The Unfortunates (35 page)
Enough with the glowing, cluttered screen. He slams the laptop closed. He shall tend to his house, if he’s the only one left in it! Iris, going every day to that stupid job. Why aren’t he and Iris on a boat someplace dipping their hands in the water, squinting into the sun, sails whipping against the mast? That’s what a man in his circumstances should be doing. They should be making a baby on a boat off the island of Mykonos. He should be recovering in dignity, in warm, luxurious isolation.
“Come on,” he says to the dog, back in the great room. “Come!” 3D raises his head, lifts his black nose, exhales once, forcefully, and puts his head back down. What dog, alone in a house, doesn’t want a master to follow from room to room, to curl up under the desk of, to join on a walk? Fine. He will without the mutt survey what the house needs for the coming of spring.
First of all, there’s the murky grotto under the glass wall. Its waterfall is full of iced leaves. He goes though the mudroom, puts on Iris’s rubber gardening boots, rolls up his khakis, and descends into the shallow pool. He pulls the brown tangle from the pump and throws it up the embankment onto the lawn. He wades around, collects a raft of more brown leaves and scum, and tosses this too onto the mini-embankment. Done! Are you interested? You, who may or may not be watching? Is
this
of any interest? He goes to the garage to find the switch that will activate the burbling fountain. He succeeds in switching off the power to the house, room by room. He likes it better that way, he decides. Dim and quiet, disconnected.
Silence
, spectral data!
Away
, invisible hum!
The front of the house could also use an assessment. He drips across the living room and exits the front door, slamming it shut. He sets to untangling the balloon strings still twisted around the low branch of the ash, now tatty and faded. 3D comes around the house, the rubber grenade in his mouth. How did he get out? 3D drops the grenade at George’s feet.
“You want the ball?” he hears himself say. “Yes?” He throws it once, twice, again, again, until they have, by way of toss and retrieval, shifted across the lawn to the swimming pool, still wearing its cover. Had Iris said something the other day about not opening the pool this summer? About how they hardly use it?
He tosses the grenade onto the pool’s cover. He watches 3D dash out onto the vinyl, the vinyl, meant to hold a blanket of snow but bowing and bouncing under the dog, who looks back, uncertain, but fetches the grenade and leaps out after it onto the sagging cover, again and again, until they hear a car and pause. Ah, it’s Iris! George is so relieved it’s Iris. He’s so relieved she’s home. He watches her car curve up the drive and out of his vision again, hears her park in front of the garage and slam the door. He and dog united in this leaping relief. He resumes their game of fetch.
“Come join us!” he shouts, as she crosses the lawn.
“My God, my God, what are you doing? Don’t do that!” she cries, but he’s caught her in his arms and 3D is circling with the grenade in his mouth and George is kissing her feverishly and she looks at him, appalled, and at first she twists away. She smells like fatigue. But it’s okay, because finally she gives in.
CeCe walks a half-moon around the lake, a determined expression on her face. The cherry blossoms and one of the dogwoods have begun to bloom, white and pink. The grass under her feet has turned from straw to green. The morning sun is pale as a wafer. As she’s trained herself these last months, for ballast her arms are lifted high away from her sides, bent in the attitude of a marionette pulling its own strings. This and the crooked yank of her legs under her black coat—what she must look like from afar. A broken spider; a vigorously expiring crow. She’s left the walking stick against the bench. She walks around the lake every day, sometimes twice. She is, relatively speaking, swift. Last evening, wearing instead the bright red jacket Esme brought, she watched the sun set in the water, the molten color of a monarch’s wing. The lake has melted, save the twiggy ice slushing the far reeds. She’d like to feel the bracing green-black water, to smell the brine on her hands. She can’t bend far enough, but soon she may be able. She reaches the farthest cherry tree and rests lightly against its trunk, the closed petals dipping above her head like balloons. Across the water, she sees her French doors.
I was never there.
Yesterday they told her: the study is expanding. She is going home.
She has learned to distinguish Astrasyne’s side effects—that spike of murder-energy, once or twice a day; the gnashing insomnia, once or twice a week; the snapping, neural fervor that’s not mania, but like it—from the feelings that are her own. Her excitement upon learning she is free is hers alone, though she feels a minor bout of murder-energy coming over her now, as she circles back around the lake. One of its features is a blazing impatience that makes her unpleasant company. For example! The blimp with the red bull’s-eye. She’d like to sail a dart over the treetops to pierce its side, watch it sag to the earth in flames. It’s better to be alone when she’s like this, to carve her erratic groove around the lake. To keep the burden of her moods. In her room, she risks tormenting a nurse. Once, scrambled with irritation, she kicked Esme under the table. She pretended it was a spasm.
“I’m sorry!” she said, and sorry she felt.
This side effect’s most seductive feature is how it imitates the wicked pleasure she used to take in discovering the weakest edge of a person, the pleasure of saying something truthful and unkind. A part of herself she’d meant to protect her children from. Only, had she? She’d pretended the pleasure of her invective didn’t have its price. She’d come to understand this after Dotty’s death. From Dotty, who never guessed when she was being insulted. Walter would have called CeCe’s feeling for Dotty fool-pity and been right. She makes her way up the grass. Walter, if you could see me here, what would you say? Walter, in the good early days, inviting this or that group to Booth Hill for a weekend, a week, whomever, anyone he met in the city, then disappearing to the barn to put a line on canvas, just the one line, often enough. They were all for it, the brilliant friends, following him to the barn to name it:
Reindeer No. 17
,
Blue No. 12
. She, sitting in his lap sideways, her legs crossed over the arm of the chair. How powerfully he made her laugh. The only man she’d known who was not afraid to scandalize her. He’d understand about the blimp.
When she returns to the bench, a man holding a folder with Oak Park’s logo is sitting in her place, staring at the lake.
“Yours?” He tips his head toward her stick. “I’m in your spot. I should be getting back, anyway.” He heads in the direction of the parking lot. She sits. The cherry tree she’d leaned against is now on the other side of the lake, pocket-size. Distance, restored with the muscles of her legs. The tree’s reflection oscillates in the water. Poor Iris! What does Iris think of George, now that she’s seen what kind of person he can be?
And what, will CeCe block him forever? The last day at Oak Park is fast approaching. A piece of paper with a date. She doesn’t know if she can forgive George, but she will see him. Astrasyne has not yet been approved by the FDA, but it has passed some safety or efficacy marker and the trial is entering its third phase. Their eighty-three-person treatment group will expand to become two thousand people dispersed across the states. They will receive the drug, at home, and she will be one of them.
“You’re doing well these days,” the doctor said. This doctor, using
these days
,
as of now
,
so far
, or some other temporal qualifier. “So far, your rate of degeneration has slowed. If you keep to it, you’ll live long enough to die of something else.”
“Like old age?”
“Like old age.”
“Have you got a trial for that?”
She’s kind, this doctor. She knew to laugh. She smiled at CeCe, a miraculous, charming doctor’s smile, her skin wrinkling at the eyes. Two days after, Pat called and they talked the longest they had since Pat was a girl. They planned a visit with Lotta and Douglas for the beginning of summer. Before she hung up, Pat put the phone to Douglas, and there was the wondrous gurgling of baby.
From the bench, she watches Yasser and two new landscapers head toward the woods behind the lake, one with a ladder balanced on his shoulder, the other with a set of pruning shears hanging from his hands like talons. Gone is the little one with the flame-red hair and the lummox by his side. Last summer, looking so often as she had for Yasser, she’d come to recognize his help, even from far away—the set of their shoulders, the way they dragged their feet.
“Hello!” she calls. “Hello!”
Yasser nods to the boys to continue without him. He comes to stand beside the bench. Winter, she missed him. A few days after the first thaw, she looked out the window and saw the wheelbarrow by the lake.
“You’re looking well,” he says.
“Thank you! Have you seen me out walking?”
They hear the saw rev and branches clatter through the canopy.
“Walking and walking.” He draws a circle in the air around the lake with his finger. “Very nice. Very good. You’re so strong, you could get a job cutting trees.”
“You’ve got new help.”
“I had to.” Something in the way he looks at her she doesn’t understand. “My nephew is the young one.” He gestures toward the trees. “From Maryland.”
“How’s the rest of the family? Your children?”
“Everyone’s good. We’re having another.”
“Well, congratulations! But—with you here, and them there?”
“I visit winters.”
“I’m happy for you. I have a grandson. Born this winter. Not—” She’s about to say
conceived
but becomes embarrassed. “Isn’t it nice when friends have good news. Yasser, thank you.” She’s scowls with fresh discomfort. “For making this beautiful walking stick. It means more than you know.”
There is another crackling of branches falling through the trees. It’s followed by a harder sound. Yasser is already up and striding the lawn when they hear the shout, the older boy running to meet him. They dash into the trees, out of her vision. She rises, her hand on the bench, but before she’s thought what to do—stupid, she’s in front of a hospital, stupid, go get someone!—Yasser and the boys reappear, walking slowly along the curve of the lake and past her toward Oak Park. She hasn’t moved. The nephew from Maryland has one arm draped over the other boy. Yasser’s arm loops his nephew’s waist.
“He’s okay,” Yasser calls over his shoulder. “Cut himself out of the tree.”
The boy turns and stares at her. He’s tucked his left arm against his ribs. From the crooked angle of his elbow she sees the arm is broken. His eyes go wide. He had not realized his injury until he read it in her face. She’ll follow them inside and be useful and meddlesome, make sure they know Cecilia Somner is invested in his care. She lurches after with the wide step of her disorder. She hopes the boy is not in too much pain. But even as she worries for him, her worry excites in her the certainty that she won’t be at Oak Park to see him come out of his cast or to see the lake turn blue, to see the lake’s ring of trees bloom, unbroken in the fullness of their prime.
The real estate agency has given Iris some freelance administrative work at the decent rate of $23 an hour while she waits to land or be granted a new client. No one mentions George or
The Burning Papers
, but they know. She can tell. Those two times she found him muttering his way along the main street in town, looking right enough from far away but not quite right up close—she can’t be the only one who saw. Her coworkers are kinder to her than before, with a careful reserve—stopping to make small talk, including her in lunch runs. It takes her a while to realize that no one in Stockport who’s aware of George’s mistake—the mistake is mostly what she thinks of it as—will want her as an agent. Giving her the administrative work is an act of charity. Maybe this will change once time wears some of the gossip away. She’s grateful for the income and for how dull and soothing the work is. One morning, she organizes the mailing of five hundred glossy cards advertising the agency’s services; the next, after claiming to know Excel, she teaches herself Excel and reorganizes a list of past clients by buyer and seller and sale price, confirming who still lives at the houses that had been sold to them, or, if they’d moved and used a different Realtor, which one. She photocopies the many-paged contracts that Nellie and the other agents leave on her desk; she reads the new listings written by the active agents and says,
Looks good
. She uploads photos to the website: exterior a, exterior b. Largest interior downstairs room. Kitchen, bath, and so on. She doesn’t have to think about George when she’s working, and she doesn’t have to think about money. She looks at listing prices all day, but these numbers are none of her business, abstract in their calm march down the page, unaware of her. (Unlike the bills at home, where the numbers are tiny hammers of doom or bad grades or angry eyebrows, depending.) At work, they are decorative and inscrutable as hieroglyphs, jaunty with their K: 750K, 500K, 275K.
She waited a long, terrible month for Bob to call her with news of their investment. Not that he didn’t call; he’s made a habit of calling her several times a day. At first, if George wasn’t in earshot, she answered the phone as fast as she could. Had the money come through? But then Bob would say, “Hello, sunshine,” and wouldn’t mention the investment at all. When she asked directly, he’d say it was in the works and stay on the line to share stories she didn’t care to hear. In a kind of reverie, he’d tell her how he’d wanted to be a baseball player, or what he thought about debt ceilings, or how much his father’s death still shreds him, and that he never felt so comfortable talking to another person. Once he asked her to authorize a trade and she did, but nothing seemed to come of it. He talked about what he hoped for his sons, and how Martha wants another child but he does not. Once he left her a message that was three and a half minutes of the song “Let Go” by the Pist. He wanted to take her to this particular Korean restaurant, whenever she could get away. She murmured noncommittally, thinking, What a jackwad, but she was sorry for him too, once she recognized it was loneliness, as much as arrogance, that kept him talking. He took an excessive pleasure in what little she responded. He said they were really getting to know each other. She gave up believing there was any investment at all. She answered his calls less frequently and with more dread. When she didn’t answer frequently enough, his messages grew long and hurt.
