Next Year, for Sure Read online

  TUESDAY

  The second day at the hospital feels longer than the first. Chris calls Kathryn whenever there is downtime, and there is a lot of downtime. Her phone rings and rings and goes to voicemail.

  Hey little bug, he says. I’m guessing your ringer’s off. Hope that means you’re sleeping lots. I’ll try again later.

  They’re able to see Stephen, off and on. He speaks clearly and in full sentences, though it’s hard at times to tell how the ideas fit together. And people have to explain things to him several times, like what the buttons on his bed do. Emily is the best at this, at finding new ways to explain things to Stephen and making it sound like it’s the first time.

  You two always did have this way, her mom says, which plainly irks Emily. But they do have this way. Chris feels honoured to get to witness it. Then he lures Emily’s parents out of the room.

  WEDNESDAY

  By Wednesday, Chris is worried.

  True, Kathryn doesn’t always remember to turn her ringer back on, but it’s been a day and a half. She would have checked her messages.

  Chris calls Sharon at work, catches her on her lunch break. No, she says, she hasn’t heard from Kathryn in weeks.

  Can you go by and check on her? he asks.

  Where are you? Sharon wants to know.

  He has to tell her that he is in San Francisco with Emily and so can’t go himself to make sure Kathryn is not dying alone in their apartment.

  Honestly, Chris, what the fuck?

  I just want to make sure she’s okay, Chris says.

  Are you in love with this girl?

  This isn’t about that, Chris says.

  But Sharon says, No, it kind of is. Are you in love with her?

  I’m in love with Kathryn. And with Emily.

  You can’t be, Sharon says. That’s not how it works.

  Chris exhales into the phone.

  Look, Sharon says, it’s possible you love both of them. I would believe that you still love Kathryn. But you’re not in love with her.

  This little word, in, makes Chris wild. It has never made sense to him, this love-but-not-in-love thing that people have been saying his whole life, like it’s a fact we all agree on, like it’s the difference between a liquid and a solid and a gas and no one has ever heard of plasma. He can feel a rage burbling up, fury that feels like it belongs to someone else, and when it reaches his throat he opens his mouth and says, Sharon, I’m going to think very seriously about everything you’ve said. Will you please check on Kathryn.

  —

  Chris does think about what Sharon said. She’d said it badly and much of it was wrong-headed, but she was right about one thing. He shouldn’t be here. He should be at home taking care of Kathryn. And yes, he should also be here for Emily, but Emily has her family and an entire hospital staff, and Kathryn has no one. Chris is her person and he should be there.

  —

  Sharon calls from the apartment to say Kathryn’s not there.

  Where did she go? Chris wonders.

  Sharon says how should she know, like this is a dumb question.

  But Chris can always tell where Kathryn’s gone, just by looking at how she left the place. Did she take one canvas bag or two? (That’s produce versus staples.) Did she wear her blue shoes? (She’s gone for a walk, an hour at least.) Did she wear her blue shoes but leave the orthotics behind? (That’s going to the corner store for tortilla chips.)

  What does it look like there? he says. What do you see?

  It smells like vomit, Sharon says.

  Is there a note on the fridge maybe?

  There is no note. There is no takeout or takeout receipt. There is no thermometer behind the bed. Sharon does find Kathryn’s phone, almost drained, but there are no outgoing calls since last week, and the last fifty incoming calls are from Chris.

  Goddammit, Chris says. He doesn’t know what to do.

  This is why people pick one person to be with, Sharon says.

  Chris thinks Sharon is probably right.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ten Days

  MONDAY

  Chris calls Kathryn from Emily’s dying cell phone. He’s at the hospital, he says, in San Francisco. Kathryn is confused for a moment. She had been expecting him to walk in the door any minute now and find her like this, clammy and wretched on the couch with a trash can full of puke. She had been waiting for Chris to come make it better, or if he couldn’t make it better, then to bear witness to how bad it was, which would somehow make it better.

  But now it’s all pouring out of him—the call from the hospital, the quiet terror of the drive, the waiting and waiting, and then seeing Stephen so scrambled, and not knowing if it was an accident, and everyone silently blaming everyone and themselves.

  Kathryn almost doesn’t tell Chris about being sick. Her own symptoms are hastily receding in the face of actual life-or-death trauma. It’s a flu, she thinks. Probably just that thing Emily had. It won’t kill her.

  But Kathryn does tell Chris, because he asks, because he knows her too well.

  His torment is palpable, and gratifying. He wants more than anything to be here for Kathryn. He wants to come home on the next flight. She can feel him trying to climb through the phone.

  Kathryn won’t let him come home, of course. It’s not the right thing to do, but she likes knowing that if she said, Come home, he would.

  He loves her, he says. He’s thinking about her.

  When the phone dies, the nausea comes back.

  TUESDAY

  On Tuesday, Kathryn wakes up needing to pee worse than usual. No doubt from all the clear fluids she’s been trying to force down, but maybe it worked. She feels not bad, she thinks, getting out of bed. Then she falls over. She laughs at herself, stands up, and falls over again.

  A wave of nausea rolls in. Her bladder cramps. She’ll have to crawl to the bathroom. She gets on all fours, and still she falls over. Topples over, she thinks. Each time toppling to the left while the room, she notices now, keeps lurching to the right.

  She drags herself to the bathroom, slowly, hugging the floor, but when she gets there, she can’t balance on the toilet seat long enough to pee. She keeps listing over to one side and onto the linoleum.

  Finally, she curls herself into the bathtub and lies there in a ball while the urine finds its way to the drain.

  —

  Kathryn is scared about her brain. She isn’t sure what would make someone suddenly unable to walk, or even crawl or sit upright, but it seems like it would have to be something bad. Is it getting worse every minute she lies here doing nothing? Is there some mnemonic everyone is supposed to know about how critical the first few hours are? The first few minutes?

  Or it could be nothing. She’d call an ambulance and the paramedics would get mad at her for wasting their time with a dizzy spell. At the trailer park, you never called 911, not for anything. You took the person to town in the pastor’s old Plymouth, or not at all.

  —

  It’s probably mid-morning when Kathryn’s phone starts to ring somewhere in the apartment. She listens to it from the bathtub, ringing and ringing. It sounds far away, wherever it is.

  It’s Chris calling, she’s sure. He said he’d call and check on her, and so of course he does, though Kathryn wishes for once in his life he had said one thing and done another. She wishes Chris had ignored what she’d said on the phone and instead gone straight to the airport, and that the sound she was hearing right now was his key in the front door.

  She keeps catching herself expecting this to happen.

  —

  By noon, Kathryn has figured out a trick. If she lies on her right side, ear to the ground, the nausea and spinning mostly die down. She might be able to inch around the apartment in this position, if she keeps her head flat and takes lots of breaks. What would she need to get through the day? Water bottle, phone, blanket, book. Four trips, tops, and she could set up camp in the bathroom indefinitely.

  She hauls hersel
f out of the bathtub and onto the floor. She’ll get through this. She’s gotten through worse.

  —

  Kathryn is on her fourth and final trip, dragging a blanket behind her, when someone knocks on the door. We’re not home, Kathryn thinks. She’s halfway to the bathroom; there’s no way she’s going back to answer the door.

  The person knocks again, then jiggles the doorknob. Kathryn freezes. Who would jiggle the doorknob? She can’t remember if the deadbolt is on.

  The person knocks again.

  Kathryn pulls the blanket around herself and lurches to her feet. She makes it a couple of steps before she falls. Then up again and a couple more. She gets within shouting distance of the door on the third go.

  Who the fuck is it, she yells.

  It’s Moss, Moss says.

  —

  Kathryn had arranged with Moss that he would come by today to finally look at the dish rack. They’d already postponed three times—twice it had been Moss who begged off—and Kathryn had ceased to think of the appointment as a real thing that would eventually happen.

  Kathryn yells out where the spare key is hidden and Moss lets himself in. He pauses when he sees her on the floor, half-naked and clutching a blanket.

  We said one thirty, right?

  I’m sick, Kathryn says.

  Moss kneels down on the floor beside her. He looks at her carefully. She can feel him taking in her hair, her eyes, her rug-burned face.

  You can’t stand up? Moss says.

  Kathryn shakes her head slightly. She’s trying to keep her right ear perfectly flat to the ground.

  Fever?

  Maybe, she says, and tells him about the thermometer. He stands up and disappears from view. Kathryn can hear her bed being lifted up and away from the wall, and a moment later set back in place. There’s an interval of silence, while Moss is presumably reading the thermometer, then he whistles appreciatively.

  Kathryn hears him running the bathroom tap.

  I like your bivouac, he calls out. Kathryn hates that anyone would see all that, her underwear drying on the bathtub faucet, the spattered toilet bowl, the mess left behind. But when Moss comes back into the living room, Kathryn suspects that he really meant it, that he admires her crawling into the tub and doing what she had to.

  He hands her the thermometer. Let’s see what you got, he says.

  —

  Her temperature barely registers on the thermometer, but then it has been at least forty-eight hours since she ate anything.

  What say I take you to the hospital? Moss says.

  I’m fine here, she says.

  Moss appears to consider this.

  I don’t need to be rescued, Kathryn says, though why she should say such a thing is not clear to her. A couple of hours ago, she was longing for precisely that.

  It’d be a waste of time, she says. I’d sit there all day and then they’d tell me to go home and rest.

  That’s possible, Moss says.

  Of course, Kathryn thinks, it’s also possible they could do something for her. They might give her some pill and then miraculously she’d be able to stand up again, or they might say, It’s a good thing you came when you did. But more likely, they’d say go home and rest.

  And how would we even get there? Kathryn says. I can barely move without throwing up.

  I could carry you, Moss says. My truck’s right out front.

  The thought of it makes Kathryn sick.

  —

  The ride is awful. Every time the truck turns a corner, Kathryn retches and heaves, but nothing will come up. By the time Moss carries her into the waiting room, Kathryn is sobbing and grasping for the floor.

  They are rushed into an exam room. People shine lights into Kathryn’s ears. They hit her with little hammers. They make her lie purposely on the wrong side, the left side, for ninety sickening seconds, make her hang her head backwards over the edge of the exam table. Moss stands in the corner and glares at them.

  They gradually rule out a lot of scary things. They say, Well, it isn’t this and it isn’t that, and Kathryn gives them a thumbs-up and holds on to the reeling exam table. In the end what they write down is vestibular neuritis, which sounds scary but apparently isn’t. Her inner ear is somehow irritated. They don’t know why. Also she’s dehydrated. They give her this stuff to drink and she has to take one tiny sip every minute for four hours. Moss disappears for some of this time and returns with a bendy straw so she can drink without lifting her ear off the table.

  They give her a shot which tamps down the nausea but leaves the walls slowly revolving. It also makes her doze off between sips. Moss watches the second hand on the wall clock and says, Drink. Again. Again. Again.

  When they finally leave the hospital, Kathryn walks out on her own legs, and Moss steers her around poles and parked cars. She curls up on the front seat and falls asleep before they are out of the parking lot.

  WEDNESDAY

  When Kathryn wakes up, the sun is rising and the truck is parked in front of Ahimsa. Moss has a book resting on the steering wheel.

  What’s happening? Kathryn says.

  I thought I’d let you sleep.

  I can sleep at home, she says.

  I know, he says. Or you could stay in our guest room.

  Kathryn rouses herself, sits up for a moment, then lies back down.

  I have to pee, she says.

  Moss closes his book and slides it under the seat. He looks at her like he is waiting for something and can wait a long time.

  It’s cold, Kathryn says.

  Should I take you home?

  Maybe not.

  —

  In the end, Kathryn stays in Moss’s room, which is closer to the bathroom, and it’s Moss who sleeps in the guest room. All they do for most of that first day is sleep. And when they wake up, Kathryn has become an eating thing.

  Miriam brings Kathryn the rest of the shepherd’s pie from dinner, and when Kathryn has gone through that, Moss orders Thai food, and they lie on his bed and eat. Kathryn names all the things she would like to eat right now: huevos rancheros, stuffed grape leaves, English muffins, mayonnaise. Moss says, I can go get that stuff, and Kathryn says, No, no, I don’t need it, it’s just what my mouth wants.

  Kendra loans Kathryn pyjamas, some clean socks and underwear. Us girls gotta stick together, Kendra says, and Kathryn isn’t sure what that means.

  I should call Chris, Kathryn realizes. The phone doesn’t reach to Moss’s room, so he installs a phone jack by the bed. It takes him ten minutes. Why do you know how to do that? Kathryn asks, and Moss says he is sometimes an electrician.

  —

  Chris is distraught on the phone, crazed with worry. I didn’t know where you were, he says, and when Kathryn says she is okay, that he can stop worrying, he weeps.

  He tells Kathryn about calling Sharon, about calling the police, about calling his mom, about not knowing who else to call.

  Kathryn tells him about falling off the toilet, about hearing all his calls and wishing she could answer, about dragging herself across the apartment.

  Chris says, I’m so sorry, Kathryn. That’s awful. I’m so, so sorry.

  And Kathryn says, No, you should’ve seen me. I was unstoppable. What was the word Moss used? Formidable. She was formidable.

  THURSDAY

  Kathryn is bored and restless. Not well enough to get out of bed, but well enough to want to. She thinks maybe she’d like to start running, be a person who runs. Her body craves some kind of impact.

  Moss’s room is full of books that Kathryn would like to read, but the words keep drifting off the page. TV is dizzying and dull.

  Moss keeps her company, in his way. The man cannot tell a story. Kathryn has to pry everything out of him, one bit at a time, like a pomegranate.

  It’s rewarding, though. He’s an interesting weirdo, and the day slides by.

  FRIDAY

  Chris calls every day, full of concern and little stories for Kathryn. He’ll
be flying home on Monday, he says, now that Stephen is out of the hospital. Emily will stay another week or two, just to be sure.

  I can’t wait to see you, he says. He sounds tired. We’ll get you back home, back in your own bed, he says.

  —

  Moss shows Kathryn a pair of shoes he’s making. They’re horrendous.

  Do you know they sell shoes? Kathryn says. Pre-made.

  I wanted to know how it’s done, Moss says.

  This makes sudden sense to Kathryn. Of course we should know how to make our own shoes.

  But why just shoes? Kathryn says. Why not shirts and pants?

  I did make this shirt, Moss says. He shows her the stitching, precise and peculiar.

  And the pants?

  I found the pants, he says.

  SATURDAY

  A bunch of things happen, one after another. Kathryn stands up and moves around without help. Kathryn takes a shower. Kathryn uses all the hot water. Kathryn sits at the dinner table like a human and talks to people about their day and what happened in the world. Zachary sings Kathryn a song he knows about throwing up. Moss and Kathryn order second dinner, Lebanese tonight, and sit on his bed and eat and watch some cop show on his old portable TV. And when Moss stands up and says, like he does every night, I’ll let you sleep, Kathryn says, You should stay.

  kissing

  beards and, 9:02–06

  biting and, 9:06, 9:08, 9:11–13

  wrestling and, 9:13–15

  nakedness

  as exploration, 9:51–10:32

  as invitation, 9:23–35, 9:42–51

  nerve endings and, 9:51–58, 10:04–08, 10:20–32

  sex

  as animal behaviour, 10:37–43, 11:07–12

  as communication, 10:43–58

  as play, 10:58–11:07

  dizziness and, 11:08

  sensory aspects of,

  smell, 10:32, 11:15

  taste, 10:32–37, 10:43–49

  touch, 10:43–49, 11:15

  SUNDAY

  What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is everything about having sex with Moss. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is Moss lifting her off the mattress and then pressing her down into it. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is simple yes/no questions. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is him watching her, never taking his eyes off her, like she might do anything. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is the angles. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is the ache of her muscles, the loss of vision and speech, that feeling of drowning. What Kathryn likes about having sex with Moss is that it occurs to Moss.