sitting beside us with nothing to do.”

  I look at the young father reading to his daughter on the other side of the room. The little girl looks to be about six years old. She has pale hair tied up with a pink ribbon. I used to tie different-colored ribbons in my girls’ hair when they were small. Blue for Lila, pink for Gracie. “She’s all alone,” I say, “and I don’t even think she realizes what that means.”

  “Your mother’s not alone, Kelly.”

  “Not my mother.” I shake my head again. “Gracie. Gracie is all alone. She’s doing this alone.”

  Louis leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. His barrel chest and long legs seem to overwhelm the chair and all the space around it. His voice is tight. “Let’s not talk about that here, okay? There’s enough going on at the moment. Are you hungry or thirsty? I could run down to the cafeteria. What would you like?”

  I mouth the word nothing, and hope that Louis will move his eyes away from my face.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Leary?” A young man in blue scrubs is in front of us.

  We both stand like obedient students who have been called on in class.

  “Your mother broke her hip, and she bruised a few ribs. You can see her, but I gave her something for the pain, so she’s groggy. She needs an operation to repair the break. Two other doctors checked her and agreed it was required. I’ll schedule the surgery for tomorrow morning—the sooner the better.”

  “Surgery,” Louis says.

  “That can’t be necessary,” I say.

  “It is necessary,” the doctor says. “In over ninety percent of fractured-hip cases, surgery is the only possible course of action. Your mother isn’t one of the lucky exceptions.”

  We are walking now, following the doctor down the hall. I am thinking that he looks awfully young with his smooth face and blond hair. Perhaps he is too young to understand the difficulties of someone as old as my mother. Perhaps he is mistaken.

  He says, “We’ve already moved her to a room. There was no reason to keep her in emergency. She’s stable. And you’re in luck, because one of our best surgeons will be working on her tomorrow morning.”

  Why does he keep mentioning luck? Do we need luck?

  The doctor is walking in front of Louis and me, and he suddenly turns his head and looks into our faces. “My name is Doug Miller, by the way. I know we’ve never met, but I’m friends with your daughters.”

  He gives us such a wide smile that I feel compelled to smile back. I notice Louis does as well. “You must know Lila from medical school,” Louis says politely.

  “Yes. And I dated Gracie a few years ago.”

  “I thought your name sounded familiar,” I say, although I know I’ve never heard his name before.

  Doug Miller keeps up his big smile as if this is some kind of reunion. As if Louis and I had the faintest idea five minutes ago that this man existed, much less that he is one more in what seems to be a long line of men Gracie has been close to. As if we’re not standing together in a hospital to talk about the fact that my mother needs to be cut open.

  As the three big smiles finally fade, a space spreads through the gray linoleum hallway. Space between us and the doctor, space between me and Louis, space between where we stand and the last door on the hallway, behind which my mother lies with tubes and machines attached to her. The distance seems insurmountable.

  “They put these tubes in me without asking,” my mother says when I enter the room alone. “Please tell them I don’t like pain medication, Theresa.”

  “It’s Kelly, Mom.”

  “So Theresa couldn’t be bothered to come.” She tosses her head like a petulant child.

  “Theresa doesn’t even know you’re in the hospital yet.”

  “You can’t do everything yourself, Kelly.” The fog seems to lift from my mother’s blue eyes for a moment. She is tiny in the hospital bed, lost in the yellow sheets. They have her propped at a funny angle on her side, I assume to take pressure off her hip. I was worried when I walked in that she would look broken, but she does not. Any damage is hidden by the bedding.

  She says, “I don’t want to leave my room at the home. I do not want to move into the other building. Please don’t let them move me.”

  My mother’s appearance does not match up with that of the woman I had pictured sitting in her room, manipulating my life. This frail-looking patient couldn’t have known what I was doing two towns away. She probably wasn’t even thinking of me when she fell to the floor. Her accident wasn’t a moral message; it was simply an accident. I think that perhaps my mother is finally getting old.

  “It’s all right, Mother,” I say, using the same soothing tone I used when my daughters were babies. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Apparentl
y that tone, as rusty as it is, works, because at that moment my mother closes her eyes and falls either to sleep or unconsciousness.

  I sit with her for a minute. I watch her breath. It occurs to me that I have never seen my mother sleep. That is something you do with your children, not your parents. This state of affairs is organically wrong. My mother should not be lying, tiny and injured, in this bed before me. She should have called for help instead of lying on the floor of her room. I should not have to sit and watch her rest with her head tipped back, her mouth slightly open. My mother in her right mind, off of drugs, would never allow me to see her in this condition.

  When I go back out into the hallway, I don’t see Louis right away. He is standing halfway down the corridor, his arms crossed over his chest. He is staring in the direction of the nurses’ station. He turns when he hears my high heels click on the linoleum floor.

  “How does she seem?” he says.

  “I’m going to stay with her in case she wakes up. I’ll call my brothers and sisters and let them know. Will you call the girls?”

  He nods. “I’ll wait with you.”

  Anger crashes over me, so strong I have to grit my teeth. “I’d rather be alone with my mother,” I say. “I’ll see you at home later. Tell the girls everything is going to be fine.”

  Only when Louis turns the corner at the end of the hall and his broad back has disappeared from view do I calm down. I abide by the NO CELL PHONES signs on the wall and find a little booth with a bench and a pay phone inside. As I step in and close the glass door behind me, the setup reminds me of a confessional. My mother used to insist as children that we confess every Wednesday and every Sunday. She would load us all in the car in our good clothes and then line us up outside of Father Brogan’s confessional stall. She would use her hand to smooth our hair into place. She would warn us that omission was as big a sin as lying, and then she would give each of us a small shove toward the velvet curtain. Inside the dark spartanlike box, on my knees with the priest’s voice and, even worse, the sound of his breathing seeming to come at me from every side, I would pore over the four days since I had last confessed, trying to find any sins. I suspected that Father Brogan was bored on his side of the stall, and hoped I would come up with something good and challenging for him, a real Commandment breaker like murder or coveting your neighbor’s wife. But I was a very good child, and usually the only bad acts I could think of had been committed by my brothers and sisters. Most afternoons, for lack of anything better to offer, I would end up telling on them. The priest seemed to enjoy that. He would give a soft chuckle and dismiss me after assigning one Hail Mary for tattling. He would then call back in one or more of my siblings who had already confessed that afternoon. Meggy and Johnny spent most of our childhood muttering Our Fathers and Hail Marys under their breath in penance for their sins. I wore constant bruises on my shins for turning them in.