I thought it was nice of her not to let on that she understood that the attraction was the chair, the person who walks beside you everywhere you go. And I supposed I should cut the kid some slack. Affliction fascinates children—my friends and I used to feign fainting spells or close our eyes and pretend to be blind, swiping about with an umbrella we used as a cane.
Anyway, the girl was still clutching my dress, her knuckles digging into my hip, and as I detached myself I glanced down at the top of her
head: Her part had gone crooked, and the flowers in her hair had started to wilt around their wires. Thinking, from her view, of the unmitigated pleasure everyone took in the babies—who were tedious, really, hadn’t even considered the uses of a flower basket—I felt a flash of sympathy for her.
As we drove away, the flower girl stood, waving, at the end of the driveway. I beeped the horn at her and glanced over at Kate. I had arranged her hands so they crossed demurely in her lap, her legs and feet set neatly before her. She turned to me, keeping her head against the headrest for support. As she looked up at me, her head tilted and chin lowered, her posture seemed faintly flirtatious, but it was only a trick of perspective. She waited till we were at a stop sign so I could look straight at her lips, which still bore the rose-colored lipstick I’d painted on them a few hours before.
She swallowed carefully, then lowered her chin so she could speak again. “Maybe I should have said ‘I love you too,’ ” she mused. “But I just had no idea who that little girl was.”
FOR THE REST OF
the drive Kate was quiet. I concentrated on the smooth empty roads, and Kate looked out her window at the fields. Soon the outermost subdivisions would show up on each side of the road, big brown-and-white signs with pictures of pheasants and ducks, faux–English manor names.
“I can’t believe that candle didn’t even catch her skirt,” I said.
Kate shook her head. “I still have the impulse to reach out,” she said. “I thought I actually did, for a sec.”
I had looked at her as it happened, seen her eyes widen and her chin jerk forward as the candle fell.
We passed the first huge subdivision on the western edge of Madison. A couple years before it had been farmland, and now it was all big houses rearing up on flat fields. The BMW’s headlights flashed across a deer on the side of the road, pale brown bulk and a smear of scarlet on the concrete.
“Slow down a little,” Kate said. I slowed down to fifty. “They start watching for speeders around here.” We were quiet for a few moments, listening to Mozart on the radio.
When I looked at her at a stoplight, I saw that her eyes were closed. To our right was a wine store where we used to buy mixed cases for guests, a florist Kate had liked, a caterer. To our left was a road that went off toward Kate’s old house, where she had lived with Evan. I peered down the road on my left, wondering what Evan and Cynthia had done with the house.
When I glanced her way again Kate was looking at me. The skin beneath her eyes looked puffy, and her mouth had lost its color.
“Are you exhausted?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Just a little tired.”
The light turned and we started down the road. “Ever wonder what your old house looks like?” I asked.
“Their whole living room is probably devoted to nude statues by now.” We snorted, but then she said, “Never mind. It’s probably fine.”
After a moment she let her eyes close again, but they opened in surprise as her head fell forward, her chin dropping toward her chest. This had been happening more lately. The next step was a new headrest on her wheelchair, more of a brace, to grip her skull and hold her up. I reached over as I drove, my palm and fingertips flat against her forehead as I tipped her head back again. She felt warm, her smooth skin leaving a faint trace of powdered slickness from her makeup on my hand.
“Thanks,” she said. “I hate that. Maybe it’s worse when I’m tired.”
I took a left onto Chambers. “You want me to stay home tonight?”
She shook her head. “Don’t be silly. Hillary will be there. Go out. You put your time in.”
H
ILLARY WAS WAITING AT
the house when we arrived. She and Kate went into the bathroom while I changed into jeans and a jacket, called out good night, and went out to meet Jill at the Union. We got our beers and went out to the terrace, where I gave her a thumbnail sketch of the wedding. Though the air was still a shade too cold for sitting outside we did so anyway, stiff in the metal chairs.
It was a quiet night, which bore the faint air of disappointment that neither of us was terribly vivacious. Our recent stories had all been told. We drank one beer and ordered another out of habit before realizing we were tired enough already. We left them unfinished, hugged, and walked away to our cars.
I rolled the window down as I drove. I wanted it to wake me up, refresh me now that the wedding was done and the day was over. I wanted nothing more, I had realized as soon as I sat down with Jill, than to be silent. After a day of nonstop translating and speaking for Kate, I finally got to drive, just drive, to leave my mouth closed and stop looking searchingly around to find the cues that let me conduct other people’s conversations for them.
At home Hillary was in the living room, the intercom monitor next to her on the couch, a cup of tea on the table. She looked up from her book as I came in, adjusting her glasses.
“I thought you’d be later,” she said.
“Yeah, I was tired. Long wedding.” I threw my purse on the counter and glanced at the mail: nothing for me. “How’s Kate?”
Hillary was putting on a jacket. “Fine. Sleeping. I’m not sure that cold isn’t coming back though. She’s been a little raspy.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said.
Hillary got out her keys. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “I could have made myself hear it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I picked up the mail again and shuffled the envelopes. “Do you think she looks smaller? At the wedding today I looked at her and she seemed really thin.”
Hillary leaned back against the door frame and sighed. “You’re probably right. I can’t say I’ve seen it myself, but we’re so used to her. It would make sense, though.”
We were both quiet for a moment. “Maybe we should give her an extra shake a day,” I suggested.
Hillary gave me a cheerless smile and said, “If she’ll let us. Couldn’t hurt.” She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Sometimes she seemed about forty.
“Thanks for staying for a while,” I said.
“Sure. Good night.” She waved over her shoulder as she headed to her car.
I washed my face, used some of Kate’s eye cream. It was close to midnight when I got into bed, and I stretched out, happily tired, enjoying the cool pillow and the breeze from the open window. Just to be sure I turned up the volume on the monitor.
I THOUGHT AT FIRST
the sound that woke me was a scrape. Like a drawer, perhaps, a window forced along its frame. I was suddenly staring into the darkness, listening, not quite sure where I was or what was happening. I couldn’t decide if I had heard nothing at all or if I had been listening to it for a long time.
Then the sound came again. It wasn’t stealthy and soft, like someone breaking in, but reckless and haphazard. Desperate. This time it sounded large and echoing.
I could hear it in the hall as I ran. I could hear it still echoing through the monitors as I dashed into her room. I thought—illogically—that I’d see chaos in there, Kate on the floor in a tangle of sheets, possessions thrown everywhere.
But she was right there in bed where Hillary had left her. I could see the heave of her ribs, their lurching, and I saw her eyes shine at me in the dark, the whites showing all around. This, I knew instantly, was far worse than the coughing fits of the past weeks. I was still stopped in the doorway, hands braced inside the jamb.
I shook myself out of it. I crouched next to her.
She had the button beneath her fingers. I put my hand over her wrist. I didn’t know if she’d had the strength or presence of mind to press it yet.
“Do I need to call?” I asked her. My voice sounded brisk at first, as though this were just another daily question, except that I seemed so loud.
She stared at me but didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure she could. “Do you want me to call?” I said again. I tightened my hand on her wrist.
In my mind I saw myself pressing down on her fingers and hitting the button. I saw it so clearly I had to take my own hand away, digging my nails into my palms, or else I knew I’d do it. I told myself I still could—I just had to make her agree and then I could mash her hand down on the button and wait for the sirens. I watched her face, waiting for her to nod and let me call them.
She was making eye contact for seconds at a time and then looking all around the room. I couldn’t get her to focus on me, and the sound she was making—it was wood cracking; it was tires on wet pavement—seemed to enthrall her, so that I didn’t know if she quite registered anything other than its rhythm. No matter how I listened I couldn’t hear words. There was nothing of communication in it.
She couldn’t talk. I tried again, my voice even louder. I didn’t think she was even listening to me. I wasn’t even sure if she could nod or shake her head. If she was on the verge of convulsing, then nodding or shaking her head wouldn’t be accurate anyway.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Kate, listen. Do you want me to call? Blink. Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
I was holding her shoulders, bony and rounded in my fingers. I realized I was pressing down on her with all my weight to hold her still so I could read her face. If her body could have moved itself she would have been arched off the mattress, but only her neck did, the tendons
straining, as she lifted her chin, and then lowered it, her teeth gleaming in the light from the streetlamp.
“I can’t understand you,” I said. My voice rang through the room, all over the register, high, low, cracked. The frustration made me desperate, almost violent—suddenly I knew why people in films slapped the hysterical or uncommunicative. I got hold of myself and said, “Blink once for me to call, twice for no.”
Kate’s gaze had been roving all around the room again, as though looking for breath in a corner or near the window, but now she met my gaze, her eyes huge.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them. She squeezed them shut again. Two blinks. Her tongue touched the roof of her mouth, just behind her teeth. Her lips curved into a circle and she shook her head.
My hand had already been moving to the lifeline. I was about to press it when I comprehended what she was saying. I stopped, my hand in midair. For a second neither of us moved. In the dark her hair was a wild mass around her small face, her skin white and opaque as a ceramic mask.
I turned on the lamp. In the light I could now see that her face was strangely mottled, red, bloodshot, but drained white around her nose and mouth.
“Tell me again,” I said. “Once for me to call, twice for me not to.”
She was still gasping, but she did it again, a blink. Another blink. It wasn’t a spasm. It was
No
.
I stared at her. Her eyes, red-threaded, rimmed in tears, watched me fiercely.
I reached down to her hand on the button, took hold of her wrist, and lifted it away.
“Are you sure? Do you want me to do this?”
It was a whisper. I’d been yelling before, but suddenly now the room was still but for her attempts at breathing, that sucking in and wheezing exhale. She stared at me, down at my hand lifting hers away from the button. I paused, holding her wrist a few inches above it.
“If I move your hand you won’t hit it accidentally.”
She arched her neck, a great spasm of a gasp filling the room. She nodded into the pillow and gave me an exaggerated, single blink.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’m moving it then. I’ll get it out of the way.”
I set the button carefully on the floor, away from my foot, being certain not to hit it accidentally. I could tell I was moving slowly, so slowly it might have been maddening to her, but I wasn’t capable of anything faster.
I felt us to be miles away from everyone else in the world. The room, with its one bright light and the silence outside, was like a chamber in the center of a mountain—isolated, helpless, airless.
I climbed up on the other side of the bed, next to her. I was on my knees up near her shoulders, looking for a way to hold her, to cradle her head in my lap, to wrap my arms around her. I didn’t know how to do this. I was shifting around pointlessly, trying to find the right spot to lift her or touch her. Her eyes rolled as I moved, following me each moment.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. Finally I knelt next to her on the bed, my body folded over and my face only a few inches to the side of hers. I wanted to be closer to her, closer than this. I gathered up her hands in mine, and they felt cold and clayey, the bones shifting beneath my grip. I pushed her hair, still warm and roughened from sleep, out of her face. Her lips were turning blue at the edges. They were stretched back from her teeth, her tongue. She watched me the whole time, her gaze locked with mine.
I could ignore her and push the button. It would take less than a second. I decided I would do exactly that. I didn’t care if she would thank me later, or hate me for it. She could do whatever she wanted later; I just knew I couldn’t watch this happen. She looked petrified.
“Please,” I said. I leapt on that fear, relieved, and hoping I still had a good chance at persuading her. “Please let me call.”
But she blinked and shook her head again, her eyebrows knit together.
No
. I couldn’t pretend now that I hadn’t understood her, and she was watching me to see if I would override her. We kept looking at one another as she struggled for breath, our gazes locked. I couldn’t look right at her, when she knew what I was thinking, and disobey her. The opportunity to ignore her and hit the button had slipped away from me for good. Everything was shifting out of place, as though the
disinterested earth had just shrugged us both off its crust. There was nothing she would let me do.