Five Days Read online

  ‘Ben is your favorite.’

  ‘I consider you and Ben equally wonderful. And the thing is, you honestly have no idea what your life is going to turn out to be. Or where it will land you. Even when you think: “So this is what my life is now,” well, things can change in an instant or two.’

  ‘You think that because you look at other people’s tumors all day.’

  Ouch. I smiled tightly.

  ‘Well . . . it does give me an interesting perspective on things.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a slave to routine.’

  ‘Then don’t be somebody’s wife.’

  There. I said it. Sally flinched, then shot back with:

  ‘You’re somebody’s wife.’

  ‘Yes, I am. But—’

  ‘You don’t have to complete the sentence, Mom. And I know if I were a really creative type like Ben . . .’

  There are certain arguments with children that you simply cannot win.

  ‘There’s a sister, isn’t there?’

  ‘That’s right, Sally.’

  ‘And they are rather different, aren’t they?’

  I was snapped back into the here-and-now of Dr Allen’s office.

  ‘Sally is a rather different person to Ben,’ I said, hopefully sounding neutral.

  ‘Ben intimated that to me. Just as he intimated he feels closer to you than to his father.’

  ‘Dan stills loves Ben.’

  Dr Allen looked at me with care.

  ‘I’m sure he does, in his own way,’ she said. ‘But let me ask you something, Laura – do you always feel the need to make things better?’

  ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘It can be rather disheartening, can’t it? I mean, other people’s happiness – it’s ultimately their own concern, isn’t it? And that also includes your children at this point in their lives. You can’t blame yourself for Ben’s problems.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’

  Half an hour later I met Ben – as arranged by Dr Allen – at a café off campus. He’d lost a noticeable amount of weight – and he was already skinny before all this. His face still looked a little pasty. He let me hug him, but didn’t respond in kind. He had difficulty looking at me directly during the half-hour that we spoke. At first, when I told him how well he looked, he said: ‘Mom, you’ve never lied to me about anything . . . so please don’t start now.’ He then proceeded to ask me how things were going at home, whether his sister was ‘still hung up on Mr Jock Republican’ (I was very reassured to hear his natural acerbity hadn’t vanished), and how he’d actually started a new canvas that was not a collage.

  ‘It’s a painting this time. So it doesn’t contain body parts or try to replicate a car crash with me behind the wheel of a Porsche.’

  ‘You mean, like James Dean?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother the Culturally Aware Technologist.’

  ‘Not that culturally aware.’

  ‘You just read more than anyone I know.’

  ‘That’s more of a hobby . . .’

  ‘You should try and write, Mom.’

  ‘What would I have to write about? I’ve not done anything that interesting or important with my life . . . outside of raising you and Sally.’

  ‘You were under no obligation to add that.’

  ‘But it’s the truth.’

  Ben reached out briefly to touch my arm.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You look a little tired,’ I said.

  ‘I’m finally starting to sleep again without pills. But I’m still on other medication. Pills to keep me happy.’

  ‘There’s no real pill for that,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Ben said with just the barest hint of a smile.

  ‘But you seem stronger . . .’

  ‘You’re being far too nice again.’

  ‘Would you rather me be far too mean?’

  Another half-smile from Ben.

  ‘You’d never pull it off,’ he said.

  ‘It’s good to see you OK, Ben.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I freaked you out.’

  ‘You didn’t freak me out.’

  ‘Yeah, right . . .’

  ‘OK, I was very concerned. So was your father . . .’

  ‘But you’re here today.’

  ‘Your dad’s got a job interview this morning.’

  ‘That’s good news. Because it’s all such bad news with him now.’

  ‘That’s a little extreme, Ben. He loves you very much.’

  ‘But we’re not friends.’

  ‘That will change.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘At least we’re friends,’ I said.

  Ben nodded.

  ‘You’re sure you’re not angry at me?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m never angry at you.’

  Upon returning home that evening from Farmington I wrote my son a text, informing him that, though I was always here for him day and night, I still wouldn’t crowd him.

  Take your time, know that I am always at the end of the phone – and can be with you in ninety minutes if you need me.

  Since then, I’ve had at least two texts a day from Ben – often funny/ruminative (Do you think the only real broken hearts are in country and western songs?), sometimes troubled (Really bad night’s sleep. Session with Dr Allen today), sometimes just a hello. Twice a week there’d always be a phone call. But still no indication that he wanted to spend a weekend at home, or wanted to see me.

  Until . . .

  Bing.

  Staring out at the water from Pemaquid Point, my brain awash with so many thoughts, I dug out my cellphone and found myself reading:

  Hey Mom. Want to finally get out of Dodge this weekend. Thinking maybe we could meet somewhere like Portland. A couple of good movies in town. We could also catch dinner somewhere. You up for this?

  Damn. Damn. Damn. This would have to be the one weekend in literally nine years that I am going out of town. I texted back:

  Hey Ben. Would love to do dinner and a movie Saturday . . . but I have that professional conference this weekend in Boston. I could try to get out of it . . .

  His immediate reply:

  Don’t do that for me.

  My immediate reply:

  It’s just a work thing. But you are more important than that.

  And you never go anywhere – so let’s push the night out to next weekend.

  Now I’m feeling guilty.

  You’re always feeling guilty about something, Mom. Go run away for a few days – and try not to feel bad about it.

  I stared at this last text long and hard. Thinking of a phrase my poor father invoked time and time again whenever considering the limitations he’d placed on his own life:

  Easier said than done.

  And considering my own personal condition, Ben’s admonition genuinely unsettled me. Because the only response that came to mind was:

  Easier said than done.

  Three

  . . . YOU NEVER GO anywhere . . .

  Ouch.

  Though I know Ben didn’t mean that comment to hurt it still did. Because it articulated an uncomfortable truth.

  Walking back to my car, putting the key in the ignition, pulling out of the parking lot, the ocean now behind me, I turned left and followed the spindly, narrow road left, knowing it would curve its way past the summer homes now largely empty with autumn edging closer to winter’s dark harshness, before veering right again and ascending a gentle hill lined with the homes of the peninsula’s full-time residents. Outside the occasional artist or New Age reflexologist, the majority of the houses here are owned by people who teach school or sell insurance or work for the local fire brigade or have retired from the navy or the shipyard in Bath and are trying to get by on a pension and social security. These houses – many of which (like my own) could use several licks of paint – soon give way to open fields and the main route back west towards town. I mention all this because I have driven
this stretch of road three, four times a week ever since Dan and I moved here years ago. Bar the two weeks a year when we have been out of town on vacation, the town of Damariscotta, Maine, has been the centre of everything in my life. Just recently the thought struck me: I don’t have a passport. And the last time I left the country was way back in l989, my senior year at the University of Maine, when I talked my then-boyfriend Dan to drive with me up to Quebec City for a long weekend. Back then you could still cross into Canada with an American driver’s license. It was the Winter Carnival in Quebec City. Snow was everywhere. The streets of the Old City were cobbled. The architecture was gingerbread house. Everyone spoke French. I’d never seen anything so magical and foreign before. Even Dan – who was initially a little unnerved by the different language, the weird accent – became charmed by it all. Though the little hotel in which we spent those four happy days was a bit run-down and had a narrow double bed that creaked loudly every time we made love, it was a sublimely romantic time for us – and, I am pretty certain, the moment when I became pregnant with Ben. But before we knew that we were about to become parents – a discovery that changed the course of everything in our lives – Dan told me that we’d always go back to Quebec City. Just as we’d also visit Paris and London and Rio and . . .

  One of the many naive pleasures of being young is telling yourself that life is an open construct; that your possibilities are limitless. Until you conspire to limit them.

  I have rooted myself to one spot. This thought has been on my mind considerably. But, honestly, there is no anger towards Dan underlying this realization. Whatever about the other problems in our marriage, I don’t blame him for the way my life has panned out. After all I was the co-conspirator in all this. It was my choice to marry him. I now see that I made certain huge decisions at a moment when my judgment was, at best, clouded. Is that how life so often works? Can your entire trajectory shift thanks to one hastily made resolution?

  I hear these sorts of ruminative regrets frequently from patients. The smokers who are now ruing the day they took their first puff. The morbidly obese who wonder out loud why they have always needed to compulsively eat. Then there are the truly sad souls who are wondering if some chance tumor – with no direct link to what doctors like to refer as ‘lifestyle’ – is some sort of retribution (divine or otherwise) for bad behavior, accumulated sins, or an inability to find simple happiness in this one and only life that has been granted to them.

  There was a time when these scan-room confessions – usually blurted out in moments of mortal terror, shadowed by the great fear of the unknown – were all in a day’s work for me. Are they beginning to unnerve me because, in their own direct way, they are now forcing me to reflect on the ever-accelerating passage of time? For here we are again in October. And I am now in my forty-third year and still can’t totally figure out how a year has simply vanished. My dad – who taught calculus at a high school in Waterville – once explained this to me with elegant simplicity a few years back, when I mentioned how one of the stranger aspects of impending middle age was the way a year was over in three blinks.

  ‘And when you get to my age . . .’ he said.

  ‘If I get to your age.’ (He was seventy-two back then.)

  ‘Always the pessimist. But I guess it comes with your professional territory. OK, I will rephrase. If you get to my age . . . you will discover that a year passes in two blinks. And if I make it to, say, eighty-five, it will be, at best, a blink. And the reason is a simple mathematical formula – which has nothing to do with Euclidian precepts, and more with the law of diminishing returns. Remember when you were four years old and a year appeared huge and so slow . . .’

  ‘Sure. I also remember thinking how, every time Christmas had come and gone, the wait until next year would be endless.’

  ‘Exactly. But the thing was – a year back then was just one quarter of your life. Whereas now . . .’

  ‘One thirty-ninth.’

  ‘Or, in my case, one seventy-second. This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that’s the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time doesn’t elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a week seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed – and its increasing preciousness as a commodity.’

  Dad. He died last year after a slow, cruel descent into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. Twelve months earlier he had still been so mentally sharp. As sharp as my mother before the pancreatic cancer that came out of nowhere and killed her just four summers ago. Was it the love story of the past and present century? I can certainly remember moments when I was younger – especially during my adolescence – when there was a decided chill between them. I recall Dad dropping hints that teaching calculus in one of Maine’s smaller cities wasn’t the career stretch he had envisaged for himself when he was an undergraduate and the star of the U Maine math department. But it was Dad who had elderly parents in Bangor and felt beholden after college to turn down a doctoral scholarship at MIT in favor of one at U Maine in order to be on standby for his aging mother and father. And it was Dad who took the job in Waterville when he couldn’t find a college post in-state.

  Dad.

  I got lucky on the parent front. Despite those few years of quiet, yet perceptible tension – about which neither of them ever really spoke during or afterwards – I grew up in a reasonably stable household. My parents both had careers. They both had outside interests – Dad played the cello in an amateur string quartet. Mom was something of an expert on historical needlework. They both encouraged and loved me. They kept whatever sorrows or misgivings they had about their individual and shared lives out of my earshot (and only when I was a woman in my thirties, coping with all the daily pressures of family life, did I realize how remarkably disciplined they were in this respect). Yes, Dad should have been a chaired professor at some university and the author of several ground-breaking books on binary number theory. Yes, Mom should have seen the world – as she herself once told me was her ambition when younger. Just as I also sensed she often rued the fact that she married a little too young and never really knew a life outside of that with my father. And yes, there was the great sadness that happened two years after my birth, when Mom had an ectopic pregnancy that turned frightening. Not only did she lose the baby, but the complications were so severe that she had to undergo a hysterectomy. I only found this out around the time I was pregnant with Sally and had a bad scare (which turned out to be nothing more than a scare). Mom then told me why I was an only child – something I had asked her about many years earlier, and which was explained simply as: ‘We tried, but it never happened again.’ Now, looking into the nightmare of a possible ectopic pregnancy, Mom told me the truth – leaving me wondering why she had waited so long to trust me with this tragedy that must have so upended her life at the time and still haunted her. Mom could see the shock in my eyes; a wounding sort of shock, as I struggled to understand why she never could have simply told me what had happened, and why Dad – with whom I thought there was such total transparency – had conspired with her on this huge central piece to the family puzzle. Me being me – and yes, Ben was right, I always want to make things right for those nearest to me – I never once spat out the hurt that coursed through me in the days after this revelation. Me being me I rationalized it as all coming down to their worry about the effect it might have on me, and whether (had they told me when I was much younger) I might have even suffered my own dose of survivor guilt over it. But it still bothered me. And hearing the whole terrible story for the first time when I was twenty-four . . . well, it just seemed to exacerbate the confusion I felt afterwards.

  Dan’s reaction was direct, to the point. And though I initially considered it just a little brusque, in time I realized he had cut to the heart of the matter when, after musing about it all for a moment or two, he just
shrugged and said:

  ‘So now you know that everybody has secrets.’

  Cold comfort. Dan never does touchy-feely. But at the outset we did function well as a couple. We had little money. We had a big responsibility as new parents. We coped. Not only that, bills got paid. A house got bought. We managed to hold down two jobs and simultaneously raise two children without any sort of serious childcare (except the occasional babysitter or mother-in-law). We suffered broken nights courtesy of babies with colic and were able to laugh about our four a.m. tetchiness the next day. We were frustrated about our lack of latitude. But even though we both felt a little closed in, a little overwhelmed with children and financial obligations, what I remember most about those years together was the way we fundamentally got along, dodged so many potential areas of conflict, helped each other through rough patches without ever playing the ‘I did this for you, now you do that for me’ game. We seemed to be a reasonable match.

  A reasonable match. It sounds so profoundly pragmatic, so down-to-earth, so devoid of passion. Well, ours too has never been the love story of the century. Nor, however, is it one of those marriages where the last time we made love Clinton was president. Sex is still there – but even before Dan lost his job and began to disengage from me, it had lost its basic exuberance or the sense of mutual need that fuelled it for so long. When we met the attraction was (for me anyway) the fact that he was stable, unflappable, together, responsible. Unlike the man who came before him and was . . .

  No, I don’t want to think about that . . . him . . . today. Even though, truth be told, I think of him every day. Even more so over the past two years when the realization was hitting me so constantly that . . .

  Stop.

  I have stood still.

  Stop.

  You lose things and then you choose things.

  Didn’t I hear someone sing that somewhere? Or as my dad once ruefully noted when he said to me, in passing, during the weekend of his seventieth birthday, ‘To live a life is to constantly grapple with regret.’

  Is that the price we pay for being here: the ongoing, ever-increasing knowledge that we have so often let ourselves down? And have settled for lives we find just adequate.