Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

When they pulled into the driveway, Connell asked the driver if he’d mind giving him a lift to the train.

She was flabbergasted. “You’re not still planning on going out?” He must have known that once inside, he wouldn’t be able to leave. The driver and Connell both looked to her for approval. “Go,” she said, annoyed, waving him off.

She climbed off Ed and helped him out of the truck. The snow was now a few inches thick. She held his hand as he navigated the fluffy terrain. She punched in the code for the garage door and watched the truck pull out.

Upstairs, she took off her string of pearls and changed out of her evening gown into a sweat suit. She got him ready for bed, in case he wanted to go up early.

She pulled a half gallon of ice cream out of the freezer and took two spoons from the drawer, though the second spoon was a fig leaf for her own guilt. Ed would have two spoonfuls, tops.

They sat through the lip-synched entertainment, waiting for the countdown. Ed fell asleep with his head back and his mouth open, hours before the New Year. She didn’t wake him.

As midnight approached, she thought of the night they’d met, the way he’d leaned in to kiss her when the hour struck. She’d been waiting for him to do it all night. They’d been in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by hundreds of couples. When he kissed her, she experienced a sensation she’d heard described a thousand times but always dismissed as malarkey: that everyone around had disappeared, and it was just the two of them. And now it really was just the two of them, and everyone had more or less disappeared. The ball made its languorous drop; “1994” lighted up onscreen. She tried to remember what it had felt like to kiss him that first time. All she could remember was that he had begun simply, almost politely, and then he had taken her face in his two hands and kissed her with a sudden intensity, as if he had been waiting to do so for longer than the few hours he had known her. She knew right away that she would marry him. So many years had passed since that night that it was almost a different man she was looking at now. Hairs poked up over the neckband of his undershirt. His chest rose and fell weakly, as if he were not really breathing. She leaned over him, touched her lips to his. His eyes were closed now, as hers had been that night. She was afraid he’d startle awake and scream, or throw her off him, but he just started to kiss her in his sleep.

• • •

The Caprice was declared a total loss. She took the insurance payout and added it to their checking account.

Maybe, she thought, she should use the money for a new car for herself. She was tired of buying American cars. Maybe she’d buy herself a sporty two-door BMW like the one Connell had crashed into, or one of those E-Class Mercedes that looked perfectly enameled and invincible. She wouldn’t have to cringe at the paint peeling from the roof, the felt bagging around the center light in the ceiling, the rusty creak and thunderclap of the door closing. She could get a car she wouldn’t be ashamed to park in the church lot.

The boy could be expensive, but there were times he returned something on the investment.

People came from all over for the funeral for Ed’s mother. It was the first time Eileen had seen Fiona leave Staten Island since the surprise party for Ed. Phil and Linda flew in from Toronto. Having Phil around seemed to add to Ed’s grief, not diminish it. It was as if Ed had finally realized that all the years they’d spent in different countries couldn’t be gotten back. The night before the funeral they’d sat at the kitchen table together for hours, Phil talking and Ed listening. Every time she went in there, Ed was crying big, unrestrained tears.

Cora had been a force in the parish, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea in Carroll Gardens, and so the church was packed with a lot of people Eileen had never met. Ed didn’t seem any more at home than she felt in his childhood church. His face was so red during the services that she kept reminding him to breathe. Cora had been ill for a while, and she’d had a good, long life, but it looked as if it had never occurred to Ed that his mother would actually die.

Eileen had always thought of Ed’s conscientious presence at his mother’s apartment, his willingness to go and change a bulb for her or pick her up groceries, as the fealty of a dutiful son, but the way he was responding to her death suggested a depth of feeling for her that Eileen hadn’t imagined. It might have had something to do with his condition. He was a step closer to death than an average person.

Afterward, as everyone hurried to their cars — it was a frigid day in February — her aunt Margie asked Ed for directions to the cemetery.

“Well,” he said, standing in front of the church, “where are you parked?”

“Around the corner.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He was kneading his hands together as if they might release an answer. “You need to take the highway.”

“Which one?”

“The highway around here. God, what’s the name of it?”

“You mean the BQE?”

“Yes! That’s it.”

“Where can I pick it up?”

They were a block away from the building Ed had grown up in. He might have driven a few thousand times to the BQE from where they were standing.

“It’s not far,” he said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

She cut Ed off and gave Margie the directions. She waited until Margie was out of earshot.

“You don’t know where the BQE is?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s right around here.”

She looked at Connell huddling by the car waiting to go, then back at Ed, and she was overcome by the difference in age between father and son. Ed looked more like a contemporary of his mother’s than a husband to her. His shoulders hunched forward and his face was scored with new wrinkles, as if the trauma of his mother’s dying had aged him. She knew she would have to play nursemaid to him eventually, but she wanted to hold that off as long as possible.

That night, although they were in mourning, and although Phil and Linda were in the guest bedroom, Eileen got on top of Ed, leaning close to him as she moved back and forth. Afterward, she lay wondering how long he’d be able to perform in bed. The thought of the loss of consort kept her awake most of the night, and it was only toward morning that she realized it wasn’t the idea of physical loneliness that had been bothering her but an incipient awareness that she herself was going to die someday.

• • •

She kept a log of the first times he failed to do things. It was like a diary of a child’s development in reverse. Certain failures correctly augured great changes in his mental powers. Others were false alarms, momentary hiccups.

02/19/94: Couldn’t find the BQE after Cora’s funeral. Losing his sense of direction.

At Karen Coakley’s wedding, she turned her back on Ed to get a plate of hors d’oeuvres. When she next spotted him, he had joined a group arranged along the far wall for a picture with the official photographer. It was the groom’s family, and she didn’t recognize any of them, and yet Ed was smiling gamely among their number, as if he’d watched them all grow up. He was ruining the photo by his presence. When the photographer was finished, she whisked him away with a quick, pitiless jerk, hoping no one had noticed him, though there was nothing she could do about Karen and her husband seeing him there when they examined the matte prints.

A provocative beauty emerged from the group, looking flustered. “I got felt up,” Eileen heard her say indignantly. “This man put his hand on my ass.”

“Who?” the boyfriend asked. “Point him out.”