A few years ago Evan would have been in this same spot. I used to sit up on my elbows and look down at Liam as he knelt at the foot of the bed. Somewhere, both of them might be in this position even now, marveling at a slim body or a rounded soft one, marveling the way everyone does for a while. The way you’re so determined to remember each detail that you learn it several times over, with your fingers and eyes and mouth. There’s that pocket of time between people, when you’re so rapt in the heat and furrow of another body and every flaw seems like just a clever variation, but then of course you start to seek out every mole and stretch mark without wanting to, and that electric skin cools and sets beneath your hands.
Kate had lifted her head and now she raised her eyebrows at me. I realized I had paused and I resumed tracing the calves, then around the soft skin of the heel, out along the swollen ankle. When I got up to her left hand, now bare of jewelry, I was glad I had been so careful to show the bulge of the ring on the other hand. I didn’t want Evan thinking the ring just didn’t show up. I wanted him to know it wasn’t there at all, that a few days before, Kate had gestured with her chin to indicate the wedding band, and said, “Take it off.” We had put it in her nightstand, in the drawer below the blue rubber butterfly.
I was back at her head again, the tangle of glossy hair and the curve of the jaw. I kept tracing until I closed the line at the crown of her head.
I steadied her in a sitting position, a hand at her back. She was so slim, the light bones of her shoulder blade sharp and warm against the palm of my hand. I would definitely make that guacamole; she no longer allowed me to give her extra nutrition shakes.
I lifted her to a standing position, pivoted, and placed her in the wheelchair. We both gazed for a second at the silhouette on the bed. It felt like it had taken forever, but it looked perfect.
“It was a good idea to do both sides of the mattress,” Kate said. I laughed.
A few months ago I would have liked to do something like this in Liam’s house, a house I’d never seen inside. But had I done it at all, back when I might have wished to, I would have put my figure on his side of the bed instead of in the center, the lines of my body indelible and hidden under his.
I spread the mattress pad down again, covered it with the sheets, and smoothed the quilt over everything. Before we left the house Kate told me to crack a window, and once I locked the front door I took the brass key off the ring and tossed it through the open window into the front hallway, where it ricocheted off the nude statue and landed beneath the swaying tangle of the spider plant.
I
STOOD IN THE
shallow end of the pool, my hands beneath Kate’s back. People swam past us, kicking up a wake that lapped over her torso, pooled in the depression of her navel beneath the navy suit. Her breasts were small cones in the shiny fabric, her hip bones peaking sharply on either side of her stomach. I kept my hand splayed against the back of her neck and head, holding her face above the water, and the other arm looped beneath her body. Her legs floated easily, straight out and slightly shapeless, like a clay sculpture whose musculature hasn’t been fully detailed yet.
“How’s it feel?” I asked her. She was looking up at the ceiling, the tendons in her neck tensed against the water, and she looked down her nose and cheeks at me and smiled and mouthed,
Fine
.
The doctor was the one who suggested swimming. He had listened to Kate’s lungs, clucked over the most recent cold she had not been able to shake, and warned me never to let her face hit the water.
It’ll help the muscles
, he said.
Those muscles are getting a little sulky, you’re right. A little lazy. But the water gives them some resistance
. He had listened to her chest again, his brow furrowed.
We need to clear out those lungs
, he said.
If they’re not clear in a few days, come back
. He gave me a look, to emphasize that he spoke to me as well. Then I left them alone in the exam room while I got the car. I’d offered to stay and translate, but they’d glanced at each other and Kate said,
We have a couple things to cover still. I think we’ll be okay
.
I felt the muscle at the back of her neck fluttering—it tensed, or tried to tense, then went flaccid again, the cords in her neck leaping. Her ribs leapt up and down with a sharp breath.
“Relax,” I said. “I have a good hold on you.”
Evan had done this for her before, I knew, and I thought she must be used to being held by someone larger and stronger than I was. I shifted my arms so she’d feel the hold I had on her. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a man’s long arms; she was so light that it was easy to bear her up. Stretched out, though, she was surprisingly long.
She nodded, blinking rapidly as the water splashed near her temples.
“Check your legs,” I said a little later, “see if you can work them a little. The doctor said you might.”
I looked down again at her legs, pipe stems, pale as lilies, and watched one move. Then the other. She managed a decent kick out of each of them, and another and another, pelting my face with chlorinated water.
“Hey! I’ve never seen you kick that far.”
I knew the water made all the difference, that without gravity it seemed as though she could do much more than she could. I shouldn’t trust this display, but I fell for it completely, as though I’d watched her stand up and take a step.
Her brows had been knit in concentration, but now the tension in her face broke and she laughed. I squeezed the back of her neck just barely, lifted her a little higher, and felt the muscles along her spine loosen and soften against my palms.
AFTER WE GOT HOME
from the pool, Kate said, “I have something to ask you.”
I was filing insurance papers. “Shoot,” I said.
“Dr. Klass thinks I need more care,” she began. It felt like a blow; I heard air rush from my mouth as I turned to her. She read my expression and said, “No, not better care. But he doesn’t think I should be alone at night.”
I sat down on the edge of the desk. We looked at each other. I began deadheading a basil plant.
“What about the emergency button?” I asked.
She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “We talked about that too. My lungs are not so great. It’s possible it could happen very fast, too fast for people to get to me in time if I started to have trouble
breathing. But maybe that’s okay; I don’t know.” She paused and watched my face.
I pushed the basil plant away.
ALS paralyzed everything eventually, including the muscles she used to breathe. That, suffocation, was often the final, single cause of death.
“Are you really ready to think that way?” I asked her. There was a snag in my voice and I got it under control before I went on. “It doesn’t seem right to me.”
Kate said, “No, not really. I try it on for size sometimes. But he’s been after me to have round-the-clock for a while. And lying there from ten to eight every night is not the party I thought it would be.”
“Are you asking me to move in?” I asked. “Because I would, of course I would. Or do you want to get someone more qualified for nights?”
She shook her head. “If you want to, we can work out something for you.” She seemed to be debating what to say for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you dare do it just because you think you have to. I need someone but it doesn’t have to be you. I was planning on hiring someone. I just thought I’d ask you first.”
It wasn’t that I wouldn’t move in. I would if I had to. Better me than Simone, who despite great improvement was still a little too sprightly to have around all the time, or Hillary, with her generally deadening effect. But Jill and I had lived together pretty happily for a couple years now, and since she no longer had to dart out of the house to avoid Liam, we were back to having fun together, sitting around when we got home from work and making fun of bad cable. I even liked her new boyfriend. The three of us hung out without awkwardness, a rare enough thing that I was reluctant to give it up. We knew I was a third wheel, but we all felt comfortable with it.
Something else occurred to me. “You’re going to think this is a stupid question,” I said. She watched me. I took a deep breath, unsure if I was being selfless or self-serving, and said, “What about Evan? Maybe he could live here for a while and give it a shot.” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “He didn’t strike me as all that happy at the zoo. And maybe he hasn’t even seen the mattress yet,” I added.
She shook her head and glanced away from me. “I wish I could, in a way. But I can’t count on him, even if . . . we worked out the rest.” She made a sound in her throat, clearing it. “Plus. I should have told you. Cynthia is moving into the old house.”
I had a palm full of dead basil buds, and I got up to throw them away. It shocked me a little, the flush of disappointment I felt when she said that. I remembered the way Evan had looked at Kate, even when they were together only to figure out a separation agreement. At the zoo I’d looked back and thought,
It won’t be long before this Cynthia thing just resolves itself
.
“I’m thinking,” I told Kate. I sat down behind the desk and didn’t look her way, staring at the blotter instead. It gave me a second of privacy. She knew I needed to see her, especially lately, to understand her words. Looking away from her was almost as effective as turning away from a deaf person signing. I tried not to do it much. It was cowardly, and even cruel, but I did it now.
This was a nice house. I could live in a really nice house, for once in my life. And Jill and I wouldn’t lose touch. Nevertheless I was regretting how quickly I’d said I’d move in if Kate needed it. Kate and I had a good rhythm going. I came over after classes or first thing in the morning. We ran our errands and I made my phone calls on behalf of the ALS Society (I had given up the convoluted introductions and now I just pretended to be Kate) and I cooked dinner for the evening caregiver and me, and gave Kate her nutrition shakes. Soon the farmers’ market would start up again.
But what would I really be leaving, anyway? It wasn’t as though I was cutting such a swath through society on my own.
Kate had said nothing. She sat in her chair, letting me debate myself. You can’t help but be flattered, to be given such a proposal and know that you’re the only one who got it. It didn’t matter that she told me not to take it out of guilt. She knew I would take it, because it was the lesser evil. I’d rather be inconvenienced than ashamed for refusing to help her. I was already working my way around, in my head, to the things I would like about it: that pretty house, the more frequent use of the BMW. I looked up at her and gave her what I hoped was an enthusiastic smile. But, again, and just for a moment, I regretted having
left that state of unawareness, when I hadn’t known much of what was going on in her marriage or her life, and I hadn’t had to respond to it. I could just show up, wheel her here and lift her there, my duties as simple as a maid’s.
I HAD AN EMBARRASSING
compulsion to put on makeup and take particular care with my hair and clothes when I went back to Oconomowoc. It was one thing when I lived there, running errands in my sweatpants and doing little more than wiping the shine off my bare skin before I stopped at the Kiltie for a peanut butter milkshake. But in the past two years I had become a visitor.
I just hadn’t come home one June, having lucked into a cheap sublet on Spaight Street, and when Jill and I drove back for a weekend that summer it was clear we no longer had the same ease with our old acquaintances, or even once-close friends. When we all ran into one another at The Main Event over dollar beers, or at the fairgrounds in line to buy cheese curds, we didn’t even try to hide our appraisals: After the hug came the tilted-back head, the extraneous, contemplative nods. I felt I came up wanting in these one-offs. Some of the girls I’d been in gymnastics with, the compact muscled ones who came up to my shoulder, had gone on to compete on college teams, and I must admit that seeing them again brought out the worst in me. Just when I thought it didn’t matter to me anymore I’d seen Christie Juska at a fair, her shiny black ponytail bouncing and her muscled legs in a tense, splayed-toe stance, sipping mineral water and eschewing the bratwurst as if she never knew when she might be called upon to perform an impromptu floor exercise. Next thing I knew I was doing handsprings in the backyard, out of practice and panting, my mother tapping on the window and telling me to come in before I snapped an ankle.
I no longer tried to renew old friendships beyond a night out, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t put on my jade choker, mascara, and a swipe of sheer blackberry lipstick when I went back in early April. No point in handing people their gossip on a platter, as Jill liked to say.
I was going home for my mother’s forty-fifth birthday. It was already dark when I arrived, after leaving Kate’s at five. I was carrying a
bottle of champagne and an expensive wool sweater, both of which she had helped me choose. It was extravagant, but Kate wouldn’t be charging me rent, so I had been enjoying the freed money since I had agreed to move in. I’d been on a bit of a spree: stocking up on new CDs to play in my car, a sweater for Jill, a new winter coat for myself. It was much more fun shopping for my mother with some money. As I browsed I had thought of all the drugstore cologne and aftershave I had bestowed upon my parents over the years, and then I grabbed a silk tie for my father as well.
When I had gone back at Christmas the house was festooned with colored lights and wreaths—being a religious skeptic did not prevent my mother from enjoying the trappings of the holidays, including the tree which, she often noted, was really a pagan hand-me-down—but now the decorations were long gone and the snow was piled in gray heaps on either side of the door. The siding had been avocado for years, but my father had recently painted it light blue. The house was just a tiny bungalow, with a living room at the front, their bedroom and mine off to the side, and a dining room off the kitchen. The basement held my mother’s sewing machine and my father’s workbench.