The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 26

  Around sunup they heard their mother stirring in the kitchen and they got up and went to her.

  “Why, what are you two doing?” Hattie asked pleasantly, happy to see them first thing in the morning. Then her face fell. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “He’s all right,” Doro said. She told what she knew. Jesse stood by to catch his mother in case she went down, but she didn’t.

  “I’m fine,” Hattie said. “Don’t wake your father. He needs his sleep. Just let me put some clothes on.”

  While Hattie dressed Jesse called ClairBell, waking her. She said she would be over to wait until Abel woke and then she’d drive him to the hospital if he was up for it. They couldn’t rouse Gid but they decided it was probably just as well.

  * * *

  Billy had a compound fracture in his femur, a broken arm, some cracked ribs, a head injury, and no memory of what had happened. What they knew about his accident, they learned from the police report. The nurses were keeping him snowed on morphine.

  “Did Haskell do this to you?” Hattie asked him at one point when he opened his eyes. “Was he driving the car that hit you?”

  Billy gave her a blurry smile. “He doesn’t even have a car. Somebody stole it. Don’t worry. I’m going to be fine.”

  A healthier man might have been able to mend, but Billy had spent decades of his strength in fighting T-cell counts and viral loads, pneumonias, medicines, surgeries, and years of compromising his heart and lungs and liver, veins and arteries and gray matter. He ran fevers and was in excruciating pain. A resistant staph infection set into his hip joints, and no amount of antibiotics would touch it. The plan was to keep treating for infection in the hope of curing it. Then he might get replacement joints. “They’re completely degenerated,” the doctor told Hattie. “It’s a wonder he went so long on them. He must have been in a lot of pain.”

  He was released to a surgical rehabilitation facility a few miles north of Amicus, where he stayed for the forty-day period allowed by Medicaid. Hattie visited every day, fitting in her trips while Abel napped. She grieved to see that Billy’s natural cheer had gone out of him. He was a husk of himself, thin and sallow, his skin blighted with open sores. He tried to put on a show of being brave and optimistic, but his reserves were gone. She saw his old spark only twice—when she bought him a new laptop and when Doro, who had gone home to Boston, sent an extravagant floral arrangement, birds-of-paradise in colors Hattie thought outlandish but which pleased him. Sometimes she fibbed to Abel in order to sneak in a visit, telling him she was popping out to the grocery store, so as not to hurt his feelings. And she believed. Or wanted to. Believed that her son would rise again as he had each time before.

  One day when she went to Abel’s room to tell him she was just running out to pick up some more surgical tape, he said, “Hold up, Miss Hannah.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, turning away. She wondered if he had guessed where she’d been going.

  “I want to go,” he said, so quietly she barely heard him. “I want to go with you.”

  It was an effort for him to dress, and so she helped.

  In silence they made the drive through the browning fields of September. Hattie concentrated on the road, at first careful that her driving technique conformed to Abel’s instructions, but when she realized his attention wasn’t trained on her, loosening up and doing things her way. As they approached a stoplight, she stole a look at him and then began to ride the brake rather than waiting to perform the controlled stop he insisted on. She let up pressure, then tapped again, to see if he would notice.

  He gazed out the window, thinking at first of nothing, then of the way the world sped by as he, encased in the capsule that was their rocket car, made his way through the future toward their son. How had it happened that almost fifty years had gone by since the boy’s birth? Where was the man that he, Abel, had been? Back there in time at the start of his life, an infant, a boy, a young man, then in age at full power and strength, and now old and as near to death, he considered, as he might be aware he could be. And who was he? It seemed urgent that at this moment he know, as it was late, getting later. His light might go out at the next stop, or a second from that or a second from that. Who could know? He didn’t know what he would say to his son.

  At the door to Billy’s room Abel put out a hand to stay Hattie. “Let me,” he said. “Alone.” He pushed open the door and went in.

  Hattie stood nearby so she could overhear what they said to each other. She inclined an ear toward the door Abel had closed behind him. Then, suddenly, she held back. What was between them was theirs.

  When Abel came out his shoulders sagged. He looked wobbly and drained. All the way home he was quiet, and when they got to the house he went slowly up the walk while she put the car in the garage. Inside the front door he waited for her, holding out his arms. “I’m so sorry,” he said. Stunned, she stepped into his embrace. They rocked each other.

  * * *

  At the end of forty days Billy’s infection hadn’t cleared. He was sent home with a wheelchair, a urinal and bedpan, and a PICC line, an open portal near his collarbone where pain medicine and antibiotics could be given quickly. There was no question about his coming home—there was no choice, no money for private care. Hattie settled him in the guest bedroom. It was obvious to everyone, and most obvious of all to Billy, that he had been sent home to die.

  On his third morning at home he awakened with a strange sense of mission, of relief, and to the beautiful truth that he could choose not to live any longer. For years people had told him he was killing himself. He hadn’t thought of his habits this way. He might have accidentally overdosed more than once, but ending his life was the last thing on his mind, and courting death was not what he’d thought he was doing. He had not yearned toward death but away from it. Had yearned toward immortality, he now understood. With his attempts to lift himself higher, he was seeking wholeness and union, chasing after the spirit that was always flitting just ahead. Carl Jung had come right out and admitted this could be so. Spiritus contra spiritum, he had written to Bill W., who knew it, and Dr. Bob S. knew it, too. And now Billy did. Whatever was beautiful, shimmering, loving, and warm, he wanted to keep going toward it forever.

  All day as he dozed, sleeping to pain and waking to pain, he thought about the end. What was he waiting for? He had done each of the twelve steps at least twice, some many times over. Step One, admitting he was powerless over—what? The answer in part horrified him and in part made him laugh: everything.

  He’d done the first step thirty times if he’d done it once, the second and third, too. He had confessed to God, himself, and another human being (twice this human being had been Doro, tender of the grave wherein his saddest sins were laid) the exact nature of his wrongs. He had made amends and then amended the amends and on and on and on heaped high toward eternity as he wronged and wronged and wronged again. He was tired. Tired of wronging. And there was no decision to be made now that he hadn’t made decades before.

  He spent the late afternoon, as the sunlight moved from his window and dusk began to fall, dozing and praying. Adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication. He smiled inwardly at the famous formula, glad even now and despite all their cross-purposes to be following his father’s method. He would not forget that his father had come to visit him, that after a long silence during which he stood by the bed with his palm on Billy’s forehead, he had at last taken away his hand and bent to kiss him where the hand had been, and this stood for something. He thought he might be ready.

  For all the harm he’d done, he begged repair. He prayed to be forgiven for what he was about to do, should it be another of the sins he couldn’t seem to help committing. Somehow he didn’t think so. God, he thought, cared less for judgment and more for mercy. He prayed for his sister Doro, that she might someday come into herself. For years he’d waited for her to confide. At first he’d been hurt by her failure to open up, but as time went by he ca
me to understand that there were certain boundaries she couldn’t cross, that she’d spent too much time building the story she told herself, and it was probably too late.

  For those who withheld mercy for his kind, he prayed their hearts would open to receive hearts different from and yet the same as theirs. That those he was leaving would be comforted. They knew he loved them; he’d made no secret of it. Not in all the years, however down he’d been, however up. He had told each of them outright when they visited him in the rehab hospital—his father and mother, Doro, Jesse. Why ClairBell and Gideon hadn’t come to visit him—not once in forty days—he didn’t know. Why, he had written in anguish across the foolscap pad he used to keep track of his medicine doses, have C and G abandoned me? For a time he contemplated what he had written. It was a stark, terrible question, and there was no answer to it. In the end he tore off the sheet and crumpled it and tossed it in the wastebasket so no one would see it after he was gone, and in this act he understood for the first time the reason his sister couldn’t admit who she was. He wanted no pity.

  When Hattie entered his room that afternoon with his medicines, he told her the doses weren’t touching his pain and that at rehab the nurses often doubled down when he needed it. “Usually that takes care of it,” he said. “For a while at least.” He summoned a smile. In a curious way, this was like the old days when he would lie to her or try to fast-talk in order to get more drugs so he could go to Joyland.

  “Are you sure you need more now?” What a stupid question, Hattie thought even as she asked it. That time was past. Were there limits to mercy? Boundaries to love?

  “Mother, it’s bad,” he said.

  “Wait just a minute, then,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried to the kitchen for sterile water and then returned to draw up a chair beside his bed. With the mortar and pestle she crushed the big methadone tablets into powder the way he specified and made a solution. She drew the liquid into a syringe and prepared his PICC line to fit the syringe in place.

  “Thank you,” he said. He lifted a hand to pat her arm, but he was careful to make no sentimental or telling gesture that would alert her to his purpose.

  Hattie smiled, convincingly, she hoped. “You’ll feel better in a little while.” Slowly and carefully, as she’d been taught, she pushed down the plunger and watched with relief as his tension relaxed, the furrows on his forehead smoothed, his stricken look vanished, and he closed his eyes.

  Peace overtook him.

  “Hold off a minute before you go to sleep,” Hattie told him, glancing toward his bedside table at the water glass that had grown smudged and cloudy. “Let me get you a better glass so you can take your other pills.”

  When she got back from the kitchen the room felt different. Without watching for the rise and fall of his chest, without taking his pulse, she knew. She held her breath, waiting for a sign that he was alive. But she knew.

  She lowered herself to the chair beside his bed. She bowed her head and waited to feel something. Finally she lifted her gaze and looked toward the ceiling, slowly releasing the breath she’d been holding and allowing the words to flow through her. Thank you, she said. Thank you.

  She sat for a time with him, and then she rose and went to the kitchen to stand at the sink and stare out the window at the Japanese maple, its rustling crimson leaves like living fire. From Abel’s room came a surge in the television’s volume. A frantic commercial for Celebrex urged him to dance to the music. She turned toward the sound and made her way down the hall.

  * * *

  Abel lived through the winter, occasionally enjoying a good day but for the most part enfeebled. Not himself, Hattie would tell visitors. Toward the end, as spring came on and the weather warmed, he might get out of bed on a good day and she would see him sometimes in the sunshine of the south yard where the pool had been, stretching his arms like wings, as though he were preparing to fly, a scrawny, wizened old fledgling.

  One day, seemingly out of the blue, he asked her, “Whatever happened to that book? That marriage book I brought home? I’ve looked for it everywhere. I always thought we could read it together.”

  “The one with the pictures of people”—she didn’t know how to finish—“doing things?”

  “Yes, that one. Ideal Marriage. By that randy Dutch doctor.”

  She affected a pensive pose. “Why, I don’t know where that thing could have gotten off to.”

  He lowered his gaze and made busy with his feeding tube, arranging the bandage. “Hattie. Hannah. I always wanted to ask you something.”

  Shyness had not been his way. It was odd to see him so hesitant. She said, worrying that she sounded too flip, “Well, ask away.”

  He tried to clear his throat but the effort was too much, so he spoke through it, hearing as well as feeling the quaver and catch of his voice. “That part of it. Did I let you down? Were you disappointed?”

  “Not once,” she said quickly, truthfully, “not even once.”

  And so they went on. The old irritations didn’t die but they seemed to trouble less, and in their place had come a sense that there were no more storms to weather, only these long last days. They had forgiven each other everything. “You have a beautiful spirit,” he told her once as she trimmed the gauze bandage around his tunnel.

  Marriage, she sometimes said to herself, marveling. Theirs was not ideal and sometimes it hadn’t even been good, but it was good enough and it didn’t need an adjective. It was marriage.

  One afternoon as she lay trying to nap the thought came to her that it was through Billy’s sacrifice that at last she was able to devote herself fully and without stint to her husband’s care, that through her son’s death she had been released to attend to Abel, but she quickly pushed the idea away. She would not make Billy’s suffering her life’s redeeming.

  When Abel died—a peaceful quiet death at home in his back room with hospice care and Hattie and the children ranged around—she was sad, and she knew she would miss him for the rest of her days, but for the first few weeks of her widowhood, before the reality of his absence overtook her, she was also secretly giddy. She felt as if she’d become unmoored from earth, had become small and buoyant, airy as a puff of thistledown, a feather, and was drifting upward through the clouds, following him aloft. Then, naturally, literally, she fell. Stepping off a curb outside the post office where she’d gone to buy a book of stamps, not even thinking about the many sorrows of the past year, she turned her foot wrong, or misjudged the drop, and down she went, scraping her knees and banging her forehead, and it was only when a passerby hurried to help her to a sitting position on the curb and asked if she was all right and she heard the tenderness in his low voice that she allowed her grief out into the world, wailing like a baby to a stranger on the street. She cried for Abel, for Billy, for Nick, then back again for Abel and so on around until she didn’t know for whom she wept, only that it hurt and that there was no greater or lesser, no comparison, no favorite, only loss.

  * * *

  She lived on in the big house, alone. Every now and again her children carted her around to various places, trying to spark her interest in independent living or assisted living or whatever euphemism they were calling cold storage by these days, but Hattie was wise to them. She stood fast. She would stay in the house. It was her life’s work, or at least the vessel that carried it. The children were put out with her because she wouldn’t do what they wanted, but she didn’t care. They thought they knew best, especially Doro, whom she suspected of long-distance badgering and getting the others to spy on her—twice she’d caught Jesse following her car as she drove home from church—but the truth was that they didn’t know anything. They were nowhere near old enough to know anything. Sometimes she even laughed to herself at what the lot of them had yet to learn—that good stories did not always have happy endings, for example, but that you could make a story happy by looking back and taking those small moments of love or joy or grace and adding them together. T
hat even in great sorrow you could find peace. That old griefs could be changed, with time, into a feeling of boundless tenderness. That the shape of anybody’s life, even the most ordinary, was anything but regular, and that the lines that connected hearts to heads rarely traveled straight.

  Whether it was that Abel was no longer around to temper her rising power or that she had simply, almost suddenly, grown into what felt like wisdom, in her new knowledge she became garrulous and outspoken. For most of her life she had yielded to the will of others, she had done what others wanted, but now it was her turn to be obstinate and she resolved to enjoy it. She waited until Doro came home for a visit and then summoned everyone to a family dinner. This worm has turned, she planned to say.

  She hadn’t cooked for months, but all day she’d worked on pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, Jesse’s favorite creamed cauliflower, green salad, and yeast rolls. Remembering dinners past, she at first set the big oval table for eight, thinking as she laid out the Eliot china and the Ennis silver of their seating order of years gone by. She laid a place for Abel at the table’s head, at twelve o’clock. At his left hand she put ClairBell, then Nick, and then Gideon. At six o’clock, facing Abel, was Jesse, because he was left-handed. Rounding the turn and next to Jesse she set a place for Billy, and then Doro in the middle. At Abel’s right was her place, closest to the kitchen door. For a time she stood to survey her work, satisfied with her centerpiece of bittersweet and oak leaves, firethorn and red sumac from the yard, with the glimmering crystal in the amber light of the chandelier.

  She wasn’t muddled or mixed up or confused, she was at peace and remembering, but Doro, passing through the dining room, said worriedly, “Mother?”