The Lake Shore Limited (12 page)

Now he lay next to Lauren in the dark. She was motionless, quickly back in her deep sleep. Dreaming, maybe. Dreaming of the way she used to be.

A few weeks ago he'd been getting something for her from her desk, and he'd read the top page of her memoir in progress. She was describing a dream she'd had, a dream of running. "In my dream, my body worked perfectly. My breathing was unstrained and full and slow. My legs were weightlessly muscled. My knees rose high in front with each step, my heels kicked high behind me, everything was smooth and effortless. I woke to the sound of my own laughter, as grateful and happy as we are when we conjure some long-dead friend or lover in our sleep and get to talk with them or touch them once more."

Now she lay propped up on her pillows in her drugged sleep next to him, her body immovable as a dead woman's--only her labored, thick breathing attesting to the life it still held, captive.

A month or so after they got the diagnosis, Grace had called and asked them if they'd take her cat. The house had sold, and she was moving, but she couldn't take the cat with her. Belle-Vue had a no-pet policy. She'd tried giving him to a younger friend, but the woman's son turned out to be allergic.

Rafe's first impulse was to say no. He and Lauren were still in a fragile state, one or the other of them likely at any time to begin to weep--though Lauren had already begun, too, to sometimes make a quick, biting joke about it. But he said to Grace that he'd talk to Lauren and get back to her.

Lauren wanted to take him. She would be home more of the time, and Marsh--short for Marshmallow--would be nice company. They decided Rafe would drive over and get him, and while he was there, break the news to Grace that Lauren had ALS. Lauren said she knew this was a rotten thing to ask him to do, but that she couldn't possibly do it herself: "I'd just as soon take a knife out and
stab
her about a dozen times."

So Rafe set out on a Monday morning in mid-December. It was snowing, but the really heavy stuff wasn't supposed to start until nightfall, by which time he'd be at Gracie's, safely off the road. And by the time he headed back, after breakfast on Tuesday, the roads would have been cleared.

There was something hypnotic about the drive. There was almost no traffic on the Pike, so Rafe didn't have to think much about what he was doing. The snow came at the windshield steadily, and the wipers kept a constant rhythm. The road gradually turned white. He stayed in the one lane where there were tire tracks. Occasionally he passed a plow, throwing up wet clumps of brownish slush. He was relieved to be away from Lauren. He had the sense mostly of that, of being on the road,
going away
. He listened to music, he kept his mind empty.

Route 9 across Vermont was slow, busy with local traffic and occasionally slippery. Twice he scared himself with a long skid. When he got to Bennington, he stopped and had a drink in a bar. There was a giant television mounted high on the wall in the corner with the volume turned off. Men in football uniforms ran this way and that. There were two couples lingering at tables, having finished lunch a while earlier, he supposed. The snow fell steadily on the empty street outside the plate-glass window. He had another drink. He wanted nothing more than he wanted to stay there and have one after another until he was shit-faced, but after those two, he paid up. He stopped at a liquor store in town and bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, and then he drove to Grace's.

The field around her house was unreasonably beautiful. The day was still, no wind, and the snow had collected evenly on every branch of the twisted old apple trees, of the swooping birches bent low under it; it had settled thick and white on the dark green of the mammoth pines at the bottom of the meadow. He sat for a while after he cut the engine, thinking about missing this, thinking about losing it, about losing Lauren, losing Grace, losing Pete and Nat. It seemed more than he could bear, this beauty, and all this loss.

He saw Grace's face, blurry and white, moving across the living room window. He got out of the car. The snow was about a foot deep, soft, light. He retrieved his overnight bag from the backseat. As he came up the walk, she opened the door.

"My favorite son-in-law," she said.

"Hello, Gracie." They kissed, she held him and patted his back heartily, as if she were burping a baby. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair smelled a little oily.

While he went to hang his coat up, he looked around. The rooms were nearly bare, but he'd expected this--she'd given away or sold everything but what she was taking with her to the retirement place, and they'd been consulted every step of the way. Earlier in the fall, before Lauren was diagnosed, he had come over in a rented van with a friend and taken some stuff back to Boston--an old chair Lauren liked, books, china and linens, boxes of photographs, silver, candlesticks, the worn quilts she'd grown up with.

Now their voices ricocheted around the rooms, their footsteps sounded hollow and ominous on the naked floors. Grace had some boxes she wanted him to bring downstairs, and he did that. Then he got the snowblower out of the garage and cleared the front walk and the porch--Tim Holloran would come by when the snow stopped, late tonight or early tomorrow, to plow the driveway out.

When he came back in, it was already getting dark. He could smell meat cooking--roasting beef or pork. He went into the kitchen. He'd resolved to tell her before dinner. He couldn't sit across the table from her and eat and make small talk and then spring it on her.

She was peeling potatoes at the sink, her back to him, her arms and hands in steady, tight motion.

"Come have a drink with me, Gracie," he said.

"Can't," she said without looking up or stopping what she was doing. "I want to get this stuff going. Then I'll get looped."

"I need to talk to you. Come on and have a drink now."

She looked sharply at him and set the peeler down at the sink. "I don't like the sound of this," she said.

"No, it's not good."

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and came over to the table. She sat and he poured a tumbler full for each of them. She had a swallow, and then she said, "You're not splitting up again, are you?"

"No." They were almost at right angles to each other. "No, this is about Lauren." He didn't look at her. "She's been diagnosed with a disease." He heard a little intake of breath. "A wasting disease." He'd decided on these words a few days ago, after Lauren asked him to do this.

"A wasting disease? What disease?" She pushed her glass away.

"It's ALS."

She shook her head.

"Amytrophic lateral sclerosis." He pronounced it slowly. "ALS. Lou Gehrig's disease. Remember when she was having trouble getting around last summer? When I had to carry her?" Her eyes were unwavering on his face. He tried to meet them. "Well, that was a sign of it."

"I've heard of this disease," Grace said. "But I don't know what happens to you. What will happen?"

"She will get weaker, progressively. She will need ... help. She may, in the later stages, even need help eating, or breathing."

Gracie's mouth opened. Then she said, "So, she's going to
die
from this."

"She will." He was looking down at his hands.

"How long does she have?"

He shrugged. "I guess it's different from case to case, and for that reason the doctors won't say, at this point. But we've read about it, and it could be three years. Maybe five years. It's certainly a few years off. She's still able to do most everything now."

"But ... this is so terrible." Grace's face was awful to look at.

"It is," he said. He reached over to take her hand.

She drew in a deep breath now, and expelled it. "I believe I'll go upstairs for a bit." She shoved her chair back.

"Take this." He filled her glass almost to the brim, and handed it to her.

She took it. At the door, she turned partway back. "You might get the potatoes on, sliced, in boiling water."

"Okay," he said. He was near tears. He wanted her to go, so he could cry. For her, for Lauren, for himself.

She must have sensed this. Or maybe not. At any rate, she said, "I'm so sorry for you, dear, having to tell me this."

"Well, I'm ... sorry, too."

But when she left, he didn't cry. He drank some more scotch, he peeled the potatoes and put them on to boil, he checked on the roast. He saw the baster sitting out on the counter next to the stove, so he basted it, just in case. This was how he'd been functioning for weeks now.
Oh, this foot? You put it down in front of the other one
. Now he moved his chair over by the window and sat, his drink in his hand, watching the slow fat snowflakes descend.

He didn't hear Grace come down, but suddenly music blared forth from the living room--horns and voices from the thirties or forties.

He turned, and she was in the kitchen, the cat trailing her.

"We're not having any vegetables," she announced. "The hell with them. Just meat and potatoes, that's all I feel like doing tonight." She went to the oven and opened it.

"Then that's all I feel like eating," he said.

She took the roast out of the oven and set it on the counter. "And we'll drink."

"I'm ahead of you there," he said.

"Have you been drinking?" she asked. She was at the sink pouring the steaming water off the potatoes. "I mean, in general?"

"Not so much. Lauren thinks it makes her speech worse, plus she's on some med for depression, which means, I guess, that she's really not supposed to." He had another sip of scotch. "But tonight is different. Let's get wrecked."

"I am wrecked, whether I drink or not. But yes, let's have a few. Let's get blotto."

He set the table while she mashed the potatoes. She put the food on the table and went back to the living room to restack the records. They ate, listening to the music, and then it stopped. They talked in a desultory way, always about Lauren, about the disease. Grace wanted to help. She spoke of coming for a week or so each month, once Lauren needed her. She seemed, so quickly, to have taken it in, to have accepted it.

But as they stood side by side, doing the dishes, she stopped and turned to him. "How will I go on living, after she dies?"

He couldn't think of an answer. He just stood there, and then he shook his head, and she went back to the dishes.

Later, they danced a little, and then he helped her pack up the records--Lauren had said she wanted them.

In the night, he heard Tim Holloran plowing the driveway, he saw the headlights of his truck rake the ceiling. When he woke again, to a muted light, his mouth was dry, and he had a headache. Aspirin, and then coffee helped.

He packed the car. Grace had more stuff for him to take than he'd counted on. The cat would have to ride in his carrier in the front seat. He took two bananas and left without eating breakfast. Maybe the roads would be plowed, maybe they wouldn't, but he couldn't bear to stay any longer in the emptied house with this flattened, silent version of Grace. And he thought it was likely that she wanted him to go, that she needed to be alone.

As he turned at the bottom of the long driveway, he saw that she was still standing where he'd left her, watching him out of sight.

The first preview performance had only a few glitches. Annie, the actress playing Emily, dropped her glass of fake bourbon and it broke, and Bob--Alex--flubbed a line but covered for it nicely. Rafe felt he gave an off-kilter emphasis to "Elizabeth," his last line--the play's last line. It seemed to him, just after he'd said it, that it sounded as though he didn't recognize his own wife.

No one was interested to discuss this with him at the bar afterward, where most of the cast and some of the crew had gathered for a celebratory drink. A few spouses were there.

He talked to Billy. Just as she was about to turn away, she asked him, "Hey, where's your wife, to whom you're so very
married?"

"I told you, she goes to bed early."

"Every single night?"

"She's an invalid, actually. She's not well."

Her face fell. "Oh, I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, we're sorry, too."

"But I'm sorry also because I was sort of ... teasing you, and that's, that's just ... inappropriate."

He knew what she was saying--that she'd been flirting, that she'd been teasing him sexually. "Ah, it's okay. I miss being teased."

"I suppose one would."

"One does."

Later, as things were breaking up, he found her. "Want some help walking your dog?" he asked.

"You can come along if you like. My dog actually mostly walks himself. And it's a quick walk at night. Strictly business, as it were."

They went halfway into Union Park and up the steps of one of its grand brick bowfronts. She let them into the front hallway where a staircase rose splendidly and vanished into the upper reaches of the house. She opened one of the double doors into what once must have been the town house's parlor.

A black shape bounded forward out of the dark toward her. The dog was enormous. As she spoke to it enthusiastically, it rose on its hind legs and rested its front paws briefly on her shoulders. Its head was almost at the height of hers. Its tail was wagging frantically. They seemed to be smiling at each other.

The dog dropped and then came to Rafe and poked him with his nose once, approximately in the groin.

He asked her what the breed was, and she said she'd been told a mix between a Newfoundland and something else maybe even bigger. "Though what
that
could be, I don't know."

"He is unbelievably huge," Rafe said.

"Yes. I thought I'd get the least appropriate dog for a person my size that I could find." She turned away. "Let's get your leash," she said conversationally to the dog.

She stepped into the dark room, and Rafe and the dog followed. The parlor was vast, high-ceilinged. He saw double pocket doors, partially pushed back, and beyond them another room and windows.

The dog stood patiently while she hooked the leash to his collar, and they went outside. They strolled down to the corner, where patrons still lingered in the glass box of a ground-floor restaurant, and then they walked slowly back. The dog must have lifted his leg twelve times.