Undone (3 page)

The invitation to appear on Tovah’s show had arrived quite out of the blue, without Jasper’s either hoping for or expecting it. Any slight reluctance he might have felt about appearing on a program infamous for its lachrymose wallowing in tragedy, its tabloid-like exploitation of others’ suffering, was outweighed by what he understood to be Tovah’s unique power to publicize a book, and thus to spread more widely the message of hope and inspiration that was his main reason for publishing the memoir in the first place. And so he had agreed to go on the program. To date, the only truly regrettable fallout from that decision was the massive increase in his mail, which he felt obliged to sift through, and answer, each day.

Stooping, he gathered up the fifty or so letters that lay on the carpet below the mail slot and, with the mystery envelope tucked among them, walked from the foyer into the large, sun-filled open-plan kitchen at the front of the house. He sat at the table and began going through the mail. He had opened and
read only one letter when he heard a car pull up in the drive: Pauline, arriving home from her daily physiotherapy.

He walked back out to the foyer and opened the door on a fresh, flower-scented May afternoon. Standing on the front step, he saw, through the play of confetti-like light and shadow cast by the maple tree that grew from the front lawn, Deepti, Pauline’s live-in caregiver. She was standing by the back of the car, operating the hydraulic lift that lowered Pauline’s wheelchair from the retrofitted SUV onto the gravel driveway.

“Need help?” he called.

“No, no, Mr. Jasper,” Deepti sang out in a lilting Indian accent. “I am fine.”

Maddy, whom Deepti picked up from preschool every day on the way home from the hospital, unclasped her seat belt, clambered from the backseat and ran up the flagstone path through the mobile green-filtered light. “Daddy!” she cried, throwing herself into Jasper’s arms.

“Hey, Muffin!” he said, swinging her up off the ground. She was almost five now and, as the twinge in his lower back told him, getting too big for him to lift in this way. He nuzzled her neck, then pulled his head back and studied her face, the soft bow-shaped lips, the near-transparent skin glowing as if lit from within. Her dark bangs and the dimple in her right cheek were exact replicas of Pauline’s. From Jasper she had inherited only his blue eyes and the suggestion of a cleft, really just a shallow dent, in her chin. “How was House of Wee Folk?” he asked.

“Great! I can sing the whole ABC song!”

“Wonderful,” he said. “I’d love to hear it.” He lowered her, gingerly, to the floor. “But right now, I want you to go wash all that preschool off your hands.”

“Kay!” she said, and ran off into the house.

Deepti, in the meantime, had wheeled Pauline up to the front door.

She looked strikingly as she had before the stroke: smooth-skinned, large-eyed, dark-haired, her almond-shaped face as beautiful as ever, save for the slight droop of the right side of her mouth and her right eyelid. Her once-animated hands, through disuse, were curled permanently into fists in her lap. But there was no doubt, in her alert gaze, of her undiminished awareness and intelligence. She returned Jasper’s greeting and kiss with a blink and a kind of twinkle that Jasper, who had known her for over fifteen years, recognized as true contentment.

When first told by Pauline’s neurologist that her locked-in status did not necessarily mean a shortened lifespan—”Indeed, with good care, she can live as long as you or me,” Dr. Carlucci told him—Jasper had been assailed with horror. He thought of Pauline trapped, indefinitely, within her isolating paralysis. Might not death be a welcome escape? Dr. Carlucci had quickly reassured him, saying that recent long-term studies showed that locked-in patients who were well cared for and encouraged to communicate, to be engaged with their world, reported levels of contentment
equal
to those of healthy people—stunning results that, frankly, called into question the most basic assumptions about human happiness. “Of course, the patients who do
best are those who feel that there is something to live
for
,” the doctor added. “A great many are parents of young children, like your Maddy.”

Pauline was proof of all that Carlucci had said. She had, since coming home twenty-two months ago, made remarkable strides. Increased diaphragm strength meant that she no longer breathed with a ventilator; she no longer fed through a gastrointestinal tube, and was able to swallow smooth purees and thickened liquids; improved bladder control meant that she no longer relied on a catheter—all advances that had resulted in a marked uplift in her mood, which in turn gave her doctors hope for continued improvements. So, despite what was undeniably a difficult circumstance, Jasper refused to surrender to despair. Pauline would not have allowed that, in any case.

Deepti pushed the wheelchair through the foyer and into the kitchen, parking it by the table where the pile of mail lay. She went to fill the kettle, and Jasper sat down beside Pauline. “Today’s haul,” he said, gesturing at the stack of letters. He liked going through the fan mail each day with Pauline, soliciting her opinion on which letters to answer, which to discard. “Shall I?” he said, lifting one. She blinked.

These blinks (once for yes, twice for no) were her sole means of communication. Pauline had tried to master the art of dictating messages to Jasper by blinking at the appropriate time as he recited the alphabet to her, picking out sentences letter by letter—some locked-in patients managed to write entire books with this method—but deficits in her short-term memory (an
effect of the stroke, Carlucci surmised) so far made it impossible for her to hold a phrase of any length or complexity in her mind while laboriously spelling it out. A retina scanner to aid her in choosing letters from a computer tablet with movements of her iris had proved little better, since this too required holding an utterance in the mind for extended periods. Much of her current physiotherapy was aimed at improving her memory and overall mental and physical stamina so that she might, one day, accomplish the task of writing by dictation. Her therapists, lately, had noted some improvements. But for the time being, she relied solely on the binary, yes-no responses of blinking. Jasper had been duly trained in how to avoid asking open-ended questions, how to start and stop conversations, and how to recognize when Pauline wished to “speak.” For all its initial cumbersomeness, the method had proved surprisingly effective.

“I was looking at this letter when you arrived,” he went on, smiling, to signal that it belonged to that category bound instantly for the trash. “It struck me as amusing—in an end-of the-American-Empire kind of way.”

Pauline’s eyes twinkled in anticipation.

“It’s from a man, Scooter Reece, in Atlanta. A so-called marketing entrepreneur. He suggests I travel around the country preaching what he calls the gospel of Daughter. Ten thousand per speech—guaranteed. As a nondenominational lay minister, I won’t pay taxes on any monies brought in through my ministry. Scooter will get this house listed as our parish—no more pesky property taxes. We’d have to cough up 60 percent to Scooter,
but he’s a man with ideas, including a special limited edition American Girl Maddy doll. Do we go for it?”

Pauline’s eyes sparkled with mirth. Just to be sure, she blinked twice, in quick succession.

“Thought so,” he said with mock disappointment. He tossed the letter onto the pile reserved for the trash. “I knew your integrity would ruin everything!”

Maddy ran into the kitchen and climbed onto Jasper’s lap.

“Hey, don’t get too comfy,” he warned. “Nap time in five minutes.”

Deepti brought over to the table a tray laden with a teapot and cup for Jasper. He pushed the pile of letters aside. “So,” he asked Pauline, “did you have a good day?”

She blinked once. She waited a beat, then blinked again, asking the question back to him.

“Not bad,” he said. “I’m still trying to start this new Bannister. But I’m not getting anywhere. By now I should have an entire outline.”

“Mr. Jasper,” said Deepti sternly as she poured him a cup of tea. “It is too soon for a new book, with all the excitement over your memoir. The
Tovah
show. All this mail to answer. You must take a break.”

Jasper smiled across the table at Pauline, whose eyes glinted in response. “You’re right, Deepti—very sage advice,” he said. “But you know the saying about the devil and idle hands.”

“What kind of hands?” Maddy piped up.

Jasper explained that unless you keep busy, you start doing
bad things. “For instance, not getting ready for your nap.” He lowered her to the floor and playfully swatted her bottom. “Go forth,” he said.

She ran off down the adjoining hallway, shouting, “Come and tuck me in! And bring Mom!”

“In a minute,” he called after her. He turned to Deepti, who was fussily laying out cookies on a small plate. “Please, Deepti,” he said. “Take your break.”

She thanked him, finished with the cookies and then repaired, as she did every day at this time, to the guesthouse out back to phone her daughter, an undergraduate at Brown University.

Jasper again took up the subject of his stalled Bannister mystery with Pauline. “I’ve actually drawn up a list of possible crimes and solutions and characters,” he said. “But everything feels so familiar.” Serial killers, rapists, forgers, counterfeiters, kidnappers—he’d done it all before, sometimes more than once. He needed a fresh crime, something that would stretch Bannister’s powers of detection, and Jasper’s powers of invention. “Maybe we could talk about this tonight, after dinner?”

Pauline blinked.

It was amazing to Jasper how helpful Pauline could still be with his writing. They had met, fifteen years ago, when she was an assistant to Maxwell Smythe, his first editor at Crucible. She had been one of the earliest and most enthusiastic champions of his Bannister series, and after four years, with the unexpected death, by heart attack, of Smythe, she had taken it over, vastly improving it in all aspects. They had, as a natural outgrowth
of their work together (her desk at Crucible strewn with marked-up manuscript pages and half-full Chinese food cartons, or having a post-work drink in one of the old-fashioned bars on Third Avenue), fallen in love and, in their fifth year together as editor and writer, married. Pauline remained a crucial collaborator. During his composition of
Lessons from My Daughter
, he read every new draft passage to her at the end of each working day, pausing often to ask: “Is that too sentimental?” or “Is that too private?” or “Is that how you remember it?” Her advice was indispensable, and it was only because of her strenuous refusal that he agreed to leave her name off the book as coauthor.

“With this new Bannister, just to shake things up, I’d like to try something new,” he said. “I’m thinking of writing alternate chapters from the perspective of the bad guy.” Every previous Bannister had been written solely from the blind detective’s point of view.

Pauline blinked, to signal that she liked the sound of this.

“I’m thinking of making him
really
bad,” he continued. “A total sociopath. Let’s face it, the bad guys are always more interesting—at least in fiction. Give me Iago over Othello any day.”

As he spoke, he absently dug around in the pile of mail in front of him, dislodging a lingerie catalog that slid into view on the tabletop. It featured, on its cover, a trio of nearly naked models, all bronzed, blemish-free skin and cascading locks. Demonstrating the latest in lacy bras and thongs, they looked boldly out at him with just a hint of a smile and an expression of dulcet invitation. He felt an involuntary jolt through his
nervous system, a reaction wholly divorced from his rational mind. Almost simultaneously, he felt a spasm of regretful frustration, of self-castigation, at this bodily reflex—a reminder of that one aspect of his marriage missing ever since the stroke. A reminder that, for all the love, fellow feeling, regard, respect and closeness that he still shared with Pauline, gone was that central element: the physical.

He pushed the catalog under the pile, pushed it from his mind.

“Dad!” Maddy’s voice reached him from her bedroom down the hall. “I’m ready! Bring Mom!”

“Coming,” he called.

When Jasper’s father built the house, forty years ago, he did so with the foresight typical of a man obsessed with long-range planning, instructing the architect to put all the rooms on a single story, in anticipation of the day (decades off, it was hoped and assumed) when he and Jasper’s mother would be too old to manage stairs. Thus Jasper had been able to bring Pauline home from the hospital to an already wheelchair-accessible house.

He maneuvered Pauline’s wheelchair into the bedroom and parked it by the foot of the bed. Maddy was already under the covers. He kissed the child’s forehead and whispered, “See you in half an hour.” He turned off the bedside light, tiptoed over to Pauline and kissed her cheek. She blinked in response, and he slipped out.

B
ack in the kitchen, he stood over the pile of mail on the table and struggled with himself. Perhaps it would be best after all if he were simply to surrender to biology, grab the cursed catalog and slink off to the bathroom to deal with what was becoming an increasingly disruptive urge. He reached under the pile and in doing so uncovered the mystery envelope—the one he’d signed for. Perhaps it contained some information (an offer, an invitation) that would provide a distraction from the silly lust stirred in him by those Photoshopped models. Or at least briefly delay the inevitable.

The return address read: “Department of Children and
Families, Office of Child Support, Newport, Vermont.” An appeal for a donation, he assumed. He almost put it aside for later consideration, but the letter’s origin in Vermont sparked his curiosity. He had spent a summer teaching tennis there, in the lakeside town of New Halcyon, almost twenty years ago, after graduating with his BA from Columbia and before starting his master’s at Yale. That was four years before he met Pauline and six months before his parents’ deaths. He had felt an affinity for the state ever since, a sentimental attachment that derived from his sense of Vermont as belonging to a prelapsarian world, a time when his family was still intact and he was, as yet, innocent of tragedy.