I. Deep Dive
Around nine on a cold Tuesday morning in March, my wife, Maggie, is already up and showering, so I figure it’s one of her good days. There’s no reason, as far as I can tell, to avoid a last-minute meeting with my boss, Kenn — what he calls a “pulse check re: workload.” When I click into the pulse check, he fills my laptop screen, nosing at the camera like a curious water-adapted mammal — black eyes, slitty nostrils, hydrodynamic hair. My own camera feed in the inset shows the waxy, bloated face of a man who’s decorated his home office with movie posters and antique reels as if these are things he still cares about.
“Thanks for grabbing some time,” says Kenn.
The waterlogged face in the corner purses his lips. I hide the inset.
“So the freelancers are spinning their wheels on the audit,” says Kenn. “Which, you know, I get. Turns out it’s got a longer tail than the predictions predicted. But we’re dumping a poop ton of cashola into the freelancer pool, so if you ask me, they better get their ducks in a row pronto. Anyway, while we’re in a holding pattern, I’d like to run something up your flagpole.”
“Sure,” I say. The pipes tick in the wall as they heat up, and I picture Maggie in her little world of steam and skin — rolling soap in her hands, turning her back to the stream, massaging shampoo into her dark hair.
“First,” says Kenn, “I’ll need — nay, demand — your discretion on this. Strictly between you and me. And whoever’s listening in from IT.”
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s a joke, David. About the listening. Probably.”
“Makes sense.”
“Wonder bar!” He sips from his water bottle, which pops when he pulls it away. “So it hasn’t gone unnoticed that your emails of late have been — what’s the word? — just really on point. Like off-the-hook eloquent. So my question for you, my friend: How do you plead?”
I’m guilty, of course. Since we started working from home a month ago, I’ve been jacking up my emails with the same jargon I’ve been subjected to in division meetings filled with galleries of lingo-wielding chest thumpers. To them, people don’t talk; stakeholders dialogue. Problems aren’t solved; dilemmas are solutioned. Work isn’t started; initiatives are operationalized. So, as an inside joke with myself, I’ve been throwing their language back at them. It’s not mature or kind or even clever. It’s what I have. A small, good thing in a dark time.
I enter a plea of guilty before Kenn. And feel that way. Guilty. Ready for sentencing. But I’m not in trouble. This new project, he says, is super-duper in my wheelhouse. Since we all went home, he tells me, communication skill sets have lapsed into a kind of limp modality of expression. So he’d like to leverage my wordsmithing chops to shore up the comms of my peers.
A bottle of shampoo thuds to the bathroom floor, and the shower comb skitters behind it.
“So I channel their stuff to you,” he says. “You tart it up. Make it pop. Presentations, reports. Emails mostly. Like the reactions should be all Holy wowsers! Who’s this silver-tongued devil?”
“I got a lot of stuff,” I say.
“That’s all offshorable. And this counts as upskilling, so you’ll get supplemental remuneration.” His image freezes with his mouth agape as if somebody’s pouring ice water down his back. But his audio continues. My new role, the voice says, centers exclusively on inflation. Zhooshing. The output should be, in a word, inscrutable — so confounding, so utterly incomprehensible, as to drown any possibility of criticism or opposition.
The shower thunks off, and the curtain hisses on the rod. She’ll be stepping out onto the musty rug, drying off, wrapping herself in a towel. Maybe she’ll get dressed, go downstairs, and eat or read. Anything different would be good. It’s been a month of lockdown now, and she’s still without a job. Which isn’t her fault. But she’s got nothing to do and nowhere to go. And neither of us knows how to talk about it. It’s like time itself has become an unfinished sentence. Things we used to wait for — the weekend, maybe — are suspended in a state between expectation and impossibility. A tensed muscle that can’t untense.
I can’t help her. I can’t stop what’s happening. But I do things. I buy groceries, wash the clothes, pick up her meds. She spends her days in bed while a glacier of blankets builds up, layer by layer, around her. If we talk, we talk about supper. Like I’ll sit on the bed and go, “There’s stuff for tacos. Or there’s breakfast for supper.” She’ll say, “I don’t know.” “Don’t know what?” “Don’t know what I want.” I’ll bring her a tray of oatmeal, strawberries, and orange juice, but it stays on the nightstand till morning.
So the shower’s a big deal. Maybe things are turning around. And maybe it’ll warm up soon, and we can both get some air and sun and sky.
Kenn unfreezes. “What do you say there, Hoss?”
I’ve missed a lot of what he said, but it doesn’t matter. I say okay. I can’t think of a reason not to say okay.
“Excelente,” he says and walks me through the nuts and bolts of my new assignment — the turnaround time, file format, review rounds. Payment, he says, will be chunked in a different bucket. I should keep an eye out for disbursements from BusinessCasual Solutions LLC.
“Unless there’s anything else,” he says, “you get twenty minutes of your life back.”
There’s nothing else, and we disconnect. I creakily stand and stretch. It’s 9:12. I’m thinking of having another cup of coffee, maybe some waffles or a banana, but there’s a loud bump from the bathroom.
It’s more than a bump. It’s a crash. A tremor. A deep outburst of gravity.
I run to the hall and open the bathroom door. Steam billows out. Maggie’s lying on the floor, without a towel on, under the tangled slats of the venetian blind. She’s making an ape-like sound that I take for sobbing at first, but when I move the blind, I see she’s laughing — her eyes clenched, her teeth bared. The cord from the blind is looped twice around her neck. She sits up, and I help her unwind it. Laughing turns to hyperventilating, and she hugs my waist and pushes her temple into my ribs, and we stay like that, holding on, until she can breathe again.
“I got you,” I say.
II. New Learnings
Her depression — that’s the word — has always been there. It was there before we got married, and it was there before we knew each other. She’s told me that it feels like cold water filling up around her sometimes. There isn’t anything I can do, she says, except stay nearby, and I shouldn’t ask why it’s happening while it’s happening. So, as a rule, I give her all the proximity she can tolerate, and I keep my questions on mute. But it’s odd. She’s always been the stronger one, the overall better person — somebody who works hard, picks responsible charities, and wheels shopping carts back into the store. Why not ask why?
The crisis line tells us to drive to the ER, so I drive her to the ER. At the front desk, we put on new masks, and I stand there holding the back of her neck. An older man (a retiree filling in, I imagine) questions us from behind Plexiglas about flu-like symptoms. Then he reaches around the shield, shakily holds a thermometer gun to our foreheads, and waits for an explanation.
“There was a suicide attempt,” I say. I’m proud of the wording. It’s a deft, respectful way to convey the information without accusation or judgment. Like I don’t go, “This one here tried to choke herself to death, can you fucking believe it?” It’s not the time to be glib. Glib can wait.
We’re escorted to a narrow room with peach walls, where we can sit in non-slip socks without having to fuss about knowing what’s supposed to happen next. Amenities include two knobby cots, a small table, and a machine that chirps every ninety seconds. In the next room, a woman is angrily moaning.
Over the next two hours, we lie on our individual cots and listen to the chirping and the moaning. The chirping persists, but the moaning thins out to a whining and then nothing. Eventually, a nurse appears. She’s a wiry, befuddled woman wearing scrubs that show penguins in various activities — skiing, ice-skating, building snowmen. She closes the door behind her and pulls her mask up over her nose.
“Your VRU’s set up for an intake,” she says.
“Great,” I say. “What’s a VRU?”
“The rep is virtual.”
“Sounds good. Rep from where?”
“They’ll do an eval and make a rec.”
“Recommendation?”
“The eval’s virtual.”
“Gotcha. Rep from where?”
I do manage to glean a few things. We’re to hit the call button to be chaperoned to the bathroom. Masks are optional in the room but required in the common areas. We should order lunch from the menu on the — you know — the round thing (pointing to the table). Nothing can be done about the chirping. That thing’s got a key that left with a nurse who left in that last wave.
The most important learning: they’ll soon wheel in a two-way TV so Maggie can get an eval. Which is private (eyeing me). They’ll try finding a bed for Maggie somewhere. There aren’t a lot of open beds in Maine, but they can try St. Joseph’s, a psychiatric hospital about eighty miles north.
The nurse exhales, “You good?” Her exasperation makes me feel bad for her. She is, I figure, another person whose job has separated her from herself.
“We’re good,” I say. “Thank you.” She twitches as if to nod and then scoots.
Maggie and I rest on our cots for a few minutes. “Oh,” I say. “Hand me the menu. It’s on the round thing.”
Maggie squints to warn me off shtick. No shtick, then. I get the menu, which is stiff with old food stains, and unfold it like a parchment.
“Meatloaf with broccoli,” I say. “Chicken fettuccini Alfredo. Hamburger and peas. Sandwich. Doesn’t say what kind. Just sandwich.”
Maggie draws an irritated breath to speak, but the door opens.
A tall cart rolls into the room carrying a thick TV with a Thermos-sized camera strapped to the top. The penguin nurse squeezes by the cart and sends me into the hall to sit on a narrow stainless-steel bench. The door thuds shut.
Inside, the first thing Maggie says is this: “I tried killing myself.” The phrasing is strange. Tried killing. Like it’s just another thing people try. I tried needlepoint, I tried sushi, I tried calling but there was no answer.
She keeps talking but drops into a monotone, so I can’t make it out. After a while, they both go quiet. In that stillness, I get an acute need to go back in time. Doesn’t matter when. High school, maybe — that time Maggie climbed the bleachers during the homecoming game, sat next to me, and held my hand for the first time. Or later, when we’d talk on the phone so long that my ear would sweat. Or swimming at night those summers at the lake. That’s the one. I float in that memory awhile, until the door opens. The TV cart glides out like a 1950s sci-fi robot, dragging the nurse behind it. It stations itself by the door and releases the nurse, who jogs down the hall.
Maggie, slouched and exhausted, appears in the doorway.
I stand up. “What happened?”
“Things and things.” Her eyes bulge briefly.
The nurse trots back carrying Maggie’s coat and a clear plastic bag full of Maggie’s effects.
“Be right back.” Maggie follows the nurse down the hall and leaves through a set of swinging doors.
I pace while the bot keeps vigil. The door next to ours is open just enough to reveal a desiccated old woman sleeping about as well as she can with her head cocked back and her bandaged arms folded over her belly. Her mask is suctioned to her lips, forming a shallow recess, like a tiny birdbath, against her mouth.
I wait for what feels like a long time. Eventually, the nurse drifts back and startles when she sees me. Maggie, it turns out, has been taken by ambulance to St. Joseph’s. The hospital will call. I should go home.
“Go home?” I say.
“Go wherever you live.”
I fume and, despite ample evidence to the contrary, tell her I’m not to be trifled with. I storm down the hall, through the doors, and out to the back parking lot, where I cinematically rip my mask off and exhale vapor into the bright overcast sky.
But aside from a few cars, the parking lot’s empty. No ambulance. No staff. No patients. And no Maggie to speak of. Unless you count the memory of Maggie, Maggie as abstraction, Maggie as essence, Maggie as a rising panic in my chest. If that counts, the parking lot is the opposite of empty.
III. Back Burner
I drive around awhile, down to the beach and back, and don’t get home till after dark. The house is cold and still, as if it’s slipped back in time to an era when everything wasn’t constantly bright and loud, an age of candlelight and whispers. I turn on the range light in the kitchen. Things still sit on the counter where we left them — a full cup of coffee, a partial yogurt cup, a black sock with a hole in the toe, a notepad with the crisis line scrawled on it.
Still wearing my coat, I sit at the kitchen table, and my cell buzzes with a call from St. Joseph’s. When I get on the line, the doctor first insists that I call her Tracy, not Dr. Whatever, and says Maggie’s okay.
“Can I talk to her?” I ask.
“She’s resting.” Tracy has the practiced, soothing patience of somebody who knows exactly how much empathy to withhold. “We’ll get a call scheduled soon, okay?”
“There was a mix-up at the ER.”
“Understood. She’ll call you, David. For now I have some questions.”
I unzip my coat. “Let’s have it.”
The questions are unsubtle gauges of our recklessness. Do we own guns? (No.) Do we use drugs? (Not the kind she means.) Drink? (Maggie never has. I do, increasingly.) And has Maggie been attending therapy?
Yes and no, I say. There’ve been remote sessions with her prescriber, but her therapist, Donna, has been sucked into a parallel dimension unreachable by phone or email. I tell Tracy I’m looking, though, and lay out my system — a spreadsheet with columns for therapist names, accepted insurance, general notes. Strikethroughs denote those who’ve presumably followed Donna into the vast unknown.
I hear Tracy typing and wonder if she actually writes vast unknown. Then she plunges into a list of things I should make inaccessible. Pills and ropes are off limits, as are any sharps — Tracy’s word for things like scissors, knives, and razors, and probably cleavers, hacksaws, samurai swords, and the like. Sharps can hide in plain sight, she says. Pencil sharpeners have blades. I ask about anything intrinsically or potentially stringlike — belts, power cables, scarves, sashes, hoodie strings, bedsheets. And the basement, full of ways to cut flesh, will need to be padlocked, no?
“Your best weapon against suicidal ideation,” says Tracy, “is communication. How would you describe your level of communication?”
“Good,” I say. “We talk all the time.”
“Does she talk about her feelings?”
“No,” I say. “Actually, now that you mention it, her facility for communication has taken a real nosedive. She never told me she was feeling like that, anyway. I mean how was I supposed to know? I had no way of knowing. No way.”
I place the phone on the table and put Tracy on speaker. I wiggle out of my coat and let it crumple to the floor.
“Not to throw her under the bus,” I say.
On speaker, Tracy’s voice is tinny and niggling. “You’ll need to talk to her about this, okay? She wants to talk about it. After chatting with Maggie, I get the sense you’re both guarded individuals.”
“You want me to be unguarded?”
“I’d like you to use appropriate candor.”
“Candor, then. Gotcha. How about putting her on the line?”
“One good communication tool, when she does come home, is to ask her to rate her depression, anxiety, and suicidality on a scale of one to five.”
“Sounds numeric.”
“It’s an objective way for Maggie to express her state of mind. With depression, it’s like wearing a heavy backpack. You don’t ask somebody with a heavy backpack to do jumping jacks. Just talking is a weight.”
“It is.”
“So we’ll set up a call. Meantime, let us know what you need.”
“In all candor, Tracy, what I need is my wife. First name Maggie? Same last name?”
“A call will be made. Is there anything else?”
“Is Maggie there?”
She tells me to get some sleep and ends the call.
The house feels colder than it should, and I can smell woodsmoke. I should check that the front door’s closed, but I stand up and move through the dark living room and then upstairs to the bedroom, where I flip my boots off and crawl under the covers. Even fully clothed and covered up, I shiver wildly. I turn onto my side. The moon, a waning gibbous, shines through the bare branches of the oak outside the window. The Granny Smith green that Maggie painted to the left of the window last summer shimmers in the moonlight, making the old mocha to the right look like a vacancy, as if the wall’s been cracked open to the vacuum of deep space.
My heart races, and I can’t stop trying to picture Maggie. All I have to go on, though, is movie tropes — patients wearing johnnys, bouncing their knees, staring numbly as horrors course through their unquiet minds. Is that Maggie now? If I talk to her, will I be talking to an inmate? How do you talk to an inmate? Maybe indulge in banalities: Sleeping alright? or How’s the food? Maybe unleash the candor: Why are you doing this? or What were you thinking? Or just let all those unspeakable things quietly seep into conversational fissures, where they freeze and expand: I’m empty, I’m alone, I’m scared, I can’t do this.
I stay like that, pretending to sleep, for as long as possible. It’s my only option now. My best chance at being fresh for work in the morning.
IV. Scope Creep
The next day, I’m not fresh and don’t technically work. I log in to keep my status on green, jogging my mouse in convincing worker-like intervals. But then Kenn emails me a file and says it’s time to hit the ground running. It comes back to me: I’ve been installed as BusinessCasual’s head zhoosher. I should at least make it look like I’m hitting the ground running.
At first I work with all the gusto of somebody asked to chew a certain amount of aluminum foil by close of business. Hyphens in particular hurt, each one landing like the crack of a gavel: real-world, level-set, multi-channel, data-driven.
But that feeling succumbs to a mindless calm, a serenity like floating on an inner tube down a creek in late summer. I buttress, I bolster, I embellish, I encode. I convert perfectly good language to cryptic, incontestable jargon. The dingy “We’ll start work once they send us the files” becomes a dazzling “At such time as the vendor relays viable working documents, priority will be shifted to a proactive initialization.”
For a while, I forget about Maggie. So, when I do eventually call St. Joseph’s, I don’t feel entirely unguilty. For penance, I’m set down in a voicemail maze that wends through all the departments specializing in various calamities — extremely old age, extremely young age, unrequested cancer, billing. I eventually get to something that sounds promising — Behavioral Services — and leave a contrite message.
After lunch, I get a job from Carla in HR, who wants us to inject some zing into her slide deck. As I’m starting work, she IMs me to say she’s super-duper psyched about it and then, over the next hour, floods our chat with quick tweaks, aha moments, and updated bullets. I suggest deferring the zing job. No, she says, she needs it end of day, opening bell tomorrow at the very latest. I type a frank message and, for an intense minute, let it smolder there unsent: Even with the highest legal dosage of zing, Carla, your presentation will be super-duper forgettable, perhaps dangerously soporific. Recommend leaving unzinged. But I delete it and tell her I’ll be right back.
I’m not right back. I stall until it’s time for the division meeting. When I click into it, the CEO, Erik Pilch, is midway through a story about how he once did a walking tour of Japan and was arrested for public urination. Heart and LOL emojis waft up from the bottom of the screen, and Erik says, somberly, “There’s more to your colleagues than meets the eye. You don’t know what somebody’s going through.” He opens the floor to comments, and the confessions begin. Katy says she recently exhumed her high school saxophone to torture her upstairs neighbor. Marcus reveals, on camera, his third pinky toe. When Deke comes on screen, I scramble to click the leave button before he can start in about his botched vasectomy.
And so the minutes of my day swell into hours, and the hours engulf the afternoon, which upscales into evening, which pivots to a sustainable nighttime, which puts out feelers to the robust and timely dawn. Sleep, contrary to conventional wisdom, has become discretionary.
Opening bell next morning, Carla pings me: Prezzi coming up, wondering where we are. My plan is to let the message soak awhile, but the pings keep coming. I type Really up to my neck in it, I’ll circle back, two shakes. For authenticity, I send a second IM to gripe about the shalnish hitting the fan in a joking-serious way designed to make me seem rhetorically inventive or maybe bilingual. I tell her I’ll keep her in the loop.
A couple hours later, Kenn IMs me: How’s the presentation going?
Swimmingly, I write, hoping he’ll go away, but within thirty seconds, his sleek, aquatic face is as big as ever on my screen.
“Just checking on your ETA,” he says absently.
I say something optimistic but noncommittal.
“You do good stuff,” he says. “I appreciate you.”
Something’s off. This is the cowed, subdued Kenn. I get a shiver like you get from seeing a wonky-eyed raccoon stumbling around in broad daylight.
“I know you’re working hard,” he says finally. “It’s Carla. We’re in a tough spot.”
I don’t, however, catch anything about the tough spot we’re in. My phone buzzes with a call from St. Joseph’s.
I mute my laptop speakers and mic, douse my camera, and type BRB in the chat. On screen, an oblivious Kenn soundlessly explains our tough spot while playing an imaginary accordion.
“This is David,” I say to the phone.
“This is Maggie,” the phone says.
Kenn notices my BRB and types I’ll drop some nuggets here.
“Where are you?” I ask her.
“London.”
“What?”
“Jesus, where do you think I am? St. Joe’s Home for the Criminally Disturbed.”
“You sound awake.”
“I guess I am, sort of. It’s weird being someplace else. Weird being inside somewhere other than the house. It’s nice. I mean, institutional. But there’s a PlayStation. You can play Minecraft or Minecraft. I’ve been playing Minecraft.”
“So . . .” I’m annoyed she’s forced me to picture her playing video games, tilting the controller the way she does. “What’s happening, though?”
“I’m standing in the hall wearing jim-jams with no waistband and not much room in the chestal region. The phone’s from the nineties. It’s got a metal cord that’s like an inch long. Reminds me of college. Not nearly as many used rubbers, though.”
“What did they say? Are you coming home?”
“No.”
“I mean, when are you coming home?” I remember my oath of candor, but I have to be careful. I say, “I didn’t see you before you left.”
“I only got a minute. Just letting you know I’m not dead.”
“What about next steps?”
“I have to go,” she says. “I’m going.” She hangs up.
I look at my phone like it’s broken and then slam it facedown on the desk. For a long time, I focus on sitting still. Then, involuntarily, my fingers splay, and I put my hands over my face, make a spooky creaking sound, and double over as if to puke.
When I recover, I see Kenn’s nugget in the chat: Got an unpleasant call from Erik. You-know-who spilled the beans on BC. But I’m on your side. There’s just concerns about the noncompete clause. Don’t worry yet.
I type Need to go.
Three dots pulse in the chat to show Kenn’s typing, each dot ballooning and shrinking in succession. Finally: Got a sec?
I slap the laptop shut.
Ten minutes later, I’m cranking the heat in my pickup. While the windshield clears, I search St. Joseph’s on my cell. An hour-and-a-half drive. That’s it. The length of a short movie. A buddy movie. A teen comedy. Something deliberately released in the obscurity of late August so the studio can pretend it never happened.
I notch the blower down, twist around, and slowly back out of the driveway.
V. Moving the Needle
I make landfall at St. Joseph’s some ninety-eight minutes later. When I approach the heavyset attendant stationed on a stool in the main foyer, he peevishly puts down his phone and follows protocol: interrogate on flu-like symptoms, do point-blank temp check, wait for explanation. My wife, I tell him, was admitted after a suicide attempt, I haven’t called ahead, but she is, to reiterate, my wife.
He tells me to put on a fresh mask and shuts me in a conference room barely bigger than the oblong table in the center. I pass an hour in a plastic chair, occasionally flapping my elbows to keep the overhead lights from shutting down. I’ve just executed a flap when the attendant comes in, now wearing a thicker mask, a paper smock with fold lines in it, and blue exam gloves.
“You’re David,” he says as if I need a confidence boost.
“I am David,” I say, properly boosted. “Husband to Maggie.”
“You didn’t call.”
“A call was placed,” I say, thinking of Dr. Tracy Whatever.
He cocks his head, and I consider telling him that Tracy — that’s right, Tracy — has personally authorized my visit. But then I picture him calling it in, like any henchman would, and I’d be forced to knock him unconscious, steal his uniform, and slip past their security to wherever they’re holding Maggie. Instead, I tell him I’m sorry for not calling.
He’ll take me upstairs, he says, but there’s a rule: Don’t ask Maggie about going home. I don’t get why, and it feels impractical, almost sadistic. But I agree not to talk about home.
“Let’s roll,” he says, boosting me again. As he leads me through the deserted corridors, we pass bulletin boards announcing bake sales and school plays for last year. My tailbone tingles. I’m in. Working my way toward the inner sanctum.
That feeling stops, though, when I see Maggie. She looks malnourished and half drowned, drooped like a question mark over a table in another conference room. She’s wearing a tapioca robe with no sash. Her masked face, framed by straight black hair, sustains that old blankness, a deadening of the skin and muscles. Her dark eyes flit toward me when I walk in. She stands, and we exchange a brief, professional hug.
When the attendant leaves, we take off our masks and sit on opposite sides of the table, our fingertips almost touching. We speak of the spartan décor of the room and its fridge-like temperature and then sit in silence.
“Oh,” I say in a tone people use for factoids. “I stopped sleeping.”
“Sucks to be you.” She clicks her tongue.
She’s still Maggie, then. But she’s started toggling again. I haven’t seen the toggling for a long time. I used to see it in idle moments — watching TV, say, or waiting for the bus. Her face would snap from one emotion to another. Microexpressions. Surfacings. She’d be bored, briefly surprised, then bored again. Contented, morose, contented. Angry, amused, angry.
Now, as we sit there, she alternates between desolation and something else. Glee, maybe, or mischief. Whatever it is, it deserves to exist for longer than a fraction of a second.
I say, “Is there depression at all? Anxiety? On a scale of one to five—”
“Let’s not do the scale.” She straightens her back.
“We won’t do the scale,” I say. “Stepping off the scale.” The scale, however, is my only icebreaker. What am I supposed to talk about if not the scale? Current events? TV shows? The Wordle? All memories of home.
“How much do you hate that scale, though?” I ask. “Like if the scale were a movie, how many stars would you give it?”
She sags again, so I talk about going home. It’s all I can think of. To be safe, I talk about talking about going home: “I’m not supposed to talk about going home.”
“I know,” she says.
“Did they tell you not to talk about it?”
“I heard them plotting to tell you not to talk about it.” A smile lifts briefly. “It’s like they forget you’re here when you’re here? They say things they probably shouldn’t say.”
“They seem nice, though.”
“They do indeed seem.”
“So what about it?”
“What about what?”
“What about going home?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about going home.”
I’m about to throw her another scenario — how she’d rate St. Joseph’s on Yelp — but my cell buzzes, and I pull it from my pocket. A text from Kenn: BC SHUTTERED! Call me!
I consider texting that it’s not a good time, but he’ll take that to mean it’s a good time. And I don’t want to know anything beyond shuttered anyway. Leaving it at shuttered means I can believe, at least for a while, that I’m done with BusinessCasual but not done with my job and not done with insurance.
Maggie waves her hands to get my attention. “You know I’m here, yes?”
I pocket my phone. “Just Kenn.”
“How’s the Kennister these days? Still a gigantic asshole?” She straightens up.
“He’s not a gigantic asshole.”
“Sorry — asshole of ordinary girth.”
“He’s not like that anymore. Not a bad guy. He just gave me a raise.”
“Well that’s nice.” Her eyes fall blank, and she slouches. So, before I realize it, I’m jabbering about BusinessCasual as if she’s a carnival game where she’ll deflate if I stop talking. I tell her how, for a day at least, I translated emails and such into jargon, how Kenn’s paying me from funds chunked in a different bucket, how I feel ashamed and powerless and angry and guilty and scared and hollow. But it’s all over now. The jig, after the world’s briefest heyday, is up.
She processes all this. “Sounds a little shady, sweetie. Like money laundering. Or puppy trafficking. Or puppy laundering.”
“He’s not laundering puppies.”
“Well at least you’re not part of the problem.” A smirk. “What’ll you do now that you’re not shilling for big lingo?”
I exhale, world-weary, and look at the wall as if there’s a window in it. “Hard to say, really. Put things back together. Try to move on. Maybe zhoosh now and then just for old time’s sake.”
She widens her eyes. “You zhooshed?”
“I did. Not gonna lie, I’ve done some things. Things I’m not proud of. But it is what it is. At the end of the day, you can’t go back in time. You gotta keep your chin up. Establish, maintain, and grow a blue-sky mindset.”
“I’m so wet right now.”
“Really?”
She flicks my temple. “You’re so dumb.”
“Dumb like a fox.”
“No, just regular dumb.” She sandwiches my hand between hers, and we sit like that, three hands layered, without saying anything. She drops her head onto the hand pile and says into the table, “Jesus, sweetie.”
With my free hand, I reach to stroke her hair.
She quickly sits up. “What now?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “Things can be done, though. There are options.” I suddenly believe it. Saying it like that, saying it out loud, I feel it’s possible. Efforts, I tell her, can be launched. Initiatives spearheaded. The future, I tell her, is today.
She pops a laugh.
So I keep going. “Seriously. We’ll advantage our momentum. Stand up a communications paradigm. Ensure frequent, unambiguous expressions of appropriate candor and synergy. We play our cards right? Our support framework’s bound to engender downstream benefits, including but not limited to authentic, even actionable, affection. But let’s not get out over our skis. There will be blockers.”
“So many blockers.” Her smile twitches at the corners.
I say it plain then. I say it plain because she needs to hear it and I need to say it. I say we’ll figure this out, the two of us. We can do it. Whatever it takes. If she needs to change her meds, we’ll change her meds. If she needs to talk, we’ll talk. If not, I’ll back away. And if we need to buy groceries, shovel the driveway, mow the lawn, walk the beach, watch movies, mock the neighbors’ Halloween decorations, we will. We’ll do one thing and then another and then something else. We’ll keep going.
Her toggling sticks midway between smiling and frowning. Her eyes are red and watery, but she nods. She’s okay and not okay. In being both, she’s neither. In being neither, she’s something new. That thing doesn’t have or even need a name. It is what it is.
I add a fourth hand to the pile. She squeezes my knuckles hard enough to hurt.
“Yes,” she says. “That.”
For a moment, we’re in high school.
She’s climbing the bleachers, pulling my hand from my pocket, holding on. Then we’re on the phone, her voice close to my ear. Then we’re swimming at night, and a thin mist on the lake is the only way to tell the difference between the dark water and the dark sky. I float with my back against the ladder of the swim raft, and she pulls herself toward me, and we stay close, bobbing with the raft in the dark, as long as we can.
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- Downstream Benefits - August 13, 2024