“But we’re still here,” she concluded.
Daniel’s father took his hand and held it. “You making a good living these days?” he asked.
“Pay no attention to him,” said Joy. “I’d better wash the berries. Where’d you get them? On the street?” She licked a pink finger. “Now I’ll get mad cow disease and Ebola.” She went into the kitchen.
“I’m making a living,” Daniel said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
“I don’t know why you work for that organization.” He said the word “organization” with distaste. “Go where the action is.”
“Where’s that, Dad?”
“Just ignore him, Danny,” his mother called from the kitchen.
“Wall Street.”
Daniel rolled his eyes.
“Well, you can lead a horse to water,” said Aaron.
Daniel left them sitting in the dining room eating the strawberries. As he closed the front door, he heard his father say, “Nice boy. Good work, Joyful.”
“Wall Street?” she answered. “You want your son to be a crook?”
6
Aaron was lying on his side, turned away from her, when Joy got into bed. She put her arms around him and they talked about the past. He remembered unexpected things, digging clams in Cape Cod right after they were married, the poem he’d memorized for freshman English (“how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death”). She talked about the children, about the grandchildren. A little bit about work, though he was no longer interested in her work, could not really follow what she was telling him. He was very romantic these days, more romantic than he had been in what she sometimes thought of as their real life, before he began to drift away. He called her darling, asked what the hell the colostomy pouch was, apologized for it, thanked her for putting up with it and him. Then they fell asleep. That was how it went most nights. Sometimes when she lay down on the bed with Aaron, her face pressed against the back of his head, she would cry. When he asked her what was wrong, she would say she missed her parents.
But one night, just as Joy climbed into bed, when Aaron pulled up his pajama shirt and poked at the pouch and said, “What the hell is this?” he yanked it out before she could stop him.
She cleaned him up. She changed the sheets. She settled him back in bed. He told her he loved her. She held him and cried, said again that it was because she missed her parents.
It began to happen frequently, regularly, sometimes twice in a night. What the hell is this, and a yank. Joy didn’t tell anyone. That would have been disrespectful to Aaron. But beyond that, she knew if she told anyone, her children, her friends, they would tell her she needed to hire help or that Aaron ought to be in a nursing home.
“Please don’t pull out the pouch tonight, Aaron.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. She’d gotten him into his pajamas but not into bed yet. He was in his chair watching television. The TV was on so loud she could feel the vibrations in her stomach. She brought him some ice cream, then canned pears. He smiled at her and asked for toast and tea. She imagined the plastic colostomy pouch puffing, swelling, being pulled off by his big restless hand.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the pouch when she got him settled in bed. “Your colostomy pouch from your surgery.”
“I had surgery?”
“It saved your life.”
Aaron looked away from her. “Some life,” he said with a sigh.
Joy rigged up the bed so that she could strip any wet or soiled sheets from his side without disturbing the king-sized bottom sheet. She put down layers of chux and towels and an extra sheet folded four times. They were not always necessary, he sometimes left the pouch undisturbed. But even then, he himself was disturbed, more and more, by noises, by movements, by Joy. The rustle of the sheets if she turned over, the click of the remote control if she watched TV, even with the sound off. If she got up to go to the bathroom, Aaron started, called out in fear.
Joy got very little sleep, even after she moved onto the lumpy living-room couch. If she was in the bedroom, she startled him and woke him up. If she was not in the bedroom, he woke up disoriented and called for her. She preferred the living-room couch. It gave her the illusion of distance and freedom, and the cushions seemed to fit her tired back perfectly. She slept like a cat, listening, curled in a ball, one eye half open. When her husband called, she woke immediately and leaped up. She did not slink gracefully from the room like a cat. She shuffled in her slippers and made small distressed murmurs, turning on lamps, holding the wall for balance. Sometimes, after soothing Aaron or getting him ginger ale or cleaning him up, she would be too tired to go back to the couch and she would fall asleep at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, as tired as she was, she couldn’t get back to sleep until morning. Those pre-dawn hours were excruciating at first. She paced and fretted and prayed for sleep. But after a few nights like that, she realized what a gift she was being given. She spread herself out on the couch and read whatever novel happened to be lying around. The time became precious to her. It was too late for anyone to still be out and too early for anyone to be out yet. The streets were hushed.
7
Joyful, Joyful, Aaron whispered. Their fingers were entwined. They lay on the cool sand. An orange moon hung dreamily on the horizon. We will visit every island on earth, Aaron said. We will go to Iceland and Corfu and Tahiti and Orkney and the Isle of Mull. We’ll live in Tasmania and Ischia.
Long Island will do, Joy said.
There once was a man from Nantucket, Aaron said.
Poetry!
And the moon rose above them, growing smaller and paler as the night grew darker.
8
“My father is very ill,” Molly said to the woman next to her on the plane.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to New York to see him.”
“I’m sure that will do him good.”
Will it? Molly wondered. She thought of Daniel so many years ago, when he was so ill. He was just a kid, eighteen, younger than Ben, her son, was now. Younger than Ben and in the hospital for so long, almost a year. Then in a wheelchair for months. How had he stood it? The way he stood everything, she supposed—by ignoring it. Had it helped Daniel, had it “done him good” when Molly came home from college to sit with him in his hospital room? She had tried to entertain him, telling him amusing stories, family gossip. She’d read the newspaper to him, brought him milkshakes, too. And she’d given him novels, Lucky Jim, A Handful of Dust, which he was too sick to read. Did any of that “do him good”? There he’d been in his hospital bed, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, squinting against the smoke, smiling at her, laughing at her funny stories, but when it came time to leave, she’d see his eyes sink back into their blank gaping stare of pain. Oh, she’d had some good fights with the nurses about his painkillers, such as they were, not that anyone cared what a college girl said. Their mother had been even fiercer, but still the doctors refused to give him sufficient pain medication, insisting it was too addictive for a teenaged boy.
So had her visits done Daniel any good at all? Would this visit to her father do him any good? Would it restore his short-term memory? Would it give him back his strength, his balance, so he could walk? Would it replace the colostomy bag with his own intestine? Would it make him healthy, would it make him whole?