We Are Not Ourselves(177)

One of his hands went to her waist; she felt she was watching from outside her body as she didn’t move it away. His other hand joined in.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

He pulled her to him. Her arms went up in halfhearted protection and the cold, wet rubber sent a tingling across her skin. She felt bloated and squishy against him. She’d put on sixty pounds in the years since Ed’s diagnosis, nearly a pound for each her husband had lost, as if she’d been eating to maintain their equilibrium. Sergei’s face, as he moved in to kiss her, was smooth enough that she wondered whether he had shaved right before he came down. His drugstore aftershave, liberally applied, did not repel her up close as she had imagined it would. She felt a pounding through his chest. His hands moving over her left ghostly sense impressions everywhere they’d been. She found herself ascending the stairs with him.

? ? ?

Afterward, in her room, she locked the door and moved the armchair in front of it. She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt the need to protect herself, to hide. She climbed into bed and wept for a while, and then somehow she slept, the body doing what it had to do. She woke in the middle of the night to the unsettling light of the lamp and heard the low hum of Sergei’s television. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t awake.

? ? ?

In the morning she showered and dressed before she moved the armchair. When she ventured out of the room, she saw Sergei’s door wide open. She walked over to it and looked inside; none of his things were there. She ventured downstairs and was startled to find him sitting at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the suitcase next to him.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“For what?”

“I understand you want I should leave.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You have a job to get to. You can begin to look for a place. In the meantime, this is where you live. There’s nothing more to say, as far as I’m concerned.”





88


Connell had hatched his plan over Thanksgiving, when he learned that his mother was going to have her Christmas party on Christmas night instead. Cindy Coakley was planning to host Christmas Eve again, as she had the previous year and probably would indefinitely now that the old order had been toppled. It wasn’t ideal, his mother said, as there wasn’t as much to look forward to, and people couldn’t stay out as late, but it was important to her to have a party in the house this particular year, with the usual cast of people. She understood that it would be redundant, the same people going to both, and she understood that they would go if she insisted, and she was going to insist. She said she wanted it to be as nice as any Christmas they’d ever had. He knew it was going to break her heart not to have his father in attendance, so he was going to make sure his father was there after all.

? ? ?

They went together on Christmas morning to see him. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays. Small clusters of visitors amassed at every sitting area, and many of the rooms were packed, with an air of festivity. The nurses and orderlies were less formal with his mother than with the adult children and grandkids who flew in from far-flung places, but they were also more circumspect. It must not have been convenient for them that she came every day, particularly as she was a career nurse who wasn’t afraid to assert herself.

They found his father asleep in his bed, his mouth hanging open. They didn’t wake him but sat in chairs on either side of the bed waiting for him to come to on his own. Connell got the creepy feeling that they were looking at his corpse. Just as he was about to reach out and shake his father awake, his mother did it herself. His father opened his eyes without startling and began babbling hushed syllables. He lifted his hand slowly to scratch his nose, as if moving through an invisible viscous substance.

Connell’s mother had tried to prepare him for how much his father had deteriorated since summer. When they transferred his father to the wheelchair, his father couldn’t push himself up off the bed without help.

After his father was in the chair, Connell watched his knee for some vestige of the gesture that had bound them over the years. It had begun when he was young, when his father would throw his arms around him and declare, “What a good boy I have here.” Early on in the illness, whenever Connell hugged him, his father squeezed back and said simply, “Good boy.” When his father began to lose his strength, the squeezes turned to pats; when he lost his coordination, the pats became pounding slaps. “Just rub,” Connell said once, as they clutched. “Rub. Now just keep your hands still for a second, like this.” Then his father started to slur his words, so that all he could say clearly was “Good, good, good,” and then eventually that “good” gave way to an inarticulate sound—but Connell knew what it meant, even if no one else could have interpreted it. Then Connell would lean down to initiate a hug, and his father would reach up from the couch, until eventually his father didn’t reach up anymore but just patted his own knee. The final stage came when Connell noticed that his father patted his knee whenever Connell was even in the room. Now, though, in the wheelchair, he didn’t move at all.

Connell wheeled him to the big picture window that looked out on the lawn. Remnant clusters of white from a recent snowfall dotted the landscape. It was too cold to take him out on the veranda. His mother had not mentioned the possibility of taking him home for Christmas, and seeing his condition, he knew why. He was undaunted, though. He would lift his father up into the car and carry him up the stairs and give his mother a little of her life back for a day.