David Vann - Caribou Island

Mm, she said, and pushed back into him, something so natural and easy. He closed his eyes, not wanting to lose this, a moment increasingly rare between them. Basic comfort, the two of them needing each other. Why wasn’t this enough?

His first attraction to Irene had been instinct. He was in grad school at Berkeley, becoming a medievalist, but he was outclassed and he knew it. Couldn’t keep up with the others. He was fine on the primary texts but couldn’t keep up on the secondary documents, long histories and registers, almanacs, journals, all in Middle English. Religious documents in Middle English, Old English, and Latin. Then all the criticism, keeping up with current books and articles. It was just too much. And he didn’t have French or Old French, which was a big problem.

A friend in the program introduced him to Irene, at a group dinner in a cheap restaurant. She had long blond hair then, blue eyes. She looked like something from an Icelandic saga. She didn’t talk in jargon. A preschool teacher, still in education, but not intimidating. He felt he could breathe, finally. She was safe.

Gary held Irene and tried to remember back to who they had been at twenty-four years old, tried to feel what he had felt then, but it was a long way back. Irene moaned again, moved away from him and tried to clear her throat, threw back the covers suddenly.

I can’t swallow, she said. I can’t breathe, and now I can’t swallow. How am I supposed to get any air?

She walked into the bathroom and Gary sat up. Is there anything I can do?

Make it stop, she said. I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep. The pain won’t go away. And now I’m dizzy. The Vicodin. She gargled, tried to clear her throat.

Come back to bed.

I’m drowning, she said. Maybe food will help. And some tea.

So she dressed and they went to the kitchen. Rhoda had food on the table, a cup of hot tea ready.

Thank you, Irene said, and she gave Rhoda a kiss on her forehead. Gary wadded up newspaper at the fireplace, stacked small sticks in a tepee, a few thicker pieces and a log, lit the edges and fanned it until a good fire was going.

Irene started crying. She was trying to eat some mashed potatoes and beans, but then she was just crying.

Mom, Rhoda said.

Irene, Gary said, and they sat on either side of her, put their arms around her.

It really hurts, she said. It just won’t stop. But she wasn’t crying only about the pain, she knew. She had an excuse, finally, to cry without hiding, and it was impossible to stop. It had a volume and depth, a physical space inside her, vaulted, a carving out of everything. Gary leaving her, after thirty years spent in this cold, unforgiving place. She didn’t know how to stop that, how to slow the momentum of years, how to make him see.

By the time Jim returned from dropping Monique at the hotel, Rhoda was already home. At the sink, doing his dinner dishes.

Hey, she said. This was a hell of a spread. How come I don’t get Baked Alaska? She was smiling. Making up. And she looked pretty good to Jim. He kissed her and pulled her close.

Hey, wait. Let me get the soap off my hands first.

Jim was taking off Rhoda’s jeans right there at the sink.

I take it the meeting went well? Rhoda asked, but her voice was getting lower.

Jim kneeled before her on the kitchen floor.

Never mind, she murmured.

Afterward, they played Yahtzee at the kitchen table. Rhoda got a Yahtzee with ones. She gloated and he groaned. Then, her next turn, she got another Yahtzee with ones, on only two rolls.

Whoa, Jim said. The gods are out there.

He got a crap roll, everything but a three, went for twos, got one more but that was it.

Okay, he said. And then Rhoda rolled a third Yahtzee, again with ones.

Aah! They both yelled. Rhoda put her hands to her teeth and began bouncing in her seat. Jim was screaming, seriously freaked. They both got up and ran around the room, brushing themselves off instinctively and shivering, as if luck, with its little batlike hands, were still clinging to them.

Irene could feel every bump in the road on the way to town. Every rut and ridge, washboard and pothole, all of it sending arcs of red spinning into the world behind her right eye. A sunny day, a summer’s day, but even the light hurt, so her eyes were closed.

We’ll be there soon, Gary said. Just hold on a little longer.

The Vicodin’s making me nauseated.

Only a few minutes, Gary said.

At the office, they took the X rays and Frank read them on a lit whiteboard. Here’s a frontal view, he said, and it was Irene’s skull, eye hollows and fleshless jaw, rows of grinning teeth, just like in a skull and crossbones. A vision ahead to her own death.

Creepy, she said.

And here’s a side view, he said. And the other side.

Where’s the infection? Irene asked. What does it look like?

Well, that’s the problem, Irene. There’s nothing here.

What do you mean, there’s nothing?

You don’t have any locked-in infection according to the X rays.

But I do have one.

You certainly have a cold, with maybe a bit of an infection. If you really want, I can give you an antibiotic for seven days.

I don’t understand.

The X rays just don’t show anything.

Irene started crying, rocked forward in her seat, her head in her hands.

Irene, Frank said, and he patted her shoulder awkwardly.

I have something, she said. Something’s wrong.

I’m sorry. I’ll give you the prescriptions. But there’s just nothing there.

So Irene waited until she could pull herself together, tried unsuccessfully to blow her nose, then took her prescriptions, paid, and had to tell Gary in the waiting room. Nothing showed up on the X rays, she said.

What?

I know there’s something, she said. It just didn’t show up.

Irene, he said, and pulled her into his arms. I’m sorry, Irene. But maybe this is good news. Maybe you’ll get better soon.

No. I have something.

I’ll take you home, he said. We’ll set you up by the fire.

So they did that. Filled the prescriptions, drove home, all the ruts and bumps, Irene in agony, and Gary brought blankets out to the couch by the fireplace, laid Irene down, built a good fire.

A stone fireplace, a good home, her husband making her comfortable. Maybe this awful pain will turn out to be a good thing, Irene thought. Maybe it will bring us closer together. Maybe Gary will remember me. A strange time in life, her children gone, her work taken away, only Gary left, and not the Gary she began with. She didn’t like retirement. Until only a few months ago, she had danced and sung every day with the children at school. Three- to five-year-olds, learning through play, following their interests from worm gardens to dinosaurs to building trains that could cross to Russia and continue on to Africa. They would come sit on her lap, make themselves at home.

Gary made her tea, and she sipped at it, held the hot mug in her hands. She had taken the new medications in the truck on the way home, and she was still waiting for an effect.

The pain’s not going away, she told Gary. I don’t feel anything from the medications. What painkiller did he give me?

Gary opened the bag from the pharmacy. Looks like Amoxicillin for antibiotic, some decongestant I can’t pronounce, and Aleve for painkiller.

Aleve?

Yeah.

That little shit. Aleve is just Advil. Call Rhoda. I need more Vicodin.

Irene. You should take what he prescribed. He said nothing showed up on the X ray.

The X ray is wrong.

How can an X ray be wrong?

I don’t know. It just is.

Rhoda stayed at work late, until Dr. Turin and everyone else had left. Just finishing up some paperwork, she’d told them. In the cabinet of prescription samples, she took the rest of the Vicodin, which had been sent mistakenly. Only a week’s supply, and they would never be getting more. She would need something else.