In the Middle of All This (19 page)

“That's right,” he said.

“Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye.”

“He tried to turn their daughter against her,” Ruben whispered stagily as he stood yet again in the open doorway. He seemed, these days, almost always to be standing there, a fixture or a ghost. If only she could believe in ghosts. “But Cindy told Jenny everything. I say good for her.”

“Ruben,” she said wearily, “I've got class in five minutes. Why are you telling me this?”

“I don't know. Entertainment. Gossip. I thought you'd want to know.”

“I don't want to know anything,” Lauren said.

“Julia's in rehab again.”

“You told me.”

“I was lying. This time she's really in. I dropped her off this morning.”

“Oh.”

“You think I'm being a drama king? I'm just giving you the facts. Maybe that way, when we begin the slow lynching of your absent husband, you'll have something to fight with.”

“That's not—” She stopped herself and stared at his wizened face, his straggly beard. It was hard to believe he and Lazlo were the same age. It was hard to believe they'd been friends for thirty years. “Whatever,” she said. “I've got to run.”

“Am I harassing you?” Ruben said, as she gathered her things and pushed herself and him out of the office.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Well,” Richard's mother was saying as she smoothed the lap of her dress for what must have been the tenth time, “I do think it would be a bit intrusive to be poking about at his work.”

“I agree,” Martin said.

“It's all terribly tricky,” Richard's father said, his voice husky from exhaustion and age. “I'm not sure what it is we're about here. I'm not even sure why we are here.”

“Well, it isn't an emergency,” Richard's mother said.

“Of course not,” Martin said.

They all sat in the living room with their shoes lined neatly in the hall, as the owners preferred it. They must have been sitting there for ten minutes, but was it really only that long?

“Richard is a good boy,” Richard's mother said.

“An excellent young man,” Richard's father said.

“I'm afraid it's a little unnerving, is all. I mean, the notion that you can stop the world and get off,” she smiled, repeating what Martin had conjectured, “it does seem to be like them. They're adventurous. They
want
to live. I admire them both tremendously.”

“I do, too,” Martin said. What was it about talking to old English people that turned him into such a smarm?

“When do you think you'll go home?”

“I don't know.” He looked at his socks—he'd been wearing the same crusty pair the last few days. He hoped no one could smell them. Maybe they didn't smell.

“And your wife is …”

“Hanging in there,” he said.

“I believe your mother might come over if she finds something to do with your father.”

Martin laughed. “That's always the trick.”

“Is he … progressing?”

“He's hanging in there.”

“You Americans like to hang in there,” Richard's father said.

“Justin!”

They laughed. She stood, smoothing her dress as if she were wearing an apron. “I suppose I could make some tea. Or perhaps something stronger?”

“Stronger,” Justin said.

In the kitchen, as Martin poured a drink for Justin, who'd been unwilling to come in from the warmth of the living room, Richard's mother readied tea.

“Lemon?” she said.

“Yes, please.”

“Then you put it in there, like that,” she said under her breath. “Just so. Yes.”

And he strangled back a laugh.

“What is it?” She looked frightened.

“I think I'm a bit on edge,” he said.

“Of course. Of course.”

They went together into the living room, carrying tea and scotch. Richard's father was dozing in the big leather chair.

“Drink?” she said softly.

“Hmm?” He opened his eyes. “Well, maybe not. Martin, would you do the honors?”

He'd thought he'd just have tea, for once. He looked at the amber single malt, the way he'd poured it to fill the glass just so. He sat across from them on the sofa, and set the scotch neutrally on the coffee table, like an ornament.

“I'll get you some tea.” Richard's mother went off back into the kitchen.

Martin waited. Justin looked at him, smiling.

“This is some pickle,” he said. “You'd call this a pickle, wouldn't you?”

“It's been a pickle for a long time,” Martin said.

“Eighteen months,” Justin said.

Martin was surprised by the exactness with which he knew it.

“We love your sister very much,” Justin said.

“I know,” Martin said quietly.

“They are a wonderful couple.”

“Yes.”

“So.” Richard's mother returned with a fresh cup of tea. “Where were we?”

“Here,” Justin said.

“I think what I'll do,” Richard's mother said, “is call Emma and let her know where things stand.”

“I was going to call her,” Martin said.

“Of course you were. But it's better, isn't it, coming from her mother?”

Martin picked up the scotch and sipped it. It was the thirty-year-old that Elizabeth had let him open after Richard had vanished. It was incredibly smooth, and then as sharp as an ice pick. He sipped it again.

“Good, is it?” Justin said.

Martin nodded in midswallow.

“They have such a lovely home,” Richard's mother said. “I'm sure they'll come back.”

“Quite sure,” Justin said. He raked his thick moustache with an index finger. “Quite so.”

Hmm, Martin thought he heard himself say. He took another sip of the scotch and waited for it to occupy his head.

When evening came they sat at the table in the kitchen and ate buttered bread and presliced meats rimmed with jelled fat and little pickles and some very mayonnaisy potato salad. Justin and Paula drank cold water. Martin worked slowly on the scotch. Their baggage—they'd flown in from Ireland, where they had retired to—hadn't moved from the front hall, as if they were awaiting an invitation. He wanted to say something gracious. On the flight up to see them not long after her diagnosis, Elizabeth had later admitted to him, all she wanted, all she
really
wanted, was for the plane to crash.
Then they just sat around all weekend and stared at me
, she'd said.
Like they were waiting for me to die right there
. Later she decided that they were sweet and attentive. It was hard to figure them out. Anything could be true about them.

“I'm sleeping in the study,” he blurted out.

“Oh good,” Paula said. “Then we'll take the guest room.”

While she and Justin saw to the dishes, he cleared himself out of the guest room and made the bed to look new. There was a room next to the guest room with an exercise mat and a futon mattress on the floor, but he certainly didn't want to be that close. He brought his bag down to the study. He was feeling better. Maybe it was true what they said about really excellent single malt—maybe he wouldn't get a hangover.

He took their bags up all in the same trip—heavy, boxy buggers from the midsixties, he guessed. The luggage felt like it held weeks' worth of clothing. He knew they didn't like to be uprooted. They liked everything just so, but they wouldn't complain.

“So you're all set,” he told them as they dried dishes in the kitchen.

“Thank you so much, Martin,” Paula said.

“Cheers,” Justin said.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” they said.

He lay on the built-in bed in the study, beside the shelves of books about getting pregnant and getting even. He never slept well without Lauren next to him and the kids near. He'd either turn in relatively sober and wake intermittently and for prolonged periods, or he'd try it blasted out of his mind and have one bolt of sleep and be up for two hours trying to cut up the hangover and then sleep for a last hour. He was now more into the latter sequence, even though he felt quite helplessly clear, that sense of distance between him and Lauren and the kids beginning to overwhelm him, as if he'd have to swim the ocean himself just to get back to them. What was it that he was always trying to escape?

As if there was a single answer—a force that could push him into another way of life. It was more complicated than that, more typical. Sometimes he felt a serenity, or not exactly that, but the possibility of it. But what or where was it? Was it death? Was it Lauren? Was it the children? Was it the past? Over the last eighteen months, at odd moments he'd be looking at a particular spot—the empty, wind-sheltered deck at the top of a battlefield observation tower, a patch of green grass on a remote soccer field, a pristine, hilly apple orchard right as the trees bloomed white in spring or flamed out in fall—and it hit him that he was looking for a suitable place to die. A place of isolation and comfort. A place on both a grand and a small scale, where the infinitesimal quality of his own life relative to all others could be enveloped in something not unlike a womb.

Where
was
she?

Nothing Sparks told him was news. He knew about the three new spots on the liver, the growing lesions on the spine and sacrum. He knew they wanted to zap her ovaries and she wouldn't let them. There wasn't a thing he didn't know.

“It's sad, really,” Sparks said, not smiling, combing a loose strand of gray-blond hair out of her eyes. “We can offer her comfort. We can offer her quality of life. But she feels we're falling short, because we can't offer her a cure. Do you know what she told me last week? That she wasn't going to be one of those young women who die on Taxol. Sometimes I think she thinks that because we can't cure her, we're just trying to kill her. That we just want her out of the way.”

Martin nodded, unwilling to contradict her.

“Of course, I'm not surprised she's left. She'll come back, though. She has to.”

He shook his head. “My mother always thought she'd have to come back to the States. She's very strong. She doesn't have to come back to anywhere.”

“Well.” She checked her watch. “I don't know about that. I'm afraid I have another appointment.”

“I'm grateful for your time.”

“It's always hardest on the family,” she said.

On his way to the tube, he tried to remember what he'd liked about Sparks from their other meetings. That she spoke directly to Elizabeth and never to him. That she was older than he'd expected. That she had a slyly frontal and yet reassuring delivery of the news. The disease was
easing out of control
, but she could
live with very little liver
. Lines like these, when he recalled them, made him laugh out loud. But when he first heard them, he was just writing them down to share with everyone else and even with Elizabeth, who tried so hard to listen that sometimes she couldn't remember anything. He'd read back his notes like a transcriptionist, and in Sparks's syntax they could find both the facts and even some comfort, if not exactly hope. From Sparks's view there had never been any hope. She hadn't been supposed to make it to New Year's. Now New Year's was in the rearview mirror, just another date. She was still alive. What did Sparks know?

But he'd felt his sister's humiliation. She didn't want to return to Baltimore because it would be a form of surrender. She didn't want to give up her breasts or her ovaries. And how sick she must have been of everyone's second-guessing—she hadn't pursued the right career, married the right man, chosen the right treatment, lived the right life. Their mother had once told her that if she died, it would be her own fault. Their mother was kind of like Vince Lombardi, and she easily forgot the harsh, exhortative things she said. It was important to find blame in someone else's dying because that meant it couldn't happen to you. But someday, he knew, he'd wake to find a lump or rise from the toilet to the evidence of a blood-black stool or feel a strike in his brain or at his heart that would be the last thing he ever felt. Everybody got a turn. There should be no sense of humiliation about it.

As he stuck his key in the door of Elizabeth and Richard's home, it opened and there stood his mother.

“Hello,” she said evenly.

“Hey,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Every time he saw her she seemed leaner and more muscular.

“You still love your old mother?” she said.

“Of course!”

He moved past her to hang up his coat, and there was his father, standing like something being propped up from behind, his belly lapping over his waist, his face puffy and yet drawn.

“Dad!” Martin said.

“Hey there.”

They hugged. It was impossible not to love hugging his father, who was sweet and warm and soft. When Martin felt him begin to sob, he pushed gently from him and finished hanging up his coat on the tree. The tree was nearly full now. There were a lot of people in the house. He didn't feel oppressed by it.

“So?” he said, turning to them. “I can't believe you came.”

“Of course we came,” Martin's mother said. “Why wouldn't we come?”

“Your mother insisted,” his father said.

“You insisted, too,” his mother said.

“It's great you're here,” Martin said.

Then the air seemed to go out of everything, and he was stuck with the fact that they were there and there were two more old people in the kitchen.

“What happened to your hand?” his mother said.

“Nothing. I had to break in to get in.” He was gratefully surprised that Lauren hadn't told them.

“We had a key,” his mother said.

“So did we,” Paula called from the kitchen.