Ask Again, Yes (27 page)

What did they talk about for that hour and a half? They were so warmed up after just a few minutes that they had to take off their coats and scarves, pile them on their laps because the stools didn’t have backs. Lena would never let him sit on a stool without a back. What if he lost his balance? Francis noticed how close Joan’s knee was to his, the line of her clavicle where her blouse was a little askew. He asked about her work, and when he asked the same question twice, she laughed, dipping her chin to her chest like she was trying to hide it from him, and when she looked at him again it was as if she knew every thought he’d ever had.

It was easy, and that surprised him. He felt young and strong and completely unconnected to the person Lena had been fussing over for so many years. Joan was frank about it, which helped, at first. Later, it was her frankness that made him most disgusted with himself.

“I live in the Hilltop apartments now,” she said. “Renting until my settlement.”

She touched his elbow. She tapped her index finger on his forearm, just once, so quickly he thought he might have imagined it except that he could feel his pulse beating there. But then she was gathering her coat, her mittens. A short walk. A turn. Another short walk. His heart was beating so loudly he thought surely she would hear. The noise of the festival disguised the direction of their footsteps. Mid-December, the gloaming came early, the sky going orange and then a bruised purple and then dark gray. She pushed through the front door to the lobby, and they stood side by side without looking at each other, without speaking, until the elevator arrived.

“What are we doing?” he asked, once they were inside, but Joan only looked at him and smiled, opened her cabinets to find glasses. She switched on the TV and turned the volume low. No point pretending
now, though he was shaking like a schoolboy. His hand passed over his eye—he had a new prosthetic as of that month, hand painted by a ludicrously expensive ocular artist in Connecticut, and the girls were floored by how good, how real, it looked. Worth every penny, Lena had said, though they hadn’t paid all the pennies yet; the day they paid off this one single eyeball would be the day he decided whether it had been worth it. But he did like talking to people again like he once had, not having to pretend he didn’t notice them studying his face, their eyes darting back and forth as they tried not to stare at his old prosthesis, which had been so uncomfortable and so false in appearance that Kate told him the patch looked better. He’d gotten so used to the patch that his face felt naked now.

She put her hands on either side of his neck, cold despite the mittens, running them in perfect symmetry across his shoulders, down his arms. He shivered and fitted his hands on either side of her waist like he had early that morning in May, seven months before.

It had nothing to do with Lena, whom he loved as much as he did the day they married. It only had to do with him, and the things he wanted, and the things he missed about himself, the things he missed feeling. Whatever had happened with Joan, whatever would happen, again, he hoped, could exist entirely apart from his life with Lena, couldn’t it? And yet, just an hour after stepping over the threshold to Joan’s apartment, when he hurried back down to the sidewalk and approached the festival from the southern end, as if he’d only taken a little walk over to the duck pond, and saw Lena waiting for him on the double yellow, the detritus of the festival scattered around her, the naked fear on her face, he wondered if, in fact, it did have something to do with her. He’d been a good cop, a good husband, a good father. He’d been great, actually, at all of those things, and it didn’t feel immodest for him to think so. But
then, through no fault of his own, because he was good, because he was responsible and dependable, he’d gone to his neighbors’ front door and been blasted into a new reality, one where he wasn’t a cop at all, wasn’t a good husband, apparently. Was he still a good father? He hoped so, but as of the last hour he had his doubts.

“People said there’s black ice near the firehouse,” Lena said. “They said someone slipped and fell.” She delivered her worry like an accusation.

“I’m fine,” he said, taking her bags from her. Her tablecloth, the trays she’d taken from home for the displays.

“People spill drinks, they don’t realize how quickly it freezes up, weather like this.”

And then, “Are you okay?”

“Lena, for the love of God, please stop asking me if I’m okay. Just stop.” He sounded angrier than he felt. “I went to the new bar. I ran into a lot of people.”

“Sorry,” Lena said, chastened. She touched her fingertips to her temples. “I just don’t feel very well. I thought it was a cold but maybe it’s the flu.”

Francis met Joan twice more after that. Twice more over the course of ten days. They met at her apartment again. And the last time was at a park a little upstate where Lena didn’t like to bring him because she thought the walking path wasn’t even enough, that he risked tripping on a cracked paver or a root. He took the bus to a strip mall in Riverside and from there Joan picked him up. He pressed her slim body against the concrete wall of the park’s restroom, closed for the season. She suggested they go to the Holiday Inn on Route 12, stay for a couple of hours, and then she made fun of him for seeming shocked. “What?” she laughed. “My treat. It’s not the Plaza.”

But at the front desk he waved her money away, mortified. He put down his credit card.

“Do you want me to drive?” he asked later, when they got back to her car, and just like that she handed over the keys. He drove to her place, and from there he walked to Jefferson. At that point, he hadn’t driven a car in over four years. Just sliding behind the wheel made him feel younger, more like himself than he’d been since the accident. And Joan didn’t seem the least bit worried about being his passenger. Merging onto the thruway, glancing left over his shoulder, he got disoriented for a second, but almost as soon as he looked straight ahead again it was fine.

On the day he was planning to see Joan for a fourth time, Lena stayed home from work because she couldn’t shake that same cold she’d felt coming on the day of the fair, made a doctor’s appointment, asked Francis if he wanted to come along. She didn’t need him in the room with her, nothing like that, it was just that the doctor’s office was near the hardware store, and maybe he wanted to browse. They hadn’t been down that way in a little while. There was no opportunity to call Joan, so he hoped when he didn’t show up that she’d figure it out.

That day, just after Lena’s appointment, they were sitting at a window booth at the Gillam Diner when Lena asked if it was possible a person could give herself cancer. The doctor took a chest X-ray, diagnosed bronchitis, said she needed rest. “Can a person give herself cancer just from worrying about things? Stress?” She looked off toward some distant point out the window. She’d read a book about it, she said.

Francis couldn’t remember how he’d responded, but when he thought back on that moment, the sun on the window, the film of oil floating on top of their coffee cups, the bustle of the waitstaff and customers all around them, he imagined a small, dry seed falling through Lena’s body and landing somewhere near her left lung. He imagined the seed growing fat on Lena’s warm center, a sprout pushing through soft tissue, wrapping itself around and around. He imagined all of this happening
while he stared at his plate and thought about Joan Kavanagh, the way her long red hair looked against the white of her narrow back.

“You knew already,” he said when she finally told him. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.” He was angry with her. He was angry with himself. He wanted to comfort her but instead he crossed his arms and stepped away. The doctor had diagnosed bronchitis, yes, but he’d also noticed something else, and had ordered more tests.

She apologized when she gave him the news, and he couldn’t get himself to say what he was supposed to say, which was of course it wasn’t her fault, and they’d get through it, and it would all be okay. But was it her fault? When had she first had an odd feeling in her chest? According to the doctor it could have been several months earlier. When she said she had no symptoms, the doctor said it was just that she hadn’t noticed them. Some people are more tuned into their bodies than others. When Francis caught her coughing on her way to their bedroom, her hand on the wall to steady herself, he stood at the bottom of the stairs and told her he thought she was smarter than that, why in the world had she waited so long to go to the doctor? And even when she sat down on the step and cried, he found he could not go to her or say any of the things that would make her feel better.

“You’re going to be fine, Lena,” he said eventually, her at the top of the stairs, him at the bottom. It was an order. He once had a dozen men in his command.

The girls came home the night before her surgery, to help her get ready. “Lena,” he whispered into her hair that morning, the house still sound asleep. She’d set her alarm for 6:00 a.m. but it hadn’t gone off, and now they’d need to rush. “Lena, love,” he said, and drew her closer to him, told her he was sorry about the way he’d been acting, he was just so shocked, and he couldn’t lose her, it was something that absolutely could not happen. She reached behind and found his hip, squeezed, told him she knew all that, of course, that it was all going to be okay, that he would see.

He got dressed quickly, and while the girls bustled around—Sara and Natalie cross-checked the contents of Lena’s bag with the list the doctor’s assistant had provided them; Kate offered to go into the shower with her, to help wash her with the special surgical soap (Lena had laughed. “Oh, honey,” she’d said)—he realized he had a little time to kill before they had to leave for the hospital. Without telling any of them that he was stepping out, he walked down to the deli like he did most mornings for his coffee and a paper. Something about sticking to his routine was soothing, and as he watched his breath in the cold air, he began to feel for the first time that all would be well. His face hurt. His body was not in synchrony. But it felt temporary. The doctors would do their mysterious work and she’d suffer, no doubt, but she was strong and in the end it would be fine.

And when he turned the corner onto Main Street, there was Joan Kavanagh in her blue coat, her long hair brassy in the sunlight, looking at him coming like she’d known him long enough for him to hurt her. But she hadn’t known him long enough to earn that look, and he hadn’t known her long enough to feel anything other than shame. He thought of his mother for the first time in a very long time. He thought of his father. The two of them dead and buried, gone twenty-five years. Neither of them able to fathom America beyond the little bit of it they’d seen together, when Francis was an infant. Neither of them capable even of half-baked promises to visit, one day, like other old-timers sometimes said to make it all easier. Neither of them capable of lying in any way, not even when a lie would be merciful. “Sure I’ll be back to visit in no time,” Francis had said that day when they clutched him in the threshold of the cottage, and his mother pressed her dry cheek to his over and over again.

“Arrah, why would you?” his father had said.

His father told him that in New York City there were bakeries galore and he’d have to take care not to get fat. It was his single piece of advice. They’d not warned him about money or women or drinking or fighting because Francis was a good boy, a sound young man, with a good head
on his shoulders. If they were looking down on him now, from heaven, they might not even recognize him. Francis had not seen Joan since that afternoon at the Holiday Inn. He hadn’t returned her calls since Lena’s diagnosis.

It was a Monday morning. Surgery was scheduled for eleven, but Lena had to report to the hospital by nine. It was early still, just after seven, and construction workers passed Joan by, rushing in and out the door that jangled with every swing. She kept her eyes on Francis as he approached. Local cops left their cruisers in the No Parking zone, ran in for coffee. ’Scuse me, ’scuse me, g’morning, they said as they passed, one, two three. He remembered being a cop once, jogging up stairs, steering his vehicle down city streets, the heady pleasure of knowing he was about to stop a bad thing from happening, the crushing disappointment when he arrived just a few minutes too late. On that particular morning, a frigid cold day in late January, Lena whispering her prayers at home, Kate on break from her first year of college, far too young to lose her mother, Francis remembered settling a ten fifty-two in the Two-Six by calling each party into the fifth floor hall of their building one at a time and asking each one if they loved the other, and if so could they please stop throwing things at each other. To please stop waking the neighbors. After that the guys called him Lieutenant Love for a while.

Once, Joan called the house when she thought Lena was at work, but Lena answered. Francis stood outside their bedroom door listening to their conversation with his fists clenched so tight he got a cramp in his forearms.

“Joan Kavanagh,” Lena said when she hung up, a question mark in her tone. “Casey wants Kate’s address at school for something, a reunion of some kind.” And then: “I think she was drunk, to be honest.”

Francis had murmured signs of interest and then stepped into the bathroom. He studied his face in the mirror and saw that the old scar tissue was livid and sore looking.

“I heard about Lena,” Joan said outside the deli that morning when he
was close enough to hear her. Hearing Lena’s name in her mouth would be part of his punishment, too, he supposed. She didn’t have the right to say her name, but it was his fault she didn’t see it that way.

“What happens now?” she asked, and looked at him like she deserved an answer.

How to say what he needed to say without making everything worse? So he said nothing at all. He brushed by her like the construction workers had, like the cops had, and he got his cup of coffee, tucked his paper under his arm.

She drove by him, slowly, just a minute or so later and called him all the things he already knew he was: a coward, a cheat, a prick. He could have crossed to the other side of the street, where he wouldn’t be able to hear her as well, but he stayed where he was. Every name she called him was true. She followed him and shouted the words until he turned onto Madison.