The Year That Follows (4 page)

“Do you know,” Cat asks, “was your father in the war?”

“What war?”

“World War Two.”

“He was too young, I think,” Sherri says. “I had an uncle, my father’s brother, who died in it, I guess. Fighting on the wrong side, you know.”

“My father wants me to go visit him,” Cat says. She still hasn’t told him about Kyle’s son—if there even is one. She hasn’t told anyone.

“So go,” Sherri says.

Later, the waitress arrives with the salmon plates, sets them down, then pulls the wine from the ice bucket and adds it to both glasses. Cat takes in the smell of the fish, fragrant with lemon. Sherri opens her arms to acknowledge the spread, and this prompts Cat to raise her glass in a toast. “I still can’t believe you landed the whale. Here’s to you.”

They drink. “How’s Connor?” Sherri asks. It’s the foolproof question. No mother ever minds talking about her child.

“Good. You ever going to have one?”

“I need a man for that, right?”

“It’s one school of thought.”

“I want one, but not right now,” Sherri says. “I mean, I’m supposed to want one, right?”

Cat almost tells her about Siobhan and the boy, but she pulls back.

“What is it?” Sherri asks.

“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this business. I’m floundering. I should have gone to law school.”

“Law school? You gotta be kidding me.”

“No, I loved those constitutional law classes I took as an undergrad.”

“So, why didn’t you go?”

“Young and lazy and stupid. Then, older, wiser, and pregnant. And so now I’m in mortgages.”

“It’s just sales.”

“Exactly.”

“Sales,” Sherri says. “It’s seduction, you know. You gotta show desire and indifference at the same time. You want it, but you don’t need it. Stick with me. I could teach you to sell.”

“I might be a special case.”

“Ah, Catwoman, I’m sure you are.”

S
am walks, smelling the ocean, hearing its rhythm, the bay creamy white, covered in mist. He walks every day without fail. Never much of an athlete, he nevertheless cannot live without exercise. Mind and body, that’s the idea. He’s eighty. I have to keep moving, he thinks, or I’ll be dead.

He makes a cup of instant coffee after the walk. He could do better, but he needs only one cup. He dresses and heads into town for a doctor appointment. He’s been short of breath, and every once in a while he feels a little chest pain. It could be heartburn, not that he ever eats that much. Today they will fill him full of dye, and take a look. It’s amazing, really, what they can do, though he wonders if it’s all for the good. When he was
young, old people got sick and died, at home, with their families. They didn’t fear being alone, or the indignity of a hospital.

The cardiologist’s name is Cunningham. He’s a nice enough man, though perhaps a little too smiley for Sam’s taste. Sam admits to a prejudice against overly cheerful people; he assumes they are idiots. He especially prefers dour professionals, but they are rare in California, and sometimes Sam wonders how this state handles all the feigned happiness. The tests take the better part of the morning, and then the nurse comes in and tells Sam to dress. Dr. Cunningham wants to see him in his office. This is a first. Usually there’s a chat while Sam sits shirtless on the examining room table. He didn’t know Cunningham had an office.

It’s a bright room, with bookshelves painted white and lined with medical tomes. Cunningham is a product of the California public university system—Irvine undergrad, Davis Medical School—but he comes well recommended and Sam is not inclined to travel to Minnesota or Cleveland just for reputation. Sam sits and soon Cunningham appears, a dark-haired man with crow’s-feet, although otherwise he looks as young as all the lawyers and policemen and rabbis and business-suited lunch-goers whom Sam notices when he ventures from his apartment. Judging from the Roman numeral date on Cunningham’s degree from Irvine, Sam figures he’s about forty.

“How you feeling, Sam?”

“Good.”

“But short of breath?”

“Doctor, at my age I’m thankful for any breath at all.”

“There are four arteries that carry blood to the heart. Two of yours are, for all practical purposes, clogged. The other two are mostly so. Sam, you need a bypass. Right away.”

“A bypass. Another one?” He’s had one, way back, at Henry Ford Hospital. Ford. The name meant something once.

“Today. Tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve put in calls. Did you eat breakfast?”

“No.”

“Then we could do it today.”

“Cut my chest open?” says Sam.

“That’s how we get in there. It’s a serious operation, yes, but also quite common. You’re in fine health otherwise.”

“I’m old. Can’t you do something else? Put in one of those things?”

“A stent? No, not for you. Besides, you’ve got valve issues, too. You need the operation.”

“I’m too old.”

“Your age is not the risk that your arteries are. This surgery is indicated in patients your age with your health characteristics. I can guarantee you that if we do nothing, then you will die of some event—a heart attack, most likely—and that it won’t be that long from now.”

Well, Sam thinks, there it is. Damned either way. He says, “I won’t survive surgery.”

“You won’t survive if you don’t have it. This is truly a case of now or never.”

“Never, then.”

“Sam, you will die.”

“You, too,” Sam says, feeling comfort in the words. He wants to live, and so sets himself against the operation, against the heart doctor. This takes will; it is a great temptation to give your life to a doctor. He can reconsider once Cat and Connor are gone. Missing their visit is impossible.

“Yes, yes, all of us eventually,” Cunningham is saying. “My job is to push out that date. I can’t just let you walk out of my office, drive a car. Your condition is serious.”

“I’m not having surgery. I’d rather just get the days I’m going to get.”

“Today may be the last day you get,” says the doctor.

“Believe it or not, I actually considered that possibility this morning. I consider it every morning.”

“Sam—”

“In two weeks my daughter is coming to visit. My surviving child. And my grandson. My boy was killed on September eleventh. I want to be able to see my daughter and mourn the child who isn’t here. If you put me under the knife, I’ll likely still be in the hospital then, if I’m alive at all. Bedridden certainly. I’d rather risk it.”

Cunningham measures his words carefully. “Let’s say you get lucky, and you’re alive in two weeks. You see your daughter and grandson. Then will you have the surgery?”

“We’ll see.”

“Say yes, Sam.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Cunningham, I want to live. I survived World War Two, kamikazes buzzing all around. One hit my ship. It’s why I can’t move my head from side to side. I thought I died that day. I woke up and was paralyzed. I thought I died again. Now here we are. It’s almost fifty-seven years since I discovered that I’d get a life. Fifty-seven years. More than I probably deserve, I know, but all I’m asking for, right now, is two more weeks.”

“I don’t know that you’re going to get them.”

Sam correctly predicted that the doctor was going to say this. They have their procedures, their miracle cures, their technology, and they want to use all of it. But Sam won’t miss the
yahrzeit
. He cannot let Cat slide through his fingers one more time. He had plenty of chances, but the last was really after Ann died. He tried to teach her things, and he did, but he only let her so close. She made him nervous. She was a girl, almost a woman, his daughter, and he didn’t feel equipped. What does a man know, really, that can help a young girl? For over twenty years she drifted off. Clearly, this is his last chance with her.

“Sam?” the doctor says.

“No.”

“No what?” asks the doctor.

“No surgery. I’ll take my chances.”

“They’re lousy, your chances. Doomed.”

“So they are,” Sam says. He stands and heads for the door. He knows he’s being reckless, but there is no other way. He hurries out, before he changes his mind.

S
he can’t dream. She wakes, knows from the darkness it’s still quite early, not yet six, perhaps not yet five. Before Connor she dreamed, remembered long and detailed dreams of travels and adventures, of worlds happy enough that she woke hopeful. Even after her mother died, her dreams stayed bright. She’d wake and remember shopping trips with her mother that never happened in real life, her mother buying her shoes that made her feet look smaller, with a heel that lifted her almost to six feet, the height of men. In her dream her mother loved the shoes and Cat wore them out of the store, laughing, walking arm in arm with the woman, a wish fulfillment if there ever was one.

She lies in bed, moving her legs between the sheets, seeking the cool spots. She would like not to wake alone. She hasn’t seen Chris for three months. She met him last winter and they dated sporadically till the spring, when she slept with him, slept with him because he was young and cute, because he wanted her and she had desire of her own. After that, unlike everything her mother taught her in high school, she couldn’t get rid of him. She liked him, but at thirty-four he was childless, without a real career, still young and unformed. He couldn’t conceive of the responsibilities of parenthood,
and when she realized she didn’t want him to meet Connor she knew he had to go. It fit her basic philosophy for the men she dated: namely, that if she could live without them, then she probably should.

She gets up and walks to the bathroom, her balance a little off, as it is every morning, as if she must wait for the world to right itself. She wraps herself in a robe and walks to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. The stove clock reads
6
:
14
. Forty-five minutes to drink coffee and read the paper till she has to wake Connor and get him ready for his day. She logs on to the computer, searches again for Siobhan, and again she comes up empty. She has tried to access public records, but these yield no pictures and it is a spotty endeavor, something no doubt done better by the
Times
. She has also called two private investigators, but with just a first name and a photo, they made her no promises. And they were ridiculously expensive. So she decided to do it herself. She will, she realizes, look forever. It reminds her of being a kid, when she would always check the pay phones for returned change, back when there were pay phones, even though she never found so much as a penny. She knows looking for Siobhan is likely a lost cause, and yet she believes in it, too. Not everything has to make sense.

At seven she goes to Connor’s room and sits on the edge of his bed. He sleeps hot. She runs her hand lightly through his golden hair, which is matted and damp with sweat. She can feel the heat when her hand is an inch
away. “Hey, my angel boy,” she says, now rubbing the worn powder blue cotton of his pajamas, “it’s time to get up.” He turns away, then back, his eyes open.

“Okay, Mommy,” he says, and he swings his bare feet out of the bed and onto the floor, stands, and looks back at her as though he’s been awake for hours. The perfect little man. “Let’s go,” he says.

“What am I?” she says. “Chopped liver?” This is her father’s line. Connor runs the three steps back to her and hugs her. Then she lets him go.

By the time she reaches the kitchen Connor is already sitting at the counter, his feet dangling off the stool, the television at the counter’s end tuned to Nickelodeon and an early-morning episode of
SpongeBob SquarePants
. There was a time when Cat would not have allowed this, but then her father reminded her that he’d let her watch television when she was young. “In the navy,” he said, “they taught me never to give an unnecessary order.” And so she relented. It was one of many things she has relented on. Not to use the microwave, for instance. She’d read somewhere it did no good, but this morning she cooks two pieces of bacon in it, then five frozen silver-dollar pancakes, Connor’s favorite, food he prefers over anything she can make from scratch. To get the pancakes he’d bargained away labor—he’d promised to make his bed—and Cat has to admit he does a good job of keeping up his end of the deal. Whenever Cat looks at his bedspread, arranged into a childish approximation of order, she
thinks that her philosophy of parenting really can be boiled down to one concept: bribery.

She sets the food in front of her son and he turns to it, then smiles at her.

“I love you so much, Mommy,” he says.

“I love
you,”
she says.

“No, really,” he says. “I love you so much.”

“I love you so much,” she repeats. He smiles at her, satisfied, and takes a bite of bacon. Remember this, she tells herself. Remember when your boy looked at you and said he loved you. Remember it because otherwise you might let it slip, it was possible to forget anything, even love and dreams. She wonders where Kyle’s boy is right now, if someone is making him breakfast, and who it is.

S
he dresses Connor for day camp, that summer refuge for the children of single mothers and dual-income families, and then has him watch TV at the counter while she takes ten minutes to put on a little eyeliner and then some concealer to lighten the darkness that now never seems to leave the underside of her eyes. She thinks of Kyle and that time when Cat was eight or nine and she lured Kyle into a McIntosh tree in their backyard and left him there. Kyle was too scared to climb down. Cat thought this hilarious. She left him, went into the house, and turned on the TV. It was almost an hour before her mother appeared, face bright with fury, a smudge of red lipstick on her teeth.

“How could you?” she demanded. “How could you?”

Cat actually had no idea what she was talking about.

“He’s your brother!” she yelled.

Later that night Cat lay in her bed, dreading her mother’s visit, worried she wouldn’t come, or worse, that she would but that she wouldn’t care anymore. It was cruel to leave Kyle in the tree, Cat saw that now, and she didn’t understand how she could have done it. Why? she asked herself. Why did I?