He turned and propped himself up on his elbow, head in palm. “He’s just hitting the ball off the tee. Imagine how good that must feel. God, after all these months. Just imagine.”
This was Mark, always wanting to return to the way things had been before. Everything fixable. Nothing ever truly out of reach. Everything open to regain, renew, restore. There was a card game they’d played all the time when the kids were younger—she couldn’t recall the name—in which the rules changed frequently, but every so often you drew a card that said, “Throw out all new rules. Return to basic rules.” Mark was always so relieved to get that card. The kids loved the new rules, but he’d play that card the second he got it. Return to basic rules. And here he was, back at his basic rules: 5:55, ping-beat-beat-beat-ping.
“This is bad,” she said. “It’s—”
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please. Don’t do what you’re—”
“How can you not see that this is bad?”
He sat up. “For Christ sakes, he’s been lying on the couch for six months and finally he—”
“It’s because he wants to play. He thinks he can just rejoin the team. He thinks he—”
“First,” he said, pointing his finger a little too close to her face—she was still lying down—“you don’t know that. And second, what if he does? Who’s to say he can’t?”
She pushed his hand out of her way and sat up. “The doctor,” she said. “Remember? The eye doctor? The expert?”
“He didn’t say he couldn’t play. He never said that he could not play. He said he wouldn’t be able to hit a ball. But listen! Listen! He’s hitting a ball.”
“Off a tee,” she said. “Let’s not get carried away.”
“Oh no,” Mark said. He flipped the covers off and got out of bed. “That’s the last thing we’d want to do, isn’t it? We definitely wouldn’t want to get carried away. We definitely wouldn’t want him to get off the goddamn couch and start thinking maybe he could have his life back. Wouldn’t want that. Oh no.”
“That’s not—”
“He hits twenty balls off the tee and you’ve already lived through the disappointment of the next year, mapped it all—”
“I’m not. I’m—”
“I can see it in your face. You’ve planned it out already, for all of us, stop by stop, every dashed hope along the road. Whoosh, seen it all. No need to live it. Just shut it down right now, close up shop. Why not? You already know what’s coming.”
“You’re screaming at me,” she said. “You are screaming at me. Meredith can hear—”
“Meredith can’t hear anything,” he spat from across the bed. “She’s hardly even looked at me for two weeks. She’s so far away from us I don’t even know how we can still see her. But he”—he nodded in the direction of the ping—“he’s coming back. Don’t you dare screw that up.”
She wanted to hit him. She imagined getting out of bed and walking over to him and punching him in the face, and when that was not enough she imagined picking up the alarm clock and smashing him over the head with it. “Don’t you dare screw that up.” There was no way to read that other than the way it was so obviously intended, the accusation that screwing things up was always what she did, that only due to the emergency intervention of others was she able to not screw up every single thing she touched.
“You’re being horrible to me,” she said, her voice shaking in a way she absolutely despised, a pathetic, wronged-housewife whine.
“Well, I’m sick of it,” he said. “I get to be horrible. Maybe for like a month, okay? I get to be horrible for one fricking month. I’m sick of being the nice one. I want my children back. I want my children.”
“Your children are gone,” she said. She swung her legs out of bed and spoke with her back to him. “They’re gone. They grew up. Accept it. Things happened to them. Terrible things. And now they’re gone. And they’re not coming back.”
“They’re still here, Claire,” he said. She couldn’t see him but she knew the expression on his face. He had faith in what he loved. His face always said so, in a boyish, earnest way. It was part of what everyone who barely knew him adored about him. “Believe it or not,” he said. “Like it or not. They are still in this house.”
“Barely,” she said, scoffing. It was an ugly sound, uglier than she thought she was capable of, made even uglier by its juxtaposition with his conviction.
“They are still. In. This house,” he said again. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door.
?
One thing he’d said was true, the thing about Meredith. Something had happened to her that night, the night she’d said the mysterious thing to Evan: “There’s no dog.” Meredith had vanished in a way that Claire could not specify. She was going to school. She was doing her homework. She talked on the phone. She ate and slept and showered. But there was something essential missing, some profoundly blank space.
Several years ago, before the tolerant cat and the intolerant cat, they’d owned a cat that had absolutely no interest in them, in a way that far surpassed the normal, expected indifference of cats. The cat actually did not seem to understand that there were other sentient beings living in the house. It became a great family joke, just how aloof this cat could be. The children became desperate to befriend it, not because they especially loved it, but because they wanted to defeat its indifference. The cat walked across their feet while they stood in the hallway, walked across their bodies on the couch as if they were merely part of the furniture, material objects to be crossed or scaled. One day after they’d had him a year or so, the cat walked down the long backyard—Claire saw it go from the kitchen window—and never returned, and the children never missed the cat because he’d never really been their cat to begin with.
Meredith walked around the house like that cat. It was like she couldn’t even see them. Or when she did see them, what she saw was something else.
But maybe that was just what happened to you when something happened to you. Meredith had been to two appointments with the psychiatrist in the last ten days, and each time, after fifty minutes with Meredith, Dr. Moon had sent her back to the waiting room and called Claire and Mark into the office and without inviting them to sit down told them the same thing he’d told Claire over the phone:
“She’s processing. Still processing. Be patient. It’s a process.”
So maybe all there was to do was to wait and see if Meredith wanted to say something. Say anything. Processing was a process, yes. You couldn’t expect things to get better overnight. You had to be patient, like Dr. Moon said. Maybe all there was to do was stand back and wait for the processing to be complete, the way you waited for X-rays to develop, for the images to rise out of the black pool. It had always been so satisfying for Claire, that moment, her instincts confirmed: Yes—yes! There was the problem, the damaged root. And now that the problem has been revealed, the solution must surely be at hand. But there was no rushing the image. To rush, in fact, was to ruin.