When Patrick first saw Lucy, he thought, Here comes trouble. She had a wild corona of blond hair and she was skinny as a whippet. Jeans, sneakers, big, complicated earrings. He knew the type. When he was at the commune, whenever they couldn’t grow enough of their own food, a few of the members would go out to a stand to steal fruits and vegetables. Just a little, because they didn’t want to ruin anyone’s business. Just enough so they could eat. They always sent the younger members because they thought it was less likely that kids would be caught, and if they were, the kids were instructed to cry, to act terrified, and usually they were just let go with a warning never to come back.
He didn’t really expect Lucy back the next day. Still, all morning he kept looking toward the entrance. Maybe it was the early morning rain that had kept her from walking all this way. He switched on the radio and heard the Kinks and then the news. The superintendent of schools had resigned. It was going to be warmer again tomorrow.
He worked all morning in the greenhouse, getting the plants ready to bring outside: lettuce, spinach, leeks, chard, and the easily stored root veggies. His crew had arrived in April, plowing the fields, starting to plant his onions and parsley, which could take the lingering cold. Here it was May, and everything was now in full swing, the farm stand hopping, and it would stay that way until October and maybe even until December, when he brought in Christmas trees and decorations, and then he’d shut down for a few months, choosing seeds, setting up a schedule, tending the greenhouse. He was bringing in a crate of carrots, the earth still clinging to them, when he saw her standing by the cash register, looking around for him. She was wearing a red dress and cowboy boots, a gold clip in her hair. “Lucy,” he said, and she gave him a smile.
He walked over to her, setting the carrots back down. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, her face bright with hope. “Where do I start?” she said.
EVERY FEW MINUTES he watched her. She picked up a broom, curving herself around it, sweeping the floor. She talked to the customers, and at one point he looked up and she was laughing as a man with a baby strapped to his back like a papoose clearly flirted with her, dipping his head to say something that made her blush. Well, she was a pretty girl. He couldn’t blame the guy. But she was also really young, no matter what she said.
He made her take a break, telling one of his crew to take charge of things. “Let’s get a snack.”
“I’m not hungry.”
She was so skinny he could have threaded a needle with her. He couldn’t imagine what she was eating at home or even what her home was. He’d already decided that when she left for the day, he’d give her some carrots, a few pears. “Come on. I’ll make something for us both to nosh on.”
He hadn’t really planned on taking a break with her. He had his routines. A cheese sandwich and soup. An apple. Some quiet time with a book in his kitchen or sitting out on the porch swing. A few times he had actually yearned for company. He would drive into town and grab a beer or two with his friend Sal, who supplied his restaurant with Patrick’s produce. Or he’d go to Sal’s house, where Sal’s wife, Becky, would fuss over him and try to talk up her female friends to him in hopes of piquing his interest. “I’m not ready,” he said, cutting her off in midstream.
“Well,” she said, “who ever is?”
So usually he just kept to himself, sometimes sipping wine to get through the rest of the day.
Lucy finally agreed and followed him into his house. He hadn’t had company for a while. He had slept in the living room the night before so he could see the stars from the main window, and now he suddenly felt a little embarrassed that there was a pillow and blanket on his sofa. When he and Lucy went into the kitchen, he was relieved that he had done all the dishes that morning and put them away. He had even scrubbed the stove and the countertops. “Tea?” he asked, reaching for the kettle. “Some cake?”
“I never eat cake. All that sugar.”
“What? Sugar is one of the great pleasures of life.” He took out a chocolate cake and cut them both thick slices. She leaned down to the plate and inhaled deeply. Then she picked up her fork and took a bite, her eyes closing with pleasure. “What did I tell you?” he said.
Lucy talked nonstop, about how she was from Boston and she hadn’t seen her family for a while and, though she missed them terribly, she sometimes wondered whether they missed her. It sounded like a true story to Patrick.
“Why wouldn’t they miss you?” he asked.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “So do you have family?”
He thought of his parents, now retired and living in a beachfront condo in Florida that was hilariously called Pelican Heights. As soon as his parents had moved in, they both took up golf and cards, and his mother did scrapbooking with a group of women. Every Sunday they called him, wanting him to visit more often, his father trying to talk him into moving down there so they could all be together. But Florida to Patrick was the land of the white shoes, the place where you went to be bored to death. The few times he had managed to visit, he couldn’t bear the sticky heat, the way everything was washed out in pastels. The beaches were crowded and noisy, and everything hummed with air-conditioning that was so cold he ended up wearing his jacket. He hated the way his parents fussed over him, their concern like a scratchy wool blanket he was desperate to throw off. His parents never mentioned his past. Instead, everything was about what was next. “What would you have to do to finish your degree?” his father had asked him the last time they were together. “Whatever it is, we’ll pay for it.”
“Go back to school,” his mother urged. “Get back to life.”
But when Patrick thought about taking exams, getting his botany degree, he didn’t think of it as getting back to life. It just reminded him of what he had lost. “I have a life,” he told his parents. “I’m perfectly content.”
“Really,” his mother said. “A college-educated man running a farm stand in the middle of nowhere.”
“I make a living.”
“Talk to me when you use the word ‘happy,’ ” she said.
The one time his parents had visited, his father had walked around the farm stand without saying a word. His mother picked up the apples and put them down. She studied the jars of honey he sold from another farmer who kept bees, the delicate hand-painted labels, but then she put the honey back and didn’t reach for her wallet. When Patrick showed them the house, the vintage couch that had a tiny rip on the arm, the chipped wooden desk he kept, the kitchen floor that needed to be retiled, his mother’s face crumpled. At night, they all sat out on his porch, and when a shooting star appeared, his mother shut her eyes. “There, I made a wish for you,” she said. He didn’t have to ask her what it was. He knew.
Now, he looked at Lucy. Welcome to the fucked-up families of the world, he thought. “My family situation’s complicated, too,” he told Lucy. Then he busied himself clearing plates.
“What’s your story?” Lucy said.
“I don’t really have one.”
“Sure, you do. Everyone does.”
“I lived in a commune for a while. How’s that?”
“You did? Was it like a cult?”
“Nope. It was sometimes wonderful. For a little while, anyway. But it wasn’t for me.”
“I don’t know. It sounds good to me. Always having people around you and all. It gets lonely, you know?” She bent her head into her hands.
“What’s wrong?” he said, and she waved her hand, swiping at her eyes. “It’s nothing. I just sometimes get sad.” She stood up. “We should probably get back to work. Do you have a bathroom I could use?”
He pointed down the hall. While she was gone, he did the dishes. He had a quick glass of wine and then called her, but there was no answer. “Lucy?” he called again, and then he went down the hall, past the empty bathroom to his bedroom, and there was Lucy, staring at the photo he had on his dresser. He and Vera at Cape Cod in the fall, both of them laughing and windblown, holding on to each other on the sand. “Who’s this?” Lucy said. “She’s beautiful.”
Patrick carefully took the photo out of her hands and put it in his dresser drawer.
“Why’d you do that?” Lucy asked.
“It’s time to go back to work,” he told her.
AT THE END of the day, Patrick gave Lucy her pay, minimum wage, a total of five dollars. “No, no,” she said, waving her hands. He took the bills and fit them into her hands.
“You did a great job. You deserve this money.”
She hesitated, and then she tucked the bills into her back pocket.
“I’m driving you home,” he said. “Just let me grab my keys.”
“No, no. You don’t have to do that.”
“I need to pick up some things in town.”
“I like to walk,” she said. She hesitated. “Can I come back? To work, I mean?”
He nodded yes as he ducked inside the house, grabbing the keys from the green hook in his kitchen, but when he came outside, she was gone.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER he closed the stand, covering the produce, shutting the door to the inside market, Patrick sat alone on his porch swing, slowly rocking back and forth. Stars speckled the sky, and he could hear a dog howling in the distance. He thought about Lucy. The girl was like an ellipsis, a sentence with something left out. Who knew what her life was really like? He couldn’t even figure out his own. He went back inside, back into his room, and opened his top drawer. There was the photo of Vera that Lucy had noticed. He picked it up.
Patrick had fallen in love with Vera when they were both fifteen and living twenty minutes away from each other in Cleveland. She was the new girl in school, with big, cartoony eyes, curly black hair that seemed to be running away from her head, and bright orange basketball sneakers. She was always reading. He had never seen anyone like her. She felt his stare. “Come to my house after school,” she said, socking him playfully in the arm. They spent the afternoon talking, making cookies, and kissing. After that, they were together all the time.
Patrick knew his parents thought that it was just puppy love, that it would fall apart when he and Vera went to college, but Patrick knew different. “We love Vera, but can’t you find a nice Catholic Vera?” his mother asked him, and when Patrick told Vera, laughing, she sighed. “My parents want to hire a Jewish matchmaker for me,” she said. He and Vera applied to the same schools: Boston University, Berkeley, the University of Michigan. They both got into the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and it wasn’t long before Vera moved into his dorm room, and then they moved into an apartment, and their parents gave up trying to split them apart.
One day, Vera took Patrick to see a psychic. “Really?” he said. “This is really what we’re going to do?”
“Maybe she can tell us where we’ll end up working,” Vera said. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Patrick believed in God, but he also believed in science, in the things that he could see and feel or that could be proved. You couldn’t convince him that a woman in a turban would know what was going to happen. “Come on, this is silly,” he said, but Vera just grinned. She believed in all manner of things. She had to tap the light four times before leaving a room because it was good luck. She couldn’t start a flight of stairs on her left foot; it always had to be her right. She wore lucky earrings, an old cheap pair of red glass danglers, and she insisted that every time she wore them, something good happened. And she loved going to psychics because she said it gave her life a framework. “Don’t be so closed-minded,” Vera said. “Doesn’t science say that the world is stranger than we can imagine? Scientists say there’s really no such thing as time, that the past, present, and future are happening all at once, and maybe that’s just what psychics are tapping into.”
He still thought it was nuts, but he went with her anyway. The woman in the shop didn’t have a turban but was wearing a floral shirt with blue buttons, her frowsy white hair held up with a chopstick, which somehow made it even funnier to him. “I’m Madame Celeste,” she said, and Patrick gave Vera a look, wanting her to smile with him, but Vera’s face was serious. Vera handed Madame Celeste twenty dollars and sat in the chair opposite her. Patrick took the seat next to Vera. Madame Celeste spoke in a bored drone and said the usual things. Vera would travel. She would have a good job. Money would not be a problem. “You will move to a new house,” Madame Celeste said, which was hilarious, since they could hardly afford their apartment right now, let alone a house.
Then Madame Celeste leaned forward and looked from Vera to Patrick and back again. She sat up straighter. “Marry him fast,” she said quietly.
Vera smiled. “Really? Fast?”
“Don’t wait,” Madame Celeste said. Her mouth closed like an envelope and then she shook her head. “That’s enough for today,” she said.
Patrick followed Vera outside. He felt giddy. It had been a silly thing to do, but he looked over at Vera, and her cheeks were flushed, and she had a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were in another zone. He grabbed her hand until she met his eyes.
“Please,” he said. “Marry me fast.”
THE DAY AFTER they graduated, they married in Vera’s backyard in Cleveland. It was a Mexican-themed outdoor wedding that Vera’s mother, Ellen, had planned, with a mariachi band, three kinds of make-your-own tacos, bowls of guacamole, and a chocolate wedding cake. They had both a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi, which seemed to satisfy all the parents.
Patrick’s parents came in from Florida tanned as leather and bearing the gift of a sizable check and two big boxes of oranges. Ellen and her husband, Tom, Vera’s father, clapped Patrick on the back and told him that he was now officially the son they never had. “Not that you weren’t that way before,” Tom said. Ellen wrapped both arms around him. “Anything you need, you just ask us,” she told him.
“By the time you have kids, maybe you’ll decide on one religion,” Vera’s mother said. “Being both is so confusing to a child, don’t you think?”
“We just got married,” Vera said. “And now you want me pregnant?”
“You know what I mean,” her mother said, and then she leaned over and told Vera that all she had had to do was look at Tom and she got pregnant. “We’re a fertile lot,” she said.
MARRIED LIFE WAS WONDERFUL. They moved into a new apartment in Ann Arbor on East William Street, with a kitchen so small there wasn’t enough room for more than one person at a time. The walls were so thin they could hear the guy walking upstairs and the married couple below them arguing. Ann Arbor was filled with movie theaters and museums and restaurants, and there was the Arb, where they went to picnic, sometimes throwing stones into the brook.
Their days were crammed. Vera studied library science part-time, squeezing in a waitressing job, while Patrick managed Flower Child, a florist shop, and pursued his master’s in botany with a full-ride scholarship from the university.
He felt like an adult. He had friends who were still dating, crashing into breakups, and then going out again and were not very happy about it. But Patrick was in a state of bliss. He loved studying botany. Plants made sense to him. He loved his job at the flower shop, too, tending the showy blooms, watching over the refrigerated compartment where the more fragile flowers were kept. He got to know the customers who came into the shop. His favorite was the man who bought a bouquet of lilies every Friday for his wife because that was her name. Every flower was symbolic of something, he knew that, but what he really appreciated was that flowers took on the meaning you wanted them to. If you disliked roses, then who’s to say that giving a rose wasn’t the worst gift you could give someone? If daisies made you yearn, then that was the message you sent by giving them to someone. He filled the apartment with Vera’s favorites: dahlias, poppies, zinnias, anything bright and splashy.
The only thing he loved more than being married was her. They cooked makeshift dinners—noodles and beef, spaghetti and broccoli. Whatever was cheap and healthy and could be dreamed up in a pan. They went out to the movies, always sitting in the first row because Vera liked the film to be right in her face, and at night they sat out on their front stoop eating ice pops and talking. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they both had stipends at school. They could make do.
His last year of school, Vera began to notice babies. Even though Ann Arbor was a college town, people loved it so much they stayed. They built families and businesses. Vera and Patrick couldn’t go out to a restaurant without Vera’s homing in on whatever little one was wedged into a booster seat or seated on a lap. She waggled her fingers, smiled, and played peekaboo, and if a pregnant woman was there, Vera congratulated her, asked how many months pregnant she was, how she felt, and whether she wanted a boy or a girl or didn’t care. When Vera turned her attention back to him, he saw the longing in her eyes. “What do you think, should we get one of our own?” she said, leaning toward him.
He loved her, but they were so young yet. There was so much he wanted to do with her. Go scuba diving in Bermuda and ride camels in Morocco. Camp out under the stars and see the Great Wall of China. He loved kids. Of course he did. But it felt too soon. Was it wrong that he wanted more time with his wife? He loved being able to just pile into a car together and go upstate, to sit up all night watching movies or talking. You couldn’t do that with a baby. “It’s just—I don’t know, right now? Neither of us have graduated yet. We both are going to need to find jobs. Can’t we wait a bit?”
“I don’t know if we can,” she said. He thought of all those times they had had sex in high school and the condoms had broken and she had never gotten pregnant. Maybe it would take a long time, and by then he’d probably be ready to start a family. She punched him gently in his arm. “Think of the fun we’ll have trying,” she said. “Come on, say yes,” she said. “You know you can’t say no to me.”
He kissed her mouth. “You got that right,” he said.
VERA DIDN’T GET PREGNANT. Every time she had her period, Patrick felt relieved. “Next time,” he told her, and she echoed it back, and then she’d go take a shower and Patrick would hear her crying under the rush of water.
Vera’s unhappiness began to seep into him. Was this his fault somehow, because he didn’t really want it? Because he didn’t feel ready? Because maybe part of him wondered why his love wasn’t enough. One day he brought her a bouquet of perfect lilacs, and she accepted them so sadly that he couldn’t bear it anymore. “Let’s go to bed and make a baby,” he said.
He focused on her face, her lovely eyes, but the sex felt more like a job than something erotic, and when they were finished, she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.
A month later she saw a specialist who did a round of tests and told her everything was fine. Patrick went to have his sperm tested, whacking off into a cup in a little air-conditioned room with magazines like Big Bottom Girls on a shelf by a TV. He thought of Vera and splashed into the cup. His sperm were plentiful and strong swimmers, and somehow that made it worse, because if there was no one and nothing to blame, how were you supposed to proceed?
Vera began to look faded and get tired earlier, and her back began hurting her. “The body will heal itself if you let it,” she declared, and she began making macrobiotic dishes, brown rice and seaweeds, which she barely touched. He’d come home and find her asleep in a chair, a book on her lap. She couldn’t stay up past dinnertime and would collapse on the couch. “Just for a minute,” she said, and then she was dozing. She complained of indigestion that came and went, and she began going on these crazy diets, popping Tums and drinking baking soda in water, but nothing seemed to help. When he reached for her, she gently pushed him away. “I just can’t tonight.”
“Come here, then,” he said, curling around her, wrapping her in his arms. She sighed and then fell asleep against him.
One night he woke up to find Vera standing in the middle of their bedroom, her hands tucked into her armpits. “Can’t sleep, that’s all,” she said. He touched her forehead, glowing with heat. “Are you okay?” he said. “You feel feverish.”
She shook her head. “It’s just hot in here,” she said, and then her mouth moved in a funny way, as if she didn’t want to say the next words. “Do you think we can’t have kids?”
“Of course we can,” he told her.
But Vera began to look more and more haggard. “Things taste funny,” she complained, perking up only when he told her he had read that was sometimes a sign of pregnancy. She pounded her fist on her chest. “I wish. I think in my case it’s heartburn.”
She gave up on macrobiotics, but she still ate lightly, so that the two of them often had different dinners. One night, he caught her studying herself in the mirror. “I look like shit,” she said. “My color’s really awful. Should I go to another doctor? Maybe get completely checked out?”
He thought of all the bills they had. They were barely making their rent, and the last time he had looked in their bank account, there was only three hundred dollars. Even with the crappy health insurance they had, it would still cost a fortune just to have a checkup. “Honey,” he said, “you’re just stressed out. All you need to do is relax.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she said.
It was her idea to stop trying to have a baby, to give it a break. She dropped out of school for a semester but kept working because they needed the money. “I’ll go back to school,” she told him. “You don’t have to worry.” She began going to the local YMCA to take a yoga class and meditate, but as far as he could see, she didn’t seem more serene, and it worried him. But then he was in the middle of his finals, and he had to concentrate. He had to study. But the more he studied, the more he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention in class, he hadn’t taken good enough notes, because he had been worrying about Vera. What was he thinking? Why hadn’t he done both? He called his other classmates to borrow their notes, he tried to set up study groups, but it all made him more exhausted and confused.
He began staying up until three, cramming on the dining room table, while Vera slept on the couch, keeping him company. He carried his books everywhere with him, reading at breakfast and on the bus. He began to worry: What if he didn’t pass? What if he didn’t get his degree? As it was, they were barely managing on Vera’s meager waitressing salary and his at the shop. How would they live? He watched his wife reading on the couch and felt a stab of irritation. The last time he had asked her, “When do you think you might want to go back to school and finish?” she had shrugged. She got to just read and work part-time and sleep. When was the last time he had been able to sleep? He had to work and go to school, and he felt as if it was all on his shoulders now. How would they ever afford a child?
The week before his finals, he had fallen asleep on the living room couch, still in his jeans and T-shirt, his sneakers on, his textbook spilled across his chest. He woke up startled to see Vera, fully dressed, standing in the middle of the room. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ll come to bed.” They had always had a pact: no going to bed alone. He’d go to bed and lie there until she was asleep and then he’d get up and study some more.
But Vera didn’t look right. She was blinking hard as if she had just realized something important. She took a step and stumbled and her hands flew to her head. “I think I need to go to the hospital,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” he said, and then Vera’s eyes fluttered and she crumpled to the floor.
He jumped up. Three steps to get to her, to gather her up in his arms. A sound rumbled from her, like song. “Vera!” he shouted. “Vera!” He had to call someone, he had to get help, but the phone was in the other room. He could see it from where he was huddled over her, but he couldn’t reach it, and to get there he’d have to leave Vera, and how could he do that? “Help!” he screamed through their thin walls. “Help!” Her eyes rolled in their sockets, and he let go of her and leaped for the phone, dialing the operator, yelling out the address for an ambulance. “Tell them to come now!” he shouted. He flung the receiver from him, running back to her, cradling her, stroking her hair, and then, finally, finally, there was the banging on the door, and his door opened as if it were being broken in, and two paramedics in blue uniforms took Vera from him. “She’s still warm,” one of the guys said, his hand flat against Vera’s shoulder. He leaned closer to Vera, and the paramedic looked at him.
“What are you doing?” Patrick said, panicked. But then they were carrying her out, down to the ambulance, to a hospital, and he rushed to follow.
HE WAITED FOR NEWS, one person in a sea of orange plastic chairs, until a doctor came out in green scrubs. As soon as Patrick saw the doctor’s face, he knew. He stumbled back until he hit the wall.
The doctor told him that she had an enlarged heart, that she might have had it since birth, that some people never even had symptoms.
“What symptoms?”
“Indigestion, extreme fatigue, sweating—” the doctor said.
Patrick tried to swallow. “If I had known—if I had seen—could this have been treated?” he asked.
“There are medications,” the doctor said, and then he put one hand gently on Patrick’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
It was five in the morning. A social worker had come and given him the name of a funeral home. He had to fill out papers. Afterward he stood in the corridor, holding one of his hands with the other. “Is there someone who can come get you?” the social worker had asked, but the only person he wanted to be with was Vera. He kept expecting her to round the corner, laughing at the fuss made over her. She’d calm him down. She’d hold his hand. Can you believe this? she’d ask him.
No. He couldn’t.
He couldn’t leave her. Not yet. He walked to a pay phone and called Vera’s parents, making them both get on the phone at the same time. When he told them, his voice tight, a woman walking by brushed past him, and then Vera’s mother screamed so loudly Patrick let the receiver clatter against the wall, hanging, and then he walked away, his hands clapped to his ears, as if even a mile away he would still hear her.
HIS PARENTS FLEW up from Florida. Vera’s parents were there, too, from Cleveland. So were his friends. But he didn’t remember much of anything. Everyone crammed into their apartment, someone put food in front of him, crackers, cheese, and grapes, but he couldn’t eat. Everything hurt him. Her face creams in the bathroom. The hairbrush with her hairs threaded through it. He found, hidden under the bed, where he had never looked, a small blue box, and when he opened it, there was a tiny red taffeta party dress, a funny pair of baby suspenders with dogs on them. He put the clothes to his face and wept.
It felt as if someone had ripped off a layer of life, something that had kept him from seeing what was really there, and now he could never go back to the way things were, to the way he had felt. He could sleep only if he downed four glasses of wine or took a pill, and his dreams, when he did sleep, were thick and heavy with her. In his dreams, she was serene, and smiling at him. How come you aren’t calling me? she asked him, and then she handed him a piece of paper and leaned over and kissed him. But where are you going? he asked, and she laughed, like a line of jazz, and then she was gone, and when he opened the paper, the numbers she wrote were smeared and he couldn’t make them out. Wait! he called. Wait!
A MONTH AFTER the funeral, he stopped going to work. He stayed at home and he talked to his wife as if she were still there. Why did you leave? Why didn’t you tell me? Do you hate me for not knowing how sick you were? Because I sure as fuck hate myself. The house ticked around him. He bolted up in the middle of the night, sure he heard a rustling in the kitchen. “Vera—” he said, and he went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, and a mouse scooted under the stove.
“Marry him fast,” was what that psychic had said. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if he could have done something?
His boss sent over a huge bouquet of flowers with a note that said, Come back whenever you’re ready. But he knew he’d never be ready. He let the bills pile up on the side table, even though there was the surprise of money from Vera’s life insurance, a policy he hadn’t even known she had. A check for $100,000 arrived in a nondescript white envelope. Why hadn’t she ever told him about that? he wondered. It was typical Vera, taking care of details, taking care of him. Well, what did he care about money now? There was also a letter from the college, saying that they acknowledged his situation and that even though he hadn’t taken his finals, he could still do so. He could still graduate, but he had to let them know, he had to make arrangements. He thought about how much he had wanted this degree, how much it had meant to him, and how it would have changed his life and Vera’s. He crumpled the paper in his hands. Dreams. All of it dreams, and now he had woken up.
At night he lay on Vera’s side of the bed. Come back. Come back.
Mostly he thought about how he should have insisted she go to a doctor the first day she said she wasn’t feeling well. He could have paid more attention. Not been so cheap. He should have known something was amiss. What was wrong with him? She might have lived.
His parents called often. And then one night, when he was staring at the TV, Vera’s mother, Ellen, called him. Her voice was soggy with tears, and she asked him how he was doing, whether he was working or eating, and he lied and said he was.
“Was Vera sick? Was there any sign?” Ellen said. He heard her swallow. “I know what the doctor said, but I just wondered . . .” Her voice trailed off like a ribbon.
He put his head in his hands. Here they were. All the questions he had been asking himself every night. Why didn’t you see? Why didn’t you do something? She had told him. She had described symptoms, and he had told her it was too expensive to see a doctor. If he told Vera’s mother the truth, she would be as haunted as he was, always wondering what might have happened if he had taken action, wondering whether Vera might still be alive. She would hate him, and he would deserve it.
“She was fine,” he lied, and he hated himself even more.
“Was there anything you noticed about her? Anything at all?”
“Why are you asking me this?” he said quietly.
“You were the last person to see her. I’m her mother—”
“And I’m her husband.”
“When she was a little girl, all she had to do was cough and I’d take her to the doctor. I’d make sure she stayed in bed,” Ellen said. “You love someone, you notice everything about them, you take care of them. That’s all I’m saying.”
Anger beat like a pulse inside him. He pressed the receiver against his forehead.
“Are you listening to me?” Ellen said.
“The doctors told me it was something in her heart. That she might have always had it,” Patrick said.
“But you never noticed anything?”
“Neither did you.”
There was a clip of silence, and then he heard her quietly weeping, and instantly he was ashamed of himself. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, but she hung up, and then he missed Vera so much he couldn’t breathe.
The college phoned Patrick, asking him point-blank whether he was going to make up his finals, warning him he wouldn’t graduate if he didn’t act soon. His friends began slipping him the names of grief therapists. He quit his job. He quit school. He kept walking around the city, going in and out of stores, because he couldn’t manage to stay in one place without thinking of how Vera might like those soaps or how she might like that brand of chocolate. Was he doomed to see the world through the eyes of his dead wife? Would life never stop reminding him that she was gone?
He went home and packed up his things and shipped them to his parents. He paid all his bills and then he called the landlord and said he was giving up the apartment. And then he got in the car and drove.
HE DIDN’T WANT to be alone, so he stayed at a commune for a year, learning to grow and tend vegetables and fruits. He worked the plow and planted seedlings in their greenhouse. In winter he pored over the seed catalogs with everyone else, and later he helped with the harvests. At first he loved the sense of order, the people all around him, the way he was so busy he didn’t have a moment to think about anything other than what he was doing. He slept in a big white house, in a high-ceilinged room with six other people, mattresses spread on the floor. He chose his clothes from a communal closet and he ate meals at a round table. He never had to leave the commune for anything, and he felt safe and cocooned. “Love you, man,” people kept saying to him, and even though he knew it wasn’t really true, the phrase wrapped around him like a blanket. But then they instituted a community meeting every week. Everyone sat around a small campfire, and one of the guys held up a piece of wood decorated with blue paint. “This is our talking stick,” he said. “Whoever holds it can speak his or her mind.” They passed the stick around. One girl talked about how she was mad at her boyfriend, Bill, for sleeping with someone else, even though she knew there was no ownership. A man mentioned that he was really hungry at night, and he wanted to keep food in his sleeping room. Everyone talked, until they got to Patrick, and then he said, “Pass.”
At first they let it go, but gradually, when Patrick hadn’t spoken for weeks, people started pressing him. He looked sad, even when he was happy, they said. He seemed as if he was hiding something. “You’re supposed to open up. To share. We’re here for you,” one girl said. He looked at her open, eager face, her hippie braids and paisley dress. She had painted a daisy on her cheek and she had rings on most of her toes. “I’m here for you,” she said in a low voice. She trailed a finger down his chest. He realized he had to leave.
This time he ended up on the other side of Pennsylvania, in Tioga, which was just as isolated and green as the commune but seemed to have fewer people. When he saw a small farm stand that was for sale—a big wooden building with rows of tables, a greenhouse, and a small porched cottage attached to it—it was an easy decision. He bought the property, kept the crew that was already there to help him, and got busy building a business. He would wake up at five to start working. He tended the plants he grew, widening his garden, growing organically, the way they had at the commune, and he began to get a reputation for having the best produce around. By nine o’clock each night, he was exhausted. It was the same as living on the commune except he was on his own and no one asked him to talk about his feelings. In 1969, he got his draft notice, but his lottery number was 315, and part of him was too numb to be glad about it.
He habitually had a glass of wine at dinner to take the edge off. To dim the panic. And then he started having two. It was easy to begin having wine at lunch. He was proud of the fact that he made it to eleven thirty before having his first drink. He told himself it was really like a happy hour, because after all, he had been up since five. He told himself he wasn’t tearing up the house. He looked at himself in the mirror and he didn’t look drunk. And what did it matter anyway?
At night he watched movies on TV until he fell asleep, all those other lives flickering in black and white in front of him. Well, that was what his life was like now, black and white. He had just turned twenty-eight. He knew he wasn’t fooling himself. It wasn’t a good life, but at least it was something.