We Are Not Ourselves(130)

“Sure,” he said.

He might have been telling the truth.

“Dear God,” she wrote, “I will offer this up to you without complaint, but please protect all I know and love.” She copied it out neatly onto an index card that she folded and put in his wallet.

She never heard Ed ask, “Why me?” but she couldn’t help asking it for him. Why Ed? Why now? Why so young? There was the obvious answer—it was random, senseless, genetic, environmental—but she didn’t like that one. She also knew she couldn’t sign on to any system that said it had all happened for a reason. So she took a third path, the pragmatic one. It hadn’t happened for a reason, but they would find something to glean from it anyway. There didn’t have to be a divine plan for there to be meaning in life. People’s lives will be better because of his illness, she told herself. They’ll appreciate life more. He’ll remind them that their lives are better than they think. It was as good a story as any, and it had the virtue of often seeming plausible, though never when she lay awake at night, when the public life faded away, and other people vanished, and she was left staring at the back of her hand and thinking, All of this is an illusion, even the consolations. She was taken back to her bed when she was a child, when she would lie awake listening to her parents in the living room rehearsing their fixed roles after her father had returned from the bar, and she thought, No time has passed since then. I’m there right now. She remembered examining her hand then as well, and the only thing to differentiate this moment from any of a hundred in the past—the only thing that reassured her that the loop of her life wasn’t about to start over again—was the crenellated landscape of wrinkles around her knuckles, which she ran her fingers over, feeling their washboard knobbiness.





58


They were staying home on New Year’s Eve for the first time in the twenty-eight years since they’d met. Last year all they’d done was drive to the McGuires’ to watch the Times Square telecast, but at least they’d left the house. This year she couldn’t face all the work involved in getting him out. She knew she’d spend the whole night minding him and wouldn’t have any fun.

New Year’s, being the anniversary of the night they met, meant extra to them. When they lived in Jackson Heights, they’d go to balls, Ed in a tux, she in a shimmering gown with pearls. She’d rush around in her slip, blow-drying her hair and applying makeup, and come up short when she saw Ed wrapped in a towel, staring into the mirror as he shaved. They’d leave Connell with Brenda Orlando and come back very late. She’d be contentedly exhausted the next morning as she got the three of them out to Mass.

She sat at the kitchen table in her housecoat and slippers, her hair pulled back in a plastic clip. Connell sat across from her, reading the sports pages.

“What are you doing for New Year’s?”

“Going to a party with Cecilia.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere in White Plains. I don’t know.”

“How were you planning to get there?”

“I thought I’d take Dad’s car.”

“Have you asked him yet?”

“I didn’t think I had to. I thought you were staying home.”

Something in his tone irked her. “We were,” she said. “But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d like us to go out as a family.”

“I have plans.”

“The three of us are going to go to dinner. You can go out after that.”

“I’m supposed to eat with Cecilia and her parents before the party.”

“You’ll simply call her and tell her you’ll see her later.”

“Whatever. Fine.”

Connell left the room in a huff. She called to Ed in the den and told him to go shower. She went up and laid out a sports coat, dress shirt, tie, and neatly pressed pair of pants for him. She put on an evening gown and zipped the plastic sheath off her mink.

? ? ?

It was snowing out. The Caprice was in the driveway, blocking her car in the garage. Ed headed for the driver’s side door. She pulled on his arm.

“You have your car key?” she asked Connell.

“Yes.”

“You drive. Your father and I are tired.”

There was no way she was letting Ed drive in this weather. Even when it was perfect out, lately he gave her a heart attack any time he was behind the wheel. Backing out of the driveway once, he’d hit the stone wall, torn off the side-view mirror, and dragged an ugly streak down the length of the car. Outside church, he’d have run over an old lady in the crosswalk if Eileen hadn’t shouted and thrown her arm across his chest. She’d been trying to think of a way to take his car away from him without turning him against her. She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that that part of his life was over. She couldn’t just take away his keys or sell the car, but she couldn’t just let him crash it either. Someone could end up dead. Ed could end up dead. She would have to figure something out soon.

Connell hopped in. Ed got in the shotgun seat, she in the back. She watched him fumble with the belt buckle until Connell reached over and snapped it in.

Connell turned to her. “Where are we going?”

“Surprise us. Take us to the city. Someplace you like to go.”