The Rest of Us: A Novel (39 page)

“Exactly,” she said. “You’ll have final say, obviously, but I’ll be the researcher. Like a consultant, but hands-on. I’ve already amassed a ton of information.” She had restarted the car, was pulling out into Eighth Avenue traffic. “This is going to be the greatest thing we’ve ever done together.”

•  •  •

It seemed foolish, but I had hoped for Rhinehart to be alive to see the baby. It didn’t appear possible now. He was on a regular regimen of pain medication and spent most of his time in bed, except for a mandatory afternoon walk that we took around the apartment together to keep his circulation up. I hadn’t wanted to believe him when he’d said that what saddened him the most, besides leaving me alone, was that he wouldn’t be able to see his child. I thought of how the original expectation for his own life, that he would never be a parent, had actually been right.

Standing over his bed, I said, “Your clairvoyance is impressive, Madame Blavatsky. Timothy, lowercase ‘t’ is on the way.”

He opened his eyes slowly, coming into consciousness. “A girl!”

“Hallie was pleased about it. I’m not sure she would have been so keen on a boy.”

“If you don’t like timothy, we can combine our mothers’ names.”

“Anna Lily,” I said. I liked it.

He said, “I knew today would be special. I felt God with me and stronger right before you walked in the room.”

I climbed into the bed knees first, like a child. “What does it feel like?”

“A source of stillness and peace. Like a woman is with me, like she will go with me. God feels like my mother and my wife today.” He smiled. “Tomorrow may be different. But today the feminists were right. Will you take our picture?”

“Now? Why?”

“Because I want to capture this moment. The moment we found out about our baby girl.” In a burst of effort, his dry mouth closed around the word and he smiled.

I set up the tripod and the cable release and photographed us. I was looking at him, not the camera; he looked peaceful, although I could see, in the tightening around his eyes, that he was in pain. I refocused the shot—the viewfinder was wet and my vision of him blurred. I knew it would be a very long time, decades maybe, if I lived that long, before I would ever be able to look at these photos.

Later, we lay in bed, listening to music. My arms around him. “Tatie,” he said. “I want to tell you before I get too sick to say it. You have been the great event of my life.”

“And you are mine.”

“The baby will be yours now.” I started to protest, and he said, “No, trust me. It’s the one thing that helps me to understand everything else.”

•  •  •

When Laura had been told Rhinehart was sick, she had become hysterical, saying “I want to see him! I want to see him!” This had been several weeks ago, and she had arranged numerous visits since, only to cancel an hour before she was to show up. The afternoon I took our photograph, I called her to tell her straight out that if she wanted to visit, she needed to make it soon. I had a perverse urge to add “speak now or forever hold your peace.”

An hour later, she showed up red-faced as if she’d been crying all the way over. It was hard for me to look at her. She’d brought a box of chocolates, not knowing how pointless that was—he was barely eating anymore and would never have been able to swallow those anyway. She stood in the hall with her coat on, gripping the chocolates and a bouquet of flowers, looking so bewildered that I had the sudden, dynamic desire to throw her out, protect Rhinehart from her weakness, so he wouldn’t have to see the horror of his own fate reflected on her face. But he was stronger than any of us, recently. Maybe he could soothe the disconsolate, maybe he could comfort even her. I pointed mutely to his closed door, and she looked at me as if I were gesturing towards the gangplank. She knocked timidly, then pushed it open. Ten minutes passed. I could hear her crying in there, and I wanted desperately to be out of the apartment. But a sense of duty restrained me. I didn’t want her to have to walk into an empty living room after leaving him. So I sat with my baby, Anna, and we waited for her.

When she emerged twenty minutes later, I feared she would want
to talk about how terrible he looked or her own horror. She had questioned me extensively on the phone, gasping when I said he was jaundiced, or that we had to rotate him every hour for his comfort. I had been giving her the sanitized version of what went on in this house, and it was still too much for her to handle.

“How did it go?” I asked, and she looked at me with such enormous nakedness that I thought back to something Rhinehart’s Sufi spiritual advisor had said, that the entire world, all that we’d said and done and felt and seen, could, at moments, be reflected in our eyes, as the eyes were the gateway to the heart, and the heart the gateway to the soul. The soul itself could never be alone, as it was connected to everyone else’s.

Laura said, “He’s dying with grace.”

•  •  •

I felt him starting to withdraw, to be relinquishing his claims on his life here, as a person moving overseas will give up his bed, and car, and house, all the things he can’t bring, and no longer has use for anyway. They represent the old life, and can only be relevant to those people left behind. Sometimes he would look at me, and I would get the sense he was seeing many things simultaneously, the past, the place he was traveling to, the immediate concerns of the present. I saw Anna and myself looming large and then receding into the distance.

I sat on a chair next to his bed and fed him ice chips, as he liked the sensation. He was dehydrated—I could tell from his lips, which were dry and cracked. He took one to please me, then shook his head. Such things as thirst, too, were the concerns of the living.

While I’d been out, he’d taken a call from Chechna. She was recovering from a hip operation, unable to travel to see him. Instead they had been talking weekly by phone. This conversation, perhaps their last, had been different, and afterwards Rhinehart was very alert and struggling to convey its importance to me.

“She said it’s wrong for. Her to outlive me. If she could she
would. Trade her life. For mine. Sounds like. Something. A mother would say.”

I was rubbing his hands. “She does love you, you know.”

“Also. She said. My father. Tried to send for me. After my mother died.”

“Really!”

He nodded. “Chechna was honoring. The promise. The promise she made to. My mother. To have me raised. In America.” He swallowed noisily, and I offered him his water glass with the straw. He shook his head impatiently. “Chechna thought. My life would be better. Here. She was right.”

“I am so thankful for her decision.”

He was still smiling. “Now my. Father and I have nothing to be. Ashamed of. When we see each other. Again.”

•  •  •

The day I thought Rhinehart was going to die, I cried for hours, convinced that I was sensing what was going to happen and preparing myself. He was slipping in and out of consciousness for most of the afternoon, talking in garbled half-sentences that I strained to make out. Then, late in the day, he rallied unexpectedly, and looking at me clear-eyed, said, “You’re a wreck today.”

I was so relieved I started laughing and babbling, “What if all this crying is making a melancholy baby, a little Princess of Denmark.” I told him about Win’s story. “There are women who say the baby is affected in utero. The ones who were happy had easygoing kids.”

His eyes had been fluttering closed, and they opened again. “No, no. It has to do with the heart.”

•  •  •

The next morning he was feeling better, and I even let the nurse take the afternoon off. It was an unseasonably warm day for the first of November, and I opened the window a crack. “Nice,” he said, inhaling the air.

The baby was kicking a lot. “She’s going nuts in there,” I said, and put his hand on my stomach to feel.

Since he had responded so well to the breeze, I wondered if his sense of smell was more acute today, and so I decided I’d make a pumpkin pie. Rhinehart and I had always loved autumn, and the scent might even chase out the dry medicinal smell that had settled on everything. I asked him if it was all right if I disappeared for a bit to make it, just from a can, nothing fancy, and he nodded. I was gone no more than ten minutes, and when I came back into the room, he was still lying in the position I’d left him in, his hand outstretched where I’d been holding it. His eyes had rolled back into his skull, and there was a dark rattle in his throat. His breath stopped, and I froze, then he inhaled again, noisily.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no.” I went back and forth to the phone and picked it up and then dropped it again, when I realized it wasn’t going to do anything. My hands and then my whole body began trembling, and I climbed into the bed with him, and wrapped my arms and legs around his, which were rigid as if he were waiting motionless for what was coming. Since I could, I began talking insistently, remembering that the nurse had said he would be able to hear me up until the end. I knitted a rope between us, speaker and listener. I told him about how when I was in college I used to watch for him to come home, and then jump into a chair to make it appear I’d been doing other things, about these visions I had that took place at my elementary school and in them I was a child, and he was coming around the corner to pick me up. They were so bizarre I’d never told him. I said that with him I’d felt protected. I felt understood, as if he could see deep into what I needed, before I could even. I talked about what he had looked like at forty-one, the blond hair on his tanned, freckled forearms, and how excited he’d been when he’d finished one of his poems, we’d gotten out a bottle of champagne and started drinking even though it was only 7 a.m., and what it felt like to be twenty years old, standing next to him after one of his readings, holding his hand. I spoke of the future, of the baby so that he could
see her. I told him he’d made me stronger in these past few weeks than I’d ever known I could be. His breath grew coarser and rolled on, the rattle more drawn out. “Thank you for letting me be with you,” I said. “Thank you for letting me know you.”

It was coming up and over us like an enormous wave, all our past, and we were together, gripping each other, rushing down this terrible chute with such speed, I became terrified—we were going too fast. I knew I needed to stop talking, but I couldn’t stop. I shouted, “Stay! Stay with me!” I shouted at God for aid and in anger. I was still attached to Rhinehart, it was as if there were millions of hair-fine roots joining us, I could feel them tearing, and I clung to him. And then, all at once, I didn’t need to anymore. I let him go. Tiny ripples of shivers like an electrical current raced over his body. He shuddered violently, and for a split second he felt so close to me, as when we were making love. The side of his face pressed against my pulsing temple. What’s next for us? I asked him. His breath had stopped, and a dark stain spread over the sheet.

I
owe so much to my parents, not only for the original encouragement, but for all the years after, for having faith in me. And Graham, who I’m very lucky to have as a brother, an artistic inspiration, and a friend.

I’m very grateful for my agent, Lane Zachary, for her kindness, insight, dedication, and belief. Everything changed the day I met her. I’m also very fortunate to have been paired with the incisively bright and talented Anjali Singh, who opened the book up for me, and is also so much fun to talk to. Thank you to everyone at Simon & Schuster, especially Jon Karp, Anne Tate, Nina Pajak, Jackie Seow, Fred Chase, Gypsy da Silva, Sarah Nalle, and Jill Putorti. And especially Millicent Bennett—many thanks.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this novel began at an unofficial residency in Cambridge, home of poet Mariève Rugo, whose intellect and talent continue to inspire me (not to mention that sense of humor). Many thanks to everyone at Fundación Valparaiso, Spain, where the novel was torn apart and constructed, and the International Writers and Translators’ Center of Rhodes, Greece, where it was revised.

I’ve had the very good fortune to study with these writers and scholars: Leslie Epstein, who understood my style and helped to develop it; Ha Jin, who has been fundamental; the deeply inspiring Guinn Batten; and Marshall Klimasewiski, who first saw something in my work and advocated for me—I will always be grateful.

Thanks to my early readers: Lee and Eva Bacon (who provided a large quantity of counsel and good judgment), the insightful Coray Ames, and Doug Harrison, whose opinion I will always seek out. As well as Dr. Lorraine Burns, a generous physician and friend, for consulting on the medical facts.

I’m also very thankful to writers Adriana V. López and Andrew Lloyd-Jones for talking it over and giving sound advice, and especially artist Karrie Hovey for our long phone discussions about art and how much to give up for it.

For all their support, and for answering obscure questions or offering well-timed anecdotes or situational metaphors: Hila Katz, Kara Decas, Sophia Sinko, Nicole Caruth, Alex Ortolani, Jen and Jacob Drew, Matthew Nicholas, Lauren Haynes, Katy Brennan, Mónica Páez, Tania Kamensky, Nicholas Cohn, and Katy Acitelli. As well as my extended family for all the stories I’ve overheard, my grandparents, the Betschs, and Lotts, especially Susan Lott for her support (and likely influence, too).

My Cobble Hill Buddhist group (SGI) has been a constant source of encouragement, especially Deborah Goodwin, Lynne Winters, and Eduarda Rocha-Waid, my unconditionally loving friend.

And a very special thanks to my Green Street—Ellen, Meegs, and Katie—Heidi, Jeremy, and Attie, and our lives together. Back when everything came with an interesting story.