Debra Dean - Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

I don't hear music anymore. They removed the tumor, although there are still bad cells brewing in there, despite a first round of chemo. I suppose the odds are against me, but then I don't believe in odds anymore. I believe it could just as easily go my way as not.

You should see me, Russ. I'm learning to do quite stylish things with scarves. I look at my face in the mirror and don't recognize it; however, I do look vaguely like Georgia O'Keeffe, which pleases me. My eyes look stronger than they did when I was well, and the bones in my face have come out like a landscape. All the fat has been carved away. Please don't misunderstand me here. I'm not reappearing in your life with any ulterior motives. I expect and hope that you have remarried; I can't imagine you alone. And to be honest, I can't afford a regret that huge. It seems like a form of suicide to regret any part of my life, even the mistakes, and suicide, at this stage of the game, seems like gilding the lily. Redundant, anyway. Still, I imagine different sequences. It's like a parlor game. I back up a few moves and try to see how else I might have played this, what other lives were open to me. I imagine the possibilities, the maze of random choices. And I always come back to you. It doesn't change a thing, but I think it's important to say.

I never told you this, in the morning it had seemed too silly to talk about. Remember that first summer after Megan was born, when we went out to North Dakota to show Audie his new granddaughter? There was a night I couldn't sleep.

The bed in your old room was too narrow for both of us. So I sneaked downstairs, threw your coat on over my nightgown and went outside. I started walking down the road from the house out toward the main road. There was no moon, no neighboring lights, nothing but an icy dust of stars from one edge of the earth to the other. At some point, I saw a slow beam of headlights in the distance, tracing a line across the dark, as straight and steady as a satellite. I walked toward it for what must have been a long time, although neither of us seemed to change position.

I had no sense of how far I'd gone, until after I turned around and started to head back. The sodium vapor light on the side of Audie's barn glowed like a firefly. I suddenly felt dizzy – the enormity of black space, the emptiness of the planet. You and our daughter slept inside that tiny light, and our three lives seemed in that moment so tenuously connected, like a miraculous accident of crossed paths. I was too frightened to sleep when I returned. I felt like someone who had been visited by angels, struck dumb by the sight of terrifying beauty. You said the next morning I looked haunted, and I told you I'd had bad dreams.

You see why I couldn't go back there after she died.

What I keep coming back to, Russ, is that you and Megan were a mystery in my life. I expected to marry a businessman, my father more or less, to raise two anonymous children, to vacation in Europe once or twice, to live out my days unsurprised. God knows, I never suspected I would care for a man who was afraid to fly, who liked canned peas and couldn't be trusted not to say whatever came into his head. I never imagined I would be wrenched with love for a child who had your temper, my crooked teeth, and a laugh that neither of us had ever heard before. Where did that laugh come from? Even if Megan had lived, she would have remained a mystery. Even if I had stayed, I would never have been able to explain the fact of you in my life. Just pure dumb luck.

I feel inexplicably lucky. Against all reason, I believe that I can send these words out into the night and they will find you. You needn't write back. If you hear me, that's more than enough.

If I were to go to sleep right this minute, I could get maybe four hours. But that's a long shot. An inversion seems to be taking place in my life: I float blearily through days that are fleeting as dreams, and then snap to at about midnight for what feels like my real life.

What I'm discovering is that the life of an insomniac very probably resembles that of a cloistered monk. Take away the unexpected diversions that fill up one's days, the soothing distraction of other human beings, and then just try to avoid becoming contemplative. The mysteries of the universe saturate the night air, questions hang unanswered in the silence. The trick here is to stay anchored to the planet. It is why I tend so carefully to my habits.

Midnight, I walk the dog. Then I slide into bed beside my wife, Robin, and go through the motions of trying to sleep. I shift into a series of positions: on my side with a pillow tucked between my knees, then on my back, my stomach, and so on, eventually returning to the fetal position. After a half dozen or so reps, it's up to check that the front door and windows are locked. They are. Back to bed. Next, a review of every relaxation exercise I can remember from years of acting classes. Somewhere in there, Puck usually has to be walked again. He is twelve years old, and the heart medication the vet has him on causes a prodigious thirst. Once I've escorted him down to the street and back, we both get a drink of water, he gets a dog biscuit, and I help myself to a few cookies. Then I settle in front of the tube and run the channels. Sometimes I get lucky and stumble onto a good movie. One of the channels is doing a Gene Kelly festival this week, so I watched the last half of On the Town before I came to bed tonight. After a while, I undress again and return to bed. I lie in the dark, as I'm doing now, watching for the shadows in the room to shift, waiting for the dark to gather itself into some recognizably malevolent shape.

The street lamps cast a dim light through the window shades, enough to see bulky shadows in the bedroom: the highboy, the television, the valet stand lurking in the corner. Now and then a car swishes by up on Prospect Park Drive. Farther out, past our quiet neighborhood, the city buzzes with sirens and car alarms and the muted rumble of traffic on the BQE, but my ears are tuned to this room, the rooms on either side, the circumscribed territory of a city dweller. All is quiet just now, except for the rhythm of Robin's breath and the dog's light snores, as muted as the sounds of the sea in a shell.

Four weeks ago, a man broke into our apartment. We had rented a video, ordered in Chinese, and were holed up in the bedroom, stripped to the skin because the night was sweltering and this is the only room with AC. A Thursday night, every light in the place on, the television murmuring, the ancient air conditioner rattling. No one who wasn't high as a kite would even think about breaking into an apartment when people were obviously inside. It's partly the irrationality of the whole incident that keeps me awake. In New York, you operate on the principle that while, yes, there's a lot of evil in the city, it's more or less predictable. Not like the suburbs, where the violence is hidden and explodes randomly, where the killers all look like computer programmers. Here, there are rules. You put dead bolts on the doors and gates on the windows, you assume the "don't fuck with me" expression when you're on the street, you avoid certain neighborhoods, certain parks, you keep to the front cars on the subway, you spring for a cab if it's late. And when you read about some tourist who got pushed onto the train tracks or a woman who was beaten in the park, you remind yourself that you don't stand at the front edge of the subway platform. You wouldn't dream of going jogging in the park before dawn. It's a terrible tragedy, of course, but they broke the rules.

I go over it in my head frame by frame, trying to figure what I've missed. The film we'd rented was a Bergman; Robin had thought maybe it would seem cooler if we were watching people shivering in bleak, snowy landscapes. Somewhere midway through, she had fallen asleep, lulled into a stupor by the drone of Swedish voices. Her freckled limbs were sprawled luxuriantly across the mattress, her hair curling in damp tendrils around her face. I can remember considering and then discarding the impulse to wake her up again. Instead, I picked at the last of the sesame noodles and was trying to see the film through to the end, when I thought I heard something in the kitchen. I pulled on my boxers and went into the kitchen. The security gate across the window was ajar.