New page: DIDN’T
Oblivious, Claudia still faced her mother. “Benji and I agreed that he’s not going to put that kind of strain on you. Didn’t we, Benji?”
Now that he had stepped up to the edge of the cliff, Benji stopped. Jump. He was one word away — a few sharp little mouse squeaks, a simple J-U-M-P — from the truth, one syllable with the power to allay his family’s fears, to free himself from an untenable tenancy. Or would he simply be convincing everyone that his primary problem wasn’t a suicidal tendency but a psychopathic one? If his family thought he was troubled before, what would they think when he pulled the curtain back on his latest charade? They’d call him psychotic. Alcoholic. Nutcase. He’d be spared the unthinkable stay at 34 Palmer Street, but roundly delivered into a sequestered twelve-step program in the remotest Adirondack woods.
He took a deep breath before placing pen to paper, but before he could finish his sentence, he heard a voice—that voice — that made it impossible to go on. “Knock, knock.” He turned to see Cat McCarthy standing there shyly, half obscured by the curtain, smiling a smile of uncertain provenance. She’d traded her stylish dress for ragged jeans and a boxy yellow (but still unaccountably sexy) T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Save Compton’s Mound.” She took a hesitant step toward the bed, but managed by the time she reached him to shed all signs of apprehension. The smile surprised him with its tenderness. Even if this was a performance, even if Cat was slipping comfortably, convincingly, into another skin as he’d seen her do five nights a week for the last two months, Benji didn’t mind.
As she leaned over to kiss King Hamlet on his unbandaged cheek, Henry made a sharp warning sound, as if she were about to step off a curb into a puddle.
“Careful,” he said, the tone of his voice traveling two orbits closer to congenial. “You’ll catch a cold.”
Cat stopped, uncertain. She looked to Benji, who shook his head to erase the interruption and ready himself for that long-deferred kiss — delivered at last — while Claudia, hands on knees, bent toward Henry with the loving indulgence of a nanny. “Daddy, you know where you are, don’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t I? We’re in the hospital.”
“And you know why we’re in a hospital?”
“Benjamin’s sick.”
“He is. But not with a cold.”
Cat extended her hand to the rest of the family, explaining who she was as if they already might know. Benji breathed in the scent she brought with her, that shampoo smell he’d been so sure he’d never smell again, with an exhilarating sense of confusion. Why in the world was she here? He expected visits from Jerry and stoner Bill and maybe even Kay, whose overly ornate get-well bouquet practically reeked of schadenfreude, but never Cat. Her appearance was a puzzle, one that couldn’t be solved — not by him, not now — but one he would enjoy piecing together in his happy haze of Percocet.
She gave him a beautiful used copy of To the Lighthouse wrapped in newsprint and dove with Henry, whose clarity returned to him as quickly as it departed, into an animated discussion of its merits. Benji fumbled through the opening pages while Cat spoke with his father. Henry’s reading lists, which as a teen Benji tended to find joyless and demanding, had largely turned him off serious novels, but he rallied unexpectedly to these opening pages. How bad could a book be when a young boy sits ready to stab his father through the heart with a pair of scissors? But after five minutes the day nurse wandered in with her blood pressure cuff and broke up the fun. Cat, ready, it seemed, for a hasty retreat, kissed him again — a softer, more lingering kiss — or did he imagine it? He set the book down and scrambled for his pad. Come back! he wrote.
She laughed as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her. “If I can.”
Wait. I won’t be here. They’re discharging me.
“That’s good news.”
I’ll be with my parents for a while. U can read to me.
“Read to you,” Claudia said, incredulous. She leaned in close to his ear, whispered, “We’re not done with the Treadwell conversation,” and, before he could protest, offered to walk out with Cat.
Benji shot her a Medusa’s stare but grabbed Cat’s hand and persevered. “Pwomise?”
“Okay,” she said with a rising blush, “I promise.”
When Cat and Claudia had left, Evelyn finished beheading the last few dying flowers before taking her spot on Benji’s bed. She placed a hand lightly on his arm and said, “Your sister loves to stir things up.”
Still savoring the delicious smoke of Cat’s promise, Benji didn’t breathe. He held his breath, as if compounding his high. He hardly noticed Henry get up from his chair, but then he felt the weight on him, extraordinary and rare. His father stood over the bed like a priest, eyes closed, head bent, one hand pressed to his son’s forehead as if to bless him. “No fever, Ev. You check.”
Evelyn shooed Henry’s hand out of the way and went through the motions of taking Benji’s temperature with supreme indulgence. “No fever,” she said, then, having ushered Henry back to his seat, turned to Benji. “What were you saying? Before your friend—” Evelyn paused at the word, turning it over like a teacup in a china shop, curious to know the price. “Before your friend came in?” She picked up his pad and turned back the page to where he’d written DIDN’T.
“You didn’t what?” She wagged a finger at him as if to say he couldn’t get away with anything, not on her watch. “See?” she said confidentially, taking his hand. “Some of us still remember around here.”
Held by his mother, watched by his father in an attitude of strange and attendant warmth, Benji took a head-clearing breath and shook his head. His fingers fluttered at his temples to show that the thought, whatever it was, had flown away, before picking up his pen. I forget.
~ ~ ~
Evelyn is afraid. It’s her first time, though no one can know it’s her first time. This is important to her. The neighbors are one thing, there’s no getting around what they’ve seen, but the doctors, the nurses: it’s none of their business, she says. She has to pray the neighbors will keep their mouths shut. And remarkably they do. Forty years later, somehow, miraculously, Claudia does not know. But at this moment, Claudia is barely four. She is in my arms. She wears a green gingham dress and wants to climb onto the gurney with her. I stoop to where she can reach and say, Give Mama a kiss. Claudia fidgets and cries; she doesn’t want her mama to go. Evelyn puts her hand in mine. I give it a squeeze before they wheel her off. It’s morning. By the time they come back, it’s night. She’s in the recovery room, they tell me, asleep. We go to the nursery. Claudia passes out on my shoulder on the elevator ride up. There are other fathers at the window, men in loosened ties with their hands pressed against the glass, staring. The nurse waves to me in her starched whites, then wheels a glass bassinet to where I can see. A boy, says the man next to me. He claps me on the back like it’s the best thing in the world. A boy, he says. What do you know about that?
4
Three weeks on Palmer Street put Benji in a mood. He liked the nubbled blue blanket from his boyhood bed and the almost arctic setting of the air conditioner he favored even in mild mid-September. He liked the season’s last tomatoes pulled warm and dusty from his mother’s garden and the sweating, fat-bellied pitcher from which she poured a heavenly homemade lemonade squeezed especially for him. After nearly a month, though, even these pleasantries had lost their charm, dulled by repetition, tarnished by daily tussles with Henry. And every time he complained to Claudia, trying to convince her that a modestly priced hotel was a better place to stage his recuperation, if only he could borrow a little cash, she said, “Forget it.”