The Healing (21 page)

On an emotional level, it made her sad because Mike used to enjoy the beach, the amusement parks, and the boardwalk ice cream more than the kids ever did. On a practical level, Karen was relieved not to have to face the crowds and the summer heat while contending with Mike's impaired mobility.

Her relief was short-lived. There was a knock on the bedroom door.

“Come in,” Karen called.

Lisa poked her head into the room. “Vinny told me you guys aren't coming.”

Karen braced herself. Lisa had always been like the entertainment director of family vacations, especially when the kids were small. If it rained and they couldn't go to the beach, Lisa was reliably prepared with stockpiled videotapes, board games, and extra snacks to keep the whining at a minimum. With up to six couples and over ten children of varied ages in the house at any given time, someone had to be in charge of the fun.

Right now it was the furthest thing from Karen's mind. “I think we'd better hang out here for today,” she replied.

Lisa looked disappointed. “But it won't be the same without you,” she said.

Karen wanted to remind her friend it wouldn't be the same whether they were there or not.

Luckily it was Mike who lightened the mood. “Looks like we've been raided by the Activity Police,” he said, eliciting a chuckle from Karen. It had been a long time since anyone had referred to Vinny's wife as the Activity Police.

Lisa awarded him a guilty grin. “Come on, you guys,” she urged. “You have to come with us. You can drive over and park in the—

Karen realized Lisa stopped herself before uttering the words
handicapped spot
.

They decided to go after all when one of Richie's lady friends arrived. Mike and Karen knew what that meant. Richie would be staying at the house and hoping everyone would clear out.

“I guess that means we're coming,” Karen told Lisa, who clapped with joy.

“I'll need to rent a wheelchair,” Mike said.

Lisa stopped clapping. “Okay. Well, then. I guess we'll see you over there.” Before they could even respond, she flurried out like a tongue-tied adolescent.

Karen didn't look at Mike. His words hung in the air like a beehive she didn't dare disturb. So she tried to be pragmatic about it. She likened Mike's need for a wheelchair to Lori's need for a stroller when she had been a baby. No big deal. It was the only way she could wrap her mind around it.

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car. Traffic was at a slow crawl along the main thoroughfares, and by the time Karen rented a wheelchair and inched the car toward the amusement park, it was already noon. Mike could've shuffled along the boardwalk with his walker, taking two naps in between, and gotten there in less time. The handicapped spots were all taken, and Karen had to drop Mike off and go find a place to park her car. Luckily Lisa had been keeping an eye out for them and met them at the park entrance, so she was able to sit with Mike until Karen returned.

“Are we having fun yet?” she said as Mike settled into the chair.

“Loads,” Mike replied.

The Activity Police had already tracked the others down on her cell phone and began leading the way.

Karen positioned herself behind the wheelchair to push it, but she didn't allow herself to really see her husband sitting in it. The place was jammed with people, and she had a hard time moving Mike along. By the time they met up with their friends and their daughter, Karen was already exasperated. She saw how the others reacted to seeing Mike in a wheelchair, even though they didn't make any verbal comments, and something inside her shut down. Worst of all, Lori looked like someone had hit her in the head with a rock.

Karen realized they never should have come.

Vinny pushed her hands off the wheelchair. “Here, let me take over for a while,” he said.

No doubt he thought he was doing her a favor, but Karen sensed the tension. She actually grew more anxious as they moved forward with Vinny steering. They didn't cover much ground before he started losing his patience. As in any amusement park, there were a lot of young kids running around—kids who didn't yet understand that it was polite to make way for the disabled.

A boy of about ten years old darted into their path. “Hey!” Vinny barked.

Startled, the boy turned around and tripped over Mike's footrest. Another boy who was chasing him crashed into him from behind, and both of them practically fell onto Mike's lap.

“Watch where you're going, damn it,” Vinny said.

“Chill, mister,” the older one said.

Karen thought Vinny would bust a vein. The boys' parents were standing only a few feet away, and the father stepped forward. “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah,” Vinny replied. “Why don't you teach your kids some manners?”

The father was soft-spoken, which only made things worse. “I'm sure they didn't mean it.”

“I guess that means you don't feel the need to reprimand them,” Vinny said. The edge in his voice meant he was looking for a fight. Karen wanted to rein him in, but she didn't think it was her place. Luckily, Lisa and Mike both chimed in.

“Let it go, Vin.”

The incident quickly put Vinny in a sour mood. Karen knew it was a delayed side effect of seeing his best friend in a wheelchair.

Things went steadily downhill from that moment on. Karen watched Mike and Lori like a hawk, and she was keenly aware of their misery even though they never uttered a complaint. Mike looked woozy and embarrassed. Lori barely spoke a word, even to Melissa and Jen.

Finally, Karen proposed the only logical course of action. “Maybe we should just leave.”

“But we can't go back to the house,” Mike reminded her.

Karen resented the fact that Richie's promiscuous sex life took precedence over the needs of his sick friend, but she quickly came up with an alternate plan. “I'll go get the car, and we can take a nice relaxing ride. With the air-conditioning at seventy and some mellow Crosby, Stills & Nash on the CD player. What do you say?”

“Sounds good to me,” Mike replied.

“Me, too,” Lori said.

Karen finally allowed herself to relax. Sitting on the old screened-in porch for a game of cards was always the perfect end to a busy day at Wildwood. As Joe dealt a new hand, it was easy for Karen to look around and appreciate the things that hadn't changed—the floor that sagged toward the front yard, the mismatched chairs, the long homemade table where everyone congregated like a big, boisterous family. It was just as easy to appreciate some of the things that
had
changed. Evenings at the beach house took on quite a different atmosphere since the kids were grown. Now, instead of little ones nagging to stay up and fighting with their siblings, there were four couples and three young women enjoying a game of poker. It was surely a change for the better.

Then there were the changes Karen consciously chose to ignore. She glanced at Mike, who was sitting across the table with a smile and a fan of cards in his hand. With his failing legs hidden under the table and the flush of mild sunburn giving his face a healthy glow, Karen could pretend there was no multiple sclerosis. She could forget the challenges of getting Mike to the beach or pushing him through a wall of people at the amusement park. In a wheelchair.

Even Lori appeared to be enjoying the card game. She was munching on tortilla chips and interacting with everyone at the table. Karen pretended there had been no car accident. No surgery, no grief, no addictions.

It was almost euphoric. If only Vinny could shake his lingering bad mood. It surrounded him like a bad odor. Karen assumed everyone noticed it. Everyone probably understood it. But nobody mentioned it.

Karen watched him warily as he looked at the cards Joe had just dealt. “I oughta call a misdeal,” Vinny said.

“On what grounds?” asked Joe.

“On the grounds that I was gonna sit there,” he said, pointing to Richie's seat. “But then we had to play musical chairs.”

Karen felt a knot forming in her stomach. It wasn't like Vinny to behave like an adolescent, but he was not happy about accommodating Richie, whose girlfriend was attached to his hip, and Mike, who needed the most comfortable chair. And Richie was now winning every hand, which didn't help Vinny's displaced defiance against all that was unfair in life.

“Stop being a sore loser,” Lisa scolded. “It's not like there's any money on the table.”

“Of course not,” Vinny said. “Some of us are too cheap to let a few dollars float around among friends.”

Karen looked at Mike. He was watching Vinny with his brows raised.

Joe was about to say something, but Janice elbowed him gently. So Vinny's comment hung in the air like offensive gas. As if that didn't make them uncomfortable enough, Richie's female guest, who looked like a blow-up doll with her helmet of bleached-blond hair and surgically enhanced breasts, was sidling up to him suggestively and whispering in his ear.

Vinny just glared at them. To try and lighten everyone's spirit, Lisa got up and fetched a bottle of Maalox from her bag, which she ceremoniously set down in front of her husband. “Take a double dose,” she said. “I warned Janice about the green peppers.”

Everyone else chuckled tensely. Vinny didn't.

So much for Karen's five-minute vacation from reality.

The card game broke up a short while later, and Vinny was the first one out of the room. Those who didn't scurry away fast enough got an eyeful of Richie and his date getting hot and heavy in anticipation of their next round. Mike and Karen, naturally, were the last ones off the porch, and they were unable to avoid the sight of two people kissing so erotically that they were squirming as they devoured each other. They were glad that Lori, Melissa, and Jen had already retreated to the small loft that had always been the “kids' room,” because Richie's hand was venturing under the woman's shirt, and the wrestling of their tongues was not in the least bit impeded or concealed by their lips. They didn't care whether anyone was still in the room with them or not. Karen was purple by the time she was out of there, and even Mike's neck reddened to match his sunburned face.

They didn't speak a single word as they got ready for bed, all too aware of what they had been missing for the past few years. The memory of it loomed between them like delicious fruit that they had been forbidden to eat, especially since they were lucky enough to be in one of the two bedrooms. Before Mike had been stricken with MS, they had to flip a coin with the others for such privacy.

Now they had a bed to themselves, but it didn't matter. Mike had long since stopped making advances. For such a long time, he had tried to act upon the desire that still burned inside of him, but he was physically unable to follow through. At the beginning medicines intermittently helped, but after a few years it was one disappointment after another. He got so angry with himself that Karen began to dread any such attempts. Finally, after Lori's accident, he stopped trying altogether.

But Karen knew what was going on in Mike's head as they were lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. She knew her husband well enough to know that the sight of Richie and his lover had stoked that ever-present need for intimacy. After relinquishing himself to a wheelchair for the first time, and after seeing that his lifelong friend did not handle it well, Mike would have found his greatest solace in Karen. She simply didn't have the heart to watch him fail again. Nor did she want to take any pleasure from him when he could have no such release.

So when he moved toward her and ran his forefinger over her lips, she pretended to be asleep and turned over, feeling like a coward. If only she were able to tell him why.

chapter twenty-five

July 2004

Mike could see that Karen seemed far away as they sat under the apple tree. Her gaze was settled on the lawn, but it was fixed and staring. As much as he wanted to ask her what she was thinking about, he wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer. Their superficial conversation had ebbed to a stop as they sipped their beers, and for a moment Mike closed his eyes and pretended he was simply sitting still in a patio chair. He wasn't in a state-of-the-art wheelchair. He wasn't immobilized by a degenerative disease. He wasn't catheterized. He wasn't wasting away. He was sitting still. If he wasn't so damned exhausted, he might have slipped into a moment of bliss. He might have pretended he could reach out and take Karen's hand or lean over and kiss her or walk with her into the kitchen and help get dinner ready.

Maybe the beer was going to his head. Or maybe it was because just a short while ago he had actually seen his wife laugh. “Karen?”

She snapped out of her daydream with a start. “Yeah?”

“Do you ever go down to the beach?”

Karen seemed surprised by the blunt question. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened as if to speak, but no words came tumbling out. Of course, she had no way of knowing that Mike wondered about this every time she went out for a walk. Her gaze fixed on his, searching for the source of his query, but he was so spent that his eyes were starting to flutter out of focus. Sometimes when he was fatigued he had problems with his vision, and an hour in the blaring light of day wasn't helping. He kept blinking and pulling his gaze back to hers, trying to hold on to the fragile lifeline that stretched between them like the thread of a spider's web.

For a few seconds Karen looked trapped, and Mike knew he had struck a chord. But then she sprang up from her seat and went to check the grill. “Yeah, I stop at the beach sometimes,” she replied, her voice sounding forcibly self-possessed. “Maybe we can get you down there one of these days.”

Mike closed his eyes because the drifting and blurring were getting worse. In his mind, he imagined what it would be like to go to the beach again . . . to swim in the salt water . . . to walk on the shore . . . to lie in the sun on a blanket next to his wife and watch Lori build sand castles. That was the only way he wanted to remember the beach. Certainly not as the poor guy in the wheelchair who couldn't venture past the grass.

He heard the screen door slam. “Mike?”

His eyelids lifted slowly. Karen was putting the steak on the grill.

“Don't fall asleep before you eat something,” she urged.

He nodded and watched her trot up the steps and back into the house. She emerged with a tray full of barbecue goodies and started unloading them onto the small picnic table.

Babe, do you think of me when you're at the beach? Do you ever think back and wish everything was like it used to be?

Karen darted over and picked up something by the footrest of his chair. It was his beer bottle. Mike didn't even realize it had slipped out of his hand. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded again. “Just tired.”

“The steak's almost ready,” she said, and dashed back to the grill.

Mike filled his bleary eyes with the sight of her—a vision in her usual summer attire of tank top and shorts. Her lean arms and legs were smooth and tanned, and her tiny waist and braless torso moved with the grace of a dancer's, disguising its great strength both inside and out. It was his favorite pastime, his only real pleasure left in life, to watch his beautiful wife and remember how close they once were.

Karen kept glancing over her shoulder at him, but there was a hint of anxiety in her demeanor. The brief encounter with his playful, blushing wife was over for now, and the sweet air of familiarity between them dissipated. Karen was back to being the worried caregiver. Perhaps his question about the beach had forced her to retreat. Or maybe it had been her own thoughts that unnerved her.

Mike parked himself at the picnic table, but watching Karen cut up his steak into tiny shavings made him lose what little appetite he'd had. And when she proceeded to offer him a fork, his fingers would not cooperate in grasping it. Karen was patient, holding the fork and holding her breath, while Mike struggled to get it in his grip.

“Why don't you just hold it any way you can?” Karen suggested softly without meeting his gaze.

Mike relented and grabbed it in a fist, but he still couldn't stab the meat and bring it to his mouth. Karen had to realize what was happening, but she still didn't look at him. After a few tries, he let the fork drop, and it clattered on his plate.

Now she looked at him, her eyes full of something that looked like pity.

Mike's will caved in like a depleted, deserted mine. When Karen picked up his fork and offered him a piece of steak, he relented and opened his mouth. He chewed it slowly, wondering how he was going to get it past his swollen throat. She didn't utter a word, nor did her eyes give away a thing. There was no indication that Karen realized she was feeding him for the first time since feeding him a piece of their wedding cake.

He could only eat a few bites. He felt so weak he was afraid he was going to pass out. Or choke. “Karen, I need to go inside and lie down now.”

“Just eat a little more.” She probed a morsel at his lips.

“I can't, babe.”

“Please?”

“I can't.”

“For me?”

He closed his eyes. Not only were they twitching out of focus, but they began to sting with repressed tears. “I can't,” he said in a voiceless rasp.
Not even for you.