Imagine Me Gone (35 page)

“I suppose we should try getting married first,” I said, to my own surprise.

“That’s not a requirement.”

“No, but maybe it would do us good, to clarify things.” Kyle turned back from the view over the water to face me with the kindly, open expression I always pictured him with, and which I found relieving, but also confusing, the way it offered no problem to hold on to. “I’m not complaining,” I said. “I don’t mean it to sound that way.”

“You can complain about Paul all you want. You’ve been with him long enough. He’s moody. I used to think he was going to stop hanging out with me because I was a ski bum and didn’t read enough. But he’s a loyal guy.”

“You’re right,” I said, as we started again up the path toward the parking lot. “He is.”

Next to the fountain that stood in front of the Legion of Honor, Paul was giving Wendell water from the little dish we kept in the trunk of our car. Laura stood beside them in her windbreaker, her hair tied in a ponytail, gazing contentedly over the city and the bay.

“Can’t we stay for a week?” she said, as Kyle and I approached.

Though she’d always evinced the same easygoingness as her husband, I’d sometimes wondered if being laid-back was more of an effort for her, a thing she’d found in Kyle and successfully emulated rather than having been born into it. Though at a certain point it didn’t matter. The emulation became the thing itself.

“Fine with us,” Paul said.

I leaned down to pick pieces of bark and grass from Wendell’s coat. He was a midsize black mutt, a collie mix, and rambunctious the way Kelsey had been, which had something to do with why I had favored him at the pound—that unaccustomed glee I’d felt as soon as we met him, a sense memory of Kelsey in the yard. He had that same eager spirit.

Once I had settled Wendell in the car, the four of us headed into the museum that stood in the middle of the park. I’d never liked museums on Sundays. They had a depressive air. Reminders of stultifying childhood outings, being told to keep quiet and stare at boring, supposedly important things. The strange loneliness of being together with your family. I had been saintlike in my patience compared to my brothers, who had quipped and mewled through those compulsory exercises like circus acts. At least as an adult, I’d shed the guilt I used to feel for not giving each and every work its earnest two-minute inspection, and allowed myself to roam freely.

I’d been through the collection before, and let Paul guide Laura and Kyle while I wandered into a visiting exhibition of an eighteenth-century German artist I’d never heard of. It began with a room of flouncy biblical scenes. Hovering cherubs and flowing gowns, a milk-white Christ at the tomb, surrounded by grieving women, God floating in the sky above the Annunciation. None drew me in. When my phone started bleating, a well-heeled older lady, the only other patron in the gallery, glanced at me in disgust before returning her attention to a friar bent in prayer.

Back in Massachusetts it was three o’clock. Sunday afternoon was not one of the many times that Michael usually tried me. I could do what, until the last seven or eight months, I’d always done. Interrupt anything I happened to be up to and respond to the latest emergency. Behaving otherwise still felt cruel. But in the spring I had flown back to see him in the hospital, canceling appointments with patients who needed their time with me, and whose fees I needed. I’d stayed two extra days to spell my mother’s daily visits, and returned with a cold that lasted for weeks. After that trip, the way I had always been toward Michael gave out like an exhausted muscle.

I told my own therapist. I told Paul and Alec and even my mother. I said I couldn’t do it anymore: talk to him two or three times a week for half an hour, about him and only him, a patient in all but name, listening to the deadening repetitions. Even if I understood, as he kept telling me, that being able to describe his state in the moment kept his panic at bay better than any drug.

I didn’t stop responding to his calls. I just started waiting a few days before returning them. I held a bit of myself back. Knowing well enough that he was at the lowest point in his life. But that was part of it. The extremity of his situation. Where did it end? What level of need couldn’t he surpass? However much his fate had weighed on me in the past, I’d never stopped to imagine that it wasn’t my responsibility. I encouraged my own patients to see the limits of their obligation to members of their own families, but not myself. I knew full well, too, that talking to him once a week or every ten days left a greater burden on my mother. Alec, who had stepped back as I had, and at around the same time, speaking to Michael less often, understood it as well. We’d made a great effort to give him the chance of graduate school. But it had only led him back to us, worse than before. No one’s capacity was infinite. I said that every week in my office. Now I believed it.

The next gallery was full of paintings on classical themes: robed gods in laurels arrayed in a tableau on Mount Parnassus; a nearly nude Perseus leading a horse; a scene of the School of Athens, with the brightly clad philosophers leaning over their books and tablets. I gazed blankly awhile at the last of these, attracted at least to the vivid colors. The show was hardly popular, even on a Sunday, and I could see why, given the stilted subjects and antique style. But it was enough for me, just then, that it didn’t require anything of me.

Portraits of princes and aristocrats hung in the final, smaller room. Men in bright silks and brocade with ruffled collars and pendants adorning their breasts. Complimentary pictures for the men who’d commissioned them.

I took a seat on the bench to rest before heading back to rejoin the others.

The portrait in front of me had a different aspect from the rest: a man in his early fifties, simply dressed in a russet coat with a plain black collar and brown neckerchief. His wavy black hair hung down to his shoulders, with no wig or jeweled clasp to hold it in place. There were no tapestries or upholstered furniture in the background, just a featureless gray-brown, which focused all the viewer’s attention on the face itself. It seemed to be by a different artist altogether. Not because of its darker palette and lack of finery, and not because it possessed any greater degree of realism. It was something more ineffable. I had the sense that this person had been alive. Not merely historically, like the other personages here, but alive in the way of experience. He’d been present to things which had marked him, and which were registered in the image.
Despondency,
I might have said, given the dark cast of the eyes and the unsmiling lips, but that didn’t suffice. It hadn’t been that simple.
Haunted,
I thought, but that wasn’t right either.
Occupied
was more like it, inhabited by a thought not his own, a force not of his choosing, something he had endured over the course of years. When I stood for a closer look, I saw the label S
ELF-
P
ORTRAIT
.

The light in the picture fell on his wide forehead and across his nose, casting the right side of his face in partial shadow. His eyebrows were just fractionally lifted, not in surprise but in a kind of openness. As if the tension of anticipation had passed out of him. He was not an old man, yet no longer young. The eyes themselves were large, and black, and dead calm. They peered into me and into the past, to whatever it was that had brought him to such an unsentimental understanding of himself. An undeluded apprehension of things as they were. He was neither afraid nor heroic.

The longer I gazed, the more familiar he seemed: the brow, the full lips, the double chin. I saw it most in the expression itself, in that particular stamp of an inescapable fate. Some essence of my father was embedded in the painting, beholding me and seemingly on the verge of speech, the words already formed in the figure’s slightly open mouth. I was listening as much as looking now. The utterance wasn’t coming from any motion of the image, filmlike, but directly from him into me. He and I were together again, the facts, at last, irrelevant: that we hadn’t saved him, that he hadn’t saved us. He knew that it hadn’t ended, that he still lived in Michael. I could say nothing in return. His presence was all there was.

We drove down through the Presidio to the marina, and found a restaurant with seating outdoors, and Kyle ordered us a pitcher of margaritas. I drank one before the food arrived, and another with my meal. Across the table, Kyle draped his arm over Laura’s shoulders, and she rested her head against him, gazing through her sunglasses at the water. Apparently taken by the mood—the sun and the drink—Paul shifted his chair closer to mine and did the same, as coupley as he ever got in public. I drifted awhile in the comfort of the four of us there together, unoccupied.

Afterward we ambled across the road to the trail that ran along the back of the beach. This time when my phone rang it was Alec. I told the rest of them to go ahead with Wendell.

“Hey,” he said, tight-voiced, yanking me in close right away. He told me how Mom had called him that morning in a state, how she’d been up in the middle of the night with Michael, how he’d wanted to call an ambulance, and how she’d had to talk him down. “And you know what else?” he said. “She’s had a real estate agent in there. She’s trying to sell the house. She says she doesn’t know what else to do.”

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.