Breakdown Lane, The (26 page)

I tried to jam my pillow over my ears, stuffing it around my head like a life preserver, so that I wouldn’t hear them crying, all that long night. I know Caroline finally went to sleep, but I heard the coffeemaker click on at about four in the morning, and Mom and Gram talking.

“…be back after she has a little…”

“…imagine him being able to…”

“…so foolish, because of her age. It frightens her.”

At one point, then, Mom sort of shouted, “It frightens me, too, Hannah! Just because I’m an adult doesn’t mean that I don’t know I’m going to live my life alone, when the kids grow up, or with some kindly helper I pay to feed me. I want what I have left while I have it, Hannah—”

“Hush, Julie, you’ll wake the children,” Gram said. I wondered why she was still there. We were sort of the Holiday Inn of the Fucked Up. You could drop in anytime. I got up and sort of curled up next to the crack in my bedroom door. “There’s Cathy—”

“You know that I want Cathy to fall in love and have her own family one day. Hannah, I know how you feel about…how Cathy is, but she’s the dearest friend….”

“I won’t argue with you there. I admit I had my concerns about her influence on the children.”

“Be quiet. She’ll hear you. I heard her come in.”

“But her door is closed tight.”

“She’s been the most loyal friend I’ve ever had.”

“I see that.”

“But she’s going to want her own life, and perhaps another child. She’s only thirty-five, Hannah. And Gabe will grow up and go to school….”

“Every one of us is afraid of being alone, Julie,” Gram said, and I heard the clink of her spoon as she added more sugar.

“It’s one thing being alone if you can travel, or go to lectures, or whatever it would be that I’d do. It’s another being alone if you fall and have to lie in your own excrement until the mail carrier comes.”

“We’ll get an alarm, Julie, and a beeper, when the need for that arises, and it may never arise. You might never have another bad stretch again.”

“But I might. I had a really severe onset of this, Hannah. I have to face the fact that in a few years, I might be using a wheelchair.”

“Julie! Let’s burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“And, Hannah, more than that. I’m not some kind of saint, but really, right now you should be with your son. I don’t want to come between you and Leo. I don’t want you to think that being loyal to the children and me means ruling Leo out of your life….”

“We won’t, Julie. When things settle down. Right now, Gabe is having a very hard time dealing with what Leo did to his grandchildren and to you. Julie, remember. You’ve been married so long to our son. You were a pip-squeak, you and him, under the canopy. I’ve known you all of your adult life. You’re not like a daughter-in-law to me, Julie, but like my own—”

“I know, but this has completely messed up the plan we had for you. Your friends, your traveling. All of it.”

At some point, I must have fallen asleep. I dreamed of Tian, in Con-nie’s kitchen that day, saying she felt like a princess of America. But she had grown taller—well, tall for a Thai person—and had short hair cut to turn under and was wearing one of my mother’s jackets
. Gabe, she said, taking my hand and patting me on the arm, how good to see you. What grade are you in now?
And I was still the same age, still fifteen. In the dream, I kept trying to stand up taller, willing myself to be taller and more imposing, so she’d see me as a man, but she was walking away, telling me how great it was to have seen me again, that I should do good in school. That she’d see me again…but that wasn’t a dream. It was really Caroline, crouched down next to me on the floor.

“Wake up, Gabe,” she said. “I want to go while she’s asleep and Aurora’s asleep. Dad is outside.”

I got up and walked past her to the bathroom, and took my time, brushing my teeth. I knew the silence would drive her nuts, but I also didn’t trust what I might say.

“Gabe,” she whispered, outside the door. “Come on out here. I want to give you the number of their house and the Quality Inn, so you can call me if Mom needs me. Not like I won’t come back here to say good-bye to her, but she’s too upset now. I don’t want to upset her any more.”

I threw the door open and Caroline almost fell in. I walked past her as if she were invisible. “Goddamnit!” she said. “You don’t have to be so rude.” I went into my bedroom, the door of which did not lock, and got into my bed. As zonked as I might have looked, my mind was banging like an engine opened up full bore. Should I try to talk sense to her? Beg her? Curse her? What would ultimately be best for us, all of us, for her to stay here and resent the hell out of Mom, get pregnant, smoke dope, whatever? Or would she settle down after he left and stopped filling her head with pictures of the glories of the Happy Valley in spring. I could imagine the Happy Valley under three feet of snow was probably a pretty grim and isolated place. There was also the matter of what kept spooling through my mind, the pictures of her and me huddled in the bus station in West Springfield, Massachusetts, wondering if we’d get out of town before they found the gun, the two of us sitting pressed up next to each other as if a storm had broken over our heads. Just her and me. My sister. Irish twins, they called us, born in the same year. Another part of me wanted to remind her of that, of the fact that she was not only leaving Mom, who would always be more loyal to her than Leo, but me. Me. Who saved her, who followed her all the way to the road across from the Breakdown Lane sign. Caroline, I wanted to say, you’re a fool, but you’re part of…I secured the pillow around my head, harder. “Gabe,” I heard her say. “Gabe? Aren’t you even going to say good-bye to me?” I wouldn’t let myself speak. “Gabe, you’re my brother,” she said, and I could tell by the break in her voice that she was crying. “Not everybody is the same. Okay, maybe you’re a bigger, stronger person than I am. But I’m not evil, Gabe. I’m not mean. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt her feelings. Mom’s feelings. That’s why I’m going, partly. It’s not just for me, Gabe.” Like, a sixteenth of my brain knew she was telling the truth. Finally, after what seemed a couple of hundred years, I felt her reach out and put her little hand on the back of my head. “I’ll write to you, Gabe. I’ll call you from the hotel. You’ll always be my bro, Gabe. I’m sorry I called you a ’tard. You’re the smartest person I know.” Oh, shit, I thought, this cannot be happening. It was some, like, surreal fucking joke. I could imagine how kids would act. I didn’t want to go there. To the Steiners, the award for best transformation from an ordinary family in the lower forty-eight. After a couple of minutes, I got my mouth to stop shaking and lifted my head. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to her.

But she was already gone.

Caroline had not been much of a presence in our lives after Leo left for the first time. She’d made sure of that. But when she left for good, she was an absence. Though I was sure (almost hopeful) that I would become symptomatic (a little mental sludge can’t hurt once in a while), I did not. I felt great. In fact, I’ve never had as bad an episode again as I had around the time of the divorce, which is probably no coincidence.

My mind remained brutally lucid. I could see my Caroline’s pixie-ish upper lip as I gathered the detritus left behind by her hurricane departure: barrettes with tendrils of blonde hair; notes folded into those complicated, eight-sided paper pyramids you can only manage to construct when you’re an adolescent; a half-empty bottle of Eau Leonie (mine). I could see her, hair twisted and pinned up, wearing the things she’d left in her closet—her long black formal skirt, her parka, the Mary Janes that made her feet look so dainty and trim, that she, of course, hated. I boxed them up, first pressing each to my face, as I had boxed up my mother’s cardigans after her funeral. But I realized then I’d nowhere to send them. So I gave them to Hannah, not really wanting to know Leo’s post-office-box number.

My sense of my own worthlessness was past measuring. I don’t know if it’s possible to put yourself inside the body of a woman who’s been ditched by her husband, her child, and at least some big part of her health. Perhaps what had animated the marionette was the sense of being Julie-who-was-wife-and-mother-and-writer. And then all but one of the strings was snipped. One hand moved, jerkily, up and down over my keyboard. Gabe was there, and Aury-now-Rory. But I couldn’t give myself to them, or only sporadically, and in bursts of affection, rather than a dependable level of maternal steadiness. I would look at them and see Caro’s wrinkled nose cross my little girl’s face. I would hear some note in Gabe’s laugh that was hers and want to shut myself away from him. And so I behaved…like shit. Rory would get a stack of Golden Books one night, a rude wave from me the next to go away and let me sleep. One week, I’d be emptying the book bag each night with Gabe and going over his calendar. The next week I didn’t notice whether he came home. Jennet said some of this might come from the lesions that either were or were not cratering away in my brain tissue, crumbling the tissue surrounding my nerves like burned toast.

Gabe was like a rock. Actually, he was like a stone. He showed almost no range of emotion or motion. He moved like a weighted diver traversing the ocean floor.

But he always made sure his little sister got home.

He always made sure she got fed and to bed, whether Cath was working late or not. I took him so for granted. He knew it.

With Cathy, there was almost a shame, a smell of failure. A sense that Abby Sun would never leave Cathy as Caroline had left me. She greeted me each morning with a strong shoulder hug I had to force myself to return with a pat of my hand. It was not my finest hour. These were not my finest six hundred hours. The perpetual dull pain and intermittent bursts of flame along my legs and the tremors in my hands and brain that made me have to S.T.O.P. and T.H.I.N.K. to type drove me mad with rage. The inability to recover words I knew as well as my own name—and, more than once, when someone answered the telephone, I had to pause and reflect before I could say my own name—had the same effect. I knew that it was necessary for me to lie down each afternoon, and that when I had my bursts of energy or creativity, and “overdid,” I paid later with hours of falling asleep during conversations or talking like a drunk. I took Valium to stop the jits and the rampant anxiety—there were times I was certain I could see Caroline lying dead in the Vermont mud, knocked off a bike by a drunk driver, while Leo and Joyous toasted each other with fucking grapes they’d stomped themselves and congratulated Leo on his excellent sperm count. I took antidepressants to thrust me out of bed in the morning, or I’d have lain, without washing my face, for days, past caring how I looked or smelled. The children never seemed to notice, and though Cath made tentative hints about the importance of getting up and at it every day (“If you get dressed and showered, Jules, everything thereafter can legitimately be considered a nap…”), it seemed so much easier just to brush my teeth and haul my computer up onto the bed. Eventually, Cathy or Hannah would wash the sheets.

Did I think I had this kind of sloth coming to me because I was a poor lady who had MS and had been dumped?

Uh. Yes.

I showed Cathy my poem “Soup in Winter,” on which I’d worked for two months, counting out dum-da-dum-da syllables. I was kind of proud of it.

Soup in Winter

Cathy looked at me and said, “Well, it’s not that it’s really bad writing. But, um, the message is that love stinks, right?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

But I had to agree. Damn her!

“It doesn’t necessarily, Julie. It’s not written that you’ll never fall in love again. You’re a young woman—”

“Oh, please! ”
I brayed at her, my dearest friend. “I mean, women my age can’t get a date if they’re millionaires. How about if they’re broke, have neurotic children and a debilitating deteriorative disease? I think that describes the dream date of the millennium.”

Then I pounded on the table until my hands hurt and apologized profusely.

“I think this thing is getting to my brain, literally. I never used to be so prone to, well, ups and downs of mood,” I said, expecting Cathy to hurry to deny that. When she didn’t, a cold black shaft opened inside me.

It was entirely possible that I was having what they call “cognitive” issues—in other words, brain damage.

With Jennet, I worked it out that I somehow believed Leo was to blame for having leached away my health by leaving me behind. I somehow seemed to think that if Leo would come back, I’d behave like a tape played in reverse—all the strings would connect again if Leo would love me. And yet, much as I loved Leo, my fantasies about Leo were not sexual but homicidal. I pictured him coming to me, frozen and bleeding, and my closing the door against him in a blizzard. I actually dreamed that, so it wasn’t my fault. Jennet said that images of Leo as cold and threatening were not bizarre, but rather ordinary. But also, I would take out his letters to me, our honeymoon scrapbook, and stare into the faces of those smug, slim, utterly sensual young people and think, Where is the clue? Where is the seed that grew into the Whole Holistic Leo? His pinch of arrogance? His touch of impatience? I was a dozen times more arrogant and impatient any day of the week, even back then. But I never, not ever, would have slipped through my wedding band and fled. As closely as Jennet questioned me, trying to probe for the soft spot, the place that admitted a certain immune deficiency in my marriage, I could not honestly find one for her. Gabillions of people have midlife wackies and come home, wagging their tails behind them, I alleged. No, Jennet would argue. That was not true. Those who take off on extended flings are practicing divorce, as a suicide practices with shallow cuts. But he had been such a wonderful father, I would counter. So were many wife beaters, Jennet came back at me. Many never laid a finger on their children.

“Okay!” I shouted at her one day. “I knew I was being a wuss, letting him go on photography vacations! I knew he was juggling with torches and he was going to drop one on me! But if I’d forbidden it, he’d just have left sooner, right? He’d just have speeded up the whole thing and booked out.”

“And would that have been the worst thing that ever happened?” she asked softly.

“I loved him!” I cried. “I was used to him! We were a team. Are you suggesting that a nice clean cut, sooner, between the children and their father would have been better than the good times we had—and we did still have good times—right up until the last trip?”

“Yes,” Jennet said. “I am.”

“Why?”

“Because the way it happened was sordid and deceitful and, for both Gabe and Caroline, has created lacerations that will remain open for years. Hate to be the one to say it.”

“And you blame me?”

“Wait,” Jennet held up a hand. “I didn’t say that. In fact, I don’t blame you for closing your eyes to what seems obvious to me, because you’re not me, and I wasn’t the one married to him. Behavior that starts gradually, the way you describe Leo’s, becomes customary, and anything customary seems preferable to something awful and alien. Like living alone. Like losing your daughter, too. But making a pastiche of Leo and your health is going magical, Julieanne. Some coincidences are coincidences. In fact, though I don’t want to offend whatever religious beliefs you have, I think most coincidences are…coincidental. In other words, if they hadn’t happened…if you asked God for proof of His existence and an eagle
did not
fly overhead, well, that would have simply been a day you didn’t remember.”

“So this leaves me?”

“With a lot of anger work to do.”

“Oh that sounds so psychie-wyckie. Anger work.”

“Well, it might. But you’ve got to acknowledge to your kids that you’re absolutely furious with their father, stop telling them to ‘respect’ him, that they want to ‘love’ him one day. That’s their choice. And right now, while you can help them honor their memories, their dad has snapped his cap. And you have to stop thinking of yourself as a victim. And stop looking like a victim, in baggy pants and sweatshirts. Get a life, Julieanne.”

Well, it was easy for her to say.

Talking to Matthew, there’d been that. Little Matthew MacDougall, my secret seventh-grade crush, now a big-shot surgeon in Boston. I was flattered at first that he’d read, much less liked, my poems.

But it wasn’t as much fun after Leo’s and my divorce. Talking about my woes with someone who was smart and funny and (tragically, but I hadn’t known her) widowed felt as if I were on a par with Leo. He’d lost his wife in a car accident that his child thankfully survived. Better yet, he obviously was smitten with his quarter-century-old memories of me. It had been a kind of vengeance. Harmless vengeance. You got a Pilates instructor who makes jam? I got a
facial surgeon,
a real doctor, not a dentist! He rebuilds jaws instead of picking berries. He makes baby’s faces whole instead of doing the Hundred.

But I didn’t really “have” Matthew, or want him.

I remembered Matt MacDougall as an absurdly short, almost elfin boy—I’d been tall for my age, and dancing with him was like talking to the part in his hair—who worshipped me through mournful aquamarine eyes and let me copy his math papers. Over the years, when a notice came round for one of our high school reunions, I would read of him vaguely—he hadn’t been a crush. His wife, Susan, who’d died when their child was just a toddler, had been the first person from our class to be lost, except in Vietnam. On my stationery,
JSG,
which I now used for grocery lists, I’d sent him a note. Though the publication and the huge check (fifty dollars) of my poem in
Pen, Inc.
, had been a thrill, I wondered why a doctor read a “little” (really little) poetry magazine.

In fact, I wondered why he wrote and asked me to call, and why I did.

I was lonely.

I wanted someone who couldn’t see me to want me. I wanted someone who didn’t know that I tripped or staggered, slurred, or stammered, to want me.

“What did you do tonight?”

“Oh, it was big,” he’d say. “I got the car washed, and I went and bought the new Elmore Leonard novel. I got a cup of coffee on the way home, though I know I’m too old for that, and it’s going to keep me up….”

“That’s more than I did this week.”

“Oh come on,” said Matt. “My friends tell me I’m the most boring man they know. Go to the gym, buy carryout, fall asleep after ranting at the news. Last month, I tried to cut a couple of my big shrubs into a topiary shape. I thought it would be fun to make them into dolphins. I got a book from the library. Well, I’m a surgeon, right? How hard could this be? Let me tell you. It looked like kids had vandalized the house afterward. No, it really looked like the KKK had vandalized the house.”

What he’d said, about his shrubs, his fireplace, his pal Shawn, and his pal Louis, from New York by way of Nigeria, made me feel connected to a normal world of people doing ordinary things for fun. The three of them had decided to go pheasant hunting. Shawn’s father lent them the guns. They’d driven to the game preserve the previous fall, but it happened to be the day that the gamekeepers were unloading that year’s stock. The pheasants hopped out of the truck and stood looking at Matt and his friends, making no attempt to fly or allow themselves to be stalked. One by one, the men exchanged glances and, without a word, put the guns back into their cases. “That was my hunting period,” Matt said. “I’m entering my fly-fishing period in a couple of weeks, when I go on vacation. I’m sure no trout will be in peril. I think my guitar period will follow that.”