Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“Okay,” she said. “This is just for now. It’s temporary. When you stabilize, we’ll get you out of here.”

He snorted at the word “temporary,” as if a bit of the old humor were back. Then he slipped back into the wailing, only now it was weirdly dislocated from the conversation and seemed almost meditative. He stared into the distance. She shook him to make him stop, and finally, mercifully, he was quiet.

“I can’t be here during the day,” she said. “But I’m going to come after work, every day. Do you understand me? I’ll be here all the time. You’re going to get sick of seeing me.”

His eyebrows shot up. “No, no, no!” he said.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m going to be fine. I’ll have help.” She reached to pat down his hair again, and he batted her away with a shocking directness and force.

“No!” he shouted, less in plea than command. He was pointing a finger at her. “No! No!”

“No what, Ed?” She had a creeping feeling he understood something. She hadn’t said she was keeping Sergei on, but she sensed that it was the topic between them now.

“What is it?” He grew quiet again, brooding, his bottom lip pushed out, his chin tucked, his eyes searching hers.

“No.” His voice was meek, but the note it struck was final.

“No what? You don’t want me to have help?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll get by. I’ll manage.”

“No,” he said again.

• • •

A vestige of evening light lingered in the air as she headed back. She decided to take a detour through town. She took Valley off Pondfield and drove up the hill, into the warren of expensive homes. The road curved quickly and with little give; she had to pull over once to let a car pass. Lush trees shouted their vigorous greens, balancing the calm of the Tudor revival homes, every one of which seemed perfectly placed and spaced.

She stopped in front of Virginia’s home. She wondered whether Virginia had ever seen her there, whether she’d noticed how often the same car stopped outside her house or across the street for a little while and then drove off.

She drove down the hill and took Garden, stopping next to the empty tennis courts. When they lived in Jackson Heights, she’d bought Ed private lessons with a pro at the tennis center in Flushing. She never forgot her admiration at the way he held his own with Tom Cudahy the first time she saw him play, or that he’d so thoroughly assimilated the little coaching he’d gotten that he’d turned himself into a decent player. Tennis seemed like the perfect sport for him to take up, or at least the perfect one if he arranged his life the way she wished he would. The exercise would satisfy him, tiring him out as effectively as the long jogs he liked to go on. The courts were state-of-the-art, and the pros who taught there were trying to get on the US Open circuit or just coming off. It was the kind of place where Ed would meet people, make the right contacts, and form an ambitious plan he might not otherwise conceive of. It lacked that deliberate grandeur of a country club that she knew he would balk at. Still, he objected to the extravagance and didn’t attend a single session. Connell wouldn’t go either. The two-hundred-dollar credit never got used.

She circled through town and doubled back on Pondfield past the restaurants with outdoor tables that would be pulled in in a few weeks. She’d imagined dining at those tables with Ed, a drink in hand as townspeople stopped to greet them by name, but now she would have to sit at them alone, or with friends from elsewhere, or not at all, because she didn’t know anyone in town.

She parked and walked past the post office, Le Bistro, the stationery store and Topps Bakery, Lange’s Delicatessen, the Alps, Tryforos on the other side of the street, past Botticelli Bridal Boutique, which had in its window a beautiful dress beaded from bodice to train, and arrived at the northbound platform of the train station, where she took a seat on a bench, looking at Lawrence Hospital in the middle distance, the place that had originally brought her to this town. The temperature was pleasant, the summer humidity ceding to the dry air of autumn. People began to amass on the opposite platform in anticipation of a city-bound train. She felt an impulse to get on that train and see where the night took her, but Sergei was at home, and she had to go home too.

A train approached on her side. She watched its light grow from a speck around the bend into a bright flash as it roared into the station. The platform rumbled under her feet, and after a few pregnant moments the train slid its doors open and allowed the emergence of people. The passengers weren’t in a hurry, but neither did they dawdle; they ducked into the tunnel or fanned out into the streets with determined efficiency to meet spouses in waiting cars or begin the walk home. The platform emptied quickly, leaving her alone again, and after another minute the train on the opposite side came in, and that platform emptied too.

She would never be picked up by Ed nor pick him up. There would be no one waiting for her in the rainy dark, taillights guiding her to him, no respite in the front seat as someone else manned the wheel. She would have to take a cab if she ever wanted not to walk from the station. The fleet of cabs waited for trains, their drivers’ expressions stony. They never pulled into your driveway but only continued up the street with their other fares, leaving you standing outside an empty house, listening to the muffled sounds of trucks on the distant highway and the drowsy hush of oncoming night.

She went back to the car and drove a long way home, drifting once through town and taking back roads. She pulled into the garage and shut the car off and sat in it long enough for the light in the door track to go off, so she was swallowed in darkness. She listened to the rhythms of the house, its quiet heartbeat. The water heater hummed in the basement, and from a couple of flights away she could make out the faint whisper of Sergei’s radio.

She went up to the second floor and stood outside his door. He was listening to classical music. There was something about men needing to listen to classical music alone, as though the emotions it stirred in them embarrassed them too much. She waited until she heard a pause in the movement and knocked. When he came to the door, the racing stripes of his track pants and the blazing whiteness of his sneakers looked slightly comical under the solid square of his polo shirt.

“I wanted to let you know I was home,” she said. “Thank you for staying.”

He waved her politeness off.

“Do you want some tea?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s not from a samovar, but it’s Irish, so it should be strong enough.”

“Any tea,” he said.

She put the tea on and set out what was left of a cake she’d made earlier in the week, a treat for Connell before he left for school. When the kettle whistled, he came down the stairs. She tucked into the preparation of the tea to escape the silence of being in a room with him. The language barrier robbed her of her instincts. She didn’t want to talk down to him, but she found herself talking slowly and loudly when she did talk. After a while, there was nothing left to prepare, and she brought the teapot over and served him and sat with him.

“You like classical music?” she asked desperately. He arched his brows and then merely nodded, deflating the little hope that she might spark an exchange with this question. She had the feeling he wasn’t much of a talker in any language. “My husband and I go— went —to Carnegie Hall, for the symphony. We had a subscription.”

She was just at the point of asking him, idiotically, if he knew Carnegie Hall, when he cleared his throat with an authoritative growl and said that his daughter had played there. She was glad she had put the mug to her lips, because she was able to hide her astonishment.