Ask Again, Yes (21 page)

That one time, the last time, once he’d finished, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his. She didn’t try to coax him to keep going, and that’s when he knew she’d done it only for him and not at all for herself. “Lena, love,” he’d said when he realized she was crying, and tried to catch hold of her hands. But she stood up, shimmied her underwear back on, went into the bathroom, and ran the water for a few minutes. And then she went downstairs.

Since then he’d waited for a sign that something would flare between them again, and sometimes when she bobbed her hips along with the music coming from the kitchen radio, or curled the phone cord around her finger while she talked, a longing opened up in his chest like a blossom. Everyone told him how lucky he was, and he knew they weren’t wrong. She’d tended to him from the very first moment the shot rang out, and refused to leave his side. In those early weeks, before he could walk, she never let him be; she was always taking a limb in her hands and massaging him so that he wouldn’t get a clot. She fed him and kept him warm and smeared Vaseline on his lips and checked his IV and his wound site, and when she didn’t like what a nurse or doctor told them, she asked to speak to another. “You’ll be fine,” she repeated to him over and over and over, and because of her, he never doubted it. But now, he could see, she’d gotten too used to being the caretaker and him the patient. She no longer went pale every time he made for the stairs, but she’d placed him in a category alongside the girls, the mortgage—another thing to worry about.

In most ways, he was back to himself. It had taken a full four years but he’d finally arrived more or less where he began—minus an eye and with some paralysis in the muscles of his face. One side of his body grew tired more quickly than the other. A run-of-the-mill head cold always felt to him like an infection. But he began taking up the odd jobs he’d done before. He began mowing the lawn again. He trimmed their trees and bushes and hauled the dead brush to the curb. When he worked hard he sweat, and when a drop of sweat dripped from his brow down
his face, it felt completely different on the left side than it did on the right. He shoveled the snow when it fell, and seeded the lawn in the spring and fall, and he soldered the basement pipe that had been weeping for years. When he hung the Christmas lights along the roofline, Lena held the ladder and scolded him the whole time, that he shouldn’t be up there, that it wasn’t worth it, what if he got dizzy, that he’d better come down that instant. But he’d done it and it was all fine.

And still, they couldn’t seem to fight their way back to each other. Not once since he came home from the hospital did she roll up against him in her sleep, not once did she slide her hand across his chest like she used to and settle there. When he thought about it too much, he felt like a child for letting it bother him. “Hug me!” Kate had shouted at Lena once as a little girl. Someone’s German shepherd had gotten loose and had chased the kids around the block, trying hard to nip their heels through his muzzle. Terrified, Kate had run inside. “Hug me!” she’d demanded of Lena, opening her little arms. Lena, smiling, had hugged her tight.

Once in a while, at night, he tested himself against her boundary to see what might happen, but it was getting more difficult all the time. Just the other night he’d run his fingertip along the ends of her hair, which was hanging in a sheet over the edge of her pillow. A whisper-light touch in the dark. All she had to do was not move and he might have tried something bolder. “Sorry,” she said, her back to him, and quickly flicked her hair out of his way. “Are you okay?” she asked over her shoulder.

But now Kate was leaving, and the house would be theirs again. He could barely believe how quickly it had happened. For twenty years they’d been talking about putting on an addition, maybe, like so many neighbors had done, but then they’d looked up and discovered they didn’t need it anymore. Used to be he’d come home from work and shout at everyone to pick up their markers, their papers, their sweatshirts, their backpacks, and then one day he’d looked around and there were no backpacks thrown anywhere. And during the day now there wasn’t
even Lena. She worked at the insurance company from nine to five and when she came home, she went straight to the kitchen, started chopping and boiling something for dinner. As a young man, as a young father, he’d never imagined there’d be a time when he’d be alone in his house every day. He thought about Ireland more and more, tried to remember if there was ever a day in his life when his own father didn’t have something to do. Sometimes he kept the TV on for company, and one day as he was flipping through, he came upon a scene where a woman and a man were kissing in what looked to be a hotel room. He stayed on the channel. Next thing, just as the man began to undress the woman, he turned her around, pushed her onto the bed, and entered her from behind. Francis was never one for porn, but this was different. It was cable. He couldn’t actually see anything, just the suggestion of something. Watching, he slid his hand inside his pants and touched himself until he came, and that started a stretch of months that reminded him of being fourteen again, disappearing to a remote field where he could curl up and slip his hand inside his pants in privacy because there was no place to be alone in the crowded house.

He still took a painkiller every day, and when his doctor said that one pill likely did very little for him at this point, he understood that as permission to take two. Sometimes two in the morning and another two in the afternoon. Nothing seemed to happen except that he felt quiet in his center, at peace. He took an antidepressant, which didn’t work nearly as well as two painkillers, and which felt a little embarrassing but which his doctor said was standard.

Sometimes, still, when he was standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window, he would hear the buzz and slap of a grass edger and expect to see Brian Stanhope’s head moving along the other side of the rocks. Then he’d remember and feel astonished all over again. He tried to recall what he used to think of Anne Stanhope. He’d mostly wanted to stay out of her way. Otherwise he hadn’t thought much about her. She was an odd bird, that was all. A person they’d have to encounter for
a little while but could one day, when the kids were gone, ignore. He’d been kind to her. He’d been kinder than anyone else would have been. And still. Sometimes he let his imagination wander and he placed Kate on their front porch instead of himself. What if she’d killed his child?

He knew she’d been moved to a different hospital. It was generous of him to have agreed to the plea deal that removed her from prison, and sometimes he felt that generosity warranted more acknowledgment. If he were a different person, a vengeful person, he would have insisted on prison, and he knew what happened to crazy people in prison. He was worried when their lawyer called that he was going to tell them she’d been released to a halfway house or some nonsense, but it sounded as if the new hospital was not as nice as the first, and Francis was pleased. He tried to examine his pleasure—what did it mean about him? As Lena had asked many times, what did it matter, really, where she was, as long as she wasn’t near them?—but at the end of these examinations, he always concluded he was within his rights to wish ill upon her. He would have been captain by then. He would have been captain or better, and if things had gone as they should have when he walked into his house at the end of a day, his wife would look at him in a way she hadn’t looked at him in four years now. Once a cop always a cop, the guys said when they visited. But the more they said it the less it rang true.

It occurred to Lena as she began to gather the bottles of soda, the cases of beer, the chips, the dips, the pounds of ground beef for burgers, box after box of macaroni for salad, the gas for the grill—that this was how she’d once pictured living in Gillam. She’d seen herself hosting parties, throwing open their doors, and inviting in anyone who wanted to come. She’d pictured music playing, bottles uncorking. She’d pictured sitting outside with friends and neighbors while the kids raced around the house. She’d selected a dining table with double leaves instead of the
usual single because she imagined she’d need seating for twelve, one day, even if that meant the table would extend right out of the dining room and into the living room. But when she brought the dining table leaves down from the attic, she noticed they were a slightly different color now than the table. The dowels were still covered in manufacturer’s plastic. She’d called for Francis to take one end of each—they were too heavy to move on her own—and as he shuffled backward he staggered for a moment. “Pick up your feet!” she cried, and then insisted on switching sides.

Graduation was on a Saturday. Kate had won the science prize and had to cross the stage to accept a certificate and shake the principal’s hand. Natalie had graduated from Syracuse the previous week, and Sara was halfway through SUNY Binghamton. With Francis’s pension and Lena’s job and a few loans, there would be enough to cover Kate’s first year of tuition. Lena had assumed she would go to a state school like Sara, but Francis was the one who noticed the brochures and envelopes from NYU coming in. “You want to go here?” he asked her one night after taking in the mail. She was eating a bowl of cereal before bed; Lena had already gone upstairs. He thought of the Ninth Precinct, and of Brian Stanhope, of all people—a field mouse of a thought that shot through his brain and disappeared. Kate shrugged and it broke his heart a little to see she’d become a girl who wouldn’t say what she wanted.

“If you had your pick of any school, which would it be?” He was determined to make her say it.

“Well, we can’t do private, right?”

“This is a dream scenario, Kate, which is it?”

Finally, she’d nodded to the envelope in his hands.

“You can get in?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“So apply, and then we’ll see.”

The party started at three and most of the guests arrived at exactly the same time. Some rang the doorbell before walking around the side of the house. Others just followed the sound of the stereo and trudged through the side yard bearing flowers, wine, platters of cookies and pies. He couldn’t remember how people used to greet him before he was hurt, but now they seemed to make a special point of it, and he wondered if talking with him made them feel virtuous, like they’d done a good deed. He could tell that most people had trouble looking at his mismatched pupils—their own perfectly synchronized eyes would dart back and forth between his as they decided which one to settle on. Most people had presents for Kate, and when Francis saw that he felt guilty—he hadn’t pictured people going out to buy presents on top of everything else they’d done for them. But Kate accepted everything gladly, and when he looked at her across the patio, he was reminded of what she’d been like as a little girl, running a private inventory of her gifts as they came in. Her friends greeted her with hugs, and the boys in the class hung around the girls in a loose circle, long armed and mostly shy.

He fired up the grill at four and began lining the grate with burgers, hot dogs, foil-wrapped corn on the cob. He had a beer. Two beers. Four beers. He refilled the coolers. A few men kept him company, while the women mostly clustered around the appetizer table. At one point Lena led a group of women upstairs to look at their bedroom closet and get advice on what could be done. She was delighted to be hosting, and when her voice carried over to him, it sounded giddy and girlish. She’d made pitchers of margaritas and when they went in the first hour, she brought out all the bottles that had gone into them and a pile of limes and mixed up more. They ate, ate more, drank more, and still, people kept arriving, Francis kept grilling. There were other graduation parties that day, and some of their guests hopped from one to the next to the next until it felt like all of Gillam was one big party.

A woman came up and asked Francis if she could get a burger without cheese, and while she waited, she asked him how he was doing, if he still got those sharp pains around his orbital wall. He turned to her quickly and she smiled, put her hand on his arm. “You don’t remember me. I’d just started at Broxton around the time you were moved there. I wasn’t on your floor but I came in to see you because our girls were in school together.”

“I do remember. Yes, of course.”

She laughed. “You don’t. But you’re very polite. You were getting a lot of visitors then. I remember a stream of cops in and out. Some of the young nurses used to put on lipstick in case any of them were single. They were sad when you were discharged.”

“Ah. That would have been pertinent information at the time, I’m sure.”

Francis took another look at her. She was petite, with long, auburn hair and a pretty dress with flowers printed on it.

“You have a daughter in the high school? You look so young,” he said, and blushed. He hadn’t meant to sound like he was flirting. But she did look young.

“I did until yesterday. Casey. Do you know Casey? She’s . . .” She turned and tried to find her. “Well, she’s here somewhere.”

He put the burger on her plate, and she put her hand on his arm once more and squeezed. He felt a charge on his skin where she touched him. “Good to see you looking so healthy,” she said, and then she slipped off into a crowd of women talking by the shed.

It was nearly dusk when he finally turned off the grill, and after dusk when he finally sat down. There were still more people arriving, and now, in the near dark, they snuck up on the crowd in the backyard like a jolt of new life. A local cop named Dowd was just telling him about
a case when Kate came up behind Francis’s chair and whispered that someone was puking by the rhododendron. They’d told the girls to be careful, to watch their friends, but it was inevitable, he supposed. They should have been more strategic about where they put the coolers, but they figured it would be okay. Lena had pointed out that when they were eighteen it was legal to drink, the law was arbitrary, and at their age Francis had been on his way to America, for God’s sake. Plus most of the teenagers at the party had a parent there, too.