The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

“Are you okay?”

  “Of course not.” Sally puts down her knife and picks up her fork, spearing the tough chop.

  “Do you think I should call Dr. Jacobs? Tell her you have pain?”

  Sally chews and looks out the window, the sky gun barrel gray. There is nothing Cindy Jacobs can do for her pain. It will take years to excavate it from her insides, grief and loneliness twined with every vein and artery and nerve. No surgeon can begin to attempt that.

  Sally swallows, holds back tears, and picks up her knife. “No. I’m fine.”

  “You just said you weren’t.”

  She puts down her cutlery and looks at Mia. “My god, Mia. How would you feel? I’ve had my breasts cut off before . . .”

  Mia leans in closer. “Before what?”

  Sally feels like her mouth is full of sand that has started to trickle down her throat. Breathing hurts, swallowing impossible, but she manages to say, “Before I could use them again.”

  Mia sits back, her mouth open, a slight gasp pushing out between her lips. “Oh.”

  Picking up her fork, Sally pierces a green bean, stabbing at it again and again.

  “Mom,” Mia says.

  “Don’t.” Sally puts up a hand. “It’s just what I feel and I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about anything.”

  Outside, Sally’s neighbor pulls a trash can to the curb, the plastic wheels scratching against the asphalt. Mia stands up and closes the window all the way, the sound dying away. She walks the perimeter of the room, picking up books and photos as she does, saying nothing.

  When David was first diagnosed, Sally rushed home from the hospital one day when he was in a deep sleep. Running upstairs, she dug under his winter sweaters and found the hand gun he’d bought three years before. She took the gun, the bullets, her grandfather’s Bowie knife, the steak and carving knives, her sleeping pills, and all the cough medicine, aspirin, and muscle relaxants and brought them over to Doris Armsby next door. Back inside, she found her measuring tape, packing twine, yarn, David’s belts, her bathrobe tie and hid everything in a trunk in the basement. She knew he’d be too weak to walk into the garage and hook up a hose to the back of the car, but from that day onward, she parked both the cars out front.

  Thinking about it now, she wants to weep over her pork chop. If he felt like she did—and he knew he was going to die—she should have arranged all his options before him, laying out Seconals and shiny bullets and sharpened knives. It would have been a kindness. She would have been thinking of him, not herself. At the end, when he could barely sit up, when he was in so much pain it hurt to breathe, when he could barely smile, she would have been graciousness and love itself to have brought in the gun and pulled the trigger on her own.

  But she hadn’t been able to let him go. Even that last day when he didn’t know who she was, she wanted him alive. Knowing that blood was moving in his veins was enough to keep her raging sorrow pushed deep and hidden. But the surprise was that the sorrow never came. She was too busy for it then, but now her old friend sorrow is back, waiting now for her to embrace it as she never had before, clinging on her arms, whispering in her ear.

  “Mom,” Mia says, standing at the foot of the bed. “Tell me what to do. I’ll do it. I’ll call anyone.”

  Sally wonders who she could call to fix what is wrong inside of her. It’s not outside. It’s not her breasts. Instead, she has something dark blooming inside her like a rotten flower.

  She wants to tell her daughter to give her the gun, to cock it, to hold it to her temple and pull the trigger, but then the doorbell rings.

  “It’s just Nydia,” Sally says hurriedly, wanting to tell Mia about the gun. “Just let her stand there.”

  “Let me go see,” Mia says. “I’ll be back.”

  “Hurry,” Sally says, knowing what she’ll say to Mia when she comes back upstairs.

  Mia walks down stairs, and then Sally hears the door open. After a moment, she hears voices, a man’s voice, and a yap-yap, the bark of a tiny dog.

  Sally strains to hear the conversation, but it sounds like hellos and brief introductory comments—something about the weather or maybe it was about the sycamore out front. Then after a second, there are footsteps on the stairs, Mia’s and the man’s. Outside on the porch, Mitzie yaps away, already lonely for Dick.

  “Hey, there,” Dick says, peeking his head in the room and then pulling his body inside. He stands by her, his hands on his hips. “How’s the patient?”

  Mia comes into the room, her face arranged in hopeful lines, as if a visitor is what Sally has been asking for all along.

  Maybe Mia’s right. Maybe Dick is just what she needs. He’s lost a wife—first her mind and body to stroke and then all of her from cancer—and knows the terror of the sick room. He probably has a gun somewhere, stashed under winter sweaters. And Dick likes her, would be willing to help. So Sally smiles her best social smile, wondering how long it will take to convince him that she’s better off dead.

  

  The next day, Mia helps Sally walk down the stairs, holding her arm, making sure not to bump against the incisions. Earlier, Mia helped her take a bath in about two inches of water, soaping her back with a loofa, and now Sally wears an outfit she ordered from Coldwater Creek before the surgery, aqua colored cotton pants and a loose blouse that hangs over her wounds and the tubes, billowy and tent-like, hiding her flatness.

  Downstairs, Mia’s opened the front door and a triangle of light brightens the carpet, and Dick Brantley sits on the couch, Mitzie on the porch, her nose touching the screen door.

  “My goodness, a day has done wonders,” Dick says, standing up and taking her arm.

  Mia steps back and says, “Anyone for a soda?”

  Dick shakes his head. “Off the stuff. High fructose corn syrup will kill you. How about a seltzer?”

  Sally wonders if she could ingest enough high fructose corn syrup to kill herself. “Nothing for me,” she says.

  Dick and she sit down on the couch, and for a moment, Sally tries to think of things to say. She could talk about the improving weather, Mitzie and her small cocker loyalty, the surgery itself, Mia’s novels, Katherine’s work, Dahlia’s children. But she can’t. Her mouth is tired. More than that, she feels as though there are strings at the corners of her lips, strings that tiny little men are pulling each time she tries to talk. The little men want her to cry, but she won’t now that she has formulated a plan. She’ll act; she’ll do something, before she cries again.

  Mia brings in a glass of water for Dick, who takes it with thanks. Then she excuses herself, saying, “I’m going to do some work on the computer,” and goes upstairs, leaving Sally alone with Dick Brantley.

  “So how are you feeling?” he asks.

  The tiny men tug, but she forces her lips to move. “Better. Mia’s been such a help.”

  Dick nods and sips his water. Sally imagines his gun, the one under his sweaters. The phone rings, but Mia answers it before it can ring again. Sally waits, hoping it’s for her, but Mia doesn’t clomp down the stairs with the phone.

  “You’re lucky to have your girls,” Dick says. “I’ve got the boys, but they’re across the country with their own families. You know that old saying. What is it? A daughter’s a daughter all her life, but a son’s a son until he takes a wife? I think it’s meant for mothers, but it’s true all the same for me.”

  Sally thinks of Katherine and Dahlia so far away and so infrequently here, their visit for this surgery almost a dream because of all the medication she was on just after the surgery. Mia’s been a Mia all her life, she thinks. Mine. But Mia would never do what Sally wanted her to, much like Sally wouldn’t do for David what he needed. Mia would never bring a gun downstairs and hand it to Sally.

  And what was that someone said to her once? Maybe it was Nydia relating something she heard on a talk show. “Parents are in love with their children. Children just love their parents.”

  Whatever it was, no one
loved anyone enough. Not enough to do what needs to be done.

  “Mia’s my main support.” Sally says this loudly, knowing she’s never said it aloud before. But then she continues, quietly, “My other girls have their own lives, like your boys.”

  “They grow up,” Dick says. “What else can they do?”

  “They don’t—they’re not in love with us,” Sally blurts.

  “In love?” he says. “Well, that’s probably a good thing. You can get arrested for that.”

  Sally shakes her head. “What I mean is they don’t need us.”

  Dick runs a hand through his thick white hair. “That may well be true. But would you want those grown kids coming round here, needing to be taken care of again? It’s our turn now. You’re turn to be taken care of. They way it goes.”

  “It’s horrible,” Sally says. “I can take care of myself.”

  “That I have no doubt of. This is a minor blip. Pretty soon, you’ll be leading the race around the block, laughing at me, just dust in your tracks.”

  For a second, she looks at Dick, wondering how someone can be this balanced, kind, whole. It doesn’t make sense. The world is a horrible place, full of things like cancer and war, and here he is giving her a happy ending.

  She sighs, picks a piece of lint off the couch. “Well, kids.”

  “Indeed. They do keep me jumping.”

  “My middle girl. I think she’s hiding things from me”

  “Like what?”

  “I think she’s a lesbian.” Sally says the word hears another truth she’s never let out into the air.

  Dick puts down her glass of water and shrugs. “She can get married now, at least in San Francisco until the courts shut it down.”

  Sally feels her mouth move upward, and then feels a smile pulse in her face. “She’s never told me for sure.”

  “Some things are hard to tell,” Dick says. “Especially when you think the person listening won’t like it.”

  Sally feels her mouth relax, as if the little men have taken a break. Her throat fills with what? Gratitude to Dick for saying what she’s never been able to about her own daughter? Sally has never moved into that discussion, and maybe that’s why Katherine is so far away, covering her life up with the busyness of her work and ideas.

  “I just didn’t know what to say. How to ask.”

  “Maybe she can’t see that. Maybe you can show her how you feel, and she’ll just tell you.”

  “Maybe,” Sally says, suddenly so tired. Did Katherine think Sally wouldn’t love her because of who she loved? Maybe once upon a time, Sally would have had a flutter of some kind of ancient moral indignation or embarrassment. Certainly, she wouldn’t have brought it up at the bridge table. But Sally knows that if Katherine brought another woman to the house, Sally would welcome them. She would get to know this new woman, make friends, ask her to find a gun. Someone has to help Sally because she can tell Dick isn’t going to. He wants her to live, too, like Mia. Even if he has a gun, it will stay unloaded and at home.

  “But she could have tried to tell me,” she begins. “She could have at least tried.”

  On the front porch, Mitzie pushes out a little growl, and Dick and Sally turn to see the mailman walk up the front path. Dick stands and opens the screen door, Mitzie bolting in and hiding behind his legs.

  “I have an overnight for Mia Alden,” the mailman says, eyeing Mitzie and her pointy bottom teeth. Mitzie growls again, her fur standing up on her back.

  Mia walks to the landing and then seeing the mailman, runs down the stairs. “Thank you,” she says, taking the gray plastic envelope. The mailman turns to leave, looking back once to make sure Mitzie isn’t following him.

  “What is it?” Sally asks.

  “Some medication for you. They forgot to give it to us during the discharge.”

  Sally hopes it’s something that she can take a lot of. But Mia keeps the pain pills in the guest room next to her bed so she can dole them out. Maybe later. Maybe when Mia goes home, she can swallow them all. She leans back, resting her head on the couch. Maybe this will be it.

  Dick takes a last sip of his water and puts the glass back on its coaster. “I think I’ve worn you out. Mitzie and I are going to finish our walk. So good to see you’re doing better, Sal Gal.”

  Sally starts. Pricks of feeling stab hot under her cheeks and in her eyes. David called her “My gal Sal.”

  “Thanks for dropping by,” Mia says. “Any time. Please feel welcome. You know where we are.”

  Mia bends down to pet Mitzie, and then Dick and his dog leave, Mitzie’s tags jangling as they walk away. Mia closes the front door and then takes the envelope into the kitchen, where Sally can hear her cutting at it with the kitchen shears. Then there is the tinkle of pills in a plastic bottle and the rush of tap water.

  Mia walks back into the living room and puts a little blue oblong pill in Sally’s palm and gives her the glass of water.

  “There you go.” Mia stands over her, her hands on her hips.

  “What is it?” Sally asks, but she doesn’t wait, putting the pill on her tongue and swallowing it down.

  Pushing her hair away from her forehead, Mia cocks her head and holds Sally’s gaze. This is what Mia has always done before she lies, the very move she’s made since she could talk and make up stories. Maybe this is what she has to do when she writes, the crooked way she looks on the world.

  “It’s for pain. It will make you feel better.”

  Sally sighs and hands Mia the glass. Mia walks toward the kitchen, and in the instant, a slash of sun rounds the house and hits her neck, warming Sally’s skin. At its pulsing, light touch, Sally wants to weep, loving how the heat and light bathe her firmly, gently, not letting her go. Back in the kitchen, Mia suddenly begins to hum, the melody a song Sally recognizes as her own, a made up song her mother sang to her.

  Sally closes her eyes. She’ll give it, this, all of it, two more days. If she doesn’t feel better, she’ll find the gun, the knife, the hose. It’s possible that all those long, loose things she hid from David are still in the trunk she brought from the old house. But with whatever she can find, Sally will end it all. And for now? She closes her eyes, lets the sun tell its daily story on her skin, listens to the highs and lows of the familiar lullaby her oldest daughter pushes out into the air, and falls asleep.

  

  Later that afternoon, she doesn’t argue when Mia helps her up the stairs, and she doesn’t cry again, though she waits for her tears, even as she falls asleep. The next day, she even finds herself smiling when Mia drives them over to her house and Harper tells them the story of how a cop pulled him over because his girlfriend was sitting in the back seat.

  “Looked weird,” the cop said.

  “I’m pretending he’s my chauffer,” Harper’s then girlfriend Lizette told him. “Keeps him in line. Reminds him who’s really the boss.”

  When this happened, Mia told Sally what Harper is omits, the part about the cop finding Harper driving with only one pant leg on. Harper only told Mia the truth when she threatened to call the cops and find out why they were pestering the youth of Monte Veda.

  “I think the cops are a form of birth control,” Mia said. “I’m going to just going to let them do what they do.”

  Later during the visit, Sally holds the phone when Lucien calls from college to talk about his philosophy class, and tells her that no one has free will. “It’s a grid. It’s all planned. You can’t stop it.”

  “Who?” she asks her grandson. “Who plans it?”

  “That’s the big question,” Lucien says, now done with his theory of life. “How are you, Grandma? Are you doing okay?”

  If she is, she wants to tell him, it’s not because of her will. Someone planned it. Someone is making her feel better.

  “I’m okay,” she says, not knowing if she means it.

  “I’m not coming home for spring break,” Lucien says. “But when I come home for summer, we’ll go to the movi
es.”

  And somehow—Sally’s not sure why or how or when, exactly—two days pass, and then three and at some point, something begins to close in Sally’s body, and it’s not her incisions. Something that was wide open and gaping and full of sadness has shut, at least partially. The jagged, harsh tear of grief that had made her want to grab Dick Brantley by the shirt collar and beg him for relief has lessened, as if sadness was a radio station she just turned down. By the following morning after that, she manages to switch the station off for most of the day, the morning the hardest part. But after Mia helps her shower and then they go down to eat breakfast, she feels lighter.

  Sally looks at the little dish of pills Mia set out on the table, knowing that something in the mix of blue and white and yellow is helping her. Of course whatever is making her feel better is something here on earth and not a square in Lucien’s god grid. Besides, Sally knows that she’s not evolved enough to fix herself on her own. She’s known that since David died.