The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (112 page)

At first she just smiled. Stopped. Then her mouth turned down
and she started to cry. Just a few shudders at first and then out and out wailing. Crying that claimed her whole body. She lay down on top of me, her chin in the crook of my shoulder, and held on and shook us both. I felt myself go soft, get smaller—slip out of her like a guilty intruder.

“It’s okay,” I whispered into her ear. “I’m out of practice, that’s all. Temporarily out of synch.”

“I’m so scared,” she said.

I thought she meant scared of getting pregnant, and so I chose that moment of intimate failure to tell her what I had done. Told her about the vasectomy. She stopped crying and, for a minute or more, everything was still. Then she started punching me—flailing away at my shoulders and my face. One shot even landed against my windpipe—started me gasping and choking. It was a kind of temporary insanity, I guess. Dessa’s the nonviolent type, the kind that carries bugs outside so she won’t have to kill them. But that night she gave me a gasping attack and a bloody nose. She had wanted another kid, she said. That’s what she’d gone all the way to Italy and Greece to decide. That’s what she’d come back wanting to tell me.

After that night, there was a couple of weeks’ worth of single syllables—lots of closet-cleaning and meals that she’d cook and then not eat. One day she rented a carpet cleaner and shampooed every rug in the house. Another time, I came home and found her stripping off the wallpaper in Angela’s room. Telephone calls went back and forth between her and her sister, between her and her friend Eileen from the SIDS group. Then, on a Saturday morning in July, she told me she was leaving me.

I reminded her again what I’d been saying over and over for a week: that vasectomies could sometimes be reversed. That if she needed to, we could try it.

“The vasectomy’s a symptom, not the problem,” she said. “The problem is your anger. What you did was just one expression of the anger you’ve felt through this whole thing—the blame you put on me.”

I asked her how
she
knew what
I
felt inside, and she said she
could feel it. That it seeped out of me like radiation. That I was practically toxic.

It was a morning for metaphors. She still loved me, she said, but our marriage had become like a game of One, Two, Three, Red Light. Every time she made a half-step’s worth of progress, my anger would catch her and send her back to the starting line. “When I was away, I could feel myself getting stronger, day by day,” she said. “Really, Dominick. I thought to myself that I was finally through something. That the worst of it was over. Then I got off the plane and saw you in the airport lounge, and I was back at the starting line again. I get short of breath when I’m around you. It’s like you rob me of oxygen. So I’m going. I have to go because I have to protect myself. I have to breathe.”

I told her I could do better. Promised her I’d go back to the support group if that was what she wanted. I begged her. Followed her all the way down the stairs and out to the car, begging. Making promises. But there all that soft luggage was, waiting in the backseat and the opened trunk of the Celica. All those tan bags she’d bought for her trip to Greece. “Come on, Sadie,” she called, and that stupid dog of hers climbed in the front seat and Dessa got in and they left.

They just left.

I read for the rest of that summer. Styron. Michener. Will and Ariel Durant. I gravitated toward fat-book authors. I didn’t look up. Didn’t return calls. The day after Labor Day, I returned to my classroom. Made class lists and seating charts and gave the new kids my usual speech about high expectations and mutual respect. Only this time, I didn’t mean any of it. It felt like I was playing a record. I distributed books. Started matching unfamiliar names to new faces. I thought I was doing okay. Then one day in late September, I cried in school. Fell apart without warning right in front of my fourth-period class. Right in the middle of some stupid, innocuous instruction about how to punctuate the bibliography for their first paper: whether to put a period or a comma after the author’s name—something as safe and ordinary as that. I was at the blackboard and everything just hit me at once: I had a baby dead in the ground and a twin brother in the nut
house and a wife who’d left me
because she had to breathe. I should have left the classroom—I know I should have—but I couldn’t. I just went to my desk and sat there. Started sobbing. And the kids sat there, frozen, facing me. None of us knew what to do. Neither did the vice principal after one of the kids went and got him. Fuckin’ Aronson. For reasons I don’t understand to this day, he called the police and they came and took me away—walked me right past a boys’ gym class playing soccer and Jane Moss’s art class, outside sketching the trees, and into an unmarked cruiser. “Dominick?” I remember Jane Moss asking me, touching my sleeve. I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

The shrink I went to labeled what had happened an anxiety attack. Situational, he said. Understandable under the circumstances, and 100 percent fixable. I could tell he was downscaling it for me because I’d told him about Thomas—had confided that I was afraid my twin brother’s craziness had begun to claim me, too. It’s funny: I can remember that therapist’s face—his rusty red hair—but not his name. During my second session, he said that in the weeks ahead, we’d be addressing the feelings of anger and grief and betrayal the baby’s death had left me with. Later on, in a month or two, we’d probably get into the difficult work of exploring what it was like growing up as Thomas’s twin. As my mother’s and Ray’s son.

“His
step
son,” I corrected him.

“His stepson,” he repeated. Made a note.

I never went back.

Never went back to teaching, either. I couldn’t. How can you cry in front of a bunch of teenagers one week and then go back the next and say, “Okay, now, where were we? Turn to page sixty-seven”? I mailed my letter of resignation to the superintendent of schools and got through the worst shit and insomnia by reading. Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck, García Márquez. All that fall and winter, I kept heating the soups and pastas Ma sent over (it was easier now that the casse
role dishes came from a single source) and turning pages and turning down Leo’s requests that we go for a couple of beers, go up to the Garden to see the Celtics play, go up to Sugarloaf and ski. “She’s got a boyfriend, doesn’t she?” I asked Leo one afternoon when he stopped by.

“How should I know?” he shrugged. “You think she checks in with me about what she does?”

“No, but she checks in with her sister,” I said. “Who is he? The guy with the braid? I saw them downtown.”

“He’s just some asshole artist,” he said. “Makes pottery or something. It won’t last. He’s not Dessa’s type.
You’re
her type.”

But it did last. I kept seeing them all over town. Kept seeing his van in the driveway out at that ramshackle farmhouse she’d rented. Saw that jazzy, psychedelic mailbox he painted with both their names on it. And so, little by little, it sunk into my thick skull that I’d lost her for good. Lost both my daughter
and
my wife, and that goofball of a dog to boot. And one night, somewhere around 3:00
A.M.
, I finally looked myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and admitted it to my own baggy, sleep-starved face: I’d lost her.

When springtime came around, I bought a compressor and a network of scaffolding at an estate auction. Stenciled the door of my pickup and reinvented myself as a housepainter. Premier Painting. Free estimates, fully insured. “Customer satisfaction is our highest priority.”
Our:
like I wasn’t the painter and the bookkeeper and the rest of the goddamned shooting match. I met Joy a year later, a month or so after my divorce decree came in the mail. We get along okay. It’s not perfect, but it’s all right.

When Dr. Patel’s wide face appeared at the truck window, I jumped. “Oh, my goodness, I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “You were deep in thought. Forgive me.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said, shaking my head, trying to compose myself. “I was just sitting here vegging out.”

“Well, come up, come up, Mr. Vegetable,” she said, a warm smile undercutting the flippancy.

On the narrow staircase up to her office, we brushed by a row of little girls hurrying from Miss Patti’s to a soda machine at the bottom of the stairs. One of them, the dark-haired girl in the yellow leotard—my resurrected daughter Angela—accidentally bumped against my arm. Up close, I could see the leotard had a pattern: alternating monkeys and bunnies.

“Whoops! ‘Scuse me,” she said, her smile revealing missing front teeth. She and her friends descended the stairs in a flurry, a chorus of giggles.

“Hold these, please,” Dr. Patel said, handing me her briefcase and a small tape recorder. She put her key in the lock, turned it, and swung open her office door. “Come in, come in,” she said, taking back her things.

Her office was a single room stripped to the essentials: small desk, two opposing easy chairs, a cube table, Kleenex for the crybabies. The walls were white and blank. The only nod toward decoration sat on the floor by the window: a cement statue two feet tall—one of those smiling Indian goddesses with the waving arms and the shit-eating grin.

“Sit down, please, Mr. Birdsey,” Dr. Patel said, hurrying off her trenchcoat.

“Which chair?” I asked.

“Whichever chair you’d like.”

Today, her sari was gold, green, and blue. That peacock-color blue. I’ve always liked the color. “I’m going to put on a pot of tea before we start,” she said. “Will you join me?” My “yes” took me by surprise.

From a closet, she removed a hot plate, a jug of water, a small box of tea-making paraphernalia. I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this was what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.

“I see you’re looking at my dancing Shiva,” Dr. Patel said. “He’s sweet, isn’t he?”

“It’s a
he
?” I said. “I thought it was a
she.
”

Dr. Patel laughed. “Well, ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not as grave a matter with the gods as it is with us mere mortals,” she said. “Whereas we are fixed and inflexible, they are impish, transmutable. Perhaps, for you, Shiva
is
a woman. I have—let’s see—chamomile and peppermint and wildberry spice.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“Ah, ‘whatever.’ The favorite word of ambivalent American men. All day long, ‘whatever, whatever.’ It’s passive-aggressive, don’t you think?”

I told her I’d have the spice. She nodded, smiling—pleased with me. “Do you know much about Hindu beliefs, Mr. Birdsey?” she asked. “Shiva is the third god of the Supreme Spirit. The Hindu trinity. Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu is the Preserver, and Shiva is the Destroyer.”

“The Destroyer?” I said. “Well, if they ever make the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger could play the lead.” The second I made the crack, I realized it was probably sacrilegious or something. I’ll do that: make a wise remark when I’m nervous. When a situation’s new. But Dr. Patel’s soft chuckle short-circuited my apology.

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking a scolding finger. “Shiva represents the
reproductive
power of destruction. The power of renovation. Which is why he’s here in this room, where we dismantle and rebuild.”

She sat down on the chair opposite mine, a notepad and the tape recorder in her lap. Through the partition came the faint plunking of piano music, a dance teacher’s muffled command to lift and
reach,
lift and
reach.
“And of course, Shiva is a dancing god, too, so I know he’s happy with my next-door neighbors. All the little tap dancers and ballerinas.”

I nodded at the tape recorder. “What’s that thing for?” I said. “Are you taping us or something?”

She shook her head. “I would like to
play
something for you, Mr. Birdsey. A bit later. Let’s chat first.”

“All right,” I said. “What’s going on with him, anyway? The message you left said something about an ‘incident.’”

She nodded. “I believe I’ve told you over the telephone about your brother’s preoccupation with the surveillance cameras. Have I not?”

“His fear of being watched,” I said. “It’s always been an issue with him.”

She sighed. “With most paranoid schizophrenics, of course. But at Hatch, the cameras are a ‘necessary evil.’ On the one hand, the activities at a maximum-security facility certainly need to be monitored, for everyone’s protection, patients and staff alike. On the other hand, many of the patients feel intimidated by them. Resentful. Which is entirely understandable.”

For the past two or three days, Dr. Patel said, Thomas had grown more agitated about being watched. More and more preoccupied with the omnipresence of the cameras. He’d begun to stare and mumble at them, she said—to whisper threats and curses, engage in a one-sided dialogue. “I’ve tried to address the behavior in our sessions, but he has not wanted to discuss his worries. With me, he has remained rather uncommunicative. Polite and politic during some sessions, glum and nonverbal during others. Winning the trust of someone suffering from paranoid schizophrenia is a long, slow process, Mr. Birdsey. And a tenuous one. A rickety bridge.”