Beautiful Ruins (103)

She hears the crunch of gravel; that must have been what woke her—Pat’s Jeep coming down the long driveway. They’re home from the play. How long was she asleep? She reaches out for her cold teacup. A while. She feels toasty-warm, except for one of her feet, which has slipped out of the blanket. Pat has rigged up two fireplace-shaped space heaters on either side of her favorite chaise, so that she can sleep out here. She balked at first at the waste of electricity; she could just wait until summer. But Pat promised to turn off every light every time he left a room “for the rest of my life,” if she would only indulge him this one thing. And she has to admit, it is lovely sleeping out here; it’s her favorite thing, waking outside in the cold, nestled in the little incubator her son built for her. She turns off the heaters, checks the horrible pad she sleeps on now—it’s dry, thank God—pulls her big cardigan around herself, and starts for the house, a little wobbly still. Inside, she hears the garage door close below.

The cabin sits on a jutting point, two hundred feet above a bay on this deep mountain lake. The house is mostly vertical, designed by her and built with the money she got from selling their home in Seattle: four stories, with an open floor plan and a two-car garage below. Pat and Lydia have the second floor to themselves, the third is common living space—an open living room/kitchen/dining area—and the top floor belongs to Dee: bedroom, bathroom with Jacuzzi tub, and her sitting room. When she was having it built, of course, she had no idea she would spend virtually her entire time here as a cancer patient, and then—after the treatments had all been exhausted and she decided to let the disease run its course—in this weakened end-time. If she had, she might have gone with a rancher, with fewer stairs.

“Mom? We’re home!”

He yells up the stairs every time he comes in the house and she pretends she doesn’t know why. “Still alive,” she’s tempted to say, but it would sound harsh. She doesn’t feel bitter that way, but it’s funny to her, the way people treat the dying—like aliens.

She starts down the staircase. “How’d it go tonight? Good crowd?”

“Small but happy,” Lydia calls up the stairs. “The ending worked better tonight.”

“Are you hungry?” Debra asks. Pat is always hungry after a performance, and he’s been especially famished while doing this play. As soon as Lydia finished writing it, she showed it to Debra, who was torn. It was the best thing Lydia had ever written, a perfect capstone to the cycle of autobiographical pieces Lydia started years earlier with a play about her parents’ divorce. And Debra fully believed that she couldn’t finish the cycle without writing about Pat. The real problem with Front Man was that there was only one person she could imagine playing Pat—and that was Pat. She and Lydia both worried that he might backslide if he had to relive those days—but Debra told Lydia she should let him read it. He took the pages downstairs and came back up three hours later, kissed Lydia, and insisted they do it—and that he play himself. It would be harder, he thought, to watch someone else play him at the peak of his self-absorption than it would to play it all out again himself. He’s been acting with the TAGNI group for more than a year now; it gives him a healthy outlet for performing—not in the narcissistic way he used to with his bands, but in a tighter, disciplined, collaborative spirit. And he’s a natural, of course.

Debra is beating eggs when Pat swings around the kitchen pillar and kisses her cheek. Kid still fills a room. “Ted and Isola said to say hi.”

“Yeah?” She pours the eggs in the pan. “And how are they?”

“Crazy right-wing nut jobs.”

She slices cheese for his omelet, Pat eating every other piece. “I hope you told them that,” she says, “because I’m getting awfully tired of them constantly writing checks to support the theater.”

“They want us to do Thoroughly Modern Millie. Ted wants to be in it. Said I’d be great in it, too. Can you imagine? Me and Ted in a play together.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure you have the chops to act with Ted.”

“That’s because I had such a bad teacher,” he says. Then: “How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” she says.

“Did you take a Dilaudid?”

“No.” She hates pain medication, doesn’t want to miss a thing. “I feel fine.”

Pat puts his hand on her forehead. “You’re warm.”

“I’m fine. You just came from outside.”

“So did you.”

“I was in that oven you built me. I’m probably cooked.”

He reaches for the cutting board. “Let me finish. I can make an omelet.”

“Since when?”

“I’ll have Lydia do it. She’s good at that woman’s work.”

Debra stops cutting onions and slashes in his direction with the knife.

“Unkindest cut of all,” he says.

It’s like a little gift, the way he surprises her sometimes with the things he remembers. “I used to teach that play,” she says. Without thinking, she quotes her own favorite line: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Pat sits at the counter. “That hurts more than the knife.”

Lydia comes up the stairs then, towel-drying her hair after her shower. She tells Debra all over again that Ted and Isola were at the play, and that they asked after her.