When Lorna woke she had a headache and it was nearly nine thirty. Sunlight seeped through a parting in the drapes across the window, which at some point during the night she’d drawn shut. From the parking lot came the sounds of children’s excited voices and a lower voice asking them repeatedly to get in the car.
Last night’s events had retreated to a safer distance, and as Lorna sat up, listening to the voices outside her window, seemed now less absolutely damning and more simply regrettable. She had acted out. She had gotten angry. She was human. No need to analyze it much further than that. The same way she resisted analyzing Adam, as much as possible, or at least resisted applying terms and definitions to him that she used with other people. He was her son, not her client. “Depression” was a catchall. A word that covered an emotional spectrum from “feeling blue” to—the furthest shade of blue.
Lorna closed her eyes and once more there was Marika, arms flung wide, knocking everything off the table.
In the parking lot, car doors slammed and an engine started. With Marika, too, she thought, climbing out of bed with effort, there were terms she could use, but again something stopped her. She was responsible for trying to figure out what was wrong with her clients, who were in her care, and she was responsible, of course, for Adam. She was not responsible for whatever was wrong with Marika. In fact, the sooner she and Adam could leave Marika to herself—as Marika wanted—the better. Get in the car. Go home.
For a few minutes she occupied herself with the small brown plastic coffee maker she’d used yesterday on top of the wooden dresser, noting gratefully that the amenities tray had been replenished, with a package of coffee, two packets of sugar and one of nondairy creamer, a waxed paper cup, and a wooden stirrer that looked like a minute tongue depressor.
As the coffee maker began to burble, Lorna sat on the bed in her nightgown, head throbbing, and reached for her cell phone, thinking to call Adam, to apologize (somehow) for the way she’d behaved the night before and to ask how Freddy had managed in all that thunder.
Her phone, she discovered, was on mute. There were two voicemail messages from Roger. One was from yesterday evening, which had not shown up on her phone until now; the second call was from half an hour ago.
Roger’s first message opened with apologies for not calling back sooner: Got your message, a lot going on at the lab, hope Marika’s ankle is better, good that Adam went with you to Vermont, let’s talk later tonight. The second message began abruptly. Something had come up. Something he needed to talk to her about. But instead of explaining what that something was, and why he’d called her at six a.m., West Coast time, what followed was a long pause.
“I’ll be hard to reach today,” he said finally. “But call when you can.” Another pause. “Take care.” Then an amplified fumble, as if the phone had been dropped in a pocket without being turned off.
Lorna remained on the edge of the bed, listening to what sounded like someone walking through a snowfield, looking at the phone’s screen and at the thin gray line indicating the length of the voicemail. One minute and forty-two seconds.
There was something Roger needed to talk to her about, and from the tone of “Take care,” it seemed he wanted her to prepare herself. Was he sick? He’d sounded fine in the previous message. But “something” had come up. “A lot going on at the lab” could mean a grant for new research or a problem. Botched experiment? Falsified data? Could he be getting fired? (How quickly her mind moved from problem to ruin.) Maybe the “something” was about himself and Angelica. Maybe they had decided to get married, a decision he would guess, correctly, that would strike Lorna as impulsive. Could Angelica be pregnant? She was only thirty-five; she might want children. Roger was sixty-three. Maybe they’d had a fight over this very issue, not uncommon between couples where one was much older. Maybe Roger wanted to talk because he didn’t know what to do; maybe their relationship was over.
Take care. Lorna continued to scrutinize the voicemail line on her phone screen. It had been years since either had ended a call to the other with “Love you.” Long before Roger left for Seattle they’d usually said, “See you later” when they said goodbye on the phone. After he left, they’d graduated to “Take care,” the modern farewell, though in the past few months, ever since she’d realized Angelica was more than a passing interest, Lorna had taken to saying simply, “Okay, then.”
She thought back again to the early years of their marriage, and her relief when it had turned mostly comradely. They were both involved in their work and then with Adam when he arrived. After listening all day to clients talk about despair and confusion, she’d been glad to come home in the evenings to someone who was rational and self-possessed, who seemed to need little from her, except dinner and to listen to him describe the experiments he was running. She and Roger were friends. Partners, Adam’s co-parents. That had not changed.
Although now it seemed that something had changed, something had come up. How are you feeling? Lonely. Frightened about being alone in a world that, more and more, seemed overtaken by sadness and disasters. Frightened enough that if Adam insisted he didn’t want to return to college in September, she would have trouble pushing him to go. Lonely enough that yesterday she’d even invited Marika to come live nearby.
Take care. Why this morning did those two words sound like a warning?
The coffee maker quit burbling. Lorna got up and stumbled over to it, filled the paper cup with coffee the color of gutter water, stirred in powdered creamer with the tiny tongue depressor, and carried her cup back to the bed.
In his message, Roger had said he’d be hard to reach, but to “call when you can.” It was past seven o’clock in Seattle. Should she call now?
He was probably shaving, eating breakfast, rushing to get to the lab, where there was “a lot going on.” She was all too familiar with his impatient tone when he was in a hurry or distracted. A tone that, just now, she felt she could not bear. Can this wait? he’d often said when Adam was little and she called him at the lab to share a small milestone or concern. Not a good time. Yes, of course. Fine. Always she would hang up a little angrier than the time before, yet secure in the knowledge that if it were something really important, he would answer differently. A conviction to hold in reserve. So she’d stopped calling Roger at the lab, stopped asking him to pick up milk on the way home or whether he could leave work early and get Adam from day care. Although she was the one who began saying see you later instead of goodbye. Had he noticed? It seemed to her now that she’d been posing a question. See you later? When Roger was debating whether to move to Seattle, she had seen it as a test of her generosity not to stand in his way. But the truth was, she’d seen it as a test for Roger.
Lorna stared into the pale depths of her unappetizing coffee. She had never said, I want you to stay. More to the point, she had never said, I want you to want to stay. She’d believed she was being honorable by remaining silent. Instead she’d been stupid. It was people who asked for things who got them.
Time to get up, she told herself firmly. Get dressed. No more wallowing. If you’re not going to call Roger, then drink your bad coffee. Go buy some doughnuts. Make your apologies. But she stayed sitting on the bed.
The truth was that she had never wanted Roger to go, had wished until the last minute that he would decide to stay, and in some distant part of her mind continued to hope, even now when it was too late, that he would come back. And yet, she had also been relieved when he left. Relieved not to have to think about what he wanted and needed, to worry that it was her fault when he was in a bad mood. Aside from Adam, they had few interests in common. Roger could be—and frequently was—careless, self-involved. Drank all the coffee and didn’t make another pot, was annoyed when she got home too late to fix dinner instead of offering to fix it himself. Snored, left socks on the floor and nose-hair clippings on the sink. Looked at his phone while she was talking. Forgot to ask about her day. Forgot plans they had made to go to a concert or a movie. Forgot that she was not always fascinated by microbes and viral loads. He was self-important, frustrating, unremarkable, and he had not particularly needed her to understand him, despite what he’d said when they first met.
All true and not true. She had not wanted Roger to leave, and yet she’d been relieved when he left because what she had always been afraid of had happened, and now it was done. She could get on with things. She could quit being afraid. That’s what she had thought.
Roger once said: I think you like the idea of me more than me. She had denied it at the time, but he’d been right. She had liked the idea of being married to him, but he had not been quite real to her. The truth was, no one was quite real to her, not Roger, not friends, not even her clients, whose problems had long ago run together into one endless sad story.
No one except Adam. And perhaps, in a very different way, Marika. Neither of whom wanted anything to do with her.
The only way to live in this crap world is to care about nothing.
Lorna set her untouched cup of coffee on the nightstand. Gazing around at her motel room, she noticed for the first time that the brown carpet was flecked with viral orange squiggles, and that the synthetic bedspread was patterned with brown amoeba shapes outlined in orange. The curtains matched the bedspread. On the brown vinyl chair in the corner rested a pillow in the same amoeba-patterned fabric, as if some kind of contagion had taken place.