We Are Not Ourselves (68 page)

•  •  •

As October gave way to November and the stream of bigger jobs slowed to a trickle, the house began to take on the patina she’d envisioned when she’d signed the papers aligning her fate with its own. She understood that it would have to remain incomplete: she wasn’t going to launch into finishing the attic or basement. The electrical would never get upgraded or the oil tank dug up or the piping replaced or the asbestos hauled away. She wouldn’t be able to keep paying Sergei the nearly four thousand dollars a month she’d been paying him. The Medicare-paid hundred days were coming to an end soon, whereupon she would start paying six thousand a month to the nursing home, which would come right out of the retirement accounts and what was left of the home equity line of credit.

She wanted to talk to him about leaving, but it was easier each week just to spend down her income and dip a little into her savings and promise herself that she’d bring it up before the next payday.
As long as I bring home money, she is happy
, she remembered Sergei saying.

One day Sergei asked if he could stay at the house on weekends as well. The request dismayed her; she had been sure this would be the day
she would say something to him about finishing his stint there; in fact, she had just been about to bring it up. Then he told her that he had left his wife a couple of weeks before and had been staying on his sister’s couch on weekend nights.

She was stunned. “I can’t afford to keep paying you full-time.”

“You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “I pay you to stay here.”

“Pay
me
?”

“I do handyman work,” he said. “I work for your neighbors.”

This radical-sounding proposal had about it the seductive reasonability of the most outlandish schemes. She affected a dubious air, but she knew its adoption was inevitable.

“I like this neighborhood,” he said, to fill the gap her thoughts had opened up.

“You’re not paying me,” she said. “You can continue to do jobs around this house while you get your feet under you.” She felt her heels come together involuntarily. “That will be compensation enough for use of the room. Eventually you’ll have to find your own place, of course.”

•  •  •

She made a sign for him with her home number on it, though she didn’t include her name. She photocopied it and put it up on the tackboards at Slave to the Grind and Lawrence Hospital. She placed an ad in the
Pennysaver
circular. She knocked on the doors of the neighbors who had asked about him.

Calls started coming in. She dropped him off at Smith Cairns on her way to work and he bought a used Taurus. Most mornings he left before she was awake. Usually he put a pot of coffee on for her. He never drank coffee himself.

She stopped feeling guilty about having kept him away from home in the run-up to his separation. Leaving his wife had been his business; it had nothing to do with Eileen, and from what she understood it had been a long time coming. If some time apart every week had been enough to drive a wedge between them, then maybe a separation had been in order.

He left more than enough money every Friday to cover his portion of the food. He hardly used any electricity.

It would have been too intimate for them to eat meals together. They would have had a lot of time to fill across a table. When she cooked, she ate first and left it for him on the stove; when he did, he left it in the fridge. She would knock and tell him through the closed door that there was something for him downstairs. He would leave a note for her in his pidgin English: “Am make dinner tonight. Don’t you do it.”

He took his clothes into the bathroom with him when he showered, and he dressed before he emerged. Once—he must not have known she had come home—she watched from the base of the stairs as he took a few thunderous steps into his bedroom, around his waist a dull white towel that might have been taken from a gym. Its ends met in a strained cinch at his hip, his abdomen pushing against it but not hanging over, as if his excess flesh were made of sounder stuff than her own. Remnant steam trailed him into the hall. The ruddiness of his face and chest suggested a lobster that had survived a boiling, while the whiteness of the rest of him ran almost alabaster.

He did his own laundry and often hers as well, though he never mixed their clothing in the same load. She didn’t have to ask for this hermetic separation; he had arrived at it independently.

They watched television in their own rooms. The set in the den was almost never used, except sometimes in the late hours, when, assured that he was tucked into his quarters for the night, she padded downstairs and turned it on, keeping the volume low and the lights off. She heard the stairs creak with his weight and muted the volume, but it was a phantom creak. The tenebrous dark in the kitchen fluttered for a moment, as if he had entered that space, but he never did.

She took the
Times
with her to work, not because she needed it during her shift but to be able to leave it for him in its entirety later and avoid awkward negotiations about sections. She dropped it on the island when she came home, and he was discreet enough to collect it when she was out of the room and put it in the recycling bin when he was done. Most days he left the
Post
for her in turn, which was a guilty pleasure she hadn’t indulged in since the days in Jackson Heights when she used to retrieve Connell from whichever Orlando apartment he was at. She’d forgotten how much she’d
enjoyed sitting at the Orlandos’ dining room table, flipping idly through the
Post
’s pages and chatting while Connell made his entreaties to stay.

•  •  •

The prospect of Thanksgiving had been haunting her for a while. She would have to justify Sergei’s continued presence in the house to Connell. Somehow she had managed to keep it from him. It helped that he didn’t call much. She had also told Sergei not to answer the phone, though she knew she needn’t have bothered. Finally, she called Connell and told him not to come home and to apply the credit to another flight. Money was tight, she told him, and he’d be home in a few weeks anyway. He protested, though halfheartedly enough to allow her to feel a little better about what she was doing. She could tell he felt guilty, but his guilt wasn’t just about not being there; it was also about not feeling more guilty about not being there.

Several well-meaning friends invited her over for the meal, but she told all of them that she was going out to her cousin Pat’s. She went up for breakfast that morning with Ed and then made Thanksgiving dinner for herself and Sergei, the full orchestration, with all the sides and a bird large enough to yield leftovers for weeks.

It was the first American Thanksgiving meal Sergei had ever eaten. She watched him assemble on his plate a heaping mound of the offerings. After he had devoured it, he filled his plate again. When he reached for a third helping of marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, she felt a warm pride settle into her, like a sip of mulled wine. He ate a whole can of cranberry sauce himself.

•  •  •

One night in early December, after a few frustrating hours at Maple Grove, during which Ed refused to eat and emitted a persistent, plaintive whine, and an enervating day at work before that, while she was washing the pan from a meatloaf whose crusted end she had polished off without so much as sitting down, she heard Sergei walk into the room behind her. She looked up into the window and saw his reflection standing in the doorway. After a few moments she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there; his steps had been too heavy, and now there was an electric charge in the air. She put
down the scrubber and took a fortifying breath, then turned to face him. He was perfectly silent, looking at her with a strange intensity. He began to walk toward her. She had rubber gloves on her hands and raised them instinctively. He came around the island and stood before her. She could feel her own breath coming fast. He inched closer to her. The tentativeness she detected in him alarmed her; it was as if he feared for both their fates, as if he couldn’t help whatever he was about to do. She reproached herself for sheltering this stranger in her house. He could do anything he wanted to her and she would be powerless to stop him.

One of his hands went to her waist; she felt she was watching from outside her body as she didn’t move it away. His other hand joined in.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

He pulled her to him. Her arms went up in halfhearted protection and the cold, wet rubber sent a tingling across her skin. She felt bloated and squishy against him. She’d put on sixty pounds in the years since Ed’s diagnosis, nearly a pound for each her husband had lost, as if she’d been eating to maintain their equilibrium. Sergei’s face, as he moved in to kiss her, was smooth enough that she wondered whether he had shaved right before he came down. His drugstore aftershave, liberally applied, did not repel her up close as she had imagined it would. She felt a pounding through his chest. His hands moving over her left ghostly sense impressions everywhere they’d been. She found herself ascending the stairs with him.

•  •  •

Afterward, in her room, she locked the door and moved the armchair in front of it. She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt the need to protect herself, to hide. She climbed into bed and wept for a while, and then somehow she slept, the body doing what it had to do. She woke in the middle of the night to the unsettling light of the lamp and heard the low hum of Sergei’s television. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t awake.

•  •  •

In the morning she showered and dressed before she moved the armchair. When she ventured out of the room, she saw Sergei’s door wide open. She walked over to it and looked inside; none of his things were there. She ventured
downstairs and was startled to find him sitting at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the suitcase next to him.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“For what?”

“I understand you want I should leave.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You have a job to get to. You can begin to look for a place. In the meantime, this is where you live. There’s nothing more to say, as far as I’m concerned.”

88

C
onnell had hatched his plan over Thanksgiving, when he learned that his mother was going to have her Christmas party on Christmas night instead. Cindy Coakley was planning to host Christmas Eve again, as she had the previous year and probably would indefinitely now that the old order had been toppled. It wasn’t ideal, his mother said, as there wasn’t as much to look forward to, and people couldn’t stay out as late, but it was important to her to have a party in the house this particular year, with the usual cast of people. She understood that it would be redundant, the same people going to both, and she understood that they would go if she insisted, and she was going to insist. She said she wanted it to be as nice as any Christmas they’d ever had. He knew it was going to break her heart not to have his father in attendance, so he was going to make sure his father was there after all.

•  •  •

They went together on Christmas morning to see him. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays. Small clusters of visitors amassed at every sitting area, and many of the rooms were packed, with an air of festivity. The nurses and orderlies were less formal with his mother than with the adult children and grandkids who flew in from far-flung places, but they were also more circumspect. It must not have been convenient for them that she came every day, particularly as she was a career nurse who wasn’t afraid to assert herself.

They found his father asleep in his bed, his mouth hanging open. They didn’t wake him but sat in chairs on either side of the bed waiting for him to come to on his own. Connell got the creepy feeling that they were looking
at his corpse. Just as he was about to reach out and shake his father awake, his mother did it herself. His father opened his eyes without startling and began babbling hushed syllables. He lifted his hand slowly to scratch his nose, as if moving through an invisible viscous substance.

Connell’s mother had tried to prepare him for how much his father had deteriorated since summer. When they transferred his father to the wheelchair, his father couldn’t push himself up off the bed without help.

After his father was in the chair, Connell watched his knee for some vestige of the gesture that had bound them over the years. It had begun when he was young, when his father would throw his arms around him and declare, “What a good boy I have here.” Early on in the illness, whenever Connell hugged him, his father squeezed back and said simply, “Good boy.” When his father began to lose his strength, the squeezes turned to pats; when he lost his coordination, the pats became pounding slaps. “Just rub,” Connell said once, as they clutched. “Rub. Now just keep your hands still for a second, like this.” Then his father started to slur his words, so that all he could say clearly was “Good, good, good,” and then eventually that “good” gave way to an inarticulate sound—but Connell knew what it meant, even if no one else could have interpreted it. Then Connell would lean down to initiate a hug, and his father would reach up from the couch, until eventually his father didn’t reach up anymore but just patted his own knee. The final stage came when Connell noticed that his father patted his knee whenever Connell was even in the room. Now, though, in the wheelchair, he didn’t move at all.

Connell wheeled him to the big picture window that looked out on the lawn. Remnant clusters of white from a recent snowfall dotted the landscape. It was too cold to take him out on the veranda. His mother had not mentioned the possibility of taking him home for Christmas, and seeing his condition, he knew why. He was undaunted, though. He would lift his father up into the car and carry him up the stairs and give his mother a little of her life back for a day.

They had brought a couple of presents, which they opened for him. The muted quality to the exchange, the way it was over in less than two minutes, made it feel as if they had come empty-handed. His mother had
had them dress his father for the occasion, in the gray knit sweater he liked to wear on Christmas, with the band of snowflakes around the middle, and a collared shirt and dress slacks, but it looked like the outfit of a much larger man had been put on him by accident. Connell hadn’t had the buffer of incremental change to reduce the shock of seeing him swimming in it.