Jo Walton
A BURDEN SHARED
Penny woke on Tuesday morning and cautiously assessed the level of pain. If she didn’t move at all, there was nothing but the familiar bone-deep ache in all her joints. That wasn’t so bad, nothing stabbing, nothing grinding. Penny smiled. Ann must be having a good day. Maybe even heading for another minor remission. This was much better than it had been on Saturday, when Ann’s pain had woken Penny with a shock; that time, she had flinched against it and made it worse. This was nothing more than the pain she had endured Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for the thirty years since her daughter’s birth. Still smiling, Penny eased herself to sitting and reached for the cane she kept hanging on the rail that ran along the wall. Once she had it she stood, breathing deliberately, as the smile became a grimace, then walked slowly to the bathroom, where she used the rail to lower herself carefully to the toilet seat.
That evening, as Penny was lying on the daybed grading papers for her next day’s classes, there was a knock at the door. She levered herself up slowly and walked toward it. Her ex-husband Noah was on the doorstep, his gleaming Viasolo parallel parked on the street. If he’d done that, and not pulled into her driveway, he must want a favour. Too bad the pain was too much for her to consider standing on the doorstep while she found out what it was. “Hi,” she said, warily. “Come in.”
“How are you?” he asked as he followed her into the living room. They had been divorced for more than twenty years, after a marriage of less than ten, but seeing Noah always provoked the same mixture of exasperation and weary affection. She could recall the times when catching sight of Noah had sent thrills running through her, and also the times when just hearing two words in his careful patronizing tone had made her want to kill him. Now what she felt was gratitude that he had always been there for Ann. Well, nearly always.
“I’m fine,” Penny said, easing herself back onto the daybed. She was stiff and exhausted from the day’s pain, but he knew all about that.
“Good. Good…” He moved books from the gray chair to the beige one and sat on the gray one. When he had lived here, the house had been tidier. “I hate to drop this on you, Pen, but can you possibly do tomorrow?”
“Oh no,” she said.
“Penny…” His entitlement pressed hard on the exact places where her affection had worn thin.
“No. I can’t. No way.” She cut him off. “You know I’m prepared to make reasonable accommodations, but not at the last minute like this. I’ve arranged my classes specifically, my whole schedule is set, and tomorrow I have three senior seminars, a lecture, and an important dinner meeting. And I haven’t had a day free this week. Janice is in the middle of a Crohn’s flare, so I took that Sunday so she could preach, and yesterday—”
“I have to fly to Port Moresby,” Noah interrupted. “I’m on my way to the airport now. Old Ishi has had a stroke, and Klemperer isn’t coping. I have to go. Our whole Papuan capacity is collapsing. I have to be there. It could be my career, Pen.” Noah leaned forward, his hands clasped together.
“Your career is not more important than my career,” Penny said, firmly, though the thought of going through the eleven-hour flight from Cleveland to Port Moresby with Ann’s pain was legitimately horrifying.
“I know, but this beyond my control. Ishi might be dying.” Noah’s big brown eyes, so like Ann’s, were fixed on Penny’s.
She had always liked Ishi, Noah’s senior partner. “Do give her my best when you speak to her. And Suellen too.” She deliberately looked down at the icon on the app that recorded how many papers she still had to grade, to harden her heart. “But I can’t take tomorrow. Ask Lionel.”
“I already did. I called him. He’s rehearsing all day. Coppélia. They open on Monday.” Noah shrugged.
Penny winced. She loved her son-in-law, but she wished sometimes that Ann had found a partner whose career made it possible for him to share a little more of the burden.
“If you can’t do it, there’s nothing else for it: Ann will just have to shoulder her own pain tomorrow,” Noah said.
The words “selfish bastard” flashed through Penny’s mind, but she didn’t utter them. She didn’t need to. Noah knew how hard Ann’s pain was to bear, and he knew how much easier it was to bear someone else’s pain than one’s own. So he knew that he was forcing Penny to accept another day of Ann’s pain, however inconvenient it was, because he knew she wouldn’t put their daughter through that. One of the things that had led to the divorce was when Noah had wished aloud that pain transference had never been invented. Penny never felt like that. Bad as enduring Ann’s pain could be, it was so much better to suffer it herself than to watch her daughter suffer. After all, Penny only took the pain. That was all people could do for each other. Ann still had to bear the underlying organic condition, and the eventual degeneration it would cause.
“I’ll take Thursday and Friday,” Noah said, into her silence. “I really can’t manage tomorrow; I have to get some sleep on the flight so I can cope when I arrive. But Thursday I’ll be there, I’ll have found my feet, it will be all right.”
Penny sighed. Mentally, she had already filed this with the many other arguments she had lost to Noah over the years. “Can you at least take the pain until you get on the plane?”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “I’ll take it right now. And thanks, Pen. You’re the best.” He tapped at the app, and the sensation as pain left her was so delightful that she almost bounced up off the bed. His face, in contrast, seemed to age a decade as the pain hit. She reached back for the cane she no longer needed, and handed it to him with a stretch that would have been impossible moments before. “Thanks,” he said, pulling himself up carefully. “Just until I get to the car. I always keep one there.”
She walked out with him. “Do you think it’s a bit better today?” she asked.
He grinned through the pain. “Better than sometimes, definitely. But you know that long-term it just gets worse.”
Penny nodded. Wincing as he reached for it, Noah pulled his cane from his trunk, one of the high-tech lightweight models with a folding seat and a retractable snow spike. It looked as flashy next to her more traditional wooden cane as his zippy Viasolo did next to her sedate Solari.
When Penny went back in, she headed for the kitchen, almost dancing down the corridor. She was hungry, as she had not been all day. Moving without care felt like a luxury. She enjoyed standing to chop vegetables, relished taking a step to the fridge for a slice of lobster with no warning stab preventing her from moving. She sang as she stir-fried, and ate sitting at the kitchen table. If she hadn’t had this break from pain she’d have ordered banh mi, and this was so much nicer. She always liked to exercise on pain-free days. There wasn’t time to go to the dojo or the pool, but she did a few squats after dinner then sat at her desk to finish the grading. By the time Noah was on the plane and the pain hit her once more, she was ready for bed.
She woke Wednesday morning in absolute agony, pain tearing through her stomach like the worst imaginable period cramps, combining to set all Ann’s arthritic joint pain jangling. Penny blinked, and gasped aloud. When she tried to move, she could not suppress a cry. She called her daughter right away.
Ann sounded sleepy. “Mom?”
“This is really bad, sweetie. It might be some kind of warning sign. I think you should go to the doctor.”
“I’m so sorry!”
Penny hadn’t been living with Ann’s guilt for as long as Ann’s pain, so she wasn’t as used to it. Her daughter had been born with the joint condition, but the guilt developed as she grew, blossoming fully only in the last decade. Penny wondered sometimes what kind of mother-daughter relationship they would have without the existence of Ann’s disease. They loved each other. But Ann’s pain, and the question of who felt it, had always been between them, both binding them together and keeping them apart.