Or Not to Be (23 page)

“A safety pocket?” She shook her head and
came up behind me. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and said into the
side of my neck, “Running is safe, Eddie. My resting pulse is fifty-eight. My
blood pressure is one hundred over sixty. Running cannot hurt me. It might be
the safest thing I do all day long. It’s peaceful. Why do I need a safety
pocket? To carry a condom?”

I held up a pink
spray bottle of ammonia and asked, “How about carrying this to spray mean
animals? The ones who chase and bark. And
bite
.”

“Eddie, you are so
sweet, but I’m not afraid of dogs anymore. That was twenty, no—cripes!—that was
thirty
years ago. I’m not afraid of
dogs anymore. I’m not afraid of
anything
anymore. And, honey, this
stuff reeks. I couldn’t run with it on me.” She hugged me again before she
walked away and said over her shoulder, “Please get that smell out of here.”

In the end, I convinced her she couldn’t
run without some protection. I think I convinced her. Maybe I just wore her
down. I failed at convincing her to be afraid, though. She conceded that she
would use my pockets to carry her cell phone when she ran. I tried not to call
her, but sometimes she was out there way too long.

“Eddie—
huff
—what
do you want?” she demanded.

My heart lightened and my shoulders
unclenched. “Just making sure you’re still alive,” I said happily.

She was alive, but
not happy. “Ed—
huff
—the reason I have the cell phone with me in—
huff
—this ridiculous pocket—
huff
—is to call
you
if I need you—
huff
—
not
for you to call me.
Got that
?” and she was
gone.

Those
pockets were great.

37

In good times and in bad
, in sickness and in health—marriage provides all of
these scenarios in an unpredictable medley. During our bad times, the months
right before her deathday, there was nothing I could do to make Anna smile.

On a morning in late September, back on
the wrong side of the sun, I was acutely aware of the path of the Earth as it
zoomed toward my wife’s deathday. We’d been avoiding each other for weeks, so I
knew when Anna voluntarily spoke to me that she must have felt desperate.

I caught her in a rage, throwing keys and
her purse to the floor while she emptied the junk drawer and dug under the
couch cushions while Joey waited for her in the car.

“Anna, what’s wrong?”

She glanced at me, pissed. Then she said,
“Hold on, will you?”

I did.

As she rushed past me, she barked, “I’m late,
Eddie.”

She was like the Tasmanian devil. I should
have known better than to step in her path, but I am a fixer. I couldn’t help
myself, but maybe I could help her. “Can I help?”

She glared at me, and I felt guilt creep
up between my shoulders, like whatever she’d lost had been hidden by me. “No.
Just leave me alone and I’ll find it myself.” She marched into the bedroom.

I followed her because I’m an idiot.

“Just tell me what you lost,” I offered.

“Can you hold on?” she asked. “Ed, I don’t have time to
talk about it. I’m late.” She
swiped everything off of her dresser with one hand. “
Picture
twenty kids bouncing off the walls with no teacher in the room. Their day won’t
start until I arrive. And when I get there,” she tossed the pillows off the
bed, “first I have to explain to the pissed-off principal that I’m late again
because I couldn’t find my damn—” she paused, stopped yelling, and whispered,
“cell phone.”

She stopped and straightened up, silent
and still. Stricken. She turned her back on me and said, “Okay. Sorry.” A deep
ragged breath, then, “Yeah, Michelle, I’ll talk to you tonight. Yeah. Yeah.
Love you, too. ’Bye.”

As she lowered it from her ear, Anna
stared in disbelief at the cell phone in her hand. The cell phone for which she
ripped our house apart. One half of my mind told me this should be funny. It
would
be funny if I didn’t know why it was happening. Anna couldn’t keep her thoughts
unscrambled with her deathday approaching and exerting its gravitational force
field on her.

My sad wife looked up at me, met my eyes
full on for the first time in a month, pleading with me to help her laugh this
one off.

I couldn’t do it. We weren’t in our time
when we could laugh together. We were on the bad side of the sun. I watched a
tear drip from her chin. I shook my head and walked away. I’m sure I just
looked disgusted with her. Inside I was falling apart right alongside her.

| | | |

I knew
things were getting even worse when she called me on
that same cell phone later that week while she was out running.

“Hey, what is it?” I was neutral and
guarded when I picked up.

“Eddie. I need a ride.” She tried to sound
like it was no big deal for her to need a ride home from her run. No big deal
for her to call me and actually ask for my help.

It was early October, a whole month away
from her deathday, so I knew she wasn’t in real danger yet. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” I heard her sniffle. “I’m lost.”

“How can I find you? What do you
remember?”

“I’m on one of those back roads where I
run, all trees and hills, but I can’t remember which one.” Silence for a moment
and then she said, “I zoned out.”

I grabbed the car keys.

“Let me get Joey, and we’ll come find you.
Okay?”

“Yeah. Call me back.” She hung up.

We found her half an hour later sitting on
a fallen tree trunk on the side of the road, about three miles and two wrong
turns off her regular running route. She wiped her eyes dry and said she wasn’t
paying attention while she ran. I’m a distance runner, too, so I could relate,
but I’d never lost track of where I was like that.

She sat beside me in my truck, weeping,
and I didn’t comfort her. I couldn’t. Instead, in my blind fear, I admonished
her for running so far out, as though she got lost on purpose.

“Anna, you have got to be careful!” I
yelled at her and banged the dashboard. Joey sat between us, eyes wide.

“Careful, Ed? Careful? I was
running
.”

“But you could get hurt!”

“No, I could not! And what do you care,
anyway?”

“Anna, listen.” I lowered my voice.
“There’s a gap, a hole. It can pull you in, take you away. Stay away from it.
Stay still. Stay home,” I pleaded.

She sniffled, and I knew I’d made her cry
again. She wasn’t listening to me. Or maybe she couldn’t hear these words.

“Anna?”

“Don’t be mean, Eddie.

“I just want you to be safe.”

“What?” she barked at me. “Am I supposed
to thank you for rescuing me?”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” I
said. Lame. Weak. Helpless.

“You’re like a broken record, Ed. You
already said that. Just shut up, will you?” And she resumed her weeping, head
turned away.

I shut up. My warnings couldn’t get
through. Damn the universe.

In my frustration, I treated Anna like an
ignorant child instead of my brilliant wife. I hurt her because I was hurting.
Weeks from her deathday, she was disintegrating before my eyes. I couldn’t even
hug her because I could not function. I could not breathe. I could not talk. I
staggered through the days as they whipped past me, out of my grasp. It felt
like my wife was already dead. I knew I couldn’t live without her, and yet I
had no way to protect her. I was paralyzed by the dreadful idea of life without
Anna and by my growing certainty that she’d choose to leave me and not come
back.

Taken
all together—her cooking, her vaporous memory, and losing her way—it was
apparent that Anna was coming unglued. Her matter and antimatter were
separating.

It was only a
matter of time, a finite and definite amount of time, until she left me.

38

A week before Anna died
, I came home from work at the end of a long day at
the hospital. I’d lost a favorite patient that day. They were all my favorites,
I’ll admit, but watching sweet Selma die was tough on the entire staff.

I walked into our house, disheveled, and
badly needing a hug and a few minutes alone with my wife, but certain I
couldn’t have either. Joey came running to greet me. “Daddy!” he yelled. I
squatted and he launched himself into my arms. I took the available hug. So
healthy and strong, he smelled like grass and chocolate. I couldn’t lift him;
he was too big for that, so I sat with him on the floor in my wrinkled scrubs
while my boy chatted about his day.

“I kicked a
homerun in kickball today, Daddy. And I learned to count to ten in Spanish.
Wanna hear?” He didn’t wait for a response. He just launched into, “
Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis
...” and got stuck.

I prompted, “
Siete?
”
and he jumped back in and finished.

“Know what else I
know? Your shirt is
rojo,
and Mommy’s skirt is
negro
! How’s that?”

I kissed his
forehead and said, “Amazing, champ!” The house was quiet. “Where’s your
madre
?”

“On the swing. She wanted some peace. She
was talking to Bethany on the phone, but now she’s grading papers.” He pointed
out the back window, and I saw Anna outside. She looked peaceful when she
didn’t know I was nearby.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked.

“Mac and cheese!” he yelled. No surprise
there.

“Coming up,” I announced. I pulled some
hotdogs from the fridge to complement the cheesy noodles.

Twenty minutes
later, I sent Joey outside to announce dinner to his mom. “Tell
tu madre
that
dinero
es
ready.”
That’s how Anna and I communicated—through our Spanish-speaking son.

“Dad,” he said
with two accusing syllables, “
dinero
is money, not food.” He
giggled and ran out the back door to his mom.

I saw Anna look up when she heard the door
slam. Irrational jealousy stabbed at my heart when she gave Joey her smile. I
wished I could hear her voice but couldn’t through the closed windows. She
shook her head. Joey turned to run back inside, but she caught his hand and
said something to him. He tiptoed to her. She bent down so he could kiss her
cheek. This made my wife smile again, but made me cry.

| | | |

Later that night
, I walked in on Anna, quite innocently, as she
changed into her pajamas. Her clothes were strewn all over the floor in our
walk-in closet. She didn’t hear me come in. The sight of her bare back, so
familiar and beckoning, stopped me cold. I hadn’t seen her skin in months.

“Anna ...” I sighed, forgetting everything
and just seeing my best friend, my other half.

She froze. She didn’t turn around. In
March, she would have removed the rest of her clothes and greeted me with a
hug. That night she said, “No, Ed. Just get out.”

I was not permitted to touch her unless I
was nice to her. It was an agreed upon stipulation from early in our marriage
when we were learning to live together. Since I couldn’t meet her eye without
looking like a fox with bird feathers in my teeth, she didn’t trust me. I
didn’t blame her. But I was dying right beside her.

I had no logical defense for my behavior.
Nothing I could say that she would understand, and so I remained silent. She
cried alone in the bathroom with the door locked every night before she came to
bed. We slept side by side but separated by a gaping chasm. Bad days followed
bad nights. She hit rock bottom and proclaimed that her mother was right about
me. How could I hurt her so much, and why couldn’t I stop?