The Forgetting Time(61)
“I see,” Dr. Ferguson said. He slid the tissue box closer to her across the side table.
They looked at each other. He was waiting, she realized, for her to cry. The square box gazed at her expectantly, its cardboard skin swimming with absurd pink and green bubbles, one tissue protruding obscenely from its slit, calling out for her tears, for her—what did the books call it?—catharsis. He wanted to see her break at last. Well, damned if he was going to get her to do that. What did it get you, catharsis? You still had to pick yourself up and go on with your life, your life that was a pile of shit. She stood.
“Where are you going?”
“Look. Are you going to give me the prescription or not?”
“It’s not advisable—”
“Yes or no? ’Cause I’ll go elsewhere.… You know someone else will give it to me if you don’t.”
He hesitated, but he gave her the slip of paper. “Come back soon, all right? Next week?”
*
You still had to pick yourself up and walk out that door and face the glare of the afternoon sun on the windshields of the cars in the parking lot.
You still had to find your car and put your key in the ignition and hear its full-throated cry as it came to life. You had to steer it onto the road with all the other living, moving things, all headed somewhere or other as if the rotation of the world depended on their trips to the dry cleaner’s or the mall. You had to pull off the road into the parking lot of the CVS and get out of the car and stand waiting at the counter with all the other people seeking the potions that would buy them another hour or another day, whether they wanted it or not, and you had to put half a pill in your mouth, just half, and swallow it, hard and dry, feeling it scrape down your throat. And then, since you had no food in the house and you had a human being besides yourself to look after, you had to walk down the sidewalk to the Stop & Shop. You had to stand there inside blinking under those bright, bright lights, all those rows and colors leaping out at you, tomatoes so red they hurt your eyes, fiery orange bags of Doritos, neon green six-packs of 7-Up, everything chirping out to the living: Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
And you couldn’t stand there forever, as if you’d never seen a supermarket before. You needed, even then, especially then, when your momentum began to flag, to keep moving. You filled your cart with what your family needed. You put a dead, skinned chicken in there and a big box of cornflakes and a gallon of milk. You put broccoli in there for Charlie, the only vegetable he’d eat, and some Vidalia onions for Henry in case he came over someday and you also put in a bag of grape tomatoes. You knew that Charlie wouldn’t eat them and you yourself preferred beefsteak but you grabbed them anyway, didn’t you, their smooth red skins peeking out at you through the mesh of the bag, grabbed them because Tommy liked them, liked to hold them in his teeth and squirt them across the room, and you wanted to show yourself that you still remembered what Tommy liked, even if it did blast a hole in your heart.
Then you had to stand in line ignoring Mrs. Manzinotti staring at you from the dairy section, so you paged through the magazines filled with celebrities falling apart or falling in love or both, noticing that Mrs. Manzinotti was walking in your direction now and hoping that she still ignored you as she did the first few years, avoiding eye contact, flinching when you passed her in the market or downtown. But here she was, filled with determined good cheer, barreling toward you, as if all that was over with and we must go on as before, mustn’t we? It doesn’t matter if you’re ready; you got ready, fast. So you talked about how nice it was that it was finally feeling like spring today (as if you had even noticed) and you asked after Mr. Manzinotti and Ethan and Carol Ann and when she said, ‘And how’s Charlie doing?’ you said, ‘We’re just fine, thank you,’ as if your own story were an article in a magazine someone could flip through and put back in the rack, as if your sweet boy wasn’t (say it) somewhere in pieces under the dirt.
And while you paid the cashier, at that moment it occurs to you that there’s a man in Florida stopping at a gas station somewhere right this minute. You can see him clear as day buying a big bag of Doritos and beef jerky and a Red Bull, then leaving the bag there on the counter with the clerk as he heads to the toilet to pee before he gets back on the road. And the eyes of that man standing there, those unrepentant eyes staring in the bathroom mirror, they were the last eyes Tommy ever saw before—
No.
No, because: Tommy was alive.
Alive on this earth right now in all his Tommyness: his love of tomatoes and marshmallows and butterscotch, his inexplicable hatred of strawberries, the way he’d grab her hand as she was leaving his bedside at night, asking her to stay for a few more minutes (Oh, why had she loosened herself from his grip and kissed him good night? Why hadn’t she stayed for the few minutes he had craved?), the dimple in his cheek that came out when he gave that foolish and duplicitous grin after some piece of naughtiness, like that time he popped his brother’s balloon on the way home from the carnival and pretended it was an accident.
Tommy was alive on this earth and no one could tell her otherwise.
Tommy was alive on this earth, and someday they would see each other again.
It happened sometimes. That girl out in Utah, for instance. The one with the friendly, open face and the yellow hair, who looked like she had stepped out of the goat stall at the 4-H instead of crawling on her hands and knees up from purgatory. There she was on the cover of the magazine, Denise still had that copy in the drawer of her bedside table, she knew it by heart: the girl had disappeared from her bedroom one night and then five years later she was home again and the monster who did it was going to jail for forever and a day. There were the pictures of her with her family, sitting on the couch with her mother’s arm wrapped around her, her father’s hand resting on her shoulder as naturally as you please. She was starting up school again, that’s what the article said. Playing piano. A shy smile on her face, blue ribbons in her hair. The girl was intact. More or less. It could happen. Things happened. It wasn’t any more or less unlikely than a child going for a bike ride to his best friend’s house down the road one Saturday morning and falling off the edge of the earth.