The knot of the tie became entangled in Nick’s fingers. In the syncopated shivers across his skin, he could feel the lingering effect of the pot of coffee he had emptied into his stomach at work. Even as he stared at the mirror, Nick’s eyes remained unfocused. His hands clutched either side of the wrinkled tie, in a precarious equilibrium. For a few moments he felt breathless and hollow. The scuffling of the carpet outside his room caught his attention. He pushed aside the looming reverie and turned to the door.
Melissa bounced in, bubbling over with smiles. “Daddy, come on,” she pleaded, “Mommy’s expecting us.” She put deliberate emphasis on the second syllable of her latest favorite word. Melissa included it in most of her sentences because, apparently, everyone was expecting something. At six, she was irresistibly charming. When she tilted her head and smiled wide, Nick was helpless; he had to smile. Her energy lapped over him. Yet, even her vigor was unable to transmute his leaden doubt into a youthful presumption of golden possibility. Nick had to feign enthusiasm to reassure his daughter. He tossed aside the tie and ran his hand through his hair, pushing Melissa out the door. She wriggled and started skipping toward the front room.
He followed her down the dim hallway. The pale light filtering in through the front windows illuminated the accumulated wisps of dust on the hardwood floor. The green runner, a forty-dollar purchase on credit from a local department store, stretched down the hall, stained with mud and snowmelt, an incidental casualty of the Midwestern winter. He had spent more than a few sleepless nights staring at the mundane artifacts of his life: shoes, shirts, jackets, chairs, televisions, and rugs. The columns of expenses had appeared so suddenly one month that he reeled as he catalogued the charges. Within the course of a few weeks, it seemed as though every room in the house had been redecorated twice.
The house would have to be immaculate when Deb returned or she’d be livid, Nick thought. He checked his pockets for the car keys. The front room, which was actually nothing more than the confluence of a hallway and the stairway, was heavy with the weight of cold, seeping through the seams of the front door. The resolute darkness of the season found its way into every crevice of the split-level.
Melissa was already out the door, a bundle of construction paper under her arm, before he could put her in the huge pink coat that hung from the rack. The elegant, simple coat-rack reminded Nick of another red entry in his checkbook, fifty-nine ninety-nine on sale. He shrugged into his own dark jacket and was about to go looking for his son when he noticed Jason sitting on the stairs, right in front of him.
Perched on Jason’s lap like a skittish bird was a brightly colored comic book. With the boundaries of every panel broken by a fist or falling body, the comics that Jason obsessed over were a far cry from the dime books Nick remembered from his own brief foray into the realm of superheroes. Granted, that had been over twenty years ago and spanned only three issues of Detective comics; Nick had been more inclined to spend his allowance on baseballs, gloves, and bubble gum. He worried that Jason spent too much time in his own world. Dreams of baseball stardom, after all, were marginally more practical than dreams of superpowers. Already solemn and withdrawn, possessing the reticence of a teenager at the age of seven, Jason was precocious and impenetrable. His teachers assured Nick that any form of reading was beneficial, no matter how coarse.
“Jason, let’s go.” His voice sounded tentative and lost, lacking the authoritative tenor Nick associated with fatherhood.
Jason stood up, his small frame already swaddled in a blue coat. With his eyes downcast, he packed up the book and gathered together a bundle of comics under his free arm, all neatly wrapped in polyurethane bags and backed with cardboard. Nick suspected that far more than his allowance had gone into purchasing those stacks of comics. The methodical organization of Jason’s collection, complete with an alphabetized spreadsheet, spoke more to his mother’s needs than his own. Nick, pink jacket in hand, opened the door just in time for Jason to march wordlessly into the evening.
The freezing air sat immovable outside the threshold. Nick hunched his shoulders as he walked out. The air was wet with the smell of snow; the weather beyond the city always seemed sharper and more extreme than within the confines of the city. Heat was more oppressive, more humid, and the cold simply painful. Nick walked over to the green minivan idling in the driveway as his children gathered near the vehicle.
Nick caught up with Melissa and wrestled her into the jacket. Her cheeks were already rosy with cold. Nick judged himself more harshly each time he noticed himself struggling with the most basic of fatherly duties. For years Nick had supported his children from a desk downtown, never worrying over the details of their lives. His own father maintained that it was the man’s job to bring home money, and it was the pursuit of familial security that allowed one to lay claim to the epithet of “good man.”
While Nick mused, Melissa had already settled into the passenger’s seat, the felt and faux leather creaking under her animated form. It never failed to amaze Nick what an adventure these trips were to her. She was thrilled to be sitting next to her father in the seat her mother normally occupied, but Nick felt unsteady seeing his daughter in Deborah’s place. He slid in behind the wheel and rubbed his hands together vigorously, giving Jason a few moments to find his way to the back seat. Jason took particular care in setting down the stack of comics, considering first one empty seat, then another, and finally deciding to rest the stack in his narrow lap. The interior of the van, a geography of misadventure, was marked with tributaries of spilled soda and lumps of melted chocolate clinging to the carpet. Each time Nick sat in the vehicle, he girded himself against the cloying smell of sucrose and body sweat.
“All aboard?” asked Nick, turning to smile at Melissa.
“Choo choo!” Melissa giggled.
“Okay, buckle up, everyone.” Nick checked Jason’s reflection in the rearview mirror and noted that his belt was already snapped in place. He shifted the van into gear and rolled out onto the gray streets.
Melissa swung her feet, knocking them between the seat and the dashboard. Nick reached out to slow her legs, and she settled into her seat, watching the fading landscape. As he drove, Nick checked the mirror periodically to watch Jason. He turned down the radio, forcing the thrumming of New Kids on the Block into a low drone.
“So, kids, how was Andrew and Amanda’s?” After school, Jason and Melissa both stayed at a neighbor’s house, conveniently located next to the bus stop. A lot of parents relied on the Morrison’s house to provide a bridge between school and work hours, and up until she went to the hospital, Nick and Deborah had prided themselves on knowing that their children never had to survive in that haphazard environment. Nick had always imagined a swirling mass of small bodies pinching, biting, and screaming. He knew, of course, that Allison Morrison, proud matriarch, could handle her share of hijinks. Although Nick only asked about Andrew and Amanda, who were closest in age to Jason and Melissa, the Morrisons actually had five children, each of their names beginning with the letter A. The youngest parents on the block, Nick and Deborah had spent hours after each neighborhood barbecue ridiculing the naming convention and the Morrisons’ stubbornly suburban lifestyle. Nick still avoided Allison’s eyes whenever he talked with her.
Melissa smiled as she spoke about the house. “Everyone’s there. It’s great.” She was thrilled to be spending her afternoons with girls her own age. The luster and mystery of older brothers had worn off for Melissa after too many days spent isolated with Jason.
“What do you guys do there?”
“We jump rope and play tag and play ghosts-in-the-graveyard in their basement. Jason just sits upstairs while the boys play videogames.” Melissa pursed her lips, her petulance the very image of her mother. The reference to videogames reminded Nick of another series of red entries in the checkbook: the massively expensive Nintendo game system and a slew of cartridges.
Nick shifted his eyes to the mirror. “Is that true, Jason?”
“Yes.” His eyes remained locked on the comic book. Nick was sure that, in the murk of the car, it was impossible for Jason to actually be reading anything, and if he was, then it was certainly hurting his eyes.
“Why don’t you play with them?” When Nick had picked up the kids today, Allison had pulled him aside and warned him that Jason was a loner. She lectured Nick on the dangers of children spending too much time in their own imaginations because, she said, of, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer. In the face of all of his other problems, the absurdity of this suggestion made Nick smile.
“They play fishing games.”
“That sounds like fun. Do you want me to take you fishing some time?”
Jason closed the comic book, slid it into an empty plastic case, and looked directly at his father in the mirror. “No. Fishing is boring.” The car lapsed into silence, and without the chatter, Nick felt the worries and doubts, prowling at the periphery of his consciousness, stalk to the foreground.
Nick had known something was wrong over a month ago. At least that was what he told himself now. In fact, even as Nick had noted the increased spending of the household, even as he had watched Deborah wake up at four in the morning to clean the house every day, nothing had seemed particularly suspicious. It just appeared that Deborah was being Deborah but on overload. When two credit card bills arrived, maxed to their five thousand dollar limits, listing dozens of charges at department stores, Nick began to worry.
His father believed that buying anything on credit was a sign of weakness. It meant either that a man could not adequately provide for his own family or that he could not live within his means. Nick’s father relished telling visitors how he had waited until he was thirty-seven and could pay for his house without the aid of a loan before making the leap into the middle class. He never mentioned all the years before, the four kids in the apartment so small that there was barely enough room for everyone to sleep. Nick understood that the omission was a matter of pride.
He had tried to sit down with Deborah and talk about their money and how the spending had to stop. There was simply no way he could possibly balance the expenditures with his income. Throughout the entire conversation, Deb moved between the kitchen stools and chairs around the dining room table, springing from one to another, unable to find a comfortable perch and never meeting Nick’s eyes. In Nick’s remembrance of the moment, her wiry frame appeared to crackle and spark as she adjusted table settings, nine ninety-nine a piece, and rearranged cookbooks. She shushed away his concerns and began to tell Nick about a party she was planning for everybody in the neighborhood. Somewhere between the talk of artichoke dip and fondue, Nick became entangled in Deb’s fantasies. Even with reality looming on the first of the month, she could still rouse his dormant imagination with her frenetic speech.
Before any of Deborah’s elaborate plans could come to fruition, her mood seemed to crumble under the weight of its expectations. One day Deborah was humming as she played with the Jason and Melissa and the next she refused to leave her bed. To say that she refused, Nick thought, was too active by far. It was more like she no longer acknowledged the possibility that she could leave her bed. The kids would hover near her closed door, as though afraid she would disappear if they stopped listening to her slow breathing. At first, Nick tried to fill their dark room with jokes and laughter, but Deborah remained obstinately quiet in her corner of the bed. Even when they slept, with her body a few handbreadths away, she seemed untouchable. In those moments, Nick thought she might have been playing some elaborate game with rules he could not divine, and he alternated between wanting to scream at her and feeling compelled to beg and plead for her to smile.
Circumstances had forced Nick to visit his father and ask for a small loan. His father looked at his face for a full minute before writing out a check. Intellectually, Nick knew that his father was worried about him, just as Nick was afraid for Deborah, but he found himself reading deep disappointment into his father’s silence. Too preoccupied with rendering his own judgment, Nick was unable to acknowledge the uncertainty he saw in his father’s eyes.
He came home to find his children asleep in their rooms and his wife curled in the middle of the kitchen floor, linoleum designs spiraling out from her placid frame. When he knelt down beside her, whispering her name, her face was cold, and he saw an empty bottle of pills on the counter. Nick panicked, scooped up a pot full of dishwater, and poured it onto Deb’s face. As often happens in moments of terror, Nick felt fractured, as though he was observing everything from just behind his own head. And from that vantage, he could not help but laugh. With the water sloshing around her dark hair, the suds rushing through the runnels of the floor, Deb spluttered and stirred.
It was the first time Nick had ever had to call 911, and once that task was completed, everything flowed into a clear path, and nothing could divert the rush of action. The psychiatrist who first spoke with Nick after his wife’s stomach had been pumped explained that it was really just a matter of balancing a few chemicals in the brain—nothing mysterious or arcane. Nick had always thought suicide was selfish, the final act of a solipsist, but the careful explanations of the doctors conditioned him against judging Deborah too harshly.
Nick navigated the van into the hospital parking lot without the least recollection of the drive; Melissa, who normally acted as his trail of breadcrumbs leading out of his own solipsism, spent the trip in a flutter of scissors and construction paper, putting the final touches on her gift. When they arrived the squat institutional building rose before them like a dark omen. After parking, the family stepped out of the car, the crash of slammed doors echoing around them. As Nick ushered the children through the darkening landscape of the parking lot, their clouds of breath danced around his waist, a nimbus of warmth that suffused the heavy down of his jacket. He rested his hands on their shoulders and watched their heads bob amidst the blue and pink mounds of their jackets. Jason had graciously left all of his comics inside the car and walked along, his hands in his jean pockets, staring at his own feet. In the alternating light of the arching lamps above, Jason’s smooth, shaved head looked like blued steel, and the sharp lines of the lightning bolts etched into the hair of his temples reminded his father of gang bangers in late night movies. The haircut was the latest fad of rap culture, following on the heels of bilious, multi-colored pants, to find a home in the wide lawns of suburbia. It comforted Nick to see the familiar signs of youthful conformity in his son—like the well-worn edges of Melissa’s My Little Pony blanket, it was soothing and recognizable.
Fluorescent light spilled out of the automatic doors as they walked into the small waiting room for pediatric ward of the hospital. Nick thought the entryway, decorated as it was with bright red chairs and scattered wooden blocks, reduced some of the inherent trauma of the hospital. Yet even with the mock flair of merriment, Nick could still feel the strange hollowness of the building apparent in every corridor; the smell of clean sheets and antiseptics hovered just above the thick odor of gangrene and rot, a shadow of a pretense. He only hoped that his children were blind to what lay beneath.
Melissa skipped down the hallway, past the attendant’s desk, and stopped next to the elevator. In the time it took Nick and Jason to catch up, she had already pressed the button fifteen or sixteen times. She turned to her father and smiled as she leaned her whole body against the illuminated circle. Her other hand still clutched at the mass of construction paper, a card for her mother that she had begun at school. When the doors split open, a gurney clattered out of the elevator followed by a nurse wheeling an IV stand; bundled in washed out blue sheets, the wrinkled man on the gurney twisted and moaned, half of his face bruised and stained with streaks of blood. The startling sound in the wide, bright hallways resonated inside Nick, a quaking breath that moved between his lungs as the nurse pushed the gurney down a hallway, around a corner, to parts unknown.
In the wake of the encounter, Melissa stood rigid next to the wall. Like the slow, inevitable crash of waves against the shore, Nick foresaw the collapse of her smile and the wilting of her eyes.
“Into the elevator, guys.” Jason was already standing inside the metal confines, but Nick had to nudge Melissa on the shoulder. Inside the elevator, as they rose to the fourth floor, Nick kneeled in front of his daughter. The mass of her dark hair had shaken loose of the ponytail, and the hair tie hung from a small lock of hair near her shoulder. The balance between laughter and tears in his daughter, young and unsure of the world, was frail and easily upset.
“Hey, your hair is all messed up. Let me fix it.” Nick carefully removed the hair tie, a black rubber band with two hard, pink spheres at opposite sides of the circle. He combed his fingers through Melissa’s hair, shook loose the tangles, and gathered all the strands together. The band tightened around the bundle of hair with a sharp clacking noise.
“All better now.”
“How do I look, Daddy?” she asked with a hesitant smile.
“Beautiful, darling.” He kissed her forehead and stood as the elevator doors glided open.
The lights were dimmer on the fourth floor—subdued to encourage warm thoughts and healing. The entire floor, carefully decorated with abstract paintings in faded colors and green plants strategically placed to hide the implements of a hospital, had an air of delayed misery and stasis. Down a hallway, past a few discretely labeled oak doors, was a larger door with an electronic speaker next to the handle. Nick pressed the buzzer and waited for the receptionist’s voice.
“Women’s Mental Health Recovery Center. May I ask who this is?” The volume on the speaker was low so as not to disturb the long hallways.
“Nicholas Leary here to see Deborah Leary.” After a moment the door clicked, and a light on the speaker flashed green. The sudden jerk as the door swung open always startled Nick. The calm sound of violins swept into the hall, and the family stepped into the reception area. The warm lighting continued in the spacious room. The receptionist smiled from behind a large plane of plastic and told Nick that his wife would be with him shortly. Arrayed in the empty room was a collection of overstuffed chairs and copies of Time, Christian Science Monitor, and Highlights. The necessity of keeping children’s magazines in this place struck Nick as particularly enervating. All the same, Melissa immediately picked up a copy and began to rustle through its pages. Jason sat down and stared at the large crucifix hanging over the far wall. Neither Nick nor Deborah had wanted to raise their children with religion and, as Deborah retreated to her forgotten faith, Jason seemed particularly unnerved by the new symbols present in his mother’s life. Beneath the cross was a small bookshelf with several copies of the Bible and bundled pamphlets of inspirational literature. Curving along the wall, bowed above the cross, was the inscription, “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not his benefits:/ Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases. Psalms 103.”
Nick fought the urge to pace across the dull, brown carpet. The room hummed with the sound of held breaths, and Nick found himself checking his watch every forty-five seconds. Inaction grated against Nick’s soul; his body was more at ease in motion than in repose. He wished that he had brought his briefcase so that he could at least finish the monthly credit report. In an effort to hide his anxiety from his kids, Nick walked over to the receptionist and spoke to her in a low voice.
“Hi again. I was just wondering if it’s possible to bring some food or drinks for a patient. I know that my wife would love a break from the hospital food. And she’s really addicted to RC Cola, so I think she’d like to have some of that.”
She looked up at Nick, played with the gold cross hanging around her neck, and smiled. “Of course you can. We do, however, have to look through whatever you bring, just to make sure the patient can’t—” the receptionist broke off. She glanced over his shoulder and then spoke again in a lower voice, “You know what I mean. Like you can’t bring anything in cans because of the metal.”
“Right. I understand. So I should drop things off with you?” Nick doubted he would follow through on the idea, but it cheered him to discuss it with the bright, young woman. She nodded, and, as he lingered near the desk, chatting with her about more innocuous subjects, her smile began to change its tenor. For a moment Nick considered the exhilarating feeling of an unknown body pressed against his, the invisible sway of conversation from the banal to the inviting. He wished that when he thanked the receptionist and turned away it was because he had his kids in mind or loyalty to his wife or any exalted sense of nobility. Instead, Nick worried over the expense of infidelity. He remembered how money seemed to slip through his father’s hands whenever he had a new mistress. It just isn’t economical, he thought.
Nick recalled the nights he had spent with Deborah next to him and wondered whether if he had been inadequate in some way, unable to keep her happy. Anniversaries had passed without any hint of discontent. He thought to himself, perhaps I wasn’t inadequate, perhaps, and he came up short, unable to complete the sentence.
A little over fifteen minutes after they arrived, Deborah opened the narrow, inner door with a smile that threatened to overwhelm her face. Before she could open her mouth, Melissa was already leaping into her arms, shouting and writhing with glee. Deborah showered kisses on her daughter and set her back on the floor. As she spoke to Melissa, Deborah caressed her face, stroked her hair, and squeezed her shoulders, to reestablish that errant sense of reality. Even Melissa seemed taken aback at the force of her mother’s affection.
“Now, love, you have to be a little quieter, okay? We don’t want to disturb anyone else on the hall.” Melissa nodded, her ecstatic grin unwavering. Deborah turned to Jason, who had been standing just a little off to the side, waiting, quietly impatient. “Come here, babe.” With those words, Jason’s demeanor underwent a transformation: he smiled for the first time in days, and looked, by turns, nervous and eager. Gone was his façade of detached confidence. When he hugged his kneeling mother, Jason looked as young as his seven years again. Nick felt a lurid thrill, as though he was intruding on an intimate moment, strangely distant from his own wife and his children.
Deborah met Nick’s eyes for a moment, smiled shyly, and then stood up and led the kids into the wide living room of the recovery ward. Since finding her on the kitchen floor, Nick had not spoken to his wife outside of the presence of his children or her psychiatrist—Nick did not want to ask the questions anymore than Deborah wanted to hear them. And so, amidst the burbling chatter of Melissa and Jason, a long silence stretched between husband and wife, an unmentionable corridor between then and now. Nick kept his distance as his family walked through the brightly lit room, a recreational area warm with the presence of knit blankets, cross-stitched pillows decorated with biblical verse, and the scattered debris of board games.
The layout of the ward reminded Nick of his short time in the freshmen dormitories during college. Rooms branched out from the hallway, each housing a pair of women. Cork message boards hung from each door, but rather than drunken scrawl and phone numbers, these were covered with pinned index cards bearing kind words and postcards of the sun setting over pine forests and dreamy clouds in a fiery sky. Anchoring both the literal space as well as the metaphoric space of the women’s minds, at the far end, was the office of the head psychiatrist, a small, tidy man with a habit of stroking his sideburns while lost in thought. It was still early in the evening, but the atmosphere was somniferous, imposing with reluctant whispers and the shuffle of bed sheets.
The kids walked into Deborah’s room ahead of their parents, and immediately Deborah’s roommate, a mousy woman with a Georgia accent, began to apologize and gathered some magazines before leaving the room. Deborah called after the woman, as she retreated down the hall, and told her that they wouldn’t be long. Was it easier for Deborah to get along with a stranger, Nick wondered. Jason and Melissa sat down on their mother’s bed, the closest to the window, and gossiped with their mother about the trials and tribulations of school. Nick was incredulous to see his son so animated, particularly in light of the muted personality of his wife. Her voice was dull in the small room, as circumspect in tone as the dark green blankets and the white cinderblock walls. He looked around for the row of amber medicine bottles but quickly realized that the medication had to be carefully guarded and its usage monitored. Whether a patient wanted to take too many pills or too few, the opportunities for misuse were obvious. At least, thought Nick, they’re obvious now.
The only sign of life in the cell-like room was the bright mosaic of construction paper and greeting cards taped along the wall next to Deborah’s bed. Melissa’s vibrancy lapped into the room through those drawings and collages, a red, green, orange, and yellow clatter of youth. Set off to the side, nearest to the pillows, hung four elaborate sketches of superheroes, traced and cribbed, colored with markers that bled through the thin notebook paper. Jason’s signature on the papers was hesitant and fragmentary, as though he had forgotten his name midway through writing.
In an effort to gain his mother’s attention, Jason began to reel off the squares of the numbers between one and ten. Deborah looked at her son incredulously and asked, “When did you learn that, Jason?”
“I’m learning it in school now. I got moved into the third grade advanced math class.” He seemed hesitant but proud, as though, Nick thought, he didn’t want to boast. Deborah looked past her son at Nick, questioning him with her eyes.
“I only learned about it on Monday,” Nick reassured her. In Deborah’s hesitation, the long pause before she turned to address her daughter, Nick saw how uncertain she was. Melissa, eager to impress her mother as well, squirmed into Deborah’s lap with her card in hand. As Deborah turned to Melissa, Nick walked over to his son and quietly put a hand on his shoulder. Jason looked up at Nick and then stared at his mother and sister.
Shortly after Melissa presented her mother with her latest collection of colorful shapes and figures, still tacky with glue, the kids became restless. They were too well behaved to say anything to their parents, and far too pleased to be spending time with their mother to complain, but Nick and Deborah both saw the darting eyes and fidgeting hands.
“Hey guys, why don’t we go out to the living room and play a game?” Before Deborah could finish her question, the brother and sister were dashing out of the room, competing to find a game to play.
Nick, left alone with his wife, smiled vaguely at her and said, “I guess we should go out there.” He walked out to the living area but stayed back in the shadows of the hallway, watching Deborah’s roommate shuffle past him back to the room and his two kids argue over the perilously stacked board games. Deborah came up behind him and interlaced her fingers with his.
“How are you doing?” Her eyes were pleated with worry, and hearing Deborah ask the question of him, rather than the other way around, made Nick feel as though half of the air suddenly dropped out of the room. He felt off-balance and uneasy at the note of reproach he thought he heard in her voice. For Nick, her words seemed to call into question his commitment to her health, and he found himself reacting defensively. His cheeks pulled back in a bare imitation of a smile.
He paused for a moment and then responded, “I’m worried about Jason. He really is keeping it all to himself. He never talks. All he does is read those damn comic books.” During Deborah’s first week at the hospital, the psychiatrist asked to speak with both of her children. He wanted to know how the sudden absence of their mother, that psychological bedrock, was affecting such young children. After sitting down with each of them, the therapist solemnly informed the parents in a shared session that while Melissa was typically distraught, Jason showed all the signs of genuine depression. His father was to watch for a loss of appetite as well as dissociative behavior and contact him with any concerns. But now everything was a concern, as the clinical approach seemed to suggest that something was lacking in Jason as a human being, as though a malignancy of spirit had curled up in son’s small frame and severed his innocence. Nick could not help but wonder how, when he had missed the warning signs with Deborah, he could be counted on to see them in Jason.
“He’ll be fine. I know him, you’ll see. He’s scared and lonely. You know, when he gets that glazed look in his eyes, I don’t think he’s worrying about me or the family. And he isn’t fantasizing about killing small animals or anything like that—we didn’t raise a psychopath. He’s just like any other boy his age: he wants to be a superhero. Can you really blame him for wanting to fly and catch bad guys when visiting here is what he has to look forward to at the end of the week?” She seemed to deflate as the words left her, and she looked wearily at the floor. “But I just don’t know anymore. I just don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Nick put his arm around Deborah’s shoulders. “Okay. All right. It’s going to be fine.”
“I’m sorry—that you had to find me and about the all the money. I am sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just money. I’ll figure out how to make it work, I always do,” he asserted even as he grimaced. It seemed just and proper that he could reassure Deb about financial concerns. He felt stronger as he held her; the weight of her body reminded him of all the promises to love and cherish he had made years ago.
The kids turned to their parents and clamored for their attention; out of the myriad options that the hospital provided, Jason and Melissa had chosen The Game of Life. The family sat down around the small coffee table and played for the last forty minutes before visiting hours were over. If Nick squinted a little and laughed loud enough, he could imagine them around their kitchen table on any other Friday night. He appreciated the simplicity of the game—there were no spaces for adultery or divorce, insanity or breakdown, and certainly none for suicide. It was just a matter of luck and balancing the imaginary income with the imaginary expenses.
The aura of wellbeing remained until Deborah was forced to take out a third loan from the bank to pay off a debt to Nick. Her eyes were downcast as she handed the money to Nick. The slumping of her shoulders coupled with the slight furrow in her brow seemed to imbue the act of payment with a more profound sense of failure. When she noticed her family staring at her, Deborah bit her lip and tried to smile in a vain attempt to cover the distress marked on her face. It was the exaggerated reaction of a child being chastised by her parent, a similarity the children easily noted. The room, filled with laughter in the moments beforehand, grew silent, an echo of Deborah. In that moment, Melissa stared at her mother, frozen. Nick thought she was seeing Deborah, for the first time, as vulnerable and lost. He watched the shadows of doubt play in his daughter’s eyes.
Nick forced a smile and said, “You know what, it’s been a long night. We need get home.” He stood up abruptly, and Deborah took the opportunity to resettle behind her façade of reserved optimism. “Kids, I want you to clean up the game, okay?” Nick asked. As the kids silently began to put away the myriad pieces of plastic and scraps of paper, Nick walked over the Deborah.
He wanted to say more, but he could only reassure her that they would be back next week and that they would be thinking about her. She crossed her arms and nodded. Neither of them spoke until the kids were done putting away the board game.
Deborah said good bye to the family in the waiting room, her face already composed to confront another week of waiting, another week without the sense of normalcy her children supplied. Neither Jason nor Melissa wanted to let go of their mother, and when she finally stepped away from them and back into the monitored confines of the ward, they were left staring at the floor.
Their silence carried them back through the long hallways of the hospital, past rooms subdued with inaction, and into the stilled night. It lingered in the car and clung to their bodies like wisps of arctic chill. As Nick drove the saturnine remnants of his family home, snow began to pour down from above in a lazy fury, a storm without a voice, thoughts without words. Beside him, Melissa stared silently out the window, her hands resting in her lap, as though she were mimicking her brother. The stoic repose signaled nothing in Jason aside from his headlong escape into fantasy, but in Melissa, the stone-face presaged a storm.
Nick pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the van. As he walked around to Melissa’s door, he saw Jason emerge from the sliding door with the bundle of comic books firmly in place under his arm. From the slight pause in the rhythm of the night, the extra moment it took Melissa to open her door, Nick knew she was crying. Snowflakes fell onto her dark hair and melted, and she rubbed at her eyes with balled fists.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Mommy’s never coming home,” she choked out.
Nick knelt down and tried to comfort her. “No, Mommy’s going to be home soon. It’s going to be okay; don’t cry.” But then she started to sob, her breath heaving.
Jason set his comic books down on the fresh powder of the snow and stood next to his sister. He put his arm around her shoulders and inclined his face towards hers, a gesture Nick recognized as one of his own. He said said, “Hey, Melly. Mom is coming home. Believe me.” Melissa looked up at her brother in surprise, her crying stilled. She nodded a little and then looked down at Jason’s comic books, resting on the wet pavement.
“What about your comics?” she asked.
“They’re in plastic; they’ll be fine.” Nick watched the exchange and felt the urge to crush his children to his chest and smell the warmth of their hair. Rather than disturb the rapport with his clumsy affection, Nick told them that they should probably get inside. Melissa wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and led the family into the house.
They watched television for an hour before Nick sent the kids to brush their teeth and get ready for bed. After he tucked Melissa in and kissed her forehead, the minty smell of toothpaste lingered. He walked into Jason’s room, obsessively organized and decorated with posters of superheroes in dynamic poses. Jason, reading a comic book on top of his bed, his body clad in furry pajamas with plastic booties, never more vulnerable. Nick saw an advertisement for a massive comic convention in the city lying hopefully atop the nightstand.
“Hey, what do you say that I take you to that convention in a few weeks? We’ll stay at a hotel in the city, and we can be the first ones in line every day.” He sat down on the edge of the bed.
Jason’s eyes widened, and he asked, “Are you serious?” Nick nodded. “That would be really awesome, Dad.” He crawled under the covers and squirmed around until he felt settled. Nick turned off the bedside light and ruffled his son’s hair, and then he said, wincing as did at how trite it sounded, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” His son smiled just the same, and Nick left the room feeling uplifted, more confident than he had felt in weeks.
He stayed awake for another three hours, staring at the bills, trying to balance the red and the black, desperately trying to keep at least one promise. It would be a start.