“Don’t you need to answer that?” Woody asked.
HOW DID ANYONE KNOW THE RIGHT WAY TO LIVE? DIANE’S HUSBAND, at forty-five, had begun to feel pains in his chest. The pains were nothing, the doctor said, but anxiety, but her husband felt, abruptly, the slow, inevitable closing of his own life. He had awakened one night, damp and trembling, after dreaming that his children had him by the throat. In the dream he had peeled their hands off and risen up, free, into the sky. She had these feelings, too, for she had her own disappointments — it had not been her dream to berate undergraduates to turn in gratuitously late papers, for one thing — but she was going along with what was given them, and when she tucked the children in, she had not thought there was anything else to do. But suddenly her husband believed that their family was killing them. He was almost gleeful in this, a solution. He was a large, healthy man, but after this dream, he began visiting doctors, checking not only his heart, but also his lungs, his kidneys, his skin. He said that something was dirty in his blood. No doctors found anything. He searched the Internet for remote adventures; he logged onto sites that described trips into mountains, forests, deserts barely developed by human hands. He said he wanted to go somewhere clean. His home office — he was a freelance reporter for a variety of computer magazines — was papered with posters of Tibet, mountains white, iridescent with snow.
This business intensified shortly after the doctor had explained to Diane and her husband that testing had placed their son on the autism spectrum. The boy, he said, loved rules so intensely it could be difficult for him to get married or live with someone. He might be tormented in public school, so make sure to explain his issues to his teachers. He could receive therapy to help him understand when another person was happy or sad. On the bright side, the boy would be excellent at math.
After they had heard this, her husband asked her to drive the car home. She stared at the shiny, broad backs of the cars in front of them. His silence made her aggressively talkative.
“I don’t know if he was the best guy,” she said. “We could see someone else.”
He sat, hunched, arms wrapped around himself as though he were freezing.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked sharply, in the tone she sometimes used, despite herself, with the children.
He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re low on gas,” he said.
THE PHONE STOPPED RINGING. SHE COUNTED; THIS TIME IT TOOK twenty rings. Woody lowered the ice pack. “Someone wants to talk to you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Actually, he doesn’t.”
The boy looked up. “There are fifty-eight Woody Wilson buttons in your bag,” he said.
“Really?” said Woody. “There are, I think, 108 signs all over town. Yard signs, billboards. I drove around counting them. My wife, Daisy, helped me put up the signs. She did a good job. It was a good day for her.” He pressed the ice pack to his head and closed his eyes. “I am her rock,” he said. “I am her anchor in troubled water.”
The hope in his face, his desire to be seen in this role, made her look away.
“You are your husband’s rock,” he said, eagerly. “I can see it.” He picked up the ice pack again. “My wife used to work in real estate,” he said. “Did I tell you? She sold a house three blocks away.” He paused. “She was very happy,” he said. “We had wine and steaks at the Port House.” He was staring at his shoe with the frozen gaze of someone banishing other thoughts from his head. Then he looked at her. “What kind of work does your husband do?”
“I don’t really know right now,” she said.
She did not know yet how to answer this. Should she say he was dead? “He left three months ago,” she said. Telling Woody was practice. She hated other people’s pity; their sympathy, she felt, was a way of flattering themselves. She tried to laugh, a hollow, cheerless sound — why? She did not want him to be afraid of her. She was certainly afraid of herself. “That was him on the phone.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I call His name when I cannot take another step.” He looked at her as though she would understand this. “Do you ever feel that, Diane? Who do you call when you cannot take another step?” Woody Wilson lowered the ice pack from his forehead and touched the dent in the blue pack. He bit his lip, concerned.
She needed to change the subject. “So your wife sells real estate,” she said lightly.
“She did until a year ago,” he said.
He set the ice pack beside him and stared at it. When he looked up, he stared through her, as though another person were simply a clear window to a better view. “She won’t get out of bed. She stays there with the curtains shut. She says the light hurts her hair,” he said.
She looked at Woody Wilson, the blazing whiteness of his shirt, the way his hair was parted very neatly in the middle. She imagined him standing in front of the mirror that morning while his wife lay silent in the dim bedroom, drawing his comb tenderly through his hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds hard.”
“Hard,” he said, and he laughed, a sad laugh. “Life is hard. But you know, marriage is a sacred union.”
“Fine,” she said, thinking that this was what she resented most of all, the lack of specifics, the cheerful vagueness. “But you know, I think that each person has to give something.”
“I give her my devotion,” he said, sitting up, excited, ready for a debate. “She does the best she can. I wake up in the morning, and sometimes I look at her face, and I just want to know what she is thinking. I tell her she needs to go to church. God will help her.” His face was naked, a boy’s face, the pale, terrible lids of a child. “I want people to see that I’m trying. I want people to say that Woody Wilson is a good man.”
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE HER HUSBAND LEFT, DIANE HAD HEARD HIM crying at odd moments: when he was in the bathroom shaving, when he was in the garage bringing in the trash. His crying was soft, private, not meant for her or the children, and each time she came upon it, she felt both wounded and enraged. He only wept away from her, and she knew this meant she was not supposed to comfort him. One night, during this time, she had woken up and made his lunch. In the dark kitchen, she had put a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, a strong cheese, and a cookie in a brown bag and left it on the counter. The next day, he took the bag to work, and when he came home that night, he said, “I took your lunch today. Sorry.”
She was then ashamed of her gesture. “I know you did,” she said, and they were both more familiar in this, the feeling of deprivation, their quiet, growing anger toward something they could not quite describe. The next morning, that same lunch was on the counter; he had made it for her. She had wept and had begun to eat it slowly; after a few bites, she stopped. He would be leaving soon; they both knew this.
The phone was ringing again. Woody clapped his hands over his ears. The boy suddenly stood up and went into the kitchen. The girl wandered off to join him. There was the scream, “Stop!” by the girl followed by the boy yelling, “Give it!” and then the sound of a body falling in the kitchen. Diane ran into the room. She heard the candidate stepping behind her.
The boy had the girl pressed to the floor with his body. She was coughing. He was trying to unpeel her tiny closed fist. “Give it!” he growled.
“I want it!” screamed the girl.
“Get off her!” Diane ordered the boy. She grabbed his thin shoulders and tried to shake him off, but the boy would not move. “Now!”
Diane imagined how Woody Wilson saw them, the disheveled middle-aged woman in the putrid kitchen, wrestling with the enraged son who was stronger than she was. Legislate against this, she thought. The girl opened her mouth to bite the boy’s hand.