For Love (44 page)

Jessica. The service. Lottie was surprised when the preacher read the lines about man passing away, the place thereof knowing him no more. Why would he speak such lines? she had wondered. Such
cruel lines. Of course, she knows that it was to emphasize how ephemeral earthly life is, the difference between everything mortal and everything connected to God. But to read this to a grieving
mother! Dorothea Laver’s voice sounds in her head, calm, slow, full of apology.

Maybe in grief you want such lines, though, maybe you cherish the absoluteness of loss, the sense of your own pain as the only connection left. Wasn’t that really what Dorothea Laver had
called Cam for? For Jessica’s last words, if there were any, yes. But also for the confirmation. She wanted him to say, I was there and I saw she was dead. She is dead. Over and over.
She
is dead
.
She has died
. The paradox that as long as we still feel the pain of that, as long as we’re able to lacerate ourselves with the fact of loss, we still feel some connetion.
When the pain fades, so, finally, does the person. And the real loss, which begins exactly then, isn’t felt anymore. A betrayal. The way things are, and must be.

Jack had never had that with Evelyn, of course. She was dead, she had died, but the place thereof continued to know her. A version of her. He had told Lottie that the first stroke eliminated a
lot of short-term memory and, for a while, speech and her ability to walk. But as she began to recover some of that and they began to be hopeful, he realized that a whole layer of her personality
had disappeared. She knew him, she knew the children, but she was childlike, her judgments and responses were shallow. He said that he felt enraged at her stupidity sometimes during that period, at
her impulsiveness. And it was during this time too – almost a year and half – that he most wished she’d died.

After the second stroke, she was so reduced that he could only feel pity, sorrow. And he finally learned to feel love for the person she had become.

And now his pain. Now that Lottie has learned to feel love.

She thinks of the weekend he spent in Boston, of how unwilling she was to hear about his pain, to talk about it. She makes herself go carefully over the details of their time together, of their
lovemaking, their fight. Her face, in the light of dashboard instruments, moves constantly – winces, frowns, is agonized – as the images play through her mind. She makes little noises
and finally, hearing this, stops herself.

This is it – her finger points at the dark road ahead: she couldn’t bear to be at the mercy of his feelings anymore, of his sorrow. In her experience, she realizes, either
you’re in control or you’re at the mercy of someone else, you’re lost. She had felt that, a kind of living death, with Derek. Somehow he set the terms – because Lottie had
still been Char Reed when she met him. Because she was trying to get to be who he was, trying to get to be like him. Low self-esteem, no doubt about it.

Now, suddenly, she sees, she feels, that it is this same Char Reed she has been dragging after herself all along, even into her marriage with Jack. Even now, driving back to him. She has felt
changed, over and over in her life. She has marked the changes: Char to Charlotte to Lottie. Char Reed to Lottie Gardner. She has reinvented herself once, twice, three or four times, shed the past
like a snake shedding a useless papery skin.
Rebirthed
herself. She smiles grimly in the upward light of the dash. Didn’t she and Cam talk once about that very thing?

She has felt the old lives fall away: her mother, the enclosing house, Derek and her struggle to catch up. Like shedding lovers, Al and Derek and Avery and all the others. She has seen herself
as a different person each time, spinning free into the false promise of a clean slate, a fresh start. She hasn’t been willing to acknowledge the refining of a self that has never changed,
that has been there through all the choosing, the grabbing, the discarding: the needy, frightened girl who chooses quickly and quickly throws things away, because she cannot bear to be chosen. To
be discarded.

Even now. Even this trip, this romantic gesture, this
gift
she is making of herself: isn’t it, really, another way of setting the terms, of insisting on a shape?

This is what Lottie is thinking.

But this isn’t what Lottie is thinking either. Because one clear thought passes into an opposite and equally clear thought. The contradictions pile up. She is tired, she is in pain. There
is just a jumble, finally. The sense of false understanding, of confusion and vulnerability at the core; all of it driven by the steady and growing pain from her tooth.

She’s in Ohio now. She’ll need some gas soon. Her headlights sweep an exit sign with the symbol of a motel on it – a bed. She begins to signal. A bed. This is what she needs.
She’ll take a whole Percocet and stop this pain. She’ll sleep, she’ll wake free of pain to a new day, a new start. The end of these morbid thoughts.

There are two motels to choose from, but Lottie is suddenly so tired, so hungry for the pill she imagines will release her, that she pulls, without thinking of comparing them, into the one on
her side of the road. It’s a Day’s Inn, like a dozen she’s checked into before, all of it familiar: the shape of the plastic key holder in her hand, the cheesy chandelier in the
lobby, the drive around to the unlighted parking lot at the back, the sudden sense of country air as you step out of the car. The same concrete staircase to the same balcony girdled by the same
spare, wrought-iron rail.

In the bathroom under the fluorescent light, she fumbles in her pocketbook, finds a whole Percocet, and takes it. She checks to see how many are left. One and almost a half. She washes her face.
She comes out into the room and tries the television, sitting on the foot of the bed to change stations. There’s only snow and noise. She peels back the covers and lies down. She holds
herself, making a gentle mewing, rocking from side to side. As soon as she feels the Percocet start to work, she turns the light off.

Pain wakes her, a solid pressure, no longer throbbing. It owns her before she remembers where she is, what she’s doing or why. She touches the tooth with her tongue. The gum below
responds. She can feel that it is swollen, hard. She moans aloud.

When she slides the curtain back, the sky is a pale, dirty gray. In its watery light, she squints at her watch. Four-thirty. She goes to the bathroom and uses the toilet. She rinses her mouth
with water that tastes wrong, that tastes of iron, Lottie thinks, or some other mineral. She takes a No Doz and another half of a Percocet. Her face is starting to swell along the jawline, but even
so she can’t believe how little it has changed. She looks tired, older, puffy, but you can’t see the vise of pain her head is gripped in. She drinks another glass of water, warm this
time, hoping this will dissolve the pills faster. She imagines them floating in her stomach, a little white circle and an approximate half circle. She is trying very hard to imagine anything but
the pain. She shrugs her sweater around her shoulders, slides into her sandals, grabs her purse, her car keys. At the door she looks around. Nothing else is hers. There’s no sign of her
having been here except for the rumpled bed.

The air outside smells fresh, and Lottie stops for a moment on the long balcony. She’s looking over the parking lot to a line of trees, black against the whiter sky. She recalls the
freshness of the sea air outside her mother’s nursing home, the abundance of floral odors inside. Manufactured air. She thinks of her mother, of her own feeling that perhaps she could call
forth from that leftover husk something that was meant for herself, some sense of what she’d meant to the woman who once lived inside those bones, that flesh. Of who she’d been to her.
Apparently, she thinks, you will have to live without that knowledge.

She starts the car and drives to the gas station next door. While the attendant fills the tank, she goes inside and buys some coffee from a machine in a lobby not unlike the one in Pennsylvania.
There’s no one else in the restaurant. The dining room here is closed, corded off. A lone worker, wearing a jaunty uniform hat, is moving behind the aluminum steam counter, setting things
up.

The sky is a lighter gray when she comes out. She pulls back on to the local road, then the access road, then the highway. She opens the coffee and sips at it. It’s too hot. She sets it
carefully on the flat console between the two front seats. After a while she tries the radio again. Anything to escape the sense of enclosure with this pain. There is a lot of silence, a lot of
fierce static. She finally gets a country music station and turns it up, loud.

She tries to sing along, guessing at the rhymes. She’s bad at this, never imagining ‘hand’ and ‘ring,’ for instance, would work. But she concentrates hard,
listening intently, visualizing the singers. She’s able to drink the coffee after a while. She holds it in her mouth briefly before each swallow, and its warmth soothes her swollen gum for a
few seconds. The sky slowly lightens behind her, a gassy yellow. She looks at the speedometer. She’s going almost eighty. She brings it back down to seventy-five. When the country music
finally fades, she jumps stations for a while again. She’s driving through flat gray terrain – fields, farmhouses. Here and there she passes a farmhouse with breakfast lights glowing in
a downstairs window.

She’s hungry too. She finds the candy bar in her purse and breaks off a piece. She chews gingerly on the left side of her mouth, finally allowing a sugary nugget just to dissolve slowly.
When it’s gone, she breaks off another piece.

Gradually all that’s been grayish in the world around her takes on color – green, mostly – and the sky is bright in the rearview mirror. The sun bursts over the horizon behind
her. She’s humming steadily. When she can’t stand it anymore, she eats another half a Percocet. She has one half left now. It is six-fifteen.

She tries to force her mind to focus on something outside herself. She thinks of Carol, giving her the pills. A nice woman. Of Ryan with the baby. The sudden sense it gave her of being pushed
aside. The way it will be. Taking her place in line.

Lottie has escaped this. Escaped thinking about it. Even with the cancer, she never allowed herself to dwell on it. She made plans, she exercised. She swore she wouldn’t die.

She and Cam have escaped it.

No, not Cam. He said – it’s true he said – that he, like her, had mothered himself; but he has also somehow been able to care for their mother. He remembers their father. He
lies to himself about where he is, but he has known very well all along where he came from, where he’s going. Lottie is the one who thinks of herself as
sui generis
, her own mother.
And even her own child: hasn’t she used Ryan’s childhood as her own? Lottie the paramecium. Divide and conquer. Be there, in every generation. ‘Immortal Lottie.’ She smiles
grimly through the very mortal pain in her skull.

The dead girl. The accident. Jessica.

It is Jessica, it is Jessica and Cameron and even Elizabeth who have brought her here, to this place, this moment. She feels, suddenly, that she owes them something, something she can’t
repay.

And now, in a strange kind of penance, Lottie makes herself think of exactly how it was, the car turning into the driveway in the rain. Jessica – drunk, pretty Jessica – stepping
forward. She makes herself imagine Cam, thinking only of Elizabeth, only her, on the drive over,
how certain he must have been that he could get control again, that he could win her back
.
How lost in that thought.

She even makes herself imagine Elizabeth, where she would have been, phoning Cam, how she would have felt. She thinks of Larry and Emily and the children somewhere else in the house, Elizabeth
hearing them, Elizabeth wanting to be safely with them again. Elizabeth choosing Jessica as the way to get what she wanted.

And Jessica, so eager to help, to be part of it. Jessica waiting outside for Cam to come. Lottie sees it, she makes herself see it all: Jessica on the dark lawn, the headlights, the girl lifted
up, falling back. Lottie’s hands gripping the wheel jerk convulsively; she cries out and hits the horn by mistake. Its honking sounds faint, distant, under the noise of the rushing car, and
Lottie presses it now, again and again, thinking of Cam, of Jessica; thinking of herself and Jack and Evelyn and Ryan.

When she stops, her heart is racing, her tooth is pulsing agonizingly to its beat. The fertile green fields roll by outside, and she listens to her own ragged breathing and wipes the tears that
are sliding down her cheeks. She can’t tell, anymore, why she’s crying: grief, pain, exhaustion, the otherworldiness of the drug state she’s in, her fear of what’s to come.
Whatever. She’s undone by it, by all of it.

She needs to blow her nose too, and has nothing to do it with. Absurdly, this adds to her sorrow. Sniffling, wiping at her face with her bare hands, she drives on and on, with the sun rising
slowly behind her in the east, flooding the world around her with pale light.

Lottie does return, as she left, to an oldies station. It’s all she can get in Indiana, and she leaves it on as she passes the steel mills, then as she descends into the
city, crosses it – long after the point when the music and lyrics are swallowed by static; because she can’t hear it anymore: she’s lost in her pain. In Indiana she had actually
pulled off the road, stopped the car and bent over, desperately feeling on the floor and under the seat, under both seats, for the little bit of Percocet that had broken off when she bit it the
evening before.

In the city, instead of going home, she drives directly to her dentist’s office on the near North Side. There are two people reading magazines in the waiting room, two people who look up
as Lottie comes in, and then, startled, keep looking at her – at her rumpled, slept-in clothes, at her smeared, swollen face, at her halting walk, the result of stiffness after the long
drive.

When she opens her mouth to explain herself to the receptionist, she begins to weep, and this works better than anything else could have. The receptionist, a Wagnerian blonde who has –
today as always in Lottie’s experience – an impeccable thick mask of makeup on, rises magnificently from her desk, comes around to Lottie, and engulfs her. She sweeps her directly into
an exam room. Within less than a minute the dentist is there. Lottie opens her mouth and points. He reaches in with several instruments and adds to her agony momentarily. She groans, screeches, and
then, with a searing jolt, the filling is off. Her mouth fills instantly with salty fluid. She is crying still, but in such relief, such happiness!