The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  It amazed him he could still remember so much about the particular way she had inhabited the world. Such intimacy, to think of these things, to know exactly the way she had cared for her own body or moved it through space. And at the same time, how ordinary, how unimportant. Yet all those years his mind had recorded it anyway. The many different versions of her: the one before she was the one he loved, the one he married, the one who continued to change in ways unseen by others. He half-wondered if he had come here to meet these successions of her. Or whether, in the wake of Adele’s departure, he had come to the place where he and Maida had always been together to make himself less lonely.

  But it wasn’t quite true that they had always been here together. Many summers Maida had stayed on, spending extra days with Ed and Gayle and the children, after Gene had returned to Colton to run the shoe store. He had always imagined her time without him as more of the same, as a doubling or tripling of what had already happened together. But how could the things that happened with him there also happen without him? Did she still leap naked into the bedsheets? Hang dirty washcloths on the headboard? Scrape her feet with a dull table knife? He would never really know.

  When he was finished fixing up the guest room, he returned to his book on the couch. The tawdry bits were beginning to seem either too salacious or not quite enough, and the love story, while replete with passion, lacked the complexity of actual love. But once he was halfway through he felt compelled to finish it, even though after a while what urged him on wasn’t exactly pleasure anymore. It was more like wanting to find out all the ways in which something slightly irritating was going to fully irritate him. He pulled a crocheted blanket over his legs and ate cocoa mix straight from the package.

  Once while he was reading the cabin brightened with an unnatural white light. When he looked up, a sweep of headlights was penetrating the trees. He opened the front door and walked to the end of the driveway with the blanket wrapped around him.

  The lake had disappeared. It wasn’t even a glint in the dark, and the lights belonged to a car much farther away than he had thought. The car wasn’t coming toward the cabin. It wasn’t even on the same road.

  In the morning he put on his coat and borrowed a hat from the bin and went out to reacquaint himself with his surroundings. It had snowed during the night and the air above the lake was as clean and still as water. Rising to the west, the peak of Mount Orry was a patchwork of light and dark, broad fields of snow and misshapen granite outcroppings. The woods stretched in every direction that wasn’t watery. Large hemlocks, their sweeping branches quivering with deposits of new snow, greened the flanks of the mountain. The tallest white pines spread great brushlike branches over the valley, and the younger trees were naked of needles except on their uppermost limbs. The leaves of the beech trees were dead but hadn’t fallen off yet, and they hung upside down like dried-out tawny bats. Some of the pines had lost their bark and the exposed wood was as smooth as bone and the color of old bone. Still other trunks were splotched with medallions of lichen, their edges ragged and curling, their velvet the vivid yellow-green of a prehistoric thing refusing to die.

  Some of the trees were dense with nests of snow that without warning would drop to the ground and splatter like eggs filled with slush. Every time he heard the soft splat behind him he pivoted around, half-expecting to see some animal leaping silently across his path. Once he startled a rabbit, white as the snow, and it dove into a bank where there didn’t appear to be an opening, and he was left wondering if he had actually seen it.

  The lake fell away in a band of shifting light. One minute it was a plug of colorlessness for a vast hole in the ground where the trees didn’t grow. Then the clouds would part and the surface would sparkle like coarse sugar. It became flickering and alive on the edge of his vision.

  His body felt surprisingly strong. To walk in these woods was to half-merge with a younger, healthier version of himself that had walked them countless times before. When he returned to the cabin he was surprised to see he had been gone more than an hour.

  It occurred to him he should begin to consider what to do about his car, which was sitting beneath a layer of snow in the downward-sloping driveway in front of the garage. He found a shovel in the garage and began to dig it out. There wasn’t enough snow to make this terribly difficult. But there was ice under the snow and when he got in the car and put it in reverse, it shimmied back and forth and then slid farther down the driveway. There was nothing to do but try again later.

  After lunch—another grilled cheese, this time made directly on the woodstove—he pulled down Ed’s worn copy of Anna Karenina. Gene disliked the book though he’d never read it, in part because he resented the claim it made on a reader’s time. He found it difficult to believe any book could be worth that many hours of a person’s life. Yet this same feature—the challenge it implied to the reader—created its own attraction.

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  Well, all right, that was fine—he’d heard it before, or something like it. It had a nice ring to it, and it sounded smart, but was it true? Not everything that sounded smart turned out to be true.

  He read the first chapter. It was different than he expected. It ended too quickly, right in the middle of things, and there was no appearance of the famous Anna. He didn’t find anything particularly special about the initial premise, but something about how unspecial it all was—the husband waking from a dream having forgotten his immediate circumstances, his irritation at having his comfortable domestic life disrupted—something about this roused his curiosity. He read another chapter. And when he finished that one, another.

  It was dark by the time he put the book down.

  That night he took out every can and bag and box of food he could find. Once it was all on the counter, he did an inventory: the tins of smoked fish, the cartons of salted crackers, the canisters of sugar and flour and coffee, the frozen bread and vegetables, the cheese. Between the items he’d brought and what was kept in the pantry, he was well-stocked. The ice in the driveway would eventually melt. If he ran out of supplies before then, he could walk to what the summer people affectionately called “the town”—three degraded commercial buildings at the intersection of two roads: a bar, a burger joint that was open only in the summer, and a former gas station that retained a tiny store, which kept short hours during the winter. It would be a bit of an ordeal to get there on foot, but teenagers determined to buy cigarettes did it all summer.

  The only potential problem he foresaw was a shortage of coffee. There wasn’t much in the cabin, and when he was packing up his car he’d grabbed by mistake the wrong can—the one containing Maida’s ashes.

  He began to possess the life of rustic simplicity he had always considered the true life—more difficult in some ways than life in a town, but also more authentic because whatever he did successfully he knew he had done without relying on anyone else. At first his fires were sickly smolderings that died down without constant attention, but gradually he learned, adjusting the opening of the stove’s door until the fire sprang to life. He drank his coffee by the hearth and watched the dawn bleed into the clouds above the mountains, filling the sky with a pink light that appeared borrowed from the atmosphere of a far-off planet.

  He discovered that he loved walking in the woods in a light snow. The snow fell with such changeability. Large flakes fell like lenses or saucers, their edges blown upward by the air, while small ones misted between the trees. Sometimes the falling snow plunged directly to the earth. At other times it drifted so slowly it seemed that the flakes themselves were still and the world was moving through them.

  After the fresh air, the cold, the exercise, everything was more satisfying. His appetite, in its size and strength, connected him to a feeling he associated with an increase in life. Even his exhaustion at the end of the day was indistinct from the vitality that had spurred him to the exhaustion. When he fell asleep at
night it was with that sudden encompassing of the entire body.

  During the day, if he wasn’t especially careful, he would catch himself drifting in and out of fantasies about Adele. In these imaginings she was always filled with regret for having broken up with him and determined to track him down. Somehow she was able to figure out where he was staying and when he opened the door, she was overcome with emotion. He would bring her inside and make her a cup of tea, but already she would be stripping off her snow-spattered clothing before the woodstove. By the time the kettle whistled, her bare legs would be wrapped around his waist and he would be moving inside her, losing himself to the fullness of her body even as he expertly maneuvered her on the floor to make sure she didn’t crack her head on the edge of the hearth. (It was possible there was just such a scene between Lana Sky and her brother-in-law, Edgar.)

  He rarely saw anyone except for a small, hardy woman of indeterminate age but undeniable fitness who crossed the frozen lake every afternoon on snowshoes, perhaps directing herself toward the column of smoke rising from White Pine Camp. When she reached this side of the lake she paused on what in another season would have been the Donnellys’ little strip of beach. She would drink from a canteen produced from her satchel and, after hardly any rest, set back off in the direction she’d come from. Late in the afternoon a ribbon of smoke might turn in the wind above one of the large timbered houses on the opposite shore.

  So life developed a pleasing rhythm. He fed the stove, he walked, he read the immense Russian novel. He felt silly for having avoided it so long. The characters were presented with great simplicity, so that without having to dwell on their virtues and vices you knew what Tolstoy wanted you to think of them. Gene disliked Anna for her revolting reflex of charming everyone as a clever way of not having to face the ugliness in herself. Dolly he found exasperating for her pretense of desiring independence from Stiva, even though she would have used it as a reason to hate him if he had given it to her. But he reserved his greatest disgust for Vronsky, whom he mocked for his foolish attempts to go into society without Anna, since Vronsky himself might have been the first to acknowledge he had wagered all of his pride, manliness, and courage on the relationship. He began to hate Vronsky just as he knew he was supposed to. He hated him for his arrogance and self-rapture and for looking at Anna with the pride of ownership. He laughed when Levin married Kitty and scorned his illusions about love, but he secretly worried for Levin because the simplicity of his life before Kitty could never be regained. It was all presented in the clearest possible way—and the pleasure of the novel was that he knew what the characters knew in their innermost souls. He experienced the satisfying elevated position you feel when watching grown-ups you know behave like spoiled children.

  His main hardship, if it really could be called a hardship, was that he promptly ran out of coffee, and instead of remembering this fact and altering his morning routine to reflect it, each day he discovered the unpleasant reality anew. He would see the can of instant coffee and for a moment grow excited, forgetting what was inside and succumbing to his own ruse. It troubled him each time he remembered the actual contents. Finally he moved the can out of the kitchen, sticking it behind some books in the shelf.

  22.

  ON HIS FOURTH night, the scream of an owl woke him in the dark. The sound was part hiss and part croak, with a box of air rattling behind it. A barn owl, he supposed, looking for a mate or protecting a nest. The cry stopped soon after it had begun, and Gene turned over and went back to sleep.

  He was tired in the morning when he went to fetch the wood from the garage. With the wood piled high in his arms blocking his sight, he forgot about the uneven transition from the linoleum to the carpet but remembered as soon as his foot caught on the ragged edge. Somehow he managed to lunge forward with a swooping motion that kept the wood from jumping out of his arms. He was aware of a grinding sensation in his ankle, but he reached the stove without dropping any of the wood.

  He built the fire easily. As he watched the wood ignite, he told himself he would ice the ankle later. But he didn’t think of icing it again until he’d returned from his walk, at which point it hardly seemed necessary because the ankle wasn’t aching.

  That night he woke again abruptly in the dark, this time without any provocation. He tried to go back to sleep but was oddly alert. At first he thought he might read a bit more of Anna, but he’d entered that bittersweet period where his time left with the book was limited. He was torn between rushing toward the conclusion and stretching out the reading to extend the pleasure.

  The second urge was stronger than the first, so he read another book he’d picked out from the shelves, an illustrated collection of folktales that was like a child’s primer on death. Monsters and devils made regular appearances in the tales, but everywhere they went, they exhibited restraint and reason. The phantoms all possessed a genteel, courtly manner, and the most ghastly apparition was a dapper fellow in an elegant hat. Even Death, a visitor as solemn as Lincoln, behaved as though charged with having to carry out a regrettable duty. And Death was never sneaky. It gave a warning: a cough, a cold, a fever, an ominous vision, a too-powerful feeling. It helped the woodcutter finish stacking his logs before taking him away, and when it came time for the baker’s departure, it ensured the loaves he left behind wouldn’t get burned. By the time each character was drawing his last breath, it was almost impossible not to feel that his time had fairly come.

  When Gene woke the next morning, he felt the penumbra of derangement you feel after an unpleasant dream, as when you’re still trying to persuade the dream to recede to the unreality from which it sprung. But the morning passed without incident. He tended the fire and reread the salacious scene where Edgar Sky first takes Lana.

  In the afternoon, when he was on his way to feed the woodstove and thinking about whether he should try to get more coffee, something rose out of the floor and tripped him. At first he was so relieved to have avoided the calamity of falling into the stove that the pain in his ankle seemed insignificant. Only when he pulled himself onto all fours and prepared to stand did he discover the degree to which he’d injured his ankle. A spongy softness prevented him from putting his full weight on it.

  Still, it was just a sprain, or maybe not even that severe. He would ice it and rest it and it would feel better the next day.

  But the next day the ankle buckled when he tried to put his weight on it.

  The sprained ankle disrupted his life. Now before he went downstairs in the morning he had to plan carefully to bring with him whatever he needed for the day—there could be no spontaneous undertaking when there were fifteen steps to navigate between the first and second floors. He could carry only one log at a time from the garage, and with no surplus wood on hand, the fire often went out. By the time he’d gotten more wood to make a new one, he was often shivering badly enough that the new fire failed to warm him all the way through.

  He might have gotten his blood flowing if he’d been able to go for a walk, but there could be no possibility of that when his ankle collapsed every third or fourth step. He hobbled around, making miserly lunches of warmed-up frozen vegetables flavored with shavings from an old parmesan rind. When he got into bed at night he experienced the peculiar tiredness of having steeped in a stagnant energy all day long. He would be tired but awake, awake but not keen, which resulted in his feeling tired and dull the next day.

  The exhaustion made him more aware of his ankle, as if now a part of his brain was perpetually alert to the slightest discomfort in his body. He felt contempt for his limited capacity for pain, having always imagined he would be valiant in the face of injury. He remembered Maida’s face filled with fear in the ambulance and wished he’d been gentler with her, more attuned to what he might have done to comfort her and less consumed by his own worry and fear.

  He could no longer sleep on his back or his side. If he lay down, his heart began to quiver with strain. He slept propped up on pillows, never enti
rely comfortable. Some nights, when he wanted to avoid taking the stairs, the couch became his bed.

  The snow continued to fall, filling the valley, and he lay in bed and read what remained of Anna. It saddened him to return to the book, aware that it would hasten the moment when the fates of the characters would be realized. But as he read, the pleasure he’d grown accustomed to from the story was now more difficult to achieve. Although he still felt he knew Anna and Vronsky and Levin as well as he knew himself, he was no longer sure how he was supposed to view them. That scene, for instance, where Vronsky takes up painting—what was he supposed to make of it? Was he to think it would have been better if Vronsky never attempted an art, because in his soul he was only a crass military man? What of Levin, who seemed to possess the rare gift of an innate wisdom that allowed him to discourse freely and naturally with all types of people—but who also gloated when learned men sought his opinion on important topics? And Anna—what was there to say about Anna? Her desperation, the increasingly antic quality of the deeds she undertook to avoid the loneliness and isolation that were inseparable from her position—it was awful, but he didn’t know if it was awful because she was an abased creature or an exalted one. Suddenly he couldn’t say that this character was good or bad or that one was complicated or simple. And the more he tried to recapture his previous understanding, the more lost he became.

  He found himself arguing with Tolstoy because Tolstoy had said that people made an error in believing that happiness was the realization of desires. This was true but misleading, because unhappiness was also characterized by desires that went unrealized. So having your desires realized and not having them realized were both causes for unhappiness. If you were unhappy, then, how were you supposed to know whether it was because you had succeeded or failed in achieving your desires? He looked everywhere in the text but couldn’t find an answer.