Esther, inside her large coat, headed out the door.
If the smoke from whatever powders I’d scorched was thick enough to hang in place, I captured it in bags, to create smoke purses, little sacklets of fumes that could be punctured by a juice box straw if I required a small dose.
In the spice cabinet I kept wicker baskets filled with these smoke purses, labeled in black marker. If I had data relating to Claire’s response to the inhalation, I noted it on the back of the purses. I wrote things like no change. I wrote muteness. I wrote talkative, erratic, nervous. I wrote giddy. I wrote, and this I wrote most, no data. Or I wrote nothing at all. The writing was strange to my hand. Sometimes before writing on the pillowy bags I had to practice on paper, and I could not always recognize the script.
I suspected that if I wrote the wrong thing, the wrong way, the lettering would harm me. I’d excite some new sensitivity in my perception, and I would collapse.
Those were quiet nights. Claire and I took breaks outside, bathing our faces in the cold November air. Our neighborhood was chilled and flat and all green growth was gone. I loved it so stripped down and frozen. There was something sculpted to the shapes, as though our streets had been carved from ice, colored with pale dyes squirted from a dropper. I loved the frost on the cars at night and the steam that flowered in marble-smooth shapes from the yards, like perfect gray ghosts made of balloon material. To be outside without our coats in such cold raw air was exquisite. Sometimes puffs of breath rose from a porch down the street and we heard the muted voices of our last neighbors. But usually no one was out, and if there were lights it was the blue glow of the streetlamps. These lamps only sharpened the darkness, radiating a pure blue smolder that made the night feel stronger. A final absence of light that would take hours of sunshine to boil off.
When the vans drove through, they did so quickly, with so little noise, their engines seemed swaddled in silencers. Or perhaps they had no engines and glided past our house on a perfect slick of air.
It was Claire one night who offered that perhaps we didn’t need the medicine we’d just finished scalding our lungs with. She seemed to be suggesting a change of strategy.
“It’s so good of you, Darling, the work you’re doing,” she said, staring at the street.
We sat bundled in a shared blanket on the steps. The cold air felt intense in my chest. I knew how wrong it was to feel happy, but I could not help it.
I didn’t look at her. Work was a wishful word for my failures in the lab. Nothing was good of me. Claire’s compliment was only necessary because of how obvious the failure was. Whatever I was brewing and pumping into her was nothing I should be thanked for.
“I know you’ve probably thought of this,” Claire said, her words slurred, “but maybe it’s not the best thing for Essie with us taking all this new medicine, in terms of how it might make her feel.”
“It’s not for her. It’s for us.”
I knew I was missing the point, but I couldn’t tiptoe around the euphemism. Esther’s well-being had become a distant concern, like worrying about the flesh wound of a god.
“Is there something, or are we …” Claire started.
I waited, but the sentence never finished. It dug a little hole in the air between us, and the hole throbbed, until I realized it was there for me to fill.
“The busses,” I said, giving it my worst guess. There was a chance Claire wanted me to finish her sentence this way, didn’t have the heart to do it herself. Maybe I was the one who had to say it out loud.
“We could bring her down there and see,” I continued. “That would remove her from anything unpleasant at home, and then we wouldn’t need to interrupt our work. Best of both worlds, maybe.”
“Best of both worlds?” asked Claire. “Really.”
She shook her head, wouldn’t look at me.
We could, I thought. Esther would not even need to know why we were going. A field trip, a vacation, with horses certainly. I’m sure there will be horses! Just look at this picture. We could pretend Esther didn’t know what these red busses were, and it would join that larger field of perceptions, insights, and facts I also pretended Esther did not possess.
The logistics of getting Esther strapped in a bus seat evaded me, led me into thoughts and plans I did not wish to have.
Was I not meant to think the unthinkable? Hadn’t our hut training led exactly to this, courting unbearable circumstances as a matter of principle?
Claire sighed, but in such a kind, noncombative way that it disarmed me. It made me sad to think that she’d been rehearsing this conversation for days, probably, hoping to sound kind and wise and open-minded. She wanted off the medicine. I think she wanted off more than that.
“Esther’s not going anywhere, Sam. You don’t get to make that decision, and I’ll never agree to it.”
It was always awkward to hear my own name in her voice. We never did that. Never. We openly discussed that we never did that. It was somehow unbearably intimate and deeply hostile at the same time.
I nuzzled up against her. “I know. I’m just saying.”
Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t saying anything. What I particularly wasn’t saying was that I could never send Esther on a bus, either, but by taking that position I could keep Claire sympathetic to the medical trials. She’d see it as an either-or situation. I saw no other way for us to stay at home.
“I don’t think medicine is the answer anymore,” she said. “I think there is no answer. I just want to be with Esther when it happens.”
When it happens? I didn’t want to ask.
“Will you let me?” she said. “Could you arrange it?”
I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, which once meant that things were fine between us, a language of anxious grips that we exchanged to rescue ourselves from disagreement. Now, it was code for nothing. You translated it and it yielded speech vacuumed of meaning.
“I promise you it’s not going to happen.”
“You can’t, though. You can’t promise me anything.”
Claire’s breathing changed and I felt her sobs in my body before I heard them.
I tried to stop what was coming by saying her name, but this only triggered it harder.
“This is my fault,” said Claire, shaking. She gestured at the street, as if she were taking responsibility for the whole world outside our house: the people, the trees, the weather. She’d done this.
I reached for her but she pulled away, repeated her claim. It was her fault. All of it. The entire thing. It was all her fault.
“Please, Claire.”
“I am to blame.” She raised her voice, shouted into the street. “I did this!”
I ducked, as if I needed to show my embarrassment to any invisible person watching us from the dark exteriors of the neighborhood.
I told her it wasn’t true. I reasoned with her, asked for evidence. There was no evidence.
“Yes, but he told me it was my fault. He told me! What kind of person does that? He must have a reason. If the rabbi is not right, then I will never forgive him.”
I said, “We shouldn’t even be talking about this. We can’t be talking about this. You know that.”
“Why?” she shouted. “Why the fuck not? How can we not talk about it? How do they expect us to do that? It’s impossible.”
“The rules,” I whispered. Instantly I hated how this sounded.