The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  If she had been hoping to find something in particular in the cabin, Gene now had the sense that she was disappointed. She hadn’t drunk a sip of her tea, but already she was handing it back to him. It crushed him a little, this gesture of returning the tea untouched. He suggested they transfer it to her canteen so she would have something to warm her on the way back. But she told him not to bother. The canteen often leaked, sometimes slowly and sometimes all at once, and it wasn’t unusual for her to get where she was going only to discover there wasn’t a drop left in it.

  Before long she set out from the back of the house, a small motor of intensity churning across a lakeland of snow. When she had traveled a little ways, she paused and bent down to fix one of her snowshoes. He expected she might turn back to look at him to acknowledge her own version of what he was feeling, which was the strange and intimate unlikelihood of their encounter, an event that by most measures shouldn’t have happened, since there didn’t seem to be many other humans for miles around. But she didn’t look his way again, and when the snowshoe was fixed, she continued on.

  The sun was getting lower in the sky, accelerating toward the top of the mountain. Light shivered across the ice, splintery and vanishing, as if it was being filtered through snow in the air that hadn’t fallen yet. Sometimes her progress seemed as insignificant as if she was marching in place, and at other times she seemed to have jumped from one point on the lake to another, skipping what was between. The closer she got to the far side, the more difficult it became to distinguish her in the dusk. Soon she was a dark speck mingled with the last oscillations of the light. He lost sight of her, then found her again.

  The last of the daylight scratched the top of Mount Orry and disappeared. Then the mountain loomed above the lake, a pit of darkness turned on its head.

  When he tried to find her once more, she was gone.

  24.

  IT RAINED AND snowed, then snowed and rained. Icicles formed on the eaves of the cabin. For such slippery things, they were rough and knobby, lumpy like gnawed carrots. All day the icicles dripped, diminishing incrementally, and he would have thought that incrementally they would have met their ending. But they broke off suddenly, crashing to the ground.

  He felt his own brokenness. He wasn’t wonderfully broken, but rather ordinarily broken, like a man who has craved something his whole life that he doesn’t understand. He didn’t understand love. He had made an effort in his life to do mostly the right thing, the decent thing, believing that someone would love him for this. Somewhere he had gotten the idea that good conduct in this life would be rewarded with unfaltering human love. He had waited for this, not really seeing himself as an actor, not seeing his own loving impulses as something that could shape or distort or thwart. He couldn’t claim that this impulse to love made a life significant or good. He could say it made pain. He could say it had hurt him.

  One night he had a dream in which he saw himself arriving at the gates of heaven. Outside the gates the Angel of the Lord asked each person who wished to enter what the purpose of his life had been. From observing those ahead of him Gene saw it didn’t matter what you said: one man spoke of raising sheepdogs; another said pissing off his wife; another, while admitting he was tempted to lie, acknowledged that for him, drinking stood above all. Each man made his declaration, and each was allowed to pass. But when Gene’s turn arrived, he had nothing to say.

  The Angel of the Lord bent over and whispered, “Just make something up.”

  Gene woke with his heart knitting its tight garment over his chest. He lay there in terror, sifting his mind for possible purposes that might be belatedly superimposed on a life. Had his purpose been to “turn out” all right? To please his parents? To marry and not get divorced? To have a family?

  There was a question in his mind as to whether his purpose was to be a husband and a father. This would not make him an anomaly—think of all those mothers and fathers who happily proclaimed that their sense of meaning in life derived from being the family nurturer or protector. But these proclamations always raised for him the question of whether the sentiment had been arrived at by default, as other dreams that would have required immense effort, privation, and luck ceded to a more accessible reality. The designation of importance might have been made afterward, once the reality of the child-rearing chaos began and the adult human required some self-reward for the turmoil and heartbreak he had indentured himself to. Was it possible to trick the self into an exalted sense of purpose, some condition where the trick fell away and the exaltation remained? Was it enough to say that his purpose had been to see his wife and daughter thrive? Was it truthful?

  The pain he felt now wasn’t in his heart—or wasn’t just in his heart. It was an all-over pain, a ringing from the inside out. At first he didn’t know what the pain could be if it wasn’t his heart. Then he realized the pain was emanating from a thought. The thought was that maybe his purpose in life—his volitional drive, not necessarily conscious—was just this: never to be alone. He had married believing it would secure someone to him who would love him for the rest of his life, and once the marriage was accomplished, some part of him believed, or hoped, the matter to be settled. The other life he had sporadically toyed with, the one in which Gayle featured as his rightful mate, was the life in which he had chosen someone who would be more faithful in spirit than Maida. His child, he’d thought, would love him innately and forever; he hadn’t conceived of her birth as the beginning of a story that wasn’t about the fierce tribal love she would always feel for him. Maida, Dary, Ed—when in various periods of their lives each had shifted their focus away from him, he had internally accused them of trying to injure him. And maybe because of this he had missed an opportunity to understand how badly he didn’t want to be alone and just how lonely the desire had made him.

  It was impossible to say whether this was true. But it was substantial enough that he couldn’t dismiss it, and part of the reason he couldn’t was that after all of his suffering, he still didn’t want to die without the people who had possibly ruined his life.

  The shock of this softened something in him. His chest opened and his breathing grew more spacious. He lay quietly without clenching himself against a new tightening or racking.

  When he tried to recover the intensity of his doubt about whether Dary was his daughter, he could still locate the doubt, he could still touch it. But it no longer possessed him. He knew he had been Dary’s father. In his daily labors—feeding her, reading to her, brushing her teeth, putting her to bed—but also in all the overwhelming intangibles parents trafficked in, worry and criticism and catastrophic thinking and pride, and always the same tiring and unceasing mental effort toward discovering the next best way to improve her life.

  It was an understanding of himself that included Maida, that bound her to him and the two of them to each other regardless of whatever might have existed or failed to germinate between her and Ed. On the basis of a perhaps faulty connection, he and Maida had still arranged to support another life and somehow they had managed to follow through on this fairly astonishing promise.

  There was no name or word or admission or rumor or fact or law or legislation that could revoke this. Not at this late stage, not when the life he was beginning to lose was not the one he had imagined or dreamed of, but just the one he’d had. And what was most confusing in all of this was that his resistance to dying, his terrible despair, his terrible fear, showed him that the life he’d had—the defective one plagued with uncertainty and misunderstanding—this was the one he wanted after all.

  25.

  THE NEXT MORNING he woke up feeling slightly better. His ankle was still swollen but the pain throughout his body had lessened. He was able to think a little more clearly and see that the pain itself probably wouldn’t kill him. And as soon as he proceeded with the belief that the pain itself did not put his life in jeopardy, the pain relaxed a little, and he relaxed a little, and some greater effort became possible. He got out o
f bed and tried to see what he could do for his body. He was afraid to shower and risk slipping, but he washed his face and neck and armpits at the sink. His clothes were rank from having been slept in and sweated in and dried out and sweated in again, and he balled them up and stashed them in a plastic bag. He had one pair of fresh underwear and one clean undershirt, and these he put on under his least-dank sweater and pants. He didn’t much feel like eating but thought he should have something, so he boiled water for tea and steeped a desiccated pouch of herbs in a pot. And as he was sitting at the table dressed in his cleanest clothes, he understood that anyone catching a glimpse of him at that moment would not see anything unusual in his situation.

  It did not entirely surprise him when after a little while he heard people outside the cabin.

  Ed entered first, followed by Dary. They were saying something to each other but fell silent when they saw him. Then they began to speak at the same time. They had been worried about him and admonished him for having gone away without telling anyone where he was going. They wanted to know how long he had been here, and also, hadn’t he anticipated they would be searching for him? Dary looked at him with an expression that seemed to contain many colliding feelings: weariness and anger, frustration and relief. “What were you thinking?” she said, and he could hear the accusation in her voice and also her attempt to suppress it so that he wouldn’t mistake it for a rhetorical question, which was how he treated it anyway.

  When he stood up from the table and crossed the room for his tea, there was no hiding his limp. Dary wanted to take him to a hospital immediately, but Ed said it would be wiser to examine him here first. Dary disagreed, and soon what had begun as a discussion escalated to an argument.

  Gene watched them with new curiosity. Ed was didactic with Dary without any special vehemence or patience—he addressed her in the same tiresome way he often addressed Gene. And in Dary’s voice he heard an exasperated, almost haughty tone, as if Ed had proposed to take away something that belonged to her.

  The argument was settled when Ed and Dary each accepted the other’s proposition. Ed would perform an initial examination of Gene at the cabin, and later they would take him to a hospital. With a note of discretion in her voice, as if she was volunteering to remove herself to facilitate the exam, Dary said she would walk up the road to see if she could get a signal to call Annie, who had stayed behind in Colton with Gayle.

  Ed washed his hands at the sink. “Ready?” he said.

  Not even if I was dead, thought Gene, but without another word he limped behind Ed into the main room and followed his instruction to lie on the couch.

  Ed began moving his hands down Gene’s limbs, squeezing them gently but firmly. He asked Gene to open his mouth and stick out his tongue. He slipped a hand beneath Gene’s shirt and pressed deep into his abdomen, so deep it felt like he was moving organs around. Gene was afraid Ed would ask him to remove his clothes, but then the moment passed when it seemed this would have been most useful, and still Ed worked his way around Gene’s body, palpating what could be palpated through his sweater and pants. Gene was shocked to see that the skin on Ed’s forearms, which he remembered as cabled with muscle, sagged like stretched-out leather.

  Ed spent quite a bit of time pressing on various parts of Gene’s ankle and cautiously articulating it in small increments. Then he released it and said he didn’t think it was broken. He went away and came back with a plastic bag filled with ice and wedged two pillows under Gene’s foot and draped the ice over the ankle.

  “It’s just country medicine,” Ed said, “but it’s what you need. If we go to the hospital they’ll charge you $1,000 to tell you that you need country medicine. That’s what I was trying to explain to Dary, but you can’t stop her from doing what she wants. She’s like her mother that way.”

  Gene knew this was the moment. If ever he was going to ask Ed, this was the time. “Do you know what I did when I first got here?” he said.

  “You busted your ankle.”

  “Before that, wiseass. I read Anna Karenina. Do you remember it?”

  “Very fondly.”

  “After I finished it, I wondered why you’d recommended it to me.”

  Ed appeared interested in this line of inquiry but didn’t say anything.

  “It was for my betterment or some crap like that, wasn’t it?” Gene said. “And, okay, I admit it, it’s a pretty good book.”

  “One of the best.”

  “But that got me thinking—you’ve always been able to pick out the good ones, haven’t you? Not just books but—everything. People, too.”

  Ed appeared to consider this. Then he said, “I’ve been feeling some regret lately.”

  “Oh? What about?”

  “All the lives I might’ve had. Whether I should’ve done something else. Been a writer, for instance. Or lived in Alaska.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  “People say that, but I don’t buy it. You start explaining to yourself why your life has to be a certain way, and then, before you know it, other people are counting on those explanations to be true.”

  “I always had the impression you felt like you could do anything,” Gene said.

  “It’s the other way around,” Ed said. “I did the things I could excel at so I wouldn’t have to fail.” There was disappointment in his voice. “But maybe regret is the most useful form of memory,” he said. “It reminds you that you belong in the life you already have, and not in that other one where the better version of you is doing everything better. That fantastical, wonderful life where no one ever gets mad at you and you never have to apologize.”

  Gene hardly knew how to respond. Was this its own tacit apology or just an evasion of one? And if it was an apology, what was it for? What had Maida been to Ed and he to Maida? The answer Ed had given was as shapeless as the flesh on Ed’s forearms. Part of Gene had always longed to see Ed weakened by something. But now that Ed was not purely strong, Gene didn’t feel invigorated by it. Instead he felt implicated. To pounce on Ed now, to pummel him into an admission of questionable value—it would be almost like pummeling himself.

  Ed reached out and tapped Gene’s shin. “How’s that ankle now?” he said. “Any better?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Ed rose and went upstairs and was gone a short while and when he came back he had with him a small tube of cream and a faded hand towel. He removed the bag of ice and dried Gene’s foot and ankle with the towel. When Gene realized Ed intended to apply the cream, he wanted to protest. But he didn’t have the energy. Ed kneaded the cream into Gene’s foot and the tendons of his ankle. Gene closed his eyes. The cream seemed to numb some of the pain.

  He must have dozed off, because when he opened his eyes Dary was tending the woodstove and Ed was not in sight.

  “Where is everyone?” Gene said, disoriented.

  Dary pulled a chair next to him. She told him Ed was digging out Gene’s car, and reminded him Annie was in Colton with Gayle. She had something in her lap, a large envelope printed with a blue crest. “This came to the house while you were away,” she said. “I thought maybe it was important.”

  He asked to see it and she held it up for him. It had been sent by the lawyer, Dale Elverson, but Dary appeared not to recognize the name and he decided not to remind her. She asked him if he wanted her to open it.

  The urgency he’d once felt to know what such an envelope might contain now seemed to belong to a previous life. It was difficult for him to recall exactly why or how he’d believed the envelope’s contents would help him, or her.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just add it to the fire.”

  She got up and opened the stove door, then hesitated. He gestured for her to continue, and she placed it inside the stove. When she sat back down, her eyes were shining with a glimmer of mischief. He tried to mirror her gaiety, but even this small effort was tiring to him. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was.

  “Are you tired?” she sa
id.

  “A little,” he admitted.

  “You must be looking forward to going home.”

  When he thought of the house in Colton, he could picture the house itself, the roof and its triangular bite into the sky, but when he tried to conjure up what was in the rooms themselves they were empty. It was strange because he knew the house was filled with belongings of such specificity that once they had seemed capable of embalming his marriage. Now he couldn’t think of a single thing in the drawers, shelves, cupboards, or cabinets that he would rush to save if the house caught fire. What he wished was that he had something of value to give his daughter, but everything he wanted her to have didn’t reside in a thing.

  “Has there—?” He paused and stopped, recalibrating his question and gathering his courage. He began again in his softest, most provisional tone, a tone that suggested she could stop him from talking about this at any time. “Has there been anyone in your life?” he said.

  “Are you asking if I’m alone?”

  “I’m asking about love,” he said, the word rushing to him before he could think it.

  “If I said yes and no, both would be true,” she said. When she continued, her voice seemed smaller. “The times of yes somehow wipe out the times of no. And the times of no seem to last forever and be permanent.”

  He cringed to hear this. “But mostly you’re happy?”

  “I think you and I mean different things when we talk about love.”