Next Year, for Sure Page 13
—
Kathryn talks to Janine Marten as she cleans. Do you have scouring pads, Janine? Do you have someone you can talk to? Are you sleeping at night? Janine, how old is this potato salad?
Kathryn tells jokes that her students used to tell her—strange, improbable jokes—and sings songs in a loud, brassy voice she never uses. Take Me to the River. I Put a Spell on You. She tries out versions of the toast she will give at Sharon’s wedding. What do you think, Janine? Too maudlin? Or just the right amount?
But also, Kathryn listens. She listens to the house settle and sigh. She listens to the quality of the silence in each room, and whether it sounds serene or lifeless. More than once, she thinks she hears a voice muttering something low and incomprehensible, but has convinced herself that this must be someone walking by outside.
—
The bed is already made in Janine’s room, but being thorough, Kathryn pulls back the covers.
The grease is visible, a waxy discoloration where Janine lays her body down at night. She sleeps on the far side of the bed, like Kathryn, away from the door.
Kathryn pulls the sheets from the bed, and the pillowcases, heavy with the unwanted cells of Janine.
There is a hall closet, Kathryn finds, full of clean linens, and she chooses the softest ones. She puts on the sheets in silence, taking care. And when the bed is made again, she lies down on it for several minutes, so the bed does not look too taut and unforgiving. No one should come home to a bed that looks better off without you.
—
From this low angle, Kathryn can see the dust coating the nightstand and everything on it—medicated lip balm, seven pennies, a foam earplug. There’s a calendar, small and tent-like, the kind that insurance companies send you in the mail, but it’s from last year, the year that just ended, and all the days are Xed off.
Kathryn flips backwards through the months. If she could find even one date that was circled, one date with a little star drawn beside it or an exclamation point or a daub of highlighter, Kathryn could believe that the Xs had been counting down to something, marking off days in anticipation. But instead, she knows, they are simply a record of days gotten through.
—
It occurs to Kathryn, lying there on a stranger’s bed, that she herself might be depressed. The prospect of it startles her.
She doesn’t want to kill herself exactly. Like most people, Kathryn wants to be old and die in her sleep, but she wishes that it wasn’t so very far off, so many days to get through and cross out.
Kathryn tries to think of one thing she is looking forward to, but the only thing on her own calendar is the unfortunate wedding blotting out her birthday. Kathryn doesn’t generally celebrate her birthday, but she might’ve wanted to have a party this year. She hasn’t had a party for how long now?
She gets out of the bed and clears the nightstand. She wipes each item, every penny, and puts them all back in place.
—
The energy that had flooded Kathryn has drained away, leaving her tired and woozy. There are still things she meant to do. The crisper drawers from the fridge are soaking in the sink, but the thought of getting them rinsed and dried and coaxed back into their tracks, it all feels insurmountable.
She wanders from room to room, looking for some task that would require no effort, but the house has turned against her.
She finds herself after a while on the couch watching Janine Marten’s big TV. Daytime television invariably makes Kathryn angry, and she would rather feel angry right now.
—
She watches people losing weight on the large TV. It’s a contest. They have teams and coaches. It seems, from the comfort of the couch, so doable: Basically, there’s this thing you want. And in order to get this thing you want, you have to suffer and sacrifice. Specifically, you have to suffer through x-many kilowatts of sweaty effort and you have to sacrifice y-many calories of nourishment. Someone with a clipboard tells you the exact amounts. You break it down, you make a plan. So manageable, so quantifiable. But it all starts with: There’s this thing you want.
What if there isn’t this thing you want?
—
It occurs to Kathryn that not wanting things is a goal she has been working toward all her life. Now, though, she badly wants to want something. She wants to want to go somewhere, like Emily wants to go to Brazil someday, but probably never will. Kathryn could get Emily to Brazil within eighteen months, she thinks, if Emily would let Kathryn hold the clipboard. They could do it together even, suffer and sacrifice together.
But Kathryn doesn’t want to go to Brazil. She could never be happy lying on a beach while poor people bring her food and drinks and other poor people are kept away. Kathryn doesn’t need to see the pyramids or the Sistine Chapel or the Ganges before she dies.
The only place she can think of that calls to her is this imaginary town on a Greyhound route where she has a tiny apartment and disappears into it. She thinks about this place sometimes when she is trying to sleep. In her mind, the town is called Doppler, but it could be called something else.
—
The weight-loss program has ended and a home renovation show is on. She’s only half watching now, flipping through magazines and catalogues on the coffee table. There’s a brochure from the rec centre with all the classes being offered in the new year, and Kathryn looks at each listing to see if it is the solution to her problems. Would learning Mandarin help? Would knowing capoeira change anything?
Maybe Janine should take one of these classes, Kathryn thinks. That’s what you tell depressed people: Get out there and do something, try something. Because it’s easy to see what other people should do.
—
There are little red dots, Kathryn notices, next to each class description, as if someone has rested the tip of a pen there, considering, then lifted it and moved on. Kathryn imagines Janine Marten sitting on this couch, looking through the offerings and feeling that nothing speaks to her.
Kathryn gets that. Kathryn goes days without anything particularly speaking to her. Days when her mouth doesn’t want any food in the world, and she keeps putting music on and then turning it off. And the last thing you want on those days is someone pressing you to find a hobby, or take an interest in something. Kathryn distrusts those people and their glib pastimes.
But it would be good to know Mandarin. Hell, Kathryn would take Mandarin. They could take it together, Janine and Kathryn, and get coffee after and practise their greetings and leave-takings.
And capoeira. Has Janine ever seen capoeira? It looks so profoundly badass. Kathryn used to stumble upon street exhibitions and stand there transfixed until the dancers packed up and went away.
Kathryn roots around for the red pen and circles the Mandarin class on Mondays, Intro to Capoeira on Wednesdays, First Aid on Fridays. And when she has finished putting the refrigerator back together and folding the clean laundry and scooting the furniture back into place and emptying the mop water and taking out the reeking garbage, she leaves the class listings open and face up on the coffee table.
CHAPTER 15
Three Days
SATURDAY
It was only going to be for three days.
Emily’s brother, who never asks for anything, had asked her to please come down for the long weekend, and Emily, who sometimes found it hard to go home, had asked Chris if he would come with her, for moral support if nothing else, and Chris, who was still not over Emily’s last trip to California, had asked Kathryn was it okay, and Kathryn had said, Yeah, you should go, and had even talked about coming along herself before deciding that, no, she should work. That was back when they still thought it was only going to be for three days, back before anyone was in the hospital.
Emily’s parents met them at the airport. Emily had wanted to take Chris for breakfast tacos at a place she knew, but her parents already had breakfast tacos waiting at home, they said. They’d gone out special and got all the makings the night before. They we
re so pleased about this, her parents, about knowing what their daughter would want when she stepped off the plane, though Emily herself seemed somehow aggrieved. After some fraught debate, Emily consented to just go home and eat what was there. She was quiet in the back of her parents’ white Saturn. She held Chris’s hand hard and stared out the window, letting Chris field most of her parents’ conversational salvos.
Chris rose to the occasion, he felt. He already knew that Emily’s parents were professors—her father of economics, her mother of political science—and Chris knew how to talk to professors. He asked about their respective research and listened attentively. He asked follow-up questions. He spoke thoughtfully about his honours thesis on the role of scarcity in underground cinema, and the modest ways his argument had intersected with econ and poli-sci. And in this way, he erected a shield behind which Emily could hide from her parents, who Chris secretly found delightful.
In the end, the tacos did much for morale. The Emily that Chris knew re-emerged briefly, and the four of them sat amiably enough in the bright kitchen and told stories about Emily as a small child. Chris loved this. He wanted to know every story there was to know about Emily, and he made a great audience.
They weren’t going to see Stephen, her brother, until the following day, and there was the question of what to do until then. Her parents wanted to make them a big dinner, wanted to show them this Romanian film they’d gotten from the library, but Emily shrugged these off and said she might just take the car and show Chris around.
The rest of the day was all people and places. Everywhere they went, someone knew Emily. She was loved. And because Chris was with her, he was loved, too. He was hugged and slapped on the back and fed and toasted and confided in and occasionally flirted with until he fell asleep in a corner of someone’s living room around midnight.
SUNDAY
They’d blocked off all of Sunday for Stephen, though no one knew what the plan was. Stephen had been staying with a friend the last couple of weeks, and his cell phone worked only sporadically. Emily seemed unperturbed by this. They spent the morning waiting-but-not-waiting for Stephen to call or text or possibly just walk in.
Emily’s parents read the paper together, each with a section, reading out lines they found interesting or fallacious or emblematic of something, and then discussing the item at length. Emily dozed on the loveseat—it’d been almost four in the morning when they got to bed—and opened her eyes every so often to check on Chris, to make sure that he was still holding up and not needing to be rescued from her chattering parents. But Chris liked Emily’s parents. He liked their energy—directed, as it was, mostly toward each other. He liked that they’d been in love for thirty years and still wanted to hear every single thing the other person thought about the world.
He considered phoning Kathryn. It was weird to have gone a whole day without talking to her. He felt full of things to tell her and empty of the things she might tell him. Did she finish her book? Did she order takeout from that new place? Did she find the little presents and notes he’d left hidden around the apartment? But he wouldn’t call right then. He didn’t want to tie up the line in case Stephen tried to call.
And then Stephen was there, ringing the doorbell.
What Chris knows about Stephen: Three years older than Emily. Taught young Emily multiplication using a box of checkers. (She had already failed the unit twice and there was talk of holding her back.) Also offered, at age six, to have his tonsils taken out so that Emily could keep hers. Got suspended from school because his book report on Bridge to Terabithia was judged too erudite to have been written by a sixth grader. (He couldn’t produce a rough draft or outline, because he’d written the whole thing on the school bus that morning. Emily had watched him do it.) Entered university at age sixteen and dropped out in the middle of his final semester, citing tooth pain. He lived now on almost nothing, and sometimes said this was what he wanted and other times said he was ready to make a change.
He was thin and lucid and gentle, hugging first his mom, then his dad, then holding Emily long and close. He shook Chris’s hand, took Chris’s hand really, and held it still for a moment, and said, I’m glad you came, and Chris could sense the man’s crushing intelligence, like the molten core of an otherwise dead planet.
They went for dim sum, the five of them, and because Chris was there, had an excuse to tell the old family stories that needed retelling. It was the first time the family had been together in one place in almost two years, and it kept feeling like something important was about to happen. But when it didn’t, Stephen thanked them for coming, embraced them one by one, and headed off down Stockton on foot, leaving them to wonder what it had all been about.
He seemed good, though, Emily’s mother said in the car. Upbeat. And they all agreed that that was something.
Back at the house, there were a dozen messages for Emily from friends who’d heard she was in town and wanted to see her.
What Chris wanted was to sit with Emily’s parents and watch the Romanian film, and possibly drink the hot toddies they’d mentioned, and then fall asleep reading back issues of The New Yorker which could be found in every room of the house. For a moment, Chris considered suggesting this plan to Emily. It would be a nice gesture; parents die unexpectedly and you wish you’d spent more time. He also considered suggesting that he stay with her parents, keep them company, while Emily went out and saw her friends. He did want her parents to like him, and also he felt on the verge of breaking down at the thought of meeting one more human. But it was their last night in San Francisco—tomorrow they would go home to their manageable lives—and Chris wanted to give her everything.
MONDAY
They were packing their bags for a noon flight when the hospital called, and the hospital didn’t say much. Just, Did they know a Stephen Leighby, and that they should come right away. The four of them got into the white Saturn with this information and did what they could with it.
The nurses weren’t sure what had happened. Stephen had been found unconscious by an early-morning fisherman on Baker Beach. He had a head injury and was in surgery, but that’s all they knew. Later that day, they would know things like subdural hematoma and intracranial pressure, but they still wouldn’t know what happened. Mostly it would be a day of sitting there.
Chris did whatever he could think of for Emily and her parents. He brought them coffee. He found them new magazines when they were tired of staring at the old ones. He tried to be present when his presence was helpful and stay out of the way when it wasn’t. He listened to the rational and irrational thoughts that occurred to everyone. He prayed when he was asked to pray. And he let their noon flight leave unnoticed.
By late afternoon, Stephen was out of surgery and it seemed he was not going to die. The surgeon kept saying how Stephen could’ve died, kept emphasizing this, which was apparently the surgeon’s way of saying that Stephen was not going to die.
When they finally got to see Stephen, he was confused. He asked them several times how they got here, as if their thirty-minute drive in a white Saturn was the most notable event of the last twenty-four hours.
He would be in the hospital a while, that much was clear.
—
Chris calls Kathryn from Emily’s dying cell phone.
Oh my god, Kathryn says. Is he going to be okay? Is Emily okay?
Are you okay? Chris asks Kathryn. She sounds terrible.
Kathryn has been vomiting all day, she says. Has a fever, she’s pretty sure, but dropped the thermometer behind the bed before she could read it.
Chris is flooded with the need to be there, taking care of her. They always take such good care of each other.
I’m going to call right now and see when the next flight is, he says.
Kathryn says no. And he, too, had known as soon as the words came out of his mouth that he couldn’t get on a plane and leave Emily with her broken-open brother. But he can’t tolerate the thought of Kathryn vomiting in an
empty house.
What about Sharon, Chris says. Could you call Sharon?
For what?
To bring food and stuff. To get the thermometer out from behind the bed.
It’s probably just that thing Emily had, Kathryn says.
Emily’s phone is beeping urgently, foretelling its demise.
Kathryn, will you please call Sharon?
If it gets bad enough, Kathryn says.
It feels now like they’re arguing, and Chris tries in their last remaining seconds to change course. He loves her, he says. He’s thinking about her.
—
The best anyone can figure is that Stephen was walking on the rocks and slipped and hit his head. It would have been dead black out there, easy to misstep.
But why was he out there at all? Emily’s mom keeps saying. Isn’t the beach closed at night? She can’t stop asking in various ways if the whole thing with the dim sum and Emily being asked to come down was to say goodbye.
You don’t try to kill yourself by tripping and falling down, Emily’s father says. He is adamant about this. A bit later he says, People who want to commit suicide jump off the damn bridge, they don’t hit their head on a rock underneath it.
Emily says little. She seems sunken and menacing, like a two-hundred-pound mine floating just below the waves. Occasionally she surfaces to tell her parents to stop speculating, stop hypothesizing, stop talking.
Privately, though, in bed that night, Emily worries that Stephen might well have been saying goodbye, whether he knew it or not. She says she had felt something like this coming since she and Stephen were teenagers, but thought it was their secret to keep. Chris massages Emily’s back late into the night, digging his thumbs hard into her muscles the way she has taught him, until she at last sleeps. Then he crawls into the sleeping bag on the floor beside the narrow bed of her childhood.