Life After Life (20 page)

And so he did his time. Months in the hospital, a rebuilt pelvis. A plate in his head. A scar along his right eye that looks like he got in a knife fight. He got a couple of months in jail because he had been warned too many times by too many people and then a lot of community service and what Stanley now is able to laugh and say was the hardest service of all—going with Martha to church every single week. She was the one who suggested he forget about the pressures of administrative positions and think about teaching. “You have always been good with kids,” she told him. “You could coach. You could do driver’s ed.” As soon as she said it, she caught herself. “Maybe not driver’s ed. But . . .” She paused and Stanley could tell she was choosing her words carefully. “You could do a course with kids, you know, to talk about what can happen.” And that’s what he did and in no time it seemed he was on the right path; he worked hard and he checked in with Martha several times a week to talk about what all he was doing. She listened about the pumpkin patch long after any normal person with a normal threshold for boredom could’ve stood and yet there she was, the two of them so closely knit together by then that Stanley could do as he pleased and not have to deal too much with either of them. He was working hard and getting pretty sick of it. There was very little he enjoyed and he realized this the day there was an electrical storm that blew the power out and he could not watch the evening news. The evening news. That was what he looked forward to.

Ned’s older brother, Pete, had breezed through without a single problem; they see him on major holidays and Stanley gets presents along the way. Pete was easy, a no-nonsense unemotional boy, the opposite of Ned, who was the kind of tantrum-throwing child Stanley had no patience for. People always talked about how good Martha was, how sweet, and yeah, he could give her that, but what all those people didn’t know was also how passive and withdrawn she was. Yes, she was
there
for Ned, and yes, dinner was almost always on the table—sometimes microwave shit in later years but there nonetheless—and the clothes did get washed and she did almost always go to church and to bridge club, but even before Martha got sick there was a low-grade despondency, a depression that Stanley was probably responsible for, too. He tried to make it better in the early years. He bought flowers every now and then. He never forgot her birthday, but still something was always missing in their life together.

People didn’t go running into therapy every five minutes back then, but he suspects if they had, someone would have told him that he was a really shitty father—a really shitty man, in fact. He had done so much wrong and yet on the surface he looked like a man who had done a wonderful job with everything. When Martha complained of her weariness and fatigue, he made jokes. When someone at church had suggested that she might have Epstein-Barr, he told how he knew a fellow named Epstein in the service—Epstein’s Bar and Grill—food guaranteed to slow you down so you have to take to the bed or have a blinding migraine that lets you off the hook to do pretty much anything. Sex? What in the hell was
that
?

But then she got cancer and no one denied the reality of that.

Stanley wasn’t there enough. He knows that now. Truth is he knew it then but just didn’t have the guts to stand up and deal with it. He was so focused on his business. He did what was expected of him. It was like standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Every now and then, you actually feel patriotic and like you might give a goddamn, but usually it’s just a pain in the ass to have to stand when you’ve worked your ass off and feel tired. Just do what is expected in a way that numbs the world. And he stayed there, humming along, worked on a few church committees, advised the city council, did the Boy Scouts a couple of years, took a sack of toys to some poor family across the river at Christmas. When he looks back now he wishes he could recall some of the faces there waiting, but he can’t. He was thinking of things like how his muffler didn’t sound quite right or what in the hell was he going to buy for Martha when she didn’t need another goddamned thing cluttering the space. It already drove him crazy, that wall of knickknacks that rattled when you came through the living room. Things rattled all over the house. She loved little Limoges boxes—expensive-as-hell things commemorating this or that and to this day he regrets the way he cleared a shelf with the brush of a hand, leaving everyone silent for days. He remembers that with great clarity, the landing of every splintered shard of porcelain, but he can’t remember a single child receiving from his asshole hands the only Christmas gift of the year, something Martha or someone at the church had bought and wrapped.
Boy: age 8. Wants a skateboard but really needs clothes. Girl: age 6. Wants a kitten but understands she might get a Polly Pocket doll instead. Really needs shoes and a coat and underwear.
He found these slips of paper in her purse, right there with grocery lists and a coupon file—pieces carefully clipped but obviously never used.

He and Martha had not planned what they would do in their old age; like everything else, he had assumed they would deal with it when they got to it, muddle on through. There was plenty of money. He had made sure of that, but somehow he had always assumed she would be the one left to deal with everything. The day she died—that awful day he had to sit there and tell her it was okay to die—he knew he had to figure out and execute his own plan immediately. He didn’t want to wait until he got sick and slapped into an old folks’ home somewhere. It would be like Pete to just come get him and check him in to some really nice spot near him and then drop by once a month. But Stanley wanted to stay home. He grew up here and he has lived here for seventy-nine years and he wants to die here. The past decade has brought Ned back to life, remorseful and reformed and not willing to leave Stanley’s side, but very much alive. Ned wants to be the son Stanley has always wanted him to be, though even Stanley would be hard-pressed to say what that might entail. And though Stanley would not have given anything for Ned’s presence all those nights he lay there beside him, it was also his own time of reckoning. He had been a bad father and he could not let Ned feel all the responsibility himself. Ned was vowing to stay put, live with him, do things together, and that’s when Stanley began hatching the idea of what he would do. What he
had
to do. He would tell his sons first that he
wanted
to live in a place like Pine Haven and then when they successfully reminded him of all the times he had said he would
never
live in such a place, he would convince them that he
needed
to be there
, needed
the assistance and the secure knowledge that someone—a medical person he would stress—is always close by. He knew not to list physical problems because that would have meant many hospital visits and tests. No, the easiest was just to create his own dementia, confess that he was having trouble remembering things and then focus on something—wrestling—in a way that was obsessive and exhausting. He has never acted a day in his life, but he took the role and has done quite well with it. The hardest part was giving up driving but small sacrifice if it buys him some time alone and forces Ned to move on. Everyone seems convinced and for the first time in years Stanley feels a real sense of solitude. People usually say
peace
and solitude but he’s not there yet. The peace is yet to come and maybe it never will. Maybe a lack of peace is what comes to someone like him who never was able to give the right thing at the right time. Someday he will let Ned know the truth; someday, when Ned has more people in his life and Stanley is closer to the end, he will list his many regrets and all the ways he feels he failed as a father. “We’re even,” Stanley will say. “It ain’t a pretty picture, but we’re even. And you,” he will add, “you are young and have a whole life ahead of you.”

Some of those nights when Ned lay there beside him, Stanley would inch his hand close enough to feel the warmth of his son’s body. How many nights could he have so easily reached for Martha’s hand. Once she was diagnosed, it seemed wrong, false somehow. Though of course he did hold her hand at the end, he was so sorry that it came about because she was dying, that she would see it that way, the result of her dying. And he
did
love her. She was a good person, a kind person. She was a friend, a companion, and perhaps that’s all it was. And perhaps that was all someone like him was capable of. Oh sure, trace it back to hard parents, hard living, but how awful to come to the end and see that all you’ve been is another goddamned link in the chain that keeps out the happiness. And Pete is just like him. Everyone thinks he’s so successful and great, a chip on every square. And yet for all Stanley knows Pete could be as empty and hollow as that cheap chocolate Easter Bunny that poor weird child from next door was giving out last month along with Girl Scout cookies.

When he was a much younger man, he liked watching wrestling. It was a guilty pleasure and something he would never have wanted Martha or his colleagues to know any more than he would invite them in when he read
Playboy
and allowed his hand to satisfy in a way that Martha never had and never would. There was something in the reckless abandon in both acts that he loved and admired. He liked the way big burly men strapped themselves into nothing more than a jock, peroxided their hair or got big tattoos and then came out like animals sprung from a cage. He thought how it must feel good as hell to scream at the top of your lungs and hurl your body into somebody built like a concrete post, to breathe heavy and pound and slam and sweat. Yeah, it did have a lot in common with his sexual fantasies in those days, though the fantasies were all about women—strong, tough women. Not to diminish the sweet corn-fed-looking ones, the tea-cake service ladies and Martha was definitely one of them, but he liked the fantasy of a woman who could grip his wrists and hold him in place. He liked women like he saw on Roller Derby, but God knows that was a century ago.

It was the Saturday night after Martha died. Pete and his family had come and gone, done all the right things and all that needed doing.

“I don’t need you here, Ned,” he said. “What’s your problem?”

“I want to be here for you.” The boy’s voice cracked like he might’ve been twelve and there he was a forty-five-year-old divorced reformed druggie schoolteacher studying to be Curly in a low-rent production of
Oklahoma,
a show Stanley thinks is only rivaled in stupidity by
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Who cares what the surrey looks like or how goddamned high the corn is. Martha ate all that shit with a spoon and he was as tolerant as he could be, but a man has his limits for sure. He sure hated to see Lois Flowers decline so quickly and have to live over in the nursing wing, but he had sure as hell
not
missed those sing-alongs at dinnertime. She either sang ridiculous jazzed-up show tunes or beautiful old songs that nearly broke his heart.

“Don’t pity me, Ned. It’s unbecoming to both of us,” Stanley had said. “And you’ve done your time. Use your ‘get out of jail free’ card and just go away.” He went in his bedroom and slammed the door; he tried to read but couldn’t and there wasn’t a sound. He imagined Ned just stood there frozen long after the fact, like a snake will do once you startle it. Ned coiled up and ready to strike, only Stanley knew that was not true. Ned was a different man; the anger and the bitterness and the weak victim wash he’d lived in all those years, all dried up. So many nights, Stanley got himself to sleep with a tortured litany of all of his failings. He was a shitty father. Embroider it on a pillow. And he was a shitty husband. Paint it on the overpass of the interstate. And the God he prayed to on behalf of others was not someone he even knew or believed in. When Martha’s hospice volunteer, a young woman he sees coming and going out of the nursing building here at Pine Haven, came to their house, she told Stanley that Martha needed his help.

“She needs you to help her go,” she said. “She needs you to tell her it’s okay to die.”

“But it’s not okay to die,” he said, and he said it loud, so loud he is sure that Martha heard him even though she had been in a coma for days. Her breathing changed and there was a restlessness, limbs twitching.

“Please,” she whispered, and gripped his hand. “Help her.” It was just the two of them there. Pete was with his family at the Holiday Inn and Ned had gone to the grocery store and so he went and sat down, took Martha’s hand in his own. “Tell her,” the woman prompted and stepped back from the doorway. Outside the birds were singing and the winter sky was a clear pale blue, the color of those little boxes she bought when the boys were born. He leaned in close to Martha’s ear and whispered that he loved her and that he would miss her but that he understood it was time for her to go. And her eyes opened like something in a horror movie and that was the end. It was just like that. It was just that fast.

That stare. He tried to think of everything else in the world except that stare, but it kept coming back and waking him, shocking him out of the traces of light sleep. Regrets and regrets and then he heard the door open and then felt weight on the other side of the bed. And then Ned was there, defying him, disobeying him, stretched out in Martha’s place. Stanley faked sleep, letting his breath lighten, but with Ned’s presence his mind was able to wander, allowing him to step into a ring and beat the shit out of everything that he hated in his life. He would wrestle it all to the ground. He heard the announcer say so: Stanley Stone—hard as a rock, heart of granite and blood as cold as marble.