The Animal Girl (5 page)

“You just collapsed.”

“I tripped.”

“Your knees gave out from under you. I saw it. You've been tired lately. I've seen that, too.”

She turned her back to him and kicked a stray house slipper into the wall. “I'm dying.” She was furious at him for making her say it. But in the long silence after her admission, her anger faded. “I lied to you earlier. I'm not recovered. I'm sick.”

“Dying,” he said flatly. “Dying when?”

“I'm dying now.”

“When?” he asked again. “How long?”

“Not long.” She turned around. Charles was naked save for his boxer shorts. His pale shoulders were drooped in a sad way that made her want to go to him, and through the slightly open slit of his shorts, she glimpsed a small part of his limp penis, the sight of which left her feeling tender and proprietary toward him. He was hers—her lover, her friend, her companion.

“From what?” he asked.

“Cancer.”

He nodded.

“It's gone to the brain,” she said. “That's why I get dizzy.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“It'll get worse,” she continued, unable to stop herself. “Before it's over, I might not be able to make facial expressions. I might not be able to pronounce words correctly.” She shrugged. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“You didn't tell me any of this.”

“We were having a fling,” she said. “That was our agreement.”

She sat down next to him, but he moved away and then stood up and began hurriedly dressing. “No,” she said. She hadn't meant to say that.

He struggled to tie his necktie, finally just letting its ends fall. “I've got to go for a while,” he said. He picked his shoes up from the floor, walked into the hallway in his socks, and closed the door behind him.

She hadn't expected the heartbreak, the thoughts of him, the simple, unrelenting desire for an absent person. She called twice and left messages. In the first, she asked him to please call. In the second, she was blunt. “Call me, Charles. Call me today.” She was shocked by her aggression, her outright command. But she was even more surprised by the fact that he didn't call, not on that day and not on the next. The third time she called, Ryan answered with a flat, face-slapping, “Yeah, who is it?”

“Kate,” she said softly. “I'd like to speak to your father.”

“What did you do to him?” She'd expected the rudeness, but not the defensiveness, the obvious anger in his voice.

“I'd like to speak to him.”

“He's not here.” He paused. “What did you do to him?”

“I don't think that's really your concern.”

“He was crying the other day. He was just sitting at the table crying. I guess you found out just how much you could push him around. I'd say you're an expert at that.”

The rage in Ryan's voice left her both overwhelmed by guilt and glad that there was love for Charles mixed in with his son's bitterness. “Please tell him I called.”

“Maybe I will,” he said, and then hung up.

By mid-November, the beautiful portion of fall had ended. The winds came and blasted the leaves from the trees, and the rains turned them to brown gutter slush. The dark fell early, and more often than not Kate woke to gray mornings and the wet sounds of cars driving through water-drenched streets. Melissa continued to stay away, arriving home late in the evenings and slipping out of the house with her book bag early in the mornings. Kate worked half days now at the bank. She'd told her bad news to her district manager, who was happy to let her work until she no longer could. She spent her solitary afternoons at home rereading old mysteries and watching stacks of rented movies. She slept. She hoped that Charles would call. And she prepared herself for what would be a quieter, lonelier death than she'd expected.

Just when it seemed things would go on in this way, Kate came home from work one afternoon to find Melissa on the couch hugging her knees. She was in her favorite pajamas—thin yellow cotton with blue polka dots—and her eyes were raw from crying. In the crook of one arm, she held her worn-out teddy bear. Kate sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “Where's Mark?” she asked.

“He's gone.”

“Home?” Kate asked.

“Gone,” Melissa said. “He dropped me.”

Kate felt a rush of guilt. She wanted to go to her daughter, but Melissa made no gesture or sign of wanting her. “I'm sorry, sweetheart.”

“I scared him off,” Melissa said. “I was too intense for him, or something.”

“I don't think it was you,” Kate said. “I think it was the circumstances.
Sixteen-year-old boys don't particularly want to be around a house where the mother keeps taking to her sickbed.”

Melissa shook her head. “I don't want to talk about that.”

“OK,” Kate said. “There are other boys.”

“It doesn't matter,” Melissa said, beginning to cry again. “I was just using him. That's what he said, and maybe he was right. He was my protector.” She looked up at Kate. “From you.” She stopped crying then and sat up straight and made an effort, Kate could tell, to be brave. “I'm going to try to be around more.”

This news caught Kate off guard. She didn't know what to say, and was just as surprised when she felt the tears come. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“I can't be here all the time,” Melissa said cautiously. “But I'll be here after school, and I'll be here for dinners.”

“I know what to expect this time,” Kate said. “I'm going to be better. I'm not going to …”

“You went hunting the other weekend,” Melissa interrupted.

Kate nodded. “I actually shot a bird.”

Melissa laughed. “I can't picture it.”

“I did. I shot it and Charles roasted it and I ate it.” Kate and Melissa both laughed at the thought of it.

It took Charles three weeks to call. He left a message on the machine asking Kate to coffee at the café where they'd first met. That afternoon, the temperature fell below freezing, though the sun was out, and people hurried over the sidewalks, bundled in heavy coats. Wanting to look her best, Kate went without a hat and suffered for it, her ears numb by the time she entered the warm, mostly empty café. She found him seated in the same sunny corner where they had met, though he looked different now. After three weeks of not seeing him, he looked paler, thinner, slighter than she'd remembered him. He sat clinging to his coffee cup as if for warmth. His mustache was back, for which she was glad. In truth, she preferred him with his mustache. “Thank you for coming,” he said after she'd sat down.

She could hear the fear in his voice and was at first reassured by it. “I've missed you,” Kate said. It was a great relief to have said this, to have let it out.

He smiled, but his smile didn't last. “I'm not good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't know what I want to say.”

Kate already knew from his tone what he wanted to say. “Sure you do. I don't know why you had to make me come out in the cold to hear it.”

He shook his head as if he were trying to rid himself of a thought. “I'm very sorry about your … about your being sick. I wanted you to know that.”

“Thank you,” Kate said. “I'm sorry, too. About not telling you.” But she couldn't make herself sound sorry. And once again, she was surprised by her anger. She wanted to strike out at him now. Instead, she sat back in her chair and waited for him to speak.

“It's nice to see you. I've missed you. That's true for me, too. But I don't think I know you well enough to …”

He was going to make her finish his thought. He didn't know her well enough to watch her die. “I suppose not,” she said. And then she added, with more anger in her voice than she'd wanted, “Your electric razor is still in my bathroom.”

“Oh,” he said.

For a moment, she remained silent and fought off an urge to weep. It stung to see this man who had giggled and tumbled in her bed now hold himself at a distance. And when she was sure she would not cry, she laughed. “It was just a fling, right?” Her voice sounded fake, and though she knew this pretense made her ridiculous, she couldn't help herself.

“Sure,” Charles said. “I just wanted to see you again.” He put his head down, and for a moment Kate thought he might cry. But when he looked up again, he managed to smile briefly. “It was nice,” he said.

He wanted her to agree. He wanted her to say something equally fake and cheerful, but she didn't.

Melissa came back to her, as she'd said she would. In the late afternoons, she opened her books on the kitchen table and worked while Kate prepared dinner. One afternoon, Melissa brought dozens of
college brochures home from school, and Kate and Melissa paged through them, talking about whether a large or a small college experience would suit Melissa best. Did she want a school with a Greek system? “That's not for me,” Melissa said. And Kate, who didn't want to be too influential, was inwardly glad that her daughter would not be a sorority girl. It was far too early to be so absorbed by these questions, but Kate was grateful for any opportunity to talk about her daughter's future, and Melissa seemed to know this and indulged her.

In December, Kate's double vision worsened and she finally left the bank for good. Her doctor recommended that she tape her left eye shut and wear a patch. And so this small part of Kate was already dead. Once or twice a week, she would suffer headaches that were bad enough for morphine. But for the most part, dying was surprisingly painless. More than anything else, it was exhausting, so exhausting that merely standing up was a struggle. At times, death seemed more mundane than frightening. The drawn-out brightness of the mornings, the length of midday and of the late afternoons when she lay on the couch alone waiting for Melissa to come home from school left her fatigued and drowsy.

Kate still had her bursts of energy, though they'd last now for hours rather than days. When a blizzard descended on Ann Arbor, Kate and Melissa put on their fattest winter coats, gloves, and hats, and walked for more than an hour in the new snow.

Melissa and Kate almost never spoke of what was happening—and what would soon happen—until one afternoon when Kate was especially sick. She lay over the couch, groggy from painkillers and covered in blankets. Kate had been discussing as lucidly as she could the virtues of Carleton College, while trying to hide the fact that this was the school she would choose for her daughter, when Melissa stopped her with a blunt question. “Does it hurt?”

Kate looked at Melissa for a moment. “You're sure you want to know?”

Melissa nodded.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But not as much as I thought it would.”

“But it hurts.”

“Yes.”

“Will it hurt when it happens?” Melissa wasn't looking at her. She was paging through a glossy college brochure.

“No,” Kate said. “I won't be awake.”

Melissa shook her head. “I don't think I want to be there then. If that's OK.”

For an instant, Kate wanted to beg her daughter to be there, to stay with her, above all, at that moment. Instead, she nodded. “I'll be asleep. I won't know who's there.”

“Is it OK?” Melissa asked.

“It's OK,” Kate said.

It was raining out when someone knocked. The day nurse had just gone home, and Kate had to summon all her energy to rise from the couch and answer the door. A cold in-suck of air filled the entryway, and despite the grayness outside, the light had a raw brightness that Kate had to turn away from. Charles was wet, and the stringy flatness of his hair made him appear desperate. He held a small bunch of drenched tulips out to her, and she managed to carry them back to the couch. Looking at the flowers—their dramatic mess of color—exhausted her. “I got caught in this,” he said. Water dripped off his coat and onto her wood floor. “I'm sorry,” he said. Then he explained himself: “I just wanted to visit. As a friend.”

“I'm tired, Charles,” she said. “I won't be able to say much.” As usual he was nervous, and for the first time Kate was irritated by his fear rather than touched by it. She knew that he was merely afraid to be in the presence of a dying person. He seemed so reduced: every inch the furniture salesman. She should have offered him tea or coffee, but she could not imagine how she would get up from the couch again. She was in her robe, for God's sake. “Your eye,” he said. “Is it OK?” She'd forgotten about her patch until then, and now felt humiliated. She didn't want him there. She didn't want him to see her dying. He had been right: They didn't know each other well enough.

“No,” she said. “It's not OK.”

“You look good.”

She almost laughed, but stopped herself when she realized how horrific laughter would sound coming from her. For a time they were silent until Kate finally said, “I'm tired.”

He nodded. “I hope … I hope I wasn't unkind. I hope I didn't mistreat you. I hope …”

Kate understood now why he had come. She shook her head, and because he looked so achingly vulnerable, so convinced of his guilt, and because he was so extremely kind that he believed he was in the wrong when he wasn't, she said, “Of course not.” And though she was too exhausted to summon the requisite tone of penitence and regret, though she wasn't sure it was entirely true, she remembered her daughter's recent courage and summoned her own. “I suppose I used you … a little. I didn't want to end up alone. I didn't want to end up”—she paused and let her head sink into her pillow—“like this.” She smiled. “It's not as bad as it looks. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. I have my daughter.” And now that she had said it, she thought it was true.

His shoulders lifted as if a chain had just come off him. How easily people might push him around. How easily she might have delivered a blow to him right now, had she wanted to. “It was just using me?” he asked.