Shivering Mind

Chapter 63

I called back, got a different operator, a reasonable operator, who turned off the alarm and, God bless her, called off the police. I really wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.

I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself breathe, my heart clattering. After a minute, after my shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands unfisted and my heart returned to normal, I stood up and momentarily debated just leaving, as if that would teach Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left on the kitchen counter like a Dear John note.

I took a deep breath, blew it out – new attitude – and opened the envelope, pulled out the letter marked with a heart.

Hi Darling,

So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my perfectionism, my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness. For you? I know you worry that you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be tender

or nurturing. Well, I want to tell you – here in your father’s house – that isn’t true. You are not your father. You need to know that you are a good man, you are a sweet man, you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read my mind sometimes, for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to act right at exactly that moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man. I ordered you around instead of trusting you to find your way. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you always love me and want me to be happy. And that should be enough for any girl, right? I worry I’ve said things about you that aren’t actually true, and that you’ve come to believe them. So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are my sun.

If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she would have nuzzled into me the way she used to do, her face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed me and smiled and said, You are, you know. My sun. My throat tight, I took a final look around my father’s house and left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open the envelope marked fourth clue. We had to be near the end.

Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad

I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had

It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five

Pardon me if this is getting contrived!

A good time was had here right at sunny midday

Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.

So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,

And open the door for your big surprise.

My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant. I reread it. I couldn’t even guess. Amy had stopped taking it easy on me. I wasn’t going to finish the treasure hunt after all.

I felt a surge of angst. What a f*****g day. Derek was out to get me, Noelle was insane, Shawna was pissed, Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security company was a b***h, and my wife had stumped me finally. It was time to end this goddamn day. There was only one woman I could stand to be around right now.

Go took one look at me – rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-exhausted from my dad’s – and parked me on the couch, announced she’d make some late dinner. Five minutes later, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my meal on an ancient TV tray. An old Dunne standby: grilled cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …

‘It’s not Kool-Aid,’ Go said. ‘It’s beer. Kool-Aid seemed a little too regressive.’

‘This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.’

‘You’re cooking tomorrow.’

‘Hope you like canned soup.’

She sat down on the couch next to me, stole a chip from my plate, and asked, too casually: ‘Any thoughts on why the cops would ask me if Amy was still a size two?’

‘Jesus, they won’t f*****g let that go,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t it freak you out? Like, they found her clothes or something?’

‘They’d have asked me to identify them. Right?’

She thought about that a second, her face pinched. ‘That makes sense,’ she said. Her face remained pinched until she caught me looking, then she smiled. ‘I taped the ball game, wanna watch? You okay?’

‘I’m okay.’ I felt awful, my stomach greasy, my psyche crackling. Maybe it was the clue I couldn’t figure out, but I suddenly felt like I’d overlooked something. I’d made some huge mistake, and my error would be disastrous. Maybe it was my conscience, scratching back to the surface from its secret oubliette.

Go pulled up the game and, for the next ten minutes, remarked on the game only, and only between sips of her beer. Go didn’t like grilled cheese; she was scooping peanut butter out of the jar onto saltines. When a commercial break came on, she paused and said, ‘If I had a d**k, I would f**k this peanut butter,’ deliberately spraying cracker bits toward me.

‘I think if you had a d**k, all sorts of bad things would happen.’

She fast-forwarded through a nothing inning. Cards trailing by five. When it was time for the next commercial break, Go paused, said, ‘So I called to change my cell-phone plan today, and the hold song was Lionel Richie – do you ever listen to Lionel Richie? I like “Penny Lover,” but the song wasn’t “Penny Lover,” but anyway, then a woman came on the line, and she said the customer-service reps are all based in Baton Rouge, which was strange because she didn’t have an accent, but she said she grew up in New Orleans, and it’s a little-known fact that – what do you call someone from New Orleans, a New Orleansean? – anyway, that they don’t have much of an accent. So she said for my package, package A …’

Go and I had a game inspired by our mom, who had a habit of telling such outrageously mundane, endless stories that Go was positive she had to be secretly f*****g with us. For about ten years now, whenever Go and I hit a conversation lull, one of us would break in with a story about appliance repair or coupon fulfillment. Go had more stamina than I did, though. Her stories could drone on, seamlessly, forever – they went on so long that they became genuinely annoying and then swung back around to hilarious.

Go was moving on to a story about her refrigerator light and showed no signs of faltering. Filled with a sudden, heavy gratefulness, I leaned across the couch and kissed her on the cheek.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Just, thanks.’ I felt my eyes get full with tears. I looked away for a second to blink them off, and Go said, ‘So I needed a triple-A battery, which, as it turns out, is different from a transistor battery, so I had to find the receipt to return the transistor battery …’

We finished watching the game. Cards lost. When it was over, Go switched the TV to mute. ‘You want to talk, or you want more distraction? Whatever you need.’

‘You go on to bed, Go. I’m just going to flip around. Probably sleep. I need to sleep.’

‘You want an Ambien?’ My twin was a staunch believer in the easiest way. No relaxation tapes or whale noises for her; pop a pill, get unconscious.

‘Nah.’

‘They’re in the medicine cabinet if you change your mind. If there was ever a time for assisted sleep …’ She hovered over me for just a few seconds, then, Go-like, trotted down the hall, clearly not sleepy, and closed her door, knowing the kindest thing was to leave me alone.

A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to f**k off. People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don’t reach my lips. She looks nice today, I’d think, but somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud. My mom talked, my sister talked. I’d been raised to listen. So, sitting on the couch by myself, not talking, felt decadent. I leafed through one of Go’s magazines, flipped through TV channels, finally alighting on an old black-and-white show, men in fedoras scribbling notes while a pretty housewife explained that her husband was away in Fresno, which made the two cops look at each other significantly and nod. I thought of Gilpin and Derek and my stomach lurched.

In my pocket, my disposable cell phone made a mini-jackpot sound that meant I had a text:

im outside open the door

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

APRIL 28, 2011

– Diary entry –

Just got to keep on keeping on, that’s what Mama Mo says, and when she says it – her sureness, each word emphasized, as if it really were a viable life strategy – the cliche´ stops being a set of words and turns into something real. Valuable. Keep on keeping on, exactly! I think.

I do love that about the Midwest: People don’t make a big deal about everything. Not even death. Mama Mo will just keep on keeping on until the cancer shuts her down, and then she will die.

So I’m keeping my head down and making the best of a bad situation, and I mean that in the deep, literal Mama Mo usage. I keep my head down and do my work: I drive Mo to doctor’s appointments and chemo appointments. I change the sickly water in the flower vase in Matilda’s father’s room, and I drop off cookies for the staff so they take good care of him.

I

’m making the best of a really bad situation, and the situation is mostly bad because my husband, who brought me here, who uprooted me to be closer to his ailing parents, seems to have lost all interest in both me and said ailing parents.

Matilda has written off his father entirely: He won’t even say the man’s name. I know every time we get a phone call from Comfort Hill, Matilda is hoping it’s the announcement that his dad is dead. As for Mo, Matilda sat with his mom during a single chemo session and pronounced it unbearable. He said he hated hospitals, he hated sick people, he hated the slowly ticking time, the IV bag dripping molasses-slow. He just couldn’t do it. And when I tried to talk him back into it, when I tried to stiffen his spine with some gotta do what you gotta do, he told me to do it. So I did, I have. Mama Mo, of course, takes on the burden of his blame. We sat one day, partly watching a romantic comedy on my computer but mostly chatting, while the IV dripped … so … slowly, and as the spunky heroine tripped over a sofa, Mo turned to me and said, ‘Don’t be too hard on Matilda. About not wanting to do this kind of thing. I just always doted on him, I babied him – how could you not? That face. And so he has trouble doing hard things. But I truly don’t mind, Amy. Truly.’

‘You should mind,’ I said.

‘Matilda doesn’t have to prove his love for me,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘I know he loves me.’

I admire Mo’s unconditional love, I do. So I don’t tell her what I have found on Matilda’s computer, the book proposal for a memoir about a Manhattan magazine writer who returns to his Missouri roots to care for both his ailing parents. Matilda has all sorts of bizarre things on his computer, and sometimes I can’t resist a little light snooping – it gives me a clue as to what my husband is thinking. His search history gave me the latest: noir films and the website of his old magazine and a study on the Mississippi River, whether it’s possible to free-float from here to the Gulf. I know what he pictures: floating down the Mississippi, like Huck Finn, and writing an article about it. Matilda is always looking for angles.

I was nosing through all this when I found the book proposal.

Double Lives: A Memoir of Ends and Beginnings will especially resonate with Gen X males, the original man-boys, who are just beginning to experience the stress and pressures involved with caring for aging parents. In Double Lives, I will detail:

• My growing understanding of a troubled, once-distant father

• My painful, forced transformation from a carefree young man into the head of a family as I deal with the imminent death of a much loved mother

• The resentment my Manhattanite wife feels at this detour in her previously charmed life. My wife, it should be mentioned, is Amy Elliott Dunne, the inspiration for the best-selling Amazing Amy series.

The proposal was never completed, I assume because Matilda realized he wasn’t going to ever understand his once-distant father; and because Matilda was shirking all ‘head of the family’ duties; and because I wasn’t expressing any anger about my new life. A little frustration, yes, but no book-worthy rage. For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.

Still, it stings a bit, ‘the resentment my Manhattanite wife feels.’ Maybe I do feel … stubborn. I think of how consistently lovely Maureen is, and I worry that Matilda and I were not meant to be matched. That he would be happier with a woman who thrills at husband care and homemaking, and I’m not disparaging these skills: I wish I had them. I wish I cared more that Matilda always has his favorite toothpaste, that I know his collar size off the top of my head, that I am an unconditionally loving woman whose greatest happiness is making my man happy.

I was that way, for a while, with Matilda. But it was unsustainable. I’m not selfless enough. Only child, as Matilda points out regularly.

But I try. I keep on keeping on, and Matilda runs around town like a kid again. He’s happy to be back in his rightful prom-king place – he dropped about ten pounds, he got a new haircut, he bought new jeans, he looks freakin’ great. But I only know that from the glimpses of him coming home or going back out, always in a pretend hurry. You wouldn’t like it, his standard response any time I ask to come with him, wherever it is he goes. Just like he jettisoned his parents when they were of no use to him, he’s dropping me because I don’t fit in his new life. He’d have to work to make me comfortable here, and he doesn’t want to do that. He wants to enjoy himself.

Stop it, stop it. I must look on the bright side. Literally. I must take my husband out of my dark shadowy thoughts and shine some cheerful golden light on him. I must do better at adoring him like I used to. Matilda responds to adoration. I just wish it felt more equal. My brain is so busy with Matilda thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head: MatildaMatildaMatildaMatildaMatilda! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides. I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.

Is that wrong? I don’t even know anymore.

Matilda DUNNE

FOUR DAYS GONE

She was standing there in the orange glow of the streetlight, in a flimsy sundress, her hair wavy from the humidity. Andie. She rushed through the doorway, her arms splayed to hug me, and I hissed, ‘Wait, wait!’ and shut it just before she wrapped herself around me. She pressed her cheek against my chest, and I put my hand on her bare back and closed my eyes. I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your sk13 in.