We Are Not Ourselves (16 page)

“Can you stay here and read?”

So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.

Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.

“Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.

Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”

“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”

“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”

“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”

“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”

“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”

He looked at her. “
Really
choking?”

“It was in his windpipe.”

“What was?”

“A cherry tomato.”

“You got it out?”

“Donny did.”

He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”

“Donny came down,” Connell said.

“To eat with us?”

Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.

“I’ll explain later,” she said.

“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.

“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”

Connell nodded.

“Good.”

And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading
Lonesome Dove
and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.

The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.

“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”

“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.

Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.

“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.

“Yes, but they’re in New York.”

“They have to win two.”

“They’ll do it.”

“It’s Roger Clemens.”

“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.

“ ‘Ya gotta believe,’ ” Connell answered.

“Well, then.”

It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.

At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She
moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.

She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.

“I almost died,” Connell said.

“You’re fine,” Ed said.

“I was scared. I’m still scared.”

Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”

“I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.

“Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”

“You really think they’re going to win?”

“The Mets? Yes.”

“Both games?”

“Both. You’ll see.”

“You’re sure?”

“Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”

As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement
of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.

She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched having him there. Still, it was going to be a long night, and she’d be exhausted in the morning, so she’d eventually have to move him off her.

She lay there thinking,
I almost lost him. I’m never serving goddamned cherry tomatoes again. Ed better be right about the Mets, or this kid is going to be more disappointed in his father than he is in the Mets. Then again, he has to learn that things don’t always work out the way you want them to.

She went back and forth between thinking it would be nice if Connell got the outcome he wanted and thinking it would be character-building for him not to get it. Fatigue from a long day at work and the effects of adrenaline withdrawal must have been enough to overcome her need for space, because she felt herself drifting off, even though he was still attached to her.

The kid would be thrilled
, she thought.
Let them win
.

The next thing she knew she was waking up. Somehow in the night she had gotten herself to face the boy, who was still sleeping, and Ed behind him on his back, out cold. Connell breathed in and out softly. His lashes were long like his father’s, and in the muted sunlight peeking through the blinds his cheeks looked sweet and full. As if he could sense her looking at him, he opened his eyes and blinked a few times in that half-conscious,
slightly perturbed way he used to as a toddler when he hadn’t yet fully come to. He gave her a slumber-drunk smile; then he was back asleep. She didn’t know what to do with everything she was feeling for him, even for her husband, so she got up to take a shower and left the two of them to wake up and find each other there.

Part III

Breathe
the Rich Air

1991

15

A
fter Connell turned in, Ed surprised her by not moving to the study to grade lab reports or read journal articles. He lay on the couch with the newspaper listening to Wagner. She didn’t have to know music to recognize that it was Wagner, because the swelling crescendos and singer’s deep voice gave it away. Ed often listened to Wagner when he was in a contemplative mood.

She sat on the other couch with her book, happy to share with him the beaten-back chill of a February night, which made itself known in the frost on the windows. She switched the light on in the artificial fireplace, pausing briefly to rattle the glass coals and hear them clack against each other. It pleased her that the man she’d married, in addition to possessing an erudition that impressed even worldly friends, read the sports section in its entirety. At one point he rose and went to the study, and she thought she’d lost him for the night, but he returned with a pen to do the crossword. She loved the carefree way he called on her for help when flummoxed by a clue. It suggested an abiding faith in the soundness of his intellect that he could meet head-on those swells of ignorance that might capsize another man’s confidence; they were wavelets lapping against his hull.

“I’ve done everything I can do,” he said, as he lay the quarter-folded newspaper on the coffee table. “I want to be realistic. Maybe it’s time for me to relax.”

She glanced up from her book to catch his eye, but he was looking at the ceiling.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“I’m turning fifty soon. I’m slowing down. I’ve earned a rest.”

“Nonsense,” she said.

“I’m going to become one of those guys who come home and call it a night. Maybe I’ll watch some TV.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“I can start right now.”

Her heart leapt a little. It was pleasant to imagine him spending more time in their bed. He had finally given up the night classes, thank God, but he still worked so hard, often coming in from the study long after she was asleep.

“I don’t know how long you could keep that up,” she said. “You’d get bored.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Well, if it makes you happy,” she said.

He’d already moved to the stereo to change the record. He plugged his headphones in and had them on before she could hear what he was listening to. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

She waited for him to acknowledge her gaze. He liked to lie like that and slip into a reverie, but he usually opened his eyes between movements to give her a little review with his raised brows. She wondered if he were sleeping, he was lying so still, but then he began tapping his foot rhythmically. When the side ended, he lay there, arms crossed across his chest, impassive. She shut off her light and stood to head into the bedroom. She called his name, but he didn’t reply. She watched for some kind of acknowledgment of her departure, but he only shifted his glasses. She went to him and stood over him. He must have imagined he could outlast her in this game, but she was starting to grow disturbed by it. She leaned in to kiss his cheek good night; before she reached it he had opened his eyes and was staring back at her in a kind of horror, as if she’d interrupted him in a reflection on something monstrous.

“I’m heading to bed,” she said.

“I’ll be right in.”

After a few bouts of fitful sleep—she never slept well without him beside her—she headed to the living room. She found the end table lamp on and Ed still wearing the headphones. A record was spinning, and he’d
set up a stack to be played by the autochanger. She shut the stereo off and called his name. He put a hand up to silence her.

“I’m just going to lie here a minute,” he said.

“It’s four in the morning.” She switched off the lamp, but ambient light still filtered into the room from the coming sun. “You need good, quality sleep. You’re always saying that. Don’t lights interrupt sleep? You need REM sleep.
Restful
sleep. Come on inside. You have to teach in a few hours.”