The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  David was watching them too, and his face looked grief-stricken.

  “Why yes, Miss Bell. I’ll be a part of your company for a while,” said Hawkins.

  As they were leaving, Caroline touched her father’s elbow. “Papa.”

  “Caroline, I do not wish to hear it, not again,” he said.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline went to David’s room, after. She knocked, then slipped inside and closed the door behind him, startling him as she had that day when Sophia’s dress had sprawled across his chair.

  No dress there now, no Sophia, only David in the chair, reading at the center of a bare room.

  “I need you to help me talk to my father,” she said. The room was dimmer than the hallway outside and some special light seemed to flicker in her peripheral vision as she looked at him.

  He didn’t rise. “You don’t need any help speaking, Caroline.”

  So he assumed that when she was quiet it was because she wanted to be.

  “I’ve tried. You’ve seen me trying,” she said. “We need him to listen, and he isn’t listening to me. To you, he might.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “He loves you. You love him. If we could have filled this school with you in replicate—eight versions of you in pretty skirts—all would have been well.”

  David leaned his face forward into his hands. He’d rolled up his sleeves, warm perhaps from the fire in this small, dark honeycomb chamber of a bedroom where they’d put him to live, across the hall from all the best light. Caroline watched the muscles of his forearms, veined like a map, tense under the weight of his head. “Please, Caroline. I’m too tired.”

  “It’s a difficult time for you.”

  “How do you manage to do that, I wonder? Make such a sentence into an insult?”

  “I’m very sorry, David, that your wife went home without you. But we are still here. We must, must do something.”

  “About a course of medical care?” David said, but she heard his doubt.

  “You said you wanted the reasons and the methods to be the same. That’s what you said when you told us why you’d come here. You wanted to be able to look at either of them. I watched you, during the treatments. You couldn’t look at that.”

  “I—”

  “And now—what was the purpose of it, even? It isn’t even working.”

  “The purpose—”

  “What are we thinking?”

  “All right!” he said, standing. “All right.” He met her eyes, sighed, set his shoulders. “Yes. We’ll talk to him.”

  “Thank you,” Caroline said. She found herself surprised—she hadn’t really thought she’d be able to make him do anything. “Tonight?”

  “Tonight.”

  She watched him across the room. He was as still as he had been that first day she’d found him on her doorstep, the world’s false promise to her.

  “You’re merciless, Caroline,” he said, and at last his face was full of all the longing she’d always wanted to see there.

  Perhaps she might try that, being merciless. As merciless as others had been. Eliza, chasing always what she needed, what she thought she might need. Caroline’s mother, taking what she pleased from everyone. Hawkins, and her father, requiring from Caroline everything, and Sophia, free to leave when she chose. Here Caroline was, still inside one of the chambers of her father’s dreams, for which she had paid and paid, though they weren’t hers.

  Perhaps she might find out what this room could hold for her.

  Close up, David would look only at the floor, but he did reach out and take her hand. She closed the space between them. She pressed her body hard to his, and he made a sound like lifting a heavy thing. For a moment, she watched the ceiling above his shoulder and pretended he was lifting it off her, to open a space through which she could reach the sky.

  Then at last there was the sweet full offering of his mouth. His hands moved to her arms, clutched them. She put her palm to the ridge of his cheekbone and slid her fingertips into his hair.

  She felt suddenly sure that in spite of everything hers was a strong body, that if she asked it to, it could take her great distances, relearn its shape as many times as necessary.

  He opened his eyes—hers had already been open—and trailed his fingers softly down to her elbow, then back up. Then to her face. His soft fingers on her cheek, her forehead, her hair—too soft, not enough, not as much as she wanted. She closed her hand tight on his wrist, and he pushed her up against his desk. His hands were on her breasts now, and not so reverent. She felt herself straining up through her dress to meet his skin. It was the feeling of her whole fullest self rising up in her. Above the ceiling, she knew the sky unreeled.

  A red wave began to build at her center. Pictures pushed bright through her, flooding her to her fingertips.

  Running after William through the field, sun on her face. She should have caught him. She’d been able to run as fast as anyone.

  David at the breakfast table, his hand just beyond the reach of hers.

  David on her doorstep on the first morning. Red birds spinning through the space behind his head, even if she couldn’t yet see them.

  David on the day of the sheet sewing, the day of the walk, the day of the nest, the day she’d fainted, all the days she had not touched him, had thought she would never touch him, and she was touching him now.

  His mouth was moving down her neck, harsh enough that she couldn’t tell if his lips or his teeth were closing on her. She gasped at the need. Inside her the cresting built and built.

  She fumbled at her skirts, lifting the endless cloth. He was lifting too, until his hands found her thighs.

  He tried to move back then. Into the space he left between their bodies crept, for a terrible moment, Hawkins and his hands, and a brief panic flooded her. She took David’s hand and pulled him nearer and the panic left.

  “We can’t,” he said.

  Caroline could.

  She pulled harder until all the space between them was gone, and he closed his arms around her again. Then his fingers moved, filled. He pushed her hands out of the way and undid his belt himself.

  Pushing, pushing.

  Her head full of light.

  The wave broke and its breaking was the moment of containing and releasing both, it was both, she could do both things at once, amazing animal that she was.

  Another moment and he twitched, parted from her, and she knew he’d pulled back for the end. They were both breathing in quick, warm puffs in the chill, dark space of this room, which they had flooded.

  He pulled out a handkerchief and turned away. She pulled her skirts back down.

  * * *

  *

  In her room, Caroline surveyed herself. There was a rawness between her legs and an almost pleasing soreness in her arms from pulling and being pulled, but mostly she felt the same, except more solid. Here was her whole, real self—she was surer about that self than she’d ever been before. Its facts felt realer now that someone else knew them too, and now that she knew the facts of someone else.

  Bodies, in the essays of Samuel Hood, were only incidental housing. In his life he never much discussed them. Though as a child Caroline felt warmly enveloped by his love, in actual practice he’d sometimes gone days without touching her.

  “Papa,” she’d asked one night when she was about ten, as they were reading by the fire, “what’s so exciting about a wedding? Ginny was going on and on today about a wedding they went to, for somebody named Celeste Matthews. She kept talking about the dress. She said it was exquisite.”

  “You have some doubts about its exquisiteness?” her father asked, smiling.

  “I don’t understand why it’s so interesting to Ginny, is all.”

  “The dress ought perhaps to be less in
teresting to her than it is. I’m sorry if that troubled you, but glad too that you were troubled.”

  Caroline was relieved to learn that he wasn’t sending her to these girls only to turn her into them.

  “I do think, though, that the fascination with these material things springs from a fascination with the larger ritual, and that is appropriate, if a little premature in this case. Marriage is the great ceremony of a woman’s life.”

  The use of the article alarmed her—what woman?

  “It joins all her gifts, passions, pursuits with another’s. It is a great bestowing of herself on a man she feels will appreciate and make wise use of that gift.”

  Caroline imagined herself approaching a shadowy boy, putting a box into his hands.

  “I am glad that you asked me about this,” Samuel told her.

  As she grew up, then grew older, Samuel had sometimes gazed at her with a misty preoccupation and asked if she was lonely. She knew what answer he expected and she delivered it promptly, but each time resented his asking, his making her inspect her life. If she had been meant to outgrow its fit, he should have said so. The question raised a faint dark suspicion that he’d been keeping some truth from her.

  But now here it was, as she paced her bedroom for the feel of the tendons in her knees catching and letting go, for the smooth weight of her arms. Now she could see that truth whole, and it consisted only of these arms, these legs, this mouth. All the actions these could take. It didn’t look to her like anything Samuel, or anyone else, could ever have known about before.

  * * *

  *

  David was shaky and tight-faced when Caroline went to him that evening. He smiled as if sick but laughing a little at the sickness.

  “It will be all right,” she said soothingly. She had a good soothing-voice after all this time. She took his hand, kissed it, and he gave her another smile, more real this time.

  When they knocked at the door of Samuel’s study, she dropped David’s hand, but still the moment felt very like the start of a scene in which a suitor announces himself and his intentions.

  “Come in!” Samuel said.

  He stood before his bookshelves. Caroline knew what he’d been doing a second before: surveying all those spines, searching for something, running his fingertips over them to help his search. She imagined instead the bare spines of the girls turned toward him. His outstretched fingers.

  “What is it?” Samuel said quickly.

  “Oh, nothing, no—nothing new,” she said—the soothing-voice again, and she stopped, because that voice had no place here. “But we do need to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Samuel said. His eyes darted between their faces.

  There was no reason to think he could see what they’d done together. No reason to think that anyone could. This was one more secret Caroline’s body would keep, like the secret of the tingling she could feel even now in her heels. She would have liked to tell David about the sureness of this inaccessibility, that he didn’t need to worry.

  “We’ve decided we can’t let it go on,” Caroline said.

  “We’ve been through all this, Caroline. You’re speaking about an accepted course of care for a documented condition—”

  “Which their parents don’t even know they have. For which none of them has given permission to have their daughters treated.” It felt different to be speaking with David beside her—together they were more than Samuel was, and she felt the shift in weight, as if the room were a scale, moving. “And that isn’t even it, really. It’s what it’s doing to them. You must see.”

  She knew Samuel had been trying not to look at the girls’ faces, but it was written everywhere on them, even on their spines, the bump bump bump of where knobs of bone stretched skin.

  Her father watched her quietly as she spoke. Then he gave that quiet face to David. “Now this is your opinion too?” he said.

  Yes, David would say.

  “I am concerned,” David said.

  Caroline had been so sure of his yes that she almost heard it. She turned, slowly, to look at him.

  “Well, of course you are. It’s concerning,” Samuel said.

  David looked imploringly at Samuel, which was the wrong expression to wear when they were the ones on the side with more weight, the side that was winning. “It does seem we have an obligation to make certain—I have feared that the effects on the girls are—”

  “What, in your expert opinion, should the effects of this particular medical treatment be on patients?” Samuel said.

  “I don’t know, of course,” David said. “You’re right, I don’t know.”

  “He’s right?” Caroline said, but David was still looking at her father.

  “I just fear it might be—I just fear we might be overstepping.”

  “We’re not overstepping but stepping! Taking steps!” Samuel thundered. “We’re taking care of the girls in our charge. We are doing what medical science says must be done for them, and we are guarding our vision, and we are doing all of that because it is the right thing. Because of the importance—the critical, the essential, importance—of what we are trying to provide.”

  Here David began to nod.

  “A life that no one else could ever have shaped for these girls. You know all of this.”

  “I do.”

  “Qualms mean no more than the presence of complication.”

  “And certainly we have complication.”

  Caroline should have been expecting nothing else. This was David. David who, yes, had stood on the doorstep, had summoned a wave in her, but who had also shown again and again how easily he said fine things. Who had talked to her all the time he knew he was married and she did not, and taken joy in the talking. Who’d talked beautifully to Sophia earlier and after too. Who’d said his fine things even to their girls, who’d so loved their love of him.

  And long before David had ever come to Trilling Heart, when he opened his mouth to speak the best of his words, it had been Samuel he’d been imagining every time as listener.

  “You do see, then? We are in agreement?” Samuel said.

  “I think so, yes,” David said, still not looking at Caroline. He hadn’t looked at her once since coming into the room.

  Together the two men turned toward her. The cue for her own yes, the one she’d given them so many times. The scale was moving again as David climbed between its platforms. Caroline could not outweigh them both. She was expected to move now too; it was what she had always done, what she’d practiced.

  But if she had practiced assent, long assent, and given each time every required thing, she had also practiced anger. Anger growing with each year.

  She let the anger and not the assent move her. Without a word to either of them, Caroline turned and left the room. David and her father could stand there as long as they liked. Let them practice holding nothing.

  18.

  NEST

  “I cannot explain how I know,” she said, her breath now failing, “but oh! I do know.”

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 420)

  Caroline’s body took her on a walk. She took her body on a walk. A weight was moved; she was moving it.

  At the place where the birds had swarmed her, she stopped. There were no birds here now, only frozen earth and the skyward reach of the trees. She paused and watched the clouds of her breath dissipate. Look at her body, breathing so well. Able to do so many things, and what would she make it do now?

  She made it walk into the woods, the way she’d tried before the birds had stopped her. Branches cracked under her shoes, making sharp, slight sounds in the cold air. The ground was uneven with frost heaves, catching her arches and heels awkwardly. She could see so far with no screening leaves—trunk after trunk before her. Above, branches and more branches, like blood vessels pulled out fr
om skin and muscle and frozen high in the gray light, doing nothing to break up the weak sun.

  Up ahead of her, though—were those leaves after all? A cluster of trees with lines blunted by brown clumps of something. Perhaps leaves that had somehow fallen and frozen there. She moved closer.

  Not leaves. Nests.

  Nests upon nests, mound upon mound upon mound of them, heaped and splayed like an enormous soft-angled body across the trees. Many nests—she could see all the dark circular dappling openings, too many to count—but also one, all joined into a single structure, a sort of roughly molded haystack, that spanned this stand of trees, hanging from the branches it had swallowed. The length of several Carolines, the height of several of her stood on end. The shape was irregular, unpredictably curving in and out, like the shape of that smaller nest she’d found before and pulled from the tree. As if that nest had doubled and redoubled itself here—the first chamber of a many-chambered thing.

  It was loose and messy at its edges, riotous with hay, with twigs, so much she couldn’t believe the birds had made it without plucking the hillsides bare. Tighter and more compact near the openings, all those openings. A beast with so many mouths.

  Though a beast was not quite what it looked like: that curving, that swelling and receding, the narrowness of it in places and the thickness of it in others. Here was the shape that had evaded her when she’d seen only part of it, in the bits that had crashed through the ceiling and then in that smaller nest. It was rough, yes, loose, shrouded, but she recognized it. A joining together of girls, buried girls. One standing, two sitting, two lying down, none of them free to move because of the way they’d been covered over and woven together into this one large supine body. Hips, heads, waists, shoulders.

  There were trilling hearts here, she saw: a few in the trees, a few perched on the body of the nest itself. They were quiet and mostly still, just a ruffle here, a shifting there. Then one flew toward the nest, slowing as it neared, flapping once and twice, choosing one of the small dark openings, winding its way inside.