Chapter Three
Three
The Greensbury Valley School District consisted of two schools, Greensbury Valley Elementary and Greensbury Union Middle it seemed to beckon with newfound freedoms. What would they do?
Well, Miles had an idea, and Kate loved the idea, it was a great idea, she would be happy to try out Professor Rumphius’s couch, his shower, his bathtub…
But she had just received an email from the English Department, informing her that she needed to enter her syllabus into the online course catalogue, which meant transferring every assignment into text-entry boxes, one by one.
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
And so Miles stuffed one pocket with a Snickers and the other with some kibble, and set off on a hike with Giuseppe.
He had selected the hike from the Greensbury Outdoor Club guidebook, for its “roaring brook,” its “damp hemlock forests,” and its “ancient sugar maples that bear witness to the history of a now-vanished farm.” The trails were poorly marked.
Were this a Russian fairy tale, he might follow a magic rolling ball, but he was on his own.
Brook first: high, the water swift and clear.
A grove of aspen shivered on the far bank—a single creature, hydra-headed, connected at the roots—this piece of trivia from Wesley, like much of Miles’s knowledge obtained in the past five years.
An otherworldly blue bird, with wing feathers of light blue and black bands, was singing a song of extraordinary variation.
A rarity: he was certain of it. The day simply was too blessed for something common.
Indeed, everything seemed promising. Watch him hopscotch nimbly across the stones, grab a small trunk, and swing onto the bank, then drop down to another little beach, a second little brook, more stepping-stones.
One-one-one-two-one-two-one.
Then onto the bank and into the woods. He whistled for the dog, who, sensing the cooperative, optimistic spirit of the day, stopped digging what he was digging and followed.
—
And what woods! For a week, Miles had been hiking and swimming and looking and marveling, but now that he was alone, now that he was not apportioning bribes, or fielding arewethereyets and howmuchlongers, he felt like he was in a different forest altogether.
The ground was soft and the air cool, the understory almost empty.
Mushrooms spanning the full range of the Crayola 64 rose from the duff.
And the quiet. The quiet!!! He whooped a little, then a little louder.
He hadn’t been alone since California, substantially alone.
Guidebook in the car, now taking trails by eenie-meenie, which was how he chose many of his paths in life.
For the hell of it, he took off his shirt, and at a stream crossing dipped it and tied it over his head.
Not winning any muscleman contests was Miles, but, all things considered, it could certainly be worse.
He was down seven pounds from the earliest days of his dissertation, could still knock off a few push-ups—wait—yup, twelve was definitely more than a few, not bad for a bookish guy on the cusp of forty-five, he told himself, slapping dirt from his palms. Here he was, in a new place, a new start, and his kids off at school, and he alone, as topless as Adam, a little softer, but better read.
His phone buzzed in his pocket; it was a text from Kate, asking if he could get groceries after he picked up Olive.
Of course, the answer was yes—he had the only car, and she was preparing for her class.
But that was fine, he was happy to help, though it did occur to him that the “finishing your dissertation” part of their sojourn was going to be a little harder if he was the one hauling to and from the Co-op.
On the other hand, here he was, hiking in the woods on a workday, while she was getting carpal tunnel from cutting and pasting the page numbers from Milton. So, in the balance.
And it was a balance, wasn’t it? He could still remember the moment he first saw her in grad school at Berkeley, in a seminar on biblical poetry, seated at the far end of the table, her cascade of hair gathered to one side of her neck, loop earrings, a white blouse opening ever so slightly as she turned toward the professor.
He’d loved it when she spoke, because it gave him an excuse to look at her.
Three years his junior, straight out of college, a star from the start, and she held forth with such confidence, such perfect sentences, that later, to tease her, he’d whisper “New paragraph” when she took a breath.
Since the beginning, he’d wondered about the secret of her ambition, so foreign to him.
Was it because she was the daughter of a machinist, had seen his hours, his uncomplaining ethic?
Or was it the lesson of her mother, who had served for seven years as the receptionist of a midsized law firm, only to be fired, after childbirth, for “no longer meeting the needs of the position”?
Or were there even darker reasons? A sense that time was fleeting?
Her freshman year of college, light had vanished from her left eye, replaced by aching pain each time she moved it.
It was the first attack of what would soon reveal itself as multiple sclerosis.
Steroids had given her her sight back, but for the next five years, she’d lurched between relapses.
Somehow she’d graduated, with honors, after dictating her senior thesis to her mom because she couldn’t type.
When Miles met her, nothing suggested that the woman he had asked out to dinner that October evening had once been partially blind, once bed-bound.
It had taken her weeks to first disclose this history.
His apartment, his bed, their legs enjambed and fingers interlaced, naked after the first time they slept together.
On her shoulders, thighs, and belly, she’d shown him the divots caused by her daily injections.
He’d known almost nothing about MS, its cycles, its whimsy, its symptoms settling and lifting like successive spells across the body of the person he was then madly in love with.
What malicious god had invented such a disease?
These limbs benumbed; uncouth, augmented pain; and sight tormenting.
And yet she felt so healthy then, against him, that it almost seemed like she was putting him to a test.
Later that night, she’d let him watch the ritual of her injections, and later, on days when she broke down, exhausted by the repetition, she let him take over.
It had a strangely illicit feel, like she was shooting up, or fortifying with a banned elixir.
Or more: That he had been granted a privilege, a proximity that was forbidden other people.
That the woman of such seeming invulnerability would let him handle her lifesaving drug.
For two years, she was healthy. Scares, yes, and many shitty midnights in the ER.
But no hospitalizations, and there were days when he found himself forgetting the ranks of needles waiting in her refrigerator.
And then, in her third year of grad school, her father was hospitalized after a heart attack, and whether it was the stress of this, or the end of the quarter, or a heat wave that had come down over California, she’d suffered a renewed assault that left her temporarily unable to walk.
It seemed impossible at first. Just two weeks before, Miles had followed her as she swam across a high Sierran lake in just her bra and underpants, arriving, breathless, at a giant boulder that seemed to perch upon the water.
Where she had risen against the sun, and held her hand to test the movement of her fingers.
He, watching, heart spinning from the sight of water droplets running down her silhouette, had sensed the whole world wobble.
And she: I’m sure it’s just numbness from the water. But he heard it in her voice.
He became her driver. He didn’t mind; the truth was, he much preferred her presence to his studies. It was her last big relapse, yielding yet again to steroids, and then a new drug, infused monthly at the clinic. Weeks passed, and seasons, and they waited for the disease to redouble its attack.
But nothing.
And then, one day, almost two years into the treatment, she’d come to him laughing, then crying and laughing at once.