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She wasn’t going to be able to rely on her son, but she didn’t want to just bring another nurse in. The time had come to approach the problem differently. The fact was, she was handcuffed to Ed. Everything she did when she wasn’t at work, she had to do with him. What she needed was someone who would be there more of the time and in a more unstructured way, who could free her up to have a bit of a life; someone who could effortlessly pick up Ed when he fell. Maybe this person could even help around the house in a handyman capacity. Maybe what she’d needed in the house from the beginning had been a man.
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If she was going to bring someone in full-time, she had to find the money to pay for it. She decided to take advantage of the fact that mortgage rates had gone down significantly since she and Ed had bought the house. She refinanced to bring her rate down from 10.3 percent to just over 8 percent, which gave her a little more to work with every month.
She put out feelers at work and posted flyers, but she didn’t get any promising leads. Then one of her nurses, Nadya Karpov, said her older brother Sergei was reliable and strong—too strong, Nadya said, to be driving a cab nights. He didn’t have nursing experience and he was in his fifties, but she thought he’d be good at it, as he was patient and calm. He didn’t have a car and he lived in Brighton Beach, but he was willing to make the long trip on the A train and the Metro-North. Eileen knew the nine hundred dollars a week she was offering would be a significant raise. The amount was just shy of what Ed’s pension and Social Security payments added up to, after taxes. Nadya said Sergei would probably jump at the chance to spend part of the week in Westchester and get away from her sister-in-law. “She’s Russian,” Nadya said simply, with raised brows, and Eileen nodded back, as if she knew something about the terror of Russian wives.
“We’re having company today,” she said to Ed shortly before Sergei was scheduled to arrive with Nadya for an interview. “A friend from work and her brother. Sergei’s his name. I think you’re going to like him. He’s excited to meet you. He doesn’t have many friends in the area. They’re from Russia. So I’ll need you to show him a good time.” After she’d said this, Ed sat at the kitchen table and wouldn’t move. She wanted him in the den, out of the way, to give Sergei a few minutes to walk around and get acquainted with the place. She could bring him in to meet Ed after he’d seen how nice everything was, what kind of people she and Ed were. But Ed wouldn’t budge. She could already envision the scene—Sergei in the house less than a minute, Ed wringing his hands and wailing, decision flashing across Sergei’s face: this is too much, too weird, too uncomfortable, he’ll find something else, it’s nice to meet you and your husband. Then he would say a polite good-bye, would leave her with Ed again, with Connell drifting through like a ghost until he flew back to school.
She tried to entice Ed into the den with a plate of cheese and crackers, but he just muttered at the kitchen table. She waved to him, patted the pillow at her side. Something must have told him she was plotting a betrayal.
She turned the television off and joined him in the kitchen. She put some potpourri on, as if she was trying to sell the house, and in a way she was. She understood that Russians were big readers. Maybe Sergei would get a kick out of all Ed’s books. Maybe they’d stoke a fire in him to work on his English, make his way through the rows.
She poured a glass of wine and tried to read the paper but kept staring at the same sentence over and over. When the doorbell rang, she leapt from her seat and rushed to adjust Ed’s collar, which was pointed up. Through the glass she saw Nadya smiling broadly, her brother hulking behind her. Sergei doffed his cap as he crossed the threshold, seeming to fill the room. He shook her hand, then walked over and did the same with Ed’s. A bald patch rested on top and gray nibbled at the sides of his head, but otherwise Sergei was the picture of virility: a ruddy glow, hair sprouting out of his collared shirt, a quiet formality about him, even in his jeans and leather jacket. He was shorter than Ed but bigger in the trunk.
“What a beautiful house!” Nadya gushed. “What a beautiful neighborhood! Isn’t it beautiful, Sergei?”
He nodded. Eileen invited them to sit and took their coats into the den. When she returned, Nadya was seated beside Ed, Sergei across from him. Nadya was looking at Ed with sensitive eyes, though Eileen had told her to play it like a regular visit. The relief was how calmly Sergei was carrying it. He too wore a compassionate expression, but he was sitting back, giving Ed space. His bearing said he understood something of what Ed was going through. His hands reminded her of her father’s. She could picture those hands grabbing barrels of beer from a truck, securing a big metal hook to their rings, and dropping them into cellars. She could see Sergei jamming metal rods into barrels to tap them without getting his head knocked off by the pressure they released.
She left Ed with Nadya and gave Sergei a tour of the house. In the spare bedroom she heard the floorboards creak under him, and for a moment she was sure he would break through, that the house couldn’t bear his weight.
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Ed woke up raving at three in the morning. She tried to rub his head, but he batted her hand away and seethed through his teeth. Then she felt the wetness of the sheets. He might have drained his entire bladder into the bed. She was careful about making him pee right before sleep, but maybe she’d forgotten. It wasn’t the first time. It had gotten to the point where she could sleep, and felt comfortable letting him sleep, in a little wetness of the sheets. This was a full-on soaking, though.
For a few days, she’d experimented with putting adult diapers on him before they went to bed. He complained about the way they cinched his waist and the loud crackling noise whenever he moved, but the real problem, she understood, was the humiliation he felt wearing them. One night he took them off and peed the bed anyway. She gave up trying to get him to wear them after that.
Moaning, flushed with agitation, Ed left the bed and began to roam mindlessly, bent on something inscrutable. She alternated between securing a corner of the fresh sheet and shooing him away from the stairs so he didn’t spill down them. When she was done, she tugged the T-shirt off him, but he wouldn’t let her change his underwear. She was too tired to argue, so she let him crawl sopping into the clean sheets. She didn’t sleep the rest of the night; her hand kept drifting over to his underwear to feel if it had dried.
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She cleaned the house top to bottom in preparation for Sergei’s arrival. She felt nervous taking a strange man into her home. It was a Sunday, the start of his work week. She’d never liked Sunday evenings, which filled her with a creeping dread that went back to grammar school.
In the days leading up to Sergei’s arrival, she mentioned him often, casually, hoping through these hints to make his presence in their lives seem natural in Ed’s mind. She felt the way she imagined Ed must have felt when he used to condition his lab rats with tiny, nonfatal doses of pure cocaine. “Sergei is going to help us around the house,” she said. “Sergei is going to take care of a few things for us.” “Sergei will be here on Sunday.” “Sergei might stay the week.”
That morning, after they stopped in at Mass for a few minutes, she walked Ed around town for two hours. He behaved better when he was tired. Still, when she answered the bell and led Sergei in, Ed said, “No, no!” again and again, until he wasn’t speaking anymore but yelling in a high-pitched wail that sounded like a baby’s cry.
“This man is here to help us,” she said. “Can I tell you something?” His face was turning purple. “This man is not here for you. Do you understand? He’s here so I don’t have to worry about you when I’m not here. He’s here for me.”
He began to quiet down, and the violent color drained from his face, and he looked as if he could breathe again.
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She woke in the middle of the night to find Ed half on top of her trying to make something happen. She wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing, or if he was even awake at all. She lay him down, calmed his pounding heart, and got on top. It was awkward and a little heartbreaking, but the blood still raced through her veins, and it was more attention than some of her friends had gotten in years.
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Sergei stayed until she got home from work on Friday. She might have been able to give him less than nine hundred a week, but she wanted to convey the gravity of the job in the pay, and she was taking this man from his home, his wife, even if Nadya said he was happy to get away.
Sergei’s main job was to cook Ed’s meals and keep him company. Friday evenings were awkward; the transactional nature of the relationship couldn’t be avoided. She counted out a pile of fifties and handed them over in a folded stack, avoiding Sergei’s eyes. Some Fridays he finished watching a program with Ed before departing. Others, he was waiting by the door when she arrived. Even when he seemed content to chat, he didn’t speak much, owing to his poor command of English. In that respect, he and Ed made a good pair. She imagined them grunting at each other like cavemen when she wasn’t there. It wasn’t the worst thought in the world. She may have had to act disgusted if it happened around her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take private delight in the idea of it.