The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 16

  Up and down and up and down he went. She couldn’t remember all the swings. They ran together when she looked back at them. Just now he was low, and had been for a while. When she drove to town to give him money or run him around to pay his bills or take him to his doctor’s appointment or bring him home to spend a night or two, he was high, although she pretended not to notice.

  He and Abel were on a collision course, it seemed. Both of them going downhill fast and she couldn’t tell who would win. Or lose, as the case may be. And she didn’t know whose situation was most dire, whom she should care about most. Some days Abel couldn’t get out of bed and then other days he was outside, trying to hammer a nail or sort screws into jars. You couldn’t tell what kind of day he’d have. He had trouble swallowing. His left eye drooped. He blamed his weakness on the doctors, accusing them of some kind of malfeasance with his medicine, but Hattie wasn’t sure. His myasthenia was progressing, the doctors told them. He would weaken to the point that he couldn’t swallow food, and eventually he would either have to allow them to insert a feeding tube or allow his body to finish the business it had started.

  He was increasingly unsteady on his feet, and several times he’d lost his balance and fallen, most recently a few nights before when he’d gone to his armillary sphere hoping to sight Polaris. When he tipped his head back to align his gaze with the arrow his body kept going, sending him sprawling backward into the boxwood hedge. One night he’d fallen on the bathroom floor and she’d had to drag him back into bed. The task had taken an hour, and it had been pitiful to see him helpless. There were other days, however, when he was as sharp as ever, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it.

  The worst was his habit of night wandering, when the sundowning he’d experienced during his hospital stay returned and there were whole hours when he wasn’t certain where he was. The night before had been such a time. She sped up her rocking, getting the rocker going at a fast clip the better to think, for at last she had landed on the subject she’d been circling—the events of the night before.

  All day he had been angry with her and he wasn’t speaking. She knew him well enough to tell that he was mulling over the confiscation of his firearms, probably parsing the language of the Second Amendment and pondering how Blackstone might rule on the police’s actions, but she couldn’t determine if he understood exactly how the events had transpired. Time, she supposed, would reveal the answer. In the meantime, she felt the need to tell someone what had happened.

  In the past, when she had weak moments, she called Doro. It wasn’t like she called to complain. Far from it. She kept most things to herself, after all. It was just that she needed to hear another voice. Usually after she hemmed and hawed and beat around the bush awhile Doro would get her to open up and reveal what troubled her and then they would discuss it and laugh about it in the hectic way they’d developed over the years, shaking their heads at the futility of trying to account for behavior, usually her sons’ or her husband’s, behavior that often defied reason. And for a moment, at least while she was connected to her daughter, the receiver warm against her ear, she could almost think the situation was funny and that everything would be all right. Except that it wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be.

  She picked up the telephone and dialed Doro’s number in Boston. While she waited for her daughter to answer she resolved not to make a big deal about the night before, only to report it, to get it on the record. If she made too big a deal, Doro would be on a plane that very day. She’d come in and shake up everything and try to make people stop being who they were. That wasn’t what Hattie wanted. She just wanted to tell her troubles to someone.

  After their usual pleasantries—weather, health, work—her daughter listened quietly while she went over the night’s events. At the last minute, just when Hattie was ready to tell her about Abel waving the gun around, she substituted a claw hammer. She wasn’t sure why she did this. But her hiding the fact of the guns meant that she couldn’t tell Doro the real reason Abel wasn’t speaking to her, the confiscated firearms.

  “Oh, dear,” Doro said when she had finished. “That’s terrible. You must have been frightened.”

  Hattie considered, remembering her dry mouth, the flutter under her breastbone. “Well, I guess I was.”

  “Have you talked to the doctor lately?”

  “Your father won’t let me. He’s always been secretive. Remember, he’s the man who had all his teeth removed and dentures fitted without my knowing it. And every time we go to the VA he goes in the exam room by himself and I hear them in there laughing and carrying on. It’s like they’re playing poker or telling dirty jokes or something, and then he comes out with some new prescription that he refuses to take the right way and I just don’t know what…”

  “Mother, I mean your doctor.”

  Hattie considered. “I’m not sick.” She allowed herself a tentative laugh, testing the Doro waters to see if they could turn the conversation into something lighter. “I’m just old.”

  “Mom, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “That’s what you think. And what can the doctor do? She can’t solve this.”

  “She could give you something that would help. You’re under terrible stress. Trying to take care of Dad and Billy, not to mention your own health. Maybe something for anxiety…”

  “But I’m not anxious! I’m tired.” Just then applause erupted from Dr. Phil’s studio audience. Hattie pointed the clicker at the television and turned down the volume.

  “You could be anemic,” Doro went on. “Or potassium-depleted. Or magnesium…”

  Doro was as bad as ClairBell, who liked to pretend she’d been a nurse. Say you felt a little shaky, ClairBell would snatch up your wrist and pinch it, counting your pulse. Doro had been married to a doctor and she seemed to think this gave her a license to practice medicine. Both her girls were always trying to catch people and needle them with questions and then diagnose them against their will. Abel’s know-it-all gene shot true through all her children in one way or another.

  “I’m not anemic. I eat plenty of red meat and leafy greens and I take vitamins. And besides, I think I’d know.” If she were to tell the truth about her health, she would admit that in addition to worrying about her heart she was worried about her memory. She forgot things. Would arrive in a room having forgotten what she came for. She’d begun burning things on the stove. It took her two hours to bake a batch of cookies that might once have taken a half hour to finish. And her reflexes were shot. Her driving was getting shaky. There were two dings on the new Camry already. Abel hadn’t seen them and she prayed he wouldn’t. He would hold the dings against her, even though his own Dakota looked like the pace car from a demo derby.

  Hattie essayed a little laugh to prove her good health. “Really, I’m just fine. It’s your father you should worry about. Some days he can hardly lift his head up and other days he’s perking around here like that drum bunny.”

  “That’s his myasthenia, Mom. It’s unpredictable. The doctors told you that, right?”

  “Well, yes, but it’s hard to watch. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not complaining, Doro.”

  “No, you’re not,” Doro said to mollify her mother. “But maybe you need some help. You have to admit you’re under a good deal of pressure. Let me make you an appointment.”

  “You’re all the way on the other side of the country.”

  “I can use the phone, Mom.”

  “I don’t want to bother anybody. I can handle this. Don’t do anything. I’m strong.”

  There was strained silence at Doro’s end. Finally, she said, “Mom.”

  Hattie bristled. “Mom what? I know what I’m doing. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  Doro’s voice grew patient. “What about Pastor Gwynn? Maybe a talk with him?”

  “What could he do?” Into the silence at her daughter’s end of the phone she continued, “And I’d rather not air my dirty laundry in public.”
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br />   “Mama, this isn’t laundry, it’s your life. And there’s nothing wrong with seeking help. He had a hammer, for God’s sake! What if he’d tried to…”

  “Don’t say ‘God’ like that, Doro. Say ‘gosh’ if you have to say anything.”

  “You needed help. What did you do when he…”

  Hattie laughed ruefully. “Oh, don’t you worry. Whenever I need help I just stop what I’m doing and say the twenty-third psalm. It takes exactly one minute, did you know that? Sometimes I time things in the microwave that way. Or three-minute eggs. Just say it three times and they’re perfectly done every time. Go ahead. Time me. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to…’”

  Doro struggled to retain her patience. “The Lord tells you to run yourself ragged? To put yourself in danger?”

  Hattie held her tongue. She could say a word or two about people running themselves ragged. Doro was a workaholic, a career woman who had left town, left the state, left her mother. Doro, whom she’d always thought would be the dependable one, the one to get her through old age. Oh, her daughter talked about retiring and moving back to Kansas, getting her hopes up, but of course she never would. ClairBell said it was because Doro had to have all those books and gourmet food and trips to New York and summer rentals in Maine, and also she was ashamed of her family, and she spent a lot of energy fronting like some hotshot, pretending to be better than she was, and also she’d forgotten her roots—but Hattie believed that this was just ClairBell’s unkind speculation. No, the reason Doro wouldn’t retire and move back … well, she wasn’t really sure.

  “Why don’t you just—” In a seizure of loneliness and need, Hattie had started to say “come home,” but she stopped herself and instead said, “stop worrying.”

  “Dad needs to go to skilled nursing,” Doro said. “He’s a danger to himself and others. That’s one of the criteria, Mom, the main one. What if he’d hit you with that hammer? Think about that.”

  Alarm shot through Hattie’s chest. Her hands felt numb. “I don’t have to think about it. He didn’t hit me. And he’ll be all right. He just had a bad night’s sleep.”

  There was silence on both ends of the connection until Hattie broke it to say, “Did I mention that the weather here has been just beautiful? I took the bougainvillea out of the greenhouse and put it on the side porch and it shot up like a weed.”

  Doro wanted to protest further but she knew it was futile. Her mother had changed the subject and would reveal no more. “Sounds lovely,” she said.

  Hattie heard the falseness in her daughter’s answer, and she, too, was done. Pretending alarm, she exclaimed suddenly, “Oh, dear, my pot’s boiling over!”

  Doro sighed. There was no pot boiling over. Her mother had called from the guest room phone. Dr. Phil had blared in the background throughout the conversation. But the line had gone dead.

  Her stomach queasy with a sense of urgency, Doro went to the computer to look for airline flights home, but by and by she thought better of her impulse. She’d been home just a few weeks before, for her May visit, and she didn’t want to get in the habit of monthly trips. Not yet. In an emergency, yes, but not just because she was worried. Her father probably needed to be in a safer place, but Hattie would prove a roadblock, not to mention the stink her father would put up if he got wind of such a plan. Things did seem to be escalating, though. After a time she calmed down, realized her nerves were on edge because this was an old story and the crisis was like the apocryphal pot on her mother’s stove, brought to the boiling point and then at the last minute snatched from the flame. She went back to her book.

  Meanwhile, Hattie had turned up the television’s volume and tried to concentrate on the screen. A man and a woman were arguing about how to toilet train their toddler while Dr. Phil sat back with his arms crossed. The toddler, dressed in a miniature three-piece suit with a bow tie and pocket square, a suit that made her think of Billy’s, was a spoiled brat, mugging and showing off for the camera. The mother egged him on, saying wasn’t he cute, while Dr. Phil shook his head and the child’s father frowned. Hattie should have such problems. At least those parents had someone to talk to.

  Jesse. She could drive over and confide in him. She wasn’t sure, though. His farm was only a mile or so from Amicus, but he rarely had visitors. His housekeeping was terrible and people had learned not to go inside his farmhouse. The boarders stayed down at the barns and when family members came to call they spent time in the barns or the tomato fields.

  Hattie could look past the stained bowl in his bathroom, discolored by hard well water, and even the sulfur-smelling toilet so low to the floor that she practically had to squat. Years ago, on a pop-in visit, as she sat trying to keep contact with the seat to a minimum, she happened to look directly in front of her where a toilet plunger stood. At the tip of the wooden handle, a bit below chest level, a quick movement caught her eye. She looked away, thinking the movement was another eye floater, but when she looked back she saw that balanced on the handle tip, its tail limp and the matted gray fur of its flanks heaving in slow respirations that were obviously its last, sat a mouse.

  She was not afraid of mice or insects or even snakes; but she was at midstream and the sight startled her. She tried to stem the flow, thinking to finish later, but her attempt was in vain, and so she concluded her business while looking into the creature’s black eyes, eyes that seemed even as she looked into them to cloud over with a milky film, like sudden, creeping glaucoma. The creature’s poor sweetness, the squalor amidst which it sat, made her soften, and memory served up Robert Burns. “Wee timorous cowering beastie,” she addressed it gently, and a curious thing happened. It was though she were in sudden communion with the mouse, as though she’d pronounced its benediction, as though her utterance ushered it out of the breathing world, for it tipped over and fell to the floor and moved no more. Since then she had not been back into the house, which was how Jesse managed to pretend he lived alone and that Patsy Gaddy, his dance-away lover, was not in residence. Patsy had lost her job, her driver’s license, her husband, and her children, who lived with their father. She owed money all over Butler and Sumner counties. Her life was falling—had fallen—apart, collapsing post by beam by strut, and Jesse had determined to save her from herself. Probably Patsy was there now. So, no, not Jesse.

  ClairBell, then. She should depend more on ClairBell. She had her faults, but at least she hadn’t flown off a thousand miles across the country. She’d stayed close by and she was around when you needed her.

  Besides, since the trip out west she’d felt a change in her younger daughter. She hoped it was the arrival of long-overdue maturity, and that this maturity would bring about a diminishing of ClairBell’s sense of being unloved and treated unfairly. She’d been that way since she was a tiny baby, always on the lookout for what the other children received, alert for signs of favoritism. Gideon had come along when she was only sixteen months old—maybe it was that she hadn’t had enough time to be an infant—and she had refused to look at Hattie for two weeks after the new baby was brought home. Wouldn’t meet her gaze. Stiffened when Hattie tried to pick her up. What broke the impasse was that ClairBell caught a cold and finally, in her misery, she accepted comfort. Maybe the idea that she’d been betrayed had taken root then. Oh, who knew? The past was the past and no going back to change it. All she knew now was that something was thawing. Billy liked to say that ClairBell was like a heraldry lion, either rampant or dormant, and Hattie thought of her as a blender with only two settings, Off and Whip. For years ClairBell had been sluggish and sleepy and grouchy, quick to anger, but now she’d inexplicably become a dynamo—bustling, ordering, putting her two cents in places Hattie hadn’t asked for, asking odd questions, such as what were Abel’s favorite cake and ice cream flavors and did she think he liked fried chicken or barbecued chicken better. Her mood was bright. Whatever were her reasons—and Hattie knew her younger daughter well enough to know she most certainly had r
easons—she was currently set on Whip. Which of course was a far sight better than Off. Anyway, she resolved to depend more on ClairBell. With new energy, she got up from the rocker and went to the kitchen to take a pound of bacon from the refrigerator. Abel never turned down a good BLT.

  They would ride this out.

  Things would get better.

  The situation wasn’t that bad. You just had to look on the bright side.

  Eight

  A few quiet days later, just as she was beginning to recover from the upset of the night of the guns, Hattie was in the guest room watching Little House on the Prairie. It was one of her favorite episodes, the one where that tattletale Nellie Oleson was thrown by Laura’s horse and pretended to be crippled so Laura would take the blame. She liked it because Nellie was so blatantly bad and Laura was so good. It was easy to tell right from wrong, and right always prevailed.

  Suddenly she started up from her chair as though some invisible live wire had zapped her. She’d forgotten something! Something important, something she had meant to do, something she’d promised to do. She ransacked her mind for the day’s tasks, wondering which she might have left undone, but try as she might she could not wrest from the air the forgotten thing. But it was important.

  She went to the kitchen, which was the last place she remembered thinking about the whatever-it-was. As she stood opening cupboards, hoping memory would supply what she was looking for, a groan came from Abel’s room, followed by violent coughing, and then a crash.