“I know. But all that sunshine reminds me of Florida.” He paused before attempting to explain something he had only ever explained to The Pig: “What I mean to say is that there was always too much light down there. All that blue sky—so blank and open and empty above. It started to feel that way in my mind too. Does that make sense? Like that vast blue emptiness seeped into my brain somehow. The only thing of substance were those clouds. But try holding onto a cloud and see where that gets you.”
When he was done, Tünde stared at him, keeping her face still, much like The Pig’s when Charlie had said the same thing. At last she closed the curtains, then walked to a lamp in the corner and snapped it on. “Who knows of you being here besides me?”
“Nobody.”
“No family? No friends?”
“My brother is in Detroit, so no family here in Providence. And most of our friends retired and moved away or died. I’m starting to think the people in that last category were the luckiest. Because you know what’s worse than dying? Waiting to die.”
She considered that a moment before saying, “If your mind works so funny now, the way you say, how is it you drive home many miles from Florida?”
Not easily, he thought, remembering the robotic voice of the GPS and so many road signs and rest areas where he stopped to ask the same question again and again: “Am I still on I-95 North?” He kept checking the entire way, because he knew if a “little mental slip” led him to turn off the interstate by mistake, it might be difficult to find his way back even with that machine barking orders from the dashboard.
“It’s one highway and one direction. More or less. So I managed. But it took me longer than it used to. And I slept in my car to keep from getting distracted.”
“Ask me, it is lucky you did not kill someone or kill yourself in wreck. I suggest no more driving for you.”
These words put him in mind of the final conversation on that little third-floor terrace where he and Joy ate dinner most evenings when they were in Florida. She had just poured herself a glass of wine, just scooped a heaping portion of salad onto each of their plates to accompany the broiled fish she had made, then she smiled at Charlie in the flickering candlelight. She had been wearing her hair shorter since they’d begun spending winters in Florida, and she let more of the gray come through too, which had a way of making her appear elegant in her older years. That terrace of theirs overlooked a garden full of bougainvillea and jacaranda and palm trees, but it overlooked a small slip of the apartment complex’s parking lot as well. Down below, a truck was making an after-hours delivery. The driver blasted rap music and created quite a clatter as he slammed his door and rolled up the big one in the back before hauling out his dolly full of boxes. Charlie waited for some hiccup in the commotion before finally speaking the words he had been planning to tell his wife all day: “I don’t want this life anymore.”
Joy put down her wineglass. Earlier, she had cajoled him into going to the pool for a swim, so now their bathing suits were draped over the railing, drying. Charlie watched them rustle in the warm breeze behind her, worrying they might blow away and be lost to the night, before she sighed and asked, “What do you mean, dear?”
Increasingly, following that doctor’s visit a few winters before, Joy had developed a way of speaking to Charlie that irked him. It was as though she was talking to one of her students from Central High, and not a very bright one at that. Each morning, when she asked if he had taken his medicine, it was this tone she used. When explaining her need to sleep in a separate bed for the first time in their thirty-seven years of marriage, because of his newfound habit of tossing and turning, which kept her awake, it was this tone she used. And only days before that night on the terrace, when she sat Charlie down to inform him that it was time to take away the keys to the Oldsmobile, now that his little mental slips were becoming more worrisome, it was this same tone she used then as well.
“Stop talking to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a kid.”
“Well, I don’t mean to, Charlie. But I don’t understand what you’re saying about not wanting this life anymore.”
“You know what I mean,” he said over the sound of that driver’s clattering. He had made his delivery and was now rolling down the enormous back door then climbing into the truck, slamming the door shut. “You tricked me into living this life.”
“Charlie, you’re not making sense. I didn’t trick you. We planned for this. It was our dream to be snowbirds.”
“Well, I want to be a person again. Not some stupid fucking bird. Not any other animal either.”