You're Not You

by Michelle Wildgen

  I repeated it for them and looked back at Kate. She turned her gaze toward the entrance, and rather than wait for her to do a three-point turn with her chair I moved it myself. It was the sort of moment you need to handle with efficiency, the equivalent of turning on your heel and striding off. So I lifted the front wheels off the ground and pivoted the chair, then stepped behind it and followed her out.

  “CENTER ME,” KATE SAID, later that week. “The exact center.”

  She was stretched out on the bare mattress. I stepped back to get a better view of her: her hair spread out around her face, her hands flat against the mattress, her legs a few inches apart, all of it bounded by the quilted white fabric of the mattress. Despite the sweater and skirt, her dark tights, she looked a bit like a sunbather. I moved her a few inches to the right. “Okay,” I said, and I knelt on the bed next to her midriff and uncapped a black Sharpie. Before I touched the felt-tip to the fabric just above the crown of Kate’s head, I paused. We exchanged a look, and Kate smiled and let her gaze move past me and settle serenely on the ceiling.

  So I began. I kept the path of the marker as close as I dared without getting ink on her clothes or skin. I wanted the silhouette to be crisp and unmistakable.

  We were in her old house, now Evan’s, in the master bedroom. A royal blue comforter, sheets, and mattress pad were heaped on the floor. A box containing the last of her things sat by the bedroom door: A few minutes ago I had walked through the house, picking up the items Kate nodded her head at, putting them in an old nutrition-shake box. She chose a framed photo of herself and a friend who had since died in a plane crash, a gilt-edged copy of Jane Eyre, a book on dictating an effective living will, a stray makeup brush, and a big stone molcajete, its pestle set at a jaunty angle inside the huge bowl. It was time to make one last trip to the old house, Kate had informed me that morning, and get any leftovers all at once.

  I’d grinned when she indicated that the molcajete, sitting on the counter next to the stove, should go into the box. The meals I made for our caregiver dinners three or four times a week were of varying complexity: Like any cook, I got overwhelmed sometimes and fell back on pasta or turkey burgers, especially once Simone admitted she ate meat. But the prospect of a new gadget excited me again, and I knew I’d be grinding cloves of garlic, pumpkin seeds, or rings of sliced onion against the rough stone bowl, while she watched and gave directions. Since the toast, I’d been able to persuade her more often to eat in front of me, and sometimes at our shared meals with other caregivers: a shred of beef, a crescent of poached pear. I’d feed her guacamole, I decided, pale green and unctuous, rich as butter.

  I had situated the molcajete in the box and then paused outside the kitchen, resting the heavy box on the table that held the nude statue in the living room. The spider plant still hung above her, but the statue had been moved, yet again, a few inches to the left and out from under the vines.

  “Let’s take her,” I said, and Kate looked at it with distaste. “For a hat rack,” I went on, and Kate laughed. “We’ll set her in the garden, let her get overgrown with pea vines.”

  Kate had looked toward the back of the house. “Maybe we’ll do something else instead,” she hedged.

  I nudged the statue back beneath the plant and followed her back to the bedroom. Something about being back in this house, alone in the silent neighborhood on a dark winter day, had made me restless, nervy. I wanted to crack an egg behind the radiator, knock over the milk, loosen the salt shaker cap. It was the kind of diffuse mischief a teenager would feel while cutting school. Did it even matter whose house we were in? I might have felt the same impulse anywhere to chuck a rock through a stranger’s window or dig my nails into the fruit at the grocery store. Maybe it was only winter, the impersonal stillness of the air outside.

  “A friend of mine lived with a guy who collected board games,” I told Kate. “Which should have been a clue. Anyway, when she moved out she went through and took one necessary piece from every single game.”

  She grinned. She was surveying the dresser top for her possessions, and I set down the box and observed the room while she wheeled around the perimeter. I sat on the bed, thinking about the first time I’d had to get her up, reaching across that expanse of sheet and comforter and blanket to where she had lain, marooned at the center.

  “I wonder if he’ll notice the wheelchair tracks,” she mused.

  “Probably. We could rub something messy on your wheels just to be sure. Why?”

  She shrugged, then said, “I know him. I bet he can pretend I was never even here.”

  “Leave handprints on all the walls at wheelchair level.”

  Kate did a three-point turn in the chair. She let her head lean back against the headrest, her chin raised and her eyes slightly lowered as she looked at me, sly, imperious.

  “No. We’ll leave an outline on the bed,” she said.

  I stared at her. I’d been feeling hyper but hadn’t planned to act on it. First the zoo, now this? Was this how things were going to be—following Evan, getting at him? I thought of all the times Jill had stopped me from calling a guy, or going to see him, and wondered if Kate was just beyond worrying about all of that. It was something to imagine—what if I had just called Liam one of those times, talked to his wife as though I were a coworker, a telemarketer, to see what it led to?

  “Are you sure you want to start this kind of thing?” I asked her carefully.

  She was already waiting by the side of the bed. “I’m not starting a sad pattern of harassment,” she said. “It’s a one-time thing, I promise.”

  I gave in, and I had to admit that once I began the outline I enjoyed it. I loved the sneakiness of it. An outline, beneath all the bedding, drawn directly onto the bare mattress. No one would see it for weeks if Evan was the sort of sheet changer who left the mattress pad untouched. It wasn’t malice, only mischief. I made the lines of ink as thick as I could.

  I traced around Kate’s hair, which, a day or two after the zoo, she’d had cut into thick bangs swept across her forehead, stylishly haphazard wings framing her face and neck.

  I got just right the silhouette of her earlobe and the hoop earring where it peeked out from a bell of dark gold hair. Next I traced the stem of her neck, in which a tranquil pulse beat just beneath the curve of her jawline. The small shoulder was easy, then the line of the arm, so slender it tapered below the shoulder joint, swelled at the elbow, and clearly showed the bone of her wrist. On the middle finger of her right hand was a thick gold ring with a topaz set flush in the metal. I spread the fingers enough to trace the outline of its bulky band. I coveted that ring, and though Kate offered to let me wear it, the ring needed slim, neat hands like hers. Mine were long but now bore the signs of a cook: healing nicks and burns, nails a little too short. Maybe if I took more care with knives and hot pans.

  I moved the marker along her rib cage, from the tuck of her waist to the arc of her hip. The outline of a slim thigh was effortless, and of the knees. Below the calves, the cool purpled skin was puffed with fluid that obscured the bones in the ankle and in the tops of her feet. Except for the feet, the silhouette would be all sweeping lines, slim bone. By now I was kneeling at her feet, one hand braced by her leg.

  A few years ago Evan would have been in this same spot. I used to sit up on my elbows and look down at Liam as he knelt at the foot of the bed. Somewhere, both of them might be in this position even now, marveling at a slim body or a rounded soft one, marveling the way everyone does for a while. The way you’re so determined to remember each detail that you learn it several times over, with your fingers and eyes and mouth. There’s that pocket of time between people, when you’re so rapt in the heat and furrow of another body and every flaw seems like just a clever variation, but then of course you start to seek out every mole and stretch mark without wanting to, and that electric skin cools and sets beneath your hands.

  Kate had lifted her head and now she raised her eyebrows at me. I realized I had
paused and I resumed tracing the calves, then around the soft skin of the heel, out along the swollen ankle. When I got up to her left hand, now bare of jewelry, I was glad I had been so careful to show the bulge of the ring on the other hand. I didn’t want Evan thinking the ring just didn’t show up. I wanted him to know it wasn’t there at all, that a few days before, Kate had gestured with her chin to indicate the wedding band, and said, “Take it off.” We had put it in her nightstand, in the drawer below the blue rubber butterfly.

  I was back at her head again, the tangle of glossy hair and the curve of the jaw. I kept tracing until I closed the line at the crown of her head.

  I steadied her in a sitting position, a hand at her back. She was so slim, the light bones of her shoulder blade sharp and warm against the palm of my hand. I would definitely make that guacamole; she no longer allowed me to give her extra nutrition shakes.

  I lifted her to a standing position, pivoted, and placed her in the wheelchair. We both gazed for a second at the silhouette on the bed. It felt like it had taken forever, but it looked perfect.

  “It was a good idea to do both sides of the mattress,” Kate said. I laughed.

  A few months ago I would have liked to do something like this in Liam’s house, a house I’d never seen inside. But had I done it at all, back when I might have wished to, I would have put my figure on his side of the bed instead of in the center, the lines of my body indelible and hidden under his.

  I spread the mattress pad down again, covered it with the sheets, and smoothed the quilt over everything. Before we left the house Kate told me to crack a window, and once I locked the front door I took the brass key off the ring and tossed it through the open window into the front hallway, where it ricocheted off the nude statue and landed beneath the swaying tangle of the spider plant.

  fourteen

  I STOOD IN THE shallow end of the pool, my hands beneath Kate’s back. People swam past us, kicking up a wake that lapped over her torso, pooled in the depression of her navel beneath the navy suit. Her breasts were small cones in the shiny fabric, her hip bones peaking sharply on either side of her stomach. I kept my hand splayed against the back of her neck and head, holding her face above the water, and the other arm looped beneath her body. Her legs floated easily, straight out and slightly shapeless, like a clay sculpture whose musculature hasn’t been fully detailed yet.

  “How’s it feel?” I asked her. She was looking up at the ceiling, the tendons in her neck tensed against the water, and she looked down her nose and cheeks at me and smiled and mouthed, Fine.

  The doctor was the one who suggested swimming. He had listened to Kate’s lungs, clucked over the most recent cold she had not been able to shake, and warned me never to let her face hit the water. It’ll help the muscles, he said. Those muscles are getting a little sulky, you’re right. A little lazy. But the water gives them some resistance. He had listened to her chest again, his brow furrowed. We need to clear out those lungs, he said. If they’re not clear in a few days, come back. He gave me a look, to emphasize that he spoke to me as well. Then I left them alone in the exam room while I got the car. I’d offered to stay and translate, but they’d glanced at each other and Kate said, We have a couple things to cover still. I think we’ll be okay.

  I felt the muscle at the back of her neck fluttering—it tensed, or tried to tense, then went flaccid again, the cords in her neck leaping. Her ribs leapt up and down with a sharp breath.

  “Relax,” I said. “I have a good hold on you.”

  Evan had done this for her before, I knew, and I thought she must be used to being held by someone larger and stronger than I was. I shifted my arms so she’d feel the hold I had on her. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a man’s long arms; she was so light that it was easy to bear her up. Stretched out, though, she was surprisingly long.

  She nodded, blinking rapidly as the water splashed near her temples.

  “Check your legs,” I said a little later, “see if you can work them a little. The doctor said you might.”

  I looked down again at her legs, pipe stems, pale as lilies, and watched one move. Then the other. She managed a decent kick out of each of them, and another and another, pelting my face with chlorinated water.

  “Hey! I’ve never seen you kick that far.”

  I knew the water made all the difference, that without gravity it seemed as though she could do much more than she could. I shouldn’t trust this display, but I fell for it completely, as though I’d watched her stand up and take a step.

  Her brows had been knit in concentration, but now the tension in her face broke and she laughed. I squeezed the back of her neck just barely, lifted her a little higher, and felt the muscles along her spine loosen and soften against my palms.

  AFTER WE GOT HOME from the pool, Kate said, “I have something to ask you.”

  I was filing insurance papers. “Shoot,” I said.

  “Dr. Klass thinks I need more care,” she began. It felt like a blow; I heard air rush from my mouth as I turned to her. She read my expression and said, “No, not better care. But he doesn’t think I should be alone at night.”

  I sat down on the edge of the desk. We looked at each other. I began deadheading a basil plant.

  “What about the emergency button?” I asked.

  She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “We talked about that too. My lungs are not so great. It’s possible it could happen very fast, too fast for people to get to me in time if I started to have trouble breathing. But maybe that’s okay; I don’t know.” She paused and watched my face.

  I pushed the basil plant away.

  ALS paralyzed everything eventually, including the muscles she used to breathe. That, suffocation, was often the final, single cause of death.

  “Are you really ready to think that way?” I asked her. There was a snag in my voice and I got it under control before I went on. “It doesn’t seem right to me.”

  Kate said, “No, not really. I try it on for size sometimes. But he’s been after me to have round-the-clock for a while. And lying there from ten to eight every night is not the party I thought it would be.”

  “Are you asking me to move in?” I asked. “Because I would, of course I would. Or do you want to get someone more qualified for nights?”

  She shook her head. “If you want to, we can work out something for you.” She seemed to be debating what to say for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you dare do it just because you think you have to. I need someone but it doesn’t have to be you. I was planning on hiring someone. I just thought I’d ask you first.”

  It wasn’t that I wouldn’t move in. I would if I had to. Better me than Simone, who despite great improvement was still a little too sprightly to have around all the time, or Hillary, with her generally deadening effect. But Jill and I had lived together pretty happily for a couple years now, and since she no longer had to dart out of the house to avoid Liam, we were back to having fun together, sitting around when we got home from work and making fun of bad cable. I even liked her new boyfriend. The three of us hung out without awkwardness, a rare enough thing that I was reluctant to give it up. We knew I was a third wheel, but we all felt comfortable with it.

  Something else occurred to me. “You’re going to think this is a stupid question,” I said. She watched me. I took a deep breath, unsure if I was being selfless or self-serving, and said, “What about Evan? Maybe he could live here for a while and give it a shot.” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “He didn’t strike me as all that happy at the zoo. And maybe he hasn’t even seen the mattress yet,” I added.

  She shook her head and glanced away from me. “I wish I could, in a way. But I can’t count on him, even if . . . we worked out the rest.” She made a sound in her throat, clearing it. “Plus. I should have told you. Cynthia is moving into the old house.”

  I had a palm full of dead basil buds, and I got up to throw them away. It shocked me a little, the flush of disappointment I felt when sh
e said that. I remembered the way Evan had looked at Kate, even when they were together only to figure out a separation agreement. At the zoo I’d looked back and thought, It won’t be long before this Cynthia thing just resolves itself.

  “I’m thinking,” I told Kate. I sat down behind the desk and didn’t look her way, staring at the blotter instead. It gave me a second of privacy. She knew I needed to see her, especially lately, to understand her words. Looking away from her was almost as effective as turning away from a deaf person signing. I tried not to do it much. It was cowardly, and even cruel, but I did it now.

  This was a nice house. I could live in a really nice house, for once in my life. And Jill and I wouldn’t lose touch. Nevertheless I was regretting how quickly I’d said I’d move in if Kate needed it. Kate and I had a good rhythm going. I came over after classes or first thing in the morning. We ran our errands and I made my phone calls on behalf of the ALS Society (I had given up the convoluted introductions and now I just pretended to be Kate) and I cooked dinner for the evening caregiver and me, and gave Kate her nutrition shakes. Soon the farmers’ market would start up again.

  But what would I really be leaving, anyway? It wasn’t as though I was cutting such a swath through society on my own.

  Kate had said nothing. She sat in her chair, letting me debate myself. You can’t help but be flattered, to be given such a proposal and know that you’re the only one who got it. It didn’t matter that she told me not to take it out of guilt. She knew I would take it, because it was the lesser evil. I’d rather be inconvenienced than ashamed for refusing to help her. I was already working my way around, in my head, to the things I would like about it: that pretty house, the more frequent use of the BMW. I looked up at her and gave her what I hoped was an enthusiastic smile. But, again, and just for a moment, I regretted having left that state of unawareness, when I hadn’t known much of what was going on in her marriage or her life, and I hadn’t had to respond to it. I could just show up, wheel her here and lift her there, my duties as simple as a maid’s.