One night in early December, after a few frustrating hours at Maple Grove, during which Ed refused to eat and emitted a persistent, plaintive whine, and an enervating day at work before that, while she was washing the pan from a meatloaf whose crusted end she had polished off without so much as sitting down, she heard Sergei walk into the room behind her. She looked up into the window and saw his reflection standing in the doorway. After a few moments she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there; his steps had been too heavy, and now there was an electric charge in the air. She put down the scrubber and took a fortifying breath, then turned to face him. He was perfectly silent, looking at her with a strange intensity. He began to walk toward her. She had rubber gloves on her hands and raised them instinctively. He came around the island and stood before her. She could feel her own breath coming fast. He inched closer to her. The tentativeness she detected in him alarmed her; it was as if he feared for both their fates, as if he couldn’t help whatever he was about to do. She reproached herself for sheltering this stranger in her house. He could do anything he wanted to her and she would be powerless to stop him.
One of his hands went to her waist; she felt she was watching from outside her body as she didn’t move it away. His other hand joined in.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s okay,” he said.
He pulled her to him. Her arms went up in halfhearted protection and the cold, wet rubber sent a tingling across her skin. She felt bloated and squishy against him. She’d put on sixty pounds in the years since Ed’s diagnosis, nearly a pound for each her husband had lost, as if she’d been eating to maintain their equilibrium. Sergei’s face, as he moved in to kiss her, was smooth enough that she wondered whether he had shaved right before he came down. His drugstore aftershave, liberally applied, did not repel her up close as she had imagined it would. She felt a pounding through his chest. His hands moving over her left ghostly sense impressions everywhere they’d been. She found herself ascending the stairs with him.
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Afterward, in her room, she locked the door and moved the armchair in front of it. She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt the need to protect herself, to hide. She climbed into bed and wept for a while, and then somehow she slept, the body doing what it had to do. She woke in the middle of the night to the unsettling light of the lamp and heard the low hum of Sergei’s television. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t awake.
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In the morning she showered and dressed before she moved the armchair. When she ventured out of the room, she saw Sergei’s door wide open. She walked over to it and looked inside; none of his things were there. She ventured downstairs and was startled to find him sitting at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the suitcase next to him.
“Forgive me,” he said.
“For what?”
“I understand you want I should leave.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You have a job to get to. You can begin to look for a place. In the meantime, this is where you live. There’s nothing more to say, as far as I’m concerned.”
88
Connell had hatched his plan over Thanksgiving, when he learned that his mother was going to have her Christmas party on Christmas night instead. Cindy Coakley was planning to host Christmas Eve again, as she had the previous year and probably would indefinitely now that the old order had been toppled. It wasn’t ideal, his mother said, as there wasn’t as much to look forward to, and people couldn’t stay out as late, but it was important to her to have a party in the house this particular year, with the usual cast of people. She understood that it would be redundant, the same people going to both, and she understood that they would go if she insisted, and she was going to insist. She said she wanted it to be as nice as any Christmas they’d ever had. He knew it was going to break her heart not to have his father in attendance, so he was going to make sure his father was there after all.
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They went together on Christmas morning to see him. The nursing home was decorated for the holidays. Small clusters of visitors amassed at every sitting area, and many of the rooms were packed, with an air of festivity. The nurses and orderlies were less formal with his mother than with the adult children and grandkids who flew in from far-flung places, but they were also more circumspect. It must not have been convenient for them that she came every day, particularly as she was a career nurse who wasn’t afraid to assert herself.
They found his father asleep in his bed, his mouth hanging open. They didn’t wake him but sat in chairs on either side of the bed waiting for him to come to on his own. Connell got the creepy feeling that they were looking at his corpse. Just as he was about to reach out and shake his father awake, his mother did it herself. His father opened his eyes without startling and began babbling hushed syllables. He lifted his hand slowly to scratch his nose, as if moving through an invisible viscous substance.
Connell’s mother had tried to prepare him for how much his father had deteriorated since summer. When they transferred his father to the wheelchair, his father couldn’t push himself up off the bed without help.
After his father was in the chair, Connell watched his knee for some vestige of the gesture that had bound them over the years. It had begun when he was young, when his father would throw his arms around him and declare, “What a good boy I have here.” Early on in the illness, whenever Connell hugged him, his father squeezed back and said simply, “Good boy.” When his father began to lose his strength, the squeezes turned to pats; when he lost his coordination, the pats became pounding slaps. “Just rub,” Connell said once, as they clutched. “Rub. Now just keep your hands still for a second, like this.” Then his father started to slur his words, so that all he could say clearly was “Good, good, good,” and then eventually that “good” gave way to an inarticulate sound—but Connell knew what it meant, even if no one else could have interpreted it. Then Connell would lean down to initiate a hug, and his father would reach up from the couch, until eventually his father didn’t reach up anymore but just patted his own knee. The final stage came when Connell noticed that his father patted his knee whenever Connell was even in the room. Now, though, in the wheelchair, he didn’t move at all.
Connell wheeled him to the big picture window that looked out on the lawn. Remnant clusters of white from a recent snowfall dotted the landscape. It was too cold to take him out on the veranda. His mother had not mentioned the possibility of taking him home for Christmas, and seeing his condition, he knew why. He was undaunted, though. He would lift his father up into the car and carry him up the stairs and give his mother a little of her life back for a day.
They had brought a couple of presents, which they opened for him. The muted quality to the exchange, the way it was over in less than two minutes, made it feel as if they had come empty-handed. His mother had had them dress his father for the occasion, in the gray knit sweater he liked to wear on Christmas, with the band of snowflakes around the middle, and a collared shirt and dress slacks, but it looked like the outfit of a much larger man had been put on him by accident. Connell hadn’t had the buffer of incremental change to reduce the shock of seeing him swimming in it.
His mother was uncharacteristically quiet, and Connell chattered until the engine of his monologue ran down and they gazed out at the leaves getting whipped up in the wind and sent swirling around the grounds.
Kacey, the social director, came by with the tropical bird on her arm. “Look, Mr. Leary,” she said. “Calypsa wants to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday!” The parrot wore a miniature Santa suit with a black belt, and a red felt hat with a pom-pom on top. It did a little shimmying dance. Connell couldn’t help bursting into laughter. Maybe that’s the point of dressing it up that way, he thought. Maybe there’s a method in her madness. His mother barely raised her eyes to acknowledge either woman or parrot, and after holding the bird for a bit, Connell decided he had to get her out of there before her mood darkened any further. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s a lot left to do.” He wheeled his father back to his room. When they reached the car, he told his mother he had to run to the bathroom, and he went back in and told the desk attendant of his plan to return that evening and pick his father up. She checked to see if he was on the sign-out list.
“It’s not a problem,” she said, as she closed his father’s binder. “I have to remind you that he is your responsibility once you’ve signed him out.”
“I got it,” Connell said as casually as possible, failing to hide the tremor in his voice.
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He would have to wait for the right moment to leave. His mother would be leaning on him for help. She had outdone herself this year: new strings of lights, new boxes of ornaments, a second crèche, a new star for the tree, expensive-looking wreaths.
A different level of intensity attended this year’s preparations. While Sergei did a last-minute grocery run, Connell hauled the last boxes down from the attic. He added a final platoon to the small army of Santa Clauses, wooden soldiers, and snowmen that already occupied the first floor. Artificial holly hung from every wall, bedecked by bows, with wreaths affixed to every door. The tree was heavy with ornaments, strings of lights, and tinsel clumped thick as cooked spinach. Rivulets of lights ran along the fireplace and the baseboard molding, around the doorframes, up the banister. Plugged-in candles sat on end tables and the breakfront, and illuminated manger scenes fought for space with ceramic Christmas trees. Everything seemed to have a light in it or on it or behind it. Somehow, despite the overwhelming number of individual pieces, the house still felt underdecorated once everything was plugged in and turned on, as if the dark spaces were more apparent than the lit ones.
The amount of food in the kitchen suggested a team of cooks and not a single determined individual. Plates, pots, and pans took up every countertop and the island. The dining room table, at full extension with all its leaves in, was covered in white lace atop red linen. A smaller table pushed against it spilled into the living room. Drummer-boy napkin holders topped the place settings. Even on that sprawling surface, there wasn’t much room to set a drink down.
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The guests started arriving, and Connell carried their coats down to the rack in the basement. They amassed in the kitchen, mugs of eggnog in their hands, glasses of wine, cheese cubes, butter cookies, chocolate truffles, nuts from bowls, Swedish meatballs on toothpick spears, crackers plucked from dwindling rows, boughs of grapes snapped off a larger bunch, chips dunked in chunky dips, bread wedges spread with baked brie, gourmet pigs in handmade blankets, slices of cured imported meat—the orchestral tune-up for the symphony to follow. There would be leftovers for a week.
He watched his mother slide through the kitchen to kid Tom about saving room for dinner, as she cleared plates of toothpicks and crumbs and swept back into conversation with Marie. She was her best self at parties. She had a gift for putting people at ease. She always said she’d have made a first-rate diplomat or politician, but Connell knew she’d have been content with his becoming one in her place.
Incandescence and bodies combined to heat the den quickly. He opened the patio door, but it brought a violent chill into the room, and he had to close it again. The living room’s wing chairs, folding chairs, and couch were packed with people balancing plates of appetizers on their knees. By the bar in the atrium, Jack Coakley and a man from up the block had planted themselves, guests weaving between them to refresh their drinks. The door to the front porch was cracked for air. Connell opened it fully and saw the team of wooden reindeer Jack had made one year in his garage workshop, and the lights that fringed the fence and lined the walkway and festooned the shrubs.
He went outside, closing the door behind him, and unplugged a strand of lights, throwing the right side of the house into darkness. He went back inside and told his mother that a light string was broken and that he was going to the store for a replacement. He knew that she wouldn’t be able to tolerate such a prominent blemish on the evening’s perfection. He got in the car and headed for the nursing home, pausing in front of the house to look at the dark patch he had created there. He could see her point in worrying over details like this, because it filled him with a vague foreboding to look at it. He found a Christmas radio station and set off into the rapidly darkening evening.