Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  Shannon clicked the mug and sipped and clicked it closed. She’d always been perceptive, and right away Diane knew she saw through her. “You’re not yourself,” Shannon said.

  “Myself wasn’t working.” She reached for a cigarette to kill the emptiness in her hands. “Besides, Tim has helped me understand everything that’s happened. How I’ve been perceiving things all wrong?” As she popped the cigarette into her mouth she let her thumb crinkle the cellophane, an old habit even though she’d used her own lighter for months.

  “No more young gentleman?” Shannon glanced down the hallway.

  “He’s gone. As soon as they turn fourteen it’s over. Even the boys. You’ll find out someday.”

  “You know Frank had a vasectomy. We decided years ago, remember? I asked your advice?”

  “But before that,” Diane went on as though she hadn’t heard, “those eleven, thirteen, however many good years really are good. The best, if you want to know the truth. There’s nothing like them.” All at once she smiled and teared up—two expressions that, over time, had twinned into a single emotion, boring as all the rest. This was too much, she realized—too close to her heart—and she waved it away, the conversation, the memory, the future that threatened her, all of it. She sat up straight and put on her usual melancholy. Diane knew she’d lost Shannon as a friend. “It’s been hard,” she said as she watched the smoke above the table try on scarves of different light. “But I keep going. What else can you do?”

  How, she wondered, were you supposed to convince anyone that life was just a thread or a chain you’d dropped, something you could simply pick up again—Oops!—and keep following, as though nothing had happened? Lost my way, sorry, but here it is, let’s keep going. In what world did all these people live? How long before you couldn’t take any more surprises? Before you’d felt too much for one lifetime? It was morbid, she knew, but she’d lost all control over that. She’d forgotten all the boundaries Tim had helped her establish. How long, she wanted to know—how much could you take—before you paled into a ghost, wandering from room to room long before your body died or shot its haunted brains all over the walls? What if you someday simply ran out of grief? What if—while there may yet be plenty to lose—there was no longer a way to grieve those things or persons lost?

  Still, for the sake of those around her, she decided it was better to live as though each chore, errand, and conversation was an act of healing. On the last Wednesday in April, on her way to therapy, she sang along with the radio, and for a moment she tricked even herself. She believed that some wound had sewn itself shut, and as she searched for the reason—sifting through the last month for the truth—she realized it didn’t matter. If the brain was this stupid, believing any lie you told, why fight it? If this was how she felt, why care? Before she rolled up the windows she cranked the stereo and had another cigarette, collecting, from the people who walked by: stares of surprise and concern, a thumbs-up, a fist pump as though they were at a concert, and, from one old woman, a frown usually reserved for teenagers. For years, Diane had never allowed herself any fun, and she stuck out her tongue as the old woman—not much older than herself, if she was honest—shuffled off to her car.

  On the way upstairs the song wouldn’t leave her. She hummed it to herself, stepping on the linoleum in time with a beat only she could hear. It was hard not to feel cheered on, the world suddenly with her instead of against her. Tim was waiting, resting his elbows on Kathy’s desk. How they both smiled—she’d never felt so welcome, anywhere on earth. In Tim’s office it was easy not to act, not to wear a costume of strength. Even his comments on the weather made her feel as if she’d stepped down from the stage and resumed her life. But it wasn’t the same life. Right away she talked about a dream she’d had, in which she and Colin bought a house she hadn’t lived in since she was ten. By the time they’d found the little tumor of anxiety at the heart of the dream, she realized he’d written nothing down. He didn’t once reach for his pen. He did nothing to hide the openness of his eyes, begging for more of her light. “I always used to think dreams were garbage,” she said. She’d worn a pair of sandals that showed off her toenails, shiny from a fresh coat of polish. “Just the junk you throw out at the end of a long day.”

  The rule is: at some point you have to confront the fact that you’ve fallen in love. What she wanted was this exact thing, for her to visit Tim’s office once each month and keep that love a secret. For them both to know but pretend they didn’t. Living with it could be its own mild pain.

  “There’s a variety of theories,” Tim said. “Some think dreams are total rubbish, like you said. I like to read a little more into them. They don’t come out of nowhere. But I’m also not going to base everything we know off some dream you might have of an old boss or one of your college professors. You’re more than your dreams. So am I. So is everyone.”

  “I never went to college.”

  He smiled and took off his glasses. “You’re a master at missing the point,” he said as he cleaned them with his shirt. “Or a mistress, I should say. To use the proper term.”

  He’d gone red, and, if he wasn’t helpless without his glasses (she realized that she had no idea, and this struck her as strange in someone she felt she knew so well), he would’ve seen her blush back at him. She knew she was reddest just beneath her collarbone, where her heart, it seemed, couldn’t hide its heat. “Mistress,” she repeated. How easily could he lean forward, slip his arm in the small of her back, and kiss that spot? Alan had once called it her sunrise. “The sun’s coming up over the mountains,” he said after their third time together. It was the most poetic thing anyone had ever said about her. Her eyes weren’t blue skies, to him; her lips weren’t rose petals: he’d seen something no one else had. He hadn’t found it in a book or plucked it like a common chord.

  “You know I got the point,” Diane said. She drew her shawl over her shoulders as though she was cold. “I just like to tease you, is all.”

  Tim replaced his glasses and pushed them back with the pad of his finger. Had Kathy walked in, it would’ve looked like an honest therapy session.

  “I’ve been feeling much better,” Diane said. In truth she’d only felt better since the parking lot, but in her head she translated everything she’d said and done over the last month into expressions of hope. “Funny how the brain works. So much of it’s the weather, I think. What was it? Only a month ago we had snow everywhere? I still don’t know why I live here.”

  “I’m a fall person. All summer I feel like I’m just waiting for it. Hovering by the window like any second the leaves will change.”

  “Snow is just so disgusting. Months and months of it. Who was it? Jack London called snow a silent…a silent assassin. Something about it slitting a man’s throat?”

  “Sounds like I need to read Jack London again,” Tim said. “I’ve read all his work. Most of it several times, since I was a kid.”

  “I’m just so grateful it’s spring,” Diane said. “I feel like I’ve melted with the snow.”

  “I wonder where in London’s work he said that. If this was trivia night, I’d have lost.”

  “You wouldn’t be the only one. Ask me the capital of Vermont.”

  “What’s the capital of Vermont?”

  “I have no idea.” She laughed and coughed into her hand. With her heel, she nudged her purse under the chair as though Tim could see through its lining. I’ve been feeling better—her own words absurd in her head, those of a grown woman, a mother, who illegally carried a firearm everywhere she went.

  “The lilacs will be out soon,” she said. “Every year it’s a thing for me.” She clasped her hands together in her lap, staring at the ceiling as she tried to paint for Tim the perfection she’d never be able to find again. “In a perfect world they’d grow on the walls of my living room. If I was to come home someday, from work or whatever, and someone had filled the whole house with lilacs, I’d die. Right then. I saw this movie once where
the main character filled this woman’s yard with daffodils—her favorite—and I’m ashamed to say I cried.” She teared up as she pictured the man standing in what she could’ve sworn was an entire country of daffodils. She placed the girl’s movie heart on top of her own heart and its love for lilacs.

  This is how she’d cry, she realized, if, some years from now—had they done something stupid and chosen to be together—Tim remembered this very conversation and donned their house with lilacs. She pictured them on the mantelpiece, the dining room table, along each baseboard, hung like purple pinecones on all the curtain rods and door handles.

  “I saw that one, too,” Tim said. “I can see it in my head. I thought the same, except it was something I would do for someone else.” He closed his eyes as though it was playing on the backs of his eyelids, but Diane knew he was only waiting for the tears to sink back inside.

  “This is crazy,” she said, but when Tim asked what she wouldn’t clarify. “I’m just,” she said, and that was all. Talk about the weather. “It’s like I haven’t seen grass in years,” she said, pinning Tim back in his role as therapist. By the end of their session he’d even taken a few notes, his crooked little arrows and illegible, underlined phrases like street signs in an otherwise strange city where you’d once spent a year abroad.

  In May she began a new list. She kept it on the fridge, scrawled on the magnetic notepad Alan had used for groceries. Her first accomplishment was to convince Colin to get up at ten on a Saturday morning for a drive down to Roselawn. She pictured Alan’s grave as the most neglected of the cemetery, overgrown and disintegrating under a layer of bird shit. At the gates she had to ask for the grave site. Since the burial, she’d meant to return, to bring flowers. That first night after the funeral she’d imagined her life as a series of sunny afternoons on a picnic blanket, talking to him as though he could hear. How hopeful that seemed, in hindsight—a way of healing you could put on a poster or a sympathy card. She wanted to go back in time and smack that Diane, to blow cigarette smoke in her face. Give up now, she wanted to tell her. Take your kids to Mexico and start a new life.

  “It’s this way,” Colin said, tapping his finger on the map the attendant had given them. “Left here, then right, then straight ahead, then right.”

  “I suppose it’s too much to ask for a cemetery to be on a grid system.” She smiled at Colin but he was staring at the window. Every grave was different but they were all immaculate, with or without flowers. Alan’s, too, looked as if they’d only just left, save for the grass covering the grave. She caught herself looking for the seam where they’d shoveled out the dirt, but there was only grass that went on to meet more grass, as though there’d never once been a way in or out of the ground. “It’s chilly out,” she said, and gathered the snacks they’d brought for a long morning. When they arrived home she took out a large black marker and crossed Visit Roselawn from the top of her list, and by the following weekend she’d planted flowers out front, sorted through the plastic tubs of photos in the basement, and packed for an overnight stay in Escanaba, Michigan, where Paul had lived without visitors for three and a half months.

  “This will be kind of like practice,” she said to Colin as they took the interstate into Wisconsin. “For the big trip.”

  For weeks they’d called it the big trip, as though it was a three-month vacation around the world. Colin had the atlas in his lap and was tracing the route with his finger. He’d already taken off his shoes and socks. As he sank into his seat he put his feet on the dashboard, the map resting on his knees like sheet music on a piano.

  “Hopefully this little trip won’t make us kill each other. If we can’t handle eight hours we sure as hell can’t handle four days, right?” She nudged him with her elbow. He didn’t answer, instead flipping through the atlas to Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming. As she toyed with the CD player she watched him out of the corner of her eye, memorizing each state’s map. “Hey, buddy.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t go on the trip without me.”

  “Shut up.” He slapped her hand away and sank further into the seat. Like his sister, he’d mastered the sulk. “You’re going to take the 160 at someplace called Angelica,” he said, “but it’s a couple hours away.” Wisconsin had never seemed so large—not even when she’d driven back in tears after handing Paul over to the nurses. Don’t touch him, she’d said, wincing at how cruel it could sound. I mean, he hates that.

  Where Paul lived it wasn’t spring. All the towns along Lake Michigan had not yet found color, and in the occasional shaded ditch or back of a barn they could see lumps of snow, hiding as though in ambush. What the brochures promised was cherry trees in bloom, meadows of wildflowers, waves full of sunlight lapping at the shore’s white rocks. That grey link between winter and spring was even uglier out in the country. Under an overcast sky, the old farmhouse her son shared with a dozen other violent, autistic boys couldn’t fool anyone into believing it was anything but a prison. In the oblique January sunshine, she remembered, the glare on the windows had hidden the bars between the panes. There were guards at the main entrance and a security gate at every stairwell that could be closed off if there was, the attendant said, “a situation.” They stayed as long as they could stand. The nurse led Paul into the room by his hand—something that no longer bothered him, drugged up as he was. She tried to smile as she sat with him, running her hand over his acned cheek. It was the first time she’d touched him since his father was alive, and she tried—even saying it out loud to Colin, “He’s letting me love him!”—but it was impossible to ignore the truth. The boy she touched was not Paul. Even the human sheen of his eyes seemed to have dulled, and it was hard not to think the nurses had taken even his tears away from him, inconvenient as they were. At the hotel she paid for a separate room so she could cry alone. When they returned home she threw the list away.

  After visiting Paul she wanted to give up. She didn’t deserve her children. She didn’t deserve to live. But—at the end of May—the Diane who walked into therapy was suddenly repulsed by that weepy, dying Diane. She’d seen enough of her, had suffered enough of her. When she entered Tim’s office it was in high spirits. By then, she felt like her life was a treasure she’d dug up from the pale San Francisco beaches she now—with their trip only a week away—dreamed of every night. “I can’t believe it,” she said as he arranged his things for the notes he wouldn’t take. “If you’d have time-traveled and shown me a picture of this”—she gestured to herself, lowering her hand down her side like she was a prize on The Price Is Right—“I’d have asked if I had a long-lost twin sister.”

  “You do look fantastic,” Tim said.

  “So do you.” She patted her hand on the table as though it was his arm and he thanked her. “I’ve been—” She smiled and glanced down at her own hand, still resting on table. It was hard to believe that all it took to look younger was a coat of nail polish. “I’ve been looking forward to this all month,” she said. “I never—and this isn’t a reflection on you—I never thought I’d make it this far. I never thought I’d get used to telling a stranger all about my life.” She laughed, within it the first choke of a sob. “To asking for help.”

  “Diane.”

  She shook her head and dried her eyes with a fresh tissue. She laughed again. It leapt out of her like the hiccups or a bad cough—something you had to ride out. “Anyway,” she was trying to say, but it kept sounding like “and,” as though there was something to add, some other secret. She waved her hand in the air but not to make it all vanish. If she was to ask for any power right then it would be to arrest the entire scene and keep it, like a bauble or an ornament, for the times—should there be any more times—when she’d need it most.

  “If you want to know the truth, I’ve been looking forward to this as well. It’s not common practice to have favorite…” Tim touched his pen to the tip of his nose, chewing his lip as he searched for the kindest, most unmedical word. “Favorite sessions. But sometimes…w
ell, I guess for the first time, someone so magnetic comes along you can’t help but fall into their magnetic field.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say.” She gathered herself higher in the chair, flashing a quick, insincere smile. Insincere only because she’d rather be grinning or laughing open-mouthed. She’d rather reach across the table with both hands and pull Tim’s face toward her own. Instead she dug each hand into an arm of her chair. “Anyway,” she said.

  “Anyway,” Tim said.

  “I wanted to tell you about this dream—”

  “Oh!” Tim placed his notepad and pen on the table. “I wanted to tell you.” He pointed at her. In all these months he’d never once interrupted her, or if he did it’d never felt disrespectful. “That Jack London thing you quoted, about snow? Like I said, I’ve read it all. So I did some research. Actually asked a friend who’s a librarian. They have all his work digitized now, you know. So I said, search for this, and I gave him the quote—word for word. Nothing. Nada. We tried variations. Jack London never said that. Do you think you got your wires crossed?”

  She gave that smile again, insincere in another way, and looked down at her lap. Her hands were pale for May, the nails red in a way that looked, on second thought, vulgar, almost ghoulish. She pulled them toward her palms and rested her fists on her knees. “Apparently so.”

  Why could you trust nothing? For weeks she’d looked forward to crossing the country, to the chance at a glimpse of a wild herd of horses thundering—she wanted so badly for it to sound like thunder—over the trampled grasslands of the plains.

  Last night, I watched my wife sleep for the first time. I can’t say why I’ve waited so long. Perhaps because she’s so remarkable a woman it scares me. You get to know her and love her and she turns you into a musical instrument, a cello or a harpsichord. Even in sleep she could pluck those strings. Whale on those keys. What more can you ask for? Once, she wrinkled her forehead, going out of her way to worry in a dream, to think something over. Wondered if it was me. Knew it wasn’t. All that she’ll go through—it can’t not cripple you, but you know she’ll walk away, in the end, more radiant, more beautiful, never defeated.