But that’s not how any of it went.
That squirrel I mentioned earlier?
It wasn’t a squirrel. Even though I could see it in my mind so clear, could mentally track the tremble of its cheek each time it puffed out to make its distinctive rattling screech, still, it wasn’t a squirrel.
It was Kelly.
I’d woken with the sun in my eyes, the country sun of our new house, and that noise I was hearing, it was the only thing it could be, all the way out here: a squirrel.
And, the reason I can’t say for sure if Kelly fell for three seconds or four, it’s because the foyer, it’s where the stairway starts. Where the thick railing comes to a stop, where the banister swirls up into a knob of wood the size of a cantaloupe.
On the way down, Kelly’s lower back cracked into that knob of wood.
And then her momentum flopped her over, facedown on the concrete, two of her teeth cracking halfway up, blood seeping from her left ear. There was sawdust on her open eyes, too.
Stan told me about that part. That that’s why he thought she was dead. That that’s why he thought his little girl was dead.
But he spit into them—fathers are the most desperate, stubborn people in the world—and he rubbed them wet again, got her to cough, pulled her head into his chest because he didn’t know the first thing about first aid.
And, me? Mark, the husband, the protector, the brave one?
I was up in the loft with a hard-on, listening to a squirrel chatter.
Kelly’d been making that noise all night, the way she tells it. It was all she could do, all she had left. The only way she could scream.
I haven’t eaten a piece of chicken for months, now.
But the house, our house.
It’s finished, now. It’s ours.
•
Because Stan’s Stan, the whole time Kelly was having surgeries and doing physical therapy and telling me it wasn’t my fault, he kept building. I know it didn’t go down like this, but the way I picture it is he fired everybody off the job, even the subcontractors, and did it all himself. The wiring, the plumbing, the taping and the bedding, the tilework in the foyer. The high gloss trim on all the molding. Staying late to get it all just perfect.
His listing in the phonebook has always been STAN THE MAN, with a cartoon picture of how handy he is, how resolute, how fair.
What really, happened, though—I’ve seen the work orders—is he doubled up on workers, called in favors.
The house was done in two months. The only thing was, because he thought it would jinx her—builders, I’ve found, are the most superstitious people you’ll ever meet—he refused to make any of it wheelchair accessible. Because she wasn’t going to need any damn wheelchair, he’d grumble to me if I asked, which I finally stopped doing.
How he would have made it wheelchair accessible, though—man.
That front stairway? It’s grand, no doubt, but the footprint of our house, it’s small for the square footage involved, something our architect had had to do because of our craggy lot. Translation: our staircase doesn’t sweep up dramatically, like Kelly had probably been dreaming of. It can’t. What it does is go up about ten steps then switch back, to hug the wall. That wall-hugging part of it, sure, we could put a chair lift there. Those first ten steps, though, they just have railing to either side. Throwing up some structure solid enough to allow a lift to be attached—Stan could have done it, but it would have gone against his aesthetic, his sense of ethics, his push to always preserve the resale value, and a ramp, to be long enough to actually use, it would keep the front door from opening.
The workaround we finally settled on, it was two wheelchairs, one on the first floor, one on the second, and me telecommuting. I’m basically a consultant anyway, and had already been just going into the office twice a week, so it wasn’t that big a change. And Kelly’s lost so much weight through all this that I can hoist her up into my arms with no problem. The stairs are dicey, sure—steps are always a trick when you’re top-heavy, can’t see your feet—but carrying her, I don’t know. I feel like a protector again, yeah? Like I’m making up. Like I’d carried her over the threshold of the elevator that long-ago Friday and had never put her down.
Nobody recommends we keep doing it like this, of course, Kelly’s physical therapist especially—and she rallied the doctors, and Stan—but in the end it was our decision, and Kelly said she trusted me not to trip. For my part, I said that old thing about valuable cargo.
The compromise was that I promise to wear back support, that I keep one brace at the bottom of the railing and one at the top. It isn’t to protect me so much as to keep me from shifting my weight to allow for this or that soreness, thus upping the chances of our big fall, the two of us spilling us down into the front door. Kelly says it’ll only hurt her half as bad, so she’s not worried. I tell her I love her.
The way it really worked out, though, after the physical therapist was gone, after Stan wasn’t making daily visits, was that Kelly’s found she can pretty much just live on the first floor, only calling upon me for occasional visits upstairs. Over the months, it’s kind of became understood that the upstairs, it’s mine, the downstairs, hers.
“A house divided,” she told me one night over dinner, grinning.
“Can stand forever,” I toasted back, and held my cup there until she nodded yes, yes.
Still, in the mornings I collect my laptop like a ritual, tell her I’m off to work, does she need anything before I do my making like a tree act?
I’m just standing at the bottom of the stairs when I go through all this, of course. By the front door, but we rarely open it, mostly use the garage door instead, which I had somebody else build a ramp up to—I thought on the sly, but then when I went to pay, the handyman backed off, said Stan wouldn’t allow it.
So we shook hands, and he rattled off in his truck.
Leaving us alone with ourselves.
It had been our dream, why we’d bid on this lot when everybody was telling us it had always been empty on purpose, that building a house here would be more trouble than it was worth, that there was a reason it had been vacant so long.
We were too far in to give up, though.
And maybe someday she would walk, right?
Maybe this was all just a test.
From the first step of going to work, I nod to her on the couch and she smiles back, her chair cocked there beside her, then I follow the banister upstairs, steeling myself not to look to either side like always, for fear of seeing her mid-fall. For fear that she’d look over at me.
•
During the day, the phone calls and emails and teleconferences up in my aerie, as she calls it (with a grin), I can hear the wheels of her chair on the first floor, creaking. It isn’t that the bearings need grease, anything maintenance like that, it’s just the grabby rubber of her tires. Especially when she brakes one side, to turn.
I can muffle the phone against my chest and tell when she crosses from the tile of the foyer to the hardwood of the living room, and I can distinguish the expansive squish of the large tiles of the foyer from the smaller, rougher ones of the kitchen.
The only time I can’t hear her is the hall, that long rug there—runner, runner, runner—just wide enough for her wheelspan, if she drives absolutely straight.
For those silent parts I often find myself holding my breath, imagining the thousand things that could be going wrong right now, but after my first few crashes down the stairs, taking them five at a time, flinging myself around the banister like a cartoon, I’ve learned to give her her space. That I’m her husband, not her day care attendant. That she can get along for hours at a time without me. Probably for days. That you can mother-hen a person…maybe not to death, but to annoyance, anyway.
Anyway, I’m down on and off, just in the regular course of the day. She usually gets our lunch together on the tall counters then wheels down to exactly the spot she fell, calls up that it’s getting cold, come and g
et it.
It’s usually salad or something that’s supposed to be cold, but, you know. It’s also become kind of a game for her to have to call me twice, even though after her first call I’ll just be up here waiting for her to call again in her chiding voice. It’s somehow thrilling for her to use it on me, is some return to normalcy.
Which—I know, “normalcy,” that being before, when she could come upstairs, reach over me, click my monitor off, saving me from myself, “this” being now, the un-normal times, it’s not helpful to anybody to think like that. But you can’t always control how you think, either. Or, you can’t help how you feel from leaching up to your head.
Not everybody I consult with is on central time like us, though. The international contracts, they sometimes pull me upstairs well after dark, Kelly’s shows murmuring below.
A time or two I’ve slept up there, even, on the futon, half on accident, telling myself it’s because I didn’t want to wake her.
I tell myself a lot of things. One of them’s that my left side of the bed, it’s not jinxed now.
I can’t ask her to change, though, can I? After all these years.
The loft, though, it’s strictly storage, now. Stan didn’t have the framing in place to wall the ledge off, and’s too professional to just tack something in place, but the rails he’s put there, they’re burly, are no joke.
I haven’t been up there since we were unpacking, and Kelly’s never been back.
In a book or a movie, of course, it’s exactly where she’d have to go, it’s where we’d go together, to have sex again, christen that room, washing it clean of its sins.
Except this is real life.
If your dog got run over in a certain intersection, you don’t find yourself lingering there later, do you? Just waiting for Rex to stand up from the asphalt, shake the years off.
No, you move on, you keep moving.
You pretend that intersection of bad ideas, it isn’t there at all.
It’s just where old files go, where you put things you don’t want to think about anymore.
A happy home is one with dark rooms, yeah.
That’s not what I’m saying.
•
In my random, mean-nothing dreams, I’m never flying.
Because I’ve conditioned myself that it’s all just mental tiddlywinks, maybe, my dreams about half the time, they’re looking over my own shoulder as I work, like I’m revisiting the chores of the day. I guess that’s the stimulus-response of my eyes, how I’ve been conditioned. Muscle memory, associations I’ll never be able to shake.
The other half of the time, I don’t know what my dreams are. I just turn off at ten or eleven, come back with Kelly creaking away from the bed in her chair, and then it all starts over again, just like the day before.
I’m not complaining.
One of those times I turned off, though, it was late, an international conference call that a client had been called away from—his dime—and when I came back, it was to a different sound.
Downstairs.
I licked my lips, studied my monitor until my eyes were good enough again, then pushed back silently in my chair, automatically punching the speaker button on my phone, settling the receiver down soundlessly.
I stood slowly, using mostly my legs—the arms of the chair were leather, loud—and, like always, because the ceilings in this corner of my office are angled, short, I steadied myself with my fingertips on the clearcover I’d taped up there to keep from making a grimy spot. Resale, resale, all that; Stan had infected me, I guess.
He had also built the floors up here to be quiet, had told me early on that that was the mark of a good framer: you couldn’t hear people stomping around upstairs. So long as the owners weren’t stupid enough to put down something other than carpet, that is.
Since we weren’t stupid, I was able to cross to my railing, bend down to get a line on Kelly.
My first thought was that it was later than I’d figured—Kelly’d gone on to bed, wasn’t on her place on the couch, her legs tucked up beside her.
But then…it didn’t make sense.
Not the hour, but the chair.
It was still there.
I gripped the railing, swallowed, and behind me the client came on finally, was asking for me, saying my name over and over across all the thousands of gallons and miles of the Atlantic Ocean.
I studied the couch again, and then all the parts of the floor around it I could see.
It didn’t make sense, this.
Kelly couldn’t walk. Kelly couldn’t have walked anywhere. There was no room in the world for a third option.
But then there was that other sound, the one I didn’t know, couldn’t catalogue, couldn’t associate.
It was a steady pulling, punctuated by breaths.
I leaned out over my railing, trusting Stan’s mounts, and just caught sight of a leg, a side view of a leg. Which I could only have seen if the person was lying down on the floor of the foyer, right?
Right.
A few pulls and breaths later, Kelly clumped up onto the couch, dusted the front of her sweat pants off, then reached down for first her right leg, then her left, and hauled them up beside her, unpaused her show.
I watched her watch, my client still asking for me from my desk.
“You didn’t want to wake me,” I finally said down to her but mostly to myself.
She’d heard my keys stop clacking, knew I wasn’t talking on the phone, maybe had even heard me snore a time or two. And I’d told her a few days ago, pretending I had special husband radar, that my hearing was getting better to compensate for how I couldn’t see through walls yet, that I knew the individual creaks of her wheels on different surfaces.
“Asking for a glass house?” she’d said.
“I look like a bird killer?” I’d said back.
But, this. With no chair.
She’d needed to hit the bathroom past the kitchen, I knew—her bathroom, with the handrails I’d mounted into the smooth wall myself—and it was all tile between the couch and there, so she’d just poured herself off the couch, gone there on her hands. Pulling herself along like a mermaid, and probably not for the first time.
The next day, after lunch, I swept all of the tile I could get at, and then, while she was napping, rolled the runner in the hall up as well.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked, running the dishes under water, me carrying the rolled-up rug on my shoulder like a body.
I just kept doing it.
•
If it had stopped there—well.
It’s been nearly a week since that day, now.
Same routine, same everything.
Except.
Three nights ago, I woke on my side of the bed certain I was back in our townhouse again. Like time had slipped, was giving me another chance. Like Kelly’s father was about to rush up the long dark hall and lean over the bed and breathe too close to my face and vomit up blueprints, his late wedding gift, now that it looked like our marriage was going to stick.
I jerked up into the headboard, scrunching the sheets to me, and…there was no resistance. Nobody over there to weigh them down, fight me for them.
I let myself settle back into the present. Into our new house, our new life. This situation.
The one where the sheets should be tucked under Kelly like she always did.
I was alone.
My heart slapped the inside of my chest in terror. Not that a hallway was about to open up impossibly beside me, spitting out all kinds of horror, but that—the last time I woke to her gone, that was the night she fell.
This was the first floor, though, right?
Much as I hated to give it voice even in my head, it was her prison. And, barring electrical sockets and, I don’t know, some jagged grout, she was going to be all right.
As far as I knew—and because she wouldn’t need them—she didn’t even have keys to open the front or back doors from the inside, and the gara
ge grinding up on its long screw would have shaken me awake.
“The bathroom,” I said out loud, to myself.
That bathroom the bathroom the bathroom.
Never mind that there was one a few steps from the bed. Or, a few rolls of the wheels.
You’re not always thinking straight when you wake in the night, you’re simpled down, like. You might think just “bathroom,” then go to the one you’re most familiar with.
On the far side of the kitchen, then. On silent wheels.
I straightened the sheets back out as best I could, somehow certain that they were now arranged in some unnatural way that would, in a glance, tell her I was still babying her, was still too worried.
But the way I straightened them back out, it was obviously fake.
I smiled at myself, shook my head and stepped down, was halfway across the cold floor to the short hall when something registered.
I stopped, turned my head half around.
Kelly’s chair.
Over the top of the bed I could see its handles. They were looking back at me.
I stumbled to the side a bit as if punched, found myself breathing hard, and then heard it again, just like before: pull, pull, breathe.
I shook my head no but followed the sound.
It was Kelly, of course.
She was a black shape, pulling herself past the kitchen island. Scraping her bare, senseless legs on the rough tile there.
I opened my mouth, reached for her but couldn’t say anything.
I was standing not three feet from her, was going to have to step aside if she didn’t stop, and—she wasn’t stopping. Wasn’t even dimly aware of me.
She was still asleep.
I gave her room to pass and looked ahead, down the long, runnerless hall.
We went down it together, her crawling, me shuffling behind.
At the turn in the foyer she slapped a hand onto the thick, decorative post that had broken her back and pulled herself around.
Two minutes later she was back by the kitchen island, only, now her thighs were leaving occasional streaks of blood.
I sat down by one of them while she made her slow way down the hall, rubbed at it with my hand, just making it larger.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 17
