You're Not You (10 page)

By midnight it was obvious that the night had gathered steam into a genuine bender. I wasn’t sure anymore if I was really having fun or just simulating it, but either way I was glad to be out of a quiet house, among people and loud music. Sometime around one, as I watched Jill and Nathan play a game of pool, Nathan reminded me I had to get up early for work. I just snorted. Even I could hear it was a hateful sound.
Don’t be afraid to make your needs clear to a caregiver. Now is not the time for shyness
. Something bitter that had edged around me all night took hold, and I gave up my virtuous pretense and said, “Look, I basically just live this woman’s life with her. For her, whatever. And fuck it, I can do that with a hangover.”

“I thought you liked her,” Jill said. She took a shot and missed. The end of their pool game had been going on for half an hour.

“I think I do,” I said, leaning against the table. “As far as I know, anyway. She seems pretty nice.”

“So what’s the problem?”

I watched Nathan’s cue ball sail smoothly into the corner pocket near my hand. I didn’t know quite what to say to that.
I don’t know what will happen to this woman
, I could have explained.
I don’t know what I’ve agreed to
. Instead I told Jill we had to get out of there before I had anything else to drink.

But news of our departure was received as an invitation. People trailed along after our cab, and a moment after we’d walked into our
apartment and turned on the fans to cool it down, we heard the familiar roar of our friends’ decrepit cars in the driveway. They came in with fresh packs of cigarettes and a new case of beer they’d gone to Maple Bluff to buy since the Madison liquor stores closed at nine, and when someone has gone to that sort of trouble you have to let them in for at least a token beer. A pizza delivery was set in motion. The television and the stereo were turned on; Jill moved the trash can to the middle of the room for empties, and scattered around tin ashtrays stolen from a fast-food joint. We were settling in, and I had no intention of removing myself to get some sleep. The last thing I remembered was Jill coming out of the kitchen toward where I lay sprawled across three people on the couch. She was holding out a vodka tonic in a red plaid thermos in one ringed hand and smiling kindly down at me.

W
HEN MY ALARM WENT
off I prayed it was early but it wasn’t. In the shower I leaned my head against the wall and wondered if I could call it off. The smell of stale cigarettes came off my wet hair. I was in terrible shape, nauseated, with a headache that felt like white sheets of light flashing behind my eyes. It was either drink a beer, which Kate might smell, or throw up before I left. I chose to throw up. It helped a little. Then I managed to brush my teeth and shuffle out to my car. On the way out I saw that Nate was sleeping on the couch, sprawled with one foot still on the ground. The trash can stood in the middle of the room, filled with beer cans, and the ashtrays had overflowed onto the coffee table.

As I drove I tried to remember if I had called Liam. I didn’t think I had—Jill wouldn’t have let me, but then I might have sneaked away to do it. No. She had bullied me out of it. For a moment I was awash with gratitude for her, almost weepy at the way she looked out for me sometimes. You were always better off not calling. Why did I never remember that?

It felt okay, even appropriate, being hungover on the east side, but the farther west I drove toward Kate’s house, the more overtly respectable the city became. My Honda puttered along next to gleaming minivans and BMWs and if I had been able to lift my head I would have noted how expensive and sleek everyone was. You could bet that no one else on this side of town had wet hair knotted in a rubber band they’d taken off the neighbor’s newspaper. I turned into their neighborhood, wondering as I drove how long she and Evan had been in their house, or in Madison, for that matter.

It really was a pretty neighborhood, even if it did lack funk. I didn’t think anyone with the kind of money they had would want a neighborhood like mine anyway. Especially not if you were trying to maneuver a wheelchair around steep staircases and honey-colored but uneven floorboards. Everyone kept saying how lucky it was that Kate was married, but I thought it was lucky that she had all that money. Who knew what the equipment and caregivers cost? At least they had no kids to worry about. Maybe they’d meant to, till they’d found out, or maybe they’d never wanted any.
It is important, though certainly not easy, not to let children take a backseat to the needs of the patient
.

I parked the car and left the windows down. Nothing was going to happen to my car in a neighborhood of BMWs. I sat there in the driver’s seat for a second, finding the warmth soothing for my headache. I didn’t have to stay. I wasn’t locked into this. They hadn’t said a word about the facts of her illness, what I was really signing on for, so they couldn’t blame me if I left now that I knew. I could deal with their disappointment, if they had any. I wouldn’t see them anywhere, any more than I would run into Liam’s wife at Bar Association meetings.

I walked slowly up their driveway, my head pounding with each step. I thought it would be better once I got in there: I’d sit in one of their big armchairs, breathing the cool air that smelled faintly of lemons or the bowl of pears. I’d file some papers and sit very still. What a relief to walk into their living room. It was so calm and still that I thought I might even try and spend a little time in here today, lay my cheek against the cold belly of the stone girl.

Kate was in the kitchen. She had a book on a tray affixed to her chair. A frame held the book open, and there was a little mechanical hook along the bottom of the pages. There was some sort of sensor involved, so that when she moved her head a certain way, the hook turned the page. She’d shown me the device the day before. Kate glanced up and seemed about to smile, but then she looked a little stricken. Obviously I looked worse than I’d thought.

She said something, what I thought was, “Are you okay?”

Embarrassed to admit I wasn’t fighting my way through the flu or malaria, I nodded. The nod hurt.

“You look jaundiced,” she went on. It took me a second to get that
word. Then I smiled a little when I picked up on it. It wasn’t the easiest word in the world.

“I’m okay,” I said. She nodded toward the cupboard and when I opened it I saw a big bottle of ibuprofen. I tipped out two and she raised her eyebrows at me, so I shook out another and took them with a glass of Coke. She shook her hair out of her face and nodded toward the book apparatus and said something.

“Should I take it off?” I asked. I was stalling. I knew perfectly well she’d asked me to remove it. “Or maybe you’d like to read for a while and give me something to do in the meantime.” A nice easy day around the house would be a godsend.

“For starters, I was planning on the farmers’ market,” she said apologetically. “We’re having people over tonight.”

Before I could stifle it I looked at her in horror: It was unspeakably sunny and hot and the market would be crammed with people. Why the hell did she need me so early on weekends? Nothing truly needed to be done right then. And where was Evan, anyway? Wasn’t the farmers’ market a couples kind of thing?

“Oh, the market,” I said. “Uh-huh. Hey, what about that filing and insurance stuff? I could do that first.”

Kate gave me an appraising look before she spoke. “No,” she said. “We’ll do this, please.” She backed up the chair and rotated, turning it toward the bathroom. Just before she turned the chair away from me she said, “Late night, huh.”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Okay. Fine. But I’m not rearranging my day around your parties, Bec.”

My first thought was pure, pissy defensiveness. I could have walked out right then and there. What business was it of hers what I did when I left? I wasn’t so bad off that I couldn’t slap some pointless blusher on and hand over money for a bunch of parsley at the market. I watched her roll down the hallway toward the bathroom and stayed where I was, thinking seriously about whether I wanted to deal with her anymore. I thought I liked her, maybe even quite a bit, but she seemed imperious right now. I wondered if she was like this a lot.

I took another gulp of my Coke and glanced at my purse slung over
the back of the chair. She hadn’t made up her mind about me either, it suddenly dawned on me, and I could tell that if I was going to leave, today was probably the day to do it and get it over with. But I was too ashamed to act on it—her expression had had none of its usual humor when she told me to get it together. I pictured that shiny, unreadable fall of blond hair as she’d rolled out of the kitchen. She was waiting in the bathroom, calm and detached, idly wondering if she had to interview people all over again.

She was probably debating whether to fire me. My awkwardness around her, my total lack of experience and confidence, seemed all the more vivid through my hangover: After several tries yesterday I still wasn’t very good at helping her in the bathroom—she had to tell me to wipe her harder, which seemed to cost her as much to say as it did me to hear. Twice I had lifted her so badly that she had had to tell me, her voice urgent and unintelligibly fast, to put her down before I dropped her. I splashed nutrition shake on her clothes because I looked the other way when I poured it. No doubt when she compared me to Hillary, who’d been with her over a year, I seemed even worse than I was.

I went to the end of the hall. She was at the door to the bathroom, her chair pivoted so she could back in. When she saw me still standing several yards away she spoke, knowing, I was sure, that I would have to come to her to hear her. So I did. I started walking, interested to know what she was saying, before I even thought about it. As I came closer, fighting down another lurch of nausea, I saw her break into a grin.

“It’s just a hangover,” she said. “I used to run races with hangovers.”

“Races?” I clarified, repeating after her.

She nodded, her face softening. “But you can take your time with the makeup until the meds kick in.”

“Thank god,” I said, and she laughed for real this time, sending a rush of relief through me so fast it startled me.

As I did her mascara I looked at her face, at the tiny lines that bracketed her wide mouth, and the freckles that showed across her nose. After a while she began to talk, and I paused and watched her so I could understand.

“I kind of envy you,” she admitted sheepishly. “I’m too old for it
now anyway, but I miss just going out to a bunch of places, having a drink, and going to the next.” I tried to imagine a night out with the Kate of ten years ago, knocking back shots and shouting in noisy bars, and for a second something plummeted in me. I had never been very good at facing up to the fact that some things were unfixable.

Her eyebrows were a little mussed from when I’d taken off the book turner, and I smoothed them, one at a time, with my fingertip.

“I don’t know if it’s as fun as you’re imagining,” I said.

I FELT A LOT
better by the time we reached the market. The stands circled the grounds of the state capitol, and people joined the throng moving counterclockwise along the sidewalk, ducking in and out of the horde to stop at the vendors. The tables were piled with food: orange carrots with plumes of thready green leaves; yellow, purple, and green beans; early scarlet strawberries piled in wooden boxes; blocks of white cheese and butter. I’d catch the scent of basil from one table, smoked trout from the next. I leaned over a stack of spinach and realized I could still smell the dirt on the roots.

We kept near the lawn, so that Kate could pause her chair easily while I darted across to the tables. My arms were weighed down with plastic bags of radishes, strawberries, and bundles of skinny, blushing rhubarb stalks, fresh herbs, soft-skinned garlic. After a while I gave in to the slowness of the crowd and it was kind of fun. For one thing, it wasn’t my money, so if she pointed me toward a stand for goat cheese in herbed olive oil or venison sausage, I never had to count the bills in my pocket. I looked over quarts of strawberries much more carefully than I ever would have for myself. At home I usually ate them standing over the trash can and spitting any bad parts out, but now it seemed extremely important that each berry be perfect.

The other perk was the samples, which I made it my business to research. Cheese, sausage, sweet peas, smoked fish. At a stand that sold beeswax candles, I took a spoonful of honey and then glanced over my shoulder at her. My constant nibbling was rude, I realized, and I held up the plastic spoon to her. She shook her head, but she was smiling.

Halfway around the capitol Kate slowed her chair and nodded toward
a little café. There was nothing on the list that corresponded so I bent down to see what she wanted.

“Pastry,” she said. “You really need one.”

I watched her from across the street as I waited in line for a chocolate croissant. I felt I shouldn’t look away from her, as though she were a toddler in a stroller. It was probably safe. No one was going to harass her, and I had her purse with all the money in it. She was sitting near the street, just out of range of most of the people, with big tortoiseshell sunglasses covering her eyes. She was dressed in a crisp blue shirt, a light skirt and sandals, and a silver bracelet that flashed in the sun. Her head was tilted to one side as she watched people go past. They glanced at her and then away, their body language showing that they didn’t want to stare, or else they smiled at her to show some kind of solidarity. I watched the smilers to see how they came off. I knew that’s what I would be, grinning away. Even from here they seemed a little fatuous.

When we got back to Kate’s house it was still empty. “What’s Evan up to today?” I asked. I was getting her into her wheelchair in the driveway. I had to reach into the car, bumping my head several times and making her wince each time, and position her as when I got her out of bed: situate her legs and feet, bring her up to her feet, and then pivot.