The Burning Side(30)
Sadie struggles with speech acquisition. We try to limit television, but still, she watches a lot of it. “Maybe it’s time to give her a sibling,” I say one night, half kidding. The windows are open to let in birdsong, and we’ve been laughing. But we leave the suggestion floating aimlessly through the air, because surely this isn’t the time to bring life into the world.
April gets out of bed later and later. She pushes food around her plate with her fork, leaving most of it. I ask what she needs, and without turning her gaze from the blue light of the television, she says, “I don’t know, just a little space.”
We’ve been siphoned into our homes, everyone wondering how we got here. Not here as in avoiding sickness, but here, in our various homes and families and jobs and lives. There is a widespread buzz of individual reevaluation, and I watch it land directly on my wife.
My old beast raises its head, telling me April will get rid of me, warning me not to show need, which is difficult in such close quarters. So I give her as much space as I possibly can, and I touch the totem of my wedding band. I always become a burden eventually.
* * *
Come autumn, our family has managed to evade the virus, and Argyle High opens back up. I’m relieved to be able to finally give April some real space, and to see my students. There are strict protocols. Plastic shields frame each desk. Kids are in and out with exposures and mandatory quarantines. Their grades are down. Their spirits.
One morning, a student comes in after losing her job at McDonald’s. I don’t know why she was let go, I only know she needed the money. It takes a minute to realize she’s crying behind her shield, her hair, her mask. Another kid tosses a tissue over the shield for her, and it flutters downward. She picks it up, pressing it to her eyes as her shoulders quiver. Everyone stays distant like we’re supposed to, and I get a tickle in my throat, sorrow like the start of a sickness.
After that, I throw myself into teaching and open my classroom for after-school tutoring. We talk and read and work and test straight through those desk shields. Sometimes, we even laugh. At home, I’m a burden. Here, I am needed.
DEB
Two Days After the Fire
STEPPING INTO THE BACKYARD IS like stepping off the bullet train of time. It’s still, with the night sky and distant croak of a frog. My gin and tonic is in hand, ice tinkling. Our Adirondack chairs are beneath the bistro lights, where Billy sits with his whiskey like a hundred times before. But all is not as it was.
Once, when my kids were young, a friend saw them after a long time and said, “Man, growth is like an acid trip.” I had to agree. April’s new teeth and freckles, Josie’s thinned baby cheeks, and Cameron’s height. It had all happened before my very eyes, a succession of sprouts and blooms in my garden of children.
I look now at Billy. He is still strong, still rides his bike regularly. If I study his long, lean muscles, at times I still dizzy with desire. His vision remains sharp, nearly six decades of life with no glasses. But there are traces of time. His joints bother him. His skin is dotted with sunspots. There’s a hairless orb on the back of his head, his brain beneath it, misfiring. A museum of gray matter, its shelves being robbed and emptied with each passing hour.
I sit down beside him.
He takes my hand in his, leans his head back, and rests his eyes. Quietly, he hums “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” the song a sort of anchor for us.
I think of the day we spent four hours dragging the kids to furniture stores to find the perfect couch. We argued and stopped for lunch. Josie spilled fruit punch on herself. I ground my teeth. Hours were spent and used and lost, the way hours are. I don’t regret that day; what I regret is rushing to the end of it. I was spinning with checklists and children, trying to keep up, though I’m not sure with what.
I take a sip and feel the piney burn of gin in my throat, the stillness around me, the man beside me. It has only been six years since I stopped bleeding each month. There was a sadness with that, a sudden desire to get pregnant again. I remember thinking, Maybe we could adopt. We have time.
I join Billy in closing my eyes, and I flip through my catalog of memories, hoping to pull strength from somewhere in my past. I gave my mother medicine through a straw, then kept my father alive, then chose hymns for his funeral. I married a man I barely knew and raised a baby I didn’t plan on, then two more I did. I fed countless neighbors, listened to them cry over casseroles. I became an orphan, a wife, and a mother, all at times I wouldn’t have chosen. And now— The bullet train circles back and draws closer. Billy got lost today. Lost.
Now, I am becoming my husband’s caretaker. A gulf is opening between us, a canyon where I have knowledge he doesn’t, a future he doesn’t, where I will make decisions he can’t. It’s our last storm, and it’s all I can do not to throw myself on the ground in protest. I wanted to be the first to go. And the anticipation of grief is a grief itself.
With energized sorrow, I open my eyes. “We need to tell the kids.”
Billy opens his too, and he nods. “I know.”
He knows. He knows. I could cry with relief, he knows. It’s the two of us together, pipe and joint, pier and beam.
I swallow another sip of gin. “Tomorrow?”
He hesitates. “Does April…”
I look at him, apologetic.
He says, “She already knows?”