Why They Run the Way They Do (6 page)

“Oh my,” Carrie said. She turned the puppet over in her hands. Its eyes were black beads and they glinted in the bright lights of the preschool hallway. “Wow. Look at that.”

“Is that yours?” Lindsay's mother asked, extracting herself from the clot of waiting parents.

“Ours?” Carrie asked. She was aware of herself blinking too many times—her eyes felt like black beads, too—as she looked at Lindsay's mother. She didn't even know the woman's name. Jane? Melissa? “Is it ours? It is ours, yes.” She nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Mommy,” Chloe said.

“Well, Lindsay thought so,” the mother said, relieved. “But when we called last night your husband said it wasn't, so we thought we'd bring it in today and check with some of the other kids. I guess I should have asked you. My husband would have probably thought the same thing—can't tell one toy from another, can they?”

“It's hard for them to keep track,” Carrie said softly, remembering Dan on the phone. “Wrong number!” he'd said, cheerfully.

“Mommy?” Chloe said.

“There's so much,” Carrie said. “So many things . . .”

Lindsay's mom scoffed. “Like they even try!” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if she and Carrie had an understanding, shared a history. As if she and her idiot husband were made of precisely the same cloth as Carrie and Dan.

“Dan's not like that,” Carrie said. “He tries. He—”

“Now, Mommy!” Chloe exclaimed. Carrie looked down at her daughter, who had both hands clasped between her legs. “Right now!” she said.

“Lindsay's having a baby,” Chloe said at dinner. They all sat at the kitchen table, Chloe flanked by the giraffe—towering—and by the armadillo on the chair beside her, propped up on its tail and resting its paws on the table.

“I doubt that very much,” Dan said.

“She is! In the summer.”

“Maybe her mommy's having a baby,” Carrie said.

“But Lindsay
gets
it,” Chloe said.

“Sure,” Carrie said. “Okay. I see what you're saying.”

“Can I have a baby?” Chloe asked.

Carrie looked at Dan. They had talked about it before, of course. It had always seemed something they would do, when the time felt right. But years had passed quickly—how could Chloe already be almost five?—and they were so busy, both working. It could be a good thing, though. Four. For a while three had seemed right. They'd gotten used to three. They'd gotten used to a lot. But four. Four wasn't that many. She could give up her cigarette.

“Someday,” she said.

“When?” Chloe asked.

“Sooner rather than later,” Carrie said.

“Saturday?” Chloe asked.

Dan smiled. “Not quite that soon,” he said.

That night, after they put Chloe to bed, Dan sat down in the living room in front of a basketball game while Carrie went outside for her cigarette. He flipped through the paper, read all the bad news, waited for her to return. He wanted her to sit next to him on the couch, wanted to laugh at something on TV—some idiotic commercial, some know-it-all sportscaster, something that could draw them together, remind them that, in the little ways—and weren't those the ways that mattered, anyway?—they were on
the same page
. He craned his neck to see out the front window, thinking he might spot the glow from her cigarette, breathing as she breathed, but the yard was dark. Sometimes she went for a short walk, if the weather was nice, but it was cold outside and he couldn't imagine she would have gone far. At halftime he climbed the stairs and went into Chloe's room. The giraffe lay stiffly beside her, filling a good two-thirds of the bed, its leather hooves overshooting the mattress by six inches. The armadillo was out of sight—under Chloe, he imagined—but when he rolled her warm torso over to peek, he found nothing. He surveyed her room then, still no Michael, went down to the kitchen, walked through the living room, checking all the usual spots, under the couch, behind the chair pillows, inside the DVD cabinet. No armadillo. He went back upstairs, put on his pajamas, and brushed his teeth. He slipped into Chloe's room and looked out her window and down the street. His wife had been gone for almost an hour. A lot could happen in an hour.

But then he heard the front door open and close. She ascended the stairs, quietly, then tiptoed past Chloe's room and into their dark bedroom, the smell of cigarettes trailing in her wake. He followed her and stood in the doorway, a hand on either side of the doorframe, as if an earthquake were approaching. She was in the bathroom and he listened to the usual sounds of preparing for bed. When she opened the door she gasped to find him standing there, his shadow thrown into the dark room by the nightlight behind him in the hall.

“What did you do with it?” he asked.

“Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.” She walked over to the bed and set her alarm for morning. When he didn't move from his spot, she looked up at him. “You're very ominous, looming there in the doorway like that.”

“What did you do with it?”

“With what?”

“You know with what.”

“It's gone,” she said, swinging her legs under the covers. “Just . . . it's gone.”

He shook his head. “She's gonna cry.”

“Maybe for a day. But then she'll be fine.”

“Where'd you put it?”

She sighed. It was a sigh with a message. “Dan, he's gone, okay?”

“But where
is
he?”

She turned onto her stomach, slid her arms under her pillow. “He's nowhere,” she said.

Nowhere? He gripped the doorframe tighter. Where was nowhere? Had she buried him at a construction site, tied a brick to his tail and thrown him in the river? Maybe she had cut him up into a million little pieces. He'd seen a movie once about a man escaping from jail, a prisoner who dug a tunnel from his cell with crude tools, and every morning the prisoner covered up the hole with a poster and put the rubble from the night's work into his pants pockets and went out into the yard and gently shook the rubble, crumb by crumb, from the holes he'd cut in the tips of his pants pockets and out the bottom of his pants legs, leaving it scattered across the jail yard, pebbles among pebbles, dust among dust, so no one was the wiser.

He looked at her lying there. She was pretending to sleep, but he knew she wasn't really. He was no fool. She wanted to skip this conversation, wanted to wake up in the morning with the issue too many hours closed to continue. He would not let her win. He would just stand here, his shadow covering her. He would stand here in this doorway until she was forced to say something more.

But as her breathing evened—could she really fake him out, after all these years?—the bed began to look more and more appealing. He was tired. And he liked the bed, liked this whole bedroom, really, which he and Carrie had painted together years before because they were too cheap to hire a painter and so there were paint smudges on the ceiling. He went and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. Tomorrow was Tuesday. Tuesdays were always crazy; he needed a good night's sleep. He lay down and turned toward her, looked over her rising back and out the window. It was snowing. The snow was billowy; instead of falling it lifted and spun and sailed outward into the black sky. Watching the flakes whirl by the glass he imagined tiny, indistinguishable bits of Michael the armadillo, tiny puffs of fluff and pieces of brown fur, spinning from Carrie's pockets as she went throughout her day, covering the house, the yard, the world, so that instead of being gone, instead of being nowhere, he was everywhere.

It's true that some things
I did not witness first hand: the music therapist's half nelson; the chair with the built-in straps; the suitcases packed for college; the field. But I am a reliable witness to most of what happened that day. Certainly I can be sure of my role, which officially consisted of a paint-by-number and a Styrofoam cup of cranapple juice. About other, earlier days I am equally certain. About the woman who believed we were angels. About the phones that didn't ring. About the macramé noose. About the threads of drool that spooled from her lips after ECT. My memory is sharp. I keep it sharp. Ten smooth strokes a day on the sharpening stone, always in the same direction.

Madeline was four years older than me. She had long dark hair that hung in violent tangles. She was so skinny that I could have bench pressed her, despite my own weakened condition. She had been everywhere. She could have written a travel guide to hospitals across Missouri and Illinois: what to bring, how to dress, what foods to avoid, currency, language, customs. She had seen it all, seen people
raw
. She told me stories about the places she'd been and the things she had seen people do to themselves and to each other. She was nineteen and her life was almost over. She was in the home stretch.

About Simon & Garfunkel. About where we hid the screws. About the drinking fountain with the masking tape. About the bus. About the buffer boys. About morning stretch with the cripples. About the stuffed bunny in the clothes dryer. About croquet with foam mallets and rubber wickets.

“I need you to do something for me,” she said. It was midmorning and we were supposed to be changing out of our scrubs but instead we were sitting on the heater in her room because it was the only really warm place in the whole unit and we were always cold. “I need your help.”

She needed my help.
My
help. I couldn't remember the last time I had helped someone. My blood was so thick with prescription drugs that I could hardly hold a conversation. My eyes were dirty windshields, the whole world covered in a milky gray film. A year before I'd played junior varsity softball, ripped line drives up the middle. What had it been like to see the ball, not just the ball but its twirling seams, as it connected with my sparkling bat? I could not begin to recall this image, this sensation, nor even the girl in the batter's box who had felt it. I had only a vague sense that she had once existed, not a memory of her but a recollection of her presence, like the grandmother who dies when you are three.

“When we go down for OT,” Madeline said, “I'm going to say I have to pee. The bathroom in OT's getting fixed so they'll have to let me go in the RT room. I saw somebody do it yesterday. Nobody's in that room then. They just watch you from the OT door. I'm going.”

(If you close your eyes and listen very hard you can actually hear, through years and miles, my fifteen-year-old brain creaking forward like a long dormant watermill while I process this massive amount of new and confusing information.)

“To the bathroom?” I asked.

She looked at me and rolled her eyes without rolling her eyes. That was something she could do. Then she lit a cigarette even though she had one burning in the ashtray. Sometimes between us we had four or five cigarettes going at once, sitting in ashtrays around her room. We just kept lighting them. Cigarettes were the only thing we had enough of. Our parents brought cartons and cartons of them to the hospital. It was all they could give us. It was all we wanted.

“
Going
going?” I said. “Where?”

“To get some pills,” she said. “There's that Walgreens up the road.”

“You should brush your hair,” I said. “So they think you're a regular person.”

“A lot of regular people don't brush their hair,” she said.

“I don't think you know how fucked up your hair is,” I said.

On this point I am absolutely clear: there was no need for her to explain what she was going to do with those pills. We had discussed ideal dosage, blend, timing, technique, at length. I had failed before; we had both failed before; but we were not going to fail again. She had learned from others' successes. She had been schooled by the best teachers in the finest institutions. Here in the world of healing, pills were locked away in vaults, like treasure. Out in the world, in brightly lit stores, they lay across aisles in white boxes for the taking. You only had to know which boxes to choose.