“You’re not calling Roger.”
He started to dial.
Evelyn followed a worn path across the rug and put her finger on the switch hook. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
He puzzled the darkness in the window, tapping the card faster and faster. “The book is done,” he said emphatically. “He needs to read the book.”
Whether he meant the abandoned manuscript locked in the safe behind him or one of the books he published years ago, Evelyn didn’t know. And better, really, not to ask. She’d learned strategies for getting her husband back to bed, for taking his hand when he got lost in the fog. In the doctor’s office, in the caregiver guides that sat beside her own bed, in her talks with Sandra, the day nurse, these tactics made perfect sense. Speak in a clear, reassuring voice. Respond to the emotion, not the confusion. Never argue. She might have said, “You sound anxious about work.” Or, “Are you missing Roger?” The proper volley was easily imagined, but Evelyn played better in practice than she did in the game.
“Stop being silly. He’s read the books. All the books. Except the one you didn’t finish.”
It took an hour of pulling and corralling and repeating herself to get him out of the room. The more she pressed him to calm down or tried luring him into the sanctuary she’d set up in the living room, the angrier and more agitated he became. He didn’t want to go sit in his chair. He didn’t want to listen to music. He’d sooner drink bathwater than a goddamned cup of chamomile tea. She tried toggling the light, as if it were intermission at the theater and flashes of darkness might quiet the crowd, but Henry and, with him, the specter of Roger Fitch refused to leave. Tonight, it was Roger. But it could have been anyone: Claudia, Benjamin, his mother or father, the sister he’d stopped talking to two decades ago. Even she, Evelyn, thirty years younger, fresh from packing the kids off for school, had haunted Henry’s nights. Only Jane was missing. He had yet to see her, which surprised and, it would be lying to say otherwise, pleased Evelyn deeply.
The hour-long tussle, which ended with Henry throwing his wedding ring in the trash, left them defeated and spent, but Evelyn, with her still-sharp mind and unwavering purpose, emerged the victor every time. She may have been seventy-eight, but other than a touch of arthritis in her hip, she moved like a woman a good deal younger. With bowed head and shuffling feet, Henry followed her downstairs. He allowed her to deposit him in his easy chair. Suffered the radio she’d tuned to Brahms. And there he sat, a frightened boy left to find his way through a dark, dark thicket and reach the clearing (that may or may not exist) on the other side.
Exhausted, Evelyn went into the kitchen. With its white cabinets and white tiles, it struck her as a canvas she’d never gotten around to painting. She’d always intended to add more color, to paint a great garland of flowers that ran around the room rather than the solitary swag with a cabbage and a bird’s nest that decorated the wooden valance above the sink. But then — well, but then: life.
She picked up her husband’s socks where he dropped them, had dinner on the table the same time each night, painted almost every day without a scrap of ambition to have her work seen. She was a certain type of woman who lived a certain type of life that most girls of Claudia’s generation regarded as a disease they’d been lucky or wily or smart enough never to catch. Where Evelyn felt contentment, Claudia felt claustrophobic. Where Evelyn saw a home she could take pride in, Claudia saw a swamp to sink in. Through Claudia’s acrimonious filter, the prioritizing of family became the death of imagination. Care became sacrifice. Fidelity, a chain. But Evelyn had wanted a family. More than anything, she had wanted children. And it saddened her to no end to think that she and her daughter were at odds over both. Claudia’s approach to marriage had been as slow and trepidatious as her rejection of motherhood had been decisive and swift. They gave to different charities, went to different movies, spoke of the past as though it wasn’t one they shared. Inch by inch the differences added up until the two stood on opposite sides of a great gulf. It broke Evelyn’s heart.
Gathering herself in the kitchen in the dawn’s dove-gray light, Evelyn hit the button on the coffeemaker, her coffeemaker, which sat alongside a much larger and more evolved cousin. The cappuccino machine docked like a shiny silver barge on the kitchen counter, ready to brew double shots of espresso or froth milk, should she suddenly, at nearly eighty, develop a taste for lattes. It had arrived on her last birthday, with a card from Claudia and the unwritten purpose, Evelyn believed, of making her feel simple, unsophisticated, less than. Benji, on the other hand, had given her nothing, his usual gift for any giving occasion, and Evelyn couldn’t help wondering (more than once while the morning coffee brewed) whether it was worse to be forgotten or to be so profoundly unknown. She put a kettle on the stove for Henry’s tea — the tea, the chair, the music, all recommended by her piled books — and raided the refrigerator for something to paint. She found a head of Boston lettuce, a few white-tipped radishes, a lemon she decided to halve, and carried what would soon become the day’s composition into her studio. Otherwise known as the mudroom off the kitchen.
With the tea steeped, she brought a mug to Henry and sat beside him, sipping her first cup of coffee. In these quiet hours, they rarely spoke. Speaking, she found, tended to muddy the waters that settled near dawn. A half hour later, before Henry finally dozed off, Evelyn took him by the hand and, with the same assurances she used to whisper to the children after bad dreams shook them, led him back to bed. You’re fine, you’re fine. I’m right here. Now go to sleep. She pulled the covers up to Henry’s waist, drew the curtains, and was halfway out the door when she remembered the ring in her pocket. A strip of light from the hallway fell across her husband’s face as she crept back to the bed, but he was already asleep. She had no trouble slipping the heavy gold band onto his finger, where it belonged.
In some people’s books — Dr. Bell’s, for instance, or Claudia’s — Evelyn was a fool for not hiring a night nurse to supplement Sandra’s daytime visits. Worse than a fool, in her daughter’s estimation. Irresponsible. “You’re putting Daddy’s health in jeopardy,” the lecture went, “not to mention your own. You can’t stand guard twenty-four hours a day. I don’t care what you say: you can’t get by on four hours of sleep. You’re wearing yourself out. And then we’re going to have two sick parents to deal with. I know you think you’re being selfless in all of this, in putting Daddy’s needs before your own, but Daddy’s not getting the care he deserves, and neither are you. It’s actually very selfish.”
Evelyn hadn’t the heart or, frankly, the stomach to follow Claudia’s logic, the bread crumb trails whereby every fault led more or less directly to her. And besides, Evelyn didn’t agree. She didn’t agree that a stranger could do better by Henry. They were lucky—she was lucky — to have Sandra, yes, but a second aide at this point would have created more problems than it solved. First, Henry wouldn’t accept it. He grew more suspicious, more paranoid of people he’d known for years, most recently accusing Chip Hanehan, their legally blind neighbor of thirty years, of various and random acts of thievery; how could he be expected to open his arms to a complete stranger? Second, another nurse wouldn’t come free, and though they weren’t exactly in financial jeopardy, Benjamin required more pocket money than most forty-year-olds, and Evelyn couldn’t, wouldn’t, no matter how many times Henry called her an enabler, let her son starve.