MARY AND O'NEIL (11 page)

Back from the hospital, Kay helped him to bed in his little room of boxes, and in the morning O’Neil awoke late to find that Kay and Jack had already left for the day. Balancing on his crutches, O’Neil made coffee and took some more codeine and then paged Joe, who called him back in the early afternoon while O’Neil was watching a soap opera on the sofa, his cast propped on a stack of pillows.

“I just drove by the house,” Joe said, and in the background O’Neil could hear the wash of traffic on the Post Road. “What the hell did you do to the roof?”

“I had an accident,” O’Neil said.

“Those people are going to be royally pissed. Just get over there.”

“Joe, I have a broken leg.”

A pause followed, as O’Neil waited to hear what Joe would next say.

“Okay,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. Tell me, how’s your leg?”

O’Neil held the phone to his leg and rapped the plaster with his knuckles. “You can sign my cast, if you want,” he said. “Also, you owe my sister fifteen hundred dollars for medical expenses.”

“Jesus, O’Neil. Don’t you have any insurance?”

On the television a couple began kissing with their eyes closed. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” said O’Neil.

“Okay, okay. I have to tell them something. What’s the woman’s name? Patty?”

“Patrice. She drove me to the hospital.”

“I always thought she was pretty good looking,” Joe said, thinking aloud.

“Try telling her you’re going to paint her house.”

O’Neil passed the afternoon watching television and napping, and keeping off the leg, which had begun to hum with pain, like a low-bandwidth radio signal. He believed that Joe would call back eventually and try to settle the situation. He had never met anybody like Joe, who spoke about his native country with a rhapsodic patriotism that was like nothing O’Neil had experienced in his life. “People think Canada is cold,” Joe liked to say, “but it’s the warmth of the people that makes it special.” O’Neil had serious questions about Joe’s business practices—he underpaid all his workers so badly that almost no one stayed, and he seemed to be taking deposits on houses he couldn’t paint in a million years—and yet O’Neil liked to think that his loyalty, doing an awful job nobody else wanted, would count for something in the end. But Joe did not call back, and as the afternoon wore on, it occurred to O’Neil that this silence might be permanent.

After dinner, when Kay and Jack had left him to catch an early movie, O’Neil put two pills in his shirt pocket and swung on his crutches out to the patio, a concrete slab attached to the back of the house that Kay and Jack had dressed up with plastic furniture and potted marigolds. O’Neil arranged himself in a chair and washed the pills down with a can of Coors, and waited for the codeine to kick in. The day was nearly gone, and the last of the light seemed to pour into the shadows like water down a drain. His body had always been highly responsive to medication of any sort, and this was true of the codeine, which made him feel like hammered tin. At times like this, O’Neil sometimes thought of Sandra, the last girl he had loved. They had broken up just a few months after his parents’ accident—with so much on his mind, O’Neil had simply drifted away—and though they had managed to remain friends for the rest of their time at college, O’Neil often felt a stab of longing for her, and the way she had made him feel: more alive somehow, as if his life were an open door he had only to step through. The summer after graduation, Sandra had ridden her bicycle across the country, raising money for hunger relief; now she was in California, a medical student at Stanford planning a career in pediatric oncology, while O’Neil was painting houses and living in a storage room. He would have liked to call her, but what was there to say? On top of everything, Joe owed him two weeks’ pay, and O’Neil had begun to wonder if he would ever see it, let alone the fifteen hundred for his broken leg. If his parents had still been around, he would have asked them what to do. For some time after they had died, when he was alone and feeling lost, O’Neil would speak to them, asking them questions about his life. Should I drop calculus? Should I buy a car? He has never told anyone about this, not even Kay, though secretly he believed she did the same thing.

Now, five years later on his sister’s patio, O’Neil found that his memory of his parents, their incorporeal vividness, had receded. He could no longer hear their voices, or even imagine what they might say to him. When he closed his eyes he could still conjure their faces, but these images were static, like photographs. Sitting in the dark on Kay’s patio, he understood that’s just what they were—memories of pictures, nothing more. It wasn’t just the codeine, O’Neil thought. They had left him alone.

The accident that killed their parents happened on a trip they had taken to visit O’Neil at college, the fall of his sophomore year. His parents had driven up for parents’ weekend, and on the way home, in a snowstorm, their car went off the road and fell a hundred feet into a river gorge. All of this would have been clear enough—a skid on a wet road in failing light—if not for the fact that they had left the college at noon and crashed their car six hours later, on the wrong road entirely, having driven only thirty miles. Where had they spent the intervening hours? Their mother had telephoned Kay at four-thirty, but not said where she was. The stretch of road between the campus and the ravine where their car was found was empty: no towns at all, and no reason to stop. Sleeping in the college library, O’Neil had awakened at five to see, out the window, the first dry flakes falling; by midnight nearly a foot of snow was on the ground, and he had learned that his parents were dead. Identifying the bodies was a job that should have been O’Neil’s—he was, after all, right there—but in the end he could not face this; he waited for Kay and Jack to drive up from New Haven and stood outside the police station in the snowy cold while they saw to this task. Then the three of them drove on to Glenn’s Mills, the upstate New York town where O’Neil and his sister had grown up, to wait for the bodies to follow them for burial.

O’Neil arranged to take incompletes in all his courses and was planning to stay on at their parents’ house until school started again in January, when Kay would return to New Haven and they would put the house up for sale. Though some might have thought this a morbid scene, a pair of orphans moping around the house, in fact the weeks following their parents’ death passed quickly and became, for O’Neil, a time of strange and unexpected contentment. Unhappiness, he discovered, was an emotion distinct from grief, and he found it was possible both to miss his parents terribly—a loss so overwhelming he simply couldn’t take it all in, like looking at a skyscraper up close—while also finding in the job of settling their affairs a satisfying orderliness. Accounts to be closed, bills to be paid, letters to be read and discarded, clothing to be boxed and carted off: he knew what he and Kay were doing—they were erasing their parents, removing the last evidence of their lives from the earth. It was, O’Neil knew, a way of saying good-bye, and yet with each trip to the Goodwill box behind the Price Chopper, each final phone call to a bank or loan company, he felt his parents becoming real to him in a way that they had never been in life. More than real: he felt them move inside him. Jack had returned to New Haven a few days after the funeral, and alone in the house, O’Neil and Kay slipped into a pattern that was, he realized, the same one his parents had kept, or nearly. The hours they ate and worked and slept, their habit of meeting in the living room in the evenings for a cup of tea—these were all things their parents had done, and on a night close to the end of their time together, O’Neil dreamed that he and Kay were married. It was a dream in which they were both the same and also different—they were at once their parents and themselves—and when he awoke in his old bedroom under the eaves, he felt not revulsion or shame but a fleeting certainty that he had been touched by the world of the spirits.

His discoveries were many—his father, for instance, owned nineteen blue shirts; his mother kept a needle and thread in her glove compartment; on a shelf in the laundry room, behind the boxes of detergent and fabric softener, someone had hidden a pack of Larks—and yet the actual circumstances of his parents’ death, its strange location and hour, seemed unknowable. Then on a day just before Christmas, their father’s Visa bill arrived, including a forty-two-dollar charge for a motel, the Glade View Motor Court, and the mystery was solved. The charge was dated the day they had died, November 12, and O’Neil recognized the name at once: the Glade View was a run-down motel set back from the highway, about an hour south of campus. Its curious existence, so far from anything, had always seemed so sordid and improbable that it had become a familiar landmark; O’Neil and his parents had joked about it often, to fill the final minutes of their long drives together to the college. This was where they had spent the last afternoon of their lives together. O’Neil felt no embarrassment learning this—far worse had been the discovery, in his mother’s dressing table, of her diaphragm, and beneath it a faded pamphlet on “natural birth spacing.” And yet it was still troubling, like opening a door to find, behind it, another door just like it. O’Neil and Kay sat on the sofa, passing the bill back and forth between them, reading it over and over and shaking their heads. A motel. They had visited O’Neil at college, then stopped on the way home at a seedy roadside motor court, and, leaving, had turned themselves around in the storm. It was almost funny; it made, O’Neil realized, no sense to him at all. Did they do this all the time? What other secrets were they taking with them? And suddenly he realized how little he truly knew about his parents. The bills and blue shirts were nothing. A new sadness touched him, and at once he knew it was the one he had waited for. No more or less: it was the simple wish that he could have become a man before they died.

On Friday evening, with no word from Joe, O’Neil asked Kay and Jack to drive him to Patrice’s house to pick up his car, an ancient Buick he had bought out of the classifieds the week he’d returned from Europe. He hoped that the painting had proceeded without him, but when they arrived at her house the scene he found was one of abandonment, as if time had frozen at the moment of his accident. His ladder still lay in the yard behind the yew bushes, and beside it a nearly empty can of hardened paint. Though he hadn’t thought of this before, he had spilled most of a gallon on the porch roof, which was now a total loss—it would have to be reshingled, and this, O’Neil knew, would cost Joe more money.

Patrice answered the door before he could knock, holding Henry on her hip. Henry was wearing only a diaper, his eyes were glassy from a day of tears, and Patrice wore the stunned and hopeless look of someone who hadn’t slept in days. O’Neil had taken the last of the codeine that afternoon, and looking at Patrice, this thought made him feel unworthy.

She tipped her head toward his cast. “Does it hurt?”

“You’re the first person to ask me that,” O’Neil replied. “It did, thank you, for a while.”

She moved her hand through the air toward him, stopping just shy of his face. “There’s paint in your hair,” Patrice said.

The three of them made their way to the front yard, to get a better look at the roof. From where they stood, O’Neil could see a broad splash, marking the spot where he had first made impact, and below it a wide ribbon of paint that traced his course down the sloping roof to the ground below.

“I feel just terrible about this,” O’Neil said. “This is completely my fault. Also, I never thanked you for driving me to the hospital.”

Patrice looked sweetly at Henry, who smiled back into her face. “What else could we do, Henry?” she said. “Leave this poor man in the yard?”

She helped O’Neil cover his crew kit with a tarp and store the rest of the equipment, in case it rained. She seemed to have no expectation at all for when the work on her house would resume, and O’Neil didn’t know what to say about this. Probably it wouldn’t.

“What will you do?” she asked him, when the time had come to go.

“It’s hard to say. I’m thinking maybe law school.”

She smiled at this answer. “I meant about your hair, O’Neil.”

Then, for just a moment, they exchanged a deep regard. Patrice’s eyelashes, O’Neil saw, were long and thick and, though she wore no mascara, seemed braided. Such a small thing, but that was what he saw. His mind took hold of this image, pushing aside all other thoughts, and he imagined what her eyelashes would feel like, brushing against his cheek. He thought it would be nice to kiss her—more than nice. But sad too, and in a way he had not felt before. They held one another’s gaze a second more, and then Patrice looked past him to the Volvo parked at the curb, where Kay and Jack were reading the newspaper.

“Who’s that now?” she said. “You’ve brought someone.”

O’Neil followed her eyes to the car. “That’s my sister and her husband. They’re Kay and Jack.”

Patrice turned with her hip so Henry could see and lifted his little arm to help him wave. “I’m really sorry about your leg, O’Neil,” she said. “It’s not the same without you around here.”

They said their good-byes, and Jack took O’Neil home in the Buick, with Kay following in the Volvo. As they turned the corner onto Post Road, O’Neil lifted his eyes to find Jack looking at him through the rearview mirror.

“Nice-looking woman,” Jack said, and winked knowingly. “What do you say, O’Neil? Maybe I should take up house painting.”

O’Neil said nothing. This was when he realized he’d never seen Patrice’s husband because she didn’t have one. His assumption that this man existed was just that—an assumption. Or perhaps Joe had led him to believe this. Either way, there was no such person. It was just Patrice and Henry, and their big empty house that no one was painting for them.