Untitled.FR11 (9 page)

that it was the Huntington’s kicking in much sooner than anyone could expect. Such was the conclusion the doctor quickly came to, but Katt refused, over Bein’s protest, to let the hospital keep him from his family one moment longer in its pointless probative thrall.

Now, with Marcus bedridden upstairs and Conner doing his best to mope alone, avoiding them both, Katt felt the house, airy and expansive before they arrived, close hard and tight around her like a throbbing fist. She couldn’t believe, hunched over coffee in the breakfast nook beside a triptych of rain-swept windows, how superior she felt—nor how depraved. All the house sounds, tall fridge just beyond the butcherblock centerpiece, the dull boom of new wood settling, the whole proprioceptive feel of the walls flowing in every direction toward her, meeting up, homing in—these appeared, to her ears, to trumpet her guilt, to make it as obvious as the sheeted rain itself.

Yet no one had called her bluff.

No one had said word one.

She brought the mug to her lips for a quick sip, hot roil of mist there, too sharp an angle, scald and a spill as she set it down. French vanilla scented the air, pain so slight at her lipburn that the touch of her tongue sent it fleeting. Katt’d begun in the past week to feel apart from her colleagues at work, from her fellow bodyworkers, from the BBS crowd. Her thoughts were ever with her mate and with Conner, pure love toward her son, a morbid blend of love and fixated waiting toward Marcus. What had Lyra said? Caring leads to healing. Her caring had gone off.

Protective insulation, perhaps; closing down her openness to keep away the pain of what she was about. Conner, his face an open wound, served as her lifeline. Even keeping to himself, her son felt close by, someone to cling to in their grim vigil over his father.

Katt looked up sharply. Rain spattered like a sweep of pellets against the glass. She thought there’d come a summons, his voice seeping down through wood and plaster. She rose. The garish air pressed her back, but she moved against it. More candles, she needed more candles, light that soothed, that didn’t demand so much. Everything was so harshly defined, the oak grain of her cabinets hurting her eyes with its sharp swirl, the edges of doorways like honed razors daring her to pass.

Every step seemed a reproach, here in this new world of Marcus’s collapse. Up the off-white stairs she pulled herself, feeling off-balance at every step, thick railing sturdy and yet absurdly balsa-frail at the least pressure she applied. The air above, gloomed in hallway darkness, pushed against her like fog puree. But she drove through it as part of what felt like an unending penance. Marcus called to her again. His door, edged in lamplight, stood slightly ajar. Katt gripped it, pushed feebly in, found him resting upon pillows, one forearm fulcrumed at his sweaty brow.

His eyes were closed. The man she was killing, sweet Marcus, she’d met years ago on the Pentacrest one breezy spring day, each the other’s destiny. Married in the tiny white chapel down by the student union, a child, a settling in. And now she was con-eluding his life, which stunned her at how wrong and how right it was. “Marcus?” Softly, she’d no idea if he’d heard her approach: “You need anything?”

As he turned to her, his forearm curved down so that his hands hugged the covers to his chest. “Oh hi, Katt.” The center had been punched out of his voice.

“Can I get you something?”

Marcus shook his head, rolling it on the pillow like an empty gourd.

“I thought I heard you call me.” There was that smug superiority again, not in what she’d said, but in how she felt. Her frame filled the doorway, as strong and sturdy as the jamb she leaned against. For all her man’s stocky Mediterranean muscularity, he shrank under the sheets, no strength apparent in his diminutive mien. They’d been so close in so many ways, yet she’d kept her discontent from him until it took on a separate life of its own. Now she was crushing him like a bug. And no one knew. It wasn’t any gloat or ego revelry she felt. It had no tone to it, no boasting, no villainy triumphant, though of its wicked nature she had no doubt. A soft distanced pride. That’s what she felt. Appalling, but she was not appalled. The turning of a pot gave a potter as much satisfaction.

“Oh. Oh yeah, I guess I did. Maybe some juice?”

“Sure, what kind?”

“Anything but V8.”

“Okay,” she said. She felt the impulse to close the gap between them, sit beside him, touch his cheek in love and sympathy, lean forward to embrace him. If she’d done so, she knew in her heart that it would feel, and be, both monstrous and true. This must be, she thought, what they mean by depravity. She held in her hands the power to be his healing angel; and yet the thought of using her power that way, of doing anything other than urging his illness on, moved her not in the slightest. He smiled. His face had aged some, but it was the same smile she’d first seen on that sunny July fourth on the Pentacrest, bicentennial of the nation’s independence and the beginning of her sad slide into the soul-prison their marriage finally became. She could do it. She ought to do it. Go to him, lay her hands on his head, confess her misdeeds, heal him—ah but then he’d want to know why, and the D-thing would come up and she’d spin right back into lying—No, she didn’t want a divorce, everything was fine with her—because women in the Hunt family didn’t do the D-thing, no way, no how.

“What?” he asked, wondering at her hesitation.

“Hmm? Oh nothing. Just lost in thought.”

“A penny for them.”

Grim smile. “Maybe another time,” she said.

More likely never.

Conner became aware, sitting in the rec room in the basement staring at the rain-washed silver of the window well, that his left hand was idling upon his head, doing monkey-preening things. Stuff that’d begun so long ago, it was now unconscious, stuff that just happened when he sat alone and let his mind meander. There was the nose-picking, of course, fingertip in and then down to taste. But his restless fingers also wandered through his hair, freeing loose minute scales of skin, catching them under the nail, bringing them also to his lips where teeth and tonguetip experdy retrieved them. And they’d begun now to move in warm caress over his cheeks and chin, pausing to glide about the beginnings of acne. He knew he ought to keep his hand away from all that, free himself of bad habits—but they felt so good, almost as if they were an integral part of him, and he doubted he could.

He glanced about.

Rec room.

Right.

There was nothing to rec with even if he’d felt the urge. Just boxes of unpacked stuff. Dad had promised a Ping-Pong table right there, near where the furnace stood idle. Conner bet that would never happen now.

The door to the upstairs stood open. Funny how you could paint a mind-map of the first floor, use the sound of people’s footsteps to track them from kitchen to hall to living room, up the stairs or out the front door. He heard her move from over yonder—the breakfast nook he’d seen her at—to the foot of the stairs; and then he felt her take them, soft slow animal pads. Time to snag some chips from the pantry, bring ’em down here and stuff his face.

He bounded up from the slung-back folding chair and crossed the cement floor. Off-white carpet coaxed him a step at a time up into the great room. He heard them up there talking. Whenever his mom stopped, he felt things in his brain throbbing in tandem with the sounds his dad made in reply. He wanted to shut himself in his bedroom but it was real close to theirs and didn’t allow him any privacy at all. No, just keeping clear of them—outside seemed wrong too—was best; no school, no friends, walks and biking felt like too much work, and what if Dad died while he was out? Absurd. He’d be like this, maybe not bedridden but confined, for years and years. That’s how Woody Guthrie had been. But then the disease hadn’t hit the folksinger as hard or as fast as it’d hit Dad.

He opened the pantry, cereals below, healthy snacks mixed in with the junk food above. Ranch chips! Hidden behind some open stuff. Rustling of clipped bags. Then he’d snagged them, was pulling the bag through the noisy blockade, holding them back from bursting forth like dam water spilling onto the floor. Success.

“Hi, Conner.”

He gave a start. “Oh, hi, Mom.” Not even looking. He swung the pantry door shut.

“Wait-give-me-a-hug-before-you-go,” it came rushing out of her, and he turned slightly away and she was upon him, crushing his body to her. He raised his arms along her back, the bag clutched in one hand. He wanted to be gone, not in this strange hug. Felt weird. She sniffed in a breath and he realized she was crying. Or at least her eyes had tears in them.

“You okay, Mom?” His chin dimpled the green blouse she wore, just below her shoulder. Up past her ear, the ceiling fan hung motionless.

“Yeah,” she said, lots of pressure softly released. “It’s just that. . . it’s hard dealing with it now that it’s finally happened.” She had her hand on the back of his head, cupping his neck through long dark hair. “You may never get it, you know. Fifty-fifty, they say.”

He nodded, released an mmm. Yeah, he knew. HD was not always passed on. His head might be okay, his fears might be unfounded. But he didn’t think so. No, a coil of illness, a sleeping bug, lay tucked snug inside. All in good time. Grisly notion:- If it weren’t there, he’d be betraying his dad. That was bull pucky, he knew, but the thought nagged at him anyway.

“I won’t keep you any longer, I had to get Dad some juice.” Still clutching him in that overdone way. Cold mixed with her usual warmth, and he felt in some strange way more distant from Mom in her arms than he had in the basement. “Just know that I love you very much, Conner. And that I’ll always be here for you.”

“Okay, Mom. Thanks.” Her words were good, if icky as all heck, but they felt like husks, hollow and tossed by the wind. He wriggled out of her embrace, gave her a tight smile, and turned back to the basement steps. “He likes pear juice,” he said, looking back at his mother’s upset, but glancing away from her distraught eyes to fix momentarily on the microwave. Then he waved and turned, thundering down the stairs and taking the abrupt turn as smooth as a glider on a windless day.

The following Saturday, Katt woke from a nightmare. She’d been on a Christmas tree farm, in the proprietor’s office. Mr. Kemmelman, her bow-tied principal in second grade, stood rooted to the floor, which was bare ground. “I’m afraid you can’t use that axe,” he said, “but maybe if you kiss me.” He puckered up. Wooden dummy lips, an ill-made suit one size too small, rough-barked shins and ankles thrust into the mossy earth. Behind her, through walls that were mere outline, came the mallet-upon-stake sounds of chopping, mingled with happy family murmurings as on a tape loop. The axe hung heavy in her hands, not the long-handled kind, but a short one that felt as if a legion of dead men were invisibly pulling it down. Katt hefted it, saw it rise, felt it jar into the black bark, peel away a white-lined bird-wing of wood, angled rudely out from his shin. He shivered. “Mmm, that feels good. Another, please.” She obliged, each blow an effort, and yet she was removed from her sweat, from the draw on her muscles, from the deep womb-tingle the thwunk of the axe elicited each time it connected. White flying flinders, like glints of sunlight, filled the air. Behind her, an impossible treefall began, the cracking sounds like huge sequoias giving way, not like six-foot spruces. And now her principal’s crudely whittled base held no longer and he fell, stiff, smiling, arms open wide, directly toward her. Katt stood paralyzed, with joy, with fear. And he fell through a chorus of delighted family squeals, sight of all else blotted out, as he came on in endless angled threat, closer, closer, endlessly falling . . .

Katt woke with a start, thinking she had cried out, then realizing she hadn’t. Marcus lay beside her, still dozing. What am I doing? she thought, peeled raw for an instant, a moist pulp of panic exposed. The dream clung to her. She drew from the bed, dazed and awake, failing to shake it off. The faint pink walls throbbed like raw wounds as she went by.

In the shower, moving mindlessly through her ritual of shampooing and soaping and washing off, Katt vowed to end the madness. She’d dry off, wrap her bathrobe about her, brew coffee, scramble some eggs, split and warm and cream-cheese a bagel, there in the kitchen solitude, her mind strengthening its resolve. Then she’d go upstairs, taking her man’s head firmly between her hands, ignoring his questions, reverse what she’d let begin, undo it and disarm it forever, heal him, for the love of God, as her hands were meant to do. She’d confess. She’d plead for forgiveness. And then they’d discuss . . . divorce, she said it and she meant it and by God she would say it and mean it then too.

One last turn of the handle toward Hot—she loved a final blast of punishing hot water at her nape—then she shut it off, opened the opaque door a crack, and reached for the peach towel. She fancied him breathing suddenly right there, grabbing her hand, her cover somehow blown, wrenching her past the loud shudder of glass, a smack to her arm, misstep stubbing her toe and hurling her, still dripping water, to her knees before him—but her fingers found soft warm thickness and she drew it in and blotted herself and quick-tousled her hair.

In the bedroom, she negotiated the walls to keep as far away from Marcus as she could. He was sleeping. No need to pretend to normalcy, no need to cross diagonally if no one was watching. The house lay quiet. She crept down the stairs, sunlight knifing in through the kitchen windows. It laid bare her lovelessness. But no, Conner had to be kept in mind, her son, still in his bed, maybe up there staring at patterns in the ceiling. Surely she loved him. If she couldn’t feel that love, if it seemed horrendously distant, that was because of what she’d put upon Marcus, the toll it had taken and was taking. Even Sherry had been shut out. Messages left for Katt on the BBS had been read, she’d gotten ready to reply, and then simply froze on any words, exited, and turned the damned computer off.

She stared at her plate, vaguely remembering taking in the food—and before that, preparing it. She brought the dishes to the sink, reaching for the Ivory, her mind again on automatic pilot. Time was ticking by. For her husband it was running out. She’d opened the taut nexus of his hourglass, set the sand to seeping downward, made the narrow channel broader and swifter with the probe of her fingertip. One more fork, one more dish, it felt so satisfying to rack them in the drainer, watch the sheets of rinse water run off and drip to the mat beneath.