Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  I call Theresa, and she sobs the entire time I am on the phone with her. Finally Mary has to pick up the extension and write down the surgery time and room number.

  Meggy curses and tells me how many days she has already had to take off from work this year. In a threatening tone she says she’ll come up tomorrow but that she may end up getting fired for it.

  Angel and Johnny get on the phone together. I imagine Johnny nodding and Angel growing tearful. Johnny used to be a volunteer paramedic, so he asks me technical questions about Mother’s condition, questions I can’t answer.

  Ryan starts to pray into the phone the minute I tell him the news. I tell him that I will pick him up in the morning, and then hang up.

  Pat says he is very busy at work right now, and that with everyone else being at the hospital, Mother won’t need him. He asks me to call him after the surgery and let him know how it went.

  When I hang up the phone I am exhausted. I feel like I have been awake for days on end. My eyes are dry from the sterile hospital air. I rest for a minute on the tiny bench in the booth, my forehead pressed against the metal change box on the phone. I take deep breaths, the cleansing kind that we talk about in my women’s group. I breathe until I am light-headed, and then I open my purse. I take out the card I wrote the mayor’s home number on. I dial, and when he answers, I say, “Meet me on Route 17 North next to the Houlihan’s restaurant.”

  There is a silence, and then he says, “But that’s the—”

  “I know. Just please meet me there.”

  When I arrive at the Fairmount Motel he is waiting in the parking lot in his bruised-looking Honda. Chastity peers wide-eyed out of the back window. In the darkness, the dog looks alarmingly like a small child. Vince gets out of the car with his head down, wearing a baseball hat. He looks at me anxiously from under the brim.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I come here to think. I rent the room from one of the women in my reading group.”

  “You come here to think?” He is looking at me as if I am a stranger, not the woman he confessed to love a few hours earlier. The summer air is a little cool, and I shiver in my thin blouse. Louis still has my coat. I think, Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

  “Look,” I say. “I’ve had a really hard evening. I thought maybe we could talk here.”

  “All right,” he says.

  “Are you sure?”

  He tips his hat up and I can see his warm brown eyes saying, Yes.

  I am suddenly so nervous I can feel my arms and legs break out in goose bumps. I walk ahead of him toward the room on the end of the strip motel, room number 111. I picture what lies ahead of me. The room simple, but clean. The bathroom with its nice deep bathtub. My novels in a neat stack on the closet shelf. My own pillows brought from home, extra firm. The room that has been filled with everything I need. I cannot believe, as I reach the door and fit the key into the lock, that I have actually invited another person inside.

  LOUIS

  I wake up at dawn on the den sofa, a paperback mystery folded over my chest. I tried to wait up for Kelly last night, but kept nodding off. I stand up carefully, stretching to ease the cramp in the middle of my back. I find my khakis where I left them the night before, in the den closet, folded on top of the Scrabble board. I know it is important to Kelly that our cleaning lady not know I am sleeping down here, so I have taken to doing my own laundry.

  I make my way upstairs and look in on my wife. She is lying on her side, perfectly centered on her half of the king-sized bed. I can tell by her steady breathing that she is asleep. I don’t wake her. She will have to get up soon enough, to make it to the hospital in time to see her mother before surgery. I miss Kelly. I miss lying beside her. When I first started sleeping downstairs, I thought it would just be for a night or two, just until I pulled myself together, until I had done enough work on the Ortizes’ house to get some peace. Until I stopped having nightmares about Eddie’s fall. But the nightmares haven’t stopped, and I am never able to climb those stairs when it’s time for sleep. Each night I try, and each night I convince myself that I’m not ready. I want to return to Kelly whole.

  On my way back down the hall I catch myself tiptoeing past Gracie’s and Lila’s rooms, and shake my head. In the early mornings I often think all the women in my life are still in this house. I used to love being the first one up, and hearing one sleepy pair of footsteps after another pad down the stairs.

  I put on a pot of coffee and check my beard with my hand. I need to shave. It is only after I’ve poured myself a cup that I see the note on the table, propped up against the sugar bowl. Louis, I was with my mother nearly all night. I have set the alarm to wake up. Will you please pick up Ryan and meet me at the hospital? The note is not signed. Kelly is too practical to sign a note that clearly could only be from her. I always sign mine. The writing looks too unfinished and impersonal without some kind of closing. I usually close with Have a good day or Call me if you need anything. Then I add, Love, Louis.

  Today I scrawl at the bottom of her note: There’s fresh co fee. Your brother and I will see you soon. Love, Louis. I carry my coffee up to the bathroom to shave. I look in on Kelly again before I leave. Asleep, she appears much younger than fifty-six. Her face is softer. This sleeping woman looks like the girl I married, in a way that she never does when she’s awake.

  It is only for her that I am willing to put up with Ryan. I generally avoid him as much as I can. And if anyone had asked me, I would have told him he couldn’t come to the hospital today. After all, what good is he going to be? His inane rambling, his prayers, and his sudden cruel comments have no use. I can’t help but feel that with the number of children Catharine and Patrick McLaughlin had, someone should have cut their losses somewhere along the way. I couldn’t expect Catharine to do it, because how do you turn away your own child? But there is no reason for Kelly or her other siblings to deal with this sick person who refuses to take his medication or be anything but a burden to the people around him. He should be living in a home with people of his own kind. But Kelly won’t listen to any negative talk about her youngest brother. She won’t discuss him in any light. It is as if Ryan is a given in her life, as elemental as her arms and legs. He’s not hurting himself, is all she’ll say. Yes, but he’s hurting you. You don’t need to waste your energy on him.

  I am accustomed to Kelly not listening to me, not allowing me to help her. The drive across Ramsey to his apartment building—my apartment building—calms me down. I pass a few buildings I own, and a few others I am interested in buying. I note the decay of the building Ryan lives in as I ride the elevator up to his apartment. The elevator itself is a kind of death trap. It has the old metal gate you pull across the opening that could easily catch fingers and toes. And the motor makes some bad noises, accompanied with abrupt stops and starts between floors. I am sweating by the time I reach his floor, wondering whether I should just tear this building down and sell the land. I’d hate to have my men working here among the hidden landmines of rotting floors and faulty electricity. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

  I will tear it down, I decide, as I knock on Ryan’s door. I will move in with a crane and some heavy trucks and in no time this building will be gone. That’s the only way to ensure everyone’s safety. The decision immediately makes me feel much better. It will be easier now for me to be patient and pleasant with my brother-in-law.

  “How you doing, Ryan?” I say when he opens the door. I scan the apartment. It is disgusting. A fat white bird eyes me from on top of the television, and an even fatter yellow one is perched on a bar in an open cage over the couch. There are three large crucifixes that I can see at first glance, one on each wall. The room smells like a zoo.

  “Good, Louis. How are you?” Ryan straightens in his wheelchair. Kelly says he looks up to me. I wouldn’t know about that, but I do know he makes an effort to act more normal during the rare moments that we’re alone together. The one or two times a year when I allow that
to happen, I appreciate it. “Where’s Kelly?”

  “She stayed with your mom at the hospital until very late last night. So she’s sleeping in a little and she’ll meet us there. You ready to go?” I back toward the door, keeping my eye on the white bird.

  “I spoke to Mother around nine o’clock last night and she said Kelly had already left.” Ryan wheels after me as I head for the elevator.

  I press the button and wince to hear the elevator chug into motion. I’ll dismantle the elevator the day I close on the building. “Your mother was on some serious painkillers. She was confused. She thought Kelly was Theresa for part of their visit.”

  “Oh my,” Ryan says. “I’ve been praying for her all morning. I wish I didn’t have to go to the hospital. I’ve known for weeks that something bad was going to happen to her, though. I’ve been waiting.”

  “Your mother’s getting older. It was only a matter of time before she fell, or had a stroke, or something along those lines.” I push him toward the car. I could let him wheel himself, which is what Kelly does to foster his independence, but then the whole process would take much longer. Besides, why let him think he’s independent when he’s not?

  “A matter of time,” Ryan repeats. “I guess everything is just a matter of time.”

  I help him into the front seat, then fold up his chair and fit it in the trunk. I make sure he’s buckled in before I start up the car.

  We arrive at Catharine’s hospital room before anyone else. It is barely eight in the morning. I push Ryan in ahead of me, up to her bedside. Catharine looks better this morning than she did yesterday. “Your color’s better,” I tell her.

  “It was all that medication,” she says. “I insisted they hold off this morning until they have to put me under.”

  “You look fine, Mother,” Ryan says. He is hunched forward in his chair, stretching toward Catharine. “I don’t believe in hospitals, you know that. I don’t feel God’s presence when I’m in a hospital. Maybe the doctors were wrong. In my opinion they usually are. I bet you don’t need the operation.”

  “I’ll be outside,” I say, and squeeze Catharine’s hand before I leave the room. I know I won’t see her again before the surgery. Soon she will be mobbed by children and grandchildren, all terrified that this fall is the beginning of the end. As far as I can tell, she has been fading, ever so slowly, since Patrick died. I don’t understand why she has chosen to take so long about it. My own parents seemed to disappear in a matter of minutes. It was startling and painful for me at the time, but later I came to appreciate the fact that it was quick. There was no gray area, no ambivalence. One minute they were here, the next they were gone. They never met Kelly, much less my daughters. My mother and father have no connection to the family I have now. I rarely think of them.

  I take a seat in one of the orange plastic chairs in the hallway. I pick up a magazine on auto racing someone left on the chair next to mine, but before I can even turn the page the shaky feeling comes over me. It shows up out of nowhere. I hate and dread these moments. It is how I feel whenever I think of Eddie’s fall, but lately the shaky feeling has come to me on its own, with Eddie nowhere near my thoughts. I am unable to function until the sensation leaves me. It rumbles through me like an attack of nausea. All I can do is double over and pray for it to pass. Until the shakiness leaves and I feel normal again, I am in a cold, dark place where all I can think of are the terrible moments in my life. Moments that give me that same uneasy feeling.

  I remember coming home early on a weekday afternoon fourteen years ago. There were no cars in the driveway, and no one responded when I called hello. But when I went upstairs to change into clean clothes, I heard noise coming from Gracie’s room. I walked down the hall, trying to place the noise as music, or girls laughing. Through a crack in the door I saw my fifteen-year-old daughter standing naked by her window. I watched a boy’s hand reach out and grab Gracie by the wrist. She disappeared from my view and then there were giggles, high and low. I stood frozen for what felt like an hour, and all I could see were their feet, twisted up at the end of the bed. I knew I should bust into the room and throw this kid out on his ass. I wanted to. My baby was only fifteen and this was my goddamn house. Gracie needed my protection. She needed to know that she was too young for this. But the sounds they were making were so loud, and when my feet could move I found myself headed in the opposite direction. I slammed out of the house and got into my truck and sped down the street. All I wanted to do was get away. I never told Kelly. I never talked to Gracie. I never wanted to think about it again and I did a pretty good job until just recently. I detest the inky black feeling deep in my gut that comes when I think about Gracie standing by the window, that comes when I think of Gracie now, pregnant, that comes when I think of Eddie. It’s as if I’m rotting from the inside out.

  LAST NIGHT when Kelly told me to leave, I wandered the halls of the hospital looking for Eddie’s wife. I thought that if she was on duty, and if I could just catch a glimpse of her in her white nurse’s uniform looking professional and capable and well, I would feel better. I walked from one area of the hospital to the other with a purposeful stride, knowing from experience that few people stopped me when I looked like I knew what I was doing. I scanned the nurses’ stations and glanced into open rooms, but had no luck. I still don’t know her maiden name. I actually looked at the mail in her mailbox one afternoon, hoping some of it would be addressed to her professional name, but every piece said Mrs. or Mr. Ortiz.

  Today I feel worn out, and I’m worried about Kelly. This fall must have upset her more than she let on if she spent the night at her mother’s side. Kelly is not usually one to hover. When the girls were babies, she always insisted we let them cry themselves out. That was awful for me, as there was no sound worse than Gracie or Lila screaming, but Kelly was so convinced it was best for the girls that she wouldn’t let the crying bother her. It is as if my wife is able to convince herself when and what to feel. That’s how I know her mother’s broken hip has gotten to her. Sitting by a sleeping woman’s bedside isn’t Kelly’s way. That kind of behavior has no practical effect, and she is always practical. I blame myself. I know I have been disappointing her on every level lately. She wants to talk about Gracie being pregnant, and I don’t. It’s as simple as that. I am not mad at Gracie. She is an adult and she has made a choice and I have to respect that. I’m glad I don’t see as much of Joel as I used to, since Vince is no longer assigning him to spy on me. But other than that, I have no feelings on the subject. I just know that I don’t want to talk about it.

  The door to Catharine’s room opens, and I look up. Ryan is wheeling toward me. “The nurses asked me to leave,” he says. “I was saying prayers with Mother and they asked me to leave.”

  “They probably need to prep her,” I say, not sure exactly what that means but knowing I have heard the term “prep her” on medical television shows.

  “Right,” he says. He gets the same crease between his eyebrows that Kelly does when she is worried. “I wish I trusted doctors.”

  I nod, because at least that wish makes sense.

  “Hi, Dad,” Lila says, rounding the corner. She comes at me and gives me a hug with so much speed and strength that I am suddenly nostalgic for when I was young. There were times in my twenties, before I got married, when I felt as powerful and fresh and full of purpose as my youngest daughter looks. I smile down at her.

  Lila slides out of my arms, and then I see Gracie. I try to control my look of surprise but fail miserably. I have not seen her since Easter. And yes, I know that I knew she was pregnant, but I was not expecting to see Gracie with a new body. Her belly is swollen. She looks like any pregnant woman walking down the street. Even her face is wider. She has curves everywhere. She looks nothing like the little girl who used to follow me around every weekend and inspire me to come up with stupid jokes just so I could hear her laugh. She doesn’t even resemble the fifteen-year-old girl I saw through the sliver of an open door.
She looks like a stranger.

  I pat her awkwardly on the arm. It seems as if a hug might hurt her.

  “Gram’s going to be all right, right?” Gracie doesn’t meet my eyes.

  “The nurses won’t let you in to see her,” Ryan says.

  I don’t know where to look. I hope that we won’t have to stand out here and make small talk for long. I can’t think of a damn thing to say.

  The door to Catharine’s room opens again and we all turn. A tall nurse stands in the doorway, caught in the early-morning sunlight. A jolt runs through me and I think, Thank you. It is Eddie Ortiz’s wife. I’ve found her.

  A cough strangles deep in my throat, and Lila slaps me on the back. “You okay, dad?”

  Gracie says to the nurse, “How is my grandmother?”

  Eddie’s wife looks like everything I had hoped for: professional and capable and well in her white nurse’s uniform. Her long black hair is tucked up under her cap. I lean forward to get a look at the name tag pinned to her uniform.

  Her voice is soft but firm when she addresses Gracie. “I’m Noreen Ballen. We’re about to take your grandmother down to surgery. She’s groggy, but you can spend a minute with her if you like.”