Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Page 20

  We enjoyed a few hours of innocent fun going over the falls and dunking each other under the water, before taking a break on the flat rocks that overlooked the pool so we could feel the droplets tingle as they turned to vapor on our skin. During those hours, the last unspoiled hours of our lives, I’d dared Ethan to jump from the highest cliff, something he hadn’t ever worked up the nerve to do before and might actually be able to steel himself to attempt some visit soon. I’d splashed Jean in the face and endured her promises to go running to Mom. I’d endured the inevitable payback in the form of the fistful of mud she’d mined from the pond bottom. We teased and played and pretended that time wasn’t passing at all as the sun rose high in the sky and started to sink again, changing only the pattern of the light that shone like diamonds on the rippled surface.

  Many years later, I think about the first part of the day and reflect that if the bad thing hadn’t come along to ruin it we would now remember it as one of the perfect, transcendent moments of our lives; one of those days that we all keep as permanent snapshots in our heads, when we define what was best about our childhoods.

  But then the bad thing did happen, and form a snapshot of a different kind.

  I remember having nothing in mind but scaring Ethan silly with a cannonball landing, right next to where he paddled around in circles, wondering where I had gone. Grinning, I shouted Geronimo and leaped off the rocks twenty feet above him, striking the water with the kind of concussive force that made the impact feel less like a splash and more like an explosion. The bubbles rose all around me, like a fleet of spaceships taking flight. I hit the soft ooze at the bottom and pushed off, grinning, happy, in what I now recognize as the last uncomplicated moment of my youth.

  I broke surface just behind Ethan, with a fine view of the back of his head. Jean was screaming. I didn’t know right away that this meant anything was wrong, as shrieking girls are just part of the fun of horseplay in water. But when I tracked the sound to Jean, who was paddling around in the water twenty strokes beyond Ethan, nothing in her face testified to play; she was pale, and wide-eyed, her lips peeled back as far as they would go in a grimace of horrified denial.

  My first thought was that I’d just scared her more than I’d intended to scare Ethan. My second, more serious, was that some kind of animal had bitten her underwater and that I’d catch hell from Mom for not being sufficiently watchful.

  Then she screamed, “It’s Ethan!”

  The back of Ethan’s head looked the same as it had always looked. It looked like the back of any little kid’s head, jug ears and all. I figured it couldn’t be too bad, since he was still treading water just fine, but Jean was still screaming, so I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward me.

  The only warning I had that I would not be seeing a human face where his should have been was a sudden shift of the bone where my palm touched his shoulder. It felt like the bulge of a rat scurrying around underneath a throw rug. It flattened and became something other than a shoulder just before Ethan completed his turn and blinked at me through the one eye that remained recognizable, an eye that had somehow migrated socket and all further down his cheek, and now blinked at me from the vicinity of his lips. That eye begged me for explanation. Then the skin on both sides of that eye rose up and swallowed it whole beneath a curtain of bubbling flesh.

  I was away at University when word arrived that Ethan had taken a turn for the worse and that I needed to hurry home right away.

  That was a hell of a way to put it. The phrase “taking a turn for the worse” implies that the state before it could be somehow counted as better. With Ethan, all developments were bad; some were worse than others, but every day brought a fresh nadir, a brand new visit to countries more terrible.

  This was cram week, so it took me the better part of a morning negotiating with various academic offices before I could get a hardship leave that would allow me to postpone finals without flunking out or taking incompletes. I made sandwiches before I left, borrowed a junker from a friend in the dorm, and made it home in just over twenty hours, feeling like a failure as a brother whenever I had to stop to stretch my legs or fill up the gas tank or even take a shit. On the way back I got regular updates by cell phone. Ethan was awake and coherent now; he was asking for me. Then he was insane and ripping holes in the walls. Then he was flat on his back and gasping for air, unable to take in enough to feel anything but slow strangulation. Then he was expected to be dead within the hour. Then he was dead. Then he was alive again (or rather still, the half hour he’d spent mistaken as corpse now explained away as an understandable mistake, given that he’d been something nobody could bear to think of as alive).

  Twenty hours, and then I pulled off the highway and into the cookie-cutter template the old neighborhood had become, rows and rows and rows of ugly houses without enough space between them to pass sunlight except as isolated stripes. As always after a long absence, I hated the families in all those houses, for what they’d done to the special place where I’d grown up. My folks might have still had a couple of dozen acres left over from the days when land was cheap, and they’d kept the original homestead inside it as pristine as possible behind stone walls crawling with ivy, but even as I pulled past the automatic gate, what I found past it no longer felt like a homey refuge on the edge of a forest, but rather the last threatened keep protecting itself from invaders who had ruined a once enchanted country.

  It was a much smaller estate than it had been, once upon a time. Mother had been selling off our acreage, both to pay taxes and to support us when all her energies went to Ethan and no other form of income was possible.

  I left the pavement of the hated outside, pulled onto the gravel of the family’s circular drive, and after another minute or so came to a stop behind a small fleet of parked cars clustered at the base of the wraparound porch. Jean, who’d been up all night providing intermittent companionship via cell phone, slammed the screen door and came running to meet me, her waist-length scarlet hair bouncing behind her like a banner. She was hugging me tight even before I was all the way out of the car.

  Her voice broke as our cheeks touched and her tears mingled with mine. “Oh, Lawrence. It’s been so long.”

  I knew she wasn’t talking about the months since my last visit home, but rather of these last days since Ethan started to fail. We’d lost our father to emphysema a couple of years back, and had learned back then what Jean and the rest of the family had been re-learning now; that deathbed vigils have a way of trapping time in amber, turning each passing tick of the clock into another slice of eternity.

  I didn’t have to ask how bad it had been. Life with our afflicted brother had always been bad, but my sister’s beautiful green eyes looked like the last night, alone, had aged her twenty years. “I should have taken a plane.”

  Had I been anybody else, Jean might have said, damn straight you should have taken a plane. But Jean had been with me the one and only time I’d been a passenger on a commercial aircraft, and knew that flying with me was a nightmare. I didn’t take well to enclosed places. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. Most of the time he wouldn’t have known you were here. You’re here for the end, that’s what matters.”

  The screen door slammed again, and Mom appeared. She was tall, slender, an older version of Jean who had aged in the way most beautiful women hope to age, becoming more golden where others just become more lined. Unlike Jean, who had come at a run, Mom came at a measured walk: calm, regal, as measured in every movement as only a woman who had discovered her own iron strength could be. She wore her own long hair, as scarlet as Jean’s without a touch of dye, in a tight wrap behind her head, more for convenience than any aged dignity. Her tight-lipped, tired smile was as warm to me as any embrace. “It’s good to see you, Lawrence. You made good time. I was afraid that you’d have to stop in a motel for a few hours. Do you need to sleep before you see him?”

  “No, I think I had about twenty cups of coffee on the road. I’m a
bout to jump out of my skin. You’re looking good, Mom.”

  “Nice of you to say. But I know I look like hell.”

  This was both true and untrue. Physically, Mom had never come close to looking like what women mean when they say they look like hell. More than once, doing her grocery run in town, she’d been mistaken for Jean’s older sister instead of her mother; more than once, she’d received come-ons from young men who would have been mortified to find out just how old she was; more than once, she had admitted to being lonely enough to want to take them up on their offers, if only for a night of anonymous release. It hadn’t been loyalty to the memory of my father, or fear of our disapproval, that stopped her. It was the tormented presence in the upstairs room, the sense that allowing herself to take pleasure in anything outside the family, while he still lived, amounted to failing him.

  As for the other part, the price taking care of a doomed boy enacts on the mother who loves him—well, in that sense, you could say that my mother looked like the hell she’d been through. She wore every moment of the last ten years on her face, and anybody with an ounce of sensitivity could see it. But again, on her, it didn’t mean what women usually mean when they say they look like hell. Hell hadn’t aged her. Hell had just brought out what she was. Hell became her.

  She put her hands on my shoulders. “Whatever you say, I won’t have you driving yourself to exhaustion. You can bring your bag inside later. You’ll pay your respects to your brother, and then you’ll come downstairs for a hot breakfast, and then you’ll go up to your room and catch some of that sleep you’ve been missing. I won’t take any argument on this. Is that clear?”

  I nodded, and then hugged her. “It’s good to be home.”

  I could see how close she came to contradicting me, to saying that she knew damned sure it wasn’t—as it hadn’t been; being home wouldn’t be good as long as Ethan remained what he was—but she allowed the lie to stand, as she hugged me back and told me, as she told me out loud only in times of great celebration or sorrow, that she loved me.

  There was no point in expending tears now, not with the sight of Ethan still ahead of me, and so I gave her one last squeeze and let her and Jean lead me into the house, where I nodded hello at the gathered forms of my cousins and uncles and aunts, all gathered out of grim sense of family duty for these last hours of the long vigil my mother had endured, almost without rest, for so many years. Then I went to the stairs, putting my hand on the polished banister that Ethan had once used to slide down with giggles, and holding on to it as I ascended toward the attic floor with the locked and soundproofed door that had never been able to cage the sound of splintering bones.

  On the day Ethan changed, Jean had run home to get Mom and Dad while I stayed with him, watching him shift from one terrible shape to another, enduring the sounds his insides made as they fractured and reformed into new configurations. I shooed flies away from the lungs that had burst from his chest, glistening with blood and foaming with fugitive breath. I lied to him about everything going to be okay when his spine contracted like a salted slug and bent him over backwards, with the back of his head melting into the bare skin of his buttocks. I vomited with revulsion, for the first of what turned out to be many times in our relationship, when all his connective tissue dissolved and he became a mound of disembodied organs, pulsing on the rocks where a boy had been, with nothing but a boiling puddle of blood between them to identify them as parts of the same tormented body and not as separate butchered pieces of meat.

  I had thought that nothing in my life could ever be as horrible as that half hour, and had gone away for a little while when Jean returned with our parents and a plastic tub to carry our brother in. I surrendered myself to shock and catatonia as the three of them helped me collect Ethan’s pieces, as we squared him away in an upstairs bathtub, and as we called the family physician, Dr. Zuvicek.

  My ability to form new memories went away for a while. I know what happened intellectually. I suppose you can even say I remember it, in the way one remembers a favorite movie. But in another way it never really happened to me. It never recorded. I can’t really call forth anything else until much later that day, until Dr. Zuvicek trudged down from upstairs to enter a living room still festooned with multi-colored balloons and HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners.

  Zuvicek’s status as our family doctor bore a double meaning, since he was related to us via some arcane spiderweb of genealogy that had always escaped me and frankly always would. I knew little else about him except that he specialized in treating members of our family, and in fact traveled throughout our region to pay house calls on those who had settled in the six closest states. He was broad-shouldered and thick-armed and wore a sculpted red beard with silvery flares at the pointed tips. Today he had pieces of bloody Ethan tissue on his sideburns and glistening patches of worse things on his conservative black suit. He looked colorless, which for him was like being another person, since Zuvicek had always been one of the ruddiest men I’d ever known.

  As he entered the living room, he put his big black bag on the coffee table and faced my sister and myself with a look of almost infinite pity.

  Jean, who was still young enough to seek hope even in hopeless situations, said, “Is he going to be okay?”

  He rubbed at his dark eyes with one gloved hand. He always wore black gloves, even indoors: something to do with a skin condition that made his fingers sensitive. “No.”

  “Is he gonna die?”

  “Yes,” Zuvicek said, with a sharpness that surprised me. “But that’s true of you and me as well. It might happen tonight and it might happen fifty years from now. Your brother, I think he’ll still be with us for another few years yet.”

  I heard in his voice the admission that this would not be good news for us. “But what’s wrong with him, exactly?”

  We heard footsteps on the stairs, and Zuvicek said, “Your father will wish to speak to you on this, I think.”

  Unlike my mother, who would remain youthful even after years of fighting for her damaged son, my father looked like he had aged four decades in as many hours. Ethan’s plight had ripped a hole in his life, one that had already leeched the color from his skin and the spark from his eyes. In the short time he had left, before daily existence in the same house as my damaged brother put him in his grave, he’d age still more, developing a stoop, a lingering wheeze, and a patina of exhaustion that turned every breath he took into a fresh burden he only shouldered out of habit. But on that day, as he came down the stairs, there was still some of the man he’d been left on his bones, and as he lowered himself into the overstuffed armchair that had always been his alone, it seemed less the attitude of a man without strength to stand than that of a father who now had to address his two undamaged children from across a common table.

  Father massaged his temples with forefinger and thumb. “I am sorry. In any other family, you would have been able to live your entire lives without seeing this.”

  “Seeing what?”

  “This . . . curse,” he said, spitting the word as if he would have liked to wrap both his hands against the disease, and strangle the life from it, if he could. Then he heard himself, seemed to realize that anger at the fates would only frighten us, and softened. “This disorder. It is known to our family, from the old country, but it is very, very rare. Most of us have lived entire lifetimes without ever hearing of a case, except in old stories. A distant cousin you have likely never met had a child with the condition, about twenty years ago. Your grandmother, may she rest in peace, once told me it had happened to a grand-uncle of hers, when she was a girl even younger than Ethan is now; and a hundred years before that it happened to some other poor child, whose name and exact relationship to us have been lost to history. Records only go back so far, but it has always been the hidden devil inside us, the one that slept for generations.”

  I had been learning genetics in my science classes. “You’re talking about a recessive trait.”

  My father
looked blank for a moment, as if I’d just tossed a few words of quantum physics into the conversation.

  Zuvicek answered for him. “You are a smart boy. Yes. That is exactly what your father is talking about.”

  “And . . . it only happens to our family? To no one else?”

  “As far as I know,” Zuvicek said. “There are rumored to be other families who suffer something like it. But they may be obscure offshoots of our own. There are, as I say, few records. In the old country, these things were always kept private.”

  Jean shivered and hugged herself, which was not just a fearful gesture, since she had donned her clothes while still wet and had caught a chill running back from the creek. “Why would anybody even want to be part of our family, then? Why would anybody in our family ever have children, if this could happen to us?”

  I saw pain and anger flare in my father’s eyes, reactions he tried to hide by looking away. Years later, I still wonder if that was the moment when death first planted its terrible seed in him. Maybe. It still feels like the moment when it was first planted in me.

  But Zuvicek was patient. “I understand that you are upset. I don’t expect you to take much comfort in this right away, but every family in the world has a history of increased susceptibility to one ailment or another. To compensate, they also all harbor areas of high congenital resistance. In our own family’s case, the childhood cancer rate is much lower than the norm, and the same can be said of our personal incidence of epilepsy, diabetes, and degenerative muscle disease. Nor is that all we have to be thankful for. There are many things we have to worry about less, that are much more important in the scheme of things, than this one ailment that almost never happens.”