Out back, under the stars, spring was so far away, months to go. Even longer till the kids had to get up in front of a roomful of people and pretend they were Victor Long for the night.
“What happened today?” she asked her husband. The joint was thicker than usual, and he had been outside long before she got there. He sat on a deck chair, his head on one hand, twirling the joint in the other.
“My father left my mother,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” she said. That didn’t even make any sense.
“He gave up on her,” he said. “He said he couldn’t take it anymore. He said he couldn’t watch her kill herself anymore. He said she’s a miserable woman and he couldn’t live with her another day. She’s having a meltdown.”
He looked at his wife for help. He couldn’t do this alone, and maybe he wouldn’t even be able to do it with her help.
“He can’t just leave,” she said. Who just leaves a sick person? Nobody.
“He left,” he said. “He seems pretty set on it. He rented an apartment near the pharmacy.”
Rachelle walked over to her husband and sat in his lap, she wrapped one arm around his chest, and another, loosely, around his neck. Then she told him that she didn’t want his father anywhere near her children. “Do you hear me?” she said. She said that any man who would abandon a sick woman was a filthy, horrible person and should not be allowed near a child. And he should be punished. And that is his punishment. He would have no access. He had gone insane, and he would have no access. Not her children. Not this man. Her husband argued briefly—who was in charge here anyway? was it him? did he even want to be?—but it was swift, and then it was over, because she raised her voice, she raised it loud enough that Josh heard it through his window. Josh, who had been thinking about Victor Long intently at that moment, wondering what would happen if he decided someday that he didn’t want to be a doctor and wanted to be a dancer instead, if his parents would believe in him the same way, heard his mother screaming at his father, “I will not have him in my home! I will not have him in my life!” over and over until his father had no choice but to give her what she wanted.
Edie, 160 Pounds
They were supposed to meet for a burger at a folk-music club called the Earl of Old Town at 7:00 P.M., but then her father’s test results were scheduled to come in sometime that evening, maybe the next day—the unpredictability of the timing, of everything, driving Edie into knotted bursts of tears in the bathroom attached to her father’s hospital room—so she called her blind date and asked, nicely, if they could dine earlier in the evening and also somewhere near the hospital instead.
“What a shame,” he said. “I heard that place was the place to go.”
“For what?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “For fun.”
“What does it matter where we eat?” she snapped.
“I just wanted to try something new,” he said.
“Look, I don’t even know you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s new or old for you.”
“This is us, getting to know each other,” he said, and then he started laughing at her, and she was appalled, because nothing was funny in this world, in her life, nothing.
Her mother had died the winter before, coldly, a stroke, a coma, and one day of lucidity where she faintly clung to her family members, smiling, speechless, and then she was gone. The view from the hospital room was of a parking lot, and it had snowed the night her mother had her stroke. Edie had watched an old man shovel snow the next morning, making small mountains around the edges of the lot. By the time her mother died, the snow piles were covered in filth.
Now her father was entrenched in a bed at Northwestern Memorial; strings had been pulled to get him closer to his daughter, who attended the law school a few blocks away, one Russian calling another, a private room arranged for a good man. So in addition to her everyday back-and-forth between law school and library, there was also travel between her dorm and the hospital, up the elevators, down the hallways, through the doors. Edie just spent all day (when she was not sitting in class or studying in the library) walking, sometimes running. She could barely remember to eat, let alone that she should try and find a husband at some point, something her next-door neighbor, Carly, thought was extremely important. (Weren’t they supposed to be feminists? Edie did not even have the energy to argue with her.)