But, for the first time, I notice that the little mirrored tray where she kept her bottles and lipsticks and wands of this or that—mascara, shadow, concealer—is no longer on the counter beside the sink. The guest towel with her initials, EC, embossed in blue, no longer lies beside the other, the one with his, BC.
I open the medicine chest to look for the Bayer, and in it I see a prescription bottle that wasn’t there when I left for college. I take it down and read the labeclass="underline"
“Elavil. Refills (3). TAKE 1 EACH A.M. FOR MIGRAINE.”
The prescription is in May’s real name: Maybel M. Engberg.
I put the bottle of pills back on the shelf and laugh a little to myself, thinking of May sleeping, regularly, with my father, keeping her A.M. prescription here because she’s here in the A.M.—trying to sweep the evidence of my mother away, the perfume bottles, the monogrammed towel. Why? Is she jealous? Does she think, perhaps, my mother might come back? And what if she does? Had May thought about what she’d do then? What if my mother comes home some night, turns her key in the lock, and climbs the stairs to her bedroom, where May snores beside my father—tight curls arrayed on my mother’s pillow, bony feet poking out beneath the lace of a white nightgown, maybe touching with affection the cold, hairy ankle of my father?
May’s sweet mouth would be gaping open in the dark. Asbestos, lunar ash, and whatever leftover dust of my mother still floated over that side of the bed would film May’s pink tongue. I imagine my mother hooting at that, and I laugh a little, too—a hushed, painful laugh—imagining May and my father trying to hide the evidence of their nights together before I came home for vacation. I imagine my father hurrying around the house, packing up May’s things, which would have begun to accumulate, as these things do—her women’s magazines and earrings, her extra pair of reading glasses—stuffing them under the bed, maybe. Checking the house one last time for the details that might give them away.
And here, plain as day: May’s Elavil, waiting.
Sneaky, I think, and picture my father in a bathrobe, wearing slippers, tiptoeing through a garden of white tulips, lopping their heads off with a golf club. Whop is the noise they make as he lops them.
I sleep like someone thrown into the river with weights chained around her when I go back to bed.
But I wake up sicker. Pure fever. The bedroom is humid with it—sweat diffused with furnace dust. My sickness smells like a jungle: close, and overgrown. My head and limbs ache with the kind of dull physical pain that seems to come from far away. Not stabbing or stinging pain. Radiating pain. As dull as longing.
My father sits on the edge of my bed, and, with the thermometer in my mouth, I can’t talk, and he says nothing. The silence embarrasses me. It’s embarrassing to be his grown daughter, home on vacation from college, with a child’s fever. And I think he can probably smell me—bodily, intimate, the smell of something private, swabbed. I remember the look on his face when he found me with Phil in my bed. It was as if someone had thrown a cup of milk in his face, that chalky look of surprise. I saw my father over Phil’s shoulder. My legs were spread. Phil had a hand on one of my breasts—
Seeing that look on my father’s face, the word copulation came to mind.
Something clinical and as humorless as botany, as cauliflower.
I can’t remember my father attending to any of the minor illnesses of my childhood. Croup. Flu. Strep.
It had always been my mother who’d held the glass thermometer up to the light, reading its flimsy red vein of rising blood. When my temperature was normal, she always seemed delighted, as though she’d caught me in a lie. “Get ready for school,” she’d say, slipping the thermometer back into its vinyl sleeve.
But when it was high, she’d ministrate—cool compresses, clean sheets, ginger ale, tepid tea. She’d bring me a cup of chicken broth to sip, and it would have a waxy half heart of fat floating on the top.
That pale yellow of a chicken was like forbearance, boiled down to oily water.
After a minute, my father takes the thermometer out of my mouth. “A hundred and three,” he says, and his eyes get wide. He’s wearing a suit, ready for the office, and each one of his silver hairs is combed into place. He thinks, and then he says, “I’ll stay home from work, but I think we should call May.”
I laugh, but stop short. My throat hurts—little beestings all around my tonsils, and the epiglottis feels swollen, like a fleshy fishhook in my throat. I say, “Dad, it’s okay with me if May sleeps over while I’m home. I’m old enough to deal with that, you know.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, and his impression of an innocent, accused, is good. His black eyebrows are raised in a startled line.
“I saw her prescription in the medicine cabinet. ‘Take one each A.M.’ So I assume it’s here because she’s here each A.M. And that’s okay with me.”
“Oh, that,” he says. “Oh, well, yes, sometimes she spends the night. But . . .”
“Dad, it’s really okay.” I try to sit up. He hurries to fluff the pillows behind me.
“Let me get you some juice,” he says, “and then I’ll call May to see what you do about a fever like this.”
I SPEND THE NEXT MORNING AND AFTERNOON IN BED, sipping orange juice, which stings bitterly going down. But my father brings me glass after glass and, after it’s swallowed, it feels good. It cools me.
I fall asleep for a few hours, and the fever drags me in and out of a dream in which I’m trapped in a burning building, standing outside an elevator under a sign that reads IN CASE OF FIRE USE STAIRS.
But somehow I know there are no stairs, so I stand there, flames inching down the hallway toward me as I try to decide whether to take the elevator up or down—not knowing which button to push to get there because they’re side by side, and marked in Braille. Since I can’t read Braille, I’m afraid to make a mistake, afraid I’ll make the right decision, the one that will save my life—whether to go up or down—but push the wrong button. As the flames move inexorably toward me in a bright parade—a wall of vivid oxygen melting everything as they come—finally, out of desperation, I close my eyes and feel the raised bumps.
Amazingly, I can read them with my fingers.
One of the buttons is marked Now, and one is marked Later.
I pause for a moment, then press Now, and the doors open immediately, but the elevator is filled with smoke. In the center of it is my mother. She steps out of the elevator calmly, not particularly surprised to see me, and says, “You’re getting warmer,” with an amused look on her face.
MAY’S ALREADY LEAVING WHEN I WAKE UP. SHE MUST HAVE come over while I was asleep. I hear them at the front door. “No,” my father says, “I just don’t think it’s right with her here.”
“But if Kat says it’s okay, I don’t see—”
“I don’t care what Kat says.” He whispers loudly, sounding irritated.
I sit up—rubber-limbed and warm, like a baby who’s been left by accident all afternoon in a very warm bath. “Dad,” I yell from the top of the stairs when I get there. “I insist that May stay over. May,” I shout, though my voice scrapes my throat, “I want you to stay.”
“I—” my father says. I can see his face at the foot of the stairs, turned up to me, a big dog about to beg.
“Dad,” I say, teasing him, “be good. May stays. I’m going back to bed.”
May giggles. “Well, Brock, that settles that, I guess.”