The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  Then Anna died. Anna died and the book continued on. Then it came to an end. Coming to the end was like coming to an abrupt stop on a train at an undesirable provincial station and being informed only once you’d arrived that this was the last stop and all the passengers must disembark. In psychological terms, Gene didn’t know where he was, or why he was there, or what he should do. Long after he put down the book he remained awake in the dark. Why had Ed recommended it to everyone? What had he thought they would understand or learn?

  And now he heard Ed’s voice in his head, telling Gene his relationship with Maida had been a genuine friendship. When a man told you he enjoyed “a genuine friendship” with your wife, it was not generally a good thing. A friendship in and of itself wasn’t objectionable, but a genuine friendship—there was something emphatic about the word. Genuine passed itself off as square and wholesome, but it was one of those terms that could undermine its own meaning. It had cant. Because the idea of friendship—like most ideas advanced in a straightforward manner—didn’t require emphasis or clarification to be understood. It was Ed’s addition of genuine that seeded misgivings. If Ed’s relationship with Maida was genuine, the implication was that someone else’s was inauthentic or false.

  Just then he began to feel his heart. He felt it as a distinct form, heavy and blunt, as if it was throwing itself from side to side in his chest, a lugubrious thing mistaking itself for something swift and nimble. At the same time his heart became a basket weaving its tight fibers across his chest, attempting to throttle the very thrashing that was also his heart. Fear seized him. He pressed his hands to his chest to try to quell the thrashing. A sound came out of him of its own accord, a dry, hoarse gasp.

  He pulled himself upright and the episode ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  First thing when he woke up his mind went over all of it again: Anna, his wife’s affections, Ed’s friendship with her. Certain irregularities from the past returned to him, and though they had never seemed particularly worthy of examination before, his anxiety now urged him to dissect them down to the slightest gesture. On the day Maida had gotten a heat rash and wouldn’t feed Dary, why had Ed swooped in to soothe the baby, putting her in the car and driving off to get the popsicles Maida wanted? Or he recalled the day Maida swam across the lake—how after he had rowed back to the cabin, he encountered Ed, who had just woken and suggested they drive together to the other side of the lake to pick up Maida. How could Ed have known she had swum the lake if she and Ed hadn’t made this plan together in advance? What else had they planned without his knowing? He couldn’t decide if it was worse to think of them conspiring together after Gene had returned to Colton to work in his store, or when he was still there, an unwitting party to their smoldering affections.

  Now he thought he remembered something else, a time he’d once seen Maida sitting on Ed’s lap, the two of them reposing on the deck as the sun set over the lake. Everyone else was either showering or getting ready for dinner, but there they still were in bathing suits. And there was a baby in Maida’s arms. Or maybe the baby was on Ed’s lap. Though that hardly made sense, because both the baby and Maida wouldn’t have been in Ed’s lap at the same time.

  Each thought gripped something inside him, pulling it upward, until he tasted bile at the back of his throat. His heart beat too high in his chest, at what seemed like the base of his neck, and at the same time, it throbbed in his groin, rapping against the hollow place where his leg met his pelvis. He was riling himself to a kind of conscious insanity, and he didn’t know what purpose it served, because it would leave him only with ransacked happiness and not the definite thing he was trying to find. Yet his mind couldn’t stop turning over each memory and sniffing it for signs of spoilage. He told himself it was the only way to uncover the unnamable condition that was the cause of his suffering.

  “A kind of trust”—that was how Ed had described what was between him and Maida. A phrase intended to offer reassurance. And yet what was trust but another word for intimacy? Intimacy—the drawing in of someone that implied the exclusion of somebody else. If what had existed between Ed and Maida really was trust, then maybe it was Ed who was in and Gene who was out.

  Was Ed capable of such a betrayal? Gene weighed Ed’s fondness for women, in combination with his large appetite for pleasing himself. There was also his feeling of superiority over other people and maybe especially over Gene, a feeling that might have allowed Ed to be unusually forgiving with himself, since it was only natural that a stronger animal should take from a weaker one, and when this happened no one said it was a crime against morality.

  But what about Maida? Was she the victim of a canny seducer, or had she actively conspired against Gene? And if Maida had given some part of herself to Ed, did that mean she hadn’t given this part of herself to Gene? Or was it that she had held this part of herself in reserve and never given it to anyone? What was love without the whole person behind it?

  A surge of nausea caused his forehead to break out in sweat. He tried to insinuate himself back into his former mental condition in which his wife’s affections were familiar and known. What did it matter, after all, if Ed had a crush on her that he never acted upon? How could Gene suggest there was lasting harm in that, when he was guilty of the same with Gayle? And why should he care if at times, softened by a generous spirit, Maida had allowed Ed to think he had a chance with her? He hadn’t had a chance with her. That was the important thing. Whatever vacillations she might have experienced in regard to Gene over the years, she’d stayed with him. Wasn’t that enough? Why wasn’t it enough?

  There was a kind of solace in the deepest misery, the comfort of confronting the worst possible thing that could happen to a person. How keen he felt with all of his indignation concentrated on the injustice he had suffered! It was torture, it was intolerable to contemplate the sordid details of his betrayal—but it supplied a purpose. The entire beam of his existence was now focused on transmitting enmity toward the ones who had ruined his life. My wife, my friend, my betrayal—whenever the keenness threatened to dull, he revived it with this comforting mental chant. He had withstood the worst that could happen to a man.

  But in fact, the worst was yet to come. The worst, when it arrived, sent a shock into his gut, a shower of liquid ice. The worst was—

  What if Dary wasn’t his?

  One misgiving sired another that sired still more, until he was poisoned by his doubt.

  For two bitter, incoherent days, he hardly ate, he hardly slept, he hardly did anything but cycle through a painful succession of thoughts that seized on his doubt and used his fear of the doubt growing larger to do exactly this, to enlarge it, until there was hardly anything in his mind that existed outside the doubt, and the strength of the doubt became its own persuasion.

  The doubt provided explanations for long-standing mysteries. It clinched the unclinchable with its endlessly mutating logic, which proclaimed the most intolerable answer to be the only true one. Why hadn’t he and Dary been able to get along with the easy rapport of other fathers and daughters? Why did things stick between them and cause pain? Why did she sometimes seem like a stranger to him, an alien being, oddly cold and unemotional, especially for a woman? What accounted for the closeness between her and Ed? Why had Ed brought her under his tutelage when she was young? Why, then and now, did Dary talk to Ed about matters she had never spoken to Gene about?

  After the answer—Because he wasn’t her father—passed through his head, something happened to him that had rarely happened before: his mind went blank. Not blank like snow, which was not blank at all but intricate and patterned, but blank like cold, a terrible frozen wash of white into the brain that stunned it motionless. His body decommissioned his brain to manage its intolerable pain. But something in his chest still spasmodically wrenched apart.

  23.

  HE BELIEVED HE had been at the cabin for twelve days, but he had stopped counting after finishing Anna, just as he had stopped cleanin
g up after himself. Having finished his lunch of boiled potatoes—reheated and served with ketchup—he added his dirty dishes to the others piling up. When he turned from the sink, he sensed something wasn’t right in the room.

  At first he couldn’t figure out what it was. Then he knew.

  It—death—was everywhere. It was in the lingering smell of the cooked vegetables, and in the bunched-up sheets snaking across the couch. It was in the flint of soap by the sink that shrank daily and the sponges that had the grayish cast of meat going rotten. It was in the oily stains on the dish towels. He caught a glimpse of himself in the window and was shocked by his appearance: his shoulders rounded involuntarily, his clothing hung slack on his body. He thought of the sedentary retirees in the coffee shop who waited for Ed to canter in steaming at the end of his run. These men and women had always seemed impossibly old to him, with their age-blanched faces so soft and pale they appeared interchangeable, male for female, female for male. Now he might have been one of them.

  He went upstairs and got into bed and remained there for the rest of the day, though there was still light in the valley and he had not yet eaten the three canned sardines and five salted crackers he had allotted himself for dinner. Eventually the sun withdrew from the treetops and the darkness replaced it, filling in the branches with a blackness darker than the sky.

  He tried to imagine Death as a benevolent companion, a friend who had accompanied him throughout his life and who had protected him from countless harms that might have intervened too soon. Hadn’t Death slept in his bed when as a child he had been racked with fever? Hadn’t Death swum beneath him in the lake every time he hadn’t drowned? Some sustaining power had seen to it that he would make it through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, had given him the long years of marriage and fatherhood, then had extended his time yet again to allow him the birth of a grandchild. For a long time he had thought of this dispensation as a transmission of Life, but who was to say it wasn’t Death all along?

  But a voice within told him he was just fooling himself.

  His hands were so cold they couldn’t feel the sheet they were clasping. A fear that the fire had gone out came over him. He got up and the outer reaches of the room whirled around an inner black stillness. In the absence of light, he was nothing more than a pair of disembodied eyes in the dark. He touched his own face, trying to find his body and give it back to itself, but there was nothing to say if the face he touched was the face of a dead man or the face of a living one. He was afraid of his own body, afraid it would cease to exist without anyone knowing it.

  He returned to the bed and curled up shivering. His body began to convulse—elongating, contracting—as if he was retching, though his stomach was empty. The harsh involuntary movement strained everything: his throat, his eyes, his legs, his heart.

  When he woke he didn’t know what time it was but sensed he had slept into the afternoon. The light in the room was the same shade of watery gray as the sky above the trees. For a moment, it sounded like someone was calling him at the back of the cabin. Then the sound stopped—long enough to convince him that what he’d heard was something other than a human voice.

  Then he heard something again, the thump of booted feet on the deck, followed by shouting: “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoooo!”

  He hobbled down the stairs, pulling a sweater over the clothes he had slept in.

  “Yoo-hoo! I see you in there.”

  When he opened the door, a woman was standing there. He recognized her as the one he’d seen snowshoeing across the lake many afternoons. She was at least his age and perhaps considerably older. Child-sized, with withered skin and bitty child-sized features. Her smile, cocked and antic, dispelled any fear he might have had of receiving a solemn visitor.

  She explained that her canteen was empty, and she hoped he might be able to give her a refill.

  He was so surprised to be standing face-to-face with another person that for a moment he forgot she had made a request of him—it seemed the other way around. He felt such an upwelling of gratitude not to be alone that he was afraid the sentiment would gush out and she would be alarmed. It took a physical effort, a willful bracketing of himself in silence to appear, he hoped, a reasonable human being.

  “You do have water?” she said, in an encouraging way.

  He took her canteen and filled it at the kitchen sink.

  When he returned, she wasn’t waiting where he’d left her. He heard the thunk of a blade biting into resistant snow, followed by a scrape and another thunk. The absence of the shovel from the spot he’d left it, leaning against the cabin, confirmed what he already knew. Digging.

  She was clearing him out of the snow. First the path that led up to the stairs of the deck, then the stairs themselves. She broke the compacted layers with quick, short jabs, then heaved the loosened snow to the side with a twist of her small torso. He stood at the top of the stairs and told her it wasn’t necessary, but she showed no sign of slowing down. She continued to shovel until the path and the stairs were clear. Then she went around to the front of the house and did the walkway and the landing. When she had finished this and had asked for a box of salt and he had given it to her and she had salted the steps and the walkways and the driveway—when all of this was complete she stood on the landing with her face flushed and her boots dripping and he told her the only way he could feel right about her having dug him out was if she stayed for a cup of tea.

  She was bundled in an eccentric hodgepodge of colors and textures and layers. The removal of her hat revealed a fuzzy purple ear band and a bun of wispy white hair. Beneath her outer jacket was an inner jacket, a liner of some sort, and beneath the liner was a vest, and beneath the vest a pullover with a hood. Her snow pants zipped away to reveal thick puce woolen leggings, and these leggings had matching muffs sewn around the ankles. He waited for her to make a self-deprecating remark acknowledging the peculiarity of her attire, but she proceeded to make herself comfortable in the cabin without any indication she cared what he was thinking.

  She told him she was staying at her ex-husband’s house across the lake. The ex-husband was apparently somewhere else—perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. Gene knew this only because when he mistakenly referred to her as staying with the ex-husband, she corrected him in a tone that was light but not wistful: “Oh, I’ve never been able to live with anyone. Poor Roger knew that, but he married me anyway.”

  She wandered through the cabin, inspecting bookshelves and objects. He wondered whether this roaming was her usual habit or whether something particular about the cabin had captivated her—and perhaps this question was inscribed on his face because she said, “Don’t mind me—I like to see how people have lived.” She asked if he was the one reading Anna Karenina. “I give that book to people all the time,” she said, and when he asked her why she answered, “Because everything terrible that can happen happens in it, but somehow it doesn’t ruin anything.”

  When she returned from her investigation of the bathroom she said, “I’d almost forgotten about ‘broken knowledge.’”

  He stared at her in amazement. “You know Ed?”

  “Ed who?”

  When he explained, she replied, “I don’t know Ed, but I do know Francis Bacon. That’s his—he said wonder was broken knowledge. He wrote it defending God and the scientific method at the same time, which as you can imagine, wasn’t easy to do.” She paused for a moment as if she had come to the end of the thought, but then continued on. “His point was, I think, the more you know about some things, the more you know about those things, which doesn’t exclude you from knowing absolutely nothing about other things. Look at him! He figured out how to prevent a chicken dinner from spoiling by freezing it, then promptly died after a walk in the snow.” Then without hardly pausing she added, “Have you seen a bear?”

  He remembered the last time he’d encountered a slightly batty woman. He’d mentioned the incident to Dary and she’d pounced on him for his description. Why
was it, she wanted to know, that men in their later years became “sweet” and “funny” while aging woman were judged to be “unstable” and “crazy”? Now, as a thought about his visitor entered his mind, he asked himself if he was possibly being unfair. He decided it was unfair only if a woman’s battiness made her less appealing, and that was not the situation here. He hadn’t realized how delirious he was with the want of seeing and hearing another person, and it seemed his great luck that the one who had happened to find him was not the least bit dull. The only difficulty he foresaw would be inventing some pretext to persuade her to stay a little longer.

  He said, “Are you missing a bear?”

  “Well, it used to live in the blueberry bushes behind the house. Sometimes I would leave fish for it hanging on sticks. Ooh, that would make Roger diabolical mad. He used to say to me if I wanted a theater for slaughter would I please take it to the end of the road? I’ve reused that several times, by the way: ‘theater for slaughter.’ It has a nice ring.”

  He didn’t need to say much to keep the conversation going. She was interested in how her own thoughts spun out, but he didn’t take it for egoism. To the contrary, beneath her playful manner she seemed to have an inborn reverence for the things she spoke about. She mentioned something about her students and he decided she had probably been a university professor, someone with whom young adults searching for an indication of their purpose might have competed to have lunch. But when he asked her if she had taught at one of the nearby colleges, she laughed as though the idea was at once absurd and flattering. She was an elementary school teacher, she said, or rather she had been years ago.

  “I always felt I understood children best,” she said. “You can see the seed of the whole person in their faces. There’s something remarkable about seeing it and having no idea what kind of seed it is and just blindly giving it everything—water, air, peanut butter—in case one of those turns out to be what it needs. That’s why I liked the bear,” she said. “It was just a kid when I knew it. Not a cub, not a baby, but a young thing with a real personality waiting to burst out. Adults are more tricky, in my opinion. They can be interesting, but often they try not to be.”