Five Days Left (19 page)

The clanging rolled past Mara’s ears in slow, undulating waves, and for a horrifying sixty seconds, everything occurred in stop-frame before her:

Her torso lurched sideways as the noise knocked the balance out of her. Her reaction time being HD-dampened, she couldn’t respond fast enough to counterbalance the sideways movement of her body and the momentum took the rest of her with it, causing her to take two quick steps forward before she crashed loudly into a locker.

A group of fourth graders turned to stare, as did most of the kindergartners.

The mouths of the children closest to her, Laks among them, opened in shock as Mara struggled to pull herself upright but lost her grip on the locker and fell to the floor. Trying again, she pushed up but the fourth graders’ loud cackles seemed to slide right into her muscles and paralyze them, and she fell again.

A fourth-grade boy yelled, “Hey, look, that lady’s drunk!”

A dozen fourth-grade voices laughed, followed by as many kindergarten ones.

A girl screamed, “Someone needs to call nine-one-one! What’s a drunk person doing in the school?”

Another said, “Don’t laugh, you guys! Don’t laugh! You’re being mean!”

A few stopped laughing. Others laughed louder.

The substitute teacher, hand over her mouth, told her class to get inside the room as fast as they could. But the kindergartners were frozen, gaping at Mara.

“I said, get in the classroom this instant!” the teacher said. “Samantha! Lead everyone into the room, right now! Samantha! Children! Everyone! Come quick!”

All but one of them obeyed, and Mara could hear the buzzing of voices inside room 112. “Freaky” and “crazy” wafted out the door and into the hall, ringing in her ears along with the echo of the bell and the murmurs and laughter of the fourth graders.

“You!” the substitute hissed to the one kindergartner who hadn’t followed Samantha into the class. “You!” the teacher called again. “I said to come in this instant!”

From her hands and knees, Mara raised her head and locked eyes with the child standing motionless and wide-eyed in front of her.

“Mama!” Laks scolded, her voice in a low whisper as she cast her eyes from her mother to her teacher to the fourth graders and back to her mother again. “Stand up! You need to stand up right now!”

The look of humiliation on her daughter’s face, the accusation in her voice, brought hot tears to Mara’s eyes. She willed herself to tune out the older kids gawking and laughing at her, willed her arms to obey as she tried another time to push up from the floor. It worked, and she stood tall, a proud smile on her face until she realized what a pathetic thing it was for her to feel proud of, and ordered her mouth to straighten into a line.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “The bell went off, and the noise . . . and for some reason it’s so much worse today. I lost my balance, and
then . . . I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it would be this bad. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

She took a few tentative steps toward Laks, and as she did, another fourth-grade boy yelled, “She’s really drunk! Look at her walk!”

Mara frowned, confused and annoyed by the fourth graders and their drama. What was the kid talking about? The Falling Lady Show was over, and she was walking perfectly fine. Why didn’t he find something else to exaggerate about?

As her mother inched closer, the girl took a step away. “Mama, they’re laughing at you! The big kids are laughing at you! And the kids in my class are calling you names!”

Mara’s entire body was on fire with shame. This was so much worse than the cereal aisle. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked, the lump in her throat leaving little room for words to escape. “Mama is so sorry. I don’t know why my body’s behaving so badly today.”

“You can’t go to library now! Please don’t go to library!” Tears slipped down the girl’s cheeks and she swiped at them angrily.

“Of course not. I’ll go home.”

Laks nodded, still swiping at her tears. The fourth graders fell quiet as their teacher finally appeared. Mara heard one of the boys start to recite what had happened, but the woman’s voice cut him off, announcing they were late, it was time to get to the gym, he could tell her later.

“Should I walk out with you, Mama?” It was plain in the girl’s tone what she hoped the answer would be.

“No, sweetie, that’s okay. I’m fine now, see?”

She reached to touch her daughter’s hair, but Laks retreated a step, then another. “I have to go,” she whispered, stealing another furtive glance down the hall. “Teacher said.” She made a move toward her classroom and looked at her mother impatiently, waiting to be released.

“Of course,” Mara said, waving the girl toward the classroom. “You go. I’ll be fine. The cab will be here soon. I’ll wait out front—”

“Can you wait over behind that one tree? So no one can see you from the windows?”

Mara nodded quickly and turned away.

She was slumped at the base of the tree, head in her arms, when she heard the cab pull up. Harry leaped out and ran to her, his door wide open, car still running.

“What on earth? Ya look like you’re tryin’ ta disappear.”

She raised her puffy red face to his and opened her mouth to speak. No sound came out, and she shook her head slowly, looking past him toward the car.

“Sure,” he said gently. “We’ll go home.” Without another word, he part-led, part-carried her to the car, helped her in and fastened her seat belt.

As he drove, Mara stared blankly out the window, not seeing the bright colors of Plano but only the dark, angry, tearful eyes of her daughter as the girl, humiliated, pleaded with her own mother to hide out of sight of the other children. She stopped trying to wipe away the tears that streaked her face, stopped holding a tissue to her running nose, stopped pressing her fingers against her puffy eyes to try to restore them to their normal size. She’d let Harry see her like this if he looked at her in the mirror, let him see her ugly, splotchy, puffy, snot-streaked face when he helped her out of the car at home. She deserved it. She deserved that embarrassment, and so much more, after what she had put her daughter through.

She let out a grunt of disgust at her idiocy in the hallway, when she had almost convinced herself that being here, under any conditions, would be better for Laks than being gone. Her eyes still closed, she sensed Harry shift in his seat at the sound of her voice and she could picture him looking back at her, concerned, eager for an explanation. She turned her head toward the window and pressed her forehead against the cool glass, letting his questions go unanswered as she chastised herself for her foolishness.

Of course the girl wouldn’t be better off having her around under these conditions. There was no justification for exposing Laks to more of this.
Mara could imagine the shrieks of laughter on the bus as the child’s wind-sock figure of a mother teetered on the curb waiting for her school bus. The gawking as, later, they noticed the girl’s mother was now in a wheelchair. The whispering as the rumor got around that now the woman was confined to her bed. Now, if you went to Lakshmi Nichols’s house for a playdate, you didn’t see a mom standing at the counter with freshly baked brownies; you saw a closed bedroom door. Or worse, an open one, beyond which a sickly, wasted woman lay staring out at you, or through you.

At five, Laks was too young to hide her disgust about how her mother had acted. She was too instinctively open about her feelings to pretend everything was fine, that her mother’s behavior wasn’t embarrassing. One day, though, she’d learn to filter her emotions. She’d figure out that it upset her mother, and her father, if she said anything negative about Mara. She’d learn to keep her feelings to herself, and they would roil away inside her, a toxic blend of humiliation and revulsion, bitterness and anger. How could anyone say that would be better for a child than having her mother simply die?

Mara had witnessed it, a glimpse of what was to come, when she was first diagnosed. She’d overheard one of Dr. Thiry’s nurses mention the name of a nursing home where one of their patients lived, and she’d driven there herself, lying her way into a tour with a tale about her failing mother. It had taken her no time to spot the HD patient; the woman sat in the corner of the “activity room,” a thin blanket lying in a heap on the footrests of her wheelchair while she gyrated wildly from the waist, bending forward, then to the side, then forward again, her face in a stiff grimace.

A man stood beside her and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, sat slumped in plastic chairs to the side. The woman’s gaze was fixed on an empty chair several feet away, and though the man’s mouth moved constantly, the woman gave no indication that she heard him, or that she was even aware he was there. The children might have been waiting for a train, Mara thought, as unengaged as they were with their mother.
Their heads were bent over phones and they each wore headphones and moved their heads to a beat only they could hear.

But then, it was hard to blame them, since their mother was so devastatingly unengaged with them. It was easy to imagine the kids trying, on earlier visits, to talk to her, to fill her in on what they’d been up to since they’d seen her last—what they’d done in school, on the sports field, with friends. And being met with the vacant stare Mara saw on the woman’s face now. A stare that told them she hadn’t truly heard them. She no longer even knew them. As Mara’s tour leader droned on about activity nights and field trips and meal plans, Mara watched as the man picked up the blanket and spread it over the woman’s legs, tucking it snugly behind her waist. Within a few seconds, it was at her feet again, and he smiled patiently as he bent to retrieve it again. He patted the woman’s shoulder and resumed his patter.

The woman dislodged the blanket again, and as the man stooped again to retrieve it, Mara saw the boy nudge his sister with his foot. The girl looked up from her phone and her brother indicated with his chin the pickup game their parents were playing. He glanced briefly at his father before rolling his eyes dramatically at his sister. She rolled hers back and shook her head, her upper lip curled in disgust. Their father stood, bringing them back into his peripheral vision, and quickly they dropped their chins back to their phones and resumed their rhythmic nodding, pretending they hadn’t noticed a thing.

Mara never told anyone she’d gone to the nursing home, but she intimated a few times to Tom that she knew what the end stages of HD would be like for her, and how hard it would be on Laks. And on him. Tom claimed it would be perfectly fine. Not ideal, perhaps, but they would find a way to deal with it, and they would be just fine. But he was only speaking wishfully, Mara knew. She had seen reality. She had glimpsed their future.

She stole a glance at Harry and considered what she’d been debating as they walked to the cab earlier, about whether she might be able to let
go of her independence, accept help from Tom and her parents and home health care workers and, ultimately, nursing home staff, for the sake of having more time with Laks. But all that would do, she saw now, is lead to more days like today. More snickering, more gawking, more whispering. More humiliation for Laks. Until Mara was in a wheelchair in the corner of some activity room, kicking off her blanket for the tenth time while her daughter pretended not to notice how pathetic her mother had become.

At the house, Harry rushed to Mara’s door to help her out of the cab, but she waved him away and pulled herself out. She let him follow closely behind her as she made her way up the walk, but when he reached out to help her up the front step, she shook her head firmly and he quickly dropped his hand. At the door, she handed him cash for the fare before fumbling with her keys.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and waited wordlessly until finally she sighed and handed him the key. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. She opened her mouth to thank him, but he raised a finger to his lips and shook his head. Then he turned and walked to his cab, raising a hand high in salute as he went.

Scott

Scott was showered and changed and waiting for Laurie when she arrived home.

“Wow,” she said. “Sport coat and dress shirt. And those shoes I love. What’s the occasion?”

“I’m taking my wife to dinner. Some would call it a date.”

“Twice in a row?”

“Pffft. Takeout hardly counts as a date. And even if it did, why not? You deserve a break. You need anything before we go? Our reservation is for six.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, turning to walk back out the door. She seemed to prance down the porch steps and into his car. “Oh my gosh, I can’t remember the last time we did something spur-of-the-moment like this! I love it! It’s been at least . . .” She paused. “Never mind.”

“You can say it, Laur.”

“No. It’s insensitive. You’re still—”

“Laur. It’s okay. You can say it.” He waited, but she refused to speak. “Fine, I’ll say it,” he said. “It’s been at least a year. Since Curtis moved in. We haven’t been able to do anything so last-minute since then. You’re allowed to be excited about it.” He kissed her, and started the car. “You’re allowed to tell me how you feel. You don’t have to pretend not to be
relieved to have our lives to ourselves again, when we both know you’ve been looking forward to it.

“And so have I, for that matter. It’s not like if we refuse to find a silver lining to the situation, it’ll change, right? He’s gone. We can be morose or we can find a way to look on the bright side. Either way, he’s still gone.”

She nodded, but she didn’t add to what he’d said. They held hands and sang to the radio, and when he looked at her, he saw a new radiance he hadn’t noticed before. Whether it was the late stages of pregnancy or the fact that he’d gone to the trouble of planning a date night or the peacefulness of having time without the four-foot-high third wheel who’d been with them every minute for the past twelve months, he couldn’t say. But she looked beautiful.

“You look beautiful,” he told her, raising her hand to his lips. “You look . . . content.”

“That’s exactly how I feel.” She closed her eyes, and they stayed that way for the last ten minutes of the drive—holding hands, Scott glancing from the road to his wife and the two of them singing along softly with Elton as he mourned Daniel’s departure and the red taillights.

Midway through dinner, she set her knife and fork down. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m relieved.”

He lifted his eyes from his steak and found her looking uncertainly at him, as if wondering whether she’d made a mistake in taking him at his word. He gestured for her to continue. Not so much because he wanted to hear what he knew she was going to say, but because he felt he owed it to her. She hadn’t been wild about the idea of taking the boy in, but she had done it anyway, for an entire year, for Scott’s sake. The least he could do was let her express how she felt about it.

“I am,” she said. “Relieved. Content, like you said in the car. Utterly, completely relaxed for the first time in forever. I mean, oh my God, Scott. Remember how easy last night was? Dinner on the couch, our feet up? Remember the quiet? No arguments about table manners or talking
back? And after, while you were grading your papers, I read six chapters of that book and started another, all in glorious, uninterrupted silence. No pausing to negotiate about homework or showers or bedtimes or whether someone could have seconds on dessert when he didn’t finish firsts on vegetables. It was heaven.”

She regarded him closely, a tentative look on her face. He knew she was waiting for him to tell her she could keep going. He felt a pang of disloyalty to Curtis in listening to her list all the ways in which they were “free” of the boy, and he almost raised a hand to stop her. But letting her say it out loud didn’t mean he had to agree with her. He waved his fork, granting permission.

“Okay,” she said. “Well, after I got to bed and then you went—where’d you go, anyway? Downstairs, I think? Were you on that forum of yours? Anyway, I was lying there thinking that for the next three months, every single night will be like that. Just you and me and enough quiet we’ll actually be able to hear our thoughts.”

She paused again, and he nodded. “It was definitely quiet,” he said.

“Was it ever,” she said, missing, or maybe ignoring, the fact that his tone was more wistful than grateful. “So quiet, I couldn’t get over it,” she said. “And you know what else?” He raised his eyebrows, inviting her to tell him. “The idea of all this time,” she said. “It’s incredible to me. Time together, time alone. Time to take afternoon naps! Or to sleep in on weekends without being woken at six by stage-whispering, ‘TROOPS, FALL OUT! BUT STAY IN THE HALLWAY! NO GOING INTO THE ADULTS’ ROOM AND WAKING THEM UP!’”

Scott laughed. The kid never had gotten the idea. Or maybe he had, since the stage whispers were always followed by Laurie nudging Scott until he dragged himself out of bed and went downstairs with the noisy boy so Laurie could keep sleeping.

Laurie laughed, too, her relief evident in the lightness of her voice. She reached for his hand, grazed a thumb across his knuckles and gave him one of her dazzling smiles, the kind that made him feel more liquid
than solid. “We’ve had . . . not the easiest few years, you and I, is that fair?” she said. He nodded and she grazed her thumb in the other direction.

“And I’m not saying we can repair in three months all the strain we’ve built up in that many years,” she continued. “But we can repair a lot of it, don’t you think? With all this time alone before the baby comes, think of all the date nights, the movie nights on the couch with no little body between us, keeping us from cuddling. All the lazy mornings in bed.” She flashed him a seductive look and now he was more vapor than liquid.

“Three months,” she said. “It’s enough time to get ourselves back on track before we have a third body in the house again. Enough to get ourselves melded more solidly together, like we used to be, before this little one comes and adds sleepless nights and anxiety and all the things that can pull people apart. And I guess, although I’m furious with LaDania and heartsick that we didn’t get to say goodbye to our little man like we wanted to, I see these few extra days as a gift, because it’s that much more time for us.” She looked at him nervously. “Is that . . . okay?”

“Of course it’s okay,” he said.

Because really, what other choice did he have?

After dinner, she asked if they could stop by her favorite baby store, Bundles of Joy, and pick out a few things for the registry. He called up an imitation of the most excited voice he could think of, and even though it rang hollow to him, she ran with it, either because of her own excitement about their mission or because she was letting him coast awhile longer on his date-night win.

She did not, however, run with it when she was trying to show him 0-3-month dresses and he was looking the other way at infant-sized baseball gloves and glaringly boyish Tigers uniforms. Taking him by the arm, she pulled him to the dresses. “I need you to look at these,” she said. She took one off the rack—pink gingham with a butterfly on the stomach—and held it toward him, her eyes instructing him to remark about how cute it was.

He smiled wanly and she shook her head.

“Not good enough,” she said. “I need you to be excited about this.” She shook the dress toward him. “I need you to point out the adorable butterfly on this one. And”—she reached for a yellow dress with a big daisy on the front—“the cute flower on this one,” she said, holding it toward him.

She set the dresses back on the shelf and put a hand on each of his shoulders.

“I need you to act and feel over the moon about the fact that we’re having a daughter. I need you to convince me that the most important thing in your life is not the family living in an apartment in Detroit, but the one you and I are creating in Royal Oak. I need to see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice and feel it in your kiss that this family, our little family of three, is your priority. I don’t think that’s too much for me to ask. I don’t think it’s too much for you to give. But if I’m wrong about that, this would be the time for you to tell me.”

She let go of his shoulders and turned back to the dresses. Scott examined the floor. Could he really promise, right here, right now, that as of this minute, he would get over the loss of his little man and move on? Just like that, be excited about the baby and not show another bit of lamentation about the boy?

He raised his eyes and took in his wife’s legs, her bulging belly, her face. Even annoyed, she still glowed. God, she was gorgeous. And there was something about her, about the two of them together, that was nothing short of electric. How many times had she reduced him to non-solids tonight alone with a mere swing of her hair or a flash of her eyes? For him, she was it. The only woman he would ever love.

What she had asked of him right now was, as she had said, eminently reasonable. And paled in comparison to what he had asked of her that night last April when Bray showed up on their porch, younger brother in tow. He could imagine what Pete would say—2boys, too, for that matter—if they were witness to his internal debate about whether he
should promise the love of his life that he would act from this moment on as though she were exactly that: “Uh, what the fuck is the dilemma here?”

“You’re not wrong,” he said, reaching for the pink dress with the butterfly and holding it up away from them, appraising. “So what—do they make miniature clothes hangers for all this stuff? Because no way is this kind of thing going to fit on the ones from our closet.” He held the registry scanner toward the tag, waiting for her go-ahead before he added the dress to their list.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.