He looks under the bench for the umbrellas, pushing aside their new hiking boots, their old hiking boots, their ski boots, rain boots, work boots, then a stack of flip-flops, then running shoes, then walking shoes. He brushes them all aside to see what’s behind and under them. The umbrellas are not there.
She hides things. Hides isn’t a fair word. That would imply intent. What she does is she picks things up and carries them with her until their fascination is gone. Then she plops them right where she is or besides whatever catches her fancy next. That’s the right word, plops.
If she “plops” the keys or his wallet, this makes them late. And he hates to be late, especially on appointment days and now there are a lot of those. She never minds being late. She has been late for everything for forty, almost fifty, years. She couldn’t help herself back then even though she intended, promised, swore up and down, to be on time. She was, and still is, drawn to things, and in those things, she gets temporarily lost, and time disappears. Back then self-conscience of her tardiness, she would make a self-conscience entrance—not showy, but breezy, wide-eyed, kinetic. A flourish of her arms, a smile, a light in her eyes, an engaging tale of the offending chain of calamities, circumstance, or joyful coincidence and she was forgiven—the room was hers. Now, the amyloid plaques are the cause of her tardiness, and so again she can’t help herself, but they don’t diminish her natural dramatic flair or her particular spark, just their frequency. Somewhere behind the plaque, she is there.
“That’s right. She is still Regina.” He tries to unwind her logic. She grabbed the umbrellas because she was thinking about the rain. He goes to the hall closet where their raincoats are kept and finds her old ski jacket bunched up in the back but no raincoat and no umbrellas. The ski jacket was kept in the spare room closet. There he finds the navy blue, sleeveless dress she had worn to their son’s wedding. This is normally stored in the cedar closet in the hallway where she keeps the “good stuff.” In that closet he finds her raincoat and the two umbrellas, one blue, his, and one yellow, hers.
It rained the day of their son’s wedding. The umbrella and raincoat must have reminded her of the that. Their son was married in Colorado, so they skied for a few days after the ceremony. The wedding dress reminded her of skiing. “Good ol’ Reg.”
He puts the rain gear in the mudroom and returns to her in the kitchen. She is having difficulty raising her arms to take off her bib. “This won’t do,” she mutters. Decades of gymnastics and dance have given her shoulders that betray her at this age. Three solid days of rain have conspired in this betrayal.
“I’ll get that. Sit still.”
“Thank you, Edgar.”
His name is Bill. She has been inventing names for him for months now. Diego, Elliot, Preston, Aurelio. Lately, it’s Edgar. From what he can tell, she thinks Edgar is her butler. A month ago he had told the doctor about this, she only shrugged and replied “Soon, she will be too much for you—very soon.”
He unties her bib and with it wipes up the pieces of egg and spinach that are scattered around her on the table and on the floor, the result of the steadily worsening tremors.
She tries to stand but can’t because the seats of the kitchen chairs sit low for her and her legs get stiff. “Help me up, would you?”
He bends down and she wraps her arms around his neck and together they stand up. They are face to face. They hold each other like they are tipsy, slow dancing at a church mixer. Her arms are about his neck, and his hands are resting on her hips. He looks into her eyes and is suspended in this moment with her. He remembers, the day they met, their first date, the backseat of his Oldsmobile, their wedding day, the birth of their kids. She says, “Someone forgot to brush this morning.”
He smiles and the embrace is broken. “I found our umbrellas. We’ll be able to walk today.”
“It’s still raining.”
“The rain is ending. I think we will be fine.”
“I just got back from a walk.”
“No, you just finished breakfast. We haven’t been out for a while. It’s rained for almost three days.”
She drops her shoulders, feigning exasperation. “Must you always be so disagreeable?”
“I’ve never seen so much rain.”
“When can I eat breakfast? It feels like weeks since my last meal. Are you trying to starve me to death?”
“After our walk I’ll make you something if you want. Right now let’s get you to the bathroom first.” He tries to take her arm but she refuses. “I’m not helpless, Bill.”
“Sorry.” He is happy that Bill is here with her now. Maybe it can be Bill who walks with her, not Edgar. He feels foolish for hoping this; it hasn’t happened for weeks now.
She shuffles to the bathroom. Her legs still stiff from the kitchen chairs. A few minutes pass and she calls. “Edgar? I can’t reach…these damn shoulders of mine.”
He cleans her, and they get ready for their walk. Because he is Edgar, she asks him to leave the room while she changes. He goes to the spare room with his clothes in hand. When he is dressed, he sits and waits for her. She finally emerges into the hallway between their room and the spare room with her gray sweatpants on inside-out and backwards and she hasn’t put her arms through the sleeves of her sweater. One sock is half on and flops as she walks.
He meets her in the hall and helps her thread her arms into her sleeves and bends down to slide the one sock on the rest of the way. He pulls the other one up for good measure. “You’re a good man, Edgar.” She pats his head while he is down there. He decides to leave the sweatpants as they are.
“Never mind all that. Diaper?”
“Must you Edgar? Is there no more privacy?”
“That’s very dramatic.”
“Yes, Edgar, I remembered.” She shuts her eyes and turns her head indignantly, pulling the elastic of her pants down a bit to reveal the crenelated waistband in its glaring embarrassing thickness and whiteness.
“Still as proud as ever.”
“Stop about this. What if the kids hear you. I don’t want them to know.”
They are alone in the house and have been for decades. Their son and his family live in Boulder. Their daughter in Scottsdale. “I’m sorry, was I being too loud?”
“You’ll wake the babies, Bill. Go downstairs if you’re gonna scream bloody murder.”
“Why don’t you come with me. We can head out for our walk.”
“But the babies?”
“Trudy will watch them.” Trudy is, was, Reg’s sister. She passed a few years ago of congestive heart failure but has been a frequent visitor lately.
“Are you sure? She’s deaf as a bat.”
“Yes, come on. Let’s go.”
They made a commitment years ago to walk every day, to leave behind, if even for a brief hour, the endless circumstances of working, raising children, and living together that buffeted daily life. Together they held this commitment almost sacred, and when they both retired, it was rare that they ever missed a day.
Outside, after they had bundled up, after they had argued because she wanted her pant legs over her rain boots and he wanted them in (“You’ll make me into a farmer.” She fought. “The whole point of rain boots is to tuck the pant leg in.” He countered), they stand bracing themselves against the cold. They open their umbrellas, which bump against each other until they find a way for them to nestle together, and they walk down the drive into the street.
For three days the storm front crept across the area, dumping rain that fell in intermittent sheets. The accompanying winds whipped the trees and filled the air with a doleful moan, lamenting the end of their Indian summer. The autumn leaves, which were particularly dazzling this year, had been stripped from the trees and choked the yards, the streets and the sidewalks, or roiled in the streams of runoff. The branches now skeletal in appearance reached upwards to swirling gray clouds. The temperatures had dropped and drizzle swept by the storm’s last few gasps of blustery gusts was all that remained.
Into this they walk arm in arm their brightly colored umbrellas incongruous against the gray skies and naked trees. The world is still—no cars, no people, not even squirrels. This stillness and the drizzle and the burbling runoff pack their ears.
“Where did it all go.” She mutters looking upwards at the barren trees.
He tries to take her hand but she rebuffs. “What would the neighbors think?”
“You never cared before what they thought.”
“But Bill was my husband.”
“I see. Then take my arm. It’s more proper. Okay? Just so you don’t fall? Leaves can be slippery.” He was pleased she remembered him. He was pleased when she wove her tremoring hand under his arm and into the crook of his elbow.
The disease wipes out the past. This had been his epiphany about a year ago when, while he was cutting the grass, she came out to him and asked who had hired him and warned him that she would not pay him. “Whatever was is no longer.” The thought immediately loomed over their future as he watched her walk back into the house that day. And on that instant when the sliding screen door clacked into the frame, he missed her and he hasn’t stopped. That was the day he knew he lost her.
An unshared memory can just as easily be a dream. The doctor, with all her talk about “soon,” never once discussed this loss other than by handing him a trifold pamphlet about the disease. Sometimes he felt as if he were the sick one. She was “visiting” with friends or family removed or passed. The disease rendered for her a world of Trudy’s and babies and ski trips and Elliots and Edgars. He has been rendered invisible to her—the Bill of “Bill and Regina” is no longer. He learned during his two tours in Vietnam how to cope without an anchored reality, how to carve his feelings away and create a reality that he pasted to the surreal. He learned then how to string together moments. Each one its own lifetime floating untethered to the previous and vanishing at the rise of the next. One of only two things he ever learned in that place.
They walk in silence. She is sometimes given to long silences now. It seems they get longer every day. The pressure from her hand on his arm completes this moment for him and the next and the next as each passes on. She is moving less stiffly now despite the cold. They take the same route every day, but today the storm has laid a massive oak across the road. Its roots stretching, black and mud covered ten feet into the air and the bulk of its canopy claiming an entire front yard.
She is the first to speak. “How the mighty falls.”
“Is all that necessary?”
“What should we do?”
“Let’s double back and head up Hollow Road.”
“But we parked over there.” She is pointing at the tree. “Is the car okay you think?”
“I’m quite sure it is.”
“Can’t we go around it?”
“Nahh…too much muck.”
She looks at the scene once more and nods in agreement. “Let’s just take Hollow Road. Switch it up a bit,” she says as if the idea were hers.
“Good thinking.”
They head back in the direction they just came and turn down a narrow road barely big enough for two cars. It is rough paved and marred by ruts and potholes and chunks of crumbling macadam, and now it is covered with leaves and treacherous, all of its hazards hidden or slick with wet foliage. Her grip on his arm tightens. He moves a bit closer to her.
“Trudy and I used to play on this road. And Danny Altieri bottomed out his Camaro here too.” She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, more than a hundred miles away. “Rene Duplass used to live over there.” This is true, they were both friends with Rene for the brief time when he lived here. “He was a wonderful lover.” She giggled.
He turns his head and sees she is grinning, practically beaming. “I had no idea.”
“Old Bill was wrapped up in designing that V-22. I barely existed to him, and Rene was, well, young and…You better not say anything to Bill about this. Rene was sweet and attentive at a time when old Bill abandoned me.”
He promises her not to tell. He doesn’t know what to do with this information. It could be real, it could be fiction. He could never be sure. Rene lived here more than twenty years ago during a hard time for them. Boeing had just begun work on the V-22. He was gone from home all the time, and when he was home, he was consumed with his work. There was a great distance between them then, and he recalled the fighting and many nights spent sleeping in the spare room. After a year, he withdrew from the project to be with her and the kids. It was around that time that they began their walks as an effort to save their relationship.
There are thousands of ways to be unfaithful. For a while, he gave himself to his work without abandon and with little concern for her or the family. He remembers the guilt he felt calling to tell her he was working late yet again and the shame he felt leaving her and the kids on Saturday mornings. While the thought of her with someone else left a wretched pain in his gut, he decides he doesn’t care about Rene Duplass. The affair could have been fiction, but his infidelity had been real.
“I ended it because I loved Bill.”
He had strung together countless moments since that day in the yard. This is his favorite one so far, the one he knows he will forever hold in his memory when the “soon” becomes now.
The rest of the way she talks about Trudy and her mother in long sentences that have little to do with each other and increasingly make little sense. He listens attentively and chimes in with a question here or there, but for the most part, he lets her win the room. In the distance, the sun is doing its best to push the clouds from the sky. A few chickadees begin to flit about and a chainsaw snarls somewhere in the distance.
He holds the door that leads to their mudroom and takes her umbrella. He closes hers and then his, shaking them both out before bringing them inside. She is standing in the mudroom shiny-eyed from the cold, vibrant and raw from the exercise of the past hour. The other lesson he learned in Vietnam was the intimacy of dying. Holding the hands of many fallen friends as they passed, he saw in their eyes the constructs of their lives being stripped away, left to choke the grass and the dirt and run in rivulets through the jungle detritus. Their final expressions either abject terror or abject joy. No in between. He supposed as death approached, the true self comes instantly into view, a self that is removed of the walls built to shelter it against the storm of living. And as final breaths are drawn a person is left raw and bare, their very internal essence naked and exposed to the external world, no longer protected by pretense and affectations, the ultimate vulnerability.
In this moment now he can see her true self stripped, her internal essence bared and it is beautiful, courageous, strong, pure. If he had never seen her before, if he had never been married to her, he would have fallen in love with her instantly in this moment.
He takes her arm and without saying anything, turns her to face him. He unzips her coat and peels it back. She moves her shoulders for him and the coat falls around her ankles. He leans in and one at a time slides each arm out of her sweater sleeves and then takes the bottom of it and rolls it up and pulls it over her head. She shivers. “Cold,” she whispers. He reaches behind her, clasps the small of her back and brings her to him. She puts a hand between his shoulders and her head nestles at his neck. He can smell her, raw fresh from nature. The smell that he slept with camping, the smell when they made love after a run or skiing or hike. He bends and pulls her pants which were soaked up to her knees (she had won the argument) down around her ankles. He checks her diaper front and back, this time she doesn’t turn her head and looks him in the eyes. He reaches behind her for her flannel housecoat which he hung on a hook earlier. He guides her arms into the sleeves and closes it wrapping the tie around her waist twice because she is still thin, still fit. The second wrap of the belt allows for another momentary embrace as she rocks forward with his gentle tug. He eases her down onto the bench, takes her hat off and smooths her hair with both hands and presses his lips to her forehead. He removes her rain boots and pants and rolls her socks off. She points her toes, like a dancer, to make it easier for him. With a towel he fetches from the laundry room, he dries the sweat from her feet and slides them into big fluffy socks. Helping her up from the bench they are in the same embrace as after breakfast, this time he leans forward and kisses her on the lips.
“Edgar, mashing is a crime in this state.”
“Apologies, ma’am. Now put on your slippers.”
He can tell by her gait the walk has worn her out. He suggests a nap and offers to start a fire for her. She agrees and lays down on the couch. Before he can turn to grab some wood, she is asleep.
He lights the fire anyways and plans to keep it burning until she wakes. As he watches the flames grow, he thinks of the “soon.” He thinks of the intimacy they have already shared and the ultimate intimacy they will eventually share. He regards them as transcendent gifts. One he has already unwrapped. The other he has yet to unwrap.
He sits down in his chair near the hearth and in the light and the heat of the fire that pierces the retreating gloom of the storm, he strings together several moments as the sun continues to push back the clouds.