Through the Heart (4 page)

Emily got interrogated about how much she weighed. Today she claimed to have gained three pounds. My mother didn’t believe her. She sent Mary, the housekeeper, to get the scale from the bathroom and bring it to the dining room. Then my mother made my sister get on it. That’s when I knew my mother must really be in a bad mood. She hadn’t done that for a while.

My father was the only one who escaped questioning, but he lived with her. Who knew what happened when she got him alone? And I think there was the sense that he let her have full rein as long as she respected his boundaries. Those boundaries did not include any protection for us, his children. They never had.

As all this was going on, I tried the other things on my plate. There was some dark red whipped thing. I think it was made of beets, but I can’t be sure. The chicken was out. The only things safe to eat were three tiny fingerling potatoes and seven string beans. The way she fed us, I don’t know how my mother expected Emily to weigh anything.

The dinner went pretty much the same way dinner went every week. But what happened at the end was one of those tiny moments that seem inconsequential but that end up changing your life.

After my mother finished interrogating the others, she turned back to me. It was obvious that my report on the portfolio was still bothering her.

“Timothy,” she said, “I am going to arrange for you to see Warren. I think he might be able to give you some guidance. At the very least, maybe he can teach you to have a little more respect and concern for your position in this family.”

“Mother, I don’t think Warren is going to have the time right—”

“You’ll take the plane to Omaha tomorrow morning. I think it’s best that you be out there so you’re available when he has a moment.”

I tried again. “Mother, this might not be the best time for me to leave the office. There’s a lot going on in the market right now. I need to be here—”

“You’re going.” The way she said it I knew there was no negotiating with her.

There was only one person who could veto her.

I looked to my father. He sometimes would intercede on money issues since he was the one who had made the bulk of it—in bowling alleys and strip malls and retirement homes. He had the Midas touch when it came to money, if in nothing else.

But today was not one of the days when he was willing to step in. When I looked at him, he just shrugged. “You might as well see what Buffett has to say. It can’t hurt.”

That’s how I ended up going to Omaha first thing Monday morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A
fter Tammy left, I got a burst of energy. I think it was Tammy’s prediction that I was going to be leaving. I don’t know if I believed her, but just the idea of leaving was enough to get me going. I spent the next few hours cleaning the house, scrubbing the black gook off the stove, wiping the food splatter out of the microwave, throwing out all the things in the fridge that were growing mold, vacuuming the huge dust balls that had gathered under tables and in the corners, and wiping the thick layer of dust off the TV and the hall table and the bookshelf.

I didn’t often get the urge to clean, but when I did, I loved the feeling of accomplishment. But this time, when I finished and looked around, instead of feeling satisfaction all I could think about was the fact that it was just going to get dirty again.

It all went downhill from there, and late that night I ended up sitting at the computer doing yet another Google search on the survival rates of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which was the type of leukemia my mother had. It was a macabre activity, but I couldn’t seem to help it. No matter how often I looked, the survival rates didn’t get any better. For kids, the odds were pretty good: 85 percent survived. For adults it was an even fifty-fifty. I was always trying to find better numbers, as if some words on a screen could change the outcome of my mother’s disease.

I was so absorbed in the computer, I didn’t even notice when my mother came down the stairs behind me. I just heard her voice say, “Honey?”

Even before I turned around, I could hear that the fight of the morning was over.

I had forgotten to turn on the lamp, so I was working by the light of the monitor, and when I turned around, in the darkness, in her white nightgown and her short haircut, she almost looked like a child. I had a strange sense of unreality, as if our positions were switched and I was the mother. At that moment, I felt a surge of feeling flood through me; I think it’s how a mother might love: fiercely, without reason. Love isn’t reasonable; I stopped looking for reason in it long ago.

Then my mother turned on the light, and I noticed that her toenails were freshly painted: small, perfect ovals of pink. There was something about those nails that just killed me, the color against her pale skin. It wasn’t the big things that got me the most—it was these small acts of bravery.

“Honey,” my mother said again, “I was wondering if you could maybe get me some ice cream? And some ginger ale? I think that might help settle my stomach.”

“Of course. Of course I can,” I said. I got up, grabbed my wallet and my jacket, and said, “I’ll be right back.” I knew ice cream and ginger ale weren’t going to fix anything, but the illusion of being able to make things better, even if just for a moment, felt good.

That feeling lasted exactly ten minutes—until I got to the 7-Eleven and saw the blue Camry with the license plate beginning with “CHI” and the dent over the left rear wheel.

I checked my watch. It was past ten o’clock, so the 7-Eleven was the only place in town still open. I could have driven by, made a big loop in the car and doubled back, hoping I would have wasted enough time that he would be gone—that’s the kind of thing I had been doing for the last three years. But suddenly, tonight, the effort of it seemed too much to keep up.

So I parked in the lot and went into the store and picked up a red plastic basket from the stack near the door. I went straight to the wall with the freezers that held the ice cream and picked out a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla. Then I headed toward the back of the store where they had the refrigerated cases with the sodas.

Dan was there when I rounded the end of the aisle. And he must have known I was in the store, because when he saw me, there wasn’t even the hint of surprise.

We were together for ten years, engaged for two of them, and it was now almost three years since I had seen him. In front of me stood the object and focus of probably 50 percent of my thoughts since I had been a teenager.

That was ironic, because before I fell for him (during senior year of high school), I couldn’t have been less interested. He seemed to me just another big, blond football player, handsome in an obvious, ordinary way. For most of high school, I imagined myself to be different. I knew I didn’t want the obvious—even if the obvious was good-looking and popular. Dan was a walking caricature of the obvious.

After I fell in love, I couldn’t see him that way. He was just . . . himself. And for almost a decade (Tammy called it “the eternity”), that’s what he was to me. But now, standing in the aisle in the 7-Eleven, after not seeing him for three years, I discovered that the big, blond football player was all I could see. Except that now his good looks were being chipped away by wrinkles, and he was a little soft around the middle where there used to be nothing but skin and muscle.

While avoiding him these past three years, I had worried about how much it would hurt to see him. But the surprise was that it didn’t hurt. It turned out that those three years had turned him into a stranger—a stranger with a baby strapped to his chest. A sleeping baby wearing a pink dress. A girl.

“Nora,” he said.

“Hello, Dan,” I replied.

“It’s been too long,” he said.

If anything, I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite long enough, so I didn’t know what to say.

Then I thought of something.

“How is Stacey?” I asked.

Stacey was his wife—the one he’d broken up with me for, and then married in a shotgun wedding a month later. Six months after that, they had Dan Junior. (And from the little girl strapped to his chest, it was obvious they had decided to give Dan Junior a baby sister.)

His wife, Stacey, had been in high school with us. She had been a cheerleader, and I remember her giggling a lot in the back of the room during the one class I had with her. Dan’s life had ended up exactly like I thought it would before I knew him: football player marries cheerleader and joins his father’s company. But being right about it didn’t give me any comfort, because there was that little detour in the middle where I thought maybe I would marry the football player. When my stereotype turned out to be true, the joke was on me.

“Stacey’s fine,” Dan said. “She’s fine.”

One more fine and I wasn’t going to believe him.

“Good. I’m glad.” I paused. Then, not quite as smoothly as I would have liked, I said, “Well, I wish I could talk, but I need to get going.” I took a step back, because it seemed strange to just turn my back on him.

“Don’t go yet,” he said.

“I’m sorry, maybe we can talk another time,” I said, not meaning it.

When I took another step away, he repeated more urgently, “Don’t go. Please.”

It’s hard to walk away when someone says that to you. I found I couldn’t do it. So I waited, but Dan didn’t say anything else. I shifted my gaze to the baby on his chest. The little girl was sleeping: her head lolled against his chest, her face slack, and her mouth open in that perfect baby pout. Sometimes babies look like strange versions of their parents, but this baby didn’t seem to look like either Stacey or Dan. It just looked like a generic baby, with the small button nose, the pouty lips, long eyelashes, and light downy hair.

The silence went on so long that I started to think I might be able to escape after all. I didn’t realize that the length of the silence was really just an indication of how uncomfortable the topic of conversation was going to be.

Finally, Dan burst out, “Nora, what happened to us? Remember when we thought we’d never be apart? What happened to that?”

It took me a second for my brain to process the words.

“I don’t think this is exactly the time or place, Dan,” I said. It wasn’t my most inspired response; it was trite and cliché, but it was also true. There were Tostitos on one side of us, and cheese in a can on the other.

He wasn’t really listening to me though. “That’s what I always hear. I want to know, when is the time and place? Can you tell me that?” He threw out his arms in a gesture that would have been dramatic if he hadn’t had a sleeping baby strapped to his chest. As he threw his arms out, the baby’s head bobbled—it blinked, and then settled back into sleep.

I glanced down at the baby, I thought quite pointedly, and said, “I can’t tell you. I think maybe you should try talking to your wife about that.”

Dan didn’t seem to notice the glance, and he seemed oblivious to the fact that he might not be talking to the most receptive audience.

He shook his head stubbornly, “But she’s the one who always says it’s not the right time or place. I want to talk to someone who will listen. Someone who knows me.”

He was obviously going to need a bit more of a direct hint I decided.

“Then you definitely have the wrong person,” I told him firmly. “It’s been a long time, Dan. We don’t know each other anymore.”

I thought that would surely do it. But it didn’t.

“You’re wrong,” he insisted. “I know you. And you know me. I’m the same person you knew back when we were together. I haven’t changed.”

I wanted to ask him who that was. Because there was the person I thought I knew, and then I came home one vacation to a man who had cheated on me and was leaving me for another woman. On that day I realized the Dan I thought I knew was gone—had in fact never existed.

“Maybe
I
have,” I said. “Maybe I’ve changed.” I wanted that to be true.

“No,” he said. “You haven’t. I know you haven’t. What you’re doing for your mother . . .”