The Book of Why (17 page)

WE LEFT THE
morning after the storm, before we could change our minds. I should say, before
she
could change
her
mind.

It must have been the dog—how scared Cary had been when Ralph wasn't moving, wasn't responding at all. I'd been trying to convince her for months, we'd fought about it, I'd been an ass, well-meaning, but at times an ass, and what it took, in the end, I can draw no other conclusion, was the dog. Cary woke me in the night, told me she wanted to cancel her next treatment. “I don't want to do this anymore,” she said. “Let's just go away.”

As if it had been
her
decision. As if I didn't have anything to do with it. As if upon hearing her words,
Let's just go away
,
I didn't pull her to me and hold her and tell her she was making the best decision, we'd do this together, I wouldn't let anything happen to her.

Dawn was gray and sluggish, the street strewn with trash from overturned cans and leaves blown from trees. A large branch lay across the roof of our car like something recently shot.

May in Chilmark is October in New York; we packed sweaters and hoodies and boots and raincoats. Shorts and skirts and summer dresses, too—who knew when we'd be back. Not for a long time; at least that was the plan, now that Cary had agreed.

I went through our dressers, our closets, the medicine cabinet, the pantry for perishables; didn't bother to fold or organize. Two suitcases, as much as I could shove inside, while Cary sipped tea by the window.

Ralph sat on the stoop and watched me load the wagon. When I finished, I told her to get in. She ran in the house, back out, back inside. Everyone had to be accounted for, and Cary hadn't come out yet, as if she wasn't quite sure.

It was to be the year of solitude, the year of just the three of us, the year of tuning out the rest of the world, no TV, no radio, no newspapers, as few other people as possible, the year in our bubble; it was to be the year of mindfulness, of simplicity, of hikes in the woods and walks along the beach; it was to be the year of quiet, the year of wellness. We'd live that way forever. Farewell to the rest of the world. Farewell to disease and planes crashing into buildings and the fear such murders birth.

DEW ON LEAVES
and spiderwebs. Crunch of grass frosted by overnight lows near freezing. A five-mile run that began in dark and ended in light: the push of the final mile, Ralph panting beside me, my breath a few inches in front of my mouth. The sensation, at times, that something was chasing me; at other times, that I was chasing something I could never catch. Then the first steps after, the hard work done, a stretch against a tree, beard wet, chest and back chilled from sweat absorbed into my shirt.

A warm shower, then back in bed, only a few minutes, my wet head on Cary's shoulder, the sound of Ralph drinking water in the kitchen, birds outside the window, a dog barking in the distance, Ralph's answer, then up for breakfast: granola, grapefruit juice, toast, herbal tea.

That was when I heard a fly buzz. I followed the sound: into the kitchen, above the sink, between curtain and window. Not just one. Too many to count. Blind to the glass, or perhaps expecting a different result each time, they kept crashing into the window. Flies on our anniversary; not what we'd planned. We opened the window, lifted the screen; we tried without success to shoo them out. They seemed unfazed by Ralph's attempts to eat them. Perhaps they'd heard that Ralph had never caught anything living—neither cat nor squirrel nor deer—in her life. We found dozens more in the bathroom, in our bedroom. We opened our closets and they flew out at us; they landed on our jellied toast, on our hands. They were loudly fond of our ears.

We didn't want to kill them. We didn't like killing anything; we caught spiders and wasps and mosquitoes in jars and set them free outside.

Cary propped open the door. “Leave open,” she said.

“Door,” I said.

“I'm saying it in my mind, but…”

“Forget it,” I said. “It's just a word.”

“Play catch,” she said.

We bought baseball mitts and a hardball—an anniversary gift to ourselves. I taught Cary to throw using her legs, to stretch as if playing first base on a bang-bang play. Ralph ran back and forth between us, waiting for the ball to drop. When it did, she picked it up, chewed it, played keep-away. By lunch she'd broken through the cowhide; when we threw, yarn trailed the ball like a comet's tail. Tired, we gave it to her; she chewed her way to the pill, what had been there all along unseen, a new, smaller ball for her to play with.

We ate in season: green skinnies, little rollies, sweet reds, and leaf fans. Cary's words. I said
as-par-a-gus
,
overenunciating each syllable while she studied my mouth, but the word was gone. I said
spring peas, spring, peas
,
and she opened her mouth.
Cherries, cher-ries. Rhubarb, rhu-barb
. The words were gone; she knew them only by taste.

“More purples, please.”

“Blueberries,” I said. “Blue-berries.”

“They're purple.”

“Purpleberries, then.”

For a month we had stayed away from Vineyard Haven and Edgartown. We missed our favorite bookstore and ice cream shop, but we preferred quiet. Twice a week at dawn we went to the market for milk and honey and bread and rice, and to a roadside stand for fresh strawberries and blueberries.

We never said the word; we tried not to think it by thinking about other things, whatever was in front of us: butter dripping off corn on the cob, dust visible in a slant of sunlight, mouse bones by the shed.

Silence suited us best. I lost words, too, on purpose. I played Cary's games; after all, she was playing mine by leaving New York and coming here.

Scratch that—not a game. Everything else had been a game. If you believe you'll find the perfect parking spot, if you see it in your mind's eye, it will come to you. If you believe the clouds will part on your wedding day, if you believe so completely that you don't bother renting a tent, then the sun will shine. But now I wanted to say
so what
to all that, as in: So what if it doesn't work. So what if you don't get that spot; you can try again the next day. So what if a thousand times there's no spot. So what if it rains on your wedding: the best man will hold an umbrella over you as you fit rings onto each other's fingers. So what if your arthritic grandmother has to traverse a muddy field to reach her cocktail: someone will carry her; life will go on, as they say. No, what I'd believed had been faith, hadn't been.
This
,
what we were doing, what I'd convinced Cary to do, was faith. No such thing as better luck next time. This wasn't a parking spot; this wasn't a sunny day. This was till death do us part. You can use a rope to lower a piano from a third-floor window, you can believe the knot is secure, but only when that same rope is tied around your waist as you're being lowered will you discover how much faith you have in the knot.

The flies—by late afternoon on our anniversary they seemed to have doubled—didn't seem like a game. We found their point of entry: a sink in our laundry room. We poured bleach into the drain, then plugged it. We went for a hike in the woods, no speaking allowed, only the chirping of birds, the sound of leaves kicked in stride, Ralph navigating through brush in pursuit of a woodchuck. We drove to Lucy Vincent and napped at the base of a rock into which we'd carved the twins' names. The beach was cold and windy; we liked that there were no other people. We saw a fat man sleeping on the sand in the distance, but then we realized it was a seal. We didn't need to move much closer to know it was dead.

When we came home, there were no fewer flies, but no more. This progress, if it could be called that, came with a setback: the toilet was backed up, from what we weren't sure, as we hadn't used it since morning. We flushed, and the water rose; we flushed again, same result, and now the floor was wet.

That night we could hear Ralph's jaw snapping at the flies; we told her to go back to sleep, and for a while she did, but later we heard her biting air.

I felt Cary get out of bed, but she came back and said, “I need to pee.” I laughed at the word—that she still knew it.

We put on our jackets and took a flashlight outside; Ralph came with us. Our plan had been to pee behind the house, but Cary suggested we walk down the road to the trail. It was after 3:00 a.m. The flashlight was dying. We followed the circle of light I shined at the dirt; we couldn't see Ralph, who had run ahead of us, but could hear her steps, her breathing. We took the trail. In the woods, the flashlight didn't seem like much, but when its batteries died, we missed the little light we'd had. We held hands; we called Ralph to come.

“Let's keep going,” Cary said.

“This is far enough.”

I heard her pull down her pajama bottoms. “You know what they say,” she said. “The pack that pees together…”

In the dark we could hear Ralph sniffing the puddles between our legs: an honor to be known this way.

When we were finished, we started to walk back, but I stopped. I'd never liked the dark, but there, in the woods, time and space seemed not to exist. We were creatures of smell and sound and touch; blind children kissing.

In the morning, ticks. One red and bloated on Ralph's head, one on my neck, one on Cary's scalp. She checked me, I checked her. All her curly hair, it was impossible to know I'd found everything.

Also, in the morning, more flies.

Also, in the morning, toilet water threatened at the rim of the bowl. A recurring dream I'd been having for years: I walk into a clean bathroom, but the toilet is filthy and overflowing. I walk into another bathroom, white and sparkling, but the toilet is clogged. Then the light goes out, and soon I can feel the cold water touch my bare feet. We called our plumber, only to discover that it was Memorial Day; we hadn't read a paper in over a month. We peed in the shower—something we were glad, in retrospect, not to have thought of the night before—and waited until dark to return to the woods, where we squatted side by side by side.

Also that day, late in the day, heavy rain that leaked through the roof and into our living room. We sat on the couch, a pot between us catching rain. We slept there, too, alternately soothed, then woken by the change in pitch of water falling into water.

The next day a roofer came out. He was bald—no eyebrows or eyelashes either—and had jaundiced eyes. It was unnerving to look into his eyes, but I did. He had a hacking cough and huffed his way up his ladder. It was difficult to guess his age without hair as an indication; he was just as likely forty as sixty. He evoked in me a desire to do his job for him, to ask him to come down from his ladder so I could climb up; he could tell me what to do while he swung in our hammock. I went inside to make tea, an excuse to get away from him. A few minutes later, just as the kettle started to whistle, I heard a sound I knew immediately was the ladder falling. Cary and I rushed outside, hoping we'd find him still on the roof, the ladder on the ground below, but he was on his back on our lawn, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut.

Cary called 911. I kneeled beside him and kept telling him he was all right, even though clearly he was anything but all right. His mouth opened and closed like a fish's. All the air that could come out had come out, and none was getting in. I put my hand on his arm and said, “You're going to breathe, just the wind got knocked out of you.” I shouldn't have said
just
;
the wind had been knocked out of him, yes, but he'd likely broken his back. Maybe worse, depending how he landed.

Cary came out and kneeled on the other side of him; she looked at him, then at me. He was trying to say something, but all he could do was make little puffs of air. “Breathe,” I said. “Just breathe.” I put my ear against his mouth and listened: three puffs, a pause, three more puffs.

Then, suddenly, I understood: “Call my wife.”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course we will.”

But he didn't have enough air to give us the number; that was all he could say, just those three words.

He passed out briefly, and I said, “Hey, stay with us—don't go anywhere.”

He opened his eyes, closed them again. “Hang in there,” I kept saying.

Sirens. Then the lights of an ambulance. In New York there would have been a crowd, but in Chilmark it was just me and Cary.

After the man was gone, we called the number on the side of his truck. His name was Russell, but he went by Sarge. The woman who answered the phone said she'd call Kerry, his wife. Sarge and Kerry, a roofer and his wife. That was all we knew. A few hours later, two men came by to get the truck and ladder.

We were so consumed with what had just happened that we didn't notice, not until hours later, that the flies, every last one of them, were gone. Not dead on the counters and windowsills and couch cushions, just gone, suddenly, as if they'd never been there.

They came back for a few days in July, and a few in August, as if to remind us that they had been real and could return, regardless of our wishes otherwise.

People missing limbs don't grow new ones because they don't believe they can, because they've never seen it done. People don't live to be two hundred because they've never seen someone live to be two hundred. People don't reverse, or at least pause, the aging process because they don't believe that it can be done. People don't understand that the human body is miraculous. The human body isn't meant to break down; we believe it will because it's all we know. But let me tell you: the human body is meant to go on and on. The human body is a self-healing wonder. Just ask anyone who had cancer one day and didn't the next. Believe me—they're out there. I have letters from them. They know the truth: If you can see something done in your mind's eye, it can be done. Anything imaginable is possible.

Even if you receive a diagnosis of a disease one day, your body can be disease-free the next. If you believe that your body is disease-free, and if you maintain that certainty, that vibration of health, more than you maintain your awareness of the disease, then it will not—it cannot—remain in your body. It's there only because you believe it's there; it manifested only because you believed it could.

Look around you, no matter where you are, no matter how you may be feeling, and notice something that pleases you. Best not to wait for something pleasing to find you. You aren't creating pleasure, you aren't artificially manufacturing it, you're simply noticing what's already around you. The way sunlight slants through a thin crack in the canopy of trees above you and illuminates your wife's hair as you both pause on your walk through the woods beside your house. The colors of leaves; the rings inside a felled tree; the earthy smell of the dirt trail, a whiff of mint and wet leaves. Focus on the slant of sunlight on your wife's hair and notice how you feel. Focus on keeping, not losing. Focus on what's here, now. Feel good about feeling good. Don't dwell on the tiny bones your dog has dug up; this isn't about finding something upsetting and fixing it. This is about deciding that there's nothing to be upset about—not in your world, not in the one you're perpetually in the process of creating. Best not to dwell on the felled tree; best to imagine the lightning strike that split the trunk; best to imagine that kind of power inside you. The more you practice appreciation, the better you'll feel; the better you feel, the more you'll want to notice pleasing things; the more you notice pleasing things, the more pleasure you'll attract into your life. Every time you appreciate something in the universe, you are saying, “More of this, please.” But you won't need to speak, you won't need to ask—your thoughts and feelings will be enough. When we say or feel
thank you,
the universe says
you're welcome,
as in: you're welcome to more of this, to more of anything you want.