“Why awful?”
“I don’t know. Do you feel up to it?”
“Do you?”
“Good point.”
“Paul is a grown-up. We all are, especially you.”
I laughed at his joke. Dennis had teased me about my age on every birthday since we’d met. “ ‘Don’t worry,’ you say,” I said. “It’s like saying, ‘Stop breathing.’ ”
“I know,” he said softly, and the sounds slurred together. I missed his clear, strong voice. When I lay beside him that night after turning off the light, I put my ear to his chest and listened to the steady rhythm of his hard-beating heart. Then I pulled myself away from him, and went back to my own bed.
Before the wheelchair, there had been a walker. It was black with hand brakes and a leather shelf where Dennis could sit if he ended up stopping somewhere—in line at the grocery, or in the foyer when someone came by. Standing for long periods and sitting in a regular chair had become difficult, and so he was faster, really, with the walker than he was without it. It lasted almost six months, but then one afternoon I came into the kitchen to find him on the floor, using a kitchen cabinet to hoist himself up, his legs splayed out behind him on the tile. I helped him into a chair. When he was rested, he was able to stand with his right leg, and he used the walker to leave the room to go and lie down; but the following week at our appointment, Dr. Auerbach said it was time. “Better now than after you break a hip,” he’d said. When the wheelchair was delivered, Dennis had watched from the front porch as the driver unloaded it. “Once I go in, I don’t come out,” he’d said to me. It sat unused in the foyer for another week, but after that it became indispensable. The walker went into the guest room closet. Dennis surrendered to the wheelchair seven months after his diagnosis, and it was around the same time that he tendered his resignation from the firm where he’d practiced, happily, for a dozen years, and agreed to work on a for-hire basis. At first, he worked from home two or three full days per week, but as his voice weakened, he worked less, and then not at all, and then we were living off our savings and my meager salary from the medical practice where I worked, trying to stall retirement as long as we could. Out of kindness or loyalty, Dennis’s firm kept him on the books and continued to pay his health insurance.
Before the wheelchair, when we knew that it was coming but didn’t know when, Dennis decided I needed to learn to drive the boat. “It’s for our sanity,” he said. “I should have taught you years ago.” When he was at the helm, he had to stand for long periods at the console, braced against the waves, while Margo and I sat at the stern in cushioned captain’s chairs. I realized that he feared if I didn’t learn to captain, if he didn’t teach me immediately, he might never get out on the water again.
We went out one Sunday morning. We’d invited Marse but she had plans, so it was just me and Dennis. The lesson started as soon as we climbed into the boat. Everything he did was familiar, but I couldn’t have replicated it alone, even after watching him do it a thousand times: he taught me to lower the engines into the water, to check the fuel level of the starboard and port tanks, then check the oil level. Then he walked me through starting the engine in neutral and dropping the lines and reversing out of the slip slowly, facing behind me so I could see any boats that were headed our way down the canal. Once I’d backed up, I put the engines into neutral before putting them into forward, and headed slowly down the canal, pushing tentatively against the heavy knob of the throttle.
It was a different view from the helm. Driving the boat gave me less leisure than usual to stare into the backyards of our neighbors. The Kleins had moved away a year earlier, and a former Argentine Olympic swimmer had bought the house and added a sprawling coral rock patio and an enormous swimming pool; sometimes when he swam, I watched him from my back deck, entranced by his powerful flip turns. As I drove—considerably slower than Dennis would have done, though any wake at all was not allowed in the canal—I sneaked sideways peeks out of habit, and near the mouth of the canal, in the backyard of an imposing Grecian-style house with two stone lion statues bookending the back steps, I saw a couple entwined on a blanket. As we passed, they stopped kissing long enough to look up at us, and I waved and they waved back. I looked again before increasing speed, and they had returned to kissing. Briefly, I wondered if they were the man and woman of the house, or if someone was cheating. Surely two married people don’t make out half naked in the backyard of their own home?
Dennis stood briefly to point out the channel markers I should follow—we were headed to Key Biscayne, to stop at Sunday’s on the Bay for a sandwich so I could practice docking in a tight spot (Sunday’s was always crowded, and in my opinion a terrible place to practice, but Dennis was determined)—and then he sat down again. I stood alone at the helm, watching the span of the blue water, scanning the channel in front of me for other boats or the lighter color that indicated shallows. After ten minutes, I sped up, and Dennis yelled, “Yeehaw!” and my visor lifted off my head and flew into our wake.
When we arrived, I was able to idle while a family pulled away from the dock, and with little fuss fitted the boat into the space they left behind. Dennis affixed a line to the stern starboard cleat, but it was low tide and he couldn’t lift himself onto the dock. I cut the engine and hurried to step onto the dock and fix the bowline, but when I stepped back onto the boat, Dennis was shaking his head at me. “You never leave the boat,” he said. “You’re the captain.”
“I go down with the ship?” I said.
He pointed at the line I’d tied. “What if the line didn’t hold? What if you dropped it? What if the current’s too fast, and the boat drifts, and you’re standing on the dock?”
He was irritated—not at my mistake, I knew, but at his inability to help with the docking. “Those things didn’t happen,” I said.
“But they might have, Frances. You’re the captain, so you have to think of these things.”
“All right,” I said. “But you’re here—you could just start the engine and turn around.”
He looked at me, and his scowl softened. His shoulders slumped and he wiped his face with his right hand, his stronger hand. “But what if I’m not?”
And I suppose this was approximately when I started to make plans. Nothing concrete, nothing deliberate—but I have always been a person who thinks of contingencies, and though I hated to do it, it came naturally. I thought of living alone in the big house, maybe traveling a little with Marse or Margo, but every mental picture of life in Miami without Dennis was so repulsive to me that I felt physically ill. If Bette had still been living in the area, it might have been different. But I realized that afternoon that when Dennis died I would leave Miami, and possibly never come back.
Lola, the physical therapist, came twice a week at first, to help Dennis with exercises that would slow the degeneration of his muscles. She laid mats on the back deck and they wore sunglasses while they worked. She was an elfin woman with short dark hair and small, bony hands, and she wore black stretch pants and button-down shirts that looked like they were made for men and made her seem dwarfed, almost neutered. I’d mentioned this to Dennis once—I’d said, “Why doesn’t she wear clothes that show that she has breasts?” and he’d said, “Oh, she definitely has breasts.” I’d raised my eyebrows at him. “Don’t be jealous,” he’d said. “When you help me exercise, I look down your shirt, too.” Eventually, Lola came three times weekly, then four times, and then she was cleared by our insurance to come two hours a day, five days a week.