Hugo & Rose

by Bridget Foley

  But there was no way he could do it without Mom seeing. Without her knowing that he wasn’t quite sure he could trust her.

  * * *

  Rose found boxes of temporary solutions hanging in the drugstore. Brightly colored packages hanging like ornaments from the metal prongs of the shelf, their names themselves like promises.

  NoDoz.

  Boost.

  Bolt.

  Pep.

  Rose got one of each, glancing at each “proprietary formula” and seeing the same usual suspects: ephedra, ginseng, caffeine. The ingredients of perpetual motion.

  Rose’s hands trembled as she dumped the last of them in her cart. Too much coffee this morning. Penny watched her from the seat in the basket. “Candy, Momma?”

  “No, honey. Not candy.”

  The cashier was an old woman. Rose considered her while she put all the packages on the counter. Her mouth was a delta of lipstick wrinkles, a lifelong smoker. Her fingers cluttered with cheap rings. A red-and-blue vest strained over two large, saggy breasts.

  What does she look like in her dreams? Probably not like that, Rose mused. Why have I been dreaming of Hugo and not her for all these years? What makes him so different from this lady?

  The woman laughed suddenly, her voice a jagged peal.

  “Mine wouldn’t let me sleep either,” she said.

  Rose felt jolted. This woman had a Hugo, too? She had someone who kept her awake? Someone who gave her nightmares?

  The old woman reached out from behind the counter and made a game of snatching Penny’s hand. Penny giggled, flirting with her. Her chubby little fingers reached toward the woman, then away again. Rose watched the dance of their hands.

  Idiot, thought Rose. She meant the baby.

  The woman finally caught one of Penny’s fingers and Rose was reminded of Hansel and Gretel. Of the witch feeling Hansel’s chubby digits through the bars of the cage. “Gotchyu!” cried the woman, and Penny squealed with delight.

  The cashier flashed a nicotine-stained grin at Rose and went back to scanning the boxes. “You be careful with these. Too much can be bad for your ticker.”

  Rose nodded and scanned her credit card.

  She opened the first box in the van and swallowed a pill dry.

  How long could she go without sleep? Two days? Three?

  Too long without sleep and everything begins to fray.

  Already she had had almost one sleepless night. Her nightmare had taken less than an hour to play itself out. What could Hugo have done to her family if she had given him a full eight?

  Her heart ached at the memory. Isaac dead in her arms. So real she had to fight the impulse to keep Zackie home from school. To spend the day reassuring herself that he was breathing.

  In the dream, Hugo insisted he wasn’t doing it.

  But he was.

  All those creepy boys had been him. He had made Josh disappear … and the children. Surely he had put Isaac in the van, drowned Isaac’s beautiful body in the sand of the beach. Forced the Spider to attack her.

  It had to be Hugo. It wouldn’t be Rose’s mind threatening her children. Killing them.

  Could it?

  Rose shook off the thought. It had to be Hugo.

  Josh would find something soon, a few days at most. She could stay awake until he found a prescription and then she could sleep again. Sleep without dreams. Sleep without Hugo.

  * * *

  She hoped to find a distraction from her weariness in the activity of Penny’s day. But as she sat on the carpet (Seriously, why can’t the big people have chairs?), she had a hard time focusing.

  The teacher (Miss Annie!) welcomed them back with enthusiasm.

  “We’re so glad you’re back, Penny and Penny’s mommy!”

  Rose felt that old disappointment flare up. This woman didn’t know her name. Her name was irrelevant. She wasn’t Rose here. She was Penny’s mommy.

  Adam’s mommy. Isaac’s mommy.

  Not a person outside of the role defined by her children.

  Just another mommy in the circle, bouncing and clapping her way through the class. Sitting behind little versions of themselves. No one special … no one worth even remembering another name for.

  She was special to Hugo.

  The thought had bubbled up unbidden. His face when he saw her for the first time in line at the Orange Tastee. The way he’d clutched her in the parking lot of the outlet mall.

  One of the other nameless mommies handed her a tambourine. The mommies would play while the children danced. We’re background, thought Rose, insignificant.

  Hugo had been a break from this. She had been special for a while. Part of the mysterious universe.

  The other mothers were spreading their legs wide. Bouncing their knees and shaking their instruments. Miss Annie was standing in the circle of their legs, leading the children in a routine. Little hands balled up into little fists, little rumps making little figure eights.

  Rose looked at the other mothers, big, wide smiles on their faces. Surely some of them are faking it, too. Surely some of them are disappointed in their lives. Surely they have dreams themselves. They each have their own name … names they have partially given up for the little ones in front of them.

  Rose looked back at the children.

  One of the little boys was lying on the floor in protest. The curve of his arm against the floor made Rose think of Isaac’s limp body again.

  She would lose herself rather than lose Isaac. Or Adam. Or Penny.

  She knew that now. Just as she knew that her old unhappiness would always be there. But it was different—because now she understood that she preferred her reality to any other life. That she would never want to change it.

  Her complaints were the disappointments of the good life. The small resentments and minor losses that are worth enduring for the sake of the greater whole. It was wrong of her to think that any life could be lived without them. They were pebbles in a well-fitted shoe. Inevitable and endurable.

  The children broke up their line and headed back to their mothers’ laps. Miss Annie held out a bin for the tambourines. Rose dropped hers in.

  “Thank you, Penny’s mommy.”

  She would be Penny’s mommy. Adam’s mommy. Isaac’s mommy.

  She would be Josh’s wife.

  But she couldn’t be Hugo’s Rose.

  That would cost her the waking world, and nothing was worth that much.

  * * *

  Rose popped a second pill in the afternoon. Something to help her get through the quiet hours of Penny’s nap.

  She was beginning to feel it. That stretched-thin feeling she used to get when the kids kept her up all night. She felt shaky. Nervous from the pills, but sleepiness had been banished from her body. Her knees bounced up and down when she tried to watch television.

  Josh checked in. He’d found something they used for people with night terrors. He jabbered a couple of multisyllabic words at Rose, drug names that meant nothing to her. He couldn’t prescribe them for her himself, that would push the boundaries of ethics, but he was going to talk to somebody. He might be able to bring home some samples tonight.

  “Good.” Rose’s voice was clipped. Businesslike.

  * * *

  The drug Josh thought might work was an antiepileptic. It worked by lowering the electrical activity in the brain, like a dimmer on a switch, bringing the lights down from bright to dull.

  Josh thought of what his wife’s sleeping brain must look like on an MRI scan. The flushes of reds and blues and yellows, dancing across the walnut-shell stage of her brain, describing the activities of her sleeping mind.

  When they dreamed, did Hugo’s brain dance with hers? Did they synchronize across time and space? Or was it a call and response? Hugo’s brain flashed blue and Rose’s responded by blooming with red.

  Entanglement.

  The written word rushed into his mind.

  An answer to a question on a physics test. Sophomore year of
college.

  His professor had been young and enthusiastic, the kind of teacher hated by the faculty but adored by students. The course was a general overview, not for majors, but Josh remembered a particular day when the teacher had caused the entire class to go silent.

  The professor had told a quantum love story.

  Physicists had found evidence that two particles created together through radioactive decay remain linked no matter how far apart they strayed. Changing the charge of one particle will immediately reverse the charge of its entangled mate, no matter the distance between them—be it inches or light-years. Entanglement meant a signal could travel faster than the speed of light. An entangled particle on one end of the universe could turn on its mate on the other end of space.

  Josh remembered the look of rapture on his professor’s face when he told them about this. The excitement the idea held for him. He remembered thinking what a geek the guy was. Even at nineteen, Josh was a materialist, a pragmatist. This particular lesson smacked of space dust and mysticism.

  But he still took notes. Josh was nothing if not good at exams.

  Until this moment, the professor’s story had been nothing more than an answer on a test for Josh. Multiple choice. Pick A, B, C, or D.

  But now … thinking of the electrical charges of his wife’s brain, the nightly dance of her brain with Hugo’s, hiking across the dreamworld of the island, and his own reversal, staring at the practical impossibility of Hugo’s home-built Sistine Chapel …

  Rose and Hugo. Binary particles. Bound together by some accident of the universe, their dreaming minds blinking positive/negative. The ions in their brains firing on/off/on/off, like fireflies in a dark country field. Their bodies lighting up with electric glow, signaling to each other, I am here. I am here. I am here.

  This drug his colleague told him about would be a chemic fog … a pesticide to those blinking, winking lightning bugs dancing in his wife’s brain.

  She would be dulled, dimmed, cut off from this inconvenient miracle.

  Hugo.

  If she were not his wife, she should be studied. She and he should be brought in and scanned. Poked. Prodded. Blood drawn. Tested for hormonal imbalances. Put inside large thunking machines and sedated. Eventually, some hadron collider should be constructed to plumb the particle impossibility of their circumstances—two brains wink winking together in the dark.

  But she was his wife.

  His Rose. Mother of his children. Keeper of his home. Holder of his heart.

  Josh’s throat hurt. It felt as if it had been locked in an uncompleted yawn since he had seen the fullness of Hugo’s mural, pulled and stretched into a moan of despair. His body ached. His hands throbbed, protesting against the blows he had landed on Hugo’s face.

  This thing between his wife and this man should be studied. It should be understood.

  But Josh didn’t want to understand. He just wanted to be assured that this was just some accident of fate. That it didn’t mean anything.

  Accidents happen. Cars crash. Trees fall. Bones break. Lungs collapse. Blood spills.

  Patients search for meaning. Next of kin search for meaning.

  But Josh was a surgeon.

  One did not get far in that line of work assigning meaning to the accidents of life … other than the binary of luck.

  That car didn’t hit you? Good luck.

  The train that did? Bad.

  But it did not mean anything. It was not part of some larger cosmic plan, pulling you toward a destiny on an operating table, your chest open wide, a dozen medical personnel struggling hard to keep you alive.

  Josh needed to believe that this thing his wife had with Hugo … it was just bad luck. She wasn’t being pulled toward some fate with this man, some destiny. Their entanglement was just an accident.

  Josh was in the business of fixing what happened in the wake of accidents.

  As long as it was just that, and nothing more, it could be repaired.

  twenty

  He came home with the wrong pills.

  Josh did not feel right prescribing the antiepileptic for Rose and had tried to get a medical doctor he was friendly with to do it for him. His colleague had played coy, knowing that Josh was asking for a script without a patient consult, and suggested that he would be able to see Josh’s wife in a few days.

  Josh had felt his pride flare at this. He was certain his “friend” the doctor was acting on some latent inferiority he felt toward Josh and other surgeons. That he was lording the prescription over him.

  But now that somebody knew that Josh was trying to bend the rules, Josh didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone else to do it for him. He reluctantly agreed to get Rose to come in for an appointment. He would need to coach her on what to say to make sure she got exactly what she needed.

  So it would be a few days before he was able to dim the lights in Rose’s brain.

  But he was able to secure a few sleep aids from some pharmaceutical reps. The single-blister trial packs of new formulas of old drugs were commonly passed around the hospital … though both parties knew there was little reason for the doctors there to prescribe common sleep medication. The availability of free and fast sleep drugs was a perk of the job.

  But Rose refused to take them.

  She was worried that instead of promising her deep, dreamless sleep, the sleeping aids would lock her in the dream … her body would be sedated, but her mind would be imprisoned in a nightmare with no escape.

  “I’ll just stay up.”

  “Rose…”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Josh set the single-blister packs on the kitchen counter. Rose’s eyes lingered on them for a moment—thinking of the medicine chest in Hugo’s bathroom. Their faces framed in the mirror. The feel of the expired blue pill as she placed it on Hugo’s tongue.

  How long ago was that?

  Yesterday.

  It didn’t seem possible. It had been only a day.

  Yesterday she had embraced sleep … and Hugo.

  Today she was running from him.

  What a difference a day makes. Rose snorted at the thought. Almost a laugh.

  “Rose, are you okay?” Josh put his hand on the small of her back.

  God, she was so tired. Lack of sleep was making her feel light-headed, slightly giddy. A little punch-drunk.

  “I’m fine,” she heard herself say. Everything will be fine. Or at least it will be the “not fine” it was before.

  Then Josh kissed her.

  He pressed his face into hers, his lips soft and open on her mouth, his tongue a gentle presence between his teeth. Rose could sense him inhaling her, taking her in. His fingers caught the greasy hair of her ponytail, frizzy and loose above her ears.

  His eyes were closed, but he was seeing her. Seeing her with his mouth and his nose and his hands. Claiming her.

  His mouth pulled away as he locked her into an embrace, his chin against her forehead. Rose felt one of their pulses at the contact. His or hers, she wasn’t sure.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Even as she said it, she was tugging on his clothes.

  * * *

  They made love, first against the countertop and then, when logistics made that difficult, on the floor of Rose’s kitchen, stray crumbs and pieces of lint embedding themselves in the flesh of Josh’s bottom.

  From the vantage of the floor, Josh stared up at his wife, filling himself with the sight of her, the feel of her, the her of her. His Rose.

  And for the first time in years, Rose did not mind.

  In fact, Rose had the odd sensation that she wasn’t even really all there for Josh to see. While part of her was aware of her body grinding and enfolding itself against Josh’s, another part became convinced that she had somehow slipped out of her skin.

  She wasn’t Rose at all.

  She was a glowing ball of golden light set loose in a field of dark time. Rose felt herself expanding from a cent
ral core, her consciousness floating, hovering in space, as she grew larger and larger.

  Josh’s hands on her body, the building feeling of potential between her legs … it all seemed somehow related, but distant from the radiating light of herself. She was both on her kitchen floor and at play in the universe.

  She cried out, and the orb that was her pulsed. It suddenly pulled away from an unseen force, unfettered at last.

  She exploded, her edges straining away from the gravity at her center until they were no longer edges … until she was just bits and pieces, molecules of matter, spinning in a forced trajectory away from what she had once been. She was everywhere. She was everything.

  To Josh, pinned on the floor beneath Rose’s orgasming body, she looked not just like herself, but like every self she had ever been or ever would be. She was as she was now in this moment. But she was also as she was when he met her. And as she was when she was pregnant with Isaac. When she was nursing Adam. When she told him to expect the arrival of Penny. She was young Rose from the pictures her parents had shown him when they had gotten engaged. And she was also Rose as he imagined her to be in their future together, her hair streaked with white, her face an etch of elegant wrinkles.

  His wife in all forms, in all places and times.

  He reached the precipice of fullness … and tipped over.

  * * *

  He did not stay awake with her, though he had wanted to.

  But Josh’s body was stretched even thinner from lack of sleep than Rose’s at this point. He had not had an illicit nap on Hugo’s bed. He had not even had the hour of sleep that had granted Rose the nightmare of Isaac’s death.

  Josh’s wife led him to their bedroom and tucked him under the covers, as she did with all of her babies. She kissed his mouth.

  Assured him, “I’ll be okay.”

  She even believed it for a moment.

  The wash of oxytocin was still cresting through her body, those love hormones of orgasm and childbirth and breast-feeding.

  She remembered a thousand sleepy nights with the children when they were new. Infants latched pink mouths to her nipple. Tug, tug, tug until she felt it. The let-down of milk accompanied by the “ah” of hormones, tingling outward, drifting from her shoulders to her toe tips and fingers. It made her sleepy and happy, drunk with hormonal love for the tiny people staring up at her, noses pressed to her breasts, filling themselves up with her. Tiny eyes in the dark, surfeiting themselves with the sight of their mother. Sustaining themselves. With her.