The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  The bar in York had dark paneling instead of windows. Every inch of space on the walls displayed something: schoolhouse clocks that had stopped ticking; World War II infantry helmets; empty matchboxes; ax-heads; and an array of decommissioned or pilfered signage, including one that said WATCH FOR CHILDREN THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. Their server was a woman in fur-lined boots with the tooth of an animal strung around her wrist. She wasn’t old or young, beautiful or ugly. She seemed to occupy that indeterminate position in the middle of life where you’re afraid to expect more and also afraid not to.

  Ed delayed her departure from their table by dithering over what his drink would be. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “what kind of animal does that tooth belong to?”

  She laughed as if he’d proposed something tricky. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you can guess it, this round’s on me.”

  She left them to tend another table and when she returned she said, “Well? Any guesses?”

  “May I have another look?” Ed said. The woman held out her wrist. Ed clasped it gently and nudged the tooth from side to side with his thumb. Then his eyes met hers and in his expression were the first stirrings of delight, as if he had momentarily forgotten that this wrist was attached to a face and now he had the pleasure of discovering it again. He said, “I thought they stopped importing these long before you were born.”

  “That’s your guess?”

  “You can’t fool me with that baby face of yours. If this is authentic, you got it from your grandmother.”

  Her mouth registered defiant skepticism, but her eyes shone with some weightless feeling. She took her hand away from him, but almost apologetically, as if it was a thing that belonged equally to them. Then she asked him what he did for a living, and when he told her she said, “You work at one of the hospitals around here? My sister’s a nurse at Bridgeway General.”

  “I try my best to avoid hospitals,” he said.

  “You aren’t one of those traveling doctors they send off to the latest crisis, are you? My sister used to date one of them. Every time he wanted to go to bed with her, he started speaking French.”

  Ed replied, “Je ne parle pas français et encore moins au lit. Sauf si bien sûr je suis avec une belle Française.”

  The woman laughed uncertainly. “So what kind of doc are you?”

  “I work for myself. I have a small practice I have no intention of growing, but it seems to get bigger every year in spite of my attitude.”

  “Some people just can’t help being successful,” she said. “I wish I was one. But I’d settle for being married to one—that’ll do too.” She laughed with the confidence he’d find her gall charming. “You let me know if you hear of any openings, okay?”

  She left them and returned a few minutes later with their drinks. Ed took out his wallet and tried to pay for them but she refused the money. “Don’t be silly,” he said, but at the same time he was preening, as if he believed she had behaved correctly in their situation, because he wasn’t obliged to pay for making another person feel good.

  The woman had other tables to tend and didn’t spend time at theirs after that, but something in Ed had changed nonetheless. There was an air of bravado about him, a swooping energy loose in his gestures and his voice. He began to talk loudly about a topic he seemed to know an infinite amount about, the recorded images and sounds that had been sent into space on Voyager 2, including an image of the very same lighthouse they had just visited. This collection, he said, would supply extraterrestrials with a compendium of life on Earth: the sounds of whales, tractors, wild dogs, a heartbeat, a baby crying, footsteps, a Beethoven symphony, “Johnny B. Goode”—even the recorded brain waves of a woman thinking about falling in love. Gene said very little but Ed continued on hardly without pause anyway. He seemed to take it for granted that another person would find captivating what captivated him. In this moment Gene wanted to hate Ed, to dismiss his sermon as pure unthinking egotism. But it was more than that. It was honestly joyful, delivered in the thrall of vitality and optimism. A person like Ed imagined in color and listened to his dreams, and two days after a conversation it didn’t suddenly occur to him what he had actually wanted to say. He felt at home in the world, like a spirit or an animal, and on the rare occasion when he sensed himself struggling, it only filled him with wonder and deepened his sympathy for everyone else. Gene could know all this and still know almost nothing about what it was like to be Ed.

  When they got to the car it was beginning to snow.

  “Why do you think they included the brain waves of the woman thinking about love?” Gene said.

  “The greatest power on earth,” Ed said, with awe in his voice.

  They started toward home. Handfuls of snow flung at the windshield, small detonations of brightness caught by the sweeping lights of a passing car. A string of shuttered roadside motels, grim and abandoned for the season, appeared suddenly and then were sucked away into the darkness.

  “Did you love my wife, Ed?” Gene said. He’d had no premonition of the question before it came out of him.

  “We all loved her.”

  “But did you love her the way a man loves a woman?”

  Ed’s hands slid to the top of the steering wheel. “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m a man and she’s a woman, so I guess you could say I loved her the way a man loves a woman.”

  “Did you love her the way I loved her?”

  Ed reached for the radio knob, pressed it, then immediately seemed to think better of it and pressed it again. He appeared to bring renewed concentration to the act of driving. “I wouldn’t begin to tell anyone how they loved another person,” he said. “How does it go? ‘Love—that’s a private catastrophe.’”

  “Ours wasn’t.”

  “Then it wasn’t.”

  There was a pause in which they both seemed to be searching for something else to say.

  “Why did she like you?” Gene said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What was it she saw in you?”

  “Oh—gosh. I guess we recognized something familiar in each other. Something we had in common that maybe made us different from the kind of people we’d grown up with.”

  “What was that?”

  “I’m not sure I can explain.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  There was a silence.

  Gene tried again: “You must have thought about it.”

  Some expression rotated across Ed’s face. It came and went so quickly—and was replaced by an expression of determined patience—that Gene didn’t have time to interpret it.

  “I don’t know that it’s so complicated,” Ed said. “There’s a kind of trust that can exist between two people who don’t need much from each other—who aren’t in each other’s business according to the rules of their lives. Maida and I didn’t use each other up. We couldn’t. There was a deep fondness there. A genuine friendship.”

  “Like you and me,” Gene said.

  “Like you and me.”

  “Only different—your word.”

  “Yes.”

  They had made it back to Colton. Snowplows and salt trucks were already sledging the main road, flooding the smeared streets with a painful white light. They said goodbye in the car. Gene had a feeling he wouldn’t see Ed again for a while.

  That night he was kept awake by some tender spot in his chest where every time he breathed it seemed a bone might pop through the skin. But there was no bone, no heart bone, and if he tried to find the spot with his fingers it disappeared, fleeing somewhere else in his body where it couldn’t be detected.

  He was woken in the morning by the phone ringing. A woman from the hospital was trying to get him on the surgery schedule. He hadn’t made up his mind whether to go ahead with it, but he didn’t know how to explain what he was feeling. In a moment of panic he hung up on her. His mind felt gummed up, his decision-making faculties slowed by his impossible situation. As he understood i
t, the doctor had given him two choices and both called for his eventual death. He could leave the tumor in his heart alone and he could die trimming a nose hair, or he could have the tumor removed and still die trimming a nose hair. The thought filled him with despair. Even the possibility that all of the problems with his heart might be fixed still ended the same way, with his dying of something else.

  Where was Maida? Why couldn’t she help him? Some wounded part of him still believed that it was her duty to help him. And where was Adele? He had never thought of her as a substitute for Maida—she was her own earthy entity, with her own distinct charms—but now that she too was gone he felt that he had lost both his wife and her replacement.

  He thought of calling Dary to ask her what he should do. Then he remembered what the man in the waiting room had said. About how the ending would begin as soon as people knew. Dary would fly out from California and, meaning well, she would try to help him make plans for what remained of his life. But he wasn’t ready to think of what remained of his life as a short block of time organized by other people.

  The woman from the hospital called back to tell him the surgeon insisted on bringing him in. “This isn’t a wait-and-see,” she said.

  Gene told her he couldn’t schedule anything until he spoke to his daughter, but it was too early to call California.

  He didn’t want to be home when the woman from the hospital called back later in the day. The key to the Donnellys’ cabin was still in the front closet, in the oversize coat that no one had claimed or worn for a very long time. He considered wearing it himself, but when he tried it on, the liner was disintegrating. It seeded small white flakes like dandruff into the wool of his sweater. He tried to brush them off but the attempt only burrowed them deeper into the wool. Then it looked like some insect had nested in the sweater and left behind little crisps of eggy vermin. He gave up and changed.

  He packed a small bag of clothing and a good deal of food, the meals in the freezer that Adele had prepared for him plus butter, coffee, milk, and eggs. On his way out of town he stopped at a market to pick up cigarettes for Brian. He didn’t know if Brian would still be there, but the possibility lifted his spirits.

  That afternoon there were two successive winter skies, the first one a low surly plume of milky cloud dimming the light, and the second one twice as high as the first, a bright streakless blue that made the ice on the side of the road sparkle like running water. He drove past small snowcapped houses jagging smoke above the hillsides. The trees gradually moved closer to the road, until the woods appeared to lift off the ground and organize themselves as mountains.

  After he passed the falls, he began to look for the turnoff. It was easy to miss—just a narrow cleft between the trees, the intersection at an oblique angle. The condition of the road on that final stretch was unpredictable at this time of year, and as he made the turn, hardened ridges of ice thumped against the car’s undercarriage.

  He reached the cabin just as the last of the sun was leaving the valley. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something spinning across a frozen expanse, a ghost chariot with wheels made of sparks. It was just the wind sweeping along the lake, coughing up the snow in the last of the day’s light.

  Three

  21.

  THE CABIN LOOKED as he remembered it. Not just as he remembered it from the last time he had been there (a year and a half ago, for Gayle’s birthday picnic) but according to some fixed and primitive original that seemed inalterable in his mind. The wood paneling in the main room was gouged in several places (one whole section was particularly badly damaged from the summer of indoor tricycle-riding), and some of the indentations had been filled in sloppily, with a putty lighter than the wood. A strip of blue painter’s tape on the floor between the kitchen and the main room called attention to the differential in height between the linoleum and the ragged edge of the carpet. In the kitchen, beside the electric stove, open shelves displayed mismatched dishes and the bird-shaped sugar bowl from Gayle’s first apartment. In the main area, beyond the woodstove, the tall shelves were chaotic with books, the usual motley assortment of popular novels and memoirs that collected at a summer place where people wanted to leave lighter than they arrived. Upstairs the homely BROKEN KNOWLEDGE sign was still hanging in the bathroom, next to a linen closet that never had a door.

  Gene poked around for some indication of Brian—a bag or a pillow or something that didn’t seem to belong to the cabin’s general collection of extras for guests—but the presence of the cabin itself was far stronger than that of any human inhabitant. He didn’t know how it would feel to be there and he was surprised it was a bit like a homecoming. It was strange how the most ordinary items could be comforting if only they were familiar: towels air-dried to a cardboardy roughness, a mineral taste in the water he associated with the lake, a small hexagon-shaped window at the top of a landing that the children, when they were young, had referred to as the fairy lookout. The cabin was almost shabby, or might have appeared that way to someone unaccustomed to it, but it reverberated with happy times in the Ashes’ and Donnellys’ lives, which maybe explained why it had been spared the Donnellys’ vigorous impulse to remodel.

  Looking over the titles on the spines in the bookshelves, Gene realized he hadn’t read a book for a long time. He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten out of the habit, but for years he hadn’t had the motivation. Maybe this was because whenever he thought back to the evenings he and Ed had spent talking about poems in Ed’s bohemian apartment, their behavior seemed somehow contrived, as if they had been merely playing the part of fervent intellectuals. At the time Gene’s excitement had been real, but nine-tenths of it hadn’t been about the literature; it had been about the aura of bravado surrounding what he imagined a poetic lifestyle to be. Enchanted with their own concerns, he and Ed had treated the poems as if they were empty parentheses they could fill with any idea or emotion. When they were feeling lofty the poems were about the transcendence of the human spirit, and when they were feeling vulgar the poems were about the savagery of the human animal. It embarrassed him now to remember how they regarded themselves, believing in the importance of their dialogue about the nature of man and the meaning of his existence.

  But this wasn’t the only reason his appetite for reading literature had declined. Now that he was out of practice, he was also afraid of finding it difficult. Sometimes it required an outrageous effort, and when choosing between outrageous effort and instant satisfaction it was easier to sprint through a news story in the paper, or more recently on the computer, and then forget about it and replace it with another news story the very next day, where there was something quite pleasant about the rhythm of having to continually refill the holes in his mind left behind by the fading excitement of the fading article. Once he stopped reading books, he stopped thinking of himself as a reader. Then it became easy to say to himself that the reason he didn’t read was because he wasn’t a reader any more.

  He tipped a book out of the shelves and read the back cover. It was a rural romance about a young widow named Lana Sky who had promised her dying husband, Edward, that she would never remarry or accept help from his brother, Edgar. There was nothing intimidating about a rural romance and this was exactly why it oppressed him—suppose his mind failed to follow the sentences the way a mind sometimes failed to follow sentences? If you were going to be vanquished, you wanted to be vanquished by Proust, Melville, Middlemarch. No one wanted to say the last book he ever read (the last book he gave up reading) was a rural romance featuring a heroine with a silly name. He selected two other books instead, something serious-looking about the treatment of Chinese rail workers, and a murder mystery that judging by the cover took place at a logging operation. He sat down prepared to read one or both of them and then had to laugh at himself, because in spite of having made his selections in the absence of others’ scrutiny, he still hadn’t chosen freely. He had chosen the books on the basis of their rightness—the serious book about the ra
ilways because it would make him an informed person about an important issue, and the murder mystery because that was the kind of indulgence you were supposed to crave and allow yourself when you went out of town. But what he actually wanted to read was a rural romance in which the characters enjoyed tawdry sexual romps, and in the end, after some confusion, true love inevitably prevailed.

  He nestled into the overstuffed couch and started the romance. It wasn’t so bad. The chapters went by quickly and easily.

  Eventually his stomach began to rumble and he put the book down. He made a grilled cheese the way he used to for the kids, pressing it to a desirable flatness by nesting a smaller cast-iron pan inside the larger one, with the sandwich in between.

  After dinner he put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room upstairs, which had been his and Maida’s bedroom for many summers. The kinship he felt with the familiar pattern of orange elephants interlocking their trunks seemed as old as he was, as if he rather than Dary had lain on these sheets as a child. He could remember putting Dary down for a nap between him and Maida and reaching across the baby to touch Maida’s milk-stiffened breasts.

  Maida was everywhere in the cabin. Her favorite thing to do after making this bed had been to take a shower and then, giggling, slide between the clean sheets naked, her wet hair soaking the pillow and the mild vegetal smell of the soap exuding from her body. He didn’t know why she loved doing this so much—it wasn’t something she did at home—but he never questioned it, because her happiness seemed the obvious answer. She was also sitting in the room on the edge of the ladder-back chair, scrubbing her feet with a washcloth that she would later hang to dry on the headboard of the bed. He remembered the thick brown patches she got on her soles from stepping barefoot in pine sap, and how she would scrape at them with a dull table knife, laughing at any suggestion that she wear shoes in the future to prevent it from happening again.