In the Middle of All This (20 page)

He shook his head and kept his mouth shut.

“So what did the doctor say?” his mother asked.

“Not much.” He walked into the kitchen and they followed. Now they were all in the seventy-thousand-dollar kitchen. That's what he thought every time he saw it. Seventy thousand dollars. “She said she was sure they'd come back.”

“Of course,” Paula said. “I think they're having kind of a holiday, really.”

“I got out of Richard's boss that three months of that compassionate leave are with salary.”

“Three months?” Martin's mother said.

“I thought we'd agreed we wouldn't trouble his work,” Paula said.

“It was just a chat,” Martin said.

“A chat?” Justin laughed. “Calling his chief to have a chat? I don't think so.”

“I hope you didn't make them too concerned,” Paula said.

“I didn't,” Martin lied.

“Anything else?” his mother said.

He poured himself a glass of water from the sink while they looked at him. “No.”

“I think we could all go on back home then,” Paula said quietly.

“Right,” Justin said.

“Sitting in their house and waiting for them like this is wrong,” Martin's mother said.

“Exactly,” Paula said.

“You've done what you could,” his father said.

“Right,” Justin said.

They were all still looking at him, they hadn't stopped looking at him.

What the hell
was
he doing here? He'd even failed to ask Sparks the one question that he should have. Did she have three months? Elizabeth never asked that kind of question; it was a betrayal for him to. Though Sparks had left any mode of inquiry open:
It's hardest on the family
.

“Does she have three months?” he asked them.

“Martin!” Paula said.

“As long as she's alive,” his mother said, “I have hope. That's what I believe.”

“Me, too,” his father said.

“Absolutely,” Paula said.

“Right,” Justin said. It was all he seemed to be saying lately, but he
was
eighty.

“I don't know if what they're doing is wrong,” Martin said, looking at each of them. “But it doesn't feel right.”

“You
don't feel it's right.” Paula seemed to be talking to a dish towel she was folding. “That's a judgment you're making, dear.”

“I don't know what to feel,” he said.

“There is hope,” his mother said. “I have hope.”

“That's not enough,” he said.

“Why?” Paula asked, still folding the small dish towel. “Is there something else? Something, perhaps, that you think we're missing? Do tell us, dear.”

At dinner, at a shabby Indian restaurant near the tube station, he drank beer steadily and barely spoke. The chicken vindaloo was all thigh meat, and the peas were gray, and the potatoes so soft they collapsed into a puddle whenever he tried to fork them. What
were
they talking about? It was the weather or a vacation one pair of them was thinking of taking or the expense of living in one city or another. It was what people had to talk about when they were just getting started after something tender, delicate, and unspeakable had passed among them. Before this whole awful year, in the previous whole awful year, he had once confessed to Elizabeth that he and Lauren divided their life into the before and after of her diagnosis. Oh, she'd said, I wish you wouldn't think of it that way. I don't think of it that way. It's a journey, it's not a division. But he hadn't gotten beyond that yet. He was thirty-eight, and he wanted to look at all of this squarely, and sometimes it made him feel like he was twelve and sometimes it made him feel like he was seventy, and perhaps he would never feel that he was getting it all the way he needed to get it to get through it.

“It's not terribly good, is it?” he heard Paula ask him through his wretched self-absorption, and he looked up to see her nodding at his plate.

“No,” he said, “it isn't.”

“That's all right,” she said. “It'll get better.”

The others laughed at this, an apparent joke, and he laughed, too, although he wasn't quite sure what it was he was supposed to be laughing at.

They split the check and began their way back slowly, as if trudging through snow, and he wondered if getting to be old and being old were like always having some kind of weather that you had to make it through, even when there was no weather at all. He walked at his father's elbow, and soon the others were far enough ahead so that he felt like it was just the two of them, his father panting at each step. He walked with a limp. The clouds seemed suddenly to be descending, and Martin worried they'd be caught in the rain.

“It'll hold off,” his father said. “You can go on ahead, if you want.”

“I don't mind being rained on.”

“It won't rain,” his father said. “I can smell it when it's going to rain, and I can't smell it, so it won't.”

It began to rain.

“Shit,” his father said.

They both laughed.

“It's only rain,” Martin said. They didn't bother walking any faster; his father couldn't. The rain was falling more frequently. Soon they wouldn't be able to feel each individual drop, there'd be so many.

“I have the key,” his father said.

“Maybe Paula or Justin took theirs.”

“I don't think so. Could you run ahead?”

“They'll be all right.”

“Okay.”

It was a furious downpour, and he had nothing to cover his father with, and there was no shelter from it anywhere.

“Lots of big puddles!” his father shouted.

“I know!” he said.

“Do you think we should swim for it?”

When they arrived they were both soaked, and everyone else was standing dryly under the short roof over the front door.

“You have the key,” Martin's mother said.

“I know,” his father said. He wrestled it from his sopping pants pocket and with a trembling hand gave it to her.

“Hot baths for you two,” Paula said as they dripped into the front hall.

“You've got him?” Martin asked his mother.

“Of course.” She was already mopping his father's head dry, and then she kissed him softly on the lips. He seemed to be shaking all over. “You go on up.”

On the steps Martin stood looking down at them. From the kitchen came the chime and clatter of Paula readying tea and Justin trying to help her. His mother kissed his father again while he shivered and couldn't seem to say anything. Martin went up the rest of the stairs and threw down a bath sheet.

“Leave us the shower,” his mother called.

“Okay,” he said.

He waited to see if his father was going to drop in the front hall, and when it was apparent he wouldn't, Martin shut himself into the bathroom with the tub and stripped off his clothes while the water ran and slowly turned warm. Then he got in and slowly, slowly sank down until he couldn't hear anything.

“That is one sorry door.” The guy from Potterstown Overhead peered at it while keeping some distance. “You're lucky that thing didn't fall on your head.”

“Can you fix it?”

He shook his head. “If it hadn't of fallen, I could. You can jerry-rig practically anything for a while. But a big old wooden door like that, cracked up like it is,” he said, still shaking his head. “You put it in your fireplace. Insulated aluminum. Light as silk, and runs as smooth as it, too. Practically will keep the whole house warm. That's the way to go.”

“You want me to get a whole new system?” Lauren said.

“They don't make doors like that anymore. Everything it's attached to is part of that door.”

“Nuts,” she said.

“No one wants to go spending fifteen hundred on a new system if they don't have to.” He grinned at her. “You have to.”

“I'll be inside.” She gestured a hand to indicate that he go ahead with it.

Fifteen hundred dollars? She pulled the checkbook from its hiding place in the kitchen cabinet. They had it.

In a trance Max lolled in front of the television. He wouldn't even come out to meet the guy, and he usually loved men in hard hats. “That door's going to fall again,” he'd said. “I don't want to be there.” “It can't fall again,” Sarah had said. “It's already fallen. It's
on the ground.”
And then they'd started in on each other. Now she could hear Sarah still pouting from up in her room.

“You awake?” she asked Max.

“Yeah,” he said, not turning from the television.

“We're getting a whole new door.”

“Okay.”

As she trudged up the stairs, Sarah launched into a keening moan. Lauren opened the door to her room a bit wider.

“You always take his side!” the girl cried between sobs. “He gets to watch TV, and I get sent to my room. It's not fair!”

“We're getting a brand-new garage door,” Lauren said brightly.

“When's Daddy coming home? I want my daddy.”

“Soon,” she said hopefully.

“You don't know, do you? You don't know when he's coming.
Soon
means you don't know. That's what you always say when you don't know.”

“Sarah—”

“Maybe he won't come home because he doesn't like you anymore.”

Lauren gasped and then tried instantly to cover the hurt. “I am sure Daddy loves all of us,” she said. “You can come talk to me when you calm down.” She shut the door partly closed.

“I'm never going to calm down,” Sarah shouted after her.

The phone rang. Lauren glared at it. Sarah popped from the room, wiping her face.

“Let it ring,” Lauren said.

“No.” She darted past her and plucked up the phone. “Daddy?” she said.

Lauren snatched the phone from her and set it back down. “I
told
you not to answer it.”

“It was Daddy!” Sarah cried.

“He can call back,” Lauren said. “Now go to your room.”

“I hate you,” her daughter said, quickly, as she closed herself behind the door. “And when I grow up, I'm gonna hate you more.”

“That's nice,” Lauren muttered under her breath as she scooped socks and shirts into the clothes hamper. “That is really nice.” When she dialed Star 69, it came back as untraceable. She wiped down the sink in the kids' bathroom and sprayed an organic antimildew agent onto the shower curtain. Still the phone didn't ring.

“You awake?” she called down to Max.

“Yeah!”

She knocked lightly on Sarah's door.

“What!”

She ducked her head in. “Was it really Daddy?”

“I don't know,” she admitted.

It was between five and six, the time the phone and credit card people usually called. That was probably who it was.

“Can I watch TV?” Sarah asked.

“All right.”

Sarah got up and hurried downstairs. It was impossible to keep them to the hour limit when you had them on your own. It was impossible to keep the bathrooms clean, the recyclables in order, the newspapers stacked, without the television. She'd give them another half of a show, and then, she swore, that was
it
. She refolded the towels over their racks and pulled the blinds in both their rooms and set the night-lights on. Just a few more minutes, and then she could face them.

“Hello!” someone called from the kitchen. At first she started, thinking it was Martin. Then she remembered the door guy.

“I'll be right down,” she called.

In the kitchen he stood reading the stuff on their refrigerator door. He was smiling. “Come on and see what I've done.”

From the back of his truck the old garage door stuck out in dismantled panels. The garage ceiling had been stripped of its various mechanisms. A light wind rattled the leaves against stacks of toys and the clutter of bicycles. Big flakes of snow had begun to fall.

“No door,” she said.

“No door. I'll bring it by tomorrow and install it.”

“Okay,” she said. The last time they'd left the door open all night the garbage had been ransacked by animals large enough to leave streaky tooth marks. At least the weather wasn't anywhere close to good, or the weirdos who were always there would be playing basketball in the dark.

He climbed into the truck and drove off with her door. When she looked again she realized her eyes were stinging. She seemed to be a little blinded. She felt her way inside and popped a migraine pill.

She prepared dinner and pried the children from the television and sat at the table with them and tried to eat and keep a place inside her head from which she could still see and figure out things. Then while Sarah did her homework, she bathed Max, and while she read him bedtime stories Sarah bathed herself, and the phone didn't ring and Max finally laid himself down and willed himself to sleep. She combed Sarah's hair out, her face resolute, and read to her and then let her read to herself while she organized her papers for the next day.

At last she was in her own room, sorry about the garage door and sorry that everyone had gone to bed unhappy. She had to do better. Tomorrow she'd make it to the store and buy treats and cook their favorite dinner. Tomorrow the migraine wouldn't be there. Tomorrow there would be a new door.

She slept, or thought she'd slept. When she woke, or when she became aware that she'd always been awake, her chest was tight with an inexplicable but loud pounding that muffled her ears. She put her hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat. She got up and went to the window, the pounding growing louder. Then she knew what it was and instantly she felt better, light. The weirdos were playing basketball in the snow.

EVENING

 

The line into the Fine Arts Program headed downstairs through the cafeteria and then up into the gymnasium, and Martin still hadn't figured out what was wrong with the camcorder. It was supposed to zoom in, but every time he got half the distance there, it dissolved into blurriness. After watching the afternoon performance, Lauren had given him Sarah's exact onstage position. But by the time he found a seat in the gym, he was stuck in the tenth row, too far out to get a decent shot of her.