Learning to Stay (21 page)

“Well, nothing’s wrong or anything,” I say, stalling. “It’s just that Brad and I could use some help
adjusting
, is all. It’s a big change, his being back from over there. He’s having a little trouble nailing down a job, and I have this huge case I’m working on, so I’m not around, and I’m not with him as much as I’d like to be. I was thinking that maybe it would be good for him to have something to do—to be with family right now.”

“Princess,” Mert says, “what the hell are you getting at?”

“I was just wondering if Brad could maybe, well—if he might be able to…you know, stay with you for a couple of weeks?”

I spit the last handful of words out like a teenager trying to
negotiate a later curfew, and I find myself physically ducking in much the same way a teenager might, anticipating a tirade from her parent.

In response, there’s only silence.

“Mert?” I finally ask, unsure if he’s still there.

“Well, sure,” he says. “If he’ll agree to come. That would be fine.”

I feel my vision go blurry and my limbs turn weak.
That would be fine
? It seemed far too easy. I sense an ambush, a conspiracy.
When you hear hoofbeats,
I think. It was something my dad was fond of saying: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses—not zebras.” It means that the most obvious scenario is probably the one you’re dealing with. Maybe Mert is really a horse. Maybe I just haven’t ever given him enough credit.
Me of little faith
.

“He’s okay with it,” I say, finding my voice. I’m lying openly and fear I’m getting far too good at it. “So, maybe this weekend?” I ask.

“That would be fine,” Mert repeats.

“Oh, Mert. Thank you. I really appreciate this. I’ll give you a call before we leave town on Saturday.”

“Don’t mention it, Princess,” he says.

As I hang up the phone, I breathe a sigh of relief. But out of the corner of my eye, I still can’t help glancing furtively about for the damn zebras.

Brad wakes up midmorning, and I offer to make him eggs and toast. He offers to help. We dance silently and stiffly around each other. I fear having to say what I must say to him, eventually. I know he’s embarrassed by all that’s happened. I know he’s frustrated. I know that everything I feel—powerless, crazy, sad, angry—he feels a hundredfold. And yet.

We are sitting in the living room. The television is on—a daytime show host interviewing some starlet in a too-short skirt that barely
reaches her hips when she sits down—but we aren’t really watching it. “We need to do something here,” I finally manage to spit out.

Brad doesn’t look at me. He’s staring at the television. But he nods.

“I don’t know what to do, Brad,” I say. And suddenly I’m fighting back tears. I’m trying to keep my voice from cracking. For the first time in months, I feel how tired I am. It’s the kind of tired that can’t be cured by rest alone, by one good, solid chunk of sleep. It’s the kind of tired that works its way down into you, into every last nook in you, and stays there, aching, for so long that you don’t remember what it was like not to ache.

“I’ll try harder,” Brad says. “I’ll find a job.” There are notes of hope in his voice that break my resolve. The tears that were smarting at the corners of my eyes spill over onto my cheeks. He thinks I’m punishing him; he thinks I’m blaming him.

It’s true—sometimes I do. Sometimes I can’t seem to help it. But it’s never for long and it’s never for good.

“Brad,” I say, shaking my head.

“I want to get better, E. I do.”

His voice. It’s that of an earnest schoolboy trying too hard to please. He’s gone from “There’s nothing fucking wrong with me” to “I’ll try harder.” I bite my lip, trying not to dissolve. I don’t look right at him. I can’t.

I turn the television off and go to where Brad is sitting. I kneel in front of him and take his hands in mine. “Listen to me,” I say. “This isn’t your fault.” Brad is looking up toward the ceiling instead of at me. “Listen, Brad,” I repeat, squeezing his hands until I get his attention. Until he focuses on me. “I know you’re struggling. And I don’t blame you. What you’ve been through—it’s—it’s…” I trail off, searching for the right word. “Awful” doesn’t quite encapsulate all that’s happened to my husband—both what I know and what I can only imagine.

“Abhorrent,” Brad says.

I smile up at him. “That’s a good word,” I say.
It’s a big word,
I think. Brad doesn’t use those kinds of words these days, and I’ve come to realize that his brain doesn’t hold on to—or produce—words like it used to.

He seems to know it, too. “Thank you,” he says, smiling a crooked, gap-toothed smile at me.

My God, I love this man,
I think. But I don’t say it out loud. I need to forge ahead before I lose whatever resolve I’ve gathered. I figure out where I was in the speech I’ve been constructing all morning in my head, and I continue. “I can’t take care of you like I should. Like I need to. And I know you hate to hear it, but you need taking care of right now. And I’m going to lose my job if all this keeps up. We can’t afford for that to happen, and I can’t keep this up. I just can’t.”

I lay my head on Brad’s knees and take a deep breath. He twirls a piece of my hair.

“I’m sorry,” I say, so softly that I’m unsure if he hears me.

This next thing that I’m about to say needs to come out just right. I straighten up and look at him again, right in the eye.

“How would you feel about going to live with your dad?” I ask.

We both know how big a deal it is for me to ask this of him. I brace myself for his reaction: anger, frustration, outright refusal.

“For how long?” he asks.

I shrug because I don’t trust myself to answer him with words. How do you tell your husband that you’re tired, that your nerves are frayed because of him—because an injury has made him unrecognizable to you, and to himself? How do you tell him that you’re not sure if you can do it anymore? That you need a break—maybe for a few weeks, but possibly forever? How do you explain that you need time to paint a picture of your future that you can live with, that you can survive, and you’re not sure if he’s in that picture or not?

When I don’t answer, Brad says, “Okay.” He runs a hand through my hair. I let my head fall back to his lap, wishing I could freeze this moment—the feeling of Brad’s fingers working over my scalp, finding a tangle and pulling gently but steadily until it releases, then combing back through the loosened, smoothed strands. “Okay,” he says again. And that one word sounds like a white flag, waving.

The drive to Marquette often seems never ending. Long strings of fast-food restaurants, big-box stores, coffee shops, and gas stations stretch almost continuously from Madison through the Fox Valley, and end abruptly north of Green Bay, as does reliable cell phone service. From that point on, the drive becomes a blur of thick evergreen forests, broken only intermittently by the occasional rest stop or small town or gas station cropping up in the middle of nowhere and advertising cold beer and deer bait on its marquee. In the fall, M-95, which runs from Iron Mountain on the southern border of the Upper Peninsula to Marquette, dips and climbs through foliage as bright as fire. But it’s not quite March yet, and that means these parts are still in the throes of winter. The landscape looks cold and wild and foreboding outside the windows of my car.

The only traffic patrols on this stretch are conducted by state troopers, but there’s only so much manpower they can throw at such a wide-open area; the chance of speeding tickets is low. So I let my foot press down and then down some more, finally letting it hover as the speedometer reaches seventy-five miles per hour. When I see another
car, which is rarely, I ease off the gas until my speed drops, and after I determine it’s not a trooper, I pick the pace back up.

Brad has been asleep in the passenger seat since north of Green Bay. Or, I think, he could simply be avoiding having to talk to me. He hasn’t said he’s angry. But he hasn’t said much of anything in the past few days, and so, anger is a distinct possibility. So is medication. I made sure to watch Brad as he dutifully swallowed the pills he’d been prescribed for anxiety when he was discharged and pocketed the rest to take later, an acquiescence so out of his recent character that it made me feel as if I were watching an exotic animal, caged and resigned, at the zoo.

Before I know it, as if on autopilot, I’ve made the right-hand turn at Koski’s Corner and passed the 41 Steak House and Teal Lake in Negaunee. My body shifts with the curves in the road, and I have the old, familiar sensation of coming home. I haven’t been up this way in years—since college. But I’ve always been drawn to the area in a way I can never accurately describe to the city dwellers I know.

At this point in the drive, you’re up above the town right before the road plunges you down into it, and you can see Marquette’s quaintness and isolation spread out below. You can see it spill out right up to the edge of Lake Superior, which might as well be an ocean the way it runs off to the horizon. Some days the colors are so vibrant, they almost hurt your eyes—the oranges and reds of the downtown buildings, the glistening black of the water, and the blue, blue, blue sky above it all. Other days, like today, it’s a solid wall of gray, as if the whole expanse were encased in dry ice—the dividing lines between town and lake and sky, the shore and horizon, all indiscernible from one another. I used to dread this drive: Marquette isn’t exactly easy to get to from anywhere. But right now, I give thanks that it’s not. A
person should have to do a little work to get to a place this beautiful and remote.

Mert lives past town a good ways, off County Road 550 down a dead-end road that’s more like a well-traveled path through the woods. A lot of these dirt roads shoot off from CR 550, almost all unmarked, and I start down two and end up having to back up onto the main road when each one tapers to a single-track path after a quarter mile or so.

Finally, blindly it seems, I pick the right one. The road stays the same width all the way to Mert’s house, lit up like a beacon in the blackness. I let myself think that maybe Brad will wake up and tell me that this is all a mistake, that he’ll fight a little harder for our life back in Madison—for our life together. But I know better. I know he’s all out of fight. I know he doesn’t know how to go on any better than I do. And as if to prove that point, he comes to, rubs his eyes, yawns, and exits the car without saying a word. He knows it’s what he should do, and so do I. I only wish we didn’t have to.

I unload Brad’s things from the car along with a few of my own and knock on the front door. Even though Brad is already inside, it doesn’t feel right for me to simply walk in. Mert yells for me to come in, and I find him sitting in a ratty green armchair watching the Red Wings and playing solitaire on a metal TV tray in front of him.

“Hiya, Princess,” he says, as if my presence here were an everyday occurrence.

I assume Brad has gone up to his room to drop his bags off, and I take the opportunity to talk to Mert, alone.

“I want to thank you, Mert. For letting us do this. For taking Brad in for a while.”

Mert flips two cards over and moves a run under the queen of diamonds to
its corresponding king. He doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve said anything.

“I know we haven’t been up to visit much,” I say. This is a lie. We haven’t been up to visit at all. Even when, years after his mother’s funeral, Brad reached an uneasy peace with his dad, he would stay with friends when he came home, or with me. And when we moved to Madison, his trips north pretty much ceased altogether. I should have done more to encourage Brad to visit his dad, but I didn’t. The truth was, celebrating holidays with just the two of us, albeit lonely, was a far better option in my opinion than refereeing gatherings with Mert, Ricky, and Brad.

“Brad always talks about how much he loved growing up here.” I pause and wait for Mert to acknowledge me. When he still doesn’t, I continue talking anyway. “I’ve heard all his stories about building jumps on the old railroad tracks and how he and Ricky would try to launch their bikes over, or making two-story snow forts. He sure had a great childhood, thanks to you and Ruth.”

Nothing.

I always think that I have done something, apart from being alive, to offend Mert. And inside my head a conversation usually rages in which I wonder what it could possibly be, what I could have said or done in the short, short time that it takes for him to cool on me. Then I think how unfair it is because I haven’t done a damn thing, and Mert is simply a grumpy old man, mad at the world and taking it out on anyone who actually seems to have a chance at being happy. But he’s a grumpy old man who is the only person I can ask for help. At the moment, he is my lone hope for salvation—a chewed-up, full-of-holes lifesaver attached to a fraying rope.

“Brad was telling me on the drive up about how you used to take him to the Lakeview rink at four a.m. to work on his stick skills before
school. He still remembers that, you know. He still talks about it. He was what, seven? Eight?” I look over at Mert, who doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Slap, slap, slap. His dealing a new game is my only answer.