Michael Cunningham - A Wild Swan - And Other Tales

Her condition of stunned remove stays with her as she treads water, unsure about what else to do. It stays with her as the dark-haired man, who does not speak English, attaches the harness that pulls her upward. It does not abandon her until she finds herself strapped to a gurney in a helicopter, wearing a neck brace that permits only a view of two scuba tanks hanging from straps, and a white metal box emblazoned with a red cross.

The red cross means, somehow (it seems clear, if unfathomable), that her husband is dead. She’s surprised (the baffled serenity of shock has not yet fully receded) by the piercing, inhuman wail she hears. She’d had no idea she could make a noise like that.

* * *

He will not be able to explain, because he will not remember, how he came to be lying in the shallows of a white-sand beach almost a full day after the boat caught fire. The medics who take him to the modest local hospital will merely say “Miracle,” their accents rendering it “Me-wrack-cowl.”

They bring her to him immediately. When she enters the hospital room he looks at her with chaste and monk-like calm, and then weeps as loudly and unabashedly as a three-year-old.

She gets into the narrow bed with him, and holds him. They both understand. They’ve visited a future in which for each of them the other has vanished. They’ve tasted separation. And now they’ve returned to the present, where a resurrection has occurred. They are, as of this hour, married forever.

* * *

Do you remember that story you read me?

What story? Hey, you’re not packing your Britney Spears hoodie, are you?

I like my Britney hoodie. You know, that story.

I read you hundreds of stories. You haven’t worn that hoodie since you were fifteen.

The story about the one-legged soldier.

Oh. Yes. Why are you bringing that up now?

Maybe because I’m leaving home.

You are not leaving home. You’re going to college two states away. It’s a six-hour drive. This will always be your home.

I’m not going to wear the Britney hoodie, what kind of dweeb do you think I am?

What is it about the one-legged soldier?

I knew what you were doing. I thought I should tell you I knew what you were doing. Now that I’m leaving home.

And what, darling, do you think I was doing?

Duh. You were telling me the story of you and Dad.

If you’re not going to wear the hoodie, why are you taking it at all?

Sentimental reasons. A reminder of my glory days.

Your glory days are still ahead of you.

People keep saying that. What point were you trying to make, reading me that story?

I don’t think I was trying to make a point at all. It was just a story.

It was just the only story there is about somebody who’s missing a leg, and gets followed into a fire by his ballerina girlfriend.

Do you really think I was trying to make some kind of point about your father and me?

I remember you asking me if I knew what the word “destiny” meant.

I guess I wondered … If you were worried. About your father and me.

Fucking right I was.

I’m not crazy about that word.

Tell me you never noticed that Trevor and I knew how miserable you both were. You seem to be getting better, though.

Leave the hoodie here, all right?

I’m perfectly capable of keeping it safe, all on my own, in my dorm room. This hoodie does not need to reside within the House of Safety.

Honestly? I’m not really sure what we’re talking about, anymore.

We’re talking about a paper ballerina who had two perfectly good legs of her own but flew into the fire anyway.

It’s silly for you to pack something you’re never going to wear. Dorm rooms have extremely limited storage space.

Okay, let’s keep the hoodie here. Let’s keep everything here.

Please don’t be melodramatic.

Trevor’s gone. I leave tomorrow.

And you keep saying that because …

That story was all about the paper ballerina. She didn’t have a destiny. Only the one-legged soldier did.

Do you want us to read the story again?

I think I’d rather eat glass.

All right, then.

I’m going to leave the hoodie here. It’ll be safer here.

Good. It’s nice to be told I’m right about something. Some little thing. Every now and then.

* * *

They’re into their sixties now.

He’s still selling cars. She’s returned to her practice, knowing she’s too old and yet too inexperienced to rise above the level of associate. The firm is doing well enough to have room for a competent-enough tough-but-compassionate mother figure. She’s not only there to litigate, but to be salty and irreverent for men whose own mothers tended to be prim, mannerly, and cheerful almost to the point of madness.

She minds, more than she’d thought she would, that she appears to others as a cantankerous, endearing old lady.

He’s worried about sales. Nobody wants American cars anymore.

The two of them are at home tonight, as they are most nights.

He’s become the only person to whom she remains visible, who knows that she hasn’t always been old. Beth and Trevor love her but so clearly want her to be, to always have been, grandmotherly: reliable and harmless and endlessly patient.

The next surprise to come, it seems, is true decline. The surprise after that is mortality, first one of them, then the other.

Her therapist encourages her not to think this way. She does her best.

Here they are, in their living room. They’ve built a fire in the fireplace. The movie they’ve been watching on their big-screen TV has just ended. His prosthetic (it’s titanium, beautiful in its way, nothing like the grotesque, Band-Aid-colored appendage of their college days) stands beside the fireplace. As the closing credits roll, they sit together, companionably, on the sofa.

She says, “Call me old-fashioned, but I still like a movie with a happy ending.”

Watching the credits roll, he wonders: Have we reached our happy ending?

It feels happy enough, in its modest, domestic way. And there’ve been happy endings already.

There was that night in his fraternity-house room, forty years ago, when he took off his clothes and revealed the damage that had been done to him; when she did not, like so many girls before her, insist that it was no big deal. There’s the fact that they didn’t have sex until the following night, and when they did have sex on the following night he was already halfway in love with her, because she was able to look at him and apprehend his loss.

That was a happy ending.

There was the sight of her walking into that hospital room, and his sudden, surprising awareness that he wanted to see nobody more urgently than he wanted to see her. That only she could get him out of there and take him home.

There was the night Trevor came out to him, at Beth’s engagement party, when they found themselves alone together with brandy and cigars; the night he realized that Trevor had decided to tell his father first (aren’t the sister or mother usually the first to be told?); the chance Trevor gave him to hold his trembling and frightened son, to assure him that it didn’t make any difference, to feel his son’s worried head burrowed gratefully into his chest.

That was another happy ending.

He could name dozens of others. A camping trip when, as the first light struck Half Dome, he knew that Beth, age four, was comprehending the terrible clarity of beauty, for the first time. A sudden rainstorm that soaked the whole family so thoroughly that they danced in it, kicking up puddles.