We Only Know So Much (18 page)

thirty-nine

H
eaded out to the garage to paint, Gordon meets his father in the kitchen. Theodore’s looking through a pile of photos he’s had Otis print out for him.

Come have a look, Otis
, Theodore says to his son.

Gordon
.

What?

Gordon takes a breath, tries to let it go, sits down with his dad. He’s never sure lately if his father is just mixing up names, as he always has, or if he’s getting worse. He’s also never understood his father’s long-standing need to print everything out, to make more piles of paper to lose, when he could just as well look at them on the computer. Gordon has looked at these photos before—or photos like them, hard to say. Theodore’s photos, of late, are primarily of the ongoing nature show in the yard. One out of every eight or so is in focus. One out of every sixteen is actually quite lovely: a cardinal in a snowy bush, even the blurry deer grazing. Gordon’s hard-pressed to ignore the fact that many of the ones Theodore seems most proud of seem to be of nothing at all: entire frames consisting mostly of grass, leaves, sky. Not so long ago Gordon would have been inclined to fill up the space with a discourse on any one of the featured animals or plant genuses, maybe even likened the way Theodore framed the photo to that of a great artist, pleasing his father to no end. But right now he has no idea what to say, and he’s aware that he has nothing to say, which is profoundly different and weird and uncomfortable. In the meantime, Theodore has nodded out again. Finally he opens his eyes, though he still looks drowsy.

Can I help you onto the couch for a nap, Dad?

I probably wouldn’t send you to hell for it.

Gordon smiles, gently but firmly guides his father from his walker to the sofa, picks up the photos again.

These are nice, Dad.

Arty, huh?

Gordon can’t tell now if this is his father’s sense of humor about the state of his ability to take simple photos, or if he’s really intended for these photos to be artistic.

One of them is a close-up of only the top half of Theodore’s head, from the cheerfully surprised eyes up, and it’s sideways.

That one was a mistake
, Theodore says.
But it has its merits
, he says, smiling.

Gordon nods. He’s avoided being alone with his father for months. He’s feeling something here. There’s something in his throat like a pill that’s gotten stuck.

It does, Dad.
Gordon asks his father if he can have a few of the printouts.

Sure!
Theodore says.
Take whatever you like!
He closes his eyes as Gordon draws an afghan up over him.

Gordon takes the one of his dad, the cardinal in the bush, and the one of the grass, and heads out to the garage.

forty

W
hat Jean’s stuck on today: What could I have done to stop this from happening?

No conclusions are drawn as this new series of questions arise in her. As she starts assembling the makings for tonight’s dinner, Jean wonders if she hadn’t paid James the same attention that he’d paid to her, if her skills of observation were weaker than she believed, if she might have gotten him to confide in her about his illness if she’d only been more attentive. Could he have thought she’d leave him if she’d known? Jean had never had a plan to end their relationship. She had been happy with things the way they were, had believed that James did as well. Or maybe happy wasn’t the right word, but she’d been in that dreamy haze of love for the entire year and a half they’d been together. They hadn’t talked much about the future, or at least Jean hadn’t. They’d never discussed her ending her marriage. Admittedly, it was something Jean had never been quite prepared to think about. Marriage meant something to her, or it had, or she wanted it to; things like these that she once accepted as just
what people do
were cloudy now, like everything. But certainly her family is important to her, and she sees now that she may have been avoiding this discussion, that James may have hoped for something greater, that perhaps his needs were unmet, that he may have wanted more than just afternoons with Jean, that maybe if she’d looked more closely she’d have realized the pain he was in, and she could have gotten him help.

Plus, she’s beginning to have another occasional, odd feeling: that James never existed at all, as though what happened between them was a beautiful dream that ended with a waking nightmare, that that must have been someone else’s life, because here’s mine, here with this man who talks ceaselessly, with one child who seems to hate me and two seniors in need of constant care, where everything suddenly seems without meaning. Just this morning, as she was making coffee, she thought, Why bother? She’ll never drink coffee with James again. Does she even want to have coffee ever again? Coffee brings her no joy now. And now here she is making another meal, chicken with rice and asparagus in butter lemon sauce. Why do we take the time to do this? Jean thinks. What is the meaning of this? It’s just food. She could just boil all of it, the chicken and the rice and the asparagus and throw it on a plate, let everyone season it if they want to, although she doesn’t know why they should. What is the meaning of flavor, really?

Everything that comes into Jean’s view these days is met with this kind of abject indifference. She feels as though she has exhausted her life’s allotment of emotion, good and bad. If it’s not something that sustains her life, she’s ambivalent about it. If it didn’t mean going out and shopping for new clothes, she’d wear only gray tees and sweats from here on out. None of the sexier outfits she’d chosen for James had kept him from doing what he did. Why do we continue to dress ourselves as we do, why on earth would Priscilla care so much about what she looks like to anyone, does she not see the purposelessness in it all? When Jean turns on the TV, comes across a talk show or a sitcom, hears laughter, she feels empty. That, too, has been taken away from her. That’s for other people now. Although, frankly, it’s hard for her to understand how anyone can laugh since James died. It seems indulgent. As does sunshine, and sleeping, and breathing. With each breath, Jean thinks, I am breathing, and he is not. He chose not to breathe.

JEAN FEELS LIKE PART of a woman now, like the inside of her has been scooped out like a squash, the best part, and that all she is now is just the skin.

forty-one

O
tis’s day continues to get better. He has not completely let go of his concern about people killing themselves, in spite of Caterina’s assurance that she is not suicidal. It’s just that things are going so well that he does stop to think, Well, if he killed himself now, he’d end on a high note. If it’s possible to have better days than this one, he has not yet imagined them, and maybe that is the reason why lovers kill themselves. But of course, Otis isn’t suicidal, so we don’t have to worry about that. Cutting to the chase: well before the end of the apple-picking trip, Caterina agrees to be Otis’s girlfriend. Better: it’s her idea.

What happens is, everyone is paired up with a buddy as they’re walking off the bus and it happens that Otis and Caterina walk off the bus in the luckiest order ever, one extra person in a seat in front of them, or one small misstep could have had him paired with Bethany, a nightmare he doesn’t want to imagine. Bethany, needless to say, is super-bummed to be with anyone but Caterina, much less the kid who carries the scrap that’s left of his baby blanket in his pocket. (The kids all say it’s a known fact, but in truth it’s a rumor. No one really knows or has even seen it. It could just as well be a hanky, but even if it’s nothing at all, this kid’s fate is sealed at least until he switches schools, possibly until he grows up and invents a new Internet.)

Each pair of buddies will pick from one tree
, his teacher announces.

This might be the most beautiful sentence Otis has ever heard in his life. He imagines himself in the tree, with Caterina, eating apple pie, candy apples, caramel apples, apples with peanut butter, apples with honey, apples with cheese. They live in the tree and feast on apples and drink apple juice and apple tea and talk about the insects and the birds and the squirrels that live in the tree and they make crosswords together and they hold hands and look up at the constellations and wonder what a harvest moon is and whether there’s really a man there or not and they live there forever and ever and no one dies the end.

When you have each gathered a full basket of apples, please sit at the bottom of the tree with your buddy until everyone is finished. Then we will go to the shop and pay and then we will reboard the bus to go back to school.

Reboard the bus. Back to school. There is no time to waste, Otis thinks. Otis and Caterina start picking apples from the tree and continue their conversation from earlier. He has mostly forgotten his original list of questions, except for jelly beans.
Oh!
Otis says,
Jelly beans!
He doesn’t mean to say this out loud but it doesn’t matter.
I brought jelly beans. Want some?

Sure.
Caterina examines several apples very carefully before deciding on one that looks perfect enough to put in the basket.

Otis digs around in his backpack and pulls out the jelly beans, opens the bag.
So, birthday cake isn’t so good, right?

The truth is that Caterina had mistaken the birthday cake beans for strawberry cheesecake beans, and so thinks that Otis is saying he doesn’t like birthday cake. Real birthday cake.

You don’t like birthday cake? Not even chocolate?

Otis is confused himself for a moment and the conversation almost goes into extreme who’s-on-first territory, fortunately, Otis figures it out quickly enough.

Oh! I love birthday cake! I meant the birthday cake jelly beans.

Oh! Oh. Good. Then you can still come to my birthday party.

Otis spends little time worrying about the horrible implication that “can still come” means he almost couldn’t come, and he focuses on the great words that followed:
to my birthday party
.

Oh! Yes!

If you come to my birthday party, though, you’ll have to be my boyfriend.

Otis is unprepared for this turn. He had no plan to officially ask Caterina for any such commitment, but he’s beyond thrilled to make it. He has no idea why this is a condition of the invitation and could not care less. Now, though, he wonders what this word actually means, to Caterina or to himself. Is it the same as “lover”? Is Caterina, in essence, telling Otis she loves him? Would he agree to pretty much any terms required to hold on to the title? Yes, yes he would. He will do whatever Caterina asks. If Caterina asks him to eat a caterpillar, he will absolutely eat a caterpillar. He cannot think of one thing he wouldn’t do for Caterina.

Oh! Okay!

In fact, Caterina doesn’t really know what she wants. People in movies get boyfriends at the end and then everything is better. That’s pretty much all she’s thinking. Better.

After this, the conversation dries up a little bit. As they pick apples, Otis remembers his list of questions but moves through them much more quickly than he anticipated. Caterina is ambivalent about robots. Otis remembers several facts about apples from his dad, but much like his dad, he is rewarded for his efforts with little in the way of conversation. Unlike his father, though, Otis makes note of this reaction for future conversations. He wants them to go both ways. What subjects Caterina likes, as he knows, are reading and art and spelling. Otis is not good on the spot, but he does notice that his basket is almost full and that Caterina only has three in hers.

Don’t you like apples?
he asks.

Yeah, but I don’t like any spots on them. Like from worms and stuff.

Me neither
, Otis says, although his basket is full of apples with spots.

In the gift shop, Otis steers Caterina toward Bethany for a minute so he can buy her a red pencil with an apple-shaped eraser for her birthday, to go with the crossword he has in mind to start making as soon as he gets home. He sticks the pencil in his backpack so she doesn’t see it and heads back over to retrieve Caterina, empowered by
boyfriend
. He takes her hand and pulls her away; Bethany just keeps talking. They line up for the bus, Otis takes a window seat so Caterina can have the outside. He has not let go of her hand. He will never let go of her hand.

forty-two

T
heodore spends an hour reading his paper again. He makes a few pencil marks on it here and there, marks that could possibly be construed as letters, or maybe proofreading symbols, but the truth is, a few minutes after he scribbles them on there, even Theodore is no longer sure what these marks signify. Though he’s mentioned many times to the family that he is preparing the paper for a conference, and recently announced his plan to take it to the post office tomorrow (several tomorrows having come and gone since that day), it’s been understood by everyone that none of this will actually happen, not the completion of the paper, not the trip to the P.O., and for sure not the conference. Theodore has given several papers since his original diagnosis, but the severity of the recent, rapid decline in his condition is apparent to everyone but him.

His last trip outside with Mott, however, has built his confidence, has proven to Theodore that his family has been entirely too cautious about his moves, and that taking a little walk is no big deal. He shuffles to his desk, opens the drawer with the mailing supplies. Inserting the paper into a manila envelope is a bit tricky—why are envelopes not cooperating as they once were?—but he gets it in on the fourth try and seals it closed. There’s no letter attached to the paper at all, a formality he’s forgotten about. Theodore takes great care in writing his return address in the upper left-hand corner; he has always been aware that his beloved postal service does make occasional mistakes. He rifles through a pile of papers searching for an address to send it to, a few papers sail to the floor in the process. Events like this, small moments like an article floating to the floor, are the stuff of Theodore’s days now; retrieving an item from the floor can take fifteen shifty minutes, getting the paper to stick to his fingers can take five alone, the wily paper scooting away from the tips of his fingers as if on its own, Theodore finally raising himself up only to knock something else off the pile with an uncooperative elbow, a series like this carrying on for any length of time, like a protracted game of Mousetrap. Though he appears at most mildly inconvenienced, our best guess is that Theodore simply experiences time differently now. To the casual observer, it’s hard to imagine that this sort of change in physical ability would be anything less than profoundly frustrating, but to Theodore, who may likely be forgetting that he’s dropped quite as many papers (if any) as he has, just about as quickly as he drops them again, it’s simply the same sequence of events as always. This is what we hope, for his sake, anyway.

Sometime later, he manages to write something on the envelope that in his mind represents a contact and an address. He opens a drawer on the right side of his desk, where he keeps his postal scale and the postage he’s kept on hand for about the last sixty years, a small, modified file folder with glassine envelopes containing stamps of every denomination, some as old as thirty years but mostly fairly current. Though he had adapted easily to email, Theodore had never let go of his fondness for the U.S. Postal System and all its appurtenances. He’s had his pocket-sized postal scale since he was a kid, a little brass clip for the envelope with a weight on the end and a curved measuring apparatus with an arrow. He also has a bigger scale for larger items, but for smaller ones this is his trusted go-to. It’s really a marvelous thing. Positioning the clip between his shaky fingers so that he can hold it open long enough to place the envelope there takes quite a few tries; suspending the envelope in the air still enough to read the weight is even trickier—dang thing keeps moving, never used to do that. As with the papers, the number of times he tries to pinch the clip before he succeeds could be two or it could be ten. He doesn’t perceive it as a huge hurdle. Eventually Theodore gets a good enough idea of the general weight, accounts for an extra half-ounce, and selects a dollar thirty-eight in postage from his folder. He’s only partially successful in getting the stamps from the folder to his tongue and then to the envelope; one of the ten-cent stamps sticks to his tongue, then to his fingers, until he finally crumples it off his fingers and into the trash, not to be replaced after he simply forgets he needs to.

He’ll have to wait for the right moment to leave the house, this he has learned. Theodore has sometimes been found in places where he’s no longer allowed to tread: Jean once caught him with his walker stuck behind a door trying to go upstairs,
just to see if anything was new up there
, and several times Gordon has found him at the door headed outside with his camera hoping to get a better picture of some critter or another. Though the Copelands have the sitter, and there’s rarely a time when no one at all is home, Theodore is still trusted, unwisely, to know what he can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do. The family has assumed that allowing him to continue to move freely between rooms is still okay, but that time has passed.

It’s not too hard for Theodore to find a moment to make his escape. The sitter has left for the day, Jean has run to the store, Gordon’s not home from work yet, Otis is at a friend’s house, Priscilla’s upstairs, and his mother has fallen asleep on the sofa. That the post office will be closed by the time Theodore gets there is an overlooked detail. That managing the dog and his envelope simultaneously are two conflicting endeavors is not at the forefront of his mind. Theodore shuffles into the main house; his buddy Mott sidles right up. With a few fumbles, Theodore once again manages to hook the leash onto the dog’s collar, takes him through the back door, and walks him outside.

They make it only as far as the front of the house when Theodore becomes winded and decides to take a break.
Hooph
, he says out loud to the dog.
We better stop for a minute.
Theodore steps up to the front porch with the dog and sits on the bench swing. Mott lies down, Theodore makes the bench swing lightly.
This is nice.
Theodore swings for a few minutes; a delightful cluster of sparrows lands on a tree in his sight. The sparrows flitting about will occupy his thoughts until he falls asleep.