The timing of the Before Picture dinner up at Shep’s was even worse than Jackson had foreseen. The night before, the Saran Wrap that Flicka wrapped around her eyes to seal in the Vaseline had come off while she slept—he should never have bought that off-brand surgical tape—so that morning her eyes had been flaming. While he was out for a few hours, she apparently got—well, “irritable” was an understatement.
For while Carol was always urging him to avoid subjecting Flicka to “stress,” by far and away the biggest source of stress for their elder daughter was the very condition that made her so sensitive to it. She didn’t mind her father’s familiar mouthing off about isn’t it a coincidence how every sanctimonious new “green” law legislators proposed, like a tax on plastic bags, a tax on airline carbon emissions, just happened to make the State more money. She did mind waking up with puffy red eyes halfway to conjunctivitis before breakfast. She did mind not being able to talk right when she had plenty to say. She did mind drooling all the time, and sweating all the time; even if the kids at school had been lectured on not making fun, she might have preferred a little regular-kid teasing to the outsized politeness and looking-the-other-way she put up with instead. She got sick of having to pour that water-sugar-and-salt solution into her g-tube every hour and a half, which produced none of the gasping satisfaction she witnessed in her sister after a deep, thirsty quaff of Coke. She got tired of wearing that big black “airway clearance system” vest for fifteen minutes every morning and night, as if bracketing her sleep with two rounds of boxing.
Flicka might have been grateful that the Vest now spared her parents’ uncomfortably intimate double-fisted pounding on her back while astraddle her buttocks. She might have been grateful, too, that they’d given up on the chest drainage sessions that had tyrannized her childhood: the tube worked unpleasantly down her nose, the pump’s sickening gurgle and slurp, the grotesque accumulation of mucus in the waste container; it had always amazed Jackson how much thick, viscous gunk could derive from those two tiny lungs, and though Carol had always dispensed with the effluent with her usual no-nonsense officiousness, he could not have been the only one to have found the gloppy, stringy substance nauseating. But if he himself was grateful that dislodging her congestion had grown less revolting, for Flicka gratitude was a foreign sensation. She suffered so many other annoyances that she simply transferred her vexation to something else: chronic constipation from all those meds, the humiliating enemas.
Moreover, the biggest trigger of a dysautonomic crisis was surely sheer dread that, for fuck’s sake, she was about to have another dysautonomic crisis.
The signs would have been falling into place in his absence, while Carol was making a German chocolate cake to bring to tonight’s feast at the Knackers’. He knew the drill. Flicka had endured more medical indignity by sixteen than most folks abided over a lifetime, and her true nature was stoic. Sure, she grumbled plenty, but if she ever got outright whiny, that was a red flag; “change in personality” and “emotional lability” were textbook indicators of a crisis. The thing was, most kids with Riley-Day—an older tag for familial dysautonomia that sounded like a pop duo who sang perky numbers on Christian radio—would “whine” that their sister was hogging the family computer. But Flicka had an existential streak a mile wide, and her personality never altered as much as all that. Her version of “lability” was a lot harder to take. She would “whine” about the fact that she hated her life and hated her body; about how she had nothing to look forward to besides submitting to more bouts in the hospital, ending up in a wheelchair, and having her whole cornucopia of symptoms—the wild blood pressure fluctuation, the chronic congestion, the lousy balance, the cornea infections, the seizures—get worse. Flopping and perspiring about the kitchen, she’d “whine” that she’d rather be dead. That was rough for any parent to listen to, since the declaration couldn’t be put down to regulation teenage histrionics. She meant it. This wasn’t a kid who “didn’t understand the concept of death,” either—the likes of whom Jackson had never met anyway. Like most children, Flicka understood perfectly well what death was, and on days like this she thought it sounded wonderful.
Sure enough, he could hear the girl’s nasal screech from the back of the house while he was still out on the stoop. (“No, I didn’t wear the Vest, I hate it, I hate everything, all this stuff about how great it is at least to be alive, I don’t know what you see in it!” Brief lulls were doubtless filled in with Carol’s ritual assurance that she shouldn’t talk like that, that “life was a precious gift,” sentimental homilies guaranteed only to further their daughter’s rage.) He was still feeling afloat and unfocused himself; he’d been warned not to drive, and had ignored the injunction. The sedative seemed to have brought on an after-high, for when he’d filled the tank over on Fourth Avenue his chatter with the attendant had been manic even by his own standards.
“Why don’t you just let me cut out? It’s not worth it!” Flicka wailed from the kitchen.
Walking in on this foofaraw confirmed his conviction that, Christ, he’d earned doing one thing for himself, hadn’t he? Just one?
“I don’t want your stupid scrambled eggs!” Flicka was wheezing when her father entered the room. “I don’t want to spend all Saturday afternoon with my speech therapist, and occupational therapist, and physical therapist. I’m going to die anyway, so just let me watch TV! What does it matter?”
Carol had grabbed the girl’s hair and was squeezing more Artificial Tears in her eyes. (One of the first signs of FD, that the baby couldn’t cry, was something of a sick joke; any infant with a future like this had every reason to weep.) As Flicka was rasping, “Just leave me alone! Let me fall apart in peace!” she started to hyperventilate.
Granted, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the symptoms of FD from the side effects of the meds; nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, canker sores, backaches, headaches, fatigue, flatulence, rashes, and shortness of breath came with both territories. But the nature of this episode grew clearer when in the midst of her gasping Flicka started to retch. The dry heaving was excruciating to watch, somehow more so than before the fundoplication, when she’d have spewed what little she’d ingested of Carol’s unwanted plate of scrambled eggs in a six-foot projectile plume. At least proper vomiting had seemed to offer relief. The retching was ceaseless and unavailing, as if an alien embryo in her guts were clawing its way out.
“It’s a crisis,” Carol told her husband grimly. Most wives would make such a statement in the spirit of hyperbolic melodrama; for Carol, the verdict was coolly clinical. “Thank God you’re back. Hold her.”
Jackson clutched his tiny writhing daughter to his chest. After wrestling with the button and zipper with some difficulty from behind, Carol pulled Flicka’s jeans down, hastily coated her own middle finger with Vaseline, and slipped a tiny tablet the color of marshmallow peanuts as far as she could up her daughter’s ass. Without taking a reading that they didn’t have time for, it was always tricky to discern whether Flicka’s blood pressure was soaring or plummeting, but Carol made an educated guess at low—the girl’s skin was clammy, pale, and cold—and administered a pink tablet of ProAmatine in the same rude fashion. Flicka’s whole digestive system would already have shut down, and even meds administered through her g-tube wouldn’t absorb.
“Now, remember—” said Carol.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jackson interrupted. “We gotta keep her up-right for the next three hours.” Carol never gave him any credit. He knew perfectly well that lying down after ProAmatine could send Flicka’s blood pressure from knee-high to through the roof.
All this time, Heather had been mooning on the sidelines looking envious, and envy in these circumstances made Jackson worry that she was far dumber than she tested.
For good measure, Carol inserted yet another tablet of diazepam, and within a few minutes the convulsive retches in his arms spasmed farther apart. Fortunately, Carol had crammed Flicka full of Valium fast enough to avert a full-blown crisis—the human equivalent of a hard-drive crash—which would have sent them straight to New York Methodist. However, the rescue did cost the cake, which was now filling the room with the sharp, not altogether unpleasant smell of charred chocolate.
“I apologize for the store-bought cake,” Carol said at the door. “We had a mishap with the home-baked one.”
Carol never used Flicka as an excuse, a discipline Jackson admired. Nor would either of them mention how much they’d be out of pocket for the sitter. Flicka having been volatile, they’d called Wendy Porter, their usual registered nurse, who was FD au courant. Hell, they’d have cancelled altogether if it weren’t for Flicka. “I like Glynis,” she’d stressed while they hovered, making sure that she didn’t lie down. “She never treats me like an idiot. She asks me about my cell phone collection, and not only about my stupid FD. She can be, like, sort of wicked, too, which I like tons better than all that goo-goo sweetness I get from those fawning therapists. And now she’s sick. Sicker than I am, even if that seems totally impossible. She’ll be looking forward to tonight, and if you suddenly don’t show up she’ll be crushed. So if you stay home on my account, I swear I’ll swallow some milk the wrong way and give myself pneumonia.” Blackmail, but it had worked; Flick didn’t make empty threats.
Jackson bustled into the kitchen with an overkill of booze—two bottles of wine, two more of decent champagne—meant to impose festivity on an occasion that didn’t easily pass for celebration. Marking the end of an era, this was the last gathering of their traditionally garrulous, fractious foursome that wouldn’t be undermined by dietary restrictions, fatigue, pain, or disappointing blood test results, and the very end of any era was really the beginning of the next one.
Shep had taken the same obfuscating approach to the food. Enough appetizers crowded the table on their enclosed back porch to feed a party of twenty-five: hummus, grilled chili-shrimp on skewers, out-of-season asparagus, and scallops wrapped in bacon; the dim sum, which didn’t quite fit in, had clearly been provided in order to employ Glynis’s forged silver chopsticks. The windows were lined with tea lights. Glynis came downstairs draped in a floor-length black velvet number, which matched Carol’s glittery jet cocktail dress; between the candlelight and the women’s attire, the atmosphere on the porch was that of a séance or satanic ritual. When Jackson wrapped their hostess in a fervent embrace, his fingers sank alarmingly into the velvet; that was a lot of fabric and very little Glynis underneath. Her shoulder blades were sharp as chicken wings. That was no size in which to undergo major surgery, and now he got it about all that food.
“You look fantastic!” Jackson cried. She said thanks with girlish shyness, but he had lied. It was the first of many lies to come, thus another reminder that tonight marked more beginning than finale. Glynis had applied more makeup than usual; the blush and rich red lipstick were unconvincing. Aging anxiety was already etched into her face. Nevertheless, she was a tall, striking woman, and this was the best she was liable to look for a while. That it could well be the best she would look again, ever, was a thought he tried to block.
They settled into caned armchairs while Shep fetched champagne flutes. In the olden days, meaning six weeks ago, Glynis would have hung back on the sidelines conversationally. Wised up to the fact that sparse comment carried greater weight than garrulity, she was the sort who let everyone else argue forever over details, and then made the one sweeping pronouncement that brought the fracas to a close. But now her bearing was regal, as if she were holding court, Queen for a Day. In turn, he and Carol were solicitous, careful to stop talking as soon as she opened her mouth. They let her lay out the procedure scheduled for Monday morning step by step, though they’d already got the whole lowdown from Shep. If Glynis was the center of attention tonight, it was the kind of attention that anyone of sound mind might gladly have skipped.
“At least I got contacting Glynis’s family over with,” said Shep. “Telling her mother was a trip.”
“She’s such a prima donna,” said Glynis. “I could hear her bawling through the receiver from the other side of the kitchen. I knew she’d hijack my drama into her drama. You’d think she was the one who had cancer. She even managed to make me feel bad that I was making her feel bad, if you can believe that.”
“Isn’t it at least a relief,” Carol said tentatively, “that she cares?”
“She cares about herself,” said Glynis. “She’ll milk this for all it’s worth with her book club—you know, the terrible wrongness of a child falling ill before the parent, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, my sisters are saying all the right things, vowing to visit, but they’re mostly glad it’s not them. Maybe I’ll luck out and Ruth will send me some scented candle she got on a free offer from MasterCard.”
There was a harshness about Glynis in the best of times, and Jackson wondered what reaction her family might have had that would have pleased her more.
“And how was telling your kids?” asked Carol.
Glynis visibly flinched.
“More difficult,” Shep intervened gently. “Amelia cried. Zach didn’t, and I wish he had. I think he took it harder. I hadn’t imagined it was possible for that kid to get more closed up, more burrowed into his room. I’m afraid it’s possible. He just—shut down. Didn’t even ask any questions.”
“He already knew,” said Glynis. “At least that something awful was afoot. That I slept too much and my eyes were often red. That we whispered too much, and stopped talking when he walked in.”
“I bet he thought you were getting a divorce,” said Carol.
“No, I doubt that,” said Glynis, taking her husband’s hand and meeting his eyes. “Shepherd has been very tender. Very, obviously tender.”
“Well, I hope a little affection isn’t so rare that it’s what set off Zach’s alarm bells!” said Shep, looking grateful but abashed. “You know, this room thing the kid’s got going … Nanako, our new receptionist, told me about these Japanese kids who never leave their rooms at all. What are they called, something like haikumori? The parents leave meals outside the door, collect the laundry, sometimes empty bedpans. The kids won’t talk, and never cross their thresholds. Mostly hole up with their computers. It’s a big phenom there. You should check it out, Jacks, right up your alley. A whole subculture of kids who say, fuck you, I’m not interested in your shit, leave me alone. We’re not talking dysfunctional eight-year-olds, either; lot of these opt-outs are in their twenties. Nanako thought it was a reaction to Japan’s hothouse competition. Rather than risk losing, they refuse to play. The indoor version of The Afterlife—without the airfare.”
In widening the discussion to Japan, Shep implied that it was now all right to talk about something else besides disease. Even Glynis seemed relieved.
“Those hiki-kimchi, or whatever,” said Jackson. “Precocious moochery is what that is. You gotta give these guys credit for figuring out so young that when you refuse to take care of yourself, someone else will come along and roll your sushi for you.”
“But it’s hardly an enviable life,” said Carol. “Not what any of us would want for Zach.”
His wife’s persistent sincerity sometimes grew trying. “Hey, Shep, I been thinking about that problem of my titles not being sufficiently flattering to my would-be public.” Jackson plunged a triangle of pita bread into the hummus with the pretense of an appetite. “So check this out: Just Because You’re a Quailing, Lily-Livered Twit Who Folks Smarter and Gutsier Than You Are Bleeding White Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Still a Nice Person.”
It went over well.
“Speaking of being bled white,” said Glynis, “Beryl came over the other night. Can you believe she expected us to put up the entire down payment on a Manhattan apartment?”
“Why not throw in a yacht while you’re at it?” said Jackson. “Christ, that woman is Mega-Mooch. Ever notice how these arty bohemian types think we owe them a living? As if we’re all supposed to feel so grateful that they’re creating meaning and beauty for us poor uncultured Neanderthals. Meantime, they’re always shaking a tin can in our faces—for another government grant, or a Midtown penthouse courtesy of Meany Capitalist Older Brother.” He and Beryl had met once: oil and water. She thought he was a heartless right-wing kook, and he thought she was a soft-headed liberal pill. Whenever Shep’s sister came up in conversation, Jackson couldn’t contain himself.
“But, sweetheart,” said Carol, “I thought Mooches were supposed to be ‘smarter and gutsier.’ I thought you admired them. In which case, you look up to Beryl, right?”
“I prefer folks getting away with murder who know they’re getting away with murder. Instead Beryl has that attitude like she’s the victim of some terrible injustice. As if the world needed another documentary. She should turn on the box. They’re chockablock, and most of them bore the shit out of me, frankly.”
When Jackson trailed their host to offer a hand in the kitchen, Shep remarked, “Say, you all right? You’re walking funny.”
“Aw, just overdid it in the gym. Pulled something.” The line had worked on Carol.
Dinner was lavish, with a roast and a profusion of side dishes. Worried about interactions, Jackson made an initial effort to go easy on the wine, but it seemed that every time he reached for his glass it was empty again. At length he gave up and gave in. This was a special night, and not to enter into the spirit of the occasion would have been churlish. The evening had revved into high gear, albeit with a jittery underpinning, everyone laughing too readily, too hard, and too long. At least boisterousness beat moping.
“Been following the Michael Jackson trial?” Shep brought up.
The self-styled “King of Pop” was being charged one more time for messing with little boys at his sick-fuck fun-land ranch. “Yeah, the prosecution’s making a mess of it,” said Jackson. “He’ll get off.”
“I can’t follow the details,” said Carol. “I get too distracted by that face—all the plastic surgery. His face is always the real story for me. It exerts a warped, train-wreck fascination.”
“You know, it used to be that when you had mental problems, they stayed in your head,” said Shep. “Now we all have to look at them.”
“I know what you mean,” said Glynis. “It’s like now everyone wears their neuroses on their sleeves. We used to be surrounded by a bunch of passably normal-seeming people who went home and peered miserably in the mirror. Now you walk down the street and women have breasts the size of Hindenburgs. Men in dresses on hormones are wearing push-up bras, and you can tell from the fold in their Lycra tights that they’re all carved up with some grotesque gash of a vagina. It’s like having to live in other people’s dreamscapes.”
“With Jackson—I mean, Michael Jackson,” said Carol. “What breaks my heart is the shame. How somehow he’s been made to feel that being black is humiliating, something to be effaced.”
“At this point in time,” said Glynis, “I have no understanding of going in for surgery, for anything, if you don’t have to.”
“The guy’s got money,” said Jackson. “If what he wants to buy is looking like Elizabeth Taylor, that’s his business.”
They all looked over at him as if he’d just grown three heads. He held up his hands. “I’m just saying, what’s wrong with trying to make something you dream about real?”
“Because it doesn’t work,” said Shep.
“That’s not how you felt about The Afterlife,” said Jackson. “You wanted to make that real.”
“We’re talking about hacking up your body, not moving to a new house,” said Carol. “It’s obvious, for example, that every surgery and skin-blanching process that ‘Wacko Jacko’ has subjected himself to has only made the man more unhappy. Every disappointing nose job is one more reminder that he doesn’t only hate his race, and his gender, but himself.”
“It’s like sexual fantasy,” said Glynis. “I don’t want to get into particulars—”
“Damn!” said Jackson.
“But have you ever tried acting them out? It’s flat. It’s messy or awkward and self-conscious. When you make it real, it doesn’t get you off. Fantasy works better if it stays in your mind. Let it into the world, and it comes out like some gory, misshapen afterbirth. And Shepherd,” Glynis paused, taking a forkful of green beans, “I don’t think The Afterlife was any different.”
Jackson worried they were getting into touchy territory, but Shep was used to taking gut punches with the smallest hoof. “Maybe,” was all she got out of him, and he asked how she liked the almonds on the beans. At least Glynis was making an effort to eat, which clearly made the guy so ecstatic that he couldn’t have cared less what she said.
It wasn’t until they’d pushed back their chairs from the groaning board that someone brought up Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged patient on life support in Florida whose bloated face had lolled on the lead story of virtually every TV newscast for weeks. Her husband wanted to withdraw her feeding tube, while her parents were determined to keep alive what was no longer a daughter, or even the family goldfish, but closer to an azalea bush.
“Man, am I sick of watching that same footage,” said Jackson. He did an imitation, slackening his jaw and letting drool drizzle his chin, emitting a thin nasal bleat.
“Stop it,” said Carol. “That’s disrespectful.”
He realized too late that the impersonation was a little too close for comfort to Flicka.
“What makes me mad is that this has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo anymore,” said Glynis. “The husband and the in-laws hate each other, it’s all about who wins, and that poor girl gets lost in the shuffle. They could as well be fighting over a scrap of meat.”
“It’s no longer all in the family,” said Shep. “Whole country’s at each other’s throats over this one. But honestly, if you saw a movie in which some private medical face-off ended up involving the governor of Florida—the president’s brother—the state legislature, the state Supreme Court, the federal Supreme Court, and the Congress of the United States, you’d think the plot was totally overdone and unbelievable.”
“When you look at those video clips of Terri,” said Carol, “it seems pretty clear that someone’s home. Withdrawing the feeding tube would be murder.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jackson. “Those are involuntary movements. Like when you poke at a sea anemone. Except that a sea anemone has more brains.”
“What fascinates me,” said Shep, “what with all the publicity, going on for months? I haven’t heard a single shock jock speculate about how much keeping that woman plugged in for fifteen years has cost.”
“Yeah,” said Jackson, “and if you add in the lawyers’ fees, court costs, and the time squandered in legislatures and the statehouse? That one human house plant in Florida must have cost millions, tens of millions—maybe even hundreds of millions.”
“So?” said Glynis, looking back and forth at her husband and his best friend in horror. “What does that matter? What it costs?”
“We’re talking about human life, Jim!” Jackson supplied, but Glynis didn’t smile.
“Is that all that matters to you two? What someone’s life costs?”
“It’s not all that matters,” said Shep. Jackson figured his friend was about to back down again, but surprisingly he held the line. “But it matters. It takes about five dollars a head to save the life of a kid in Africa with diarrhea. Something like two million kids on that continent basically shit themselves to death every year. If you took all the money spent on keeping Terri Schiavo alive—if you can call her alive—and spent it in Africa instead, I bet you could save every single one of those kids this year.”
“But the money wouldn’t be spent in Africa, would it?” Glynis glared. “Who else would you like to kill off, to save money?”
“No one, Glynis.” To Shep’s credit, he met his wife’s eyes. “Like you said, the money wouldn’t go to Africa anyway.”
Jackson decided to come to the rescue. “Thing is, these gonzo evangelicals, who are so fired up to save Schiavo—who’s reverted, at best, to a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby? They’re the same folks who support capital punishment. They’re gung ho on any military adventure abroad. If they had their say, they’d roll back the clock and you couldn’t get birth control out of wedlock. They oppose stem-cell research because it uses a few microscopic specks from an embryo that’s otherwise going to be tossed into medical waste. They may back national health insurance for children, but couldn’t care less about health insurance for the kids’ parents. They get hysterical about pedophiles like Michael Jackson, but they don’t get excited about women being raped, who are supposed to bear the babies of their attackers. Add it all up? This type? They don’t give a shit about grown-ups.”
The diversion came at a price. Carol wasn’t born-again, but he had still derogated a host of his wife’s opinions. Her voice was frosty. “That’s because adults can stick up for themselves.”
“Not against these people!”
“These people stick up for the weak.”
“Prefer the weak,” Jackson countered. “No competition. And they use the weak to boss other grown-ups around.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “The point is, we have no idea what kind of rich interior life Terri Schiavo might be enjoying. The dreams, the memories, how much she knows her family is there and feels them caring for her even if she can’t communicate. Her husband has no right to make the high-handed decision that since he’s tired of visiting and he’s in love with someone else he’s going to snuff her out.”
“I have to agree with Carol,” said Glynis. “You never know what kind of a life someone might still value even if you don’t think you’d put up with it yourself. In fact, you might be wrong. You might put up with it. You never know what you’ll put up with if the alternative is nothing.”
Helping to clear the dishes, Jackson marveled at the last discussion’s curious alignments. This foursome conventionally divided on issues of the day along the same axes. Shep and Carol were sentimental (they would say compassionate). Glynis was customarily on Jackson’s side. They were both practical (the other two would say callous). For Glynis to be arguing to continue artificial life support for a woman who, according to earlier photographs, used to be quite a looker, and who—were she to realize that the pics of her face running on front pages all over the nation were of a fat, vapid, floppy imbecile—would turn in her grave, if only she were allowed to have one … Well, Shep must have been wrong. Cancer did change people.
By the time they were picking at the bakery layer cake, the mood had sobered. They all seemed to remember the reason for this occasion; past midnight, Glynis’s surgery was only a day and a half away. They shouldn’t keep her up any later. She looked tired, and Jackson was rounding on an exit line when she rounded on him.
“Jackson, have you had a chance to think about what products you and Shep might have worked with in the early eighties that could have contained asbestos?”
“Well, I’ve really put my mind to it, but—”
“Jackson and I have already talked about this, and I told you we talked about it,” said Shep, his tone uncharacteristically testy. “Maybe you should drop it.”
“Hey, I don’t mind—” said Jackson.
“I mind,” said Shep.
“If some company had done this to you,” Glynis charged her guests, “would you honestly be inclined to drop it?”
“Had this happened to any of us,” said Shep, his voice flattened in a hyper-evenness that was obviously a substitute for shouting, “and if you’re right about where the fibers might have come from, everyone at this table could have been exposed—I would hope we’d all concentrate first and foremost on getting well.”
“It would be one thing if I fell and hit my head,” said Glynis. “Or smoked my whole life when I knew it was bad for me and then got cancer. But this was done to me. By people who deliberately buried medical evidence. Who kept deadly products on the market because they wanted to make more money. Those people should pay the price.”
Shep glanced at his guests with chagrin. They were close friends and went back decades, but he didn’t commonly conduct marital spats in their presence. “I know it isn’t fair,” he said softly. “But you’ll be the one who pays the price, Gnu, even if you do win a lawsuit.”
“People who care that much about money can only be punished by losing it,” said Glynis. For someone who was sick and at the waning end of a long evening, she marshaled a surprising vehemence, allowing Jackson to glimpse one appeal of her fixation: it gave her energy. “There’s a whole specialty practice of ‘mesothelioma lawyers’ who advertise on the Internet. Asbestos is their entire practice, and they represent cases on a contingency basis. So it wouldn’t cost us a dime, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jackson rarely saw Shep have trouble with self-control. But the guy’s jaw muscles were clenched, and he was holding his silverware like a pitchfork. “I repeat: the purchasing records for that era are no longer on file. I checked with Pogatchnik. I’ve done exhaustive searches on all the potentially suspect materials we might have worked with at Knack. Once in a while a brand name sounds vaguely familiar. But ‘vaguely familiar’ will never stand up to legal cross-examination. I do not—do not, Glynis—have any physical proof of having ever worked with a particular product whose manufacturer we could haul into court.”
Jackson wondered how many times Shep had recited that same speech. Since this time, too, Glynis gave no sign of having heard it, his guess was several. “When you buy things, and especially when you work with them professionally, you rely on those manufacturers to have a conscience! You have to be able to trust that when you buy a loaf of bread it’s not laced with arsenic! In metalsmithing, I have to be able to assume that if I subject a lump of solder to the torch, it is not going to give off poisonous fumes, or if I slip a piece of silver in the pickle it’s not going to explode! I—”
And then she stopped. Her face suspended in an expression of intense concentration. She cocked her head and looked a little to the side, with her forehead creased.
“I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to think of this,” she said. “In art school. The soldering blocks. The crucibles for casting, the lining we used. The heat-proof mitts. I’m almost sure they contained … asbestos.”
“Almost sure,” Shep said warily. If his wife was in the process of letting him off the hook for involuntary manslaughter, he didn’t look too thrilled about it.
“Well, yes, pretty sure. In fact, very sure. When I think back, I remember one of my teachers mentioning the material in passing. But when you’re a student, you work with what they order. You—trust.”
“You can’t sue the school,” said Shep. “You told me that Saguaro Art School closed years ago.”
“No, but virtually all our supplies were from the same company. I can visualize them perfectly, down to the elliptical logo printed on the bottom of the soldering blocks. The insulation lining for the crucibles was packaged in a cardboard canister with a metal top, like top-shelf whiskey comes in, only wider and shorter. The label was black and green. The mitts: they were cream-colored, printed with little purple flowers and green sprigs, and piped in pink. Those products have surely been discontinued or had the asbestos removed by now, but the company is still in business, because I ordered from them only last year.” Glynis looked up with an expression of beatific revelation, like Mary after the appearance of the Archangel. “Forge Craft.”
“That was weird,” Jackson said on the way home. Having kept to soda water after one ceremonial glass of champagne, Carol was driving. She was the one who could really stand to cut loose once in a while, and he felt a little guilty that his own—call it expansiveness—rarely allowed for that.
“How so?” Her coolness derived from his having, in her view, drunk too much. So she had to take care of him, just as she took care of Flicka. Little wonder that at dinner parties her husband stuck up for the rights of grown-ups. Carol was the consummate grown-up, and he sometimes worried where she found any joy in her life.
“What took her so long to remember she worked with asbestos in art school? It’s been weeks. Meanwhile, Shep’s been raking himself over the coals about having been careless at Knack.”
“Memory’s fickle.” Though there was hardly another car on I-87, Carol always drove the speed limit.
“I guess this asbestos thing has turned out to be a gold mine for a lot of people.”
“I doubt Glynis cares about the money itself in the slightest,” said Carol. “I’m glad if she’s stopped blaming Shep. He’s going to have his hands full in the coming months without feeling like, on top of everything else, her cancer is all his fault. Still, the asbestos thing—it gives her a sense of purpose. It makes cancer seem bigger than her small personal misfortune; it makes it seem more important than ordinary, pointless bad luck. It connects her to the world: to history, to politics, to justice. I can see why she’d cling to that. Because when you get sick, I think that’s the hardest part: living in a separate universe from everyone else, like having been exiled to a foreign country.”
Much like Shep, Carol wasn’t given to speeches, but when she did say something it came out whole, considered. He knew what she meant, too. When they’d hugged goodbye at the door, the feeling was like being on the deck of an ocean liner with the horn sounding. It was time for the non-passengers to get ashore. When their car reversed out of the drive with their two friends waving on the porch, it was the house that seemed to be pulling away instead, released from its moorings to recede toward a horizon from which it was impossible to send postcards.
“Sort of like Flicka, and the Jewish thing,” said Jackson.
“Yes, exactly.” She seemed unnervingly pleased that they were conducting a successful conversation. “The members of our support group … The fact that FD only afflicts Ashkenazi kids, it makes them feel that gene handed down through the generations amounts to more persecution of the Chosen People, more of God’s testing their faith. As if FD means something.” Carol allowed herself a rare surge of speed. “Of course, it doesn’t.”
Though outsiders would never have guessed, Carol was much more of a nihilist than her husband. She sat for hours numbly at her computer doing sales outreach for IBM, filled the humidifier in Flicka’s bedroom before fetching a new roll of Saran Wrap for their sadly plastic version of tucking their daughter in, and for years had risen wearily at 1:00 a.m. to pour the first of the night’s two cans of Compleat into Flicka’s feeding bag—all without any sense of mission. She just did it.
Paying Wendy in cash, Jackson reasoned that the nurse may have been worth it, since by some miracle both girls were asleep. As he and Carol got ready for bed, he waited for her to finish brushing her teeth before darting into their master bathroom himself, catching a startled expression as he closed the door in her face. “It’s for your sake,” he explained through the door. “Have to cut a wicked fart.”
How many times a day was he going to have to fart? This was going to be trickier than he realized, and he wondered if he’d thought his strategy through. He took advantage of his privacy to inspect matters, since matters had begun to hurt. He’d been relieved at first that the “discomfort” was so minimal; the real story was that the local was only now wearing off.
By the time he emerged, Carol was in bed, her bare breasts curved over the top sheet. For her slender figure, they were unusually full, the kind of knockers that other women were always trying to buy and couldn’t. That said, the lesson that you either had it or you didn’t was not one he could accept on his own behalf.
“What’s with the boxers?”
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He had rehearsed this all day. “That appointment I had this morning. Seems I’ve got some kind of skin condition, probably from showering in the gym. The dermatologist warned me that it was microbial or something.” He’d picked up the word from a pharmaceutical ad on the news the night before. “It’s contagious, and you could pick it up if I’m not careful.”
“Well, let me see it!”
“No way. It’s kind of gross. I don’t want to turn you off.”
Carol slid down the pillows. “Since when do you ever turn me off?”
God, it was a waste, with those cherry nipples like the garnish on a two-scoop banana split. He loved her with her hair down, and had been wanting to pick the bobby pins out all night. Nevertheless, though most guys would consider him lucky, for Jackson desiring his wife was always accompanied by a gnawing little torture. He never felt quite up to her. Even after having been married these many years, he was never quite sure what she saw in him.
“That’s the other thing,” he said. “We can’t—not for a while. This thing takes a long time to clear up, or that’s what he told me.”
“I still wish you’d let me take a look at it.”
“You’ve nursed Flicka all day,” he said, slipping in beside her with a discreet glance at his fly, which did indeed stay closed with the help of the safety pin. “You don’t have to nurse me, too.”
He didn’t relish lying to her about the boxers, but she wouldn’t have understood if he’d been straight—if he’d explained that when you give someone a present, especially a really big present, you had to wrap it first.