Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

No space existed between the events and Alec’s reaction to them. They were welded together.

“You agree we can’t let that happen, right?” he said, sounding like a gambler in the hole with a weak hand. “We can’t let her do that.”

There had been an episode. This is why Michael had called. And now the charge of anxiety it had sparked was completing the family circuit.

“Well,” I said, “you could start by separating your worries about money from Mom’s.”

“Wow,” he said. “Okay, then. I guess you can pay for her nursing-home care out of your trust fund. Did you notice that I work in print media? From which, FYI, I’m about to be furloughed. So sure — we can separate out my worries about money, but you really think she should sell the house to keep funding Michael?”

The high school dramatist in him was alive and well. It’s what had drawn him to politics in the first place, the performance and the rhetoric, an elaboration of the childish enthusiasm Michael and I used to mock him for. The deep familiarity of it collapsed the distance of the phone. He might as well have been standing next to me.

“We need to talk to her,” I said. “You just told me. I don’t know what I think yet.”

“Fine,” he said. “Talk to her. But you know as well as I do that it’s not just about the house. The situation has to change. He’s got to come off the meds. It’s the only solution. He’s got to get back to some kind of baseline, or he’s never going to get better, he’s never going to be able to take care of himself. He’s drowning in that stuff.”

Alec and I had debated this before, sometimes with Michael. When did the weight of all that medicine become worse than whatever lay beneath it? I didn’t disagree with Alec that it might have already. But Michael had never seen it that way.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Alec said. “I called Bill Mitchell—”

“Bill Mitchell?”

“Yeah, about the cabin in Maine. I didn’t even know if they still owned the place, but Mom gave me his number. It was a little weird, obviously, but fuck it. It’s a place to go. I think he was sort of amazed I asked, but I didn’t go into all the details. I made it sound softer, I guess, more Magic Mountain, but he got the gist. He stalled for a bit, but eventually he said that no one was using the place. The island house is all closed up, but the cabin’s there. And he was okay with it. He just said fill the propane before we leave.”

“Okay with what? What are you talking about?”

I’d come to a halt on the path, watching the three of them and Wendell step off the trail onto the sand and head diagonally toward the water.

“I’m talking about getting him off the drugs,” he said. “Going up there with him. Getting him out of his room, out of that house. Clearing his brain . What else are we going to do? What’s the alternative? Just let her go bankrupt?”

I’d listened to plenty of his tirades about our mother and money, but this was different. His exasperation had a tender edge. More than angry, he sounded upset.

“Besides,” he said, “I miss him. The way he used to be. Don’t you?”

“You can’t do it in a weekend,” I said. “You can’t just yank him off everything. It takes time.”

“I know that. Which is why it has to happen soon. I’m getting this involuntary month of vacation. They’re furloughing half the reporting staff. It’s terrifying, actually. But there it is — time off, plus all the vacation I never took. When am I going to have that kind of time again?”

A handsome couple in Lycra shorts and matching tank tops jogged past me, earbuds in, hair nearly perfectly in place, muscles toned and slick. The kind of people whom Michael, in his bitterness, would despise.

“What if he doesn’t want to?” I asked, beginning to picture it.

“I think he actually does — part of him. He’s just afraid.”

I knew what he meant. And he was right. I wished I had the money to send Michael off to some leafy clinic campus with nurses and massage and gentle yoga. The kind of program I sometimes daydreamed of sending my own clients to. Maine in the off-season was hardly that. But it was time away. A step out of his immediate life, out of the constant emergency.

Maybe it was the looseness from the drinks at lunch, or the unusual course of the day, or even just my desire at that moment to be again with Paul and Kyle and Laura with their pants rolled up, playing in the shallows with the dog, but something allowed me to imagine what Alec was proposing actually coming to pass, and to sense what a relief that would be.

That evening, after we’d folded out the couch in Paul’s office for our guests and said good night, the two of us got into bed, and Paul rolled up behind me, his chest to my back, snuggling as he didn’t often do.

“They enjoyed themselves,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

I rested my neck in the crease of his shoulder and held his arms around me. “It’s good having them here,” I said. “I like how we are with them.”

“As opposed to how we are without them?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, squeezing him closer.

Wendell, the perfectly unconflicted hedonist, detected our affection from across the room and toddled over to get some for himself. He climbed onto the bed and tried to insert himself between us, and we chuckled and squirmed to fend him off with our knees, only to have him breach our defense, force his front legs into Paul’s crotch, and collapse on top of us with a whimper. He settled at last for a spot beside me, where I could pet his flank, and there he quieted down.

“Did you always think you’d get married?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

I waited for him to roll away onto his back, but he didn’t. “Didn’t you just assume it would happen?”

“Are you going to propose to me?”

“Don’t tease.”

“I’m not,” he said, running his hand down onto my thigh.

“Yes you are.”

“You don’t want to get hitched,” he said. “We discuss it every time we go to a wedding, and you talk about your patients’ disastrous relationships, and how we still need to work on things. And then we go to Christmas at your family’s, and Michael quotes us Kafka on marriage.”

“Is that why you never proposed?”

“Says the feminist.”

“Don’t be mean.”

He touched his lips to my neck, and then reached over me to pat Wendell on the snout. “I never thought you’d say yes,” he said. “And I suppose it doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to some people, the way it doesn’t matter as much to you.”

“I love you,” I said.

“Likewise. Do you want to get married?”

“You’re teasing again,” I said.

He burrowed his head further down against my shoulder, burying his face in my back. And then, barely audible, he whispered, “No, I’m not.”

REQUEST FOR FORBEARANCE

Dear Borrower:

If you are having difficulty making your loan payments and you have exhausted all periods of deferment and grace, you may be able to receive relief through the process of forbearance. In forbearance, your loan payments are temporarily postponed. Please note, however, that all unpaid interest will be capitalized, adding to your outstanding balance. If you are currently past due, submit this form as soon as possible, understanding that submission alone is no guarantee of approval.

Part I. Borrower

I request a forbearance to cover my outstanding balance of:

$68,281.11

To begin:

twelve years ago

To end: