Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

But I said, “I think I was probably in love with you, too.”

I didn’t want him to die untouched. If he died in that condition I might have to, too.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I’m not.”

I thought of my father in the desert, receiving nothing from me but empty reassurances. He had died on his way back from the mailbox, with a handful of catalogues and flyers. I’d had a letter for him, in my pocket.

“Yes, you are,” Erich said.

I hesitated. Then I told him, “No, really. I think I was probably in love with you.”

He nodded, in a cold fury. He was not comforted. An early moth, so white it was nearly translucent, more an agitation of air than a physical presence, whirred past.

“We could have done better than this, you and I,” he said. “What was the matter with us?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

We didn’t move or speak for at least a minute. We stared at each other in furious disbelief. “We’re cowards,” I said at last. “This wasn’t a dramatic mistake we made. It was just a stupid little one that got out of hand. What do they call them? Sins of omission.”

“I think maybe that’s what bothers me most.”

“Me, too,” I said. And then, because there was nothing more to say, I went into the house to find Rebecca.

ERICH brought something new into the house. Or maybe he conjured up something old. Something that had been there all along. He rattled down the halls, skimmed failing breath from the dusty air. The plain facts of illness and death can seem remote as long as you don’t smell the immaculate chalk of the medicines. As long as you don’t see skin turning the color of clay.

Being a mother made certain things impossible, things I could have done almost without thinking in my other life. I couldn’t deny Erich what he needed and at the same time I couldn’t embrace him. I found that more or less against my will I’d become capable only, singularly, of protection. I suppose it was sentimental, though I didn’t taste anything like sentiment in my mouth. I felt hard and clinical, glacial. For the first time I didn’t think about myself. A district in my brain, that which I’d thought of as me, seemed to have been sucked clean. In its place was this steady uninflected drive to do what was needed. I fed Erich while the boys were at work, saw that he took his medicine, helped him to the toilet on the days he needed help. I spoke kindly to him. Nothing could have stopped me from doing that. But I didn’t care about him. In a sense our relations were strictly business. I cared only, truly, for Rebecca, who was alive and growing. Erich had already passed partway out of the world. While his comfort and safety were vitally important to me his existence was not. Now I better understand why mothers appear so often in stories as saints or as monsters. We are not human in the ordinary sense, at least not when our children are very small. We become monsters of care, inexorable, and if we occasionally lose track of the finer, imperishable points of the soul while ministering to the fragile body, that can’t be helped.

I was alone most days with Rebecca and Erich. Now that the boys had Marlys and Gert they were able to get home more often. But, still, the bulk of my time was spent with a two-year-old and a dying man.

I rented movies and poured juice. I began toilet training Rebecca, and occasionally changed Erich’s soiled sheets. He had passable days and worse days. On the bad ones he could be cranky with me. He could suddenly say “I hate apple juice, I’m just so sick of it, don’t they have any other kind at the market?” He could complain about the movies I brought home. “Mrs. Miniver ? God, is this all they had left?”

But he never lost patience with Rebecca. Sometimes, on the days he stayed in bed, the two of them watched videos together. I brought home Dumbo, Snow White, and anything involving the Muppets. Erich liked those movies, too. He didn’t charm Rebecca as thoroughly as Jonathan did, but he held her interest. He had a singular ability to focus, and I suspect she felt secure with him. He could so perfectly imitate a man who was good with children. He let her boss him around. He performed, on demand, a particular spastic dance with a stuffed monkey she had mysteriously named Shippo while she turned a doll named Baby Lou upside-down and waggled its stiff plastic legs in the air. He agreed to all the games she invented, many of which involved passing a rubber dinosaur back and forth while reciting a long, ever-changing list of demands. He could do the voice of Kermit the Frog, which she seemed to find hilarious and slightly upsetting.

Sometimes when I brought them a snack I found them sitting together on Erich’s bed, watching television, with toys scattered everywhere. Sometimes I had to catch my breath at the sight of them like that, Rebecca chattering and walking one of her miniature farm animals over Erich’s skinny knee or Erich absent-mindedly stroking her hair as they both watched cartoons. No matter how he felt on a given day, he was always attentive to my daughter. His powers of concentration were formidable. He seemed to have taken on a project: never to show this little girl any unpleasant or mean-spirited behavior, never to be anything but pliant and companionable in her presence. He was different from Jonathan. He didn’t love her. He liked her well enough. Being good with her was one of the organizing principles around which he built his days. He made it his job.

At first I felt it as a vague unrest that fluttered around in my belly, halfway between nausea and pain. I believed at times that I was developing an ulcer, or worse, though the doctor told me it was just anxiety. Finally, after several months, I realized. I was coming to a decision. Or a decision was coming to me. It was growing inside me, almost against my conscious will.

It didn’t reach its finished state until an afternoon in May, as I was taking a nap with Rebecca. She’d grown balky about naps, and would lie down in the afternoons only if I took her into Bobby’s and my bed and read to her from one of her books. She was almost two and a half then. She’d developed obsessions with several books, including one about a rabbit saying good night to every article in his bedroom and another about a pig who finds a magic bone. We’d read both books twice, and drifted off to sleep together. I woke twenty minutes later to the sound of Rebecca’s voice. She lay beside me, telling herself a story. This, too, was a recent habit. She could talk to herself for hours. I lay quietly, listening.

“I go to the store,” she said. “I got a talking bone. The girl never saw it before. She picked up the bone and went to Bunny’s house. And Bunny was there, and Jonathan was there. And they said, ‘My, my, my, what a fine little kitty.’ And Jonathan took the bone. He said, ‘Now I’m going to make something good with this.’ And he made… porridge. It was very very good. And Bunny said, um, and then Mommy and Bobby and Erich said. And I gave Erich some salad, because he was sick. And Jonathan had some, too. And then it was night, and Bunny had to go to bed. And then it was the next day, and the kitty is going to town. ‘My my my,’ the kitty said. Just imagine his surprise.”

As I lay listening to her, my chest constricted in panic. I could feel the heat rising to my face. I couldn’t tell at first why I was unnerved by what I heard. It was only Rebecca’s usual stream of consciousness, the kind of babbling I’d been hearing from her for over a month. But slowly, while lying on the bed with her, I figured it out. She was coming into herself. She was emerging from her foggy self-involvement and beginning to comprehend the independent life of other people. Soon she’d leave her disembodied child-world. She’d remember things. She was a camera getting ready to shoot. Click a brown house with a blue door. Click her favorite toys. Click Jonathan coming to get her in the mornings. She’d carry those images around for the rest of her life.