Who Is Rich?

The little store with rainbow flags had run out of ice. I saw the time on the clock tower above town hall. What had the nurse meant by an hour? An hour from when? I ran to the gas station by the highway, and ran back through the crowds on Main Street with the bags of ice swinging. I’d hoped I could get away for a few days and everything would be okay. I’d thought that at the very least, they’d be safe. I pictured Kaya screaming, falling into the pit, holding on tight.

When I got back, the lidocaine had worn off. I saw Amy arch, her head crowning against the pillow, her mouth open, teeth bared, no sound coming out. She hadn’t been able to open the bottle of pills one-handed. She made a noise, a jagged, improvised yowl. I ripped open the bottle, and pills went all over the floor. I accidentally stepped on one and smashed it, picked up another and handed it to her.

They’d put me on OxyContin when I had my wisdom teeth out. I gave it my full endorsement, hoping to calm her, or me: “You’re going to be okay.” I thought the pain would level off, but after a while she got into something only a great martyr could access. I held a tissue while she blew her nose.

“Hang in there, kid.” We really were being punished. Her agony was somehow a relief. One or two of the bedrooms in her suite looked empty and unused, and the others were vacant but had clothing on the floor. Her forehead was smooth and hard and I touched it and felt that numbness again, witnessing her pain. I couldn’t help her, couldn’t control myself, couldn’t catch Kaya when she fell, couldn’t protect them. When the painkiller didn’t seem to be working, I dug out another from the amber vial and handed it to her. She threw it down with the water I’d brought from the bathroom in a paper cup. There’d been six pills, counting the one I’d crushed into the floor. Now there were three.

I had to get out of there and call home. I wanted photos of Kaya’s injuries and eyewitness accounts. After I finished off Brett, I’d use the baseball bat on Curtis for renovating his house. They’d talked about tearing it down but had decided instead to blow out the rear, then beat the height restriction by raising their yard. I had to get back down Main Street to terrorize a certain jewelry store clerk, then hurry to the Barn to look through my notes to get ready for class in the morning. I had to manage my students’ egos and frustrations. I had to care. I had to get paid before Robin saw our bank balance, had to get home before she killed my kids. I needed to start on that painting of Chinese factory workers, and call Adam, and then make the Romney drawing in ink and scan it and send it in. Long days waited for me back home, parenting, bandages, differences of opinion, scrambled meals and bedtime sorrows, my sleep carved up by sobs and howling shrieks, and long nights hammering my work into an art director’s half-baked, mystifying demands, micromanaged by an erratic twenty-six-year-old publisher who’d never worked at a magazine before he’d bought one. I felt myself fighting against all that rope as the noose cinched itself down. I had to shower and change and get to that fundraiser. Carl, our boss, didn’t like those things any more than the rest of us, but the least we could do was go and kiss some donor’s ass. If you blew off parties or came late or acted less than thrilled to be there, he made note of it and didn’t hire you back. It was part of the job of the conference, the conference as one of the last remaining perks from the good old days, and I couldn’t bear to lose it.

She rolled her head from side to side, grimacing. She asked me to take out her earrings. “Deep breaths,” I said, leaning across her face, touching the sun-damaged creases on her neck. I fixed the pillow. Her eyes went wild.

“Why did you come to the hospital?”

“I was worried about you.”

“Bullshit. You walked by accidentally.”

“What the fuck. I thought you wanted me to leave you alone. You stopped talking to me for four months.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing here?” She started sobbing again. “I came back for you. I wore my cigarette pants to dinner last night for you, I didn’t see you anywhere, I had to sit with some old lady and talk about the barbecue sauce!” But I’d looked for her too, and looked for her again at breakfast. “I can’t stand it!” She said something about Mike in Frankfurt, gasping in a shaky voice. “I can’t live this way anymore. I can’t be alone all the time and then treated like shit.”

I had the creeping awareness that since March I’d secretly wished her ill, imagined some degrading payback for how she’d boxed me out, for everything, the incidental bragging, about her luncheon with Sting’s wife, Trudie, how she got trapped inside a ball gown alone at home and had to cut herself out with a bread knife, but this display of misery had already exceeded my fantasies of revenge. Her eyes had sunk into her head, her skin was greenish and sliding off the plates of her skull.

“?‘Mommy, are you sad you married Daddy? Does he wish he had no children? Does he hate us?’ Emily asks me that now. It’s so horrible.” He hadn’t made one piano recital this year, no soccer games, swim meets, parents night, nothing. He missed the birth of their youngest kid, plain forgot and went golfing. Didn’t have a single question for Lily’s surgeons. “They’re going in there to save our kid’s life with an experimental procedure and he couldn’t take his head out of the bag”—“the bag” being a derogatory term for the soft briefcase he carried with him, even on canoeing trips, filled with balance sheets for upcoming deals. “I asked the questions! I made the call!” The memory of it seemed more painful than the arm. I took out a third pill in case it got worse, and held it in my sweaty fingers as the coating came off and the thing turned gummy in my hand. “Every night of my life I have to read until I’m unconscious, or else I lie there and worry that I’ll die, and all they’ll have left is him.”

“You’re not dying.”

“He’ll hire some pole dancer to raise them. Maybe she’ll let him stick it up her ass.”

“It’s okay.”

“One day you’ll hear I’m dead, and you’ll be sad but you’ll be happy, too!”

“No I won’t.”

“You never knew how much you mattered to me.”

“You mattered to me, too.”

Between gasps, her breathing quieted. I touched her forehead with the palm of my hand and promised she’d be home soon, and rubbed the decomposing pill in my other hand. She calmed down and rolled onto her side, and made a soft, hoarse, muffled whimper, like an infant fighting a nap. There was no way to get the bracelet off her now.

Matthew Klam's books