Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“Are you planning to join us?”

“That lady downstairs,” he said. “I know I should know her. Who is she?”

“You mean Tess?”

“That’s her name?”

“Tess,” she said. “Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, rising. As they got to the door and were about to head downstairs, he stopped her. “Don’t tell her I don’t know her.”

“But you do know her.”

“Don’t tell.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Believe me.”

“Good.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“Don’t test me.”

“It’s not a test,” she said. “I’m trying to help.”

He stood there thinking. “What is it?” he asked after a bit.

“Tess.”

“I said don’t test me.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “Not test. Tess . Tess is her name.”

He repeated the name a few times. “And how do I know her again?”

“She’s Pat’s wife.”

He looked annoyed. “Pat, your cousin Pat?”

“Yes,” she said, unable to keep from laughing.

“Well,” he said, “why didn’t you say so?”

“You know who Pat is?”

“Your cousin Pat,” he said, as if she were being obtuse. “Of course I do.”

“Of course you do,” she said, chuckling. She straightened his glasses on his face and led him downstairs.

• • •

In the morning, Ed went for the paper. She was relieved to get him out of the house for a while. She had a lot to do for the party, and her nieces were there to help her. It was unseasonably warm, so she imagined he might take a seat on the bench by the Food Emporium.

Elyse helped her chop potatoes and Cecily polished the silverware. She showed the two of them how to make quiche. The Christmas music gave her movements an upbeat, cheery punctuation, and as she directed the girls she remembered the joyous way Ed, in the days before he switched over to headphones, would stand in the living room conducting along to the symphony recording with an invisible baton. She enjoyed watching him work himself into a frenzy. She loved how he laughed at his own ridiculousness.

She was happy enough that she could almost forget that Connell hadn’t come home. Watching Elyse and Cecily work in their purposeful way, she wondered what it would have been like to have a daughter instead of a son. Daughters didn’t leave the way sons did. Her friends’ daughters never seemed to move more than a few miles away from their mothers.

Ed had been gone an hour and a half. With his slow gait it wasn’t unreasonable to think he was still in transit, and anyway she was enjoying herself. A little while later, though, Tess asked, “Where’s Ed?” and Eileen began to worry: not that anything bad had happened to him, but that he’d gotten lost. She had allowed herself to get complacent.

“Topps,” she said. “The local bakery. They spoil him there. I’d better go and save the counter girl from him. He’ll haunt that place all day if they let him.”

She drove slowly down Palmer, stopping at storefronts to peer inside, feeling like a criminal casing them out. She did a circle of the town. He wasn’t on any of the benches. It had grown colder since he’d left; the wind had picked up. She regretted giving in to vanity, both his and hers, in not getting him a MedicAlert bracelet. He was wandering the streets with nothing to explain his situation.

She drove down Kimball Avenue to double through the back streets where he might have gotten turned around. When she got to Midland, she saw a man approaching a car at the stoplight under the Cross County overpass, waving his hands, and it took her a second to realize that he was her husband. She threw the hazards on and walked toward him, and when he saw her he started clapping his hands. She pulled him back by the sleeve. A blue Mercedes honked and slowed as it passed. At first she thought it was her neighbor from up the block, but she was relieved to see a gray-haired man she didn’t recognize. Still, had he recognized her? Would he recount the scene over dinner?

She was too angry to speak. She tried to imagine the melee Ed had caused since he’d gotten to the intersection. How long had it been? She was lucky the police hadn’t gotten to him yet.

She buckled him into the passenger seat and returned to the driver’s seat before saying anything. “What were you doing so far from the house?” she asked finally.

“You found me,” he said. “Don’t make a big deal of it. Let’s go.”

“Did you get lost? Were you disoriented?”

Ed looked at his feet. She noticed that the soles were separating from the leather of his shoes. He needed a new pair, or at least a resoling. She had been leaving details like this unattended to. Her secret thought, the shameful thought she’d been harboring more frequently lately, was that Ed wouldn’t notice anyway.

“I was trying to get to the mall.”

“What in the hell!” she shouted. “Tell me the truth. Did you get lost trying to get home?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“I need to know, Ed.”

“I wanted to get you something.”

“We decided about this. Remember? You and I aren’t exchanging presents this year. It’s just easier that way.”

“Not for Christmas,” he said.

“For what, then?”

“Our anniversary.” He stretched out his hands and poked at his ring. “New Year’s Eve,” he said.

“We got married on January twenty-second, Edmund.”

“But we met on New Year’s Eve.”

She was quiet. She pictured Tess’s concerned look when they got home. The look would say, in the most well-meaning way possible, Why did you let him go out in the first place? Ed sat heavily in the passenger seat. “We need to get back,” she said. “Everyone is worried sick.”

When they were nearly home, she looked over and saw him holding his wallet.

“I didn’t have any money anyway,” he said.

She hadn’t put any in his wallet in a while. She’d also taken the cards, to prevent someone from taking advantage of him.

She turned the car around and drove back to the mall, parked in front of Macy’s. She fished her own wallet out of her purse. A hundred-dollar bill flashed up at her, along with a couple of singles.

You stirred up emotions in a man when you gave him cash. She’d practiced defusing that ticking bomb during her father’s retirement years, when she still lived at home. When Ed handed her his wallet, she folded the hundred in briskly, economically, as though she were giving a flu shot.

They went inside. She told him she’d wait in the purse section and watched him amble off. He stopped to talk to a salesgirl, who pointed him toward the escalator. As he began to rise, clutching the thick rubber rail with both hands and looking over the side as though it were the edge of a ship, she decided to follow him from a distance. She trailed him into the women’s section. She had a vision of him throwing dress after dress over his shoulder in a frenzied spree, but he walked the aisles deliberately, like a big cat stalking its prey, looking at dresses without touching them. He moved from rack to rack, evidently making quick decisions, and stopped in front of a row of dresses along the far wall. He appraised them as she pretended to look at clothes across the aisle. A salesgirl came over and he waved her off. As if he had read Eileen’s mind about the dowdy-looking dresses in front of him, he headed to an adjacent rack and, after a sweep of those offerings with his eyes, held up a dress. She could see it shimmering in the light. The pattern was tasteful, the cut elegant. He waved the salesgirl over again with a frantic hand, holding the dress in front of him as though it were a banner in a parade.

She watched a strange exchange between Ed and the salesgirl. A look of patient confusion crossed the girl’s face as he passed her his wallet. She held it dubiously as he jabbed at a pocket behind where his credit cards would have been. Frustrated, he took the wallet back, removed a slip of paper, and handed it to her.