Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

JANET WAS TOO TIRED to drive herself home, and she needed her vest and inhaler, so after the party we left the hotel and I drove her to her apartment on Beacon Hill. She put her arms through the holes in the vest and pressed the Velcro straps together and did her half-hour of chest PT, spitting mucus into a little bowl, her body shaking and her mouth twisting down, as if she were a kid on a funhouse ride she was tired of. While she did that I wandered around the room. I’d been there a few times, but had never really looked at the pictures-Janet in a soccer uniform, her tough-looking dad in work overalls, her mother beside a small new car. She sucked on her inhaler, popped a pile of pills into her mouth, had a hit of oxygen, and we went to bed. In her small bed, with the lights out, she rolled over against me. Her breaths were short strips of wet cloth being torn out of her, one by one.

“I’m taking a week off to see if I can get back some strength,” she said quietly near my ear.

“Good.”

“I’ve moved up three slots on the transplant list.”

“Double good.”

For a few minutes I listened to the traffic on Beacon Street and to the building’s old pipes knocking. I thought she had fallen asleep-she was tired enough, but the oxygen always kept her awake for a while. Her right foot twitched twice. She ran the sole of it over my calf. She swallowed.

“You know I’ll never last long enough to get new lungs, right, Jake?”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“I’m about half a step away from going back into the hospital. The last lung function test was twenty-seven percent. I’ve been around enough CF people to know what twenty-seven percent means. I’ve seen enough of my friends die, and I remember what they looked and acted like a couple of months before they died. It doesn’t make it any easier for me if you pretend it isn’t there. I don’t want that from you.”

“Alright.”

“I’d like to make it to Christmas. I’d like to buy you a motorcycle and give it to you on Christmas Eve, and buy you a leather jacket to go with it, and make love to you with you wearing the leather jacket and nothing else.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t sound so excited.”

I had two minutes then of not being able to get any words out. She was running the sole of her foot over my instep. During those two minutes my mind, my strange mind, was absolutely consumed with an image of her father, balanced on a staging 150 feet above the Mystic River, patching concrete and obsessing about his daughter. I had spent a little time with Giselle’s mother and dad after her service, and had some idea what the grief of a parent felt like. I thought about them, too. In the warm room-so warm we had only a sheet over us-I was buried under the idea of what it might feel like to know your child was going to die before you died, and how she was going to die, and having to watch that as it happened, to live those days and those hours and those minutes, one after another, year by year.

“Earth to Jake,” Janet said tiredly. “Jake, come in. Over.”

I tried to talk but it was like trying to pull myself out of myself.

“Begin reentry.” She coughed and kept coughing and climbed tiredly out of bed and went into the bathroom for a while, then came back. “Coast straight down through the gloom cloud, it’s clear here on Beacon Hill.”

“Coasting down,” I finally managed to say. I felt tiny beside her then. Tiny and not brave. There had been a time when I thought her father was a coward for doing what he’d probably done, but his picture was so close on the night table that I could have reached out and held it and I had nothing bad to think about him then. Nothing. Not one bad thought.

“Mum Rossi wants you for Thanksgiving dinner.”

I had my eyes closed. My arm was around her. I could feel her ribs.

“RSVP ASAP.” She nudged me with her knee.

I couldn’t say anything. I could not squeeze out one sound.

“You can bring a date, if you want. A marathon runner. A triathlete. An oarswoman from your college days.”

She pushed me, hard. I said, “I’d like to bring Helen.”

“Who is Helen?”

I coughed. I took two breaths. “Remember the blond in the painting I was working on the first night you slept over?”

“Who is she?”

“Helen.”

“Right. Don’t be an ass. Who is she to you?”

“My mother.”

A MELIA ROSSI, IT turned out, was one of those people who get their satisfaction in life from having guests in the house, cooking for them and watching them eat, making a fuss over them, making them happy. I remember reading that in some places, in ages past, opening your house to strangers had been considered an essential part of being human, an acknowledgment of some kind of invisible link. I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. Often, over the years, customers would make Gerard and me a bowl of hot soup at lunch, or bring out iced tea and cookies. Once, when Gerard was having a tough time just after his divorce and the woman whose garage we were rebuilding was a psychotherapist, she’d taken him into her office for a half-hour session, gratis. Those small gestures always lifted us out of the work routine and put a kind of polish on the day.

Janet’s mother wanted me there for Thanksgiving, then she wanted me and my mother. Then me, my mother, and Gerard. Then me, my mother, Gerard, and Patricia and Alicia, his twins. I was afraid that, next time Janet talked to her mother, Gerard’s ex-wife, Anastasia, would get an invite, too, and though Anastasia is a fine woman and a good mother and an excellent dinner companion, it probably would have meant trouble, having her and Gerard looking at each other over a turkey carcass. But Anastasia was visiting her dad in a nursing home in Carlsbad, California. So, on Thanksgiving Day we had a two-pickup caravan heading out to the blue-collar suburb where Amelia Rossi lived and where Janet had grown up: Mum and I in front; Gerard, Patricia and Alicia bringing up the rear.

My mother was having a fairly lucid day. I’d told her we were going to my girlfriend’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving, and that seemed to make her happy. I’d been having a peculiar feeling all that morning, though, even before I’d driven to Apple Meadow to pick her up. Something was haunting me, some bad breeze from a forgotten dream, some premonition. I thought it might be because one of my favorite uncles had died on Thanksgiving Day, years before, so the holiday was always ringed in black for me.

The sky was low and gray, the winds wirling, and the truck felt less than perfectly stable on the road. To make things stranger, on the way over the Mystic River Bridge, as I was thinking about Janet’s father again, my mother said, “We forgot to pick up Dad at work.”

“Dad’s gone, Mum.”

“Gone where?”

“He died.”

“Of what?”

“Two strokes.”

She fell silent for a while, as if the shock and sadness of this fact had knocked her back down into a world of feelings that wrapped themselves around her like wet sheets. She sat there, wrists crossed in her lap, bouncing on the truck’s old seat, making her way all wrapped up and with great concentration along one dim interior alleyway after the next. Her husband was dead. Why had that happened? What did it mean?

On the north side of the bridge we left the highway and stopped at a traffic light, and in the mirror I could see one balding head and two blond ones. That cheered me up.

A MELIA ROSSI’S house was a one-and-a-half-story box with an attached garage, set behind a swimming-pool-sized patch of lawn. Janet had parked at the curb, leaving a driveway just big enough for one caravan. Gerard and I worried we were making too much work for Mrs. Rossi, so to compensate for that we’d brought along half a supermarket aisle worth of here-we-are gifts: wine, cider, eggnog, chestnuts, two cheesecakes from a famous Jewish deli in Brookline, a bouquet of flowers. We climbed out into the driveway and unloaded the cargo. I was nervous, for twelve different reasons, buffeted by cold winds and demons. Handing a package of chestnuts and a half-gallon of eggnog to Patricia and Alicia, respectively, I said, “And all the guests were amazed that the father of the bride had saved his best eggnog for last.” Even my mother looked at me as if I were crazy.