You're Not You (12 page)

Someone lit a joint, the peppery smell mixing with the petroleumand-lemon scent of the citronella candles. People were scattered around the chairs, balancing plates of food on their knees and talking loudly. Kate was at the round glass-topped table near the door, and I seated myself in the empty chair next to her. All around her conversation was going on. Kate watched a woman with cropped white-blond hair saying, “This bulldog was the most repulsive animal I’ve ever seen. I’d rather get a Komodo dragon.” Kate laughed, then shifted her attention to the woman’s husband, a good-looking bearded black guy. He was defending the bulldog, whose name was Posy.

How many other caregivers had her friends met at parties like this over the past couple years? At first there probably weren’t any except for a few hours in the daytime. Then there’d be someone lurking in the background in the evening; then closer and closer, edging into conversations and occasionally repeating dialogue and explanations. Now, I’d guess, someone was always there.

Evan walked past, pausing between me and Kate. “How’s everything?” he asked. He had rolled his sleeves up and was holding a bottle of water. He looked at me. “Any questions?” I shook my head, smiling. He kissed the top of Kate’s head and moved on.

Kate began to speak, glancing from me to the group at large. The effect was instantaneous: As soon as she began to talk they quieted and watched, waiting for me to repeat it. It was the same each time she said something, and it was admirable in a way, how quickly they perked up, but it was tiring, too, even for me, and soon Kate went back to listening, a small grin fixed on her lips.

I ENDED UP STAYING
the whole time. Each time I thought I should go, someone would draw me into a conversation and next thing I knew I was eating another cracker with smoked trout and telling them all about myself: the town I grew up in, my parents, my major, waitressing.

They began to clear out around midnight, and we stood near the door, saying good-bye, Kate being kissed and me shaking hands, Evan hugging people good-bye. After the last few I retreated and began clearing up cups, waiting to be dismissed but not wanting to ask just yet. I left Kate and Evan in the living room and went out to the back porch, slowly stacking the last of the naked enamel dishes that gleamed with oil and bore hardened white smears of goat cheese. It was peaceful on the porch, the breeze cooling off my face and the music still playing softly, and I took my time, finally blowing out the molten candles as I went back in.

Kate and Evan weren’t in the kitchen. I went slowly through to the living room, suddenly aware that it was dark and quiet and twelve thirty in the morning in someone else’s home. Then their voices, mainly Evan’s, drifted out to me from the bedroom. I headed down the hall, trying to walk loudly.

“Look. We agreed on this,” Evan was saying. The door to their room was open. “We made the compromise, so can we please just leave it alone?” I stopped in the hall and stood there. I knew I should say something, or make a noise, but I didn’t want him to know I’d heard him this way, his voice so pleading and uneven. Kate’s was an undifferentiated murmur, rising at the end. I pictured Kate sitting there, the narrow plane of her shoulders, her feet and hands still stubbornly where I’d laid them as we got ready for the party. I took a heavy step in the hallway and called out, “Well, I should be heading out.” Then I stepped into the doorway.

The room was half-dark. Only the bedside lamp was on, casting a wan oval of light on the pillowcase. They both turned to look at me. Evan was standing by the side of the bed, holding a checkbook in one hand. He ran the other hand through his hair when he saw me. Kate looked over her shoulder. A blush crept up my neck. I hadn’t much considered the room before except as a place where I worked, but it
struck me now how intimate it was to come upon a couple in their bedroom. I pictured him on top of her in the bed, her unable to move. Maybe they found some compromise, somehow. Or maybe they had just given up.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, pushing the image out of my head. I touched the light switch on the wall. “Do you want some light?”

They both looked around the dim room, startled, as though they had been in here since the sun had set and hadn’t even noticed. Kate swallowed and said, “Please.”

I hit the light, illuminating the wide blue bed. Kate turned her chair away from Evan and toward me. She gave me a brilliant smile, her eyes squinting against the light. Evan passed a hand over his eyes. Their faces were flushed.

“Thank you so much for staying,” Kate said. She tilted her head back toward Evan. “Evan’s just writing out your check.” Evan had been staring out the window, and at the mention of the checkbook he started and bent over the nightstand to write it out.

“I’m giving you a little extra since you stayed on short notice,” he said as he wrote. “And for such a wonderful job cooking.” He signed the check with a flourish and tore it out. He wouldn’t look at Kate.

I took it from him and looked at her. “Do you need any help getting to bed?” She shook her head. “Okay then.” I felt uncomfortable leaving, though I couldn’t have explained it to them. I had no pretext for staying. So what if they had argued? People always fought after parties; you either had sex, hashed over who you thought was going to have sex, or told him how he’d pissed you off. My last two relationships had broken up in the aftermath of the best parties I’d ever been to, the biggest, noisiest, and most high-spirited. Sometimes I felt I had to find some way of continuing the intensity of the evening and then it backfired on me: The resentments came out, or it turned out he’d been in a closet with some girl while I thought he was in the bathroom.

“I’ll see you Tuesday,” I said.

“I’ll walk you out,” Evan said. “It’s late.”

As we passed the kitchen he said, “There’s wine left. Did you get a chance to try the sauvignon blanc?” He opened the fridge, reached down to the bottom shelf, and handed me a bottle.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“You didn’t have to stay,” he pointed out. I conceded the point and thanked him. He held the front door open for me and looked out to see where my car was. Then he waited as I walked down the driveway. It touched me, that caution and attention. Or maybe I just wanted to sympathize with him after hearing him that way. I hated hearing a tremble in a man’s voice, especially since after that morning I knew how it felt to have Kate looking at you with that uncompromising gaze. It made me pity him. Maybe he’d known that, hence the extra money and the wine. When I got to my car I waved and I saw his silhouette wave back. I got in, setting the bottle on the passenger seat, and watched the porch light flash off.

T
OO BARE,” SAID KATE
.

“If you say so.” I hung the dress, which had spaghetti straps and a low-dipping neckline, back on the rack. In the mirror I saw the saleswoman watching us from behind the cash register.

“Trust me,” said Kate. “I couldn’t even wear a strapless bra with that. You know me pretty well by now, but I’ll avoid making you tape my breasts if I can.”

“Gee, thanks.”

She grinned. I held a blue sleeveless turtleneck beneath Kate’s chin and we considered it. A tiny, trim woman in her fifties strode past us to another rack. As she caught a glimpse of me pushing Kate’s hair off her shoulders, she turned. Still holding a dress to her collarbone, the woman said to me: “It’s so kind of you to help your friend.” She gave us both a smile.

“Mmm, thanks,” I murmured. “I’m in it for the money.”

The woman looked perplexed, though her smile remained. “Oh, I see. Well, still.” She started to say something else but then turned away toward the rack. Kate lowered her face a bit but I could still see her grinning.

In these first two months we’d settled into a schedule of four days a week. I arrived in the mornings to find Kate dressed but not made-up, her hair still damp from the shower. I gave her two cans of the nutritional shakes, some water, then rinsed the funnel and tube and wiped her side with a paper towel. Then we sat at the kitchen table to read a
list of tasks in Evan’s scratchy handwriting, which slanted up at the ends, the lines drifting toward the edges of the page.

I so rarely saw her outside her chair that for a long time I tended to forget she ever left it. Then I walked in one day to find her stretched out on the couch, her legs crossed at the ankles. She turned her head to look at me and for one irrational moment I knew that she was, suddenly, inexplicably, well. I could imagine her sitting up, swinging her feet to the floor, and striding my way so clearly that when she did not move I wondered what was wrong. It was the casualness of the posture that gave me that sensation, the arm resting on her abdomen, one leg tucked over the other.

Everyone has those dreams, the type in which the man who’s just dumped you comes back, and you’re laughing and sweet together again, but then you wake up and all that sweetness falls away. He’s still gone; he’s still moved on to a fashion design student. That was kind of what it felt like when that second ended and I went over to help Kate to her wheelchair. Later, Kate told me Evan crossed her feet so one leg didn’t fall off the edge of the cushion.

To Liam I speculated that her illness had made them closer. Perhaps when you faced death, I had decided, immediate or eventual, you put aside the really silly differences. They dealt with what was truly important, or so I felt it must be. When I mentioned this one afternoon in my room, his face grew rather still, as it always did when he was pausing before disagreeing with me. That pause had irritated me, as though he had to be sure I could bear to be contradicted. At moments like this I felt the age difference between us, and with some strange satisfaction I thought that he and his wife would never make it through anything really difficult. What paltry problem had driven him to me?

Maybe I was being patronizing, or naïve, when I was so delighted for Evan and Kate merely for living normal lives. And maybe I gave Evan too much credit for simply doing what had to be done. Friends were in and out all day and in the evenings, with varying degrees of formality. Sometimes this lessened my workload and sometimes it increased it. It depended on the visitor: With some I could absent myself and make fund-raising calls or file insurance forms while they exercised her
limbs. They might not even need my help getting her to the bed. But I had also learned not to assume I could head off to the front of the house any time a friend arrived with a loaf of bread. Certainly when Lisa swept in, her black hair pushed off her face by her sunglasses and silver earrings swinging, I could run errands to the library or the grocery store. She was so well-versed in helping Kate that she was even backup for the caregivers. As Kate’s paralysis had progressed, Lisa had learned the physical therapy, how to move her or feed her, and she was almost as good at it as Evan. Her voice would fill the back of the house as she talked about her art supply store or her succession of boyfriends, Kate’s foot braced in her hand as she moved her knee back toward Kate’s chest, stretching the muscle, and pulled it forward again.

Another friend, Helen, had originally been married to a close friend of Evan’s. She and the friend divorced, he moved to Oregon, and Helen, who was rail-thin and tentative, with an indistinct pink mouth and dark eyes that seemed forever on the verge of wincing, remained. When she arrived the first time while I was there I edged toward the door with a questioning glance at Kate, who waited till Helen had her head in the fridge to put away the fruit salad she had brought, and then shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Helen needed slightly more help understanding Kate than I thought an old friend should. They stayed out in the kitchen rather than using the time for therapy, talking lightly about books and movies. I hovered nearby and repeated Kate’s words while Helen made tea. She always poured a cup for me. I was frequently the recipient of the extra muffin or cups from a full pot of tea. I believed visitors found it intrusive to walk into their friend’s house and make themselves a snack, so they made enough for two and placed the extras in front of me instead of her. I accepted them all, understanding that, generous as Kate’s friends were to me, I was only a stand-in for the person who was sitting right there.

“I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT
your job,” my mother said one Sunday morning in July, “and I would like you to take first-aid lessons. And this woman ought to pay for them.”

“I’m planning on it,” I told her. I had the phone cradled between
my jaw and collarbone while I peeled a carrot. Ribbons of carrot skin surrounded the wastebasket and I made a mental note to clean them up before Jill woke up. I’d repudiated the pre-peeled baby carrots, but these had their drawbacks. “I need to know how to do CPR and things like that. Though I’m pretty sure I could perform CPR just from television.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” my mother said. “Anyway, I’m glad you’ll be schooled in it. Who knows what these people had planned?”

“Who are ‘these people’?” I asked, the carrot peeler inactive for the moment, a bit of vegetable flesh dangling off its blade. “And what would they
plan
? What, do you think they were hiring a dupe to commit insurance fraud?”