Chapter 14 #3
I went into the kitchen to find Phil sitting at the island, his leg resting on the stool beside him. On the floor was a spill of dry flour. A blue plastic bowl was overturned near the cat door. The light was on, glaring down.
“I couldn’t clean it,” he said. “Sorry. All the bending and getting up. I was trying to make cookies. The bowl fell.”
“No worries,” I said, and went to the slot behind the refrigerator where we kept the broom and dustpan. It was funny how Phil could manage to do so many things, and yet not sweep the floor. I didn’t mind. I did all the cleaning in the house. It was part of my job.
“So what did you do today?” he said.
“I took a drive,” I said, as a little berm of flour formed. There was enough flour on the floor that the sweeping would take a few passes. Thankfully, he hadn’t added the eggs or butter yet.
“Where to?” he said.
“Over the mountains,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. “How far?”
“I actually went to where you and Sarah had the crash,” I said, dropping the first load of dirty flour into the garbage can. “I wanted to see it for myself.”
“Why?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just curious to see it, I guess.”
“And how was it?” he said.
“Unremarkable.”
“Everything is always changing, isn’t it?” he said. “Always becoming something else, constantly on the move. I’m not surprised nothing was out there anymore.”
I didn’t respond. I found Phil’s wisdom irritating. I was getting tired of all his faith and groundedness. It was all so predictable.
“How are you getting through this, anyway, Arthur?” he said, watching me sweep near the baseboard. “I don’t feel like we talk about your feelings very much. I know it’s hard for you, too. I know you’ve been dealing with a lot. You have your own share of grief in all this.”
“I like being helpful,” I said hollowly. “It makes it all a little easier to bear.”
“Sarah had a lot of affection for you, you know,” he said.
“I know she did,” I said.
“You’ve been a tremendous help to me,” he said. “If I haven’t said it already, I’m incredibly thankful you’re here. Every day.”
“I’m glad,” I said, without feeling. “And I’m sorry. About everything.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about, Arthur,” he said.
“I do, actually,” I said. “A lot.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said firmly, and in that moment, I could tell we had passed into a new region.
Something in his tone told me that he was responding to the truth of what I was saying, and that he knew everything.
We’d shifted into a realm of openness at last. Openness, at an oblique angle, anyway.
“She told you,” I said.
“She told me enough,” he said. “Everything she needed to tell me. I didn’t need all the details. I’m sure there are things I don’t know.”
“But you haven’t said anything,” I said.
“What is there to say?” he said. “I assumed we’d talk about it when we were ready.”
“We never meant to hurt you,” I said. “I hope she told you that.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he said. “She didn’t have to.”
“And I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused,” I said.
“You didn’t cause anything,” he said.
“If we hadn’t been doing what we were doing, though,” I said, standing and emptying the dustpan again, “you never would’ve been out on that road. She’d still be here now.” With me, I didn’t add.
“You can’t really know that,” he said. “The accident might have happened anyway. There’s no one to blame. That’s all I know for sure.”
I hated the way he refused my apologies. By his way of thinking, nothing was ever wrong, and thus nothing could ever be made right again. After all that’d happened, all I’d done, he wouldn’t even admit that a sin had occurred.
“It was important for me to go there today,” I said, kneeling again to sweep the flour I’d missed. “I know you understand this on some level, but it wasn’t a small thing going on between us.”
“I don’t doubt that,” he said.
“She was going to leave you,” I said.
“I know that,” he said. “She told me as much.”
It was intolerable. Phil refused to acknowledge any problem. He didn’t believe that true love sometimes demanded a violent cutting away. I ached for his forgiveness, but he wouldn’t give it to me because he wouldn’t ever accept my guilt. I couldn’t stand how he refused to hate me.
“We were planning to have a child together,” I said.
“Is that so?” he said.
He hadn’t heard that before. I could tell the truth was touching a new place in him. I let it burrow down into his nerves.
“You loved each other very much, I have no question,” he said, already incorporating the new fact into his cosmology. “We loved each other, too. It might have been different than yours. It wasn’t so… torrid. But was it less? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said, already feeling my taste for blood receding.
He seemed so sad and dissolute, sitting in the kitchen with his broken femur.
I thought about revealing the whole, flaming contract with the Almighty and confessing how I’d sundered it to all of our great suffering, but what was the point? What could it possibly change?
“I think we had some of that kind of love,” he said wistfully. “Back at the start. And then we settled into our lives. We were building our lives on something else, I suppose. I don’t know if that can make sense to you.”
“I think it does,” I said.
“Love is time,” he said, almost apologetically, like he’d hoped to avoid this truism. “That’s what I’ve come to think. Love grows very slowly. The movies make you think it’s all at the beginning. But that’s just sex, as far as I’m concerned. It’s great, but it isn’t love, not exactly.”
I put away the broom and dustpan and started for my room. I had nothing else to say. The floor was clean.
“I’m sorry for all of us,” Phil said as I walked down the hall. “We both lost her too soon. What else is there to know?”
That night I couldn’t sleep, not for a minute.
I lay in bed listening to the sound of a faraway dog barking, the swell of a passing electric car.
I heard a train chugging through town, going slowly through the empty intersections.
Light from the streetlamp branded the wall. I lay there for hours, getting nowhere.
Had we ever loved each other? Now I had to wonder that, too.
Or had it only been lust? Somehow, without trying, Phil had won yet again.
He’d shamed me, opened all my wounds. Sarah and I had never had the chance to love, not in the truest, most committed sense.
We’d had a juvenile precursor to love, unseasoned by any experience.
We’d had nothing, in other words. It turned out not only did I not believe in God, I didn’t believe in our love, either.
At last, I got up and went into the bathroom, feeling muddled and bleak. My circuits were shorting out, my connections blinking. I flicked on the light and squinted at the bright toilet bowl and stood there waiting for the stream to come.
I’d just started to pee when out of nowhere Phil entered the room.
He had his own bathroom upstairs and almost never came down in the night.
I didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t usually even awake at this hour.
I assumed he needed something in the medicine cabinet, but I didn’t say anything.
I only watched him out of the corner of my eye as he puttered around, searching for whatever he was looking for.
I couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing, but his presence was incredibly vivid.
Then I noticed he had a baby in his arms. The baby started crying, and he bobbed it up and down.
Then the baby started vomiting on the floor.
The baby was sick, I saw. Its skin was a nauseous greenish blue.
“Are you real?” I tried to utter, but the words wouldn’t form in my throat.
I couldn’t seem to look directly at Phil or the baby, even as the wailing got louder and more tortured.
I finished peeing and backed my way out of the room, keeping my eyes on the ground, Phil and the baby just blurs in my peripheral vision.
I crept into my room and sat on the bed, terrified.
I wasn’t sure what was going on. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually left the bedroom and gone to the bathroom, or if I’d been in bed the whole time.
I checked my underwear to see if I’d peed in my pants but I hadn’t.
At what point had I exited reality? And had I returned yet, or not?
I was climbing back into bed when I looked up and saw a figure out in the living room.
It was coming my way. It wasn’t Phil this time.
It was Sarah. I could see her out there in the shadows, shimmying back and forth, with a weird smile on her face.
There was something demented in her eyes.
She didn’t seem to see me, but she was moving closer, her hips swaying.
I knew on some level that she was not real, but nothing in my physical senses told me as such.
She seemed incredibly real, so much that I couldn’t look away. The fear of her had me paralyzed.
Sarah approached the doorway. She was still smiling, still swaying, and then, gracefully, she turned around.
As her body revolved, I realized she had another face on the back of her head.
It was her own face again, smiling like the other face.
She had two faces, and as she kept spinning, each face appeared in a slow rotation, eyes closed in the same delirious state.
I climbed under the covers to hide like a child.
I had no idea if minutes or seconds passed, or how much time had gone by during this whole episode.
Maybe it was all unfolding in real time, or maybe it had all happened in a fragment of sleep, I couldn’t tell.
Maybe this was a dream I was having, or maybe the waking hallucination of sleep deprivation.
Or maybe I’d fallen into the actual reality underneath my life.
Maybe this was what I’d been deserving all along, the nightmare I’d been sentenced to.
When I finally peeked again, the double-faced Sarah was gone. The living room was empty. Beyond the doorway, only the arm of the couch and the frond of a fern waited. I was awake to see the sun rise.