Authors: Sue Miller
Lottie had a liquor box with her, and now she sat down on the bare floor in the dining room and began to go through the stacks of papers in preparation for packing them up. Here were her notes
on Donne’s poems, on Turgenev’s stories. Here was the napkin with the comment about exhibitionism she’d jotted down in front of Elizabeth so long ago. Here was a scribble
she’d made early in the summer on the paucity of twentieth-century love stories.
Wonder why not?
she had noted.
It still orders our lives – amidst all this chaos, machinery.
Abandoment. Casual betrayal.
Sitting there on the floor with this paper in her hand, Lottie realized abruptly that she wouldn’t do this article, that she had nothing clear to say about this topic. She set the paper
down. To do it right, she’d have to be able to write fiction; because what loves offers, she thought, is a narrative thread. It gives things a beginning, a middle, and – as Twain had
seen so clearly – an end. And Lottie had neither the ability nor the wish to write a story.
Still, she was careful with everything; she sorted it all, stacked it – even the napkin. She packed it all carefully into the liquor box, and on the way back to the hotel, she stopped the
cab at the post office to mail it along with the boxes holding her computer and printer, to Jack’s house.
That night Cam came over to her hotel for a drink: Lottie had arranged this by phone several days before from Chicago. They sat outside on a wide brick terrace overlooked by the wings of the
hotel, by the rows and rows of identical windows and curtains. The lamps were slowly being switched on in the rooms. Lottie was tense. She focused immediately on the house – a safe topic
– and Cam seemed willing to go along with her.
He was about to list it with a real estate agent, he said. Their mother had finally been declared incompetent. They talked about money, about how to proceed. ‘Are you going to see
her?’ he asked.
Jack had asked this too, before she left. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too much like just looking at her to see her. She gets nothing from it. And it’s horrible for
me.’
He nods. ‘She still knows me.’
‘She should. You’ve been very good to her.’
Someone on the other side of the terrace dropped a glass, and for a few seconds everyone was quiet. Cam looked in that direction, then back at Lottie. He didn’t seem the least
uncomfortable with her. It became clear it would fall to her to say something about what had happened between them, if anything was to be said.
‘Have there been any . . . repercussions?’ she started. ‘Of the accident? For you?’
‘How do you mean?’
How did she mean?
Have you stayed awake at night thinking about it? Have you heard from Elizabeth? Has anything made a dent in you?
‘Just whether all that . . . whether your life is
any different on account of it, I guess.’
‘Not really.’ His voice was chilly. Or not chilly, just flat. Expressionless. He wasn’t going to tell her anything of any real importance to himself. Why had she thought he
might?
He shrugged and smiled just slightly. ‘I got a notice that I passed my blood test.’
‘Your blood test?’
‘Yes, the one I took that night?’
Lottie frowned.
‘In the emergency room. I spent most of that night, the night Jessica died, sitting in the emergency room waiting to have my blood drawn. While every knife fight and . . . kidney stone in
Cambridge got treated first.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Lottie said; and once again, just for a moment, she felt how different his experience of those days had been from hers. ‘I forgot about that.’
After a long silence, she said abruptly, ‘I’m ashamed of myself for the scene we had.’ She had rehearsed this line. This was what she’d decided she needed to say to him.
‘You needn’t be,’ he answered.
Lottie waited, but he added nothing. She looked at him. He was so self-contained, so handsome. He was all she could ever know about her family, and she would never know him.
In her dream that night in the hotel, Cam appeared to her. The dream was strangely connected to the last radiation treatment she’d undergone for cancer, when they
threaded rods through her breast and filled them with radioactive material. They’d kept her in isolation for more than a day that time, with a sign on her door that warned everyone away.
Lottie had felt like an alien, a mutant, some science fiction creature. When Ryan visited, he had to stand in the hallway to talk to her, looking homely and frightened. He was twelve then, and his
legs and nose were far too big for the rest of him.
In her dream, Cameron, like Ryan in life, was standing on the other side of a wide room from her. She knew this to be an emergency room, in the way we know these things in dreams. It was full of
equipment, mostly the ordinary machines that fill ordinary lives – televisions, answering machines, Xerox machines, computers. But somehow it was clear to Lottie that their purpose was to
read your blood, your heart. There were beeps and clicks, amber and green lines making words on the screens. It seemed to be through these machines that Cameron was speaking to her, but she
couldn’t read the words or understand the noises, hard as she tried. Lottie was herself partially just such a machine in the dream, but full of a human straining, to understand, to speak. Her
own cry woke her.
Lottie couldn’t have said exactly how everything connected, but somehow, in the plane on the way back to Chicago, she decided that she would write next about emergency rooms. Once she
returned, she spent four days sitting and making notes in a waiting room at Cook County Hospital, watching the bits of high drama that jolted quickly past – the accidents, the overdoses, the
family fights, the spiking fevers; as well as the ordinary, slower misery and pain of people who waited, who had no other source of medical care. The ceaselessly wailing child with an earache. An
old woman with a foot so swollen Lottie couldn’t see her toes. Again and again while she sat there, Lottie imagined Cameron in a setting like this: polite, cooperative with his police escort,
nothing showing in his face or bearing of the reality of what he’d done.
She is excited about this project, and so is her publisher. It has everything, they’ve agreed. Dramatic episodes, an angle into the social and medical ills of our time, a commentary to
offer on what’s going wrong with American medicine. It’s also become part of the joke about death with Jack – how perfect for her to have access to this never-ending stream. How
perfect for him that she does.
But what is perfect for Lottie, too, is going away, being
on the road
. She’d picked hospitals in two big cities besides Chicago to study, and in three small towns. She has made two
trips this fall, one to Seattle and one to southern New Mexico, and before both of them she has felt the familiar hunger to be gone, to be alone; and then, once she’s out there, the yearning
solitary pleasure in the anonymity and isolation of the trip.
And when it’s over, each time the coming home again.
Jack had waked her that summer afternoon she’d fallen asleep on the living room couch after her long drive home. He was bending over her and gently touching her swollen
cheek.
‘Lottie? What’s going on? What happened to you?’
Lottie opened her eyes and fought off her thick sleep, untangling the bedspread and trying too quickly to tell her tale: the tooth, the girl who died, the drive through the night, the funeral,
the fight with Cameron. She had to back up again and again and start over, filling in the missing elements. Finally she began to weep as she was talking – out of fatigue, out of confusion and
effort. ‘Oh, don’t look at me!’ she moaned. ‘I’m so ugly.’ Lottie cried as a child does, great hiccuping intakes of breath between her wails, her short
sentences. ‘And I wanted so much. I tried so hard. I drove the whole way thinking of it, of how it would be. And then my tooth. But then I saw I was just like him. Like Cameron. The whole
drive. I was trying so hard to be different, to love you. And it was just like him. Except I didn’t kill anyone. But I could have. I might as well have. And now I have to have
root
canal,’ she wailed.
Jack had eased on to the couch with her as she wept, sitting and then stretching the length of his body out next to hers. He was stroking her face, wiping the tears away, murmuring comfort. At
last she stopped, and they lay next to each other.
‘
Don’t
look at me,’ she whispered after a minute.
‘I love to look at you,’ he said. ‘My hollyhock.’ His hand rested gently on her swollen jaw. ‘My half a hamster.’
Lottie laughed, and choked. She turned quickly to her side, coughing, curled against the back of the couch. Finally she lay still. Jack had raised himself on an elbow behind her.
‘You almost killed me, Jack,’ she said, hoarsely. She cleared her throat.
‘With kindness,’ he said.
‘Regardless.’
They lay cupped together for a while, looking up at the trees moving behind the panes of the windows above them, listening to Bader’s snorts and whimpers in sleep on the floor. Lottie
slept a little too, and then woke, momentarily feeling Jack’s arms and legs as part of her.
They roused themselves. Lottie went upstairs to wash her face and put makeup on. She came back in Jack’s bathrobe, rolling up the long sleeves. He was in the kitchen, wiping the counters.
He was apologetic about the mess. Lottie insisted on helping him. She wiped too, she scrubbed. She ran the disposal. She put the pizza boxes in the garbage, and then, because they wouldn’t
fit, she climbed in and stood on them until they went down. She unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher, rinsed and loaded up the ones in the sink. She swept the kitchen floor.
Jack, meanwhile, set the table, cleaned the stovetop, and fixed them dinner – poached eggs, in honor of Lottie’s tooth. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table and ate
them, and then drank wine, talking, until all the color drained from the room and twilight filled it.
Jack was speaking about the weekend he’d come out to visit – only the weekend before, Lottie realized with a little shock. ‘I was going to win you back, Lottie. I was going to
give it everything I had. But I didn’t have a chance. You were wild; that was your agenda. If I didn’t want to let you bite me, it meant I was trying to destroy you somehow.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ she said apologetically. She drank some wine. ‘And look at me now. I couldn’t bite oatmeal.’
He laughed.
A little later, when the room was truly dark, he asked, ‘What does this mean, Lottie?’
‘What?’
‘This,’ he said. ‘You. Here.’ His hoarse voice seemed to fill the darkness. It thrilled Lottie.
‘It means, I think, that I’ll pretend I can do it.’
Jack was quiet. His shirt was a pale blur across from Lottie. Finally he said, ‘Well, that’s fine, Lottie. That’s all I ask, I think. That’s what we do, isn’t it?
Like a story we tell ourselves. And then, with luck, it comes true.’
The refrigerator hummed steadily. Outside somewhere, a car honked. The kitchen was dark and still and smelled of cleansing powder. Lottie wanted to see Jack. She reached over to the little lamp
hanging on the wall by the table and turned it on. Suddenly he was there, startling – alarming, even – in his reality, his otherness. And yet exactly as she’d known he would be.
Exactly as she’d been seeing him in her mind’s eye.
And sometimes it still happens that way, when she returns from a trip or when she comes on him unawares. Just as now, turning in her bathrobe from the snowy view outside the window, she feels
the shock of pleasurable surprise, not just that he is there in the kitchen doorway when she didn’t hear him coming; but that he is as she expected him to be: the graying shock of hair, the
goodness in his lined face, the cat-colored eyes that lift now and meet hers across the dim, winter-lit room.
Sometimes, though, it takes a little longer, and then Lottie feels the way she did that afternoon in the first seconds after she woke from her dreamless chemical sleep on the living room couch.
She knew she was nowhere she was supposed to be, and Jack’s face, ehile dear to her – she knew that too – was not instantly familiar. It was in some ways like the feeling we all
have on waking in a strange place – but more intense, more deeply disordered. Perhaps more like the confusion recovered stroke victims report feeling in the first moments after it happens:
when am I? why is this? what is the being living through this moment?
And then everything shifts slightly and takes on shape and meaning, just as it did that day. And with a great effort, Lottie gathers herself together and begins to tell her story.
Sue Miller was born in Chicago in 1943. She is the bestselling author of eleven previous books including
The Good Mother, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, Lost in
the Forest, The Lake Shore Limited
, the acclaimed memoir
The Story of My Father
and the Richard & Judy hit
The Senator's Wife
. Her most recent novel is
The
Arsonist
. Sue Miller lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Good Mother
Inventing the Abbotts
Family Pictures
The Distinguished Guest
While I Was Gone
The World Below
The Story of My Father
Lost in the Forest
The Senator’s Wife
The Lake Shore Limited
The Arsonist
At the age of seventy-two, Lily Roberts became a national celebrity on writing her first book – a spiritual memoir. But her new-found fame was not well received by her son
Alan and wayward daughter Clary, both profoundly disturbed by Lily’s intimate revelations about her married life. Ten years on their resentment is still raw, and when Lily, now ill and frail,
comes to live with Alan, the bitter legacy of their very different memories threatens to upset the precarious balance of their lives.