35
daniel
“What sounds good for lunch?” I ask. I’m standing in the doorway of my living room and Claire’s sitting cross-legged on my couch, as she always does, reading a book.
She smiles and shivers, grabbing the blanket I keep folded at the end of the couch and placing it on her lap. “Something warm.”
The gray November sky could just as easily bypass rain and go straight to snow if the temperature drops any lower. “You look like you’re on the verge of hypothermia,” I say. She runs so much colder than I do. “When do you need to eat?” When Claire’s around I try to follow her schedule since she needs to eat regularly.
“Soon. Are you going to cook?” she asks, putting her book down and looking up at me.
“I don’t know if there will be any cooking involved,” I admit. “But I can make you one hell of a sandwich. Do you want turkey? Ham? Roast beef? I have all three. I bought some Swiss, too.” I walk over to the thermostat on the wall and kick up the heat a few degrees. Out of the corner of my eye I notice Claire studying me. When I turn to look at her she blushes, as though she didn’t expect me to catch her doing it. “What are you looking at?” I ask.
Her blush deepens. “You are ridiculously good-looking,” she says. She looks away quickly, flustered. Like she didn’t mean to blurt it out like that. She’s always so careful around me, never saying anything overly suggestive.
I grin. “You think I’m good-looking?” I like knowing that she thinks so, and there’s no way I’m letting this go.
“I’m sure everyone thinks you’re good-looking,” she says. “Quit fishing.”
“Probably not everyone,” I say, crossing the room to sit next to her on the couch.
“Your false modesty is refreshing, but I’m not buying it. I can only imagine the propositions you receive when you pull women over.”
I snort. “I don’t get that many.”
“Sure,” she says.
“Okay, fine. I have, on occasion, been offered very specific acts in exchange for my leniency.”
“Awkward,” she says, making a face.
“Yeah.” I stand up and head toward the kitchen. Over my shoulder I say, “Turkey and Swiss?”
She says, “Yes, please,” just like I knew she would. They’re her favorite.
My mom calls while I’m making the sandwiches. I put down the knife and listen as she tells me how worried she is about Dylan. “I haven’t talked to him in ages. He’s not answering his phone, either,” she says.
I guarantee he’s answering his phone, just not when she calls. Dylan’s excellent at avoidance.
“Have you talked to him lately?” she asks.
“It’s been a few weeks but he sounded fine,” I say as I put the turkey and cheese away. “He’s a grown man. He can take care of himself, Mom.” I want to tell her to stop worrying about Dylan, but I don’t because she will anyway. “I’m sure he’ll make it home for Thanksgiving.” I’m not sure though. I’d place the odds at about fifty percent. “I’ll try to get a hold of him and if I do, I’ll call you back, okay?”
She says okay and when I hang up and walk back into the living room with the sandwiches, Claire doesn’t have the blanket on her lap anymore.
“Are you warmer now?” I ask.
She stares down at the floor and mumbles a response.
I can’t quite understand her. “Claire?”
She looks at me but her eyes are unfocused and she seems kind of out of it. Sweat dots her upper lip and forehead. I’ve never seen Claire sweat. Ever. And it’s not as though the room is that much warmer.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
She still won’t answer and it’s starting to freak me out a little. She says my name and tries to speak, but her words trail off and she slumps over on the couch as if she’s beyond exhausted.
“Claire. Claire!” I reach for her and pull her up.
“Stop it,” she says. “I’m fine. I don’t need your help.” Clearly, she does need my help.
The realization of what’s happening to her suddenly hits me, and I rack my brain trying to recall what I read, what I should do when her blood sugar gets too low. I think about calling 911, but then I remember. Juice. Juice is best. Adrenaline courses through me as I hurry to the kitchen and grab the quart bottle of orange juice and a glass. I fill it to the top and when I return to the living room I have to set the glass on the coffee table so I can get my arms under Claire and help her sit up. She fights me and as she’s flailing about she lands a pretty good punch near my eye. She starts crying when I raise the glass to her lips and try to get her to open her mouth. “Come on,” I say. I tip the glass up and she coughs and sputters and hardly any of the juice goes down her throat. “Stop it, Claire!” I hold her jaw tight with one hand and I worry that I’m hurting her, but there’s no other way to keep her still. I try again and some of the juice actually makes it into her mouth but the rest runs down her chin and neck. “You have to drink this, Claire.” This time I tilt her head back a little and manage to get a decent amount into her. She finally stops struggling and starts working with me instead of against me, almost childlike in the way she follows my instructions. I help her take another drink and then I keep giving her sips until it’s all gone. She’s trembling and crying softly and taking these little gasping breaths. “Shhh, it’s okay,” I tell her. I set down the empty glass on the coffee table and rock her in my arms until she calms down.
“I’m cold, Daniel.” Grabbing the blanket, I throw it over Claire and pull her toward me so that her head rests on my chest. Eventually, when the shaking and the tears subside, she says, “I’m so embarrassed.”
I brush the hair back from her sweaty temples. “Hey, don’t be.” I’m suddenly aware of just how close our bodies are, and how tightly I’m holding Claire. Her head is tucked under my chin and I can smell her shampoo. “What happened?” I ask.
“I just had a little too much insulin in my system.” As much as I’d like to keep holding her I know I should probably feed her instead. I ease her off my chest. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” I go to my room and grab a sweatshirt and when I get back to the living room I hand it to Claire. Her shirt is wet from all the juice that spilled. “Go change. There are towels in the bathroom if you want to wash the juice off.” I pull her to her feet and she stands, shaking a bit. “Do you need me to help you?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I can do it.” Reaching up, her fingers graze the skin near my eye. “Did I do that?”
I smile at her, to ease her concern. “I’ll live. You’ve got a decent right hook, though, especially when you’re pissed off.”
She walks back into the room a few minutes later, wearing my sweatshirt. We eat side by side on the couch. “Do you want to lie down for a while?” I ask when she finishes eating.
“Yes. I’m wiped out.” She stretches out on the couch and I cover her with the blanket. “Don’t let me sleep past two thirty, okay?”
“I won’t.” She closes her eyes and falls asleep instantly.
I click on the TV, keeping the volume low so I won’t wake her up. I watch an old movie on cable but every once in a while, just for a few seconds, I watch Claire sleep.
“I can drive you home in your car,” I tell her, after I wake her up. “One of the guys can meet me and bring me back here.”
“No. I’m fine. I feel much better now. Really.” She stretches and rubs her eyes. “I want to go home and take a shower and put on my comfiest pajamas.”
“Are you sure?”
She pulls out her pump and checks her readings. “I’m positive. Everything looks good.”
“You’ll text me the minute you’re home?” I ask.
“Of course.”
Claire gathers up her things and I help her on with her coat. Outside, the air feels even colder. I open her door but before she
slides behind the wheel she says, “How did you know what to do?”
“I looked it up on the Internet one day. I didn’t know anything about diabetes. I wanted to know what to do if you ever needed help.”
She looks surprised, and like she might start crying again. “Lucky for me you like orange juice.”
“I don’t.”
“But you always have it in your fridge.”
“I keep it there for you.”
She looks into my eyes and holds my gaze as something unspoken passes between us. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Be careful, okay?”
“I will. I’ll text you as soon as I’m home.”
I close her door and twenty minutes later I get a text. I’m home.
I write back immediately. Good. Take it easy tonight.
36
claire
The kids are upstairs taking showers and putting on their pajamas when Chris gets home a little after eight on a Friday night in mid-November.
“Hi,” he says. He shrugs out of his suit coat and drapes it over the back of a kitchen chair.
“Hi. How was your week?” I’m amazed at how formal our communication has become. I miss how easy it used to be to talk to Chris. Now our weekly debriefing sessions—filled with snippets of our workweek and what the kids are up to—are polite, sterile exchanges that are only slightly more passionate and significant than discussing the weather. Gone are the days when we sat down and ate dinner as a family, listening as the kids shared the highlights of their day. And then after, when the kids were asleep, back when Chris worked for only an hour or so in the evening, we’d go to bed and share different things with each other.
“Busy,” he says. “We’re still understaffed, in the field and at headquarters.” Another by-product of the recession: companies trying to make do with as few resources on the payroll as they can get by with, which means it’s the employees who must pick up the slack. “But I closed every sale I was working on.” Chris smiles, and vibrates with an energy I haven’t seen in a while. He looks good. Tired, but good. No longer underweight, he’s filling out his shirt nicely thanks to the workouts he told me he was squeezing in at the hotel fitness centers. “It makes me feel better,” he said. “Relieves a little of my stress.”
He reaches into the refrigerator and grabs a beer.
“Congratulations,” I say, and I mean it. I finish loading the dishwasher and then fill the coffeepot with water and fresh grounds, setting the timer so it will brew automatically the next morning.
He opens the beer and takes a long drink. “Thanks.”
I yell upstairs to the kids. “Hey, guys, Dad’s home.” Jordan comes tearing down the stairs, hair wet, wearing her Hello Kitty nightgown, and launches herself into his arms. We’ll have trouble getting her to bed tonight. Her requests for one more book and for Chris to stay with her until she falls asleep will continue until I finally go in and play the heavy, which will leave me feeling drained and sad. She misses him. Why wouldn’t she? Jordan fires off a stream-of-consciousness-style recap of her entire week, barely stopping to take a breath, and Chris listens attentively. They relocate to the couch and Jordan snuggles up close. I smile when he kisses the top of her head.
Josh hasn’t come downstairs, so I go up to see what’s taking him so long. He’s sitting on his bed, halfheartedly strumming his guitar. “Hey, buddy. Dad’s home. Aren’t you coming downstairs?”
“Yeah,” he says, without enthusiasm.
I sit down next to him on the bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’,” he says. I wait patiently, to see if I can coax a bit more out of him by not pushing. He strums a few more times and then puts down the guitar. “It’s just that Jordan won’t shut up long enough to let me talk to Dad. And he’s just gonna leave again anyway.”
“He’ll be home all weekend,” I point out.
“Yeah, working.”
This isn’t really fair, because Chris tries hard to make sure he spends plenty of time with the kids, and Josh knows it. My belief is that his attitude stems more from his overall frustration at having one of his parents unavailable five nights out of seven than any real sense of injustice. I feel his pain.
“Come on down,” I say. “Dad wants to see you. He misses you guys a lot.”
“Okay,” he says, finally acquiescing. “But tell Jordan I get a turn.”
I ruffle his hair. “I will. I promise.” He follows me down the stairs. When Chris looks up and opens his arms, Josh goes to him, and watching them embrace puts a smile on my face. I will never say that Chris doesn’t love his children with his whole heart. He does.
After we put the kids to bed Chris goes into the office and shuts the door. I read a book on the couch with Tucker curled up next to me. An hour later I finish my book, but I don’t really feel like starting a new one. I peruse the movies in our extensive DVD collection instead. I’m not in the mood for anything violent, but Chris isn’t really a fan of chick flicks, so I compromise with Up in the Air. I’ve already watched it, more than once in fact, but George Clooney stars in it and I never get tired of him. I poke my head into the office.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” I ask, hoping he’ll be willing to take a break.
“Sure. Go ahead and pick one.”
“I already did,” I say, holding up the case.
He doesn’t respond.
“Chris?”
He finally stops typing and looks up. “Sure. Go ahead and start it. I’ll be out in a minute.”
I pop the disk into the DVD player and sit down on the couch. We used to watch movies all the time, snuggled under the same blanket. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, my head in Chris’s lap.
I sit through several previews but they end and the movie starts. I’m still waiting for Chris to join me forty-five minutes later. I click off the DVD player and the TV.
“I’m tired,” I say when I poke my head into the office. “I’m going to bed.”
“You are?” Chris asks, without looking up from his computer. It’s as if he’s fallen into an alternate reality, and I’m surprised he even heard me. “I thought we were going to watch a movie?”
“Yeah, me, too. Maybe some other night.”
In our bedroom, I strip off my clothes and put on my pajamas. After I brush my teeth and wash my face I slide underneath the covers. There’s nothing on TV when I click through the channels, and I don’t feel like walking back downstairs to find another book. Strangely, I’m both tired and restless. And bored. I shut off the lamp and lie there in the dark. It’s almost ten thirty, but I grab my phone from the nightstand and call Daniel. I haven’t heard from him since I received his last text a few hours earlier.
He answers on the third ring. “Claire?”
I can hardly hear him over the noise in the background. “Where are you?” I ask.
“Out with the guys. We’re watching the game.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Before I can hang up he says, “No. Just give me a second.” A minute later the noise disappears, save for the occasional sound of a car honking its horn.
“Are you outside?”
“Yes. Couldn’t hear you in there.”
“It’s cold out.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I don’t want to interrupt your evening. Go back to your friends.”
“It’s no big deal. What are you doing?”
“I’m lying in bed.” I didn’t think before I spoke and now that the words are out of my mouth, I realize they sounded more suggestive than I intended them to.
“Oh?” he says. “Tell me more.”
Suddenly, I’m not so bored.
This is very different in context and tone from anything Daniel has ever said to me in person. I don’t think he’s drunk, but there’
s a slightly flirtatious lilt to his words that tells me he’s had a few.
“I’m just tired. But now I can’t sleep.” It’s very difficult not to imagine Daniel here in this bed with me. Holding me close. Touching my skin. His lips on mine. I tell myself that it’s okay to imagine. These are my thoughts and they won’t hurt anything. It’s no different than thinking about George Clooney.
Except that I’m not on the phone with George Clooney.
“Is he home?” He rarely mentions Chris by name.
“Yes. He’s downstairs, working.”
“And you’re lying there? In the dark?”
My body temperature rises when he says those words. I’m fairly certain that Daniel is now imagining scenarios of his own, which means that we have just skated into very unfamiliar territory. “Yes.”
“You told me, the night I changed your tire, that you were lonely. Are you always lonely?”
“Not always.”
“But a lot of the time?”
“Yes.” I know I shouldn’t be saying any of this, shouldn’t be encouraging him. But I don’t care. At this moment I want to be selfish. I want to think things I shouldn’t and say them out loud.
He’s stronger than I am, though, because he says, “I need to hang up before I say something I can’t take back. Something you may not want to hear,” he adds, and the sound of his voice, loaded with things unsaid, nearly sends me over the edge.
Every nerve ending in my body is on fire. “Okay. Go back to your friends.”
“Good night, Claire. Sleep tight.”
“Good night.”
I set the phone on the nightstand and take a deep breath. There’s a man downstairs who has every right to be in this bed with me, but he isn’t interested. And there’s a man who doesn’t have any right at all, yet he sounds as though he’d give just about anything for the opportunity.
I have never felt more alone.
37
chris
I fly home from Utah late on Wednesday night. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Claire and I alternate whose family we celebrate with and this year it’s hers. Frankly, I’m glad. My parents try to pack my siblings, their spouses, all the grandkids, and various assorted relatives into their small two-story house and by the end of the day I usually have a raging headache. It’s much quieter and calmer when we celebrate with Claire’s family.