Enon by Paul Harding
“Look at this one, Susie. She’s so cute in this canoe.”
“What about this one, hon? Which birthday is this?”
“Look at the face she’s making here. Jesus, she looked just like you.”
Susan’s mother remained composed. It seemed she felt she had to, because she was parenting her daughter again, in a way that she had not done in a long time. Perhaps she had never had to help Susan through a tragedy. Susan had never told me about any deaths in her family. Her sisters wept and talked while they went through the photographs. They wiped their eyes with tissues and rubbed off the tears that dropped onto the photos. Susan’s father paced back and forth in front of the bay window in a discreet but vaguely military manner, as if awaiting orders.
“We should have two boards for pictures,” he said at one point. “No? One for either side of the urn?” Susan’s mother and sisters stopped riffling the pictures and looked at him.
“Yes. Yes, I think that’s right.”
“I’d better go get them, then. I saw an office supply store off the highway.”
Susan’s family debated about what sort of display board they should buy and with what to stick the pictures onto the board. While they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of cork and thumbtacks, they stole looks at Susan and had a wordless conversation about her over and above the discussion about picture arrangements. My impulse was to rescue her. Had it been my own family, I’d have felt overwhelmed. I’d have felt the need for quiet and solitude. The practical trivia of double-sided tape and making sure the photos could be mounted and taken down without damage was meaningless static. I suddenly had the urge to scream, to make all the prattle stop. It all seemed like a flimsy curtain of noise yanked in front of the silent void of Kate’s absence.
“Sue,” I said. Her family stopped talking. I tried to sound soothing, calm. “Sue, do you want to take a little break, go upstairs and lie down for a little?” Both of Susan’s sisters put their arms around her and leaned their heads against hers.
“Yeah, Susie. You need a break?” her younger sister asked.
Sue wrapped an arm around one sister and put her cheek against the side of the other’s face.
“No,” she said. She took a deep breath. “No. This is good.” She looked at me. “I’m okay, Charlie. Thanks. I’m good. Come help us. You took so many of these. Help us figure out what we should put up.”
Susan’s father said, “Okay, then. I think I’ve got what we need. I’m going. Want to come, Charles?”
“No,” I said. “No. I think I need to lie down a little myself. Thanks. I just need to go upstairs and lie down a bit.”
I BROKE MY HAND five days after Kate’s funeral, three days after Susan’s family flew back to Minnesota. I woke up that Sunday morning on the living room couch after having spent most of the night sitting in the dark, exhausted and unable to sleep. It was one in the afternoon. I experienced again the impossible grief of remembering that my daughter was dead after the little sleep I had managed had cleared my mind of the fact. Each time that happened, I felt more worn away, less able to suffer the weight. I was curled up in an old afghan and turned toward the back of the couch.
“You need to get up, Charlie,” Sue said. I couldn’t see her, but I could tell from her voice that she was in the doorway leading to the kitchen. “It’s one o’clock. I’ve been trying to be quiet all day, but I need to do things. I need your help.”
I stared at the green velvet upholstery, which Kate and I had always agreed was the color of new ferns, and said, “Everything is shit because Kate’s gone.” Susan remained silent.
“Do you know what I mean, Sue?” I said. I turned myself over to see her. She was leaning against the door frame, hands at her sides. Her face was pale and swollen and her eyes were bright red and had black circles under them. She shook her head.
“Yes, Charlie,” she said. “I know what you mean, but I need you to help.” She walked through the room and out the other door, into the front hallway, and went upstairs. I sat up then and walked across the room after her. I meant to help her. I meant to follow her and explain how I meant to help her and to be stronger but that I didn’t have any choice, that it was like I’d been withered, sapped of spirit. Susan moved around in our bedroom upstairs, opening and closing drawers. I meant to call up to her. I meant to go upstairs and to ask what she needed me to do. Even better, I’d find something essential that needed doing that she hadn’t thought of and tell her I was going to do that.
That was when I broke my hand. Everything failed inside me. Something snapped in my stomach and I cried out and put my fist into the wall of the stairway landing. The old horsehair plaster pulverized and poured from the wall like hourglass sand but I struck a stud behind it and broke eight bones. I vividly remember crying out, because that was something I’d always consciously stifled whenever I had hurt myself around Kate, so I wouldn’t upset her. I’d sighed and laughed out loud at my own foolishness in front of Kate when I’d pounded my thumb with a hammer, or had a pebble ricochet off a shin while mowing our lawn, or once had a two-by-four drop on my head when I was rebuilding the steps on the side porch and had to drive myself to the emergency room for stitches. “Your dad, the genius,” I’d said as I’d fetched the first aid kit and wrapped a handful of ice cubes in a facecloth. But the pain when I broke my hand was something else altogether. It obliterated my will and I remember gasping in awe at how much it hurt and how neatly I had felt the bones in my fingers and hand snapping. I dropped to my knees, holding the wrist of the broken hand with my good hand, suddenly wondering how in the world I could tell Susan what I’d just done. I had obviously knocked myself half senseless, because the punch had sounded like someone trying to go through the wall with a sledgehammer, and Susan had lunged out of the bedroom and to the top of the stairs, as if the punch had released the ratchet locking a coiled spring, the way an angry parent might pounce when she heard her kid knock over a lamp after she’d told her six times to knock off tossing the tennis ball in the living room. She held one of her crewneck shirts in front of her by the shoulder seams, and clutched it to herself as she looked down at me kneeling on the hall floor.
That image of Susan, at the top of the stairs in her bathrobe, her face ravaged and pale, holding the shirt—a fitted white T-shirt with a pattern of flowers and vines embroidered in black around the neck and sleeves and a small yellow bird embroidered just above the left breast—seemed like a photograph from a movie or a play that you see in a magazine you’re leafing through while waiting to have your teeth cleaned or have blood taken, and you think to yourself, Oh, I remember that scene; that’s when it all comes apart; that’s when he puts his hand through the wall and she runs out of the bedroom and stands there at the top of the stairs, like she’s a parent about to yell at her kid, but she sees him down on his knees at the bottom of the stairs, gasping, and he’s gray in the face, in a cold sweat, and he’s holding a hand up and the fingers look all mangled, and you can tell just by the expression on her face—it’s so well done—that she’s acted from reflex, that she’s still conditioned, still habituated to parenting her daughter. But it’s true: her daughter is dead, still and always and even though her mind still makes these little loops back in time to before her daughter died if she lets go of the fact for even a moment, and every time it’s like hearing for the first time all over again, Your daughter has been in an accident, and that is the moment she realizes, It’s all over and I’m going back to my parents’ house, and I’m going to stay in my old bedroom, even though it has been my mother’s sewing room for nearly twenty years. And whether or not she really believes that that is what she will do, that spare corner room with no rug and no curtains or shades and a chair and a table with a sewing machine on it and a lamp bent down over the machine and a single framed piece of embroidery of a redheaded moppet wearing a sunbonnet with a basket of flowers hooked on her arm and a rabbit at her feet, which used to be her room when she was a girl, is the concrete p
When that instant passed, whether it was between us or in my mind alone, Susan said, “Let me get some clothes on,” and rushed back to the bedroom.
Susan drove me to the regional hospital and sat with me in the emergency room for two hours, crying. My hand hurt terribly and I was exhausted and I felt humiliated for us. Not only did we have to bear our only child’s death, but we had to do so in front of a room full of miserable strangers. I tried to comfort myself by looking at the faces of the other people in the emergency room. There was an old couple holding hands. The wife had a mask over her face, with a tube running from it to an oxygen tank. Her skin was gray. Her husband held her hand and stared at the floor. There was a young kid, maybe fourteen years old, with what looked like his older brother, or maybe a young uncle, who was holding a bloody dish towel to the top of the boy’s head. The brother or uncle kept asking the boy how he was doing, saying the doctor was going to see him soon. The boy was woozy and said “All right” every time his brother or uncle spoke to him. I tried to think about whom it was these people had lost. What mothers and sisters and best friends. Susan was slouched in her chair, her clenched left fist pushed up against her mouth. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, like she was trying to breathe fast enough to keep ahead of sobbing. She gazed across the emergency room through the glass doors to the roundabout where people were dropping patients off. She shook her head as if she were saying no, no, no over and over. Tears drained from the corners of her eyes. She wiped her face and looked at me. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back. She shook her head no again and put her fist back to her mouth.
IT TOOK THREE MORE hours at the hospital to have X-rays and get my hand set in a cast. I spent the next day lying on the living room couch, trying to sleep but unable to. I could not sleep that night, either, despite the painkillers the doctor had prescribed, and left our bed for the couch, where I sat semiconscious in the dark, having nightmares from which I periodically started, only to find the waking world worse than my dreams.
Susan’s older sister called at nine the next morning and they talked for half an hour. When the call ended, Susan came into the living room.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Awful.”
“Do you think you can get up today and maybe help me with some things?”
“I’ll try. I didn’t sleep at all. My hand is killing me. What’d your sister have to say?”
“She—they—my family—wants us to go out there and visit.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I’d talk about it with you.”
It was Tuesday morning, when I normally would have been mowing lawns and Sue would have been at the elementary school in Salem, where she taught reading. A heavy wind rumbled outside, through the trees, and broke against the house in gusts. The mailman came up the walkway and I heard the squeak of the mailbox opening and closing.
I knew it was all wrong, that I was snipping the single, thin thread by which our marriage was barely still suspended. But I felt it was my obligation. I’d spent the week since the funeral lying on the couch in a daze. I’d lost my mind and punched a hole in the wall and broken my hand so that I couldn’t work or do much of anything that needed doing. I thought, Poor Sue. She shouldn’t have to deal with me. I’m no good for her, I thought. She’s being loving and gracious because she has a good heart, but I just can’t ask her to stick this out.
“Well,” I said. “How about you go? I can’t. I feel like I have to stay here. But you’ve got another week’s leave. Why don’t you go?”
Sue stared at me for a moment. It’s the last time I remember the two of us looking each other in the eye.
She said, “I need to think about it.”
The teakettle whistled in the kitchen. Susan went to make herself tea. I remained on the couch and listened to the cupboard door open and the mugs clink against each other as Susan took one out and the door slap shut and another door open and the rustle and scrape of her opening the box of tea bags and that door slap shut and then the utensil drawer opening and Susan getting a spoon.
“Sue, I think that’s good,” I called to her. “Your sisters and your mom, and your dad.”
SUSAN HAD A BENIGN aloofness that made her irresistible from the moment I saw her. She was a mystery and remained that way for the duration of our marriage. We were at school the first time we met. She and three of her friends visited the house I had just moved into with four other guys because she knew one of them. We all sat across from one another in old flea market chairs and a couch left out on the curb that we’d carried home. It was a rainy, late, luminescent August afternoon and I chain-smoked cigarettes and we talked about music and art and books and I exaggerated my enthusiasm for anything Susan mentioned that I liked, too. She poured red wine from a green jug into a blue glass. When she raised the glass to her mouth, the daylight lit the glass purple and it seemed as if her eyes turned the same color. When she lowered the glass, her eyes returned to the silvery turquoise of her scarf. She wiped the wine from her top lip and smiled at what I’d just said, but more to herself than me, and I knew that I’d never get through to her, really, fully, and that if I did it’d dispel what was already enchanting me anyway, and that made everything impossible, but it also—or especially—made her all the more attractive. When she stood up to leave with her friends a couple hours later, she stretched her arms over her head and looked out the window and her eyes turned the gray blue of the thunderclouds gathering over the vacant fairgrounds across the street.
Since I’d been a young kid I’d loved books and read constantly. I loved mysteries and horror stories and books on history and art and science and music, everything. The bigger the book, the better; I deliberately found the thickest novels I could, for the pleasure of lingering in other worlds and other people’s lives for as long as possible. I borrowed six books a week, the limit, from the library and devoured potboilers and war stories and histories of the Apollo space program and Russian novels I could make neither heads nor tails of and it was all thrilling. What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I’d never have imagined possible.
School was another matter. I was a terrible student and regularly failed assignments and wrote pathetic essays and missed due dates. The only college I was accepted to was the state university, and that just barely. When I met Susan, I’d been on academic probation for a semester, and I dropped out the following fall. Susan and I moved in together while she finished her degree and I painted houses and mowed lawns and shoveled snow.
We moved to Enon when Sue graduated. By then, she was already three months pregnant. I went to work painting houses full-time for one of my grandfather’s neighbors, a guy named Louis, who’d hired me for summers in high school. Louis had moved into a converted boardinghouse across the street from my grandparents with his wife and four kids a few years earlier. My grandparents had been friends for decades with the woman who’d lived there and let rooms before, mostly to Enon’s bachelor civil servants: firemen, cops, mail carriers. When she died and Louis bought the house, he renovated and repainted it by himself. My grandfather liked to stand around in the side yard and pass the time talking about the neighborhood while Louis replaced shingles or primed the doors. Louis always called my grandfather “Mr. Crosby” and shoveled his driveway and the footpath to the front door whenever it snowed, “Because we’re neighbors now, Mr. Crosby, and that’s what neighbors do.”
Louis paid me well, but I had to work with an old ex-con named Gus, who bragged and complained and spewed vulgarity without pause all day, each day, and nearly drove me mad.
“Shit, Louie’s a dumb wop, but I owe him,” he’d say. “You don’t know fuck-all, kid. I killed a guy down in Florida. I bought his old lady some f
Gus would work himself up into fits about Louis, that “skinny guinea who knows fuck-all,” and we’d climb down off the plank we’d run between two ladders across the front of the house we were painting, and Gus would cover his head with a wet towel and complain and threaten me. (Later, we painted with a guy named Frankie Shuey, who got paint all over people’s roofs and driveways, and Gus took to threatening to murder him instead of me.) I’d smoke a cigarette and think about the envelope of cash I’d get at the end of the week, and about Kate being on the way, and how strange it was to think of her, a little newborn girl, and Gus over there, all greasy and sweaty and decrepit, and to try to picture him as having been someone’s baby, once, to try to think of him as a newborn infant. I imagined Kate at about ten years old, wondering about me at work and what I actually spent my time doing and with whom I worked. I used to do that with my grandfather, when I was in school. Instead of paying attention to geometry, I’d wonder about what he was doing at that exact same moment—whether he was in the basement, in his workshop coat, dipping clockworks into an ammonia bath by a wire hanger, or in his black windbreaker and black Greek fisherman’s cap, driving one of his station wagons (he and my grandmother always had two matching station wagons, for which he always paid with cash that he took from one of the deposit boxes he had around the North Shore) to different banks, so he could cash the checks his customers paid him with where they had their accounts, so he didn’t have to report the income, a practice one of his neighbors, an accountant for the IRS, had taught him.