If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (4 page)

“Actually, Jack,” Bess says finally, looking down, “Lila already told me that too.”

And with just a quick hand to his shoulder, she stands and walks away.

T
he first few months of Lila’s life, she hollered as if indignant at having been born, maybe as if she saw the injury to come. He so envied Ann back then, the way she could slip her breast into the baby’s mouth, the way Lila would settle, the way Ann could know who she was to her. For all those miraculous months, that was what injustice seemed to be, his wife having that, when he did not.

Out on the path now, Lila and Wally are walking around and around and around. There’s a moment every time when it looks as though they’re heading toward him, but then they stay with the curve, Lila’s arm straightened by the unaccustomed pull of the lead. It takes Jack a while to realize she must have lost track anyway, that she can’t know where the circle starts or ends, when a full rotation is complete, can’t know whether she’s facing him or facing away.

He takes his glasses off so that out among the distant blur of green, Lila and Wally are just another distant blur.

Staring at them, at nothing, he can remember how much it felt like exile those first few months, how he seemed to be invisible to her all that year, how this new, keen, devastating love seemed to bring nothing so much as isolation. And how that changed one night when Lila was crying out, not crying, but yelling for help, for comfort. Maybe it was a tooth, maybe a terrible dream. Ann was either sleeping or pretending to be, so he went in. He found his daughter standing up, just a shape in the nightlight dusk, all her weight thrown against the rail, hollering into the night. He held his arm out, next to hers, and with his other hand he moved her grip so she was latched onto him. He remembers now exactly how she looked as his eyes adjusted to the dark and her little face emerged, curious, trusting, beautiful, as though she were a candle burning through the night. Just hang on, Lila, he told her then, and she smiled at him, she seemed to understand. Just don’t let go.

If I
Loved
You

I.

I
F I LOVED YOU,
I would tell you this:

I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer. And that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that now I understand there is no hope. If I loved you, I would say: you shouldn’t be so hard on us. On me and on Sam.

Because it may not even be just the cancer.

For all you know we have a brain-damaged son living in an inadequate institution thirty miles from our house. For all you know, we agonized one long, cold winter night six years ago over whether to send him there. But then, broken, exhausted, we finally stood together in our kitchen, staring hard at each other, both of us the worse for scotch, and just knew, just then, at the exact same moment, that we couldn’t manage him at home any longer. Not with him so big I couldn’t bathe him by myself. Not with him so strong. Not with me just diagnosed and in for my second round of chemo.

There’s so much you don’t know.

For all you know I have three, maybe four months to live and Sam is up every night trying to figure out how he’s going to break it to our brain-damaged son that I won’t be coming to visit anymore. And I’m lying right there next to him, hour after hour, trying not to think about the possibility that our boy will be angry at me for this. Or maybe worse, maybe better, that he won’t even notice that I’m gone.

You want to build a fence between our homes.

It will be wood, you tell us.

Y
ou’re tall, and you’re young, and you paid a lot of money for that enormous house next to ours. It will be solid wood, you say, with no space or light between the slats. And it will be six feet high and run along the property line you had surveyed just this week.

Understand, you say, I didn’t ask the surveyors to add land to my land. It just turns out that the line’s much closer to your house than anyone thought. I was every bit as surprised as you.

And for a moment all three of us, you, me, and Sam, stare down at the pachysandra-covered ground.

But if you build a six-foot-tall solid wall, I say, if you build it right where the pink flags are, I won’t be able to open my car door. Not without banging into your fence. Not within twenty feet of my front door, anyway. I’ll have to park at least twenty feet from my door.

You only nod.

Sam walks along the line, from flag to flag, then says, You’re telling me those hemlocks belong to you? You’re saying they’re not ours?

It turns out they’re on my land.

We’ve been paying to have them sprayed for years, I say. It’s been sixteen years. The whole time we’ve lived here. We thought they were ours.

You say nothing. Sam says nothing.

Why six feet tall? I finally ask. It seems awfully high. It’s so close to our house. We’ll just see a wall every time we come outside. We’re used to looking at the hemlocks. We’ve always had a view. Maybe they don’t belong to us, but we’ll feel like we’re walled in.

We will be walled in, Sam says.

I need it that tall because I’m going to get an animal. An animal could jump over a lower fence.

We’ve been staring at these trees for sixteen years, I say. It’s going to be a big change. But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we won’t be able to park in front of our house.

You nod. And then you hand me a letter. Our full names are typed on the envelope—complete with our middle initials. You’ve been looking through public records. You are doing this by the book. This is no friendly note held in my hand. It’s a document.

H
ere is the part I go over in my head:

When I think about you buying the house, having the land surveyed, finding the property line just about in your neighbors’ driveway, telling them you’re going to build a wall, a solid wall, right there; this is the part that I still don’t understand.

You know nothing about the reasons it might matter to us to be able to park right in front of our door.

For example, in the cancer scenario, I’ll grow weak. That’s inevitable. Walking twenty feet will feel like a mile to me. Maybe I could do it, make the walk from the car, if we were just a foot or two from the house. But all the way down the drive, all the way from where there’s room to open the door, that’s just too far.

So Sam is going to have to take out the folding wheelchair from the back. And wheel me up the drive. And then help me out from the chair and then, when he’s settled me in the house, he’ll have to wheel the chair, empty now, back down the drive to the car. And every time he does this he’ll suffer. Every time, his heart will break. Because one day soon, he knows, the chair will be empty for real.

But back inside the house he tries to make me laugh—by imitating you. We’re going to get an animal, he says. An animal! A hippopotamus, in fact.

What’s the deal, I ask, with a man who can’t just say
dog?

And then Sam says, Just don’t set a foot onto my land. My land, my land, he says in a Scarlett O’Hara voice, his fist raised in the air. And I try to laugh—for Sam. But eventually I have to raise the question of whether it’s time for us to tell our son. Because I can feel that there are only three or four more visits left in me. Power is running from my legs like sand down an hourglass. Do we tell Todd in advance? Or will I just be gone one day?

W
e hire a lawyer.

I don’t want to, but your letter quotes township statutes and talks about your rights as a landowner. It’s just possible, Sam says, that we have rights too. He looks so worn and haggard as he speaks. He looks as though this is one thing too many. I say, Go ahead, hon. Hire a lawyer. Let somebody else take this on.

Our lawyer sends you a letter. It says that we want you to hold up on construction while we investigate the situation. We want you to give us a chance to see if there’s any way around this. The phrase
adverse possession
appears in the second paragraph. We also send you a handwritten note, behind our lawyer’s back, saying we don’t want this to be a legal fight. Please. We just want you to let us open our car door in front of our house—as a courtesy. We only hired a lawyer because you gave us that document, you made it seem so official. We felt we had to do everything we could.

Your response comes hand-delivered, overnight.

“I have every right to erect a fence on my own property.”

It says a bit more. But not much.

There’s a conversation that hasn’t been had, I tell Sam. The conversation human beings have with each other. He isn’t quite treating us like people.

He isn’t quite a person, Sam says. He’s a creature. He’s an animal himself. He’s like a yeti or something.

He is! He looks exactly like a yeti. That scowl on his face. The way he stomps around his land. It’s inspired, I say. He’s the yeti.

And that is what we call you after that.

I
suppose it’s this ability of yours not to care that intrigues me so.

If I loved you, I would tell how much you’re missing because of that. I would find ways to convince you that I exist. I would resist erasure every moment that I could.

F
or several weeks the letters fly back and forth.

You’re amazed that we think we have any rights.

We’re amazed that you think rights are what’s at issue here.

Sam says he’s going to paint a bright red stripe on our side of the line. It’ll be wet paint, he says. I’ll put it down on the day they’re building the fence. So if they set a foot on our property… if they set even one foot on our property…

I’ll sit out there with a shotgun, I say. First one of them steps in red paint loses a leg…

I
want to scold you in the harsh, caressing tones of a mother to a child. I want to help you, make you understand more about the ways things
should
be than you do, make you think more, give you some imagination. I want you to imagine that I have a life. A life that matters. You should care about my life.

S
am stares out the kitchen window every night when he comes home from work.

I’ll miss the trees, he says.
I really will. I don’t give an answer.
Why make matters worse?

A
nother possibility is that Sam is in danger of losing his job.

What if I have cancer, our son is out there in the institution, and, because the boy and I take up so much time, Sam is having trouble putting the hours in at work? They’ve tried to be patient with him, they know the situation, but the irony is it’s dragging on for too long. If I’d died six months ago instead of four months from now, there might not be a problem. They’re good guys. They do care. But this is too much.

T
he fence goes up on a day when we’re out.

And you have no idea where we’ve been.

I
f I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so much to us, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t shared with you. You don’t know us.

But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there.

What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?

Why do you think you should get what is your right?

You’re so uncaring, so unreasonable. It must be a defense mechanism of some kind. I’m sure that it is.

But Sam says that’s ridiculous of me. Even to think about you that way.

It’s late at night and neither one of us can sleep. I say to him, I’m sure that the yeti must have been hurt. Very badly. At some point in his life he must have been very badly hurt. Or he’d understand our side. No one can care so little about other people unless they’ve been very badly hurt.

Not necessarily, Sam tells me. Maybe the problem is he’s never been hurt. He can’t imagine real pain because he’s never experienced it.

I can feel his hand reach across the bed for my arm.

Or maybe some folks are just bad.

He wraps his fingers around my wrist.

Maybe some folks are just bad.

My poor sleepless husband.

He says that to me twice.

II.

On the day of the mammogram I was more worried about the technician seeing all the bruises on my arms than about the results. You’ll be lucky, I told Sam, if they don’t come and arrest you for wife abuse.

I hate to see you look like that.

I was standing in just a bra and panties. The bruises were all different colors, the newest ones purple, the oldest turning yellow. It’s not so bad, I said. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t know he’s hurting me.

I know he doesn’t mean it. I’m not angry at him—you know that. I just hate to see you this way.

It’s nothing big, I said. He gets upset. He can’t talk to us, so he lashes out.

But I understood that the words were pointless, just filling the air between us with sound. There was nothing I knew that Sam didn’t know. There was only this ritual of repeating back and forth what we both already knew.

We kissed in the door and I watched him pull out his car—just behind mine in the driveway. He didn’t wish me luck and it never occurred to me that he should.

S
o, first there was the mammogram, at which I stood with my breasts and my mottled arms exposed. As the technician squeezed my flesh into position I mumbled something about having fallen off my bike. I bruise very easily, I said. Not: My son had a stroke while in utero and is severely brain-damaged. He isn’t a bad boy at all, but he has these moments of violence and these are the results.

Not that.

Then came the letter ordering me back for more tests, an ultrasound, the biopsy, the meeting in my doctor’s office—this time Sam right there by my side. And through all of this, about three weeks, right up until the surgery, all I could think about was Todd. Not even what would happen to him if I died—I couldn’t die, that was out of the question, not on the table for discussion—but little things like who would watch him while I went in for the biopsy, and could I possibly take him to the doctor’s office with me and have him there in the room.

It used to seem so simple: you’re young, you go through school, you fall in love, you marry, you get pregnant. And then the road takes a certain kind of curve. Your sense of self can disappear.

Todd: cannot speak, cannot walk, barely hears, is blind in one eye. Cannot control his bladder or his bowels. Does he know us? It’s never been clear. Until now, I’d always hoped that he did. I’d always hoped that it gave him some kind of comfort to have me and have Sam there with him. But now I’m not so sure that I want that anymore. Now I find myself hoping sometimes he never really knew who I was.

Now, my yeti, I find myself hoping he may be like you. And so won’t ever miss me when I’m gone.

T
here was spread into the lymph nodes. One doctor spoke about saving the breasts and I said, Just do whatever will make this stop. I don’t give a shit about my breasts.

New questions arise:

Just how many fifths of scotch were the two of us going through every week?

We tried not to count them in the recycling bin. And eventually we began to throw a couple of bottles into the garbage cans instead, split them up. Maybe Sam would take a bottle or two in the car and dump them somewhere else. It’s almost funny.

We were drunk the night we realized Todd would have to be moved.
In vino veritas
. In whiskey are decisions born.

Is this the brave thing to do or the coward’s way out?

Sam said, I don’t know, honey. I just know it’s what has to happen to now. And so do you.