A Window Opens: A Novel (26 page)

This information overload landed me back in high school chemistry class, studying the periodic table with a pit in my stomach. I clicked the arrow in the lower right-hand corner, scrolling left to gauge the width of the spreadsheet. It was endless.

•  •  •

Nicholas and I split a sloppy joe for lunch—the New Jersey kind, made with tongue, roast beef, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, and coleslaw, on thin slices of rye bread. He gestured toward the beer refrigerator at the deli—“Want one?”—then grabbed two Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray sodas when I gave him a look.

“How’s your work going?” Nicholas asked.

“I’m analyzing data about video games. How do you think it’s going?”

“Hmm. Sounds tedious.” I could tell Nicholas’s mind was somewhere else—definitely more focused on his sandwich than he was on my professional woes.

“It
is
tedious. Also, I don’t understand the value proposition—”

“Did I really just hear you use the term
value proposition
?”

“Yes, you did. Why are you acting like this? I feel like you’re laughing at me.”

“Al, I’m not laughing at you. I’m just wondering if we’re ever going to have a conversation again that isn’t about Scroll.”

“That’s not fair. How many times have I hashed out a work decision with you? I haven’t asked you to return the favor in over a decade.”

I tried to say this lightly, but I knew there was nothing funny about our conversation.

“Yeah, but you know the difference? I’ve gone through periods of a few weeks or— okay, I’ll grant you, a month here or there—when I’ve been obsessed with work, or maybe working around the clock and checking my BlackBerry at all hours. You’re
always
in that mode. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. And every time I roll over in the middle of the night, you’re on your phone. I feel like you’re just
gone
.”

“Wow. You’re one to talk.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, I’m sorry you feel that way.” I felt a momentary twinge of guilt, but it was quickly replaced by annoyance as Nicholas helped himself to more than his fair share of the mesquite potato chips we were supposed to be splitting.

“No, I don’t just
feel
this way—it’s a fact. You’re obsessed with your job, Alice. I get it that you’re excited about trying something new. And I’m excited
for
you, and I’ve said that a million times. But you can’t ever seem to stop thinking about it. Here we are out to lunch, just the two of us,
and all you want to talk about is MMO or GO or whatever it is. Isn’t there something else we can talk about?”

Our table was next to the dairy case, so we got blasted with cold air every time someone reached in for a carton of milk. I pulled on the hood of my sweatshirt and hunched into it.

Nicholas continued, “Alice, I don’t want to pile on, but when I was at your parents’ a few weeks ago, it really wasn’t a good scene.”

“What do you mean, it wasn’t a good scene?”

“I mean, your dad wanted to go over these papers in the dining room but it took him like ten minutes to get in there from the living room. He kept stopping and holding on to the wall. And your mom seemed nervous and talked nonstop, and that made him really mad.”

“And? What else is new.”

“Then when we were finished, he just kind of zoned out in front of the TV and your mom had to pour food into his tube. He was too tired to do it himself.”

“Ugh. That makes me so sad.”
Bereft
was a better word for it. Gutted. Devastated. Guilty that I wasn’t at my parents’ house 24/7; guilty that work was my constant alibi, not my kids; guilty that Nicholas had to step in to fill the void.

I could picture the scene so clearly: my mom, ministering to my dad, television droning in the background. Peel away one layer and the picture was different: same room, same chair, my mom handing my dad a warm metal bowl of popcorn to eat while they watched
Rear Window
together. This would never happen again. The realization was a sucker punch, one I couldn’t explain to Nicholas, whose parents were vibrant, healthy, and jointly enrolled in a Senior Scholars class on Beat poets.

He went on. “The thing I can’t stop thinking about? Your dad was watching the X Games.”

“Okay. Enough. I get it.”

My dad was a fan of
Masterpiece Theatre
. The thought of him zoned out in front of the X Games after finalizing his will—I shook my head,
hoping to erase the image like an Etch A Sketch. “I wonder if they’re going to need more help soon. Like a private nurse or something.”

“I think they will.” They were intensely private, my parents—creatures of habit and routine. It was impossible to imagine a stranger in their midst, rinsing syringes in the sink or using Will’s old beer funnel to pour Ensure down the tube to my dad’s stomach. Surely a nurse would have her own funnel, sterilized, without the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on its side. I imagined the soft pad of nurse shoes in my parents’ hallway and felt physically ill.

Nicholas and I took a few minutes to polish off our chips and then he continued: “So, to change the subject for a minute.”

I knew he was about to spring something on me. “Yes . . . ?”

“The basketball guys are going to a tournament in Atlantic City, and I want to go.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem; I’m just telling you.”

Of course I was fine with Nicholas going to a basketball tournament; I’d certainly been known to sneak away for a weekend with college friends. But his timing was suspect, and he was, as I would say to Margot, taking a tone, which I didn’t appreciate.

“Well, great. When are you going?”

“It’s not for a while. The last weekend in February. Of course we’ll see how things are with your dad. And you’ll be all right with the kids?”

“What do you mean? They’re my kids! We’ll be fine. We’ll have fun.”

“Great. I’ll let Jim know I’m in.”

Despite the semi-cordial end of the conversation, its antagonistic undertone was unsettling.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Hey guys, when you report to work today you’ll notice some new security/trackability systems we’re implementing. Employees will now run
their palms beneath our new Biometric Time Clock. Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite! This technology allows us to take attendance and keep track of all kinds of stuff like what time you arrive at work, what time you leave, how long you take for lunch, and whether or not you flossed your teeth that day. Haha, maybe not so much with the floss. But we are, at heart, a retail company, so I’m sure you will be understanding when upon occasion we play by retail rules. Clock in, clock out. We just like to know what “yous guys” are up to. I’m looking at you, New Yawk!

Getting a Saturday appointment for a checkup with our pediatrician is like landing a reservation at the coolest restaurant in town. You have to call three months ahead to the minute and then wait on hold while the receptionist sifts through desperate pleas from all the other working parents.

We’d secured an appointment in the inner sanctum while the rest of the world was still home watching
Phineas & Ferb
and reading the
Star-Ledger
. Georgie stood in front of the eye chart, naked except for her blue underpants with a monkey on the butt. One hand cupped over her right eye, she recited what she saw: A cup. A star. A diamond. A hand. A circle. A square. A heart.

A nurse pointed to the bottom of the chart. “That’s great, Georgie. Can you read the words at the very bottom, right here?”

“Sure. It says ‘Only eagles can read this.’ ”

A rogue sob ripped out of my mouth. Georgie spun around on one heel, her pigtails flaring out from her head like Pippi Longstocking’s.

“Mommy, are you crying?”

“No, sweetie, I just have something in my eye.”

I had no idea she knew how to read.

I
turned the ringer off on my phone and spent a Saturday morning raking leaves, then shoving each pile into a brown lawn bag and lugging it to the curb.

When I finished raking, I checked my phone. Six missed calls. Two were from Genevieve. On a Saturday. What could be so urgent? And then a text: “Alice: You need to demonstrate your commitment to MMO. Please prepare a white paper on your findings within the next three weeks.”

A white paper was the Scroll equivalent of a term paper—six pages, in a prescribed font (Calibri), with footnotes. I wrote back, “Sounds good! I will!” I couldn’t resist the exclamation point.

No mention of the mugs of bourbon Genevieve and I had swilled in her office the night before, toasting the Mistake by the Lake, Nicholas’s least favorite nickname for Cleveland. I was getting used to Genevieve’s Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to management. She might be your best friend in the elevator, but you never knew when she might mount her bully pulpit of virtual communication.

The fifth call was from my mom: “Alice? Are you there? We’re on our way to urgent care at Sloan Kettering. Call me.”

The sixth was from my brother: “Has Mom gotten ahold of you yet? Why are you so impossible to track down? Dad is having trouble breathing. They’re on their way to the hospital. Can you please call me when you know anything? Mary is on call tonight, but I’ll head down there tomorrow.”

•  •  •

Will, our mom, and I were sitting in a semicircle around our dad’s bed, slowly adjusting to hospital time, where you lose track of hours, days, even seasons. Nicholas was at home with our kids, or maybe Jessie was with them; I was hazy on the details. There was no hope of keeping our bearings, sailor-style, with an eye on the horizon; the roommate had the window. Everything on our side of the room was salmon-colored, even the drop tile ceiling.

Suddenly, an unfamiliar doctor yanked open the curtain that divided the room in two. He flipped open my dad’s file, balancing its metal-hinged spine on one palm like a pizza, then looked at my mom. “Terminal pneumonia?”

“Actually, my name is Joan,” she responded firmly. The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt command respect. I love that about her.

The doctor’s face remained impassive as he whipped a pen out of his coat pocket and started jotting notes on the file. “The patient has terminal pneumonia, yes?”

My brother stood up, towering over the doctor. In his ratty Bowdoin sweatpants and loosely laced boots, he was more pissed-off hockey player than middle-aged oarsman. “If he does, this is the first we’re hearing of it. What the fuck is terminal pneumonia?”

I waited for my mom to sound the siren of the language police, but she was silent.

The doctor clicked his pen closed, slipped it back into his pocket, and made sure it was clipped securely to the fabric above his name,
which was embroidered in royal blue script. “This terminology denotes pneumonia occurring in the course of another disease near its fatal termination.”

Then, with near-comic efficiency, he turned on his heel, slid the salmon curtain closed, and disappeared.

“Gee, thanks,” I said loudly. I wanted to follow the doctor into the hallway and bang his small head against the granite countertop of the nurse’s station, but I thought this might upset my mom.

Will turned to my dad. “Dad, can I get you a—”

Our patient was asleep.

Without making eye contact with my mom or my brother, I slipped my phone out of my pocket and started entering my four-digit password. Will leaned over, grabbed the phone, and threw it across the room, where it landed in the garbage with a thud.

•  •  •

When I was nine, Oliver’s age, my dad surprised Will and me with a trip to Great Adventure, an amusement park an hour away. He shook us awake on a school morning and said, “Get in the car, guys, we’re going to ride roller coasters.”

Will ran into my room in a rumpled OP T-shirt and Jams. “Is this a joke?”

It was not a joke. We couldn’t have been more overjoyed if our dad had surprised us with a puppy or the double-decker tree house we coveted. We piled into our blue Buick Regal and waved good-bye to our mom, who was as shocked by the spontaneity of the plan as we were—and, no doubt, equally thrilled to opt out.

“Dad, why are you
doing
this? Is something wrong?” I kept checking the exit numbers on the turnpike to make sure we were, indeed, heading south. Could this be an elaborate ruse to get us to go somewhere educational, like Richmond Town on Staten Island? Our parents loved places like that, with exhibitions on churning butter and one measly gift shop candy stick as the only reward for hours of boredom.

My dad smiled. From my vantage point diagonally behind him, I could see his eyes crinkle. “Just a change of pace, that’s all.”

“
Fraidy cat
,” Will hissed, from the other side of the backseat. “You’ll probably want to ride the teacups the whole time.”

But for all his big brother bravado, Will was the one who didn’t have the stomach for the scary rides. Chastened, he stuck to the flying swings and the log flume, which soaked the two of us again and again while our dad took Polaroid pictures from a nearby bench.

When it was my turn to pick a ride, I opted for multiple solo stints on the Gravitron, a stomach-turning paean to the power of centrifugal force. It was a cylindrical contraption lined with black padded panels. You picked one, leaned against it and held on for dear life as the ride started spinning at breakneck speed: around and around, sometimes upside down. Except you didn’t actually need to hold on at all—you were glued to that wall. You couldn’t lift a limb if you tried.

“Holy cow!” I squealed as the floor panel slipped from the bottom of the Gravitron. This was part of the excitement, but it was terrifying nonetheless. My dad, my brother, and their twin cotton candies dissolved into a watercolor blur on the other side of the fence. The clouds and the sky melted into each other; so did the carousel and the Ferris wheel and the white spine of a roller coaster. I felt weightless, as if I might burst through the back of my panel—a buck-toothed meteor in pink glasses and a terry-cloth jumpsuit.