The Healing (2 page)

chapter two

Mike sat at the old Formica table and struggled to lift a spoonful of diced fruit to his mouth in quaking slow motion. His ability to perform the most basic functions was dwindling. Fast. And what was his incentive to keep trying? This wasn't a war he was going to win, and everyone knew it. Why should he suffer through the battle with MS if the end was already decided? Wouldn't that be masochistic?

The struggle to feed himself might have been worth it if he were hungry. But his appetite had long since waned, along with his will to live.

Just as he was about to drop the spoon and give up, Raymond, his home health aide, chimed in from across the table to encourage him. “Come on, Mr. Donnelly, eat some more melon. It always tastes better in summertime, don't it?”

Raymond was a young Jamaican who traveled from one house of sickness to the next in a beat-up old Buick. Yet his love for life always shamed Mike into going the extra mile—at least for the four hours he spent with Raymond every other day. The guy was worth his weight in gold, not only because he brandished enough brute strength to lift and bathe Mike, but also because his basic human compassion gave people in Mike's condition the necessary push to stay alive. It was that simple. They especially appreciated him in the Donnelly house, where Karen could no longer handle the physical demands of her disabled spouse.

Yes, indeed. It had come to that.

As Mike struggled to bring the spoon to his mouth, the screen door on the other side of the house banged shut. Swift footsteps scurried through the living room and into the kitchen.

“Sorry I'm late,” Karen said, catching her breath. She gave Mike a fleeting glance, like a parent checking on a sleeping baby before addressing the babysitter. The family cat, a gray tabby named Bitsy, dashed into the kitchen and began doing figure eights around her feet.

Raymond rose to his full, imposing height. “That's okay, Mrs. Donnelly,” he said in his singsong island accent. “We were just having a little fruit salad.”

A quick briefing on the last four hours followed. Raymond reported the details of Mike's day, and Karen asked a few pertinent questions. They smiled and nodded like two old friends discussing the latest baseball stats.

As Mike listened to the exchange, his jaw clenched with frustration. His wife and the foreigner who cleaned his crippled backside talked about him as if he weren't even in the room.

Mike allowed the spoon to clatter to his plate, but nobody noticed. Instead, Raymond turned to him and flashed his good-natured smile—a dazzling gleam of white, straight teeth against his very dark skin. “See you Wednesday, Mr. Donnelly.”

Mike nodded good-bye.

As Raymond made his exit, so did any remnant of the good mood he had brought with him. By the time the old Buick left the driveway, Mike knew his highly infectious discontent had filled the void. The air in the kitchen crackled with tension because of it. But it was too powerful for Mike to contain. He watched Karen in brooding silence as she fed the cat and emptied the dishwasher. It was only late June, and she was already suntanned, mostly from working outside and going on her extended hikes. Her light brown hair, once a sleek variety of dark blond, showed the kiss of the sun for the first time in years. She wore it shorter now, but when she twisted it up and carelessly clipped it to the back of her head to keep it off her neck in the heat of summer, she looked seventeen again. She was not well endowed, but her slender, graceful body and lean, athletic limbs were the envy of her middle-aged friends. Nobody looked better in a pair of khaki shorts and a tank top than his Karen.

“What do you feel like having for dinner?” she asked, bending over to put a saucepan away.

Mike knew he was being overly sensitive, but lately Karen seemed to bristle with nervous energy whenever they were alone, busying herself with household chores. She seemed to have a hard time looking him in the eye for more than a few seconds. So he purposely didn't answer her question.

The pots and pans clanged some more, and then Karen straightened up. “What did you say?” she asked, swiping at the flyaway wisps of hair that floated in front of her face.

Her skin was flushed from bending over, and, sure enough, her hazel eyes—eyes that Mike had been able to read for more than twenty-five years—rested on him for only a heartbeat before turning away to focus on the few items in the drainboard. Inside his withering body, Mike could feel his spirit losing the battle to rise above his circumstances. “I didn't say anything,” he replied, wishing he could make her look at him like she used to. She used to gaze at him like she wanted to dive inside of him.

Karen's eyes were flecked with colors that danced with her moods. Humor, passion, wonder . . . she could never hide her thoughts from him. Now she wouldn't even look at him. Was she trying to hide the repugnance and disappointment that had to be simmering beneath the surface?

Mike felt like someone had cut off his air.

“What do you want for dinner?” she asked again. “I've got to get something going. Help me decide.”

“I don't care,” Mike replied. “Make what you want.”

Karen's movements became quicker, more agitated. Mike knew his apathy was draining her patience, but he couldn't muster much zeal for anything. How could he, when he could barely eat or go to the bathroom by himself anymore? But Karen, bless her heart, didn't call him on it. Not yet, anyway. He knew the day was coming when all the pent-up resentment and aversion would come spewing out of her like a giant volcanic belch. How could it not? Karen had given up so much for him and their troubled daughter: her job as senior editor at Pell Publishing, her circle of friends in the city, her love of reading and literature—even her involvement with the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation. She didn't have to tell Mike how she had exhausted every effort to make the best of their situation, when he had already given up.

He wouldn't blame her if she started hating him. Maybe she already did.

“I'll just throw some hamburgers on the grill, then,” she said.

Again he didn't respond, but watched quietly as Karen continued to dart around the kitchen. Either she didn't perceive his silent suffering or she chose to ignore it. He couldn't for the life of him imagine that Karen didn't see it. She was his soul mate.

But how could he believe she chose to ignore it? That possibility was far worse.

“Are you going to finish that?” she asked, pointing to the bowl of half-eaten fruit on the table in front of him. The melon and grapes had been cut up so small, a six-month-old could have eaten them without choking.

He shook his head.

Finally Karen gazed at him more directly, but her eyes were clouded with hurt. Had she read his mind? Karen could never ignore what was happening. And she could never hate him. Maybe she was trying to find a way to deal with everything. Or maybe she was just worried that he wasn't eating enough.

Either way, Karen was never one to nag or complain. She simply picked up the bowl and tossed the uneaten fruit into the garbage can without a word.

Mike wanted to ask her what she was thinking. He wanted to ask where she had walked and if she felt that moving to her family's summerhouse in Southold had been the right thing to do. Was she happier? Did she feel a little more at peace?

Did she still love him, a mere shadow of his former self?

He longed to hold his hand out to her and pull her onto his lap. He watched her youthful, lithe body with its toned muscles and feminine strength—familiar and attuned to their mutual needs—and he wanted to express his love and desire for her with every cell of his humanity.

Except his humanity was failing them both. And they were quickly becoming strangers.

The discontent was now a giant black hole, and it sucked them in completely.

Mike slowly drove his motorized chair out of the kitchen and into the living room. He picked up the television remote but didn't press the Power button. Instead, he stared at the black screen and listened, still focused on what Karen was doing in the other room. The dishwasher was opened. The water was turned on. Dishes rattled. The water was turned off.

He looked at the remote in his unsteady hand, but the numbers and buttons were out of focus. Why did Raymond always turn the damn TV off, anyway? Mike wanted to throw the remote at the screen, but he didn't have the strength.

For a moment there was silence in the kitchen. Mike heard Karen dialing the phone. He wondered who she was calling.

“Hey!” she said. It was a happy sound—Karen's old voice greeting someone she loved. The only time Mike had heard that voice around the house in recent months was when she was on the telephone. “Yeah, I know,” she said. There was a pause. “Getting by. Taking it day by day. So how are things in Chicago?”

She had phoned Helen. Karen had been calling her sister quite often as of late, but that was no surprise. They leaned on each other on a level Mike never really understood. “It's a girl thing,” Karen always told him.

Mike sighed. He used to roll his eyes when Karen made that claim. And she would laugh.

In the ringing silences of the one-sided dialogue, Mike could easily fill in what Helen was saying on the other end. When Karen wanted a real therapy session with her sister, she took the cordless phone and went outside, out of earshot. In a way, Mike was jealous of Helen because she was probably the only one who had insight into Karen's true feelings.

And every time they spoke, he knew Helen said that she wished they lived nearby, because Karen would say, “I wish you and Dave were closer, too.” Then a few tears would slip from her eyes. Tears Mike wished he could wipe away.

But today Karen had something other than her unfortunate lot in life to discuss with her sister. “You'll never guess who I saw today.” Her words were laced with girlish excitement. “No. No. Wrong again. I told you you'd never guess. Are you ready? The woman in black!”

Mike frowned. Who was the woman in black? It must have been someone they both knew pretty well, because he actually heard Helen's reply from the living room: “Get
out
!” Yet it wasn't someone he had ever met.

“It was her, I swear!” Karen was laughing now. It was a sound that lifted his spirit and wrenched his heart at the same time. “Yes, Helen. I swear. The woman in black. She was still wearing a black dress, although God knows it can't be the same one. But I think she was carrying the same straw tote bag with the big sunflowers on it. I passed her on my way back from the beach at Founders Landing.”

Mike closed his eyes. Karen's walk had brought her to the place where they had first met. He wanted to ask her if she had gone there to think about better days. More than that, he wished he could've gone with her.

“And you'll never guess where she lives,” Karen continued. She was acting like this woman in black was some famous movie star she and her sister had worshipped as children. “You know that beautiful big house overlooking the bay on Terry Lane?”

Another loud “Get
out
!” was followed by more chatter.

“No, she wasn't just visiting. At least it didn't seem that way,” Karen said. “She checked the mailbox and went in the side door without knocking.” Pause. “I know. Can you believe it?” Pause. “She nodded hello to me. So I guess she's not a ghost after all.” More laughter.

Mike finally turned on the TV. The Yankees were playing in Baltimore.

chapter three

Karen flipped burgers on the grill out back and then sat on a tattered old beach chair under the apple tree to prepare the salad. Now that summer had officially arrived, and after spending the last three months unpacking boxes, she was trying desperately to appreciate her surroundings and feel at home. Somehow that was easier to do outside in the fresh air.

Away from Mike and the anguish that consumed her when she saw what was happening to him.

As her hands tore the lettuce, Karen looked up at the back of the English colonial that had been her family's summerhouse for more than half a century. It had been built in the 1930s, with oak floors, a brick fireplace, and thirty-eight windows with numerically matched screens. Karen's father had spent far too many weeks of his vacations scraping, painting, and cleaning those thirty-eight screens and storm windows while her mother kept nagging him to replace them with the more modern variety.

Karen grinned to herself and pictured her father climbing up and down the ladder to work on the windows. She realized how valuable those old-fashioned windows were when a friend of hers built a house and paid more than twenty-five thousand dollars for reproductions of the same style. She also realized that her father, a corrections officer at Rikers Island and a World War II veteran, enjoyed his tedious maintenance projects more than going to the beach. He thought he was fixing up his retirement home, and it made him happy. If he had been able to see the future, where his wife would die before he retired and the reward for his fifty years of labor was half a decade of chemotherapy, perhaps he would have relaxed in the sun a little more.

Her smile quivered and turned into a taut line.

The same thing had happened to her grandfather, who originally bought the house back in 1953 for a laughable fifteen thousand dollars. He enjoyed it for all of three years and died of cancer before Karen was even born. When were people going to learn?

Karen saw them everywhere: her father, her mother, her grandparents; it was all so bittersweet, being in the house.
Living
in the house without them, calling it her own. It felt odd, as though they were going to come walking around a corner and Karen would find herself tumbling back in time to when she was twelve years old again.

She wanted to plant a vegetable garden like her grandmother's, which used to take up half of the backyard with its perfect rows of hardy plants. But with Mike's physical demands and Lori's emotional ones, Karen had not gotten around to it. In its place was an uncultivated patch of tangled weeds, which made her feel like she had let her grandmother down.

The house needed a paint job, especially those windows. The lawn needed mowing, and the shrubbery was overgrown. It certainly never looked like this when her grandmother and her parents were alive. But Karen couldn't allow herself to get stressed out if the place didn't look like a Thomas Kinkade painting. When Mike got too sick to work, and Karen had to give up her job to take care of him, they were lucky to have a mortgage-free house to live in. They were also lucky her sister Helen didn't need her half of the real estate value up front. Helen knew her sister's life was a shambles and had suggested that Mike and Karen sell their house in Massapequa and move into the house in Southold with Lori.

Now the three of them seemed to be floating in some kind of limbo, waiting to see if they could nestle themselves into some mode of contentment. At this point, even a mundane complacency would have been acceptable.

So much for appreciating her surroundings and feeling at home.

Lori's Honda pulled into the driveway around five-thirty. Karen's stomach clenched, not because of her daughter's emotional instability, but because it was getting harder to keep from going over that edge herself. Lately she couldn't help but wish Lori was stronger so she didn't have to walk on eggshells all the time. Everyone around her was so fragile.

Karen could predict every frame of the ensuing scene. She watched her daughter get out of her car and then march over to the dog run next to the garage. That was where Luka, the family's lovable, slobbering black Lab, whizzed back and forth on her chain until Lori came home to set her free. Once liberated, Luka came bounding across the lawn to lick Karen's face and neck. It was the same every day. Karen quickly moved the food out of the way and tried not to grimace.

Her stoic efforts were lost on her daughter, who was a staunch animal lover.

“Why do you insist on keeping her on that stupid run all day?” Lori asked. “She doesn't even have enough shade over there. For God's sake, Mom, she's
black.
How would you like to be out in the hot sun in a black coat all day long?”

Karen didn't have an answer. Day in and day out, she tried to explain to her daughter that Luka was too big and clumsy to be in the house all day, that she had to be tied up outside when the health aide came, and that living so close to the main road was a danger to a dog who thought the whole neighborhood was her territory. But Lori, as usual, believed her dog was neglected and maltreated while she was off working as a waitress at a local seafood restaurant.

When Luka began sniffing around frantically, Karen became alarmed. “Don't let her near that grill!”

“She smells the food,” Lori replied. “She's probably starving.”

“Well, if I give her anything from the table other than filet mignon, you tell me I'm killing her.” Karen realized she had to redirect the conversation, so she asked, “How was work?”

“Busy,” Lori replied. “But at least the tips were good.”

Karen jumped on the positive response. “That's great. I guess the summer tourists are going to make you richer over the next few months.”

Lori squatted down to shower more affection on her dog. If she were able to relate half as well to human beings as she did to members of the animal kingdom, she would've been more socially at ease. “That used to be us, remember? Summer tourists.”

Luka seemed more interested in belly rubs than the salad, so Karen figured it was safe to resume cutting cucumbers. “I still feel a little like a summer tourist,” she confessed. “I guess we have to go through a winter before we're really locals.”

Lori straightened up, and the dog immediately went into orbit around her feet. “Is Daddy inside?” she asked, leaning forward to steal a few slices of cucumber from the bowl.

Karen was tempted to slap her daughter's dog-slathered hands away from the food, but she refrained. “Yes, he's inside. Where else would he be?”

“You've got Luka baking in the sun when she should be inside and Daddy inside when he should be out here with you.”

Karen clearly heard the accusation in Lori's remark, but she let it roll off her. Lori had to blame somebody for everything that was wrong in her life, and at the moment Karen had the broadest shoulders.

She looked up at her daughter, whose resemblance to Mike was so striking. Lori had inherited her father's dark, wavy hair and deep blue eyes, complete with defined brows and long black lashes fanned against fair Irish skin. Unfortunately, she had also inherited his thick bones, heavy musculature, and manly height, which her psychotherapist felt added to her self-consciousness. Of course, Karen felt guilty that she was fashionably thin and looked better in trendy clothes than her daughter, but there wasn't much she could do about it. Sometimes she wished Lori had been born a boy. A son would've felt blessed to have his father's build, especially if he wanted to follow in his footsteps and be a firefighter.

“Dad's watching the Yankees game on television,” Karen said in a benign, noncombative manner.

“That's all he does lately,” Lori replied.

“Well, why don't you go talk to him? Tell him about your day at work.”

It seemed like a logical suggestion. Lori had never stopped being a “Daddy's girl.” Even now she rarely passed his chair without flicking the brim of his baseball cap or giving him a quick hug around the neck.

But when Karen went inside half an hour later to tell her husband and daughter that dinner was ready, she found Mike still staring at the TV and Lori upstairs in her room tending to her pet guinea pigs with her headphones on.

Karen was too exhausted to be angry. She couldn't fix them. She couldn't change what had happened to them. And trying to stay positive in spite of it all was fast becoming one great effort in futility.

She put dinner on the table, but nobody knew how numb she was inside.