The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  When Ryan was at their house, which was almost every night now, he was with Joe. Once the sickness consigned Joe permanently to the couch, Ryan came more frequently, not less. She didn’t think she’d ever been happier about another human being’s existence except her husband’s.

  “You’ll be wanting me to say I’m lucky,” Ryan told Joe now. She watched his eyes flick to the tumor on Joe’s mouth. On Joe’s lap, Briney aimed an annoyed glare at Ryan, then hopped down and disappeared upstairs.

  “Nnuz nuuuuhne,” said Joe. He couldn’t really turn his head, but Kagome saw his gaze stray in her direction.

  “He says, ‘Because you will be,’” Kagome told Ryan. Even Mrs. Thiel could no longer understand her son.

  Ryan grinned. “Then you’re admitting defeat before we begin. It’s what I’ve always wanted from you.”

  He triggered the game, and on screen one of the racers launched from the start and hurtled out of sight around a curve, while the other spun immediately into a side wall and blew up.

  “Nnuk,” Joe said. Ryan grinned wider, and kept going.

  Kagome saw the panic first, and moved immediately, silently. Mrs. Thiel was right behind her, and Ryan didn’t even notice until they were already beside Joe, gently disentangling his catheter tube from underneath him and beginning the several-minute process of preparing to help him up.

  “What…oh…” Ryan said, wrinkling his nose at the smell and standing. “It’s okay, dude.” He held out his hands.

  “He knows it’s okay, could you get a water bucket and the sponges?” Mrs. Thiel snapped.

  “Under the sink,” Kagome murmured. “Thank you, Ryan.”

  Somehow, once they got Joe to his feet, he managed to stay there while Kagome and Mrs. Thiel bundled up the mess in the sheets and Kagome scrubbed at the slimy, brown streaks sinking into the pillows. Those streaks seemed so devoid of mass they barely even qualified as shit. When she’d finished, she leaned back on her haunches and brushed her nose with her forearm and looked up at her husband. So thin as to be almost two-dimensional, pale as paper, like an origami approximation of himself. To her delighted surprise, he was fully alert, staring back. And smiling?

  “Nnnay nur nuky,” he said.

  “I’m lucky,” she whispered, and kissed the bones of his hand.

  “How about Tijuana Taco?” Mrs. Thiel chirped as she returned from whatever she’d done with the sheets. Framed them, probably, Kagome thought, then chastised herself for thinking it. “Kagome, green chile for you, right?”

  “Just soup,” she murmured. A few chattery seconds later, Mrs. Thiel mercifully left the house on her errand.

  Standing for so long had completely exhausted Joe, and he was swaying and shivering more violently than the trees outside as Ryan and Kagome lowered him back onto the home-care hospital bed he’d chosen to die on and settled his heap of comforters and blankets and coats around him. They weren’t enough, and Joe went on shivering even as sleep swallowed him.

  Stripping off her rubber gloves, Kagome stood and gazed down at her husband. Behind her, Ryan muted the TV, though from the clicking of the controllers, she knew he was finishing Joe’s race for him. Starting right where Joe’s car had exploded. After a while, he took up his ukulele again, stroked that quietly. The chords he played changed so slowly, she wasn’t sure they were even connected or part of a song until he started half-humming a vocal line, in his strangely sweet croak that was far too old for him.

  “Because you never… because you never…have anything…”

  She didn’t mean to hit him, of course she didn’t, but the words he had sung didn’t register right away, and when they did, she panicked, spun so fast that the fist still holding the shit-rag smacked across his cheek and her knee drove the ukulele out of his hands and across the room. Stunned, streaked with brown and red across his cheeks, Ryan stared up at her, while her free hand flew to her own mouth.

  “What did you just…” Her brain was screaming back to this morning, and she was crying again, too, seeing the stick-thin, galoshes-guy in the corner. “Ryan?”

  Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t so. She hadn’t seen the trilby man’s face. But he’d been considerably taller. And even though his shape had been disguised by his trench coat, it hadn’t been Ryan’s shape. No. It had been…what? She couldn’t remember. Furthermore, Ryan had been downstairs, just coming inside, at the moment Kagome had seen the trilby man ducking into the guest room. Because he had been there. She was as sure of that now as she’d been that he was imaginary a few hours ago.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, blinking to try to stem her tears. She bent to wipe at the streaks on Ryan’s cheek, and he let her. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “It’s okay,” he said, though she’d clearly frightened him. “You’ve been through so—”

  “That song.” Dropping the rag, she slumped into the wooden chair Mrs. Thiel always sat in, leaving the armchair for Kagome. Precisely the sort of gesture Kagome despised in her mother-in-law, even though it probably had no other motive behind it than kindness. “What made you sing that?”

  Now Ryan was staring. “Sing what?”

  “What you just sang.”

  “I wasn’t singing. I was barely even—”

  On the couch, Joe unleashed a cough that lifted his spine off the pillows and convulsed him with shudders but didn’t waken him. Kagome dug under the blankets, found the i.v. tube, and followed it down to Joe’s hand. Then she held on. After a while, she turned her gaze once more on Ryan. Her eyes had dried, her features settling into their comfortable, familiar impassivity. Mrs. Theil’s wasn’t the only mask, she realized.

  “Kagome,” Ryan murmured. “I’m sorry. I was just…strumming. Wasn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Kagome lied, and her heart banged. “I think probably you were.”

  After that, they sat and breathed and watched for Joe’s breaths. At some point, Kagome’s free hand found Ryan’s, and for a fleeting few minutes, she felt a peculiar, suspended stasis. Not peace, nowhere near peace. But there were people in this room who loved her.

  And someone else, too, who was coming to live, and Kagome gripped Ryan’s hand and closed her eyes and held still and held on.

  “She driving you crazy?” Ryan said. “Joe’s mom, I mean? What’s she so happy about, anyway?”

  For a long time, Kagome didn’t answer. Didn’t want to. Despite the waves of panic and loneliness and nausea and fear, she wanted to stay right where she was, propped in place, like a birdhouse with birds hopping around and into it, even though there was virtually nothing left inside.

  “She’s never been happy,” Kagome answered. “She just…she thinks it’s what Joe wants. You know, he’s never liked even acknowledging that he’s sick. She also thinks it’s why he’s still here. If you don’t look at it, it can’t see you. That kind of thing. I think. Maybe she’s right. You know he’s been told he had less than a year to live since he was seven years old.”

  “Does she like you?”

  The question startled Kagome out of her half-trance. For the first time in who knew how long, her eyes left Joe’s face. She looked not at Ryan but the mountainside folding into nightshadow as the November day drained away.

  Then that voice was in her ears again, and her bones, too, and the soft tissue of her arms and chest, whispering, scratching. I am coming to live in your mouth. Coming to live in your mouth. Coming…

  “She thinks I’m a vacuum,” Kagome said, and didn’t cry, or squeeze Ryan’s hand. She squeezed Joe’s, though. Hard. “She thinks he married me to have a calming presence near. Because he finally got scared.”

  “Does she know you can beat him at Boggle? Does she actually think that calms him?”

  “Scrabble. Not Boggle. Not ever.”

  Her eyes flicked to Ryan’s face. Behind his glasses, his surprisingly large green eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets like a bird’s. To her immense relief, he was smiling, a little. Somehow, in his War
ped T-shirt, with his long legs bunched up against the hospital bed and his hair falling over his face, he looked completely adrift on the currents in this room, bobbing like a bottle with a message in it. Whether the message was for or from her, she had no idea.

  Hospice arrived a little after five, an hour or so after Mrs. Thiel came back. Rising from the wooden chair where she’d stayed all day—to her mother-in-law’s visible annoyance, and not once had Mrs. Thiel taken the empty La-Z-Boy—Kagome watched the two nurses and one social worker fan through the room, silent and efficient as the elves in that story about the shoemaker, who come in on a moonbeam. Truly, they were marvels. Even the doorbell when they rang it seemed muffled. Even Mrs. Thiel went quieter when they were here, though her ferocious half-grin never wavered.

  The two nurses sponged Joe down, changed his bedding; one combed what was left of his hair while the other washed out the tumor over his mouth with a syringe. The social worker brought Kagome tea in one of her porcelain cherry-blossom cups, and may have spoken to her, too. Kagome might even have spoken back. She couldn’t be sure, knew only that the muttering in her ears and her blood had gone quiet. She could hear it, still, but barely. As though it were out on the deck in the falling dark, and just once she glanced that way, through the sliding doors, and saw only shadow.

  I know you, she thought, and didn’t even try to make sense of that.

  “You know what hospice does?” Mrs. Thiel had halfway shrieked, when Kagome had insisted on bringing them in. “Hospice kills you. You understand that, right? You think they’re coming to help? They’re coming to kill Joe. They’re the angels of Goddamn death.”

  And of course, she was right. The smothering doses of morphine and methadone that ate away at the brain, the thousand other little drugs they gave that the body couldn’t really take, all meant to keep Joe comfortable, mask the pain. The words they used, to settle them all. Get them ready. Or, not ready, there was no such thing, and they would never have used so crude a term. Tranquil, maybe. Sort of. Angels of death they truly were. But why did Americans always focus on the death part? What else did they imagine angels were for?

  So pervasive was the spell the hospice workers cast that Kagome only noticed the positions they’d taken and realized what they were about to do a few seconds before Joe woke up. Way back in her throat, a groan formed, and though it came out choked, barely even audible, the sound grated against everything else in the room and rattled Mrs. Thiel to wakefulness. And so Mrs. Thiel realized what was happening, too.

  “Get away from him,” Mrs. Thiel said, but even her voice seemed to come from under a layer of gauze, as though she’d been gagged. “Get…”

  Her words sank to nothing as her son’s eyes flew open. For one moment, he lay there, blinking, before rolling with surprising alacrity onto his side. His glare was like a bucket of water flung over the hospice workers. They were human after all, Kagome noted; all three flinched back on the chairs they’d arrayed around the bed so that their medical whites formed a sort of picket fence between Joe and the rest of the room. The life he’d lived. Just like that, they ceased to be angels, and their features resolved into ordinary, comprehensible, human ones. One of the nurses had a Band-Aid under the lobe of her left ear. The social worker had pretty auburn hair—just moments ago, it had seemed gray, Kagome had assumed that was a required color for the job, like a uniform—clumped in an unflattering working bun at the base of her neck.

  It was the social worker who spoke, as a new shiver rippled down Joe’s obscenely articulated bones. The woman’s voice was trained, alright, lulling as a 2 a.m. smooth-jazz disc jockey’s, but warmer. At once more detached and more genuine.

  “Joe,” the woman said.

  Beside Kagome, Mrs. Thiel beat her arms against her sides like an enraged mother eagle. But she held her place. Waited.

  “Joe, you’ve fought so hard, for so long. For thirty years, is that right?”

  To Kagome’s astonishment, Joe answered. And his voice came out fuller, with more of his joyful, prickly Joe-ness than at any time in the past two months. Also with more consonants.

  “Thirty-three. Got sick when I was seven.”

  “Thirty-three years, when virtually anyone else would have been dead in six months. Incredible. Please know, Joe. All we want is to help you make meaningful use of every meaningful second, and also provide comfort. To you, and your loved ones. We’ve been coming here a month. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do.”

  Was Joe smiling, now? Oh, God, was Joe crying? The tumor seemed to float across his mouth, obscuring it, like one of those black blotches television stations use to blur victim’s features on true crime shows.

  “So now. Joe.” This time, as she spoke, the social worker slid forward on her chair. As if on cue, the others edged forward, also, and Kagome almost screamed, it was like watching hyenas dance in from the edge of a clearing.

  “What is your goal now, Joe? Can you tell me that?” At this, the woman gave a practiced but mournful glance over her shoulder toward Kagome and Mrs. Thiel. Kagome watched her auburn bun shake. “What do you still want to do?”

  There was no doubt anymore. Joe was crying. If there’d been a smile, too, it was gone. “Survive,” he said, in his dead man’s rasp. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “You bitch,” Mrs. Thiel murmured, and Kagome started to nod right along with her, wanted to raise both fists in the air and cheer or scream, and then realized her mother-in-law meant her. “I can’t take this,” Mrs. Thiel went on. “I’m going to the movies.” Already, her voice was molding back into its chirp, as though it were pottery clay she was rounding, relentlessly rounding. “I’ll be back soon. Bring you those chocolate stars you like, if they have any, Kagome. Bye, Ryan, see you tomorrow?”

  Moments later, she was gone, and hospice, too, leaving a message pad full of numbers to call, anytime, for help or advice, or just to talk. They promised to be back tomorrow afternoon. Kagome returned to her wooden chair and Ryan to the La-Z-Boy. Ryan left his ukulele on the floor. They stayed there in silence a long time. Full night fell.

  Kagome wasn’t sure when she realized Ryan was asleep. He had his arms crossed tight across his thin chest, his head twisted at an ugly angle, as though someone had slipped up behind and wrenched it halfway off. His leg, barely touching hers through her skirt, felt almost hot. So palpably living. Gently, she reached over, lifted his head, and leaned it in what she hoped was a more comfortable way against her shoulder. When she looked up, the trilby man was watching through the window.

  For the second time in less than a day, a scream jagged up her throat, but this time Kagome managed to catch it between her teeth, and her tongue and everything inside her sizzled as though she’d bit down on electrical wire. How did she know the trilby man was watching, she couldn’t even see his face? The hat and the dark hid his features, made her wonder if there was a face under there at all, his head just looked like a blacker circle pasted on the black out there.

  Because it wasn’t out there. She was seeing his reflection. He was right behind her.

  She whirled, banging Ryan’s forehead with her own. His head rocked back, stars shot across her eyes and she swept her gaze wildly through the room but saw nothing. Wait—near the counter. By the kitchen. But that was Briney, Joe’s cat, creeping back.

  Tears poured through her squeezed lashes all at once, as though she’d tipped a vase that had been stored there. She couldn’t stop them, felt the shakes seize her. Then Ryan’s arms were around her shoulders, enclosing her. She let herself fold forward. For long minutes, she had no idea how long, she just leaned into Ryan and shook. He held tight.

  The only thing she was absolutely certain of, later, was that she’d started it. And that she’d been looking at Joe when she did. At the stump where Joe’s right ear had been, and the black, ball-shaped scar over the hole in his jaw where the second-to-last of the twenty-three surgeries she’d been through with him had focused. The little tumors
swelling all over his face, seeming to wriggle when she looked away, like pregnant spiders scurrying over her husband with their sacs of young.

  Partially, it was triggered by the awkward way Ryan held her, with his hands seemingly affixed to her shoulder blades like defibrillator pads he was trying to place. For most of the time Joe had been able to hold her, he’d done so like that. He’d avoided dating, most of his life. Hadn’t seen the point, he said. And so he hadn’t known what to do with his hands, at first. She’d had to show him.

  But partially, too, it was Ryan’s heat. His pale arms, with her tears streaking them, and the surprising force of his skater’s thighs pushing against hers. It was like holding Joe, but a different Joe. Joe healthy. Joe capable of expressing the hunger she knew he felt, that was too strong for his frail frame, that he’d been afraid would shake him to pieces every time they touched. She wasn’t exactly thinking any of this, but she was conscious of it all as one of her hands slid down Ryan’s chest into his lap, and her mouth lifted and found his.

  It lasted longer than she could have hoped, certainly longer than she expected. Long enough for her to wonder if they were actually going through with it, and to understand that Ryan hadn’t come here only for Joe, after all. His hands had come off her shoulders at last, and they felt so good gliding on her back. His eyes were closed, but hers flicked constantly between this boy’s sweet, helpless face and her husband’s wrecked and sleeping one. It was like touching them both, touching Ryan, yes, but also Joe through him. Their mouths had come open, and she was caressing, probing, had Ryan’s belt unbuckled when she saw the cat staring at her and froze, just for a second.

  Which was far too long. Ryan gagged, his mouth snapped shut, and he banged her head again with his own as he scrambled to his feet. “Oh, Kagome,” he said, fumbling at his snap and his belt and not getting either and finally staring down at himself and then her in disbelief. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and burst into tears.