My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (28 page)

I remained at a distance for the next few days, allowed the family to work through their internal dynamics and process the fear of the near fatality of someone so close to them. Families in that situation do not need interlopers or outsiders, however well-meaning they might be, and I knew I had no right or privilege to be included and conducted myself accordingly. I'd help when asked, might make an offer or suggestion of a lunch or coffee run, move a car that needed parking or couriering, but otherwise stepped back and behaved like a cat, absorbing everything and thinking nothing.

There was a weird, competitive quality in Steph's family that I hadn't seen before, anywhere, like there was a correlation between how much they were putting themselves out as a sacrifice to show how much affection they had for him. It was interesting, and I chalked it up to Lutheranism. Catholics endured suffering differently, I noticed. Catholics sprayed their anguish, shared it with anyone listening and in the room, handed it out, piece by piece like the Body of Christ so that the load could be shared with others, processed with a community who are there with you for that very reason.

Protestants, Lutherans especially, would rather have their tongues cut out than exhibit that level of pain and passion. Instead, they make casseroles.

I couldn't quite get the nuance, though. Maybe this was a different strain of love, in a manner that I've never seen before. Their sacrifice was forced upon you, and you would take it, by golly. Sort of like, “For all the times I couldn't say it, I will force my love upon you with jars of fish preserves.” But the odd thing is, they did: They said it clearly in their dedication. They showed it, always. I was amazed. But still, I was more accustomed to cries of anguish, gunshots fired into the night, sometimes out of windows.

Over the course of the next few days, when it became clear that the sturdy old guy was going to pull through, the levels of anxiety shifted and redirected themselves to the more quotidian, and the seams of the family surfaced and the bickering and picking of nits that Stephanie had insisted characterized her relationship to her mother and brother began to emerge. Or rather, Stephanie insisted they'd appeared, but I was unconvinced, or, if they had, they'd slipped by me unnoticed or unknown.

“Do you see how she does that?” Steph would ask me, over a private lunch or dinner away from her family.

“What?” I'd ask, not tracking. I was usually distracted by some unfamiliar brand of soda or saltine, or other mundane product from that part of the country, which I'd only visited briefly, once before. I found everything interesting and new. Moxie soda, kids at convenience stores who couldn't see spending two dollars for aspirin, so they gave it to me for free, a woman standing at an intersection with the deepest, most tragic black eye I've ever seen on a living human holding a sign, “Battered Wife/Homeless, Please Help.” I gave her twenty dollars.

“The way she said that thing about how I have no friends!”

“She did? I didn't catch that,” I'd say. Steph was in a state of constant vigilance for a double entendre or backhanded slights when she was around her mother, which must have been exhausting for both of them. And, truth be told, her mother
had
been correct: Steph really didn't have many friends.

“You mean you didn't hear her say it?”

“I, uhm, no. I mean, I just haven't heard what you've heard. I'm not sure she really means it like that, Steph.”

“God, you're unbelievable,” she said, disgusted.

“I just don't see what you're seeing; I don't think she's being malicious or undermining. I think you're actually
trying
to see an attack and so you create one where there isn't. I mean, your mother's a bit childlike sometimes, but I don't think she's actively trying to harm you, or diminish you. I think you're doing that yourself.”

That was it: that last part, probably too much. If we had been trying to get back together, if there was the slimmest indication that it was a possibility, it died there. I'd sided with the “other” and was no longer reliable in validating her world view.

Something slammed shut between us when I wouldn't side with her against her biggest vulnerability, her biggest imagined enemy, in her mother. Both Steph and I had once bonded over the idea that we were that kid in the crowd who pointed to the Emperor in his New Clothes, pointed and shouted and stomped our feet and demanded that everyone else see what we saw, determined to call out the shenanigans where others failed to see them.

I think she wanted my validation then and I couldn't offer it, couldn't buy into her persecution complex, and that made her feel even more isolated, separated us further from the idea that we'd ever end up in a happily ever after where it was just us versus them, where “them” was everyone else.

I liked her family, quite a bit. I really liked Harold, and for a time there I think they really liked me. It was a real shame that Steph was bat-shit crazy and we were as incompatible as we were: I really wanted to be a part of her family, in spite of her. It might have even worked.

One of the last afternoons we spent in the hospital, her mother and I were in a waiting room and talking about her and Harold's time in England, back in the '60s, about Carnaby Street, and I was asking questions about the fashion and the music, and her mother was delighted to revisit the memories with someone who was genuinely interested when Steph, who was sitting nearby and pretend-reading a magazine, stood up, slapped it shut, and bolted through a set of swinging doors, bringing the moment to an abrupt halt. Of course, I made my excuses and followed her, both her mother and I puzzled about what had triggered such a response, and when I was finally able to make some sense from what Steph was telling me, I realized she felt we had been flirting.

Of all things.

“This is just craziness, Steph. Your information tray is jammed. You're just fucking
wrong
, man. This is out of control.”

By this point, we'd been there for over a week, and I'd been sitting in a hotel working remotely to eastern Washington and executing my job as the designer for the bilingual periodical, which was floundering every week, the smell of print death more prevalent as the weeks passed, much more acute in ink than at the hospital, and everyone was itching to get back to their habits and routines, Harold and her mother especially. They wanted us gone, out of their hair, and Steph kept pushing our exit date back.

Also, I'd gone nearly two weeks now without a drink. It was the longest I'd been dry in years. And I thought, maybe, I was getting thirsty. I wasn't sure.

It had actually been quite easy to abstain. While we'd had a couple of spats or moments of discomfort—the biggest one when Cleo escaped captivity and wound up at a neighbor's house, and Steph asked me to take care of it, make a decision, and I was at a loss of management—that was the only moment when I very nearly went down to the hotel bar and loaded up.

But I hadn't, when I normally would have. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because I wanted her family to like me still.

At any rate, when we finally caught a transcontinental 747 at JFK, we were stuck on the tarmac for three hours, and I could see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye, and I realized she was waiting for me to lose my cool and throw a hissy fit, which would then—if history served—make her lose her cool, but instead I shook my head and kept reading
The Book Thief
, which I was having trouble following, and we made it back across the country and spent the night at my apartment downtown, and during nearly two weeks of constant exposure to one another and sleeping next to one another in many beds across the country, we didn't have sex once, and we both knew that it was really over, if we hadn't acknowledged it before, back when the whole thing started with the car wreck and the dead dog and the descent into the mountains of madness.

We were done. We just needed to see what we had left.

We were back in Seattle for a week before it happened again.

Actually it was more like five days, reimmersed in our separate living patterns, which had me working from home for the illiterate newspaper for three days a week, then working on the unpublished book I'd been writing for too many years to count, on those days that I had nothing to do, and I was making a surprising amount of progress, in the abstract. And at local bars.

Still, I was happy; I mean, I wasn't proliferating, exactly, but for a graphic designer in Seattle in the post-Internet boom, I was doing all right. And I was looking forward to being single again, left to my own vices, and devices, as it were.

Steph and I had been gone for a good two weeks and I was missing my friends back in Seattle, particularly my friend Sarah, from the karate school, with whom I'd take those twice-weekly walks around Greenlake and talk like a new mother hen.

Sarah, at this time, was not doing well. She'd just been hit with a divorce from her husband of fifteen years, and she was no longer the enthusiastic, engaged conversationalist who would delight at topics that flirted with the inappropriate, suggesting some degree of misbehavior or misconduct, right along a deep and entertaining two-mile monologue on Mary Shelley, or the suffragette movement in America, or the continued misnomers of Greek culture, or an exchange of
mamaloshen
.

We walked around the lake a few days after I'd returned, and after about a mile I realized Sarah was not, in fact, engaged in the conversation.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “You seem distracted.”

“Oh,” she said, after a bit, and we maneuvered around a group of pregnant women walking basset hounds.

“Yeah. My husband just asked for a divorce,” she said.

There was a long, profound pause before I responded.

“You have a husband?” I asked.

It occurred to me that after a year of friendship, she'd never once mentioned she was married, and I'd never bothered to ask. I was surprised.

Anyhow, Sarah was in her own doldrums, and she was my friend, and I cared for her deeply.