Every Note Played(29)

“Okay, can you balance on one foot?”

“I’m too tired. I don’t want to fall.”

“Hold on to my shoulders.”

“I can’t.”

“Oh, right. Here, lean against the wall behind you.”

She holds him firmly by his bare waist, and he shuffles back a few steps until he’s flush to the wall. She squats down in front of him.

“Lift.” She taps his left shin with the palm of her hand.

His shoes already off, she tugs the pants and boxers down and off one leg. In doing so, she slides his leg through the soiled clothing, and now his entire leg is smeared with shit. A substantial hunk of it falls out of his boxers and onto the bathroom floor. The white wall behind him has been painted brown by his rear end. Good God.

“Switch.”

He lifts his right foot, and she drags the pants and boxers down, threads them over his socked foot and off. She looks at her hands and wishes she hadn’t—Richard’s shit on her right thumb, across her knuckles, beneath her freshly painted nails, pressed into her neatly trimmed cuticles. Her sweater mask has fallen off her nose, but she doesn’t want to touch her sweater with her contaminated hands, so she leaves it. The stench, the mess, her hands. She wretches twice.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She can’t pause now to clean herself up or she won’t be able to finish. She has to keep going.

“Lift.”

She peels the left sock off, then the right. She stands and grabs the bottom of his crewneck and tries to pull it up and over his head, but his arms won’t cooperate, and he’s stuck, a puzzle she can’t solve.

“You have to go one arm at a time,” says Richard.

She wrestles his left arm through the hole, then the right, then his head. He’s now totally naked, smeared with shit and tears and shame.

She runs the shower. Richard steps in. She grabs the sponge on the tub’s edge and saturates it with liquid soap.

“I’m good like this. Melanie can do the rest.”

“Shut up.”

As she begins to wash him, to touch his shoulders and chest and stomach, she has the split-second recognition that, although much bonier than she remembers, this is Richard’s naked body before her, a body she has loved, kissed, hugged, held, spooned, sucked, fucked, avoided, despised, resented, cursed, hated. A comprehensive menu of memories and feelings related to this body, inappropriate to this bizarre situation, scrolls across her consciousness. She refuses it, ignoring his body’s history, and focuses instead on the impersonal job in front of her. The sponge, the bum, the soap, the leg, the water, the penis, more soap, the balls, the sponge, the other leg.

Finally, the water circling the drain is clear. She leaves him there, goes to the kitchen, finds a trash bag, and returns to the bathroom. She locates a clean segment of his pants and, fashioning her hand like a pair of tweezers, transfers his trousers into the trash bag. She does the same to the socks, boxers, and shirt, then knots the top of the bag to seal off the smell. Even though she’s sure she didn’t touch any poop, her hands feel contaminated again. She washes them thoroughly in the sink under the hottest water she can stand and then washes them again.

She returns to the shower and shuts off the water. Richard steps out of the tub, and she dries him with a clean towel. They then walk wordlessly to his bedroom. Without input or direction, Karina finds his clothes and dresses him.

There. It’s done. They look at each other now.

“Holy shit,” says Karina.

Richard laughs. She didn’t mean to be funny, but she’s too adrenaline buzzed to remain straight-faced and joins him. They laugh deep, hard, sighing cackles, and the release feels good. It’s been a long time since she’s been on the same side of joy with Richard.

“I’ll wait until Melanie gets here,” she says, realizing that it’s now almost 1:30.

“Okay.”

She follows Richard into the living room and sits next to him on the couch. He turns the TV on by stepping on a remote control taped to the floor. He surfs a few channels, finds nothing of interest, and shuts the TV off. They sit side by side in silence, waiting for Melanie, and the lack of anything to say or do stretches on well past uncomfortable, feeling somehow more awkward than the shit show they just endured in the bathroom.

“So what were you doing in Boston?”

“I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t ask what for or if she’s okay. She doesn’t blame him. Pandora’s box is better left locked shut.

“I was just leaving the parking garage when you called.”

She was at her annual gyn physical, not due to be in that office again for another year. What are the odds that she’d be barely over a mile away and available when he called? She looks around the room—the piano, the wheelchair, the desk and chair, the TV and coffee table. She looks at him.

“How long does Melanie stay with you?”

“About an hour.”

“Does anyone else come here to help you?”

“Someone comes in the morning, usually Bill, for an hour and a half. Then another person comes at night to help me with dinner and get ready for bed.”

“So about four hours a day?”

“Yeah, about that.”

She thinks about the twelve or so waking hours in each day when he’s alone with no help and all the trouble he could get into. What if he falls? What if he’s hungry? What if he chokes? What if he shits his pants on the front step and is locked out of the building?