We Are Not Ourselves

69

When Paula Coogan, who had hired Eileen at North Central Bronx, moved to another hospital, Eileen was surprised and dismayed to learn that Paula’s replacement was Adelaide Henry, whom Eileen had supervised at Einstein many years before. Adelaide promptly put Eileen on nights, claiming she needed someone of Eileen’s stature watching over that shift, but Eileen guessed she was trying to get her to leave, maybe out of insecurity, maybe out of revenge. She remembered being tough on Adelaide, but only because she’d noted her potential and hadn’t wanted to see her waste it, especially as executives making promotion decisions were going to be more exacting with Adelaide because she was black.

If Adelaide wanted to get rid of her by putting her on nights, though, she would fail. Eileen would’ve held on in the midst of a flaming apocalypse to last the two more years she needed to get health benefits. And it was actually a blessing to be put on nights, because with the sundowning, Ed was going to bed early, and he mostly stayed in bed, and the dark of night had begun to frighten him, so that even if he got out of bed he would never leave the house. Short of his filling the place with gas from the stovetop burners, there was very little she had to worry about if he went unsupervised at night, so she would climb into bed with him in the late afternoon and awake at ten to report for duty at eleven. It was working out better than she could have hoped for: she didn’t have to pay anyone to be there; she could take care of him when she came home in the morning and still get adequate sleep.

Maybe she spoke to the wrong person about being comfortable with the night shift, or maybe she didn’t affect a sufficiently beleaguered air, because within a month she was switched back to days. She had made it work with Ed home alone for a good while, but the idea that he would get lost worried her, and he was now a known quantity at the police station. She wanted to keep him home with her as long as she could.

She asked around at the hospital to see if anyone knew a good in-home nurse who worked off the books. She found a girl to stay with him, a robust Jamaican who wore her hair in a tower, radiated ease, and seemed perfect for the job until she made Eileen late for work one morning when she showed up late herself, claiming bus trouble. The girl’s commute involved two connections and a longish walk, so Eileen didn’t dismiss the excuse immediately; besides, she wasn’t in a position to act rashly, not without a backup in place. She gave the girl a warning; it happened again; she gave her another warning, one more than she would have given any of the nurses on her staff. The third time, she fired her, but by then she already had her replacement on call.

The second girl got to work on time, but Eileen came home early once and found Ed in the armchair in the living room, where he never sat, picking at his hands like a chimpanzee while the girl stretched out on the couch in the den watching a soap opera and talking on the cordless phone. Eileen told her that part of her job was to sit with Ed and make him feel like a human being. She came home early again the following week and ran into the girl on the phone again, this time on the patio. She paid her for the full week, even though four days remained in it, and told her not to come back.

It would have been easier if she’d been able to stay home and watch Ed herself. Even thirty years into her career — twenty-five in management — she was still better than all of these kids. When she was coming up through the ranks, the care of the patient had been the paramount concern. Now they had other things on their minds.

She had a bad feeling about the third one during the trial hour, when she saw how difficult it was for her to calm Ed’s flailing long enough to feed him, and how she could barely lift him from the toilet, but it was hard to find great help when she couldn’t pay a tremendous amount, so she hired her anyway. Then she got a call at work saying Ed had fallen and she couldn’t pick him up.

A nurse was supposed to be capable of outsized feats of strength, like a lifeguard or an ant. The girl had looked hale enough, but there lurked in certain people a softness you couldn’t see.

She’d gone through three nurses in four months. She didn’t have the patience to try another. Instead of replacing the third girl, she gave Ed strict instructions not to answer the door for anyone he didn’t know. She told him not to leave the house. She prayed he’d listen, at least until she could figure something out.

She gave in and got the MedicAlert bracelet. If people wanted to look at him as an invalid, she didn’t have the energy to stop them anymore.

70

Somehow Eileen’s old friend Bethany had heard what was happening with Ed, tracked down her new number, and called to offer her support.

Bethany had been a fellow nurse at her first go-round at Einstein. Shortly after Eileen met her, Bethany married a corporate executive and quit working, but for a few years they’d stayed in touch, aided by the fact that Bethany’s daughter Teresa was Connell’s age. Every summer, Eileen, Ed, and Connell went out to Bethany’s beach house in Quogue for a handful of days. In the mideighties, though, when Walt took a position at Pepsi, they moved to Purchase, sold the summer house, and dropped off the map.

Bethany told Eileen she was living nearby, in Pelham, and that she and Walt had gotten divorced. Teresa had dropped out of high school in her junior year and moved to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, an actor.

“Walt is heartbroken,” she said. “I tell her I only want her happiness. I’ve been trying to convince her to let me come out and visit. Maybe I’ll just show up.”

Bethany called every day that week to check in. Eileen welcomed the attention, as many of her friends had receded. She had always gotten along with Bethany, who had a frank, Jamaican sense of humor and could take the stuffing out of anyone. Eileen needed a little more frankness in her life. The friends who had stayed close tiptoed around conversations about Ed.

She invited Bethany over for tea. Bethany told her she’d become a spiritual guru in the years since her divorce. “I guess I began before the divorce,” she said, laughing. “It might have had something to do with our getting divorced. Walt wasn’t exactly clamoring for me to get enlightened.” She took out a photo of Walt, a gesture Eileen found strange. She couldn’t understand why Bethany was still carrying it around. Walt looked like he hadn’t aged a bit, as though the Jamaican food Bethany had fed him kept him young. Bethany also showed her a photo of Teresa, taken before she’d left. She was just a kid; she still wore braces.

She’d gotten involved with faith healing, she said. Her healer channeled a spirit named Vywamus. “You should come with me sometime. You might like it.”

“I’m not interested in any voodoo religion,” Eileen said.

“It’s not voodoo,” Bethany said. “And it’s not religion.” She laughed. “I’ll let you off easy this time. But I’m very persistent when I want to be.” She laughed again. “I’ll pursue you to the ends of the earth.”

Eileen laughed too, though she couldn’t help feeling a little unnerved. She poured another cup of tea to cut the tension.

• • •

Bethany made friendship easy by always driving over to see her. One Tuesday evening, just as Eileen was about to fix a quick dinner, Bethany appeared at the back door and told her she wanted to take her somewhere.

“I have Ed,” Eileen said. “I can’t leave.”

“He’ll be fine. Come.”

She called up to Ed, who was in bed with the television on, and then followed Bethany down the back steps.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

She was happy to get out, and touched by the thoughtfulness of a friend who knew she needed a break. She imagined a packed restaurant, a coffeehouse buzzing with conversation.

Bethany looked happy. She wore a poppy-colored blouse and light rouge on her brown cheeks to match, as well as lipstick. She put her hand on the back of Eileen’s headrest and backed out of the driveway.

“Where is it, though?” Eileen said, as mildly as she could. “Now you have me curious.”

“I want you to keep an open mind,” Bethany said.

As they pulled onto Midland Avenue, it occurred to Eileen that Bethany was not taking her for a gourmet meal or on a shopping spree. They were driving to her cult. “Oh no,” Eileen said. “No, no.”

Bethany grinned. “I know,” she said, and let out a hearty laugh. “But it’s not like that. It’s going to be relaxing and fun. You’ll like these women, I just know it.”

“I told you I’m not interested in that,” Eileen said, but Bethany kept driving, and they passed through towns, and soon they were parking the car in Pelham.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Bethany put her hand on Eileen’s. “You don’t know what you think about it yet.”

She took a long look at Bethany’s narrow face and close-set brown eyes, her skin that hadn’t aged in the ten years since they’d lost touch. She felt sorry for her for needing all this hocus-pocus. She decided she would go in, just this once, as a favor to her friend and an exercise in openness, like sitting through the character breakfast at Disney World when Connell was four, because it was the right thing to do.

Inside, a circle of women rose to greet her. She sat and joined them, and a woman walked in from another room, evidently the psychic channeler. She was small, no taller than five two, and her hair had a sort of deliberate unkempt quality, as if in demonstration of her ascetic bona fides. She sat without ceremony and looked serenely around at the group until her eyes fell on Eileen. She held Eileen’s gaze awhile, smiling in a way that forced Eileen to smile back uncomfortably.

The woman called them to order with a breathing exercise. Eileen took part in it, stifling her laughter.

“I’d like to welcome Eileen Leary to our midst tonight,” the woman said. “Bethany has brought her to us. Thank you, Bethany. Eileen has been going through some difficulty with her husband. We’re here to help her.”

Eileen felt herself blushing. She hadn’t expected the group’s attention to be directed at her so soon or so completely. “Please don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m just here to watch.”

“Eileen’s husband has Alzheimer’s disease,” the woman said as if Eileen hadn’t spoken, and clucks and knowing looks passed through the room. “But as we have seen so often, not everything is as it seems. We are going to discover today what is happening in her husband’s soul. Bethany tells me his name is Edmund? Edmund Leary?”

Eileen had an impulse to shield Ed’s name from them, as if by incanting it they might affix to it one of those exotic, long-distance curses that could cause a man to drop dead in the street.

“That’s correct,” she said.

“My name is Rachelle. In a minute I am going to call on Vywamus to visit us. He will talk to you about your husband. I will be channeling him. It may appear that I am talking, but I will only be a conduit. There is nothing to be afraid of. We will link hands, so you will only have to squeeze the hand of the person to either side of you for reassurance. My spirit will not be in the room during this time. I will not be able to answer any questions once Vywamus has entered my body. You must direct any questions to Vywamus. But it is advisable to simply let him speak. You may notice a slight change in my voice. That’s a result of Vywamus using my body as his vessel.”

Rachelle started to breath rhythmically and to move her hands in circles. She made guttural chanting sounds, random syllables, like a flautist playing scales to warm up. Then she began speaking. Her voice became almost comically low in pitch.

“I am Vywamus,” she said. “I am here to speak to you, Eileen Leary. I am here to tell you that your husband is one of the most repressed souls in the universe. For many lives, he has been fighting a battle with his spirit. He has been an Atlantean for centuries.”

Eileen knew that Bethany had never really gelled with Ed. Bethany had had a bit of this New Age streak even when they used to spend time together, and Ed had had little patience for it. She wondered how much Bethany had told this lady.

“This time through,” Rachelle said in a painful-sounding husky baritone, “he is fighting for his soul. The battle in his body mirrors the battle in his soul. It is not this disease that is making him obsessed with control. It is the other way around. His obsession with control has culminated in this disease. He needs to learn to open up in this life to save his soul from the battle it has been fighting for centuries.”

She had to hand it to her: once Rachelle started channeling Vywamus, she didn’t break character. Still, Eileen was having a hard time taking it seriously. She had to bite her cheeks to keep from making editorial grunts. It was all meant for someone else, someone weaker of will or less educated. Whatever kind of cult this Rachelle was running, she was mistaken if she thought she had a potential convert in the room. Eileen may have been through some difficult times, but that didn’t mean her brain had gone soft.

71

There had been times she’d wanted to kill Ed; now that he was declining so quickly, she just wanted him home until Christmas. It shocked her that her goals had dwindled to one, but that was all she could focus on, even now, eight months away from the holiday. Once Ed left, she knew, he was never coming back.

There used to be so many goals. They’d made a list at one point. Learn some Gaelic together. Visit the wineries in Napa Valley. She couldn’t remember what else was on the list. They hadn’t accomplished any of them.

They hadn’t finished the house. Much of the first floor looked new and appealing, but a good deal of the second floor was dilapidated and run-down.

She hadn’t gone back for a doctorate. She hadn’t learned to play better tennis. They’d never take another trip to Europe. They might never take another trip anywhere.

They didn’t need to go anywhere anymore, though. If she could get him to Christmas, she would take without complaint whatever was coming. A proper send-off was all she asked, surrounded by the regular crowd on Christmas Eve, the kitchen — the beating heart of the house — full to bursting. By midnight, no one would have left. Smiling Ed in his suit on the couch would be incident-free. Then Mass in the morning; then a short drive to someone else’s house, some coffee cake and a modest second round of gifts. Then let it come down. She didn’t need the whole day. Let him have a fit at four o’clock. Let him be raving and dangerous and inconsolable. She’d drive him over to the home herself. She’d always hated Christmas night anyway. It was the loneliest night of the year.

72

Eileen agreed to let Bethany take her back to her faith-healing, channeling psychic, whatever-she-called-herself friend Rachelle. She decided to experience it as a cultural phenomenon, like the be-ins and happenings she’d missed out on while she was in graduate school. She didn’t have to keep up a wall of suspicion if she went in knowing these people were doing something entirely weird and that she was going to study them anthropologically.

She joined the others in the circle and waited for “Vywamus” to come out. The woman, Rachelle, walked in barefoot, on the balls of her feet like a cat, gathered her robe under her and sat, Indian-style. Eileen couldn’t have gotten into that position if she’d been drugged and stretched into it by a team of men.

Rachelle/Vywamus started speaking to another member of the circle, the focus of the beginning of the session. When Eileen thought about the actual message Vywamus was delivering, and not the spooky way it was being delivered, she grew almost intrigued at how familiar and unthreatening the ideas in it were. The whole thing was a charade, but there was something quaint about the idea of conveying sturdy old wisdom through the medium of performance art. She imagined many of these suburban wives might be impressed enough by a brush with the avant-garde to actually hear a message they’d have dismissed if delivered by a priest, rabbi, or shrink.

After a while Rachelle/Vywamus turned her/his attention to Eileen. Rachelle had homed in on something essential about Ed right away. Eileen wouldn’t have put it the way Vywamus had, and Rachelle might have had help from Bethany, but she also appeared to be a master psychologist. Under the absurd pretense of this character, she was saying something borderline sensible.

At the end of the session, after Vywamus addressed a few of the other women and Rachelle made a big display of being physically drained, everyone stood in a circle talking and eating snacks. Rachelle returned in a different outfit, having shed the robe she was wearing, and mingled.

When Bethany drove her home, she said that she had covered Eileen for the first couple of visits, but next time there would be a one-hundred-dollar fee, and if she wanted to do private sessions it would cost one fifty.

• • •

For days, Eileen fretted over how to tell Bethany she wasn’t going back to Rachelle, but on Tuesday morning, as she dressed for work, she realized she was actually looking forward to Bethany’s visit that night. Bethany was the only one of her old friends who had gotten more involved in her life, rather than less, with the news of Ed’s condition. Eileen dug through her closet and found a pair of slacks she could still squeeze into, and a loose jacket that would hide the bulge forming at her waist. She hadn’t been indoctrinated into Bethany’s cult, and she wouldn’t ever be, but as she ironed her clothes and thought about which lipstick would work best with her green jacket, she knew she needed to be out in the world.

Ed was already in bed when Bethany rang the bell at twenty to seven. Eileen applied a last spritz of hairspray, shut the powder room light and yelled “Entrez!” toward the kitchen door. Bethany came dressed smartly again, in a turquoise blouse and white jacket. As they got into the car, she pulled down the visor and dabbed lipstick on her top lip and rubbed her lips together to smear it in. Bethany handed her a tissue to blot.

It was satisfying to be in the company of strong women, most of them semiretired professionals. Maybe she was exactly the sort of woman in a vulnerable state of mind that Rachelle sought to target, but these women didn’t seem that way. If they were, she didn’t care. She wasn’t planning to get to know them. She trusted herself not to be bamboozled by Rachelle’s charisma. There was a spiritual vacuum she needed to fill. She’d never imagined she’d find herself in the living room of a cult leader, or sitting unperturbed as she listened to the rates for future sessions.

She wondered what the others were getting out of it. The world, as Vywamus presented it, didn’t seem to matter very much; our real existence was taking place somewhere else as we lived out a shadow existence. She didn’t need to be signing on to a whole new program in her fifties. She was going for the hour it got her out of the house.

At the end of the session, she didn’t even feel awkward writing the check. Bethany took it with a smile and presented it to Rachelle. Eileen knew she was being played, but she was content to let it happen. It was good to have someone thinking of her, and she liked that Vywamus did so much of the talking. It was better than therapy. Eileen couldn’t stand the silence in Dr. Brill’s office, the fact that she was expected to open her mouth and let all the words she’d apparently kept stopped up come pouring out.

73

If you’d told her at her wedding that one day, years on, she’d be picking her husband up at the police station on a balmy evening in late May, she would have laughed and said, “You don’t know Ed,” but she’d gotten a page, and then she was nestling into a spot between a pair of squad cars in the quiet lot at dusk. She shut the engine off and sat considering the possibility that fate had finally caught up to her.

She headed toward the sign-in desk and saw Ed sitting in the waiting area with an officer, his shirt untucked, his hair a mess. He wore no anguish on his face, only an aspect of resignation. In his rigid posture he looked surprisingly regal, like a statue of an ancient Egyptian king.

She introduced herself. The officer’s name was Sergeant Garger.

“I’m so sorry about this,” she said.

Seeing her, Ed emitted a low moan that suggested he’d been caught with a prostitute or committed some other unspeakable indiscretion.

“Officer Cerullo will sit with your husband,” Sergeant Garger said. “I’d like you to come to my desk to sign some papers.”

She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. She didn’t want them to conclude that the situation was completely out of hand, because there was no telling what they might do then. She could endure any embarrassment, as long as they didn’t take him away.

“Your husband was wandering back and forth in traffic in front of the church,” Officer Garger said quietly. “He was stopping cars, waving his arms. Cars were backed up all the way to the train station. When we approached him, he was wild.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If the responding officer hadn’t seen the bracelet on his wrist, we would have booked him for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. We ascertained that he was trying to find his way home.” He took out a breath mint, asked her if she wanted one. “It’s Alzheimer’s? Is that correct?”

“Yes,” she said.

“He seems young to me.”

“Fifty-four.”

“I understand this is not the first incident,” the officer said. She nodded silently. “He comes into town?”

“He doesn’t,” she said. “This is an exception.”

“What nobody wants is for this to turn into a legal situation. If your husband is deemed a threat to himself or others, or if the home situation creates an impediment to his safety—”

“I’m a nurse. I know the law.”

“Do you let him out alone?”

“We usually have a nurse, but I had to let her go. I haven’t found a replacement yet. I got him that bracelet in case something happened. I have to go to work; I can’t stay with him.”

“Have you considered a nursing home?”

“Not as long as I can help it.”

“Are there any family members who can help?”

“No,” she said.

“Nobody?”

She thought of Connell at school. She had hoped he’d grow up when he went off to college, but he couldn’t even remember to call home on his father’s birthday without a reminder.

“Well, there is my son. But he’s away at school. He’s in a play this summer. I can’t ask him to come home.”

“You know what I think, Mrs. Leary? If you don’t mind my saying?”

“What?”

“You sure can.”

• • •

In bed that night, she thought about the way Officer Garger had looked at her. She’d gotten that look lately from men — repairmen, deliverymen — who came to the house and saw what kind of shape Ed was in. She had a few more wrinkles now, and a hint of crow’s feet, and the other day she thought she’d seen the makings of a jowl. Still, she knew she remained beautiful and that a distressed situation like the one she was in with Ed might bring out the chivalry in even unenlightened men. Lately she had told them the story as soon as she opened the door. She considered it her duty to explain that Ed was incapacitated. He had come to pride himself on his hard-won home improvement skills and would have hated for the professional craftsmen he respected to write him off as another eunuch of a househusband.

They looked at her with pity, some with more than pity. They didn’t like to look at Ed or raise their voices around him. It made conversations more conspiratorial than they might otherwise have been.

She couldn’t avoid admitting to herself that she’d given Officer Garger a look of her own. She knew it hadn’t communicated much but a vague dissatisfaction, but guilt still crept through her. When Ed’s hand explored her shoulder, she rolled over and went to sleep.

74

It was the day of their first practice as a cast. He and Jenna had arranged to meet beforehand at the Medici. He walked past the place and circled the block, then steeled himself enough to go in. He found her in a booth in the back.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

At the first read-through, Jenna had been a revelation as Puck, sexy and feral. Connell had read his own lines in a workmanlike fashion that was accidentally appropriate for the role of Francis Flute, the bellows mender given Thisbe to portray in the mechanicals’ play-within-the-play. He liked to think he would have made a good Oberon to her Puck, but the director knew better. Oberon went to an upperclassman whose magnetism attracted the available attention of much of the cast, Jenna included. When the director announced that Thisbe would be wearing a pink prom dress, the loudest laugh in the room came from Oberon.

“It’s okay.” She leaned down to reach into her backpack, her long red hair shifting forward to block his view of her. “Here, let me give you this. We should get going.”

“Hang on a second,” he said, beginning to panic. “Let me sit down.” He creaked in the joints as he bent into the seat. When he squared up across from her, he felt the nervous energy he had been carrying around in his chest settle with a queasy finality into his gut. She was not going to reconsider. If it had been a moment of betrayal that had driven her away, some passionate carelessness in the predawn hours, perhaps he could have pulled her back to him. She had a peculiar tolerance, even a fondness, for the self-absorption of dynamic young men. There had been no regrettable evening though; likely he had been too ready to offer his devotion. The little sedimentary deposits of his need had piled at her feet until they blocked her view of him.

“I think we have time for coffee,” he said, “and to talk a bit.”

“Let’s have some, then.” She signaled to the waiter, frowning in that lovely way she did when she was taking care of tasks. It was something in the way she gave in without a fight: their relationship had already receded into the past for her. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I just want to talk.” He couldn’t say the undiluted truth, which was that he needed her not to leave him. They sat in silence. He dug his knife into the candle wax poured in one of the many grooves furrowed into the table by generations of undergraduates. He couldn’t look at her.

“How’s your father? Are you going home?”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t have to, if it would make a difference for me to stay.”

“You should go,” she said. “You need to be there.”

“I miss you so much,” he said, finally cracking. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

“You’re running from something. You need to look at that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Her lips pulled into a little knot. “For what?”

“For not planning anything for your birthday,” he said. “For any mistakes I made.”

She laughed. “The only thing you did wrong was ask me to marry you. The only thing I did wrong was not say no right away.” She looked at her watch and pulled out a sealed envelope. “Can I give this to you now?”

The ring made an airy bulge in the center. He felt his chest tightening.

“We’re too young for this,” she said. “We’re nineteen! I should never have taken that thing. I was in shock, I guess.”

In his silence he was laboring to deepen the groove, but the dull knife had no effect.

“Let’s not be so serious all the time! Let’s have fun.”

“We could make it work,” he said.

“Let’s get the check. We’re late.” She patted his hand, looked for the waiter. “We’ve had some great conversations here.”

He sat, quietly despairing.

“This wasn’t one of them, Mr. Cat-Got-Your-Tongue. Mr. Eeyore. And any other animals I haven’t mentioned.”

He couldn’t help smiling. “Could you try, for one second, not to be so damned adorable?”

“I’m not adorable,” she said. “You just see me that way. That’s the whole problem. I’m fucked up inside, just like you.”

• • •

They arrived as the rest of the cast was stretching. It was going to be a physically challenging production, so Dale, the director and a theater professor, wanted them limber. Since it would be performed under the stars, outside the Reynolds Club, they would be practicing outdoors to get used to projecting their voices.

As Connell stretched, he rehearsed what he would say to Dale. He hardly knew the man, beyond taking one of his classes, but he’d already come to see him as something of a father figure, and he dreaded disappointing him. He went to office hours and listened to Dale hold forth about plays. He hadn’t read or seen most of the works Dale brought up, but he tried to nod along at all the right moments, and when he left Dale’s office, he marched straight to the Reg to check them out. He scrambled to read them before he saw Dale next, but he was always a discussion behind.

“This is where we’ll be for the next two months,” Dale said as he called them together. “There’s no intimacy out here. It’s vast, echoless. The acoustics are awful.” He gestured to the heavens. “The open air swallows all but the loudest sounds. There will be no microphones. You will have to fill this space with your voices.”

Connell watched over Jenna’s shoulder as Dale spoke. She was alarmingly buoyant. He saw her exchange a few looks with Oberon.

“Now,” Dale said, “I want you to spread out.” Connell tried to stay by Jenna. “Form two rows. Everyone has a partner on the opposite row.” When the shifting of bodies finished, Connell saw that Jenna was his partner. “Get up real close,” Dale said. “Closer. Put your face right near your partner’s face.”

Connell wasn’t an actor; he knew that by now. He was never sure where to look when he was onstage. He had tried out for this play to let some more Shakespeare run through his head and carve out some shared space with Jenna, who now was staring right into him. He didn’t know what to do with his arms, which swayed awkwardly by his side.

“We’re going to do a little exercise. I want both rows to take one step back. Okay. Do you notice a difference? Look into your partner’s eyes. Are they looking into yours?”

They were. She was laughing with what seemed like genuine mirth at the irony of their pairing.

“Now,” Dale said, “I’m going to ask you to do something a little unusual. I want you to tell your partner you love them. Don’t be shy. Tell them you love them now.”

“I love you,” Connell said, separated from her by a few feet. She said it too, her brows raised, a big smile on her face, as though she were trying to get him to laugh along with her. It occurred to him that she had never said those precise words to him before.

“Now take another step back,” Dale said, “a big one. You have to try harder to see each other. Maybe not much, but a little. What happens when you get farther away? What do you have to do to compensate? Out here, you’ll be trying to reach people a long way off. Now, tell your partner you love them again.”

Connell said it a little louder than before. Jenna seemed to mean every bit of it. There was no denying her talent.

“Now take another step back. Forget about the distance. Say it as if they’re right next to you, only louder.”

“I love you,” he said weakly across the expanse. He didn’t know how to use his diaphragm, and his breath ran out too soon.

“Now two steps. This time shout it! This is love that gives a damn.”

He did as asked, coughing as he did. She was a figure in a row of people.

“Two more steps. Again!”

This time he didn’t say anything, only listened. He couldn’t make out any individual voices, only a collective one making an urgent appeal.

“One last step! Give it your best shout!”

Jenna was a blur on the other side. His throat hurt. He threw his arms back and shouted as loud as he could.

• • •

His mother had called and asked him to come home and he had said he had a responsibility to the director and the cast to be in the play. He could hear from her silence that she was shocked to hear him talk of responsibility in refusing to come home and help, and the truth was that he had shocked himself by saying it.

He hadn’t realized how scared he was to see his father until his mother’s call. He hadn’t intended never to return; he just had no immediate plans to do so. Jenna had been the best excuse possible, but now she didn’t seem like much of an excuse anymore. He could say he was staying in Chicago to work on things with her—my future wife, he could hear himself rationalizing later, or at least that was how I thought at the time—but he saw the truth of their relationship too clearly to allow himself to pretend later that he hadn’t.

Had he tried to grow up quickly to cover up feeling like a child? Had he asked her to marry him because he needed a grand unifying theory to explain his absence? The thing was, he himself had been scared of marrying her. He didn’t want it, really, any more than she did. He was more relieved than brokenhearted, but now he had to think about everything he wasn’t doing. He had run out of excuses not to go home.

• • •

He quit the play, crammed his pair of army duffels full of dirty clothes, and got on a plane. His mother said she couldn’t pick him up, so he took the bus and train and walked from the station.

He squeezed through the back door with the bags and was struck by the punishing volume of the television coming from the den. He remembered his mother saying tests had revealed that his father had lost some hearing. He headed toward the den but found his father in the vestibule, balanced precariously on a stepladder, looking through the little windows set into the front doors. Connell muted the television and went back and called to him, but his father only mumbled something, so Connell walked over and touched his shoulder. “Dad!” he said, more forcefully. “I’m home.” The news seemed to leave no impression at all, though he’d been away for almost a year.

“He’s out there.” His father gave Connell a serious, confidential look.

“Who?”

“The man,” he said darkly. “That man. He always comes.”

“Where is he?”

Connell raised himself on his toes and looked out. No one was there except the gardener, who had finished pruning the hedges and moved to the house next door.

“Do you mean him?” he said, pointing. “You mean Sal?”

“No, no, no.” His father’s eyes flashed; his hand twitched; his hushed tone and terrified stare implied that anything was possible. Connell wanted to believe in his father’s continued ability to perceive danger accurately. Had he arrived just in time?

Connell turned again to the window; then he backed away, feeling foolish.

“Come down off there,” he said, holding his father’s elbow, but his father stood frozen. “It’s just a step. Just put your leg forward.” His father offered a tentative foot, then retracted it and tried the other. “Lean on me,” Connell said, and his father did. Once on firm ground, he clapped a couple of times before he seemed to register his son’s presence and looked embarrassed. He went to the window again. He was animated now, his finger jabbing at it.

“He’s there! He’s there!”

Connell darted over. His father was right: the man was there, and he was famously unstoppable. He might deliver death and destruction; he might deliver circulars for the Food Emporium.

“Dad!” he said. “Don’t you know that’s the mailman?”

The mailman disappeared behind the hedge. “I don’t trust him,” his father said, and then headed for the kitchen with a surprising quickness in his step. He lifted one of the blinds in the window above the sink so high that his whole face would have been visible from the other side.

When his father moved aside, Connell saw that the blinds were bent in several places. His mother must have reconciled herself to living with them rather than replacing them over and over. This one change amounted to a revolution in her thinking.

His father opened the door and then the screen, which swung back hard and crashed into him as he headed outside. When he returned, he was pressing a bundle of mail against his chest with both arms. Some pieces fell to the floor and he released the remainder onto the island like a cascading pile of apples.

“What are you doing?” Connell asked, flabbergasted.

“I get the mail.”

“Just like that.”

“I get it every day.”

“But a minute ago you were saying you didn’t trust him. You were totally spooked.”

“He comes every day,” his father said. “I don’t know who he is.”

“He’s the mailman,” Connell said desperately.

“I don’t trust him.”

“Dad,” he said, “he’s the mailman.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“But you know he’s delivering the mail?”

“Yes,” he said reasonably. “He comes every day.”

“So why are you suspicious of him?”

“I don’t know who he is,” he said. “I get the mail every day. That’s my job. I have other jobs.”

He shuffled into the den and sat down. Connell followed him and unmuted the television. The volume shot out like a cannon report. Connell retreated to the kitchen and picked up the fallen letters, wondering when the last time was that his father had opened a piece of mail and whether he’d ever open one again. He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The den was drenched in noisy static, and he went in and found his father watching the electronic snow of a lost signal as though it were a program. His father didn’t stir in that crashing noise. He clutched the remote like an amulet. Connell tried to take it from him, but his father had an iron grip on it. Connell went to the television, lowered the volume, and changed the channel until the picture came up.

“This thing,” his father said disgustedly. “It doesn’t work.” His mouth hung open, and a little drool leaked out. Connell used his father’s own shirtsleeve to wipe it up. His father gave him a knowing look. Connell wondered how much awareness still lurked in him. A faint whining hum emanated from him.

“It’s good to see you,” Connell said, throwing an arm around him.

His father kept looking at the television but patted his own knee. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

• • •

They watched Columbo. Peter Falk’s Beckettian detective wore his trademark trench coat and screwed up his face in his world-weary, gently bemused way — experience and innocence mingling in him. Connell thought, Thank God for Columbo. Thank God for Law & Order reruns. He didn’t know how he would ever fill the time with his father without television.

When the commercials came on, he had no idea what to say. His mother would ride in on a barge of stories about family friends or simply accounts of her day. Connell felt disrespectful delivering reports from the front lines of experience. He felt a little better talking about things his father knew already or that they had experienced together, but it felt awkward to introduce them into conversation. Still, he could feel it coming, the need to revert to the familiar.

“I have to say I like Paul O’Neill,” Connell pronounced academically. His father continued to look at the television. “I’m not one of those Mets fans who hate a guy like that just to hate him. He’s the heart of that team, a blue-collar worker.” The silence on his father’s end of the exchange was growing desperate. “Yankees or not, it was exciting to have a New York team in the playoffs again.” This last remark seemed to have gotten his father’s attention, because his face brightened into a smile, as though it were news to him; and then Connell realized that it was news to him, even though he’d watched all the playoff games the previous October and Connell had called after every one.

“Yeah!” he said. “Good!”

Connell felt stupid for trying to tread carefully around the old man. It was time to face facts: his father’s short-term memory was shot. He probably didn’t remember anything longer than a few minutes. As soon as Connell left the room, his father wouldn’t even know he had come home in the first place. He wouldn’t have wanted his son to sit around with him on a Friday night; it would have embarrassed him, and Connell didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so he went upstairs to get ready, because there were people he hadn’t seen in a long time.

• • •

He still had his first bottle of cologne, which he had made last a few years by dabbing it sparingly, once behind each ear, once on either side of the neck. He had sweated it out on dance floors and left its trace in heated grapplings on couches. When he’d departed for college, he’d left it behind on the counter in his bathroom, a little offering at the altar of adolescence.

He found the bottle in his parents’ bathroom, down to the dregs. A vague horror crept into him, turning to fury. His father must have scooped the bottle up in his wanderings through the house. He could see him struggling to open it, sloshing its contents around, watching it pour through his fingers into the sink. He imagined him clapping it to his neck and chest in big cupped palms and uncoordinated splashes, trying to steal some of the future that stretched out before his son. How much could he even smell anymore? And what use did he have for cologne anyway? That part of his life was over.

Connell marched downstairs with the bottle. “Did you do this?” he asked, thrusting it under his nose. “Did you take this? There was more than half a bottle in here.”

“I don’t know,” his father said, looking scared. “I don’t know.”

This time he didn’t soften it for him.

“I get it,” he said. “You don’t know. Well, you used it. I know it’s just a bottle of cologne. But it was special to me.”

His father’s eyes widened; his forehead wrinkled; his mouth turned down. He sat back in the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Part of Connell wanted to say it was no big deal, but he couldn’t somehow.

“Look,” he said. “Just be careful with my stuff. Okay? Whatever I left in my room. Maybe you could leave that stuff alone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He felt his resolve wavering. He had to resist comforting him. His father ran roughshod over everything, and everybody was supposed to go around picking up the pieces. You couldn’t get mad at him; you were supposed to feel sorry for him all the time. Well, forget that. Connell was the son, not the father. It wasn’t his job yet to pick up the pieces.

He went to a friend’s place in the city. They hit a few bars, closed the last one down. He took the first train home in the morning, the five-thirty.

• • •

He awoke to his mother shaking him.

“Your father has his routines now,” she said. “You’re disrupting him. He needs this couch for the TV. Go up to your bed.” The room was dark, but a sliver of light filtered through the sliding door. He smelled coffee and the eggy sweetness of batter on a grill. “Just go upstairs.” A frown flashed across her face. “You didn’t have to come home.”

“What are you talking about? I’m getting up.”

“I need to know what I can expect from you while you’re here.”

“I’m here,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Can you stay with your father? I don’t want to leave him alone today.”

“Yeah,” he said.

She stood there for a second looking him over.

“Can I count on you?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Just stick around the house, make sure he eats, make sure he doesn’t get hurt. Sit with him awhile. Don’t sleep too late.”

“Okay,” he said.

“He’s excited to have you home.” She made it sound hopeful, but a sad note crept into her voice. “You’re all he asks about. ‘Where’s Connell? Where’s Connell?’ ”

His mother had dressed his father in a long-sleeved shirt and slacks. He looked as if he was about to go to work. One detail remained, though: his shirttail hung out. She undid his belt, then hiked his pants up high and rezipped them.

Connell passed through the kitchen. The pancake batter bowl was empty. She hadn’t made enough for him. He threw his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s all yours,” he said, not as gently as he could have.

His mother stopped him on the stairs.

“Are you going to be here?” she asked. “Tell me now. I’ll try to figure something else out. I can’t afford to have you acting irresponsibly.”

“Mom, relax,” he said. “I’ll take care of him. Go to work.”

At the top of the stairs he heard his mother tell his father she was putting on the television, and his father gurgle in response, and then he heard the volume rising, step by step. “If you need anything,” his mother shouted over the television, “Connell is upstairs.” If his father responded, he couldn’t hear it. “I love you,” his mother said. There was a pause. “Can you say it back, honey?” He didn’t know if his father hadn’t responded or if he simply hadn’t heard him over the loud volume, but after a while he heard the garage door opening.

• • •

He thought it important to let his father drink his own soda. His father grabbed the glass by the brim and pulled it toward him too quickly. The glass dropped to the bricks and shattered. Connell picked up the biggest chunks of glass by hand and got the dustpan and broom to sweep the slick shards into the garbage. He toweled the pool from the floor. So it had come to this: you couldn’t give him anything to drink by himself. He had to be in a bib, practically. You had to hold it up to his mouth. You had to give it to him in a plastic cup, maybe even a sippy cup. And he just sat there defenseless as you reached into his lap with a sponge to soak up the spillage. He didn’t even try to brush you away and say he would do it himself. He just sighed and offered himself up. And the fragile, helpless look on his face, the way he didn’t even try to argue that everyone made mistakes, made him seem like a whipped dog, complete with sad, soulful eyes and a desire to please.

“Don’t move an inch,” Connell said. “Not one inch.” But he didn’t know why he’d said it. He had cleaned up every bit of the glass.

• • •

His father was picking at his belt, trying to get it open. He was pumping the waistband up and down like he was trying to fan out a fire. Then Connell smelled it. He went to unbuckle the pants, but his father wouldn’t let him.

“No,” he screamed. “No! No!”

“Dad!” he said. “Calm down. We have to get you clean.”

His father was whimpering as he kept his hand on his backside, trying to hold the stuff in place. In the struggle, some crap soaked through his pants. Connell maneuvered him upstairs somehow and into the shower, still in his clothes, but when he tried unbuckling the belt, his father started yelling and keening again. He undid the button of his father’s pants, then stopped. This wasn’t the time to rush stupidly in. He would get the shoes off first; everything else would follow from that.

“Can you sit down? If you sit down this will go a lot easier.”

“Go away!” his father shouted. “Go away!”

Connell moved behind him and pulled his father down onto him, breaking his fall with his body. His father crashed an elbow into his chest and flailed around like a man on fire. He would have punched Connell in the face if he could have turned around.

Connell held him in a tight grip. “It’s okay,” he said, over and over. He had to slow everything down.

He climbed out from under him, cradling his head. He tugged off his father’s shoes, unzipped his pants, and started pulling them off. His father grabbed at them and kicked at him, but Connell got them past his butt and off his feet. Crap clung to his father’s legs and fell to the tub in clumps. Connell heard it splat and realized he could never be a nurse like his mother. His father was breathing hard and staring at him with an eerie intensity, as if to keep his gaze from drifting to his nakedness.

Connell dropped the pants in a heap on the floor. He didn’t have the heart to tackle the underwear yet, so he went after the button-down shirt. His father was slicked with crap all over and hard to grip, but Connell got the shirt off; only the socks and soiled briefs remained.

“Will you stop, Dad? Will you stop for a minute?”

“Go away!” his father shouted. “No more!”

“You are going to have to listen to me,” he said sharply.

“Leave me alone! Leave!”

As he took his father’s underwear off, Connell looked away, partly so as not to mortify his father and partly because he hadn’t seen his father’s penis since he was a little kid in the shower with him. The smell in the hot shower overpowered him, and he gagged. Some of the crap fell out of his father’s underwear, which Connell cupped like a diaper and dropped into the little trash bin with the grocery store bag in it. His father lay there naked. Connell would have to pick him up and wash him, but he would have to get the tub clean too, or they would both track it around the house. His own clothes were going to get sopping wet, so he quickly undressed. He left his underwear on. He needed all his strength to lift his father up. His father wasn’t resisting anymore, but he was dead weight. Once Connell got him standing, he closed the curtain and turned the water on. The crap stuck to the bathtub began to wash toward the drain. He grabbed a towel from the rack and started wiping the crap from his father’s legs and butt. It seemed that no amount of wiping could get him clean. His father’s head hung down and his shoulders slumped. His chest heaved in deep, mournful sighs. When the towel was too filthy to continue, Connell rolled it up and dumped it on the floor. He grabbed the bar of soap and another towel and made it into a giant washcloth with which he washed his father’s genitals and gave his legs and backside a good scrubbing. He had never touched his father so much in his life. He soaped up his hands and washed his father’s feet and his own. He washed his own arms and legs and scrubbed at his hands, then turned the water off. “We’re almost done,” he said, opening the curtain, taking his father’s hand, and helping him out into the steam-filled room. He ran to the closet and grabbed more towels. His first thought was to wrap one around his waist and remove his sopping underwear beneath it, but something told him it would be a great indignity for his father to be naked while his son was clothed, so he took his underwear off and stood exposed. He toweled his father down and they stood naked together. He wrapped a towel around each of them. He found his father’s cologne in the medicine cabinet, made a little well of it in his hand, and clapped it to his father’s neck. The smell rushed up at him, and he was reminded of when his father showed him how to shave. “Go with the grain,” his father had said into the mirror. “To avoid bumps. Take it easy. Take your time. Don’t go over the same spot twice if you can avoid it.” Afterward, he’d leaned down to let Connell pull at his cheeks and feel the cool, smooth skin of his face.

Connell put some underwear on his father, and a T-shirt, and led him to the bed and tucked him in.

When his father was asleep, Connell left the house to go buy a box of adult diapers. He didn’t know why his mother hadn’t thought of this sooner. It would save everyone a lot of trouble and be a simple fix. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to use them.

• • •

“He wants to leave you his desk when he’s gone,” his mother said at breakfast the next morning, before she left for work. His father was upstairs. “The rest you’ll have to wait for me to die to get.”

“Jesus.”

“You want to be a kid forever? You have to hear this stuff eventually.”

Connell knew that getting that desk had been one of the few happy experiences his father had shared with his own father as an adult. It was of no use to his father anymore, though. Now it was where his mother did the bills. She could use the little desk in Connell’s room for that; he could switch them out.

The desk was five feet wide and three deep and made of solid wood. It wasn’t an heirloom, exactly. The wood was scratched and nicked from the banging by the chair. A set of drawers on either side formed the base on which the desktop rested.

Taped index cards ran along the front and side edges. One card listed the day, month, and year of all three of their birthdays. One had a little family tree branching out from his grandparents to his aunts, uncles, and cousins. Off EILEEN TUMULTY LEARY (WIFE) and ED LEARY (SELF) was CONNELL LEARY (SONN). One card read SOCIAL SECURRURITURY #, as though his father had picked out a syllable at random to keep the thread going. Inside the desk was a card with a pump pin affixed to it and the caption, PIN FOR BLOING UP OF BACKET BALLS.

While his father watched television in the den, Connell lugged the heavy thing up the stairs piece by piece to his room. When he was done reassembling it, he felt energized by a sense of possibility. He would fill in the drawers and get down to whatever important work lay ahead, which would reveal itself to him if he sat there long enough.

His own desk was so light that he could carry it downstairs without removing the drawers. He shoved it into place where his father’s desk had been. It looked miniature beneath his father’s diplomas. He taped the index cards to the desk’s surface.

All that remained was to bring his father’s chair up and carry his own down in compensation. His father’s chair didn’t just swivel and wheel; it pivoted back, to allow for those periodic bouts of idleness deep thinkers required for their important ideas.

The chair, which was heavier than it looked, was anchored in a metal base. Once upstairs, it lent his room an appealing seriousness. He sat in it and picked at the remaining tape on the desktop. He leaned back, to let his mind wander wherever his thoughts would go.

He must have fallen asleep, because he awoke to his father shouting. He went downstairs and found him in the study.

“My desk,” his father said plaintively.

Connell pulled at his shirt’s hem. “Mom said you wanted to leave it to me.”

“Yes,” he said. Tears were streaming down his face. “For you.” He pointed at Connell, jabbing him in the sternum. “You.”

“I brought it upstairs.”

“When I’m dead,” he said. “When I’m dead.”

The weight of a lifetime of kindnesses done him fell on Connell at once.

That night, when his mother told him to take it back downstairs, he felt almost relieved.

For a moment, he hoped that his father might forget it ever happened, but then he realized that the condition didn’t work like that. He forgot things you wanted him to remember. He remembered things you wanted him to forget.

• • •

The next day, he sat at his little desk again and tried to write Jenna a letter, but nothing came. He covered both sides of a sheet of paper with his signature, trying out different styles.

The weather was nice. He decided to try to take his father outside for a catch.

He found the gloves in a tote bag on which his father had written the family name multiple times in permanent marker during the period when he’d gone around labeling everything. The longer Connell looked at those insistent capital letters, the more they sounded like the cry of a drowning man.

His father had bought them both new gloves the year they’d moved in. Connell felt ashamed at how pristine his father’s looked, scuff-free and auburn-lustrous. They’d spent almost no time playing catch since. Connell’s glove was more worn, its leather cracked in places. When he’d quit baseball to do debate, the shift from body to mind had felt final. He hadn’t even considered taking his glove when he’d left for college.

He put a tennis ball in his glove’s pocket and led his father outside. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, he held his father’s glove out to him.

“Let’s play catch.”

His father could hardly hold the glove on his hand, so Connell decided to ditch the gloves. He stood him with his back to the wall and walked a few paces away, then bounced the ball to him, trying to get it as close to his hands as he could. When he didn’t catch it, Connell fetched it and placed it in his hands. His father couldn’t throw, but he could bounce it to him in a rudimentary way. He could tell his father was throwing because he would hold it for a while and then it would leave his hand.

• • •

He felt like he was losing his mind, or at least his intelligence, sitting there watching that much television with his father. He started spending most of his time in his room, reading novels, trying to drown out the noise of the television downstairs, and writing and rewriting a tortured letter to Jenna that got longer and longer the more he realized he’d never send it. He understood he was writing it for himself now, to try to figure out what had gone wrong with him, why he’d asked her to marry him in the first place. She was right: he was nineteen. He was embarrassed to think of how he’d behaved for most of the last semester — like a child and an old man all at once.

He heard his father cry out and dashed down and found him lying facedown in the kitchen. The runner was bunched up on the floor; he had evidently tripped on it. Connell rolled him over, saw that his mouth was bloody and that he’d broken one of his front teeth. Connell sat him up and soaked a dish towel and put it in his mouth. He saw the piece of tooth lying on the floor and laid it on the island. The quantity of blood on the bricks made Connell worry that his father might have bitten part of his tongue off, but when he forced his mouth open he saw that he had only cut his gums and split his lip. Blood pooled under his tongue. Connell leaned him over the sink and got him to spit, then sat him at the table. A broken plate rested facedown on the floor. He must have thrown it as he’d fallen. Connell gathered its halves and the plastic-wrapped sandwich into a saggy bundle that he deposited in the trash.

The runners formed little rolling hillocks. He had even slipped on them himself a couple of times. He remembered now — how had he forgotten it? — that his mother had asked him to buy double-sided tape to secure them to the floor.

He watched his father’s Adam’s apple rise and fall as his father swallowed blood. He gave him ice in a wet towel to suck on. After a while, he brought him up, got him changed, and returned him downstairs. He mopped the floor of the blood and put the piece of tooth in the little pocket of his jeans, because he couldn’t bring himself to throw it out and was too ashamed to leave it on the counter. Then he sat with his father on the couch and waited for his mother to come home and see what had become of both of them.

• • •

He heard the garage door. His mother came up the stairs carrying some bags of groceries. She handed them to him and slung her pocketbook onto the island. She told him to put them away.

“Leave that chicken out,” she said. “I’m going to make it.”

She called in “Hello” to his father and filled a glass with water. Connell emptied the bags purposefully, trying not to look at her. When there was nothing left to find a spot for, he turned to see her taking down a second glass of water with deliberate sips, as though it were medicine. She was looking at him over the glass.

“I might send you to the store for garlic,” she said. “I forgot to get garlic.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got to turn that down. I can’t hear myself think. Edmund!” she called again. “I’m home.”

She put her glass in the sink. There was a strange buoyancy in her step.

“Mom, wait.”

“What?”

“Something happened earlier. Dad got hurt.”

She started in his father’s direction. “What is it?” she asked with surprising panic in her voice. “What’s happened?”

She took the remote and lowered the volume on the television.

“What’s happened?” she asked again, sounding more alarmed than Connell had heard her sound, perhaps ever. “Are you going to tell me, or what?”

His father sat there like a statue, looking past her at the screen’s flashing, unaccompanied images.

“He fell down. I was out of the room. He landed hard on the bricks.”

“Let me look at you, Edmund. What did he hurt?”

“He fell on his face. Cut his chin. Broke his tooth.”

“Let me see your mouth, Edmund.”

His father sat stone-faced.

“Open up!” she said, sounding shrilly desperate. She turned to Connell. “How bad is it?”

“There was a lot of blood.”

“Open up!” she said. She sat on the couch and put her hand to his father’s mouth. She pried his lips open. He had his teeth squeezed shut, but Connell could see the space where his tooth had been. His mother didn’t turn and yell at him. She smoothed out his father’s hair and kissed his cheek.

“Oh, Edmund,” she said mutedly. “What are we going to do with you?”

“Nothing,” his father said finally. “Nothing. Leave me alone.”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off the television, but now he took one glance at Connell. There was embarrassment in the glance, but also something like a flash of defiance.

Connell waved his mother into the kitchen. She didn’t follow him right away. He stood away from the doorway while he waited for her, because he didn’t want his father to see him. He was ashamed.

The volume went back up, and a few moments later his mother came in.

“What is it?”

“I don’t think I can do this,” Connell said, his hands against the edge of the countertop.

“Do what?”

“This thing with Dad. I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

He looked down. “He fell. That’s all.”

“Well, you just have to keep a better eye on him.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think I can do it. I thought I could do it. But I can’t. It’s too hard for me. It’s too much.”

“I did it when I was ten years old.”

“But I’m not you,” he said. “That’s the problem right there.”

“Well, that’s just terrific,” she said. She motioned for him to move and took a cutting board out of the cabinet below.

“It’s driving me crazy,” he said.

“What do you think it’s doing to me?”

“You go to work.”

“I never go anywhere,” she said. “All day long, I’m right here in my mind.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

She sliced through the thin layer of plastic on the chicken. “Don’t worry about disappointing me. Worry about leaving me in the lurch. I need help, goddammit!”

“I can get a job. Bring some money in. You can pay someone with it.”

“Keep your money,” she said. “You’re going to need it for therapy later.”

“That’s cold.”

“I thought it would be good for him, for you”—she pointed with the knife—“if you were around. If it’s not, it’s not.”

“I wish I could do it,” he said.

“You can,” she said. “You just don’t know it.” She had started to cut the chicken, but she set the knife down. “Here,” she said. “You do this. You think you can handle it? Or you want me to find someone else to do this too?”

He felt the blood drain from his face. His mother seemed to notice. “Thin slices, across the breast,” she said a little more softly. She went to the refrigerator and brought back some broccoli. “Cut this when you’re done with that. Small pieces. My feet ache.” Then she went into the living room. He cut the chicken and rinsed the broccoli, but before cutting the latter he went to the doorway and leaned into the dining room to look at her. She had her legs up on the couch. She was holding one of the sheer curtains aside with one hand and rubbing at her foot with the other. She was looking out at the street and didn’t notice him there. He had an impulse to tell her he would rub her feet for her. When he was a kid, she would ask him to rub them, and he would grumble his way through it, because she worked all day and her feet were clammy and smelly. Her feet had only gotten more forbidding over the years, the soles tougher, the cracks deeper, but he wanted to rub them and not complain. He couldn’t find a way to tell her what he was thinking, so he just looked at her for a while. It seemed she was watching for something. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her sitting there. When they first moved in, she sat there all the time.

He went back to the broccoli and cut it with heavy chops, because he remembered her saying she found the sound a knife made on a cutting board satisfying. When he was done he hacked at the bare board for a while, rhythmically so that it would sound like the real thing. He went into the living room. She had stopped rubbing her feet. She wasn’t looking out the window anymore but was sitting on the couch. She gave him a weary glance as he approached.

“What is it?”

“Can I help?”

“You chopped the broccoli?” He nodded. She let out a faint sigh. “I’ll be in to cook. Just leave everything there.”

“Can I help with your feet?”

“My feet?”

“Do you want me to rub them?”

She had a wry expression on, as if she was weighing making a dry remark. Then she seemed to consider it further. “You’re offering to rub them,” she said dubiously.

He thought of the gap in his father’s mouth, the pool of blood under his father’s tongue.

It had been years since he’d touched his mother’s feet. He had half expected he’d never touch them again.

“Yes,” he said.

She raised her brows. “That would be nice,” she said.

He settled into the couch and took one foot in his lap as he used to. He was almost queasy with embarrassment at his proximity to her. He pressed a tentative hand against the ball of her foot. It was all there, the familiar moistness, the tufts of knuckle hair, the burst blisters, the gunky nails.

“Is your father all right?” she asked.

“He’s fine. Just watching TV.”

She seemed to relax, let her head fall against the pillow. He gave himself over to the task, using both hands to apply the proper pressure. Somehow he’d always been good at this. He’d had a certain amount of practice. His father would be busy in the study and his mother would put down the paper and ask if he’d rub her feet. There was something sweetly cajoling in the way she told him that she never sat down at work; it was the only time she ever behaved that way around him. Now, even more than before, he saw the evidence of what she’d been talking about. There was a history of her career in the bulging veins, the cramped muscles, the corns and bunions, the calluses and cracks. She wore neat shoes, but they covered a sprawling account of an overtaxed life, and there was no hiding the truth when she took them off.

He went after the pain, tried to free it up. She gave a muted cry of relief. He would be a disappointment to her later, when she remembered how he had failed her, but for now she was probably only thinking that she didn’t want him to stop. He had more strength in his hands than he used to. He used to ask to quit and she would wheedle another minute out of him and he would say he was tired and she would give in, but now he wouldn’t tire so easily. He would let her be the one to tell him when she’d had enough. The television roared in the other room. He brought her other foot up so that he could move between the two feet. He thought of the tooth in his pocket. There was a chance this would be the last time in her life that she’d have her feet rubbed, because circumstances might not conspire again to bring them together like this. There was a limit to his ability to reach out to her. It was easier with girlfriends. He was always offering to rub their feet. He threw all his affection at them and hoped that some of it would stick, maybe even come back to him, though if it didn’t he gave it anyway, he gave it more, even, because everyone had something that needed to come out.

75

She wasn’t going to be able to rely on her son, but she didn’t want to just bring another nurse in. The time had come to approach the problem differently. The fact was, she was handcuffed to Ed. Everything she did when she wasn’t at work, she had to do with him. What she needed was someone who would be there more of the time and in a more unstructured way, who could free her up to have a bit of a life; someone who could effortlessly pick up Ed when he fell. Maybe this person could even help around the house in a handyman capacity. Maybe what she’d needed in the house from the beginning had been a man.

• • •

If she was going to bring someone in full-time, she had to find the money to pay for it. She decided to take advantage of the fact that mortgage rates had gone down significantly since she and Ed had bought the house. She refinanced to bring her rate down from 10.3 percent to just over 8 percent, which gave her a little more to work with every month.

She put out feelers at work and posted flyers, but she didn’t get any promising leads. Then one of her nurses, Nadya Karpov, said her older brother Sergei was reliable and strong — too strong, Nadya said, to be driving a cab nights. He didn’t have nursing experience and he was in his fifties, but she thought he’d be good at it, as he was patient and calm. He didn’t have a car and he lived in Brighton Beach, but he was willing to make the long trip on the A train and the Metro-North. Eileen knew the nine hundred dollars a week she was offering would be a significant raise. The amount was just shy of what Ed’s pension and Social Security payments added up to, after taxes. Nadya said Sergei would probably jump at the chance to spend part of the week in Westchester and get away from her sister-in-law. “She’s Russian,” Nadya said simply, with raised brows, and Eileen nodded back, as if she knew something about the terror of Russian wives.

“We’re having company today,” she said to Ed shortly before Sergei was scheduled to arrive with Nadya for an interview. “A friend from work and her brother. Sergei’s his name. I think you’re going to like him. He’s excited to meet you. He doesn’t have many friends in the area. They’re from Russia. So I’ll need you to show him a good time.” After she’d said this, Ed sat at the kitchen table and wouldn’t move. She wanted him in the den, out of the way, to give Sergei a few minutes to walk around and get acquainted with the place. She could bring him in to meet Ed after he’d seen how nice everything was, what kind of people she and Ed were. But Ed wouldn’t budge. She could already envision the scene — Sergei in the house less than a minute, Ed wringing his hands and wailing, decision flashing across Sergei’s face: this is too much, too weird, too uncomfortable, he’ll find something else, it’s nice to meet you and your husband. Then he would say a polite good-bye, would leave her with Ed again, with Connell drifting through like a ghost until he flew back to school.

She tried to entice Ed into the den with a plate of cheese and crackers, but he just muttered at the kitchen table. She waved to him, patted the pillow at her side. Something must have told him she was plotting a betrayal.

She turned the television off and joined him in the kitchen. She put some potpourri on, as if she was trying to sell the house, and in a way she was. She understood that Russians were big readers. Maybe Sergei would get a kick out of all Ed’s books. Maybe they’d stoke a fire in him to work on his English, make his way through the rows.

She poured a glass of wine and tried to read the paper but kept staring at the same sentence over and over. When the doorbell rang, she leapt from her seat and rushed to adjust Ed’s collar, which was pointed up. Through the glass she saw Nadya smiling broadly, her brother hulking behind her. Sergei doffed his cap as he crossed the threshold, seeming to fill the room. He shook her hand, then walked over and did the same with Ed’s. A bald patch rested on top and gray nibbled at the sides of his head, but otherwise Sergei was the picture of virility: a ruddy glow, hair sprouting out of his collared shirt, a quiet formality about him, even in his jeans and leather jacket. He was shorter than Ed but bigger in the trunk.

“What a beautiful house!” Nadya gushed. “What a beautiful neighborhood! Isn’t it beautiful, Sergei?”

He nodded. Eileen invited them to sit and took their coats into the den. When she returned, Nadya was seated beside Ed, Sergei across from him. Nadya was looking at Ed with sensitive eyes, though Eileen had told her to play it like a regular visit. The relief was how calmly Sergei was carrying it. He too wore a compassionate expression, but he was sitting back, giving Ed space. His bearing said he understood something of what Ed was going through. His hands reminded her of her father’s. She could picture those hands grabbing barrels of beer from a truck, securing a big metal hook to their rings, and dropping them into cellars. She could see Sergei jamming metal rods into barrels to tap them without getting his head knocked off by the pressure they released.

She left Ed with Nadya and gave Sergei a tour of the house. In the spare bedroom she heard the floorboards creak under him, and for a moment she was sure he would break through, that the house couldn’t bear his weight.

• • •

Ed woke up raving at three in the morning. She tried to rub his head, but he batted her hand away and seethed through his teeth. Then she felt the wetness of the sheets. He might have drained his entire bladder into the bed. She was careful about making him pee right before sleep, but maybe she’d forgotten. It wasn’t the first time. It had gotten to the point where she could sleep, and felt comfortable letting him sleep, in a little wetness of the sheets. This was a full-on soaking, though.

For a few days, she’d experimented with putting adult diapers on him before they went to bed. He complained about the way they cinched his waist and the loud crackling noise whenever he moved, but the real problem, she understood, was the humiliation he felt wearing them. One night he took them off and peed the bed anyway. She gave up trying to get him to wear them after that.

Moaning, flushed with agitation, Ed left the bed and began to roam mindlessly, bent on something inscrutable. She alternated between securing a corner of the fresh sheet and shooing him away from the stairs so he didn’t spill down them. When she was done, she tugged the T-shirt off him, but he wouldn’t let her change his underwear. She was too tired to argue, so she let him crawl sopping into the clean sheets. She didn’t sleep the rest of the night; her hand kept drifting over to his underwear to feel if it had dried.

• • •

She cleaned the house top to bottom in preparation for Sergei’s arrival. She felt nervous taking a strange man into her home. It was a Sunday, the start of his work week. She’d never liked Sunday evenings, which filled her with a creeping dread that went back to grammar school.

In the days leading up to Sergei’s arrival, she mentioned him often, casually, hoping through these hints to make his presence in their lives seem natural in Ed’s mind. She felt the way she imagined Ed must have felt when he used to condition his lab rats with tiny, nonfatal doses of pure cocaine. “Sergei is going to help us around the house,” she said. “Sergei is going to take care of a few things for us.” “Sergei will be here on Sunday.” “Sergei might stay the week.”

That morning, after they stopped in at Mass for a few minutes, she walked Ed around town for two hours. He behaved better when he was tired. Still, when she answered the bell and led Sergei in, Ed said, “No, no!” again and again, until he wasn’t speaking anymore but yelling in a high-pitched wail that sounded like a baby’s cry.

“This man is here to help us,” she said. “Can I tell you something?” His face was turning purple. “This man is not here for you. Do you understand? He’s here so I don’t have to worry about you when I’m not here. He’s here for me.”

He began to quiet down, and the violent color drained from his face, and he looked as if he could breathe again.

• • •

She woke in the middle of the night to find Ed half on top of her trying to make something happen. She wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing, or if he was even awake at all. She lay him down, calmed his pounding heart, and got on top. It was awkward and a little heartbreaking, but the blood still raced through her veins, and it was more attention than some of her friends had gotten in years.

• • •

Sergei stayed until she got home from work on Friday. She might have been able to give him less than nine hundred a week, but she wanted to convey the gravity of the job in the pay, and she was taking this man from his home, his wife, even if Nadya said he was happy to get away.

Sergei’s main job was to cook Ed’s meals and keep him company. Friday evenings were awkward; the transactional nature of the relationship couldn’t be avoided. She counted out a pile of fifties and handed them over in a folded stack, avoiding Sergei’s eyes. Some Fridays he finished watching a program with Ed before departing. Others, he was waiting by the door when she arrived. Even when he seemed content to chat, he didn’t speak much, owing to his poor command of English. In that respect, he and Ed made a good pair. She imagined them grunting at each other like cavemen when she wasn’t there. It wasn’t the worst thought in the world. She may have had to act disgusted if it happened around her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take private delight in the idea of it.

76

His mother wondered what he was still doing there, why he hadn’t gone back to school. The truth was, he was okay thinking of himself as a screwup, but he wasn’t comfortable thinking of himself as a sociopath. To just leave like that, to turn his back utterly — this would be too much for him to take. He wanted to think he was a better person than that, so he stuck around. He told his mother that he would be there to help when he could but that he didn’t want to be primarily responsible for his father, and she told him not to bother. Eventually he just said he was sticking around because he didn’t want to go back to Chicago for the summer.

• • •

One morning over breakfast he told his mother that he was going to go in to see his old teacher, Mr. Corso.

“That’s nice,” she said in the flat tone she’d assumed for talking to him now that he’d made his decision.

“I thought I could get some direction from him. Maybe he could help me figure a few things out.”

“That’s not something you go to your teacher for,” she said, abandoning her flat affect. “That’s something you bring to your father. He’s still your father.”

“I don’t know what I’d say to him. I don’t know how I’d explain any of it.”

“What are you planning to say to your teacher, then?”

“Mr. Corso knows how to figure things out fast.”

“There’s no one who figures things out faster than your father.”

“Come on, Mom. Dad’s not himself.”

“Your father is still the person to go to with this. I don’t care how great Mr. Corso is. Is he King Solomon? Is he Marcus Aurelius? If not, then you talk to your father. He’s still here.”

• • •

They sat in Mr. Corso’s trophy-stuffed office, surrounded by photos of past teams and Mr. Corso standing with students who’d made good — a prominent attorney, a major Hollywood executive. He wasn’t sure what he was there for — support, direction, or just to be near the man for a while. Connell remembered seeing ex-students in Mr. Corso’s office when he was a student. It wasn’t hard to understand why they returned even decades later. Mr. Corso was the kind of man who knew how to cook a perfect steak at his summer house in Breezy Point and explain why Dostoyevsky beat Tolstoy on points after ten rounds. If all of life was a competition for Mr. Corso, somehow he seemed to draft everyone around him for his team.

“I still can’t believe you quit playing ball,” Mr. Corso said, leaning back into the red leather of his chair with his hands locked behind his head. “An arm like yours. And to join the army that talks you to death.”

Mr. Corso hadn’t stopped needling him since his sophomore year, when, just before baseball season started, Connell decided to switch to debate. Mr. Corso liked to argue over ideas almost as much as Mr. Kotowski, Connell’s debate coach, did, but after school he assisted the varsity baseball coach, strategizing on the bench as he crunched sunflower seeds. He had a friendly rivalry with Mr. Kotowski, who had stamped generations of students with his trademark brand of razor-edged hyperarticulateness, and who, Mr. Corso liked to grumble, mined his freshman speech class for prospects. Between them, they seemed to divide the world.

“I declared an English major,” Connell said. “I wanted to thank you. You had a lot to do with that.”

Mr. Corso laughed and rocked in his chair, the springs creaking beneath his weight. “Don’t come crying to me in twenty years when you look at your bank statement.”

He shifted forward, knitting his hands together at the front end of his desk. Connell could see the pink dots of his peeling tan. His eyes were keen and probing, soft brows hovering above them. His craggy, pockmarked face gave him extra gravity and toughness. Connell spent his sophomore year afraid of Mr. Corso, after he quit baseball, but when it was time to pick his senior elective he chose Mr. Corso’s modernist literature class. After a semester of Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, and The Sound and the Fury, what Connell remembered best were those bits of fatherly wisdom Mr. Corso slipped into his lessons. One time he explained the impact supply and demand had on pricing by asking them to imagine approaching a hot dog vendor with a lone dog floating in his cart as rain began to fall. “What do you think he’d take for it?” Connell remembered him asking. “You think the price of things is chiseled into tablets handed down from a cloud?”

“Where are you working this summer?”

“I came home to help with my father,” Connell said nervously, “but I don’t think I’m up to playing nursemaid. You know?”

Mr. Corso looked at him in silence for a few moments. “What makes you think it’s okay to drop the ball like this?”

“My mother’s bringing someone in,” Connell said nervously. “It’s the best thing for everyone.”

“Your family is good people,” Mr. Corso said with a slight growl in his voice. “You don’t have a clue yet what that means in life, do you?”

Connell looked away. Another silence followed.

“Those guys you debated with. Do they have summer jobs?”

“More like paid internships,” Connell said. “At blue-chip companies.”

“Do you want to work?”

Connell guessed that was why he was sitting across from Mr. Corso, though it wasn’t clear until now that that had been his purpose. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I need a job.”

“Can you do real work?”

Mr. Corso drummed his fingers on his desk. The tips were fat, and the nails were neatly trimmed. Another silence followed, in which Connell felt the hair on his arms and bare legs rise in the air-conditioned office.

“Sure.”

“The super of a nearby building on Park called to offer summer relief jobs to our graduating seniors. Doorman, porter.”

He fingered through a pile on his desk and pulled out a piece of paper as if he’d known where it had been all along.

“Does this guy have a son?” Connell asked.

Mr. Corso chuckled. “Poor kid’s only ten. They’re starting the application process early these days.”

Connell tried to hide his embarrassment at being offered this job. “You want me to go break the news to him that you can’t buy your way in here?”

“Better keep that under wraps,” Mr. Corso said, folding the paper into thirds and handing it to Connell in an official manner. “If you do a good job, we should be able to make this a regular tradition for — what — five more summers at least? Maybe beyond if the kid gets in here. We’ll call it the Connell Leary Memorial Fellowship in honor of your deceased athletic career.”

77

Connell was stationed in the basement, beside one of four service elevators, where he waited for the buzzer to ring and the indicator to light up and tell him his fortune. Gate shut, he shot up to the proper floor, to shuttle nannies to the laundry room and shareholders to the little fiefdoms of their storage cages.

There were some Albanian guys down there with him — college-aged but not in college, or a little older. Connell saw in the snappy way they spoke to Mr. Marku that they had ambitions to make it up to the lobby. Some of them were rough-looking; others, the more recent immigrants, didn’t speak English all that well. He knew he’d have had a better shot at promotion than any of them, if only he trimmed his unruly hair and shaved his scraggly goatee, but he didn’t care. He was just passing through, and he was pretty sure Mr. Marku had taken one look at him and known he’d felt that way.

He was summoned by a gorgeous au pair. While she moved her employers’ sheets to the dryer, he fantasized about going in and seducing her, then stopping the elevator between floors and having sex in it. After he’d returned her upstairs, he stood on the landing imagining the bedrooms on the other side of the door. He went down to the basement and sat in the chair thinking about her, until he rose and headed to the stall in the locker room. Sadik interrupted him, banging on the door, and he didn’t finish.

He put the garbage can in the elevator and went to the top floor to do a run, dumping the contents of their cans into his own. Ancient Mrs. Braverman on the twelfth floor opened her door and handed him a Coke from a mini fridge filled with them. She seemed to remain alive for the sole purpose of bestowing little gifts on the porters. The strange tenement squalor of her digs disconcerted him, the old abandoned furniture, the peeling wallpaper. There was none of the splendor he saw in other apartments, the slabs of stone stretched across kitchen islands as big as docks on a lake. She had kids but they never visited. Money was not a guarantor of dignity.

His presence surprised Mr. Caldecott in 10B when the latter opened his door to toss his garbage bag into the big can. Mr. Caldecott hurried out of there. Connell felt like a Peeping Tom a flashlight had settled on. The feeling wasn’t unfounded: even the proudest of porters from time to time did what Connell had done the previous day, when, once he’d taken it to the basement, he’d gone through the garbage and paper recycling, in search less of salvageable goods than of documentary evidence of the power the shareholders wielded — bank statements, work memos, eye-popping receipts, all the marvelous details of their lives.

In the afternoon, the building settled into a postlunch siesta and he leaned against the painted brick wall next to the service elevator to read Invisible Man. Instead of a brilliant campaign against Monopolated Light & Power, he was stuck with severe stretches of hallway intermittently punctuated by feeble fluorescence. The elevator car contained the only source of incandescent light, a single exposed bulb. For a few minutes he placed the chair directly in the car, but he lost his nerve the first time he heard footfalls down the hall.

Officially, he wasn’t supposed to be reading at all. The activity was tolerated as long as it wasn’t comfortable. And so he stood for hours on the threshold of the elevator and stashed the book when he heard someone approach. Whenever Mr. Marku passed — he was in a generous mood that day, announcing his presence with a stagy, whistled tune — Connell trained his gaze on the light-up panel like a laboratory monkey waiting for an experimenter’s stimulus. One time, though, Connell didn’t lose the book quickly enough. Mr. Marku didn’t give orders or ask questions. He just announced what Connell would do, as though he possessed powers of psychic intuition. “You’ll go outside and sweep the perimeter,” he said. “Then you’ll go to the store and get me a Marlboro Lights hard pack and a six pack of Heineken.” (The first time Mr. Marku told him to buy beer, Connell said he wasn’t old enough, and Mr. Marku replied — accurately, it turned out—“When they see you in that outfit, nobody asks questions.”) “When you’re back you’ll start on those fire stairs.” No one ever used the fire stairs, but Connell had mopped them three times already that week. There were four sets to mop, sixteen flights each. They never gathered any dust.

78

It was an unusually warm night. The musk of the flowers she’d planted rose up as she walked from the car. Sergei was standing at the back of the house, smoking under a clear, star-filled sky. She greeted him awkwardly, unsure of whether to invite him in, as he could come in on his own when he was finished. It almost seemed he had been waiting for her.

She went upstairs. A while later, his quick, hacking cough announced his presence inside. It was strange to hear a man in the house when her husband was in the bed next to her. Since Sergei arrived, she’d been able to sleep through the night. She wasn’t even bothered by Ed’s nocturnal ravings anymore; she just stayed in bed with a foothold in sleep and let him walk around the room.

She heard Sergei climb the stairs. She lay in bed awake listening to the quiet voices and laugh track from his television, and his own occasional muffled laughter.

It was a mystery what happened in Sergei’s room after he closed the door. She’d gone in when he wasn’t around and found little more than was present when she’d first turned the room over to him. There was the television, the radio, the armchair, and the side table. There was a small stack of Russian volumes in English translation, a Russian-to-English dictionary, a bottle of aftershave, and the suitcase he lived out of. And there was the bed, of course.

From deep within her, she felt a tremor of unwelcome desire rumble up. She lay there trying to ignore it, but it seized her attention so thoroughly that she felt a buzzing in her fingertips, the room became stiflingly hot, and the sheets lost their softness and scratched at her skin. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, even though it felt like a betrayal, even though Ed was sleeping next to her, she began to touch herself, something she hadn’t done in years, and she didn’t stop until she had brought herself off with a little involuntary cry that sounded vaguely mournful to her ears, after which she lay taking quick, dry breaths and feeling a tingling lack of satisfaction. An attempt at a second round produced no results.

79

Connell hadn’t heard Mr. Marku coming, and when he looked up from the book and saw him standing there, he let out a strangled yelp.

“Come to my office,” Mr. Marku said. Connell rose to follow him. “First, tie up those newspapers.”

When Connell entered, Mr. Marku was staring at the wall-length aquarium.

“You read a lot,” he said.

Connell nodded nervously.

“You’ve heard of Camus’s The Fall.”

He suspected a trap. Mr. Marku always dropped his bombs at the end of a shift, when you had little time to react. Connell was in Mr. Marku’s doghouse for coming in late on a seven-to-three shift on a Saturday. He had thought that Mr. Marku never slept, that he had cameras trained on every entrance and exit, until he figured out that Sadik had ratted on him. The guys built up capital however they could.

“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t read it.”

Mr. Marku was proud of the year he’d spent at Iona College before family responsibilities forced him to drop out. More than once he’d mentioned that he’d planned to be an English major.

“It’s a parable of hell,” Mr. Marku said. “The devil is this bartender.” He just waved his hand. “It’s too much to get into.” He knocked a smoke out of his pack and lighted it in the windowless office. “You’ll come in Wednesday at six forty-five in the morning.” He handed him a bundle of folded clothes. “You’ll wear this doorman uniform. You’ll shave.”

80

As Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw Connell coming up the hill. Most nights he came home after midnight, and sometimes, when he didn’t have to work the next morning, when the sun was rising. Eileen rolled down her window.

“There’s chicken in the fridge.” She expected him to wave and keep walking, but he stopped.

“Where are you going?”

She turned to Bethany, who took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“Out for a while,” she said. “There are potatoes too. Just put one in the microwave.”

• • •

When she came home, Sergei was waiting in the kitchen, sipping from a cup of what looked like coffee, but it could have contained vodka for all she knew.

“Hard work today,” he said.

“Is everything okay?”

“In Russia, even, I don’t work this hard.”

“What’s up? What happened?”

“Is no good to talk about it.”

“Is Ed okay?”

“He is asleep.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“I don’t mind to work hard,” he said. “But he is very hard work.”

He said it with a whistle that indicated a certain professional appreciation. She nodded in solidarity.

“He wipe shit on walls in bathroom,” he said. “I clean it up. Between tiles. Is all gone.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You mind if I…?” He had taken out his pack and already had a cigarette in his mouth. He was flicking the lighter absently.

“Let’s go outside,” she said.

They stood on the patio and he lit the cigarette. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. He pulled on his cigarette and looked at her. Behind it his eyes smoldered. He was stocky and his hair was thick where it wasn’t sparse. He stood in the middle of the patio but seemed to take up much of its space.

“You want?” he asked, extending the pack.

“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“Try,” he said. “One time. Is very relaxing.”

She had never had a cigarette. Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things — except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma mixed with his cologne and sweat, and the taste of it in his mouth and the rush she got when she kissed him just after he’d had one. But the memory of watching her mother smoke had permanently soured her on them. Her stomach turned whenever she saw a full ashtray; she imagined being made to eat it, butt by butt, and gagging on the ashes.

“Fine,” she said, and she took a cigarette from him. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve. She reached her hand out for the lighter, but he just took his own cigarette out of his mouth, lit hers from the flaming tip of his own, and handed it to her.

“You have to light it right,” he said.

She took a few breaths without disturbance. Sergei told her to take a deeper puff, and she did so, looking at him for confirmation. He was smiling an amused smile. Her lungs filled with heat and she fell into a loud cough.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

“This always happens,” he said.

“Usually to teenagers,” she said. “Not to fifty-four-year-old women.”

“It happened to me,” he said smoothly. “You are not fifty-four.”

“I am.”

“You may have fifty-four years”—he was gesturing in an inscrutable way that she assumed would have conveyed more to a Russian native—“but you are not fifty-four.”

She blushed. “I think I’m done with this,” she said, dropping it and stepping on it. It was nearly the whole cigarette, and her embarrassment made her kick it behind her toward the house.

“You work very hard,” Sergei said, continuing to smoke. “My wife has no job for thirty years.”

“Thank you,” she said, absurdly. Talking to Sergei made her uneasy. At first she thought it was the language barrier, but now she was beginning to think it was something else, a tension rooted in the strangeness of having a man living in her house.

“I didn’t want to have job past sixty,” he said, finishing his cigarette and stepping on the butt. They went back inside. Sergei sat at the table glancing at the newspaper while she put dishes away.

She didn’t hear him on the stairs, and her back was to him when he entered, but there was no mistaking that Ed had joined them, because her stomach seized in nervous anxiety. She heard the clicking sound he made when he was trying to get words out, like the distress call of a bird.

Sergei put down the paper and gave him a long-suffering look.

“Why don’t you sit and I’ll make you some tea,” she said.

“My,” Ed stammered, and the clicking became more desperate.

“Ed, honey. Please.”

Sergei held up a hand to silence her. He gestured for Ed to take his seat as he rose and passed out of the room. She heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs and unconsciously poured the water out of the kettle she’d been heating instead of filling the cup she’d set out. The steam rose from the sink. When she’d caught herself, there wasn’t enough left for a full cup.

“Look what you made me do,” she said.

Ed calmed down once Sergei had left the room. He sat where Sergei had been and shook his head, continuing to click, but in a softer way, like a cooing bird. “No,” he stammered, quietly.

“It’s okay,” Eileen stood behind him and rubbed his back. “It’s okay.”

“Mine,” he said.

81

The summer uniform had short sleeves and no jacket, but the pants were a thick wool-poly blend, and he wasn’t allowed to take off his hat. There was no air-conditioning in the atrium, so they opened all the doors to the enclosed quadrangle and hoped for a breeze.

The one benefit to the heat was that it kept many of the residents away from the city. He ushered their mounds of bags and cartloads of hanging clothes into Range Rovers and Jeeps, and they handed him ten bucks and headed for the Hamptons or Long Beach Island. Even Mr. Marku went out of town for the weekend. He came into the lobby with his golf clubs and polo shirts on Friday afternoons and said to get his car, his sweat fresh with aftershave. Connell loved when Mr. Marku was away, because it was safe to read in the open.

The shareholders who remained in town weren’t much trouble. There was the shipping magnate of Olympian means who spread the last scant lengths of hair across his glossy pate. He hustled through the lobby with his head down, polite and preoccupied, as though he were sorry for trespassing. Then there were the younger sharks who hadn’t yet acquired a house in the Hamptons. They talked sports with Connell, checked out women with him, and as long as he didn’t act as though they were equals, they didn’t pull rank. They hailed their own cabs, told him to stay in his chair when he rose at the sound of their approach, but if he took for granted that they would, they cracked him into action with a chilly look, all camaraderie forgotten.

Mr. Shanahan in 12C was probably the most successful shareholder in the building. He wasn’t the richest — that was the shipping magnate — but he was the one who held the most power. He was in charge of an investment bank. He had the sort of reassuringly large cranium common to movie stars, and perfect teeth, and very little body fat, and he treated the doormen more like regular people than probably anyone else in the building. It wasn’t a shock to learn that he’d been a doorman once himself, in college.

Mr. Shanahan spent a lot of time with his son Chase, who was home from boarding school for the summer. Mr. Shanahan got dropped off in a town car and met Chase for lunch. Sometimes he came home early and reappeared in the lobby a little while later with the boy, both of them in jogging outfits. They stretched in the courtyard before they went out for a run in Central Park, and they did push-ups there afterward. They weren’t technically supposed to be in the courtyard doing that, but everyone looked the other way because Mr. Shanahan was such a good guy and never got to see his kid during the year.

Sometimes Mr. Shanahan and Chase sat on the bench in the lobby while one or the other tied his shoes on the way out or caught his breath on the way back in. They teased each other in a good-natured, prep school sort of way, and Mr. Shanahan took evident pride in the boy, who, at a couple of inches over six feet, was almost as tall as Mr. Shanahan himself, even though he was only fifteen. Whenever they left the lobby in the beginnings of a jog, Connell felt a jolt of yearning.

All in all, Connell liked being upstairs. In the early afternoons, though, when the sun washed the lobby in clarifying light, and the thick, humid air muffled the car horns, he was set upon by remorse. Not only had he abandoned his father to a stranger, he had cost his mother unnecessarily by doing so. She was paying Sergei twice what he was earning at the building, and to do a job that Connell should have done free of charge. There had to be a way of looking at it that wasn’t so dark. There had to be an explanation for his selfishness. Maybe something was going on that was too big for him to see. Mr. Grossman, his junior year English teacher, had lectured one day about how the Oedipal complex worked in Hamlet. Hamlet didn’t understand all the forces that conspired in his own mind, the conflicting desires and obligations. Losing a father early, being given all that responsibility, Mr. Grossman said, had made it hard for Hamlet to act. Maybe something like that was working in Connell’s mind too, something big, something hidden. He was afraid he would never see it clearly.

82

She scheduled a solo session. Bethany picked her up and brought her to that too.

To assert ownership of the transaction, Eileen tried to present Rachelle the check when she walked in, but Rachelle cannily brushed it away and told her they could handle that later. Rachelle had her sit in the middle of the living room. It struck Eileen that no sign of Rachelle appeared in the pictures on the walls, that it could have been a house lent for the meetings by one of her acolytes.

They got quickly to work. Bethany sat close to her and held her hand as they listened to Vywamus speak. Eileen could almost physically feel the web of rhetoric being spun around her, but she relaxed in Bethany’s grip regardless.

“The true story of your husband is more complex than it appears,” Vywamus said effortfully, trailing into a long cough, as if Rachelle hadn’t gotten into character yet. Eileen liked to think she was above superstition, but she could feel herself hoping that Vywamus wouldn’t pronounce anything bad. “You only know him in this life, but your son and he have been struggling for many lives. This time around, your son has the intellect and the emotions. Your husband has only the intellect. He is fighting for his soul.”

“Really?” Eileen said doubtfully. The assessment of Ed was off base, and Eileen wanted to challenge it on principle. Anyone who knew Ed knew he felt things deeply, but how was she supposed to go about reasoning with Vywamus?

“But he is doing good things for himself,” Vywamus said. “He is putting others before himself.”

She thought of how Ed prayed for Connell and herself and not his own salvation. Maybe there was something to what Vywamus was saying. Or maybe Rachelle knew that letting Eileen leave with bad feelings might hurt her business.

“Your son left because he was angry at his father.”

“Funny,” she said. “I thought he left to go to college.”

She tried a smile, but Vywamus would have none of it. “He has been battling your husband for thousands of years.”

The whole act was so absurd, so transparent, but Eileen decided to shut off the critical voice in her head. She chose to let her mind be soaked in Rachelle’s narcotic wash of words. Eileen knew that she was the one actually spinning the web. For a couple of hundred dollars a week, she was being given the gift she needed more than any other: to be taken out of her life.

“It seems like that sometimes,” she said.

“You are guarded,” Vywamus said. “This is because of certain childhood experiences. We both know what these are, and I need not utter them now. You must open a window in your heart. There is a need for fresh air in your soul. You need to reach out to those you care about and give them a loving embrace. Remember that touch plays a crucial role in how we communicate love.”

“Okay.” She had the feeling of listening to a deathbed monologue. She felt strangely poised to carry out whatever Vywamus called for.

“You have a good child. And a good husband. This battle of his has nothing to do with how he feels about you. In this life, you have helped his soul.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

83

On a slow afternoon in early August, Mr. Marku snapped his fingers as he passed and motioned for Connell to follow him downstairs. They entered the office, and Connell sat on the worn leather couch as Mr. Marku yelled at a contractor on the phone. He watched clown fish and angelfish chase each other through the coral in the saltwater aquarium and had one of those crystallizing insights into the order of things that always seemed less profound a few hours later. The guy wanted weekend access so his workers could finish sooner, and Mr. Marku wouldn’t give it up. The doormen and porters took it for granted that Mr. Marku let his palm get greased for things like this, but as Connell listened to Mr. Marku standing this man down, he considered the radical idea that sometimes there wasn’t a cynical story to uncover, that Mr. Marku was probably just a man of principle.

He thought of his mother and the phone conversations he’d been eavesdropping on. He felt guilty listening in, but he couldn’t help it, because when he was around, his mother was so squirrelly about not talking to whoever this lady was, this friend of Bethany’s. His guilt turned to anger that his mother was getting taken for a ride.

Because Mr. Marku knew everybody, he probably knew the kind of people who could strike some fear in the heart of this lady, make her leave his mother alone. A couple of men would show up at her door, and they wouldn’t have to say much.

Mr. Marku hung up and leaned back in his chair. He lit a cigarette and gave Connell a long look that betrayed no malice, which made it more intimidating. He never prefaced anything with pleasantries; it was always speeches.

“You don’t shave, I give you a razor and tell you to shave,” he said. “You take long lunches, I say he’s a growing boy. You talk too much to the shareholders, I say I’m glad he speaks such good English. But when you don’t wear the hat; when you don’t wear the hat, and you’re standing in front of me…”

“Are you letting me go?”

“Not yet, I’m not,” Mr. Marku said. “I told your teacher I’d keep an eye on you, whip you into shape. You’re coming back down here to work.”

84

She added a weekly phone call to the Tuesday night groups and the Thursday night solo session. The rate was cheaper for the telephone session, one twenty-five an hour.

One day Connell sat at the table giving her dirty looks while she was talking to Rachelle. She tried to shoo him away, because she felt too self-conscious with him there, but he wouldn’t leave, and she told Rachelle she’d call back.

“What’s going on?” he asked when she hung up.

“What?”

“What’s up with Bethany?”

“Nothing, why?”

“I saw a show about this the other day. They’ll take you for everything you have. People end up homeless.”

“Look at this kitchen,” she said. “Look at that countertop. Does it look to you like I’m going to be homeless?”

The next time Bethany came to pick her up to go to Rachelle’s, a strange mood hung in the air. Connell came into the kitchen, followed by Sergei, and then the two of them went down to the basement. When she called down to say she was leaving, she got no reply. As Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw the garage door rising and Connell pulling out with Sergei in the passenger seat. It was something she hadn’t seen before, the two of them in the car together, and she spent the whole trip wondering where they could have been going. She usually enjoyed these rides to Rachelle’s, singing along with Bethany to pop radio, but she was distracted by the thought of Ed in that house alone, even if he was already asleep when she left.

The bell rang as she was settling into the floor. When Bethany opened the door, Eileen saw Connell and Sergei there. Connell started to enter. “Excuse me, young man,” Bethany said as she tried to stop his advance, but Sergei moved her aside with an effortless sweep of the arm and followed him in.

“What are you doing here?” Eileen asked.

“I wanted to see where you went.”

“You followed me?”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but I don’t like it.”

She was oddly comforted to see him there. She felt, for a moment, as if she wasn’t on her own.

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s home. In bed.”

“You need to get back there,” she said.

“You need to get back there,” he answered. There was an unexpected authority in his voice; he seemed to have matured by ten years in an instant. She found herself on the point of heading for the door.

Rachelle walked into the room with a natural, confident air and placed a hand on her shoulder. “This must be your son,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you.” Her voice was full of disarming warmth. “I’ve been hoping for this chance.”

She put her hand out. Connell took it automatically.

“You’re every bit as spirited as I understood you to be.”

“Thanks, I guess.” He turned from Rachelle. “Come on, Mom. We have to go.”

“And who is your friend?” Rachelle asked.

“This is my husband’s caretaker, Sergei,” Eileen said.

Sergei stood there with his arms crossed, impassive. Connell must have prepared him for his role; the thought of it touched her.

“Come on, Mom,” Connell said.

“Now, I understand you’re feeling a lot of different things,” Rachelle said to him. “Anger. Confusion. A loss of control. And I know your heart is in the right place. I probably know more about what you’re going through than you think. You might like to talk to me yourself sometime.”

“Nope,” he said. “You can keep your snake oil.”

“Watch your mouth,” Bethany said, stepping toward him. Sergei shifted in front of Connell, and he and Bethany looked like a big dog and a little one squaring off. The tension in the room was thick.

“Why don’t we all take a deep breath,” Rachelle said. “Please, sit down.”

“I’m not sitting,” Connell said. “I came to get my mother out of here.”

“Is that why you brought your friend?”

Connell nodded.

“The body is one thing,” Rachelle said. “The body can be held captive. The mind is something else entirely. The mind seeks its natural state, which is freedom. You can’t imprison a mind forever. If your mother seeks freedom, she’ll be back. There’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to fetter that desire. You can try to put her in chains, but her mind can break them. What we do here is train minds to break chains.”

Connell looked as if he was waiting for her to come to his aid, but she was frozen, partly out of curiosity about how he’d handle this challenge with a year of college under his belt.

“I don’t know what to say about all that,” he said. “I’m sure you’re a nice person. I just came to get my mother.”

“You don’t get to tell your mother how to live her life,” Bethany snapped. “If she’s discovered something you can’t understand, it’s not your place to stand in its way.”

Eileen bristled. “Take it easy, Bethany.”

Rachelle put her hand up in a pacific gesture. “You’re a bright young man,” she said calmly. “Are you willing to consider that there might be a reality beyond the comprehension of your senses? That all might not be as it seems?”

“Mom!” he said, exasperated.

“Why don’t you ask her what she wants?” Bethany strode over to stand behind her. Eileen felt Bethany’s fingertips on her back urging her into the loveseat, and she sat, surprising herself. “She’s had a lifetime of males telling her how to behave, and she’s not about to start taking orders from her own son.”

Connell fell back against the wall, looking spent. Sergei remained standing with his arms folded across his chest. She knew it must have seemed to Connell that she was under Rachelle’s spell. She wished Connell could see the granite vein of skepticism that ran through her, which Rachelle could never mine clean, no matter how long she chipped away.

“I want you to know something,” Rachelle said to him. “Your mother is in good hands here.”

“Can we get out of here, Mom?”

“I’m fine,” Eileen said. “I don’t want you to think anything weird is going on.”

“How much money have you given them?”

“He’s only concerned about his inheritance,” Bethany said. “Typical.”

“That’s not fair to the boy,” Eileen said.

Rachelle took a step toward Connell. “I’m saddened to hear you speak in such simplistic terms about the relationship your mother has formed to the truth of the universe. I may draw a modest fee for facilitating her enlightenment, but it’s only to cover basic administrative costs, nothing more.”

“You’re preying on her in a time of weakness. You should be ashamed.”

“Mind your manners,” Bethany warned.

“Leave my mother alone.”

“You’re nothing but a punk,” Bethany said.

“And you’re a crazy cult lady.” He pointed at Bethany and Rachelle. “You and you.”

Eileen knew she should step in, but she couldn’t make her mouth form any words.

“I’ve tolerated you here out of deference to your mother,” Rachelle said. “You’re no longer welcome. Please leave now.”

Bethany stepped forward; Sergei did as well.

“Mom,” Connell said, simply, plaintively.

“You’ve offended me,” Rachelle said. “I’ve asked you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to call the police.”

“I’m not leaving without my mother.”

“I’m quite sure that’s not your decision to make,” Rachelle said. “Why don’t you go peacefully and let us get back to trying to do some good for your mother, instead of causing her needless anxiety.”

Connell didn’t move.

“Now,” Rachelle said.

“Mom!”

“It’s okay,” Eileen said.

“You heard your mother.” Bethany stepped toward Connell. “Now go. If Rachelle doesn’t call the police, I will.”

Sergei was pleading with her through the dark pools of his eyes. She sensed a controlled fury in him; she could imagine it erupting if anyone so much as grazed Connell with a finger.

“You’re just going to stay here with these people? That’s it?”

She wanted to say, I’ll be home later, but the words still wouldn’t come.

“You’re ignorant,” Bethany said. “You’re an ignorant kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about. I feel sorry for you.”

“Don’t talk to my son like that,” Eileen heard herself say, and the room grew still and quiet. She rose. “He’s not ignorant. He means well. And I’m sorry if he offended you. I’m sure he’s sorry too. Yes?”

“Sure,” Connell said, evidently trying to seize the momentum. “Sorry.”

“I’m going to go home.” Before she knew it, she was paces from the door. “I’m tired. I want to thank you for everything.”

“You don’t have to let guilt rule over you like this,” Rachelle said. “You’re on the verge of a major breakthrough.”

“You’ve helped me,” she said. “You’ve made a great difference.”

“You still have a long way to go,” Rachelle said. “Don’t fool yourself.”

“I’m sure I do.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t let him influence you,” Bethany said. “He’s no better than your husband.”

Eileen got very still. “You don’t know the first thing about him.” She dug into her pocketbook for the check and extended it toward Rachelle.

“Don’t be silly.” Rachelle tried to reach for her wrist. Eileen shook her off and left the check on the table. “You’re always welcome here. Take some time to think it over.”

She must have stood there too long, because Connell was calling her over. She walked toward the door. Bethany moved to head her off, but Sergei slid in front of Bethany like a gravestone rolling into place, blocking her with his massive body as Eileen continued out to the street.

“It’s going to be okay,” Bethany called after her, but Eileen didn’t turn around. Connell raced ahead while Sergei led her down the stairs and up the stretch of the block to where the car waited. He opened the door for her in the back. Connell took the streets with the grim purposefulness of a getaway driver.

In the silence that prevailed in the car, she wondered how her son had plotted this thing, how many people knew, how he had explained it to Sergei.

They pulled into the garage and went upstairs. Sergei headed to his room. She and Connell stood in the kitchen, eyeing each other warily.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“Yes, I did.”

“I wish I could explain this to you. I know it sounds like I’m making excuses. But I was never in any kind of danger. I was in control the whole time.”

He just looked at his feet. She wondered when exactly he had gotten so big. She was having one of those moments she hadn’t had in years, where he seemed to grow before her eyes. It occurred to her that he might have seen her as being as out of control as his father was. Maybe he thought both of them were losing their minds.

“Anyway, I want to thank you for caring. I was fine, but still.”

“No problem,” he said.

“I mean it. You’re a good kid.”

“Come on. You’re my mother.”

She wanted him to hug her, but he just stood there dubious of the way she was looking at him.

“Come here.” She put her arms around him. She felt his breathing against her chest and was reminded of holding him when he was a baby, his laundered pajamas soft and fresh as he was, the whole of him fitting in her two hands, his little behind on her palm. He’d looked at her then as the source and giver of love. She hadn’t had to hide anything from him, and she hadn’t needed anything from him but his presence. And it was that way again now, for at least this day, this moment. His presence at Rachelle’s had meant everything, and his presence now in her arms meant everything too.

When they were done hugging, he looked at her strangely.

“What?”

“Maybe those crazy ladies helped you after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“That was the first time you ever did that.”

“Did what?”

“Hugged me first.”

She shook her head. “That’s not possible,” she said.

“In my memory, anyway.”

She shook it again. “There’s more that’s happened than what’s in your memory.”

• • •

When she got to the top of the stairs she ran into Sergei leaving the bathroom. He gave her a diffident wave, as though they were schoolchildren passing in the hallway during the change of classes. She stood in the antechamber to the bedroom for a while, hearing Ed’s labored breathing under the sheet.

She walked to the bed and found him lying awake in a spooky silence, looking right at her.

“Where?” he asked, sounding as if he were half dreaming. “Where were?”

“With Bethany.”

“Who?”

“Someone I used to work with. It’s not important.”

Ed had always had quick and accurate instincts about people. She crawled in and lay beside him. He drifted off. She lay awake listening to the unified murmur of televisions, her own, Sergei’s, and the one in the den. She pictured Sergei awake, keeping a solitary vigil like herself.

85

Ed had lost faith in the physical properties of things. On the way up the stairs that night, he stopped on every step. She had to follow closely behind him and tap a leg to indicate which one was next, then lift it for him. He was frantic when his foot was in the air. They proceeded at a glacial pace, and then he stopped and simply wouldn’t budge, despite how hard she pushed his leg, which still had considerable strength in it, the atrophy notwithstanding. She couldn’t get him to let go of the banister. This was one of those moments — they had been coming more frequently lately — when she wished Sergei didn’t go home on the weekends.

By the time they reached the top, they were both exhausted. She steered him into the bathroom, where she undressed him with great difficulty. Getting one leg over the high lip of the bathtub was no mean feat; getting the other over seemed an impossibility. He straddled the bathtub wall like a rodeo performer athwart two prancing horses. She upset his balance enough to get his other leg in, but then her troubles started. Laying him down was out of the question: she would never get him up again. Showering him, though, presented the risk of his slipping and cracking his head open. A visit to the hospital for something so severe almost certainly meant he would be taken from her care. While the tub was dry, her anxiety was contained; when the water came on, she began fretting in earnest. Whatever purchase he had on the tacky mat was tenuous, and there was nothing for him to grab on to but her body if he started falling. She turned the shower on and cleaned him, but when the time came to emerge, his anxiety spiked. He simply wouldn’t step over the lip of the tub. She tried coaxing him, forcing his leg up, making feints at him, but nothing budged him. His legs shook from standing so long in that fixed intensity of opposition, and his body quivered under a dew of cold droplets. She decided to turn the water back on to warm him up. He stood wordless in that superfluous rinse until she shut it off. They could not go on like this. She thought to get the cordless phone and call for help, but she didn’t want to leave him alone for even the several seconds it would take her to retrieve it, and besides, she didn’t know whom to call, and she didn’t want an ambulance to come for fear of his never returning. She could shout for help, but no one would hear.

She attempted a few more times to tap and lift his leg, exhorting him to cooperate and be a man about this. She tried luring him into a sense of ease and then going after his leg when he wasn’t expecting it, but he stiffened as soon as she wrapped her arms around his calf. She wished she’d bought the goddamned shower chair. He was in a kind of agony of fatigue now. He didn’t want to resist her, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to sit and he couldn’t sit; he wanted to leave and he couldn’t leave. He somehow had the strength to stand, though she knew he couldn’t do it forever; he would eventually fall like a felled tree. She sat on the tile floor and looked at him in his nakedness.

“Please, God, tell me what to do,” she said aloud.

Something in her aspect of defeat might have triggered some atavistic impulse to protect his mate from suffering, because he motioned to step out of the tub. She leapt up to offer a steadying hand. He lifted the leg with a vigorous thrust, as if it had come unstuck from mud after a struggle. She walked him into the bedroom and saw that it had been two hours since they’d started up the stairs. It felt like an augury: his brain was freezing up. Their time left together in the house seemed precariously little.

She dressed him with deliberateness and care. He sat on the bed in the bright white of his underwear and T-shirt and she felt tenderness for him and a yearning that she almost couldn’t bear. She laid him beneath the sheet and tucked it up under his arms. She curled up to him, clinging to his side, trying to memorize the feeling of his corporal presence in the bed with her. She did not sleep. She lay listening to his breathing, watching his chest rise and fall, staring at his face in the moonlight coming through the window. Sometime in the middle of the night she felt his erection and pulled his underwear off. He did not startle awake but rather came to gently and with tender murmurings and she climbed atop him and took him inside her. She looked into his eyes as she used to when they were first married and he did not look away. Despite his incapacity in almost every area of his physical life, he was still able to climax, and she was startled into a giggling joy at the wide-eyed surprise that overtook him as he did so. She lay in his arms for a while afterward, and in the drift of her thoughts she was brought around to her parents. This unlikely coupling with Ed tonight was proof that what was visible to others was only a sliver of the spectrum of a couple’s intimate life. A hunger for contact could overcome intractable impediments. She began to reconceive of her parents’ lives, to imagine that a shadow passion overtook them when they might least have expected it to.

She had to get some distance if she wanted any hope of falling asleep, but she wanted to be close to him, so for the first time in years she attempted to sleep facing him. She didn’t think she would actually drift off, but the next thing she knew the room was flooded in light.

• • •

That morning, a Saturday, she wanted to pay a visit to Cindy, who’d had her gall bladder out, but she didn’t want to bring Ed. She left him with Connell and drove to Nassau University Medical Center.

When she walked in that night, she found all the lights out except for a cabinet lamp in the kitchen, and Ed lying on the cold bricks of the vestibule. She cursed herself as much as she did Connell, because she’d had a strange intimation of disaster when she’d left. She knew she couldn’t trust him, and she’d left Ed with him anyway. She called his name and got no answer.

She couldn’t lift Ed, couldn’t even get him to sit up. It was as if rigor mortis had set in while he was still alive. She rushed to the cordless phone and saw a note that said that Connell had gone to the city to meet some friends. Rage coursed through her. She brought the phone back with her to Ed and set it down. She didn’t want to call anyone until she absolutely had to. She tried to get under him and wedge him up under her thighs, but she couldn’t get a purchase on him. She tried to roll him onto the rug, but he was raving, and she gave up and tried to soothe him, to no avail. He was making his clicking noise. His body was seizing up. He had never felt heavier. She wondered whether she could manage the situation until Connell got home, but most likely he would take the last train out of Grand Central.

The ambulance arrived in minutes. Two guys strapped him to a gurney and she rode with them to Lawrence, where he was admitted. The trip in the ambulance must have revived him, because he walked in with assistance, but in the ER he went wild, screaming, flailing his arms and striking one of the orderlies. They used restraints to tie him down.

“Why?” he kept asking. “Why? Why?”

He looked less healthy than he had even a few days before. It amazed her how quickly catabolic processes could take over a body once they’d begun. She hadn’t noticed how skinny he’d gotten, how bad his teeth were, how much he needed a haircut.

She stayed as late as she was allowed. At home she couldn’t bring herself to go up to the bedroom, so she just sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t consciously intended to wait up for Connell, but after a while she realized that was what she was doing. She tried to watch television in the den, but she couldn’t concentrate on any of the shows. The only thing that made any sense to her was to sit in the silence of the kitchen. She chewed her rage, grinding her teeth.

He walked in at two fifteen. She sat silently looking at him.

“What are you doing up?” he said, throwing a canvas bag down on the island.

“I asked you to stay with your father. Why did you leave him alone?”

“It was only for a little while.”

“What made you think it was okay to leave him alone?”

She had shouted. She saw the boy flinch, his eyes widen with fear. He picked the bag off the counter and put it across his chest as if he might make a run for it.

“He was asleep in bed when I left. He wasn’t going anywhere, and you were coming home in an hour.”

“Well,” she said. “He went somewhere.”

• • •

She went upstairs to put her head down for a moment. The next thing she knew, the room was bright and Sergei’s throaty greeting was booming up at her from the bottom of the staircase. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. She remembered that Ed was in the hospital.

She went to the banister and looked down the landing. “I should have called you,” she said. “With everything that was going on, I forgot. I didn’t need you to come.”

He stood in the vestibule holding his hat against his chest. “You not go to church today?”

Lately he had taken to coming earlier on Sundays, to be there when they returned from twelve o’clock Mass.

“Something’s happened with Ed,” she said. “He had some kind of collapse. He’s in the hospital.”

“I stay here with you,” he said.

“I’m leaving soon.”

“I stay anyway.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I stay with you,” he said again, this time more decisively.

Connell wasn’t in his room. She called downstairs to him, but he didn’t answer there either. She dressed without showering, not because of the late hour but because with Ed’s absence it felt like Sergei was a guest in the house, and even though Sergei had passed many hours there sitting and doing nothing, she had a strange feeling of having to attend to him.

When she got downstairs she found him sitting at the kitchen table in a state of contained agitation. She could see his deep breathing, the tautness in his fists, one of which still clutched his hat. He asked what had happened. When she told him, his hand on the hat squeezed tighter.

“I stay here,” he said.

• • •

The nurse was trying to get him to eat when Eileen walked in, but Ed was resisting mightily. He flung his arms around as she approached with the fork, and then shut his lips tight. When she managed to get the food in, he calmed down and chewed it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then reconsidered and spat it out on the tray.

“He did this with breakfast too.”

“I’ll take over,” Eileen said. She spoke sharply to him, told him to cooperate or else — what? What could she hold over his head?

“If you don’t eat,” she said, “you’re not going to be allowed to come home.”

He raised his eyebrows dramatically and took the rest of the meal with little protest. The doctor came around and they discussed how he’d been admitted for altered physical status, an acute sudden change in his condition. The goal would be to rehab him. They agreed on benchmarks: if he could stand on his own and walk to the bathroom, they would release him. Judging from his condition, that seemed sufficiently far off to give her time to adjust to her new circumstances. She needed Ed to do poorly enough for long enough to allow her to figure out what came next.

• • •

The next day, she stayed late with Ed. She was famished when she left, and on the drive home, as she contemplated the empty shelves of the fridge, she realized she’d have to order something, though she barely had the energy to make the phone call, let alone figure out what she wanted. She’d never again be able to turn to Ed and say, “What should we eat?” She didn’t want to heat up anything in the freezer. The thought of those frozen carcasses disgusted her. It felt like they were food from a lifetime ago, and indeed they were: they were from her life with Ed.

When she walked into the kitchen and saw a smock draped over the island and a pot on the stove, she was so relieved that she almost exclaimed her joy.

Sergei rose from the couch and insisted that she sit. He warmed up the pot and brought a glass of water. He ladled out a healthy portion and presented her with it, then stood watching to see her reaction. It was delicious, a beef stew of some sort.

“Give me the receipt,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

He did his habitual hand waving. It would always be like this with him: he was stubborn as a molar. He had cleaned up the evidence of his preparation, so that only the stewpot was left on a clean stove. The sink was empty, the dish drainer clean. Maybe he’d made it for himself; maybe he’d tired of eating cold-cut sandwiches. She had the sensation that this was probably how Ed experienced his meals now: they appeared before him as if by magic.

She grew uncomfortable at the sight of Sergei gazing down on her. “Please sit,” she said, and he did. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop until his hand latched onto a mail-order catalogue, which he rolled up and used to gently beat the time against the table’s edge as he watched her eat.

• • •

In the morning, she woke early to take Connell to the airport. When she was stuck in traffic, she looked at his sleeping form in the passenger seat. Everyone said he looked like Ed, but she didn’t see it.

He woke up right before they reached the terminal. The need to remove the bags from the trunk promised to make the good-bye mercifully brief. She got out of the car and stood there with him in that scant minute of grace allowed to a person unloading.

“If you need me to come back—” he said, looking past her through the doors.

“Not before Thanksgiving. I can’t afford it.”

“I’m sorry I won’t be here to help.”

“I have Sergei,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

He nodded slowly. He seemed on the verge of speaking, and then he dropped his eyes and looked away before meeting her gaze again, warmly.

“You’re going to miss your plane,” she said.

He hugged her and picked up his bags. “Call me back if you need to,” he said. She could tell he intended an air of gravity, but the way he squinted at the sunlight reminded her of when he was a small boy on her lap reaching for the curtains behind her head. How could the years have brought both of them here?

“Go,” she said, and he turned and went through the sliding doors. She watched him disappear around a corner. A cop pulled up beside the car and told her to move along. She watched the planes out the window and in the rearview mirror until she couldn’t see them anymore.

• • •

She hadn’t been at work long when she received a call from the hospital saying they were going to discharge Ed. The woman said they’d be sending him home around two o’clock.

“That’s unacceptable,” Eileen said. “I’m not home to receive him. This is too sudden.”

“It says here you have help with you at home.”

“Yes.”

“Then he will be delivered to your home aide. He’s not eligible to stay any longer. He’s stable, his blood pressure is down, he can eat. We have to send him home.”

“Is he standing?”

“He can stand with assistance.”

“Tell me, was he standing on his own when he went in there?”

“I wasn’t here when he was admitted.”

“I’ll tell you, then. He was. He walked in from the ambulance. So he is not stable, if you ask me.”

“I am telling you that he is ready to be dismissed.”

“We agreed that he had to be able to walk. He has to be able to go up and down stairs.”

“He can walk with assistance.”

“I’m going to appeal. I do not agree with the discharge. Medicare gives me two days, no?”

“That’s correct.”

“Keep him there, then.”

She slammed the phone down. Once he was back within her walls, she would have to keep him there until the end. It would be almost impossible, emotionally, for her to deliver him personally to a nursing home, without some event like this interceding to take the guilt away from her. And then she would just be waiting, possibly even hoping in some dark part of her unconscious mind, for something bad to happen to him. She didn’t want to live like that. And the hardest truth was that — no matter how good a nurse she thought she was; no matter that she’d proved, during staffing crises, or strikes, or untimely bouts of mass absence, that she could do the work of three nurses; no matter that she wanted to believe she could give him better care than anyone else could — she wasn’t sure anymore that a nursing home wouldn’t be better for him. This might have been the time for her to summon up the courage to take Ed back into her home, but she couldn’t do it. She had run up against her limit. If this was her only chance to get him out of her hands — and she saw that it was — then she had to take it and live with the guilt later, maybe for the rest of her life.

She spent the morning calling nursing homes in the area. She couldn’t afford to wait until the end of the day, because the offices would be closed. It wasn’t easy to do; Adelaide seemed to watch her every move.

When she didn’t have any luck on the phone, she left work early with a knot in her gut and drove up to Maple Grove Nursing Home in Port Chester, half an hour north of her house. They had a place for Ed, and they’d accept her application, but they told her that they wanted three years’ payment up front. It was obvious to her that they didn’t want Ed to go into the Medicaid pool, which paid less than private citizens, bargaining for lower rates. Three years up front, factoring in planned increases every six months, was over $225,000. She would drain her cash reserves to zero and still not even be a tenth of the way there. She’d have to cash out the retirement accounts, because they’d already taken out a home equity loan to pay for Connell’s tuition. Even then, she couldn’t get it done in time.

She hadn’t spent an entire career in health care not to pick up any allies along the way. Her friend Emily, whom she’d hired at St. John’s Episcopal, had an in with the state attorney general’s office. Emily had a representative from the office call Maple Grove and get them to drop the demand for up-front payment. Eileen would pay the fee for the first month, $5,800, while the Medicare paperwork got sorted out. Medicare would cover the first twenty days at 100 percent and the next eighty days at 80 percent after a copay. Then she was on her own.

She called Lawrence Hospital and had them fax in the application for her.

• • •

“They’re going to transport him tomorrow,” she told Sergei. “Maybe you can stay awhile in case I need help with anything. He may be coming back, for all I know.”

Sergei nodded as if to say he hadn’t imagined it going any other way.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” she said, but she had no idea where she was going to get the money. She would have to figure out these details later. Right now what was important was getting through a difficult time.

In silence they ate the dinner he had prepared. Something in his face, maybe the roundness of it, took the edge off her anxiety. He seemed to prefer mute expressions to speech, two in particular: a half glower that reminded her of her father’s, and a wide-eyed, almost innocent smile.

After they finished eating she dismissed him as he started to clean the dishes. He protested and would only leave the room when she insisted that she needed to use the kitchen phone to spread the news about Ed. She called as many people as she could, until it got to be too late, even accounting for time zones. She left the bunker of the kitchen to face the rest of the first floor, turned off all the lights, and walked up the stairs to the lonely bedroom to pack a bag for Ed.

It was a preposterous exercise. She couldn’t reduce his wardrobe to a few essentials at a moment when everything seemed essential. There was also the problem that what was essential to Ed wasn’t always essential to her. Some of his favorite shirts should have become cleaning rags long ago. She took out the bag they used for short trips and started filling it with three or four of everything; then she brought down a bigger bag from the attic. She would have time later to figure out exactly what he needed, but she wanted him to have enough in case of mishaps the first few days. Then she saw his peacoat. It was missing buttons and threadbare at the elbows, wrists, and collar. He looked like a homeless man in it, but he’d insisted, perversely, on holding on to it, as if he’d never left the cold-water flat he’d grown up in. His stubbornness drove her crazy. And yet his lack of interest in material things had allowed them to save a good deal of money relative to their incomes. She held the peacoat in her hands until she almost broke down, then put it back on a hanger and took a newer coat from the closet.

• • •

She walked through the day in the haze of her lack of sleep, feeling her boss’s eyes on her, as if Adelaide could sense her mind was somewhere else. They moved Ed at noon, but she couldn’t call. She wanted to pull Adelaide aside and assure her that she had no aims on her job, but how could she do so without seeming insubordinate? She felt lucky to have a job, but she saw no way to communicate that without smelling of desperation. Once Adelaide sensed weakness, she would surely seize on it. Eileen didn’t blame her entirely. Mayor Giuliani’s office, in its push for health care efficiency, had HHC working middle management to the bone. Ruthlessness was more or less demanded of Adelaide if she wanted to keep her job. Eileen had been on the other side of these managerial squeezes, at St. John’s Episcopal. It had bothered her at first to think that her days of carrying the heavy burdens of upper management were behind her, but now she didn’t care at all.

It was time now to be smart — smart and strong. She wondered whether she’d ever have a chance to be foolish and weak. She feared it would be when everyone else was foolish and weak again too, only this time around there wouldn’t be anything romantic about their foolishness; they’d be old and doddering and needy. At least she wouldn’t be alone in it, the way Ed was. Ed was surrounded by people, but there was no one in that building like him at all. He was younger; he’d given up more of life. But there had rarely been anyone anywhere like Ed, even when all had been well. He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He’d been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

86

After work she drove up to the home. She made her way to the circular reception desk from which the hallways radiated. Below the counter ran a ring of binders with red labels on their spines bearing the letters DNR, for Do Not Resuscitate. She had indicated in her application that she wanted this designation for Ed, but still that stark, resigned lineup took her by surprise. An odd few didn’t say DNR, and it filled her with shame to see them, because it meant those families hadn’t given up hope, or they were willing to stick it out until the end, the very end, the end of science and technology.

She was directed to a television room. Wheelchairs were arranged around the perimeter. The room was full of women older than her husband, some by decades, whose gazes seemed directed less at the program than at the light the set cast. There were a few men, frail and reduced; she didn’t spot Ed at first, but then there he was, hidden behind a man who distended and released his cheeks as though blowing on a tuba. Ed looked as if he’d been caught in a traffic jam. He was moaning quietly. When she stood before him, his moan turned into a wail, and he pumped his arms up and down. She wheeled aside the tuba player, who looked at her skeptically as he puffed out, with an audible pop, the air he’d been holding in. She asked at the desk to be directed to a common room, thinking not to disturb Ed’s roommate.

Ed wailed and thrashed, trying to twist in his seat to get a look at her. When he made to rise, the seat belt stopped him, and if he tried to rise farther, the barest push on his shoulder made him fall back in the chair. After making a couple of turns at the end of corridors, she arrived at the common room, which was blessedly empty. She closed the door behind her and wheeled him to a wicker chair, where she sat facing him. He continued to wail. She tried to soothe him with a hand on his shoulder and he slapped it away. She tried to touch his face and he motioned to bite her. He was seething through his teeth. She insisted on smoothing his hair. He looked wild, unkempt. Already they had dressed him in an outfit that looked shabby and unmatched. She would have to speak to them about that. The easiest way to get them to give him good care was to let them know that she would be around, that they couldn’t slip. It was the same with the nurses she supervised.

For a few moments he suffered her attempts to pat his hair down, but then he put his hand to his scalp as though deliberately to mess up the work she had done.

“I know you don’t want to be here,” she said.

“No.” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no. No.”

“I’m here. I’m going to be here. I’m going to be here every day.”

There was a confused sadness in his expression, a struggle to convey what he was feeling.

“I couldn’t take good enough care of you at home,” she said, swallowing hard. “I couldn’t keep you safe.”

He fell quiet. She was finding it hard to keep herself together. She was determined to get through this without breaking down.

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “This is just for now. It’s temporary. When you stabilize, we’ll get you out of here.”

He snorted at the word “temporary,” as if a bit of the old humor were back. Then he slipped back into the wailing, only now it was weirdly dislocated from the conversation and seemed almost meditative. He stared into the distance. She shook him to make him stop, and finally, mercifully, he was quiet.

“I can’t be here during the day,” she said. “But I’m going to come after work, every day. Do you understand me? I’ll be here all the time. You’re going to get sick of seeing me.”

His eyebrows shot up. “No, no, no!” he said.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m going to be fine. I’ll have help.” She reached to pat down his hair again, and he batted her away with a shocking directness and force.

“No!” he shouted, less in plea than command. He was pointing a finger at her. “No! No!”

“No what, Ed?” She had a creeping feeling he understood something. She hadn’t said she was keeping Sergei on, but she sensed that it was the topic between them now.

“What is it?” He grew quiet again, brooding, his bottom lip pushed out, his chin tucked, his eyes searching hers.

“No.” His voice was meek, but the note it struck was final.

“No what? You don’t want me to have help?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll get by. I’ll manage.”

“No,” he said again.

• • •

A vestige of evening light lingered in the air as she headed back. She decided to take a detour through town. She took Valley off Pondfield and drove up the hill, into the warren of expensive homes. The road curved quickly and with little give; she had to pull over once to let a car pass. Lush trees shouted their vigorous greens, balancing the calm of the Tudor revival homes, every one of which seemed perfectly placed and spaced.

She stopped in front of Virginia’s home. She wondered whether Virginia had ever seen her there, whether she’d noticed how often the same car stopped outside her house or across the street for a little while and then drove off.

She drove down the hill and took Garden, stopping next to the empty tennis courts. When they lived in Jackson Heights, she’d bought Ed private lessons with a pro at the tennis center in Flushing. She never forgot her admiration at the way he held his own with Tom Cudahy the first time she saw him play, or that he’d so thoroughly assimilated the little coaching he’d gotten that he’d turned himself into a decent player. Tennis seemed like the perfect sport for him to take up, or at least the perfect one if he arranged his life the way she wished he would. The exercise would satisfy him, tiring him out as effectively as the long jogs he liked to go on. The courts were state-of-the-art, and the pros who taught there were trying to get on the US Open circuit or just coming off. It was the kind of place where Ed would meet people, make the right contacts, and form an ambitious plan he might not otherwise conceive of. It lacked that deliberate grandeur of a country club that she knew he would balk at. Still, he objected to the extravagance and didn’t attend a single session. Connell wouldn’t go either. The two-hundred-dollar credit never got used.

She circled through town and doubled back on Pondfield past the restaurants with outdoor tables that would be pulled in in a few weeks. She’d imagined dining at those tables with Ed, a drink in hand as townspeople stopped to greet them by name, but now she would have to sit at them alone, or with friends from elsewhere, or not at all, because she didn’t know anyone in town.

She parked and walked past the post office, Le Bistro, the stationery store and Topps Bakery, Lange’s Delicatessen, the Alps, Tryforos on the other side of the street, past Botticelli Bridal Boutique, which had in its window a beautiful dress beaded from bodice to train, and arrived at the northbound platform of the train station, where she took a seat on a bench, looking at Lawrence Hospital in the middle distance, the place that had originally brought her to this town. The temperature was pleasant, the summer humidity ceding to the dry air of autumn. People began to amass on the opposite platform in anticipation of a city-bound train. She felt an impulse to get on that train and see where the night took her, but Sergei was at home, and she had to go home too.

A train approached on her side. She watched its light grow from a speck around the bend into a bright flash as it roared into the station. The platform rumbled under her feet, and after a few pregnant moments the train slid its doors open and allowed the emergence of people. The passengers weren’t in a hurry, but neither did they dawdle; they ducked into the tunnel or fanned out into the streets with determined efficiency to meet spouses in waiting cars or begin the walk home. The platform emptied quickly, leaving her alone again, and after another minute the train on the opposite side came in, and that platform emptied too.

She would never be picked up by Ed nor pick him up. There would be no one waiting for her in the rainy dark, taillights guiding her to him, no respite in the front seat as someone else manned the wheel. She would have to take a cab if she ever wanted not to walk from the station. The fleet of cabs waited for trains, their drivers’ expressions stony. They never pulled into your driveway but only continued up the street with their other fares, leaving you standing outside an empty house, listening to the muffled sounds of trucks on the distant highway and the drowsy hush of oncoming night.

She went back to the car and drove a long way home, drifting once through town and taking back roads. She pulled into the garage and shut the car off and sat in it long enough for the light in the door track to go off, so she was swallowed in darkness. She listened to the rhythms of the house, its quiet heartbeat. The water heater hummed in the basement, and from a couple of flights away she could make out the faint whisper of Sergei’s radio.

She went up to the second floor and stood outside his door. He was listening to classical music. There was something about men needing to listen to classical music alone, as though the emotions it stirred in them embarrassed them too much. She waited until she heard a pause in the movement and knocked. When he came to the door, the racing stripes of his track pants and the blazing whiteness of his sneakers looked slightly comical under the solid square of his polo shirt.

“I wanted to let you know I was home,” she said. “Thank you for staying.”

He waved her politeness off.

“Do you want some tea?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s not from a samovar, but it’s Irish, so it should be strong enough.”

“Any tea,” he said.

She put the tea on and set out what was left of a cake she’d made earlier in the week, a treat for Connell before he left for school. When the kettle whistled, he came down the stairs. She tucked into the preparation of the tea to escape the silence of being in a room with him. The language barrier robbed her of her instincts. She didn’t want to talk down to him, but she found herself talking slowly and loudly when she did talk. After a while, there was nothing left to prepare, and she brought the teapot over and served him and sat with him.

“You like classical music?” she asked desperately. He arched his brows and then merely nodded, deflating the little hope that she might spark an exchange with this question. She had the feeling he wasn’t much of a talker in any language. “My husband and I go—went—to Carnegie Hall, for the symphony. We had a subscription.”

She was just at the point of asking him, idiotically, if he knew Carnegie Hall, when he cleared his throat with an authoritative growl and said that his daughter had played there. She was glad she had put the mug to her lips, because she was able to hide her astonishment.

“Student at Juilliard,” he said.

It occurred to her that she had never really spoken to him about his family. She knew he had two kids and that the older one, his son, whose name she could not remember, worked on the West Coast; she wondered now if it were for one of the software developers in Silicon Valley. She had pictured him as a security guard.

“Carnegie Hall,” she said. “That’s quite an accomplishment.”

“She plays violin.”

“It seems like the hardest instrument to play,” she said. “Then again, they all seem hard to me.”

“Is, and is not,” he said sagely. She was curious to hear more, but she didn’t want to ask. She wondered about the life he led when he left her house on Friday evenings. She pictured his daughter coming home for weekends, the three of them sitting around a table at some massive hall in Brighton Beach, drinking flavored vodka and listening to music. She considered the reality that the time he spent at home was his real life and the time he spent at her house was only a job.

“I appreciate your staying,” she said. “I want to say that again. I can’t say for how long it will be, exactly. I’m just not sure Ed is going to stay at that home. I’m going to pay you your regular wage, of course, for the trouble of being here.”

He gave her another wave of the hand, to dispense with so pedestrian a topic. She might have been offended if she didn’t find it so reassuring. He settled back into his seat and seemed to appraise her. The warmth that settled into his features would have made more sense had he been drinking vodka rather than tea, and for a moment she wondered if he hadn’t been taking swigs from a flask or a bottle upstairs.

“I need job,” he said, chuckling. “I stay even if you don’t pay me. I don’t mind getting away from my wife. You know?”

She took a quick sip of her tea.

“She is not like you,” he said. “She not work hard. She not work at all. Russian woman, not American. I was driving cab. I should be retired.”

“Life would be easier without money to worry about.”

“Life is easy when you have good wife who don’t need to be taken care of. Who take care of you.”

She cut another slice of cake, which she began eating nervously.

“But,” he said, “when I bring home money, she is happy.”

“I have some jobs for you while you’re here,” she said. “Home improvements. There are things my husband didn’t get to do that we had talked about doing. Are you handy?”

“I was engineer in Russia,” he said proudly. “I once built violin from scratch for hobby. I can do your jobs.”

“You won’t need to do anything quite that complicated,” she said, trying to hide her amazement. She said the first thing that came to mind: “You can just help me get this place in shape to sell it.” As she said it, she realized that she was never going to sell the house, that deep down she suspected she would die in it.

“Is beautiful house,” he said. “Sell for a lot of money.”

“You’d be surprised. The market around here isn’t great right now. They put in some low-income housing not far from here. People turn up their noses.”

“You get a lot for this house,” he said dismissively.

“We took out a home equity loan to pay for Connell’s education.” She hesitated. “You know what that is?”

“Home equity, yes,” he said, looking annoyed. She was once again mortified, but it was such an odd negotiation, trying to figure out what he understood. She was getting the feeling that he understood more than she suspected. She poured them both another cup of tea, even though she’d had too much already. She could feel a buzzing pressure in her temples.

“So I still have a lot to pay on it,” she said. “If I move into a smaller place, I’d probably break even.” She didn’t know why she was telling him all this.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You have good brain.”

She could feel a slight shift in the mood, a softening of his edges, if not of hers.

“I don’t know when Ed might be allowed to return, if his condition stabilizes.” She was riffing now. “I’d like you to be here if something happens to change his status. For a little while, at least. Please tell your wife that I appreciate her patience as I adjust to this new reality. I’m sure she’s wondering why you’re still here if Ed is no longer in the house.”

“My wife, she does not know that your husband is in nursing home.”

“She doesn’t?”

“Nyet. No.” He was laughing. “What difference it makes? As long as I bring home money.”

Eileen was silent.

“How long you want wait for your husband to come home?” Sergei asked.

Eileen felt herself redden and began piling up the dishes.

“Only as long as necessary,” she said. “Only until I know he’s not coming back.”

She switched into a recitation of the things she wanted him to do the next day while she was at work — clean out the garage, dig the leaves out of the drain gutters, change the burnt-out floodlights on the side of the house. She wondered if he could tell she was making them up on the fly. It wasn’t a long list, but it would last a few days at least. She went upstairs and got ready for bed. A couple of her girlfriends called and she stayed on the phone until after ten. She didn’t mention Sergei.

She lay in bed after the calls wondering what she would find when she went to the nursing home the next day. She feared spending the night there might cause Ed to lose whatever grip he had on his old life. She couldn’t shake the thought of him staring at her in that reduced state with a crystalline, hateful gaze, as though she had betrayed him by putting him there, as though every day she left him there would be another betrayal.

When Sergei came up she heard him settle in. She listened to the shifts and squeaks he made in the bed, until she heard the muted whistle of a snore. In the glow and muffled insistence of late-night television she drifted off, though the loud commercials hectored her to intermittent wakefulness, and then the sun recalled her to life.

• • •

She encountered the social director on the way to the main desk. The woman had a big tropical bird on her arm that she tried to present to Eileen.

“This is Calypsa,” the woman said, extending her arm. “Say hello, Calypsa.”

“Hello, Calypso,” Eileen said, with forced brightness.

“Calypsa. With an a. Say hello, Calypsa.” The woman’s name tag read Kacey, but she hadn’t introduced herself, even though she was the social director. The bird just sat on her wrist, giving Eileen an eerie stare.

“I’m Eileen.”

“She’ll go up your arm if you hold it there for a minute.” Eileen could think of nothing else to reduce the awkwardness of the moment, so she stuck her hand out reluctantly. “Straight,” the woman said sharply. “Put your arm out straight. She’ll walk right up.”

Eileen straightened her arm. After a few moments the bird hopped decisively onto her wrist. Eileen had to restrain herself from crying out as the bird made its way to the soft skin inside her elbow, where it stopped and dug its claws in.

“It pinches a bit,” the woman said.

“It certainly does.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I suppose so,” Eileen said tersely.

“I take her around to the patients. She loves to crawl on them.”

Eileen was incredulous. “Crawl on them?”

“All over.”

It was hard to see how this was going to be something Ed would enjoy. The bird was making its way up her arm to the shoulder, where it settled in with a certain finality, as though it had planted a flag. Eileen was able to relax slightly, though it was kneading her shoulder through the fabric.

“It—she—doesn’t hurt them?”

“She wouldn’t hurt anyone,” the woman said with a hint of indignation. “They can scream at her and flail around and she just acts like a lady.” The bird pecked at Eileen’s collar and seemed about to engage her ear when the woman whisked her away, clucking, ostensibly at the bird, but Eileen felt it directed at herself.

Ed wasn’t in the dense crowd in the television room.

“Where is my husband?” she asked the attending nurse at the main desk.

“Who are we talking about, ma’am?”

“Edmund Leary,” she said. “He was admitted yesterday.”

“He could be sleeping. He had an eventful day.” The girl raised her brows.

“What happened?”

“Sometimes there’s an adjustment period.”

“What happened?”

“He had to be restrained. He didn’t want to be changed. He’s a little younger than our average patient. He’s got more pop in him.”

She felt a twinge of pride beneath her concern. She ached to see him. She walked down the hall and found him staring at the ceiling, the radio at his bedside playing at a low murmur. After a couple of seconds she realized it was tuned to a rap station. She shut it off angrily and headed back to the desk.

“There was a rap station playing on my husband’s radio.”

The girl gave her a blank look. Her straightened hair — whether it was her own or not — was piled on her head in a colorful tower that looked like a piece of glazed ceramic. She should have known better than to think this girl would understand.

“There should never be a rap station on his radio.”

“I’m sorry about that, Mrs….”

“Leary. Eileen Leary. My husband is Ed Leary, and I will be here every day. And I do not want rap music on his radio.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I’m a nurse. I understand they may put the radio on when they’re changing the sheets, doing up the room. Under no circumstances should the radio in his room be set to a rap station.” She could feel herself sweating. “I’m trying to make myself perfectly clear.”

“Would you like to speak to my supervisor?”

“I will call tomorrow,” Eileen said. “Thank you.”

“This won’t be a problem,” the girl said, “I assure you.”

“I know it won’t,” Eileen said, and she went back to Ed. She could hear in her head all the things that nurse was thinking about her. She’d heard this narrative in her head for as long as she had been supervising nurses, and she was fine with it.

Somewhere deep down, she knew that if Ed were his former self enough to take in the rap music with all his faculties, he might very well be curious enough to give it an honest listen. There had been times when she had suffered Ed’s open-mindedness like a thousand little cuts, but it was tolerable because he gave in to moments of tribal loyalty himself sometimes, and even displayed occasional ill-temper about the things that got her blood going — like that night she’d never forget, when a couple of Hispanic kids, who had been leaning against the streetlamp in front of the house for an hour, cursing up a storm, drew Ed out to the stoop. He dressed them down and told them to take that kind of low-class language elsewhere, because this wasn’t that kind of house, and she stood in the vestibule and watched over his shoulder as they skulked away. Now, though, that he could hardly discern the differences between things, there was no appeal she could make to a reasonable, mutual, even generational abstention from the noise around them. The silent radio reproached her. She put on a Nat King Cole CD for him.

At the end of her visit, she had a hard time navigating her way out through the identical hallways that seemed to loop back on each other. She asked for the “front entrance” because that was what she’d heard it called, even though it was at the back of the building, and even though facing the street was an entrance she imagined should have been called the “front entrance.” That entrance was the “back entrance,” and if she went out that door, she would have had to walk all the way around the facility to the “front entrance” to get to her car.

The place seemed designed to make you crazy. Maybe the idea was to make you want to stay away. Judging from the sparse population of visitors in the television room, most people obliged them.

She wasn’t visiting. What she was doing was seeing her husband after work. It was simply a part of her day. She was showing them that Ed might be there with them instead of home where he belonged, but nothing else had changed.

They could put his room in the middle of a maze and she would find her way to it every night.

She was going to be the woman who wouldn’t go away, in the marriage that wouldn’t die. Her idea of her husband wasn’t going to be diminished when orderlies looked at him as if he was just another old fool. They had no clue what kind of man had fallen into their lap, but she wasn’t going to explain it to them, because they didn’t deserve to hear it. She was content to let them think he was a gibberer, an invalid, an idiot, because she knew better. She would always know better than them.

87

She had him pour a layer of blacktop in the driveway. She had him paint everything that could be painted, and then she had him move outside to paint the cedar boards, the fences, the window moldings, the heavy metal gate to the stairs, even the bricks. He removed the old wallpaper and installed new paper with fresh patterns. She had him rip out the attic insulation and replace it, haul junk from the basement and attic to the dump, and dredge the drainage gutter in front of the house. He ripped out the horrible toilet in the first-floor half bath and installed a bright new one, along with a new vanity. He didn’t need assistance for most jobs; for the biggest ones, she paid the gardener to help him off-hours. He used his own tools, leaving alone the ones she’d bought for Ed. He patched the waterlogged wall in the garage. He reinforced the retaining wall at the end of the driveway, where the property shot up into a slope, because it had begun to lean slightly and she had been told it would eventually give way if left untended. He erected a temporary wooden buttress to keep the wall from pitching forward, dug out the backfill down to the footing, filled in the resultant gap with concrete blocks and fabric to keep the silt out, and then repacked the dirt. For a platform top over the two layers of wall, he built a wooden frame into which he poured concrete that he smoothed out so faultlessly that it reminded her of fondant atop a fancy cake.

Her friends marveled at his work. In their marveling she could hear a hint of prurience, but if they weren’t going to make their surmises explicit, then she was content to let them harbor them silently. Maybe they thought he was taking Ed’s place. Maybe they thought that she was in some fundamental way out of control. Maybe they thought it was sad that she needed a bridge between her old life and her new one. Maybe they thought she was sleeping with him. Let them think whatever they want, she told herself. Let them speculate and conjecture and cluck their tongues and drown in pity or disapproval or whatever else.

She was proud of the caliber of improvements to her property. Neighbors who had never said two words to her began to ask who had done her work. She made vague demurrals about his being a friend, and when she relayed these inquiries to Sergei, he radiated a pride she hadn’t expected. She would have preferred him to stand aloof from appraisals of the quality of his labor, because if he remained eternally elsewhere in his mind, somewhere more rarefied and abstract, then she didn’t have to think of him as reduced to his circumstances. When she saw how delighted he seemed by the compliments, though, she decided to stop worrying that she was condescending to him when she assigned him tasks, which made her more comfortable keeping him in the house, which was what she had been trying to feel for a while. She didn’t know what she would do with herself once he was gone.

• • •

As October gave way to November and the stream of bigger jobs slowed to a trickle, the house began to take on the patina she’d envisioned when she’d signed the papers aligning her fate with its own. She understood that it would have to remain incomplete: she wasn’t going to launch into finishing the attic or basement. The electrical would never get upgraded or the oil tank dug up or the piping replaced or the asbestos hauled away. She wouldn’t be able to keep paying Sergei the nearly four thousand dollars a month she’d been paying him. The Medicare-paid hundred days were coming to an end soon, whereupon she would start paying six thousand a month to the nursing home, which would come right out of the retirement accounts and what was left of the home equity line of credit.

She wanted to talk to him about leaving, but it was easier each week just to spend down her income and dip a little into her savings and promise herself that she’d bring it up before the next payday. As long as I bring home money, she is happy, she remembered Sergei saying.

One day Sergei asked if he could stay at the house on weekends as well. The request dismayed her; she had been sure this would be the day she would say something to him about finishing his stint there; in fact, she had just been about to bring it up. Then he told her that he had left his wife a couple of weeks before and had been staying on his sister’s couch on weekend nights.

She was stunned. “I can’t afford to keep paying you full-time.”

“You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “I pay you to stay here.”

“Pay me?”

“I do handyman work,” he said. “I work for your neighbors.”

This radical-sounding proposal had about it the seductive reasonability of the most outlandish schemes. She affected a dubious air, but she knew its adoption was inevitable.

“I like this neighborhood,” he said, to fill the gap her thoughts had opened up.

“You’re not paying me,” she said. “You can continue to do jobs around this house while you get your feet under you.” She felt her heels come together involuntarily. “That will be compensation enough for use of the room. Eventually you’ll have to find your own place, of course.”

• • •

She made a sign for him with her home number on it, though she didn’t include her name. She photocopied it and put it up on the tackboards at Slave to the Grind and Lawrence Hospital. She placed an ad in the Pennysaver circular. She knocked on the doors of the neighbors who had asked about him.

Calls started coming in. She dropped him off at Smith Cairns on her way to work and he bought a used Taurus. Most mornings he left before she was awake. Usually he put a pot of coffee on for her. He never drank coffee himself.

She stopped feeling guilty about having kept him away from home in the run-up to his separation. Leaving his wife had been his business; it had nothing to do with Eileen, and from what she understood it had been a long time coming. If some time apart every week had been enough to drive a wedge between them, then maybe a separation had been in order.

He left more than enough money every Friday to cover his portion of the food. He hardly used any electricity.

It would have been too intimate for them to eat meals together. They would have had a lot of time to fill across a table. When she cooked, she ate first and left it for him on the stove; when he did, he left it in the fridge. She would knock and tell him through the closed door that there was something for him downstairs. He would leave a note for her in his pidgin English: “Am make dinner tonight. Don’t you do it.”

He took his clothes into the bathroom with him when he showered, and he dressed before he emerged. Once — he must not have known she had come home — she watched from the base of the stairs as he took a few thunderous steps into his bedroom, around his waist a dull white towel that might have been taken from a gym. Its ends met in a strained cinch at his hip, his abdomen pushing against it but not hanging over, as if his excess flesh were made of sounder stuff than her own. Remnant steam trailed him into the hall. The ruddiness of his face and chest suggested a lobster that had survived a boiling, while the whiteness of the rest of him ran almost alabaster.

He did his own laundry and often hers as well, though he never mixed their clothing in the same load. She didn’t have to ask for this hermetic separation; he had arrived at it independently.

They watched television in their own rooms. The set in the den was almost never used, except sometimes in the late hours, when, assured that he was tucked into his quarters for the night, she padded downstairs and turned it on, keeping the volume low and the lights off. She heard the stairs creak with his weight and muted the volume, but it was a phantom creak. The tenebrous dark in the kitchen fluttered for a moment, as if he had entered that space, but he never did.

She took the Times with her to work, not because she needed it during her shift but to be able to leave it for him in its entirety later and avoid awkward negotiations about sections. She dropped it on the island when she came home, and he was discreet enough to collect it when she was out of the room and put it in the recycling bin when he was done. Most days he left the Post for her in turn, which was a guilty pleasure she hadn’t indulged in since the days in Jackson Heights when she used to retrieve Connell from whichever Orlando apartment he was at. She’d forgotten how much she’d enjoyed sitting at the Orlandos’ dining room table, flipping idly through the Post’s pages and chatting while Connell made his entreaties to stay.

• • •

The prospect of Thanksgiving had been haunting her for a while. She would have to justify Sergei’s continued presence in the house to Connell. Somehow she had managed to keep it from him. It helped that he didn’t call much. She had also told Sergei not to answer the phone, though she knew she needn’t have bothered. Finally, she called Connell and told him not to come home and to apply the credit to another flight. Money was tight, she told him, and he’d be home in a few weeks anyway. He protested, though halfheartedly enough to allow her to feel a little better about what she was doing. She could tell he felt guilty, but his guilt wasn’t just about not being there; it was also about not feeling more guilty about not being there.

Several well-meaning friends invited her over for the meal, but she told all of them that she was going out to her cousin Pat’s. She went up for breakfast that morning with Ed and then made Thanksgiving dinner for herself and Sergei, the full orchestration, with all the sides and a bird large enough to yield leftovers for weeks.

It was the first American Thanksgiving meal Sergei had ever eaten. She watched him assemble on his plate a heaping mound of the offerings. After he had devoured it, he filled his plate again. When he reached for a third helping of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, she felt a warm pride settle into her, like a sip of mulled wine. He ate a whole can of cranberry sauce himself.

• • •

One night in early December, after a few frustrating hours at Maple Grove, during which Ed refused to eat and emitted a persistent, plaintive whine, and an enervating day at work before that, while she was washing the pan from a meatloaf whose crusted end she had polished off without so much as sitting down, she heard Sergei walk into the room behind her. She looked up into the window and saw his reflection standing in the doorway. After a few moments she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there; his steps had been too heavy, and now there was an electric charge in the air. She put down the scrubber and took a fortifying breath, then turned to face him. He was perfectly silent, looking at her with a strange intensity. He began to walk toward her. She had rubber gloves on her hands and raised them instinctively. He came around the island and stood before her. She could feel her own breath coming fast. He inched closer to her. The tentativeness she detected in him alarmed her; it was as if he feared for both their fates, as if he couldn’t help whatever he was about to do. She reproached herself for sheltering this stranger in her house. He could do anything he wanted to her and she would be powerless to stop him.

One of his hands went to her waist; she felt she was watching from outside her body as she didn’t move it away. His other hand joined in.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

He pulled her to him. Her arms went up in halfhearted protection and the cold, wet rubber sent a tingling across her skin. She felt bloated and squishy against him. She’d put on sixty pounds in the years since Ed’s diagnosis, nearly a pound for each her husband had lost, as if she’d been eating to maintain their equilibrium. Sergei’s face, as he moved in to kiss her, was smooth enough that she wondered whether he had shaved right before he came down. His drugstore aftershave, liberally applied, did not repel her up close as she had imagined it would. She felt a pounding through his chest. His hands moving over her left ghostly sense impressions everywhere they’d been. She found herself ascending the stairs with him.

• • •

Afterward, in her room, she locked the door and moved the armchair in front of it. She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt the need to protect herself, to hide. She climbed into bed and wept for a while, and then somehow she slept, the body doing what it had to do. She woke in the middle of the night to the unsettling light of the lamp and heard the low hum of Sergei’s television. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t awake.

• • •

In the morning she showered and dressed before she moved the armchair. When she ventured out of the room, she saw Sergei’s door wide open. She walked over to it and looked inside; none of his things were there. She ventured downstairs and was startled to find him sitting at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the suitcase next to him.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“For what?”

“I understand you want I should leave.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You have a job to get to. You can begin to look for a place. In the meantime, this is where you live. There’s nothing more to say, as far as I’m concerned.”

88

Connell had hatched his plan over Thanksgiving, when he learned that his mother was going to have her Christmas party on Christmas night instead. Cindy Coakley was planning to host Christmas Eve again, as she had the previous year and probably would indefinitely now that the old order had been toppled. It wasn’t ideal, his mother said, as there wasn’t as much to look forward to, and people couldn’t stay out as late, but it was important to her to have a party in the house this particular year, with the usual cast of people. She understood that it would be redundant, the same people going to both, and she understood that they would go if she insisted, and she was going to insist. She said she wanted it to be as nice as any Christmas they’d ever had. He knew it was going to break her heart not to have his father in attendance, so he was going to make sure his father was there after all.

• • •

They went together on Christmas morning to see him. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays. Small clusters of visitors amassed at every sitting area, and many of the rooms were packed, with an air of festivity. The nurses and orderlies were less formal with his mother than with the adult children and grandkids who flew in from far-flung places, but they were also more circumspect. It must not have been convenient for them that she came every day, particularly as she was a career nurse who wasn’t afraid to assert herself.

They found his father asleep in his bed, his mouth hanging open. They didn’t wake him but sat in chairs on either side of the bed waiting for him to come to on his own. Connell got the creepy feeling that they were looking at his corpse. Just as he was about to reach out and shake his father awake, his mother did it herself. His father opened his eyes without startling and began babbling hushed syllables. He lifted his hand slowly to scratch his nose, as if moving through an invisible viscous substance.

Connell’s mother had tried to prepare him for how much his father had deteriorated since summer. When they transferred his father to the wheelchair, his father couldn’t push himself up off the bed without help.

After his father was in the chair, Connell watched his knee for some vestige of the gesture that had bound them over the years. It had begun when he was young, when his father would throw his arms around him and declare, “What a good boy I have here.” Early on in the illness, whenever Connell hugged him, his father squeezed back and said simply, “Good boy.” When his father began to lose his strength, the squeezes turned to pats; when he lost his coordination, the pats became pounding slaps. “Just rub,” Connell said once, as they clutched. “Rub. Now just keep your hands still for a second, like this.” Then his father started to slur his words, so that all he could say clearly was “Good, good, good,” and then eventually that “good” gave way to an inarticulate sound — but Connell knew what it meant, even if no one else could have interpreted it. Then Connell would lean down to initiate a hug, and his father would reach up from the couch, until eventually his father didn’t reach up anymore but just patted his own knee. The final stage came when Connell noticed that his father patted his knee whenever Connell was even in the room. Now, though, in the wheelchair, he didn’t move at all.

Connell wheeled him to the big picture window that looked out on the lawn. Remnant clusters of white from a recent snowfall dotted the landscape. It was too cold to take him out on the veranda. His mother had not mentioned the possibility of taking him home for Christmas, and seeing his condition, he knew why. He was undaunted, though. He would lift his father up into the car and carry him up the stairs and give his mother a little of her life back for a day.

They had brought a couple of presents, which they opened for him. The muted quality to the exchange, the way it was over in less than two minutes, made it feel as if they had come empty-handed. His mother had had them dress his father for the occasion, in the gray knit sweater he liked to wear on Christmas, with the band of snowflakes around the middle, and a collared shirt and dress slacks, but it looked like the outfit of a much larger man had been put on him by accident. Connell hadn’t had the buffer of incremental change to reduce the shock of seeing him swimming in it.

His mother was uncharacteristically quiet, and Connell chattered until the engine of his monologue ran down and they gazed out at the leaves getting whipped up in the wind and sent swirling around the grounds.

Kacey, the social director, came by with the tropical bird on her arm. “Look, Mr. Leary,” she said. “Calypsa wants to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday!” The parrot wore a miniature Santa suit with a black belt, and a red felt hat with a pom-pom on top. It did a little shimmying dance. Connell couldn’t help bursting into laughter. Maybe that’s the point of dressing it up that way, he thought. Maybe there’s a method in her madness. His mother barely raised her eyes to acknowledge either woman or parrot, and after holding the bird for a bit, Connell decided he had to get her out of there before her mood darkened any further. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s a lot left to do.” He wheeled his father back to his room. When they reached the car, he told his mother he had to run to the bathroom, and he went back in and told the desk attendant of his plan to return that evening and pick his father up. She checked to see if he was on the sign-out list.

“It’s not a problem,” she said, as she closed his father’s binder. “I have to remind you that he is your responsibility once you’ve signed him out.”

“I got it,” Connell said as casually as possible, failing to hide the tremor in his voice.

• • •

He would have to wait for the right moment to leave. His mother would be leaning on him for help. She had outdone herself this year: new strings of lights, new boxes of ornaments, a second crèche, a new star for the tree, expensive-looking wreaths.

A different level of intensity attended this year’s preparations. While Sergei did a last-minute grocery run, Connell hauled the last boxes down from the attic. He added a final platoon to the small army of Santa Clauses, wooden soldiers, and snowmen that already occupied the first floor. Artificial holly hung from every wall, bedecked by bows, with wreaths affixed to every door. The tree was heavy with ornaments, strings of lights, and tinsel clumped thick as cooked spinach. Rivulets of lights ran along the fireplace and the baseboard molding, around the doorframes, up the banister. Plugged-in candles sat on end tables and the breakfront, and illuminated manger scenes fought for space with ceramic Christmas trees. Everything seemed to have a light in it or on it or behind it. Somehow, despite the overwhelming number of individual pieces, the house still felt underdecorated once everything was plugged in and turned on, as if the dark spaces were more apparent than the lit ones.

The amount of food in the kitchen suggested a team of cooks and not a single determined individual. Plates, pots, and pans took up every countertop and the island. The dining room table, at full extension with all its leaves in, was covered in white lace atop red linen. A smaller table pushed against it spilled into the living room. Drummer-boy napkin holders topped the place settings. Even on that sprawling surface, there wasn’t much room to set a drink down.

• • •

The guests started arriving, and Connell carried their coats down to the rack in the basement. They amassed in the kitchen, mugs of eggnog in their hands, glasses of wine, cheese cubes, butter cookies, chocolate truffles, nuts from bowls, Swedish meatballs on toothpick spears, crackers plucked from dwindling rows, boughs of grapes snapped off a larger bunch, chips dunked in chunky dips, bread wedges spread with baked brie, gourmet pigs in handmade blankets, slices of cured imported meat — the orchestral tune-up for the symphony to follow. There would be leftovers for a week.

He watched his mother slide through the kitchen to kid Tom about saving room for dinner, as she cleared plates of toothpicks and crumbs and swept back into conversation with Marie. She was her best self at parties. She had a gift for putting people at ease. She always said she’d have made a first-rate diplomat or politician, but Connell knew she’d have been content with his becoming one in her place.

Incandescence and bodies combined to heat the den quickly. He opened the patio door, but it brought a violent chill into the room, and he had to close it again. The living room’s wing chairs, folding chairs, and couch were packed with people balancing plates of appetizers on their knees. By the bar in the atrium, Jack Coakley and a man from up the block had planted themselves, guests weaving between them to refresh their drinks. The door to the front porch was cracked for air. Connell opened it fully and saw the team of wooden reindeer Jack had made one year in his garage workshop, and the lights that fringed the fence and lined the walkway and festooned the shrubs.

He went outside, closing the door behind him, and unplugged a strand of lights, throwing the right side of the house into darkness. He went back inside and told his mother that a light string was broken and that he was going to the store for a replacement. He knew that she wouldn’t be able to tolerate such a prominent blemish on the evening’s perfection. He got in the car and headed for the nursing home, pausing in front of the house to look at the dark patch he had created there. He could see her point in worrying over details like this, because it filled him with a vague foreboding to look at it. He found a Christmas radio station and set off into the rapidly darkening evening.

• • •

He parked in the lot and waited to be buzzed in. As the vestibule gave way to the hall, a red canvas band spanned the width of the hallway at waist height, secured at either end by Velcro. It looked like an oversized winner’s tape, but in fact it was an effective deterrent against escape. Connell removed one end, passed through and felt a creeping sadness as he matched the furry strip in his hand up to its rougher twin.

He found his father in the Crow’s Nest, a small room overlooking the front lawn where the noisier residents took their meals in sequestration so as not to disturb the others, and where they spent the better part of their afternoons. A dozen or so other residents were there. With the meal over and the orderlies somewhere else, wheelchairs abutted each other like bumper cars. His father was moaning a low moan. He registered a small change of expression when he saw Connell standing there, but he hardly seemed to stir out of his hazy state. It was past his bedtime; they had left him there for Connell. The television on the wall was set to the evening news.

Connell wheeled him out. When they reached the canvas band, he stopped.

“I’m going to punch in the code,” he said. “I can tell you what it is, if you don’t tell anyone I told you.”

He waited to see if his father’s eyes would light up to indicate that he’d been longing for this key to liberty, but his father didn’t seem to notice what he’d said. The low, keening hum persisted. He punched in the code and replaced the strip and wheeled him out. He had a feeling of springing his father from jail. After they had been outside for a few moments, his father stopped moaning.

“That’s what you wanted?” Connell bent down to ask. “To go outside?”

His father’s silence seemed to confirm it.

“If only I’d known! It’s a little too cold to stay out long. Besides, we’re going someplace I think you’re going to be happy to see.”

He got to the car and opened the door and got both arms under his father’s armpits to get him standing. He got him seated in the car and secured the belt and put the folded wheelchair in the trunk.

It was the first time his father had been off the grounds in months, and Connell wondered how it felt to him to be driven down the long driveway. The trees were bereft of leaves, and strong winds whipped the denuded branches, which in the reflected glow of the headlights looked like guards reaching their elongated arms out to stop his father’s escape. They made their way down the road, his father slumped against the window, silent, his hands in his lap, his neck at an uncomfortable angle.

“Sit up straight, Dad,” Connell said, but his father didn’t move. He reached over and pulled him upright and turned the radio on. He wanted him to look out the window and see the lights strung on fences in front yards, the candles in the windows, the lawn ornaments, and, in a larger sense, the world outside the confines of the nursing home, the fact of its being Christmas, the fact that such a thing as Christmas existed at all, but it was as if his father hadn’t noticed he’d left the Crow’s Nest. It didn’t matter; when they got home, he would see the house done up for Christmas and be recalled to the seasonal cheer. He would be brought back to his life. It would make Dad happy, but the bigger consequence would be his mother’s joy at having everyone together for one last Christmas at home. She’d mentioned it so many times before his father had gone into the nursing home, and it must have been bitter for her to watch that possibility die. For his father, nothing hung on this trip, but that was because he didn’t know where he was going. Once there, he would understand that Connell had spared him a lonely drifting off in a room whose sole concession to the holiday was a drugstore-purchased Santa Claus sign taped to the door. For the night to pass without any observance, for his father to slip into an ignorant slumber, was too much for Connell to take.

Traffic was light, and they arrived quickly enough that he might almost have been gone that long had he set out in search of a string of lights. The block had filled up with cars and he had to park a little distance away from the house. He had been intending just to walk his father in and guide him to a seat on the couch, but instead he retrieved the wheelchair and wheeled him. As he neared the driveway he saw Ruth McGuire hitting the button on her keychain to lock her car. She must have left Frank at home. Her eyes widened as he approached. She met them at the foot of the driveway.

“What’s this?”

“Merry Christmas,” Connell said, leaning in for a hug, though Ruth was strangely stiff.

“Hi there,” she said to his father, bending down to kiss him. She stood back up. “What’s the deal?”

“I thought the whole family should be together for the holidays.”

Ruth put down the bags of gifts she was carrying. “Your mother doesn’t know about this?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not a good idea. She doesn’t know he’s coming at all?”

“It’s all me,” he said.

“Oh, God.” She seemed to be thinking quickly. She picked up the bags again, made a quick circle, and put them back down. “What to do. What to do?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s good. We’re going to have a nice night. She wanted this.”

“Your mother is under a lot of strain right now,” Ruth said. “She’s not having an easy time of it, and the holidays make everything harder. Believe me, I know.” She gestured toward the passenger seat her husband would have occupied. “I left Frank home with the nurse because it’s just too hard to make it work with nights like this, and I didn’t want to upset your mother. She just wants to get through the night and move on.”

“She’s in a good mood. She’s going to be happy to see him.”

Ruth walked a little distance away and motioned him away from the wheelchair. He locked it in place and headed over to her.

“Believe me,” Ruth said, “she’s doing whatever she has to do to get through it. She’s doing the best she can. Why don’t you take him back to the home?”

“I brought him all this way,” he said. “I don’t want to upset him.”

She gave him a hard look. “You will not be upsetting him. He won’t know the difference. Why don’t you take him back? We don’t have to mention anything to your mother.”

“She’ll be angry at me for disappearing for that long.”

Ruth threw up her hands in exasperation. “Let her be. Don’t make it harder for her than it has to be.”

“But it’s Christmas. She’s going to be happy to be spending it with him.”

“At least go in and tell her what you’re thinking. I’ll stay with your father. Tell her your plan and give her a chance to decide. Don’t spring this on her.”

Ruth went to the wheelchair, put her hand on his father’s shoulder, and patted it.

“I want her to see him in the kitchen,” Connell said. “I want to see the look on her face. I want to see his face.”

He took the handles of the wheelchair and released the wheel lock.

“Would you listen to me? I’ve known your mother for decades.”

“She’s my mother.”

“Connell.” She glared at him.

“I can’t take him back now.”

“You can.”

“It’s cold out here,” he said. “I want to bring him in.”

“At least give me a chance to go explain this to her.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, but she had already picked up her bags and was heading up the driveway ahead of him. He wheeled his father between the cars to the house. He pulled his father to his feet and they started up the stairs. There was no handrail, so he had to push against the wall with a stiff arm while the other wrapped around his father’s waist as he dragged him up a step at a time. An anxious expectancy rose in his chest. Again his father was emitting that low moan. They advanced slowly toward what felt like a climactic moment, though he hoped it would be more of a prelude to a memorable night and a conclusion on his mother’s part that the holiday had turned out perfect. He felt suddenly queasy. He tugged the screen door open, hoping to catch it with an elbow, but it swung back with a bang as he secured his grip on his father. Then the door behind it opened and Jack Coakley smiled warmly until Jack saw Connell’s father and his expression changed and he held the screen door open and made way for Connell to bring him in, which he did just as Ruth came in from the vestibule with his mother, the two of them moving in a brisk conference punctuated by restive hands, neither looking up as they walked swiftly, and then his mother raised her eyes and saw the two of them there and stopped, and everyone gathered in the kitchen was turned toward him with either confusion or gravity on their faces, and it was only then that he realized that he had made a costly error in judgment. His mother didn’t rush over as he’d expected her to but stood there with her mouth moving silently for what was surely only a moment but felt like a lifetime and would surely last that long in the slow-exposure image his mind was capturing of it. Sergei shifted on his buttocks in his habitual seat, and glasses of punch dangled from fingers as if arrested in their journey upward, and then a quick, throaty sob emerged from his mother as she said, “Oh, Ed,” once with a falling cadence and put her hand to her mouth. He turned to consider his father for the first time since he’d arrived at the home to pick him up, his hurrying having prevented it, though he was starting to feel now that he wouldn’t have seen him even if he’d paused to look. A thick rope of drool hung from his father’s mouth, indecorously refusing to break off and fall to the floor. Connell wiped it off and stood there in an agony of regret as the gathered crowd, led by his mother, converged on his father to pull him back toward the fireplace in the den with purposeful seriousness. The party was over before it had begun. Sergei rose and left the kitchen as if compelled by the heat of wordless gazes. Connell would have to wait for another day, perhaps another life, to feel redeemed. He had never felt so far from his father, who disappeared behind a wall of backs as his mother approached him to deliver the rebuke he knew he deserved.

“Help me with the coats,” she said with a quiet urgency that had no time for rancor. She had spent a lifetime adjusting hopes downward and knew what order to handle things in. “Get some drinks going. We have to make the best of this.”

• • •

When he was done, he went out to the front porch and picked up the string he had disconnected from the others and plugged it in. The lights came on at once, completing the outline around the railed fence that his mother had drawn for passing cars and those making the turn into the driveway. It made a neat picture, and he stood taking it in, trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.

89

She had worried that the party would last late into the night, everyone frozen by Ed’s presence, unsure when they could leave, if they could leave, but then one by one they started to go. Before everyone had departed — because she knew it would be impossibly painful for her to get him out of there once they had — she announced that she was going to take Ed back to the home, and she had Jack and Connell get him down the stairs, said some quick good-byes and asked Ruth to handle everyone’s coats. Connell wanted to drive Ed himself, or go with her, but she insisted on doing it alone.

When she got to the home, she parked by the front door, even though she wasn’t supposed to stop there. She left the wheelchair in the trunk, helped Ed out of the seat in a bear hug and shuffled him over, as if she was dancing with a passed-out man and trying to keep him up. Everything inside was dark except for a single light in the entry to the foyer. She rang the bell and held Ed up with both arms, regretting that she hadn’t just left him in the car while she waited, or stopped to get the wheelchair out of the trunk, but she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She rang again. He was shivering, and she rang again and she thought of bringing him back to the car, wondering whether they were going to come at all, but then an attendant came to the door and Eileen asked for a wheelchair. She’d return the other one another time. She wheeled him in, got him into bed, kissed him good night, and left before she could feel what was starting to well up in her, which she whisked away by shaking her head quickly from side to side and throwing her hands out like she was trying to dry them off.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to let Ed stay in the house that night, because it would have broken her heart to have him there one more time only to have him have to leave again, and there was also the matter of Sergei. She hadn’t been intimate with him since that night she’d gone into his room and let what was happening happen, the first spark catching the kindling and sending flames up quickly, and she had almost gotten to the point where she’d convinced herself it hadn’t occurred. Lately, though, they had fallen into a habit. He would come into her bed after she’d turned in and hold her for a while. At some point in the night he would get up and go to his own bed, but there had been mornings she’d woken up and found him there, and once she’d even woken up in his arms. She couldn’t have had Ed sleep in the bed, because it didn’t feel like her bed with him anymore. It wasn’t hers with Sergei, either, and it felt less and less like her bed, period. She could hardly sleep in it. She had been thinking of getting a new bed for years, and now she saw that she would have to do so right away — tomorrow, even. Now that Ed had been back in the house, it couldn’t continue the way it had been.

She was glad Connell had slept in late. Sergei was waiting for her in the kitchen when she came down. He made it easier on her by stopping her quickly into her speech and making a gesture that showed he understood. She got the feeling she might not have had to say anything to him at all, that he would have figured it out on his own. He always made things easier on her. He had gone up to his room the night before as soon as Ed came in, and he hadn’t come back down, and Ed’s presence had caused such a distraction that she was sure no one had drawn any conclusions from Sergei’s departure, and she had been grateful because leaving the room had been the perfect thing for him to do and she hadn’t had to ask.

He gathered his things quickly; there wasn’t much to gather. She asked where he would go and he said he would stay with his daughter until he figured out what was next. Something told her he would end up back with his wife, that he had been going to end up back with her from the beginning, that this had been something he had been doing for himself as well as for Eileen, that it was a life-giving escape for him too.

He stood in the door and she felt a rush of something like panic and asked if he wanted to go into town and get some breakfast with her. When he said he did, she spirited them out quickly, as it felt somehow that the reality of what had been happening between them would become more permanent in her own mind if her son came down and saw them leaving for town together.

She got in Sergei’s car, which she’d never been in before. It touched her to see how neat and clean it was, not a scrap of paper or food wrapper anywhere. There was an air-freshener smell in the car, and the smell of broken-in leather, and the smell — she wouldn’t have guessed she’d recognize it — of Sergei himself.

She had thought of Pete’s, or the other diner in town whose name she could never remember, but as he drove she realized it would be uncomfortable to sit with him and have a full-on meal and have to wait for a check and manage all the time, the silences, and have to look at each other that long, because she realized she felt more for him than she’d ever admitted to herself, and she knew he did too, or else he wouldn’t have put up with being intimate with her just the one time.

She had him pull into a spot on Palmer outside the bagel shop, and they went in. It surprised her to realize that it was the first time they had ever been in public together. She asked him what he wanted and he told her to get what she thought he would like. She remembered seeing him eat an egg and cheese sandwich once, so she ordered him one with American cheese, which he loved, a fact that had always surprised her somehow, on a plain bagel, because that was the safest choice, and a black coffee. She got the same for herself, except for the cheese, cheddar in her case, and she was so nervous paying that she had to hand over another dollar to have enough, and she felt a little of what she imagined Ed had felt when paying, and she also felt a pang of sadness or guilt, she wasn’t sure which, run through her like an electric shock. She glanced over while paying and saw Sergei looking at her, taking her in frankly and unapologetically, maybe because he was free to do so now, and she was sure the woman behind the counter would be able to see the whole story of their relationship — she had to call it that, if she was being honest — from that one look.

She brought the food over and sat at the little café table with him, in a plastic chair, and they talked about the safest of things: the weather, how the coffee was. He asked her to get him another napkin, because they kept them behind the counter and it would have required some negotiation on his part to get one, and she felt a surge of connection to him that made all the nights of his holding her settle in, like a dog going to sleep with a sigh by a fireplace, and she wanted to reach out and touch his face, but she knew that she would never be with him, that something about the circumstances of how they’d come together made that impossible, that their lives were too different, too incommensurable, and that while they’d had this thing that she saw meant more to her than she’d understood while it was happening, it too, now, was gone.

When the sandwiches were eaten she ordered a muffin for them to share, and they picked at it with a tender deliberateness that gave the sadness she’d been feeling room to breathe. After every crumb was gone, and there was no reason for them to be sitting there anymore, they sat and looked at each other for a little while. She didn’t care now what the woman behind the counter thought, because she was going to take this moment for herself and not let it slip away. She could tell he was feeling the same thing she was, though she wasn’t prepared to give it a name. They sat there and let that nameless feeling pass over them like a wind in an electric storm. Then she got up and he followed her out. She walked him to the car and he offered to drive her home, but she said she would walk, and the moment for him to get in his car was upon them, and people were coming at them from both directions, and she was nervous to be seen there with him, because she knew everyone would know, that it would take only one look at her for them to know. She put her arms around him quickly before she could stop herself and sank into his arms as he pressed her to him one final time. She wanted not to forget any of it: the fresh smell of his shirt mixed with cologne, smoke, and sweat; his jacket rough against her face and the strange innocence of its red and black checks; the strength of him squeezing her; the sound of his breathing. She felt rise up in her the years of Ed’s illness and the months since he’d been gone. She felt it in her chest but she didn’t let it out, because she didn’t think she deserved to do so. She would have to carry it around in her a little longer at least. He gave her small kisses on the neck and said something to her in Russian that she didn’t understand, and then he took her face in his hands by the ears and gave her a few smacking kisses on the forehead and walked around to the driver’s side door. He took one more long look at her before he dipped his big body down into the car, which shook with his entry into it. She listened to it starting up and watched it pull out and waited for him to come around the circle and head back the other way toward the Bronx River, and after he was out of sight she went back into the store to buy some bagels for Connell. She would eat again with him when he was up. It would give her less to explain, and it would make it less real, what she’d been feeling sitting there, and it would make it more real, in a way, it would make it more hers, something that didn’t have to exist for anyone else, something she’d done for herself, for once, and there was no need to apologize for it. She looked the woman in the eye and handed over her money and left to start the walk home. The second half was all uphill. She knew she’d barely be breathing by the time she arrived.