The Year That Follows (14 page)

She feels him running his left hand along the crook of her hip, a light touch, but without caution. When it comes to touching like this, it is a fine balance between brute force and tentativeness, but he traverses the line just right. A confident man, thus an appealing man. He puts his right index finger under her chin, turns her head up to his and suddenly she is kissing him, dizzy at first with all that has happened today, and then happy for this time, when she can forget about it all.

H
e thinks of Kyle, as he has every morning for almost a year. It is always the first thing he thinks of after the dream, and always it takes him a moment to realize that Kyle is dead, that there is nothing more he can do for the boy, that there is no way to protect him. He remembers how when Cat and Kyle were little they’d sneak into the bedroom and crawl on all fours to Sam’s side of the bed, then poke him and giggle till he woke up. It was a great joy to have someone, anyone, who wanted you to wake up. If it happened to be your children, then you were blessed.

He puts his hand on his chest, to see if he can feel his heart beating. He can’t, though it must be; he’s cognizant, alive. Still, it would be nice to get that extra tactile confirmation. He realizes that Phyllis is asleep beside him, and then that he is in her bedroom and it is morning. This he can tell from the light. Not that he can see much. Most days he can make out things in the distance, but without his glasses the world up close is a total mystery.

Phyllis, he remembers, wants to play golf today. He’s never much liked the game, and he’s never been good at it, but he was also a salesman, so he played. It’s been twenty years at least. Phyllis has reserved a cart. “You
don’t have to play,” she told him, “if you don’t want to. But you have to ride along.”

Eighty years old, he thinks, and still taking orders.

I
t turns out that he does have to play, after a fashion. It’s a bright day but still overcast, with humidity that’s making his hip hurt. Every once in a while there’s a little tug in his chest, as though someone were pulling a string out of him. He’d be happy just to sit and watch her play, but now that she’s got him out here, she wants him to play along. At first he stands and takes swings at the ball, but then, too winded to continue, he sits and takes the occasional swipe from the cart, a geriatric version of polo. He’s bad enough that eventually she just picks up his ball.

“I think it’s time,” she says, “that you tell me how your wife died.”

“Haven’t I?”

“You have, twice, and I’m still not sure I understand.”

“I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

He again recounts for her how Ann kicked him out when she discovered that he kept a separate apartment. He didn’t want to leave her because of the children—Cat was in her last year of high school, Kyle had a couple of years left—and the apartment was his way to deal with his home life. He never slept with his wife; she wouldn’t allow it. He literally bedded down each night in a royal blue mummy sleeping bag on the floor of their bedroom. He slept well like that. He had girlfriends, women who, like him, had families and responsibilities
and certain human needs and weaknesses. “It seems a lifetime ago,” he tells Phyllis, and it does, more remote, even, than the war. “It’s as though I’m talking about someone else.”

“Go on,” she says.

“It was August. Cat’s last school year was about to start. I begged Ann just to let things be, but she couldn’t. About two months later I got a call from Cat. Ann was dead. She’d taken Valium and drunk gin. Gin! That was my drink. She didn’t drink when I met her, and I taught her. I taught her about martinis, how to enjoy one. It wasn’t a bad thing to know. Martinis saved
my
life, but that’s a different story. Anyway, she did herself in, but we never found out if she meant to. She didn’t leave a note. Cat and Kyle found her. They went into her bedroom after she didn’t surface for the whole day. Kyle, I think, never got over it. Hardly said a word the whole time he was in high school. He was quiet, though, in any case.”

They’re at Phyllis’s ball. She gets out, takes her swing, sits back in the cart and starts to drive. Sam likes the cart, the
whirr
of its electric motor.

“This is the part I don’t understand,” Phyllis says. “Did she want to kill herself?”

“No, I don’t think so. But she knew better. It was as if she didn’t care what happened. Probably went to bed thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll wake up, maybe I won’t.’”

“Like you go to bed.”

“I know I’m going to wake up,” Sam says. “God is not going to let me die before Cat and Connor get here.”

“I thought you don’t believe in God.” “I don’t,” he says.

S
he wakes in a large, bright bedroom, lying in a bed beneath a down duvet. She hears the soft hum of air-conditioning. It takes her a moment to realize that she’s in Tommy’s bedroom. The blinds are drawn but they’re not blackouts. Here is a man who doesn’t sleep late.

She hasn’t slept so well in years. She lies still for a moment to let her head clear, running yesterday and last night through her mind, the little boy, the two flights, Tommy. Quite a day, and with sex. It has been months, and, of course, decades.

She looks at the blinds and tries to guess at the time, arriving at seven-thirty. Maybe eight. There’s a clock on the nightstand on Tommy’s side of the bed, and so she moves over to look at it, feeling a little decadent, sleeping so late, crawling naked in a man’s bed. Oh, my God, she thinks. It’s ten to ten.

She reaches to the floor for her cell phone—she never lets it out of her sight unless she’s with Connor—and calls Tonya at work.

“Guess where I am?” she asks.

“Uh, at work,” says Tonya. “No, wait. You’re in New York.”

“No.”

“Now I’m interested.”

“In his bed.”

“Well, well. How was it?”

“I just woke up,” Cat says. “What else do I need to say?”

“Oh God, when I think about my morning, I’d love to be able to make a call like this.”

“You’re married,” Cat points out.

“Don’t I know it. Where is he now?”

“At work, I guess.”

“Well,” Tonya says, “Go find the note he left you, then call me back and tell me what it says.”

She hangs up and finds the robe Tommy placed for her at the end of the bed. She puts it on, goes to the bathroom (no note), and walks out to his kitchen, expecting to find the note. Instead he’s sitting at his glass breakfast table in a T-shirt and boxers, typing at a laptop. He looks up and smiles at her. She wonders if this is the guy, if this was always the guy.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey, yourself. I’ve got to get to work.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Why? What do you mean, why?”

“You’re in sales, right? No time clock.”

“That’s right.”

“So, if anybody asks, or you’re worried about your image, you say you spent the morning with a rich prospect. Me.”

“So, you’re rich.”

“Well, it’s not all about money. And right now your prospect would like you to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him, and then he’d like to take you back to bed.”

“Don’t think that will get you a better rate,” she says.

“I get nothing for the effort?”

She has to take a breath, change gears. “Don’t you have to work?”

“It’s mostly a paperwork morning for me, which I’ve been doing for the last three hours. I canceled my afternoon appointments. Please, sit.”

She does what she’s told.

Y
ou know,” she tells him, “we’re basically strangers.” She’s snuggled up against his warm body, still a little light-headed, probably from not eating since early yesterday. The last twelve hours remind her how much she likes sex. Working and mothering and living alone, it’s easy to forget.

“We’re strangers with one big difference,” he says.

“What?”

“I trust you.”

“You trust me,” she says.

“Yes, I trust you. I don’t know you, but also I do. I know you in a way that I never could if I just met you yesterday. That, and the trust, is incredibly appealing. I find myself very attracted to you, in case you can’t tell.”

“I can tell,” she admits.

“Still. I always was. You’ve stayed in great shape, by the way.”

“That’s recent.”

“Really.”

“Since nine-eleven. I decided I wanted more control of things. My body seemed like a good place to start.”

He nods, and she wonders if he truly understands. He is looking directly into her eyes, and for now that is enough.

L
ater, she watches him watch her as she returns from the bathroom. She feels admired, and is amazed by it.

“What?” he asks.

“Do you think you could give me a tour of your house? This is really the only room where you’ve let me spend any time.”

She puts on the robe and follows him around. There’s the dining room she noticed off the kitchen, a den with a couch and a large television, plus two bathrooms other than the master and two more bedrooms, one of which he’s converted to an office, and the other for his son. It is here she lingers, familiar with the little-boy nature of it, the toy vehicles and sports posters of men she does not recognize, the books about dinosaurs and the solar system.

“What is it?” he asks.

“The space of a missing child,” she says. “There’s something about it.”

“He’s not exactly missing. He’s at his mother’s.”

“Who was she?” Cat realizes she doesn’t even know the woman’s name.

“She’s still alive.”

“Who is she?”

“Laurie is her name. She’s a nurse. A bad idea for a doctor, I know, but with all the training there’s a long time when the only women you ever see are nurses, or other doctors.”

“Or patients.”

“Well, yes, except that young cardiologists don’t usually treat people who are age appropriate; often they’re not even women. And if a younger woman does ever need my help, she has bigger problems than needing a date.”

At lunch she has a wonderful feeling of well-being. She’s free on a workday, eating in a restaurant. It seems there’s a whole world out here she’s lost touch with, if she ever touched it at all. She checks her watch: over three hours till she has to pick up Connor.

“When can I see you again?” he asks.

“Not for a little while.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got to go to California,” she tells him. “As you know.”

“I forgot.”

He seems genuinely disappointed by her departure. She looks across at him. “Doctor, I have several hours till I have to be anywhere. Would you like to take me home?” she asks, knowing full well that he does.

P
hyllis drives. Sam sits in her old Toyota sedan, newspapers on the floor by his feet, along with an empty paper coffee cup and what looks like a lipstick tube. He doesn’t understand how a woman who keeps her house as tidy as officers’ quarters can let her car come to this. He wanted to drive his Lincoln, but she doesn’t want him on the road, and says his car is too big for her. So here he is, old news beneath his feet, an empty paper coffee cup bumping at his ankles.

At Cunningham’s office he checks in, and then she comes with him to the examining room. Soon he is sitting on the table, looking down at the folds of his chest and the patches of gray hair. He glances at her and finds her looking at him. He thinks that the way women forgive and forbear is an essential element on the planet, like water.

Cunningham comes into the room, sees Phyllis, and introduces himself before Sam has a chance to do it. “Sam,” he says. “These next days, they’re a risk.”

“Don’t worry, Doc. I’m gonna make it.”

Cunningham pats and pokes him for a while. “You can get dressed,” he says, “but you need this operation. You need it now. We’ve got papers for you to sign, saying you understand the risks here.”

“I understand.”

“Could you convince him to change his mind?” Cunningham says to Phyllis.

“No,” she says, wonderfully succinct.

Sam waits to dress till Cunningham has left and he can catch his breath. “Did I ever tell you the story of the dinghy?” he asks Phyllis.

She shakes her head. “Tell me.”

“Summer of ’
44
.I had about another three weeks or so till I’d break my back, but of course I didn’t know that then. We came upon on the dinghy. Three Japs in it. We steamed over and one of them jumped out and started to swim away. Now understand, this was the middle of the Pacific. You jump into the water you’re not swimming anywhere but to the bottom of the ocean. It was amazing that a man would do that, but this one did.

“We pulled the other two on board. One was more or less unconscious. We took him to sick bay and he was still on the ship when we got hit, but he made it. The other one, too. A stocky fellow, dehydrated as hell, with those painful-looking cracks in his lips. He had body hair, too. A lot for a Jap. But, anyway, he was basically okay, and he had some English, so the captain asked him why he didn’t swim away, like his comrade.

“I remember, I leaned in. I wanted to hear his answer, ’cause the Japs were big on death. Big on killing themselves. I saw this at Iwo Jima; we could see them jumping to their deaths, rather than be captured. And, of course, there were the kamikazes.

“So this little stocky guy, he says he didn’t swim away
because he’s got a girl in Nagasaki, and he wants to live for her. Well, it wasn’t long till we took care of Nagasaki. But I’ve often thought about that guy, because that girl, she saved him. Probably she never knew it, but she saved his life.”

Phyllis looks at him. It’s an odd look.

“What?” he asks.

“So, are you the one in the dinghy,” she asks, “or the one swimming away?”

T
he night her mother died, she slept at Tommy’s; his parents were out of town. She told her mother she was spending the night at Tonya’s, even went there and hung around till ten, just in case her mother called. She didn’t.

The next morning, a Saturday, Tommy left early for football and took his little brother with him. She tried to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t, alone in that strange, empty house. She drove to Tonya’s and called home from there. Kyle answered.