The Things I Do For You (4 page)

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Authors: Mary Carter

BOOK: The Things I Do For You
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It took several years of stalking for Brad to catch up. But he did, eventually he did. It was twenty-six years later, and they’d been married for seven years. Bailey pulled her chair up to Brad’s hospital bed, gently took his left hand in hers, and wrapped it into a little hand sandwich.
“You know,” she said. “Most people don’t go to such extremes over the seven-year itch.” Her laugh sounded hollow in the little room. “You’re going to be all right,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.” She wanted to add, “I’m hopefully optimistic,” already projecting a day where the phrase would be a private joke between them—but she couldn’t get the words over the lump in her throat, and just in case he was listening, she didn’t want him to hear her crying. She leaned over and kissed him ever so gently on the lips, hoping to wake him like a reverse Snow White, wondering if he could hear her, smell her, feel her hair brushing against his collarbone. “I love you,” she said. “I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.” She laid her head on his chest. His heart was beating, he was still here, he was clinically alive.
 
Bailey could smell and hear Aunt Faye coming down the hall, returning from the cafeteria. Obsession, and high heels. The pitch of her voice rising higher and higher as she stopped to talk to someone.
“I’m Faye Edgers, Penthouses on Parade, if any of the doctors are ever in the market. I’ve got places near every hospital. They can roll out of bed and right into surgery.”
Then Faye was back in the doorway. Bailey looked up, meaning to smile, but not too much. Instead, she watched Faye take in the sight of Brad, bald and swelling on the bed. Faye opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then she looked at Bailey.
“I can talk to a nurse,” Faye said. “Try to get him moved to a bigger room with a view.”
“He’s fine,” Bailey said.
“Oh, darling,” Faye said. She opened her arms. Tears came to Bailey’s eyes. She wiped them away and sniffed loudly. She looked at Brad, half expecting him to laugh.
“He’s fine,” she said again.
“Oh, darling,” Faye said.
“Aunt Faye,” Bailey said. “If you say that again, I’m going to beat the living daylights out of you.” Faye sat on an empty chair facing Bailey. She crossed her arms and her legs.
“You remind me of me,” she said.
“God help us both,” Bailey said. She glanced at Brad, then pointed to the bed as she addressed the ceiling. “But help him first,” she added.
 
Five hours passed in a blur. Faye reluctantly agreed to go home, Bailey reluctantly agreed to get some rest. After she left, Bailey looked at the cup of coffee in her hand and the sandwich in her lap and wondered how they got there. She wondered if the Fairytalers liked the penthouse, the candle, the pictures on her laptop, wondered if Jason remembered the spiel. She would have nailed the sale; she knew she would have nailed it.
She snuck a glance at Brad, feeling guilty for even thinking about the sale at a time like this.
Three more nurses entered. There was no shortage of them here. So much busywork. Paperwork to fill out, way too much. Updates on Brad’s condition, way too brief. Each one left as soon as their message was delivered, but the last nurse lingered. Bailey stared at her, waiting for her to speak.
“I’m afraid I have terrible news,” she said. Bailey’s head jerked toward Brad.
“Not him,” the nurse said quickly. “The driver.”
“The driver?” Bailey said. “Of the other car?”
Was he dead? The man who ran into her husband, whoever he was? Was it a drunk driver, or a self-absorbed businessman on his cell phone?
“No,” the nurse said. “There was only one car. Your husband wasn’t driving, a woman was.” The look on Bailey’s face must have confirmed the fear of every aging wife, for the nurse quickly resumed speaking. “No,” she said. “Nothing to fear. She was an elderly woman—”
“Olivia,” Bailey said. She’d completely forgotten. How could she have forgotten? Brad told her over breakfast, he was spending the afternoon with his aunt Olivia. Unlike Faye, who was a vibrant woman only in her late fifties, Brad’s Aunt Olivia was eighty-eight years old. “Olivia was driving?” Bailey said. She glanced at Brad. He knew better. Even though technically Olivia’s license hadn’t been revoked, it should have been. But she always worked Brad like a child, conniving to get her way, and Brad always gave in. This time, it had cost him thirteen minutes of his life.
“Where is she?” Bailey said, taking a deep breath, already talking herself into going easy on Olivia. How dare the nurse not tell her sooner. What would Olivia think? Bailey had been here for over five hours, and she hadn’t even bothered to check on her? Which would be worse, that she didn’t know Olivia was here, or that she didn’t remember they were spending the afternoon together and didn’t think to ask?
“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “She didn’t make it. And we need you to identify the body.”
It felt so surreal. A cold hospital morgue. A steel gurney. Olivia’s body covered in a big sheet. The nurse who accompanied her relayed the details of the accident as she knew them. Olivia ran a red light. Accelerated, then tried to brake too fast at the sight of stalled traffic ahead. She swerved onto the sidewalk, and smashed her Cadillac head-on into Eddie’s Electronics. Miraculously, except for a glass storefront and slew of flat-screen televisions, nothing or nobody outside the car suffered any damage. Olivia was dead on impact, and Brad went through the windshield and landed on the sidewalk. He’d been sitting in the backseat. He loved to sit in the backseat and pretend Olivia was his chauffeur.
Bailey shut her eyes, wincing at the thought of her husband’s body flying through glass and landing on the sidewalk. It was a miracle he survived. When he recovered, she was going to kill him for not wearing his seat belt.
“Were you two close?” the nurse asked politely.
“She was my husband’s aunt,” Bailey said. Was that enough of a response? Should she say something else, something kind? After a moment, the nurse gently covered Olivia with the sheet. Bailey stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do. Say a little prayer? She and Brad weren’t religious. They considered themselves to be spiritual, though, so Bailey felt as if she should say something. Yet, nothing came except “You shouldn’t have been driving,” and what was the use of saying that now? Bailey touched the edge of the sheet.
“She hated me,” Bailey blurted out.
The nurse looked startled, but quickly recovered. “I’m sure she didn’t.”
“Oh, she did,” Bailey said. “But she loved Brad. So for that I loved her, you know?” Oh God, she was going to cry. But that was good, right? It meant her heart wasn’t made of stone. “I love Brad more than anything in the world.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“And I’m so glad it’s her lying there and not him!” Bailey slapped her hand over her mouth and stared wide-eyed at the nurse. “Oh God. You must think—”
“It’s been a very emotional day for you,” the nurse said. Bailey nodded. That was true.
“Olivia was . . . old,” Bailey said. “She had a gentle way of life.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yes,” Bailey said. It was a lie. The truth was, Olivia Jordan was one of the most generic people Bailey had ever met. She didn’t know how else to describe Olivia, she was just
there,
like a mass-market, bland version of the woman she could have been. And it didn’t have anything to do with age necessarily, although Bailey had never known Olivia young, exactly—Bailey just had this theory that people really didn’t change. Bailey didn’t feel any different at thirty-six than she had at six. She was a little smarter, maybe, and she didn’t carry her Easy-Bake Oven everywhere she went anymore, but otherwise she was basically the same. She still ate peanut butter with a spoon, and loved the color yellow, and twirled her hair when she was bored or nervous, and bit her nails to the nub, and she still laughed too loud at all the wrong times, in all the wrong places.
So, yes, older and wiser, but still, the same person she’d always been. Bailey had seen a picture of Olivia when she was around six years of age and she had that same vacant stare, the one that always made Bailey look eerily over her shoulder, as if an unseen spirit behind her and to the left had swiped Olivia’s personality out from under her.
“She lived in the Bronx,” Bailey said. “Riverdale.”
“How nice,” the nurse said.
“Yes,” Bailey said. The times Bailey spent at Olivia Jordan’s apartment were some of the most excruciating moments of her life. Filled with stale sugar cookies, and the sounds of her kitchen clock ticking, and the click click click of the burner when Olivia went to make tea because she no longer had the coordination to light it, but wouldn’t let anybody else near the stove. Bailey couldn’t make a move in that apartment without Olivia eyeing her. It was like IEDs were planted throughout and Olivia was just waiting for Bailey to step on one and blow them all to smithereens. Everything in her place made Bailey feel heavy and sad, from the doilies on her entrance table, to the brown rings in her chipped teacups, to the new year’s calendar hanging on her wall where a generic landscape shrouded in fog stared at you and all the little white boxes were empty.
“She liked sugar cookies, and tea, and she never ever let me touch the stove or the calendar on her wall.” Once Bailey brought a black felt-tip pen, and in the little white box designated for the day they visited she wrote
Brad and Bailey were here!!
Then Bailey grinned at Olivia and added a smiley face in the box. Olivia just stared at Bailey and blinked very slowly. Bailey stepped out of the kitchen to use the restroom, and when she returned, the calendar had been dumped in the trash. A new one hung in its place, identical to the old, and the white empty boxes stared at Bailey reproachfully as she listened to the burner click click click.
Olivia kept the windows shut and the curtains drawn, and the bulbs in her lamps were way too bright, illuminating every sparse corner, and every chip, and every stain, and Bailey couldn’t breathe when she was there. There was nothing to distract herself with, not even razors in the bathtub. Olivia’s television only got one station, and that was if Brad could get the rabbit ears to work. It was where he spent most of his time when he was there, clutching and stretching the wire antennas while bending his body into strange angles like some kind of amateur contortionist.
When he would finally get the picture in, he’d shout at Bailey and Olivia. “Hurry! Hurry! Watch! Watch!” Those were the only times Bailey ever saw Olivia come to life. Like whoever reached the couch first had Brad’s undying love. It was a sight to see, Olivia, in tall white gym socks and worn brown sandals, sprinting for the living room. By the time Bailey arrived she’d be sitting up straight on the plastic-encased flowery couch, hands on knees, chin up and proud, smiling at Brad as if he’d just cured cancer.
So Bailey had to sit there next to Olivia and pretend to be interested in the program, more often than not involving God, weight loss, or fishing. Once they sat through an infomercial on Lubricant for Her, how to make your woman wet and wild in bed. Aunt Olivia slurped her tea and blinked very slowly like she was watching a manatee behind glass and not a half-naked vixen writhing on a king-sized bed, moaning for more. Bailey sat and stared, open-mouthed, at Brad, but he was too proud of the quality of the television reception to even notice that she was sitting next to his eighty-something-year-old aunt watching another woman have multiple orgasms. Bailey wanted to lift the plastic off the couch, crawl underneath it, and suffocate.
After that Bailey offered to get Olivia set up with cable and even foot the bill, but Olivia refused, adamantly stating that cable gave you brain cancer. Bailey figured Olivia was mixing cable up with cell phones, another technological advancement she neither owned nor wanted.
And try as they might to take her out to a nice restaurant, or a movie, or even a walk around the block, Aunt Olivia insisted on having a “nice evening at home.” As far as Bailey knew, Olivia didn’t have any friends, and Brad was her only remaining family. Besides them, she didn’t have visitors, or even a cat, and if she played bingo, or knitted, or joined a book club, Bailey never caught wind of it. It was ironic, then, that Olivia ended her life by crashing into an electronics store.
“We should go now,” the nurse said.

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