Justin Cronin - Mary and O’Neil

In the little room of vending machines O’Neil finds a pay phone and calls his in-laws in Minneapolis, who use the other telephone line in the house to make travel arrangements while O’Neil is still talking with them, giving them all the news, and by the time the call is over they have booked a plane to Philadelphia, arriving the next evening. As he hangs up he realizes that he is woozy with hunger; he buys a peanut butter sandwich from one of the vending machines and puts it away in four bites, washing it down with a pint of milk as he sits at a Formica table in the empty room. My wife and daughter are asleep upstairs, he thinks, and then he says it: “My wife and daughter are asleep upstairs.” O’Neil rises again and returns to the pay phone. His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he still remembers their telephone number, and without thinking he dials it, surprised to be doing it, and by the way it feels and sounds: a sequence of bright tones that resonates inside him like an echo on a canyon wall, as strange and familiar as his own heartbeat. O’Neil intends to listen to the phone ring a couple of times and then hang up, but then there is a click on the line.

“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean-”

“Honey? What time is it?” He hears the woman turn over, and then the scratch of the alarm clock on her bedside table as she pulls it toward her. “Is it midnight?” she asks. “Where are you?”

For a moment O’Neil does not answer. The phone is slick in his damp hand. “It’s late,” he says finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

The woman’s breathing in the receiver is deep and even, like sighing, and O’Neil thinks she may have fallen back asleep.

“Mmmm. I was having the strangest dream. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” O’Neil says. He hesitates, then speaks again. “I think everything’s working out just the way I wanted it.”

“That’s nice to hear. It’s nice when everything works out like that.” The receiver rustles against her face as she pulls the covers close. “Honey? You sound… I don’t know. Far away.”

“I’m really okay,” O’Neil says. “A little tired. It’s been quite a day. I have some news too.”

“I know,” the woman says sleepily. “You love me.”

The answer is easy to give. “I do. Of course I do.”

“I wish you were here, honey. Let everybody else handle things for a while. Can you? Just come home.”

“I will,” O’Neil says. “As soon as everything’s taken care of here, I’ll come straight home.”

“Come home, my darling. Say it: I’m coming home.”

“I’m coming home.”

“And you miss me.”

O’Neil thinks of his parents, gone so long, taken from him when he was just a boy in college, standing at the door with his keys in his hand. “Yes, I miss you. It’s awful, missing you.”

“I miss you too,” the woman says, and then-so gently O’Neil doesn’t realize what has happened-she hangs up the phone.

Back in the room O’Neil strips to his shorts in the dark, and lowers himself onto the little cot. He would like to wake up Mary, to tell her about the call, but he closes his eyes instead and is instantly asleep.

Then he is awake again, and wondering where he is. It takes him a moment to collect his thoughts, and to realize that what has awakened him is the sound of crying: not Nora, as he first thought, but Mary.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary says. She is speaking softly to herself, to baby Nora, to O’Neil. She hugs the child close. “I’m so sorry.”

She is sitting on her bed with Nora in her arms, and O’Neil knows that she is thinking of the other baby, the one from years ago. It happened long before they’d even met. The baby’s father was her boyfriend at the time, a judge’s son who wanted to be a painter. He was serious and clever but had no idea what to do with himself, let alone Mary and a baby. In the end he had fallen apart completely; Mary had driven herself to the clinic.

O’Neil gets into bed behind her and Mary moves a little to let him hold her, as he always does when she is sad. In the dark room he can smell his wife’s tears, mixing with the smell of their new baby. His family fills his arms.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary says again, rocking. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

“It’s her,” O’Neil says. As he says it he believes it. He had meant only to comfort her, to offer words, but he knows at once that this is true.

“It is,” O’Neil says. “It’s the one you lost, come back to you.”

Mary doesn’t answer, and O’Neil holds her that way a long time, until her crying has stopped. He wishes she could believe it too. Around them the hospital is silent, like a house after everyone has gone to bed.

“I want to leave,” Mary says finally.

“Go home, you mean?”

Mary shakes her head. In her arms Nora makes a tiny mewing sound. She gives a startlingly human-looking yawn. “No, just for a minute. Let’s take her outside.”

By the supply closet O’Neil finds a wheelchair and a blanket, and pushes it back to the room to the edge of Mary’s bed. He holds the baby while she eases herself into it. In his arms she feels like a loaf of bread. She fusses a little when he gives her to Mary, but then is quiet again.

“How do we do this?” Mary whispers.

“I think we just do.”

He wheels her into the hallway, past the empty nurses’ station to the elevator. The clock on the wall beside the elevator says that it’s a little after 2:00 A.M. Downstairs, they pass the empty cafeteria, the lounge with its vending machines and pay phones. He is on the verge of thinking he’s gotten them lost when he turns a corner and sees the door.

“Ta-da,” O’Neil says.

He wheels them up to it and pushes the metal bar. Silence meets them, and a draft of cool night air that smells of grass. O’Neil turns the wheelchair around and backs through the door. Tomorrow it will be different, he knows. Tomorrow there will be papers and forms to fill out, and a visit from the pediatrician, and luggage to be packed; there will be more calls to make, and the nervous drive home through backstreets with no traffic, and Mary’s parents arriving from Minneapolis, their arms full of large, unnecessary presents. There will be meals to cook and beds to make and diapers to be changed. There will be a thousand details, and then a thousand thousand more, and at the end of it all, on a day far, far away, one of them will be alone.

But now it is easy, the simplest, brightest wish fulfilled: the three of them, and the cool moonlight silvering down the green grass on their first night together.

“I just wanted her to see it,” Mary says, and O’Neil wheels his wife and daughter outside, down the ramp, into the garden that lies beyond the lights of the hospital.

If you had seen them, you might have thought they were ghosts, or angels. You might have wondered if they were really there at all, these glowing bodies on the lawn. You would have known they were happy.

March 1999-September 2000

THE FIRST TIME, after the surgery, O’Neil drove. Kay had told him not to come, that the doctors would soon know more and then he should visit if he wanted to. But on he came anyway, arriving in the early morning darkness at the hospital, a citadel of light surrounded by dense green woods. The air was cold and very still, and smelled of the tall pine trees that were everywhere beyond the lamps of the parking lot. Eight hours at the wheel of his tiny car: he’d stopped only once, at a McDonald’s south of Albany, to empty his aching bladder and call Mary, who was already in bed. The baby had a cold, she said drowsily; it would be a long night.