Everything We Ever Wanted

Page 23

That was in September. Six months later, in February, James didn’t check in from work at 6 p.m. as usual. Sylvie had been annoyed. Was he ignoring her because she’d brought up the affair again the previous night? Was he punishing her? It wasn’t funny.
The minutes ticked by. Maybe what she’d said the night before had been a turning point, shoving him over the edge. Maybe he no longer cared about holding things together. Who was he with right now? What was he doing? Her heart pounded. She tried to picture him places. She called his cell phone again and again, but there was no answer. The more time passed, the more her panic spiraled. He was out with someone, doing something floridly awful. All of the feelings she’d tried to contain were urgently present. I thought you said you’d let that go, James had said to her at the party the night before. But of course she couldn’t let it go. How could he not understand that? How could he just brush it off? It altered the whole landscape of her life.
When the phone finally rang, the reality of the situation caught her off guard. A cleaning woman in his office had found James collapsed on the executive bathroom floor. He didn’t have his ID on him, and because it was after hours no one knew who he was. Luckily, a doctor in the ER was a friend and had recognized him; he’d sent a nurse to call Sylvie.
At first, she thought it was part of the ruse. Her mind was so fixed in one direction that it was hard to switch gears. She couldn’t turn from scorned rage to … to this. To panic. Concern. Fear for his life. She kept saying to the nurse, “I’m sorry, what?” The nurse had had to repeat what had happened three times, maybe four, before she started to understand.
They’d all rushed to the hospital to be with him. They had to sit in the ER waiting room for the first few hours. Even though it was the middle of the night, the waiting room was crowded, full of screaming babies and sallow-skinned old people and a shoeless, sour-smelling man. Charles sat next to Sylvie, his back straight, his hands folded in his lap. Joanna picked at a loose thread on her sweater until she’d unraveled almost an entire row. Scott slid a pair of padded headphones over his ears and bounced silently to what he called music.
At one point, Scott removed his headphones and asked Sylvie if he could borrow her cell phone. His battery had died, and he wanted to call a friend to see if they were still meeting up tomorrow. Sylvie stared at him. He’d left the music on; she heard a pounding bass through the headphones, someone’s voice pattering tonelessly. Could he really think that far ahead? Could he really worry about something as trivial as a social obligation he had to keep? Was this the kind of kid she’d raised, someone who thought his ailing father was an inconvenience? James had bent over backward to be a good father to Scott. He was still bending over backward, even though Scott barely noticed. And this was what he got for it?
Scott noted her look of disgust and raised his hands in surrender. “Jesus. Forget it.”
Sylvie couldn’t stand to be next to him for one more minute. She stood up, straightened her skirt, and stormed to the vending machine area. She sat in a phone kiosk, picked up the receiver, and listened to the dial tone clang in her ear. She felt like yelling at the operator when she interrupted, demanding that Sylvie insert fifty cents.
Finally, a doctor came and retrieved Sylvie. James had collapsed because of an artery leading to his brain, he explained. The artery had been widening over time, and it had burst. He’d had an aneurysm and was now bleeding quite severely.
They were going to treat the aneurysm by feeding a catheter into a blood vessel in James’s groin, slowly pushing it through the aorta, up into the brain’s main artery, and creating a clot. They were going to excavate him. They were going to dig a trench.
“Isn’t there an easier way?” she asked, mortified. The doctor shook his head and told her that he and his team had talked and evaluated, and this was their best shot at saving him. He handed her a consent form for the surgery. “It’s in your hands,” he said.
She signed it, practically threw the clipboard back at him, and then said she needed a minute.
The doctor slid the curtain shut. Sylvie peered down at James. He looked so damn old and small. And even though she should have concentrated all her energy on what the doctors were about to do to him and that she might, possibly, lose him, in that moment, the only thing she could think about was what she’d brought up the night before. What he’d done. All she could think about was what the woman’s name was. She wanted to shake him awake and ask him.
She hated herself for even thinking it. She hated herself for how numb she was, too—numb to fear, numb to the possibilities. She knew she should be sobbing at his bedside, cooing soothing words to him, making promises for their lives, but her anger pushed those parts of her away. She shoved out of James’s curtained-off area and went into the ICU waiting room. It was smaller and more intimate than the vast holding pen of the ER, with a stained-glass window and church pew shoved into the corner, a crucifix of Jesus on the far wall. Scott was lying on the twin bed the hospital put out in case visitors wanted to rest. His head nestled on the flat, dingy pillow.
When Scott saw her, he sat up, laying a copy of Maxim on his lap. She stood over him quivering, taking in his enormous, filthy jeans, his headphones, that permanent apathetic look on his face. James might have been an inert, unresponsive receptacle for her anger, but Scott wasn’t.
“Did you see Dad?” Scott asked. “Is he okay?”
“You could at least brush those knots out of your hair once in a while,” she exploded. “And put on something that covers up all those tattoos. I don’t want to be seen with you. You look like a criminal.”
And then she whirled around and took the stairs all the way to the main level. In the lobby, nurses pushed heavily pregnant women in wheelchairs. Elderly people dragged their IV poles outside for some fresh morning air. A man, woman, and two kids pushed by her for the elevator, holding a big bouquet of flowers and smiling. Sylvie smiled back at them as if she wasn’t going through what she was going through. As if the person she was visiting was suffering from something minor, too.
S ylvie realized she had been leaning against the upstairs hallway console table for quite some time, clutching a small jade bear sculpture between her hands. Scott bumped around on the other side of the bathroom door, getting ready for a shower. It was silent outside now; the biblical rain must have stopped. She thought of a phrase her grandfather sometimes used to say—apres moi, le deluge. Some French guy coined it, some great leader. It meant that after he was dead, he didn’t care what mess he left behind for his country to clean up. France could be flooded or raided or crumble, and it would be okay with him—it was someone else’s problem.
Scott pulled the nozzle to start the shower. Sylvie shut off the hall light and slipped to her room.
Chapter 10
I t was clear the following day, as though the world had never known rain. Joanna went out into her front yard and looked around. The world had transformed overnight. It was now green, earthy. The sun threw heat onto her shoulders, and the wind smelled like lilacs. A UPS truck trundled down the street, the brown-suited driver’s knees and forearms bare, having shed his wintry long underwear.
Joanna called her mother and told her that Charles would be coming to Maryland, too, something that still surprised and puzzled her. Why did he want to come all of a sudden? Why the sudden interest? He’d never come before. She’d helped Catherine move to Maryland by herself, while Charles was off on some work project. She’d never burdened him to accompany her to Catherine’s medical procedures. Part of her was embarrassed to show Charles the poky little house her mother had inherited. It was bad enough bringing him into the splitlevel in Lionville, although Charles was very diplomatic about it, never remarking about the house one way or another. Another part of her just figured he wasn’t very interested in going to Maryland, in getting to know her mother. Which was fine, too. Catherine was a handful; she and Charles didn’t need to bond.
But what was wrong with Joanna—didn’t she want him to come? Her mother was, thank goodness, too distracted to detect anything was off. She’d just spoken to a friend at the sail club, a man named Robert, and was trying to get Joanna to promise that they’d make a trip there the night before the biopsy. “I’ve told him all about you,” Catherine pressed. “I’d like you to meet him.”
“Okay, okay,” Joanna answered reluctantly, wondering if Catherine and this Robert guy were dating. She’d never considered the idea of her mother having a boyfriend before.
After she hung up, she walked around the house, antsy yet aimless. Her unopened boxes mocked her, a thin layer of dust on each. The packing tape that sealed them shut was beginning to peel away from the cardboard. What did Joanna own that she wasn’t using? What if she opened a box and found something unexpected inside, something that had been wiped from her identity? Something that reminded her, maybe, of how wonderful her life used to be? Only, had it been?
A few photo albums had been unpacked and were now sitting on a bookshelf. Joanna pulled them down and sat on the couch with the stack in her lap. The spine cracked as she opened the first page of the wedding book. There they were, Joanna in her silk sheath dress that now hung in plastic in the upstairs closet, Charles in a tuxedo with his hair pushed back off his face. They stood in the gazebo in Roderick’s backyard, white flowers all around them.
He looked happy, and so did she. Except for that one shaky moment where Joanna’s mother ordered her not to screw it up, Joanna really had been happy that day. She picked up the other book that showed photos of moments before their marriage. First were pages and pages of the trip they’d taken to Jamaica before they’d gotten engaged. After a series of shots of the dazzling pool and the thatched-roof tiki huts, there was a picture of Joanna and Charles sitting on a hammock, doodling pictures in the guest journal they’d found in their room. Next was a picture of Charles holding a literal log of marijuana, at least a foot of solidly packed weed. A waiter had procured it for them for a pithily small sum of money, maybe forty or fifty dollars. They’d giggled about how easy it had been to get it, how natural their butler seemed when presenting it to them, how their families, if they knew, would be horrified that they’d done this. Well, Charles’s family. Joanna’s mother would probably ask if she could have some.
“Watch, we’ll end up in a Jamaican prison,” Charles had joked. Back in the real world, he never smoked pot, never even joints that sometimes circulated at parties. But there he did, getting so stoned he could barely move. He was different in Jamaica, not bound to the rules of his life. She was probably different, too.
Next in the album were photos of their first Christmas together, just this past year. They’d been married for three months; Charles’s father hadn’t died yet. They hadn’t moved yet either; the photos were from Charles’s apartment in the city. She’d gotten him a digital SLR camera, and he’d taken countless photos of her that day, holding up every present she’d received. A copy of the New York Times, symbolizing the weekend subscription he bought her. A running jacket and matching shorts, both pale pink. And then, one of the last photos, lacy black underwear and a matching bra. Her smile was wobbly, not sure if she should take it seriously or not, as she had considered wearing a sports bra under her wedding gown. While other women pranced around their Jamaican resort in string bikinis, thongs up their asses, Joanna wore a two-piece Speedo with thick straps and a very concealing bottom. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her body, she just wasn’t an exhibitionist. Fancy underwear always made her feel like an actor in a bad play. She thought Charles understood this about her.