Water in the Well
Amy Foster Myer
For the last week of her life, your wife is
glued to the television set. She flips between CNN and MSNBC at an almost constant rate. A long-haul truckdriver in West Virginia left the cover off his well and his two year old fell in. He is stuck for two days before Baby Jonas Well Watch hits on a national level.
The screen fills with images of scabby-kneed siblings standing with their fingers in their armpits. The mother of all these children, a three-hundred pound testament to lard in backwoods America, sits on the tree stump over which her son tripped, and fumbles through Green Eggs and Ham. She plays with her son’s favorite toys at the lip of the well. Once, the microphones tune in enough so you can hear his little voice calling up, telling her that the dump truck is supposed to run over the G.I. Joes, a game you remember except the victims were your sister’s Barbies.
When the meteorologists predict record-breaking rains for the East Coast, CNN begins 24-hour coverage. On the left of the screen, the producers superimpose a computer-generated depiction of the well. Rather than an illustration of a human child, a teddy bear is lodged three-fourths the way down. As the water table continues to rise, the blue arrow creeps higher, covering first the teddy bear’s feet, then his knees. At two in the morning, you’re more likely to find your wife sitting on the coffee table wrapped in the afghan, than in bed.
The news teams come at this from every angle possible. The eldest daughter, a possum-faced girl of thirteen named – no kidding – JoAnn-jo, is flown to New York where she appears on the Today Show. Katie Couric repeatedly asks the girl what they could use – food, clothes, toys, furniture. What can America do to help? The girl looks into the eyes of stay-at-home moms across the country and says Calvin Klein jeans.
“That girl looks like a possum,” you say.
Your wife tells you to stop being racist. “You know what I mean,” she says to your baffled grin.
Due to the constant deluge and remote location, the rescue teams cannot keep water pumps running for any significant amount of time; eventually, the motors become waterlogged and burn out. Three men have been electrocuted while switching from one pump to the next. Two died and the third has lost the ability to walk or feed himself; their families start appearing on TV too. An engineer in an orange parka describes how, even if they could get a pump to work for more than a few hours, the location of the family’s home is only slightly higher than the lowest point for miles around. Regardless of how many hundreds of feet of pipeline they attach, the water continues to gather in the well.
When you come home from work Friday, no one greets you at the door. You expect to hear the blurbs of soundbites, the quickfire questions from the TV, but the house is silent. The paisley sheet is draped over the cockatiel’s cage so he’ll think it’s night and shut the hell up. The dog, who normally runs to the door as soon as she hears your car pull in, is nowhere to be found.
You go into the living room, expecting to find your wife on the couch taking a nap, but the afghan lays folded across the back of the armchair. So you drop your coat on the dining table and open the fridge. It’s only two, but you crack a beer anyway because it’s the weekend and you’ve taken off early because your boss is home preparing for a colonoscopy.
The kitchen smells like dinner. A covered casserole dish sits in the oven. Through the window above the sink, you survey the yard and finish your beer. The pool has grown a green film across the top. It looks like you might have the brewings of the next primordial soup back there. Molly isn’t lying in the hammock either. That means she’s in bed and it’s been another bad one.
At the top of the stairs, you see the dog. Like the loyal golden retriever she is, her nose presses to the band of yellow light seeping from the bottom of the bathroom door, sniffing and whining to be let in. You step over her and go into your bedroom.
Instead of your wife, you find your pajamas laid out on the bedspread. It looks like that thing Christians talk about - the Rapture - where all of Jesus’ people just disappear in the middle of whatever they’re doing and leave behind a pile of clothes. Then you notice she’s put them in the middle of the bed instead of on your side. She’s also set out a glass of water and your vitamins on the nightstand.
You find your wife slumped in the two feet of space between the toilet and the bathtub. Her wig has slid forward and her bangs flutter beneath her nose. It is amazing that this is the same person who raced you to the top of Half Dome. Who crawled on her belly through cave mud and laughed out loud when her butt was too big to fit through the narrowest part. You kick aside empty pill bottles and gently pull her out.
“Yer home early,” she says, wrapping her arms around your neck.
“Yes,” you say. “Michael’s got polyps.”
She weighs as much as a bag of flour. Her hip bones and thigh bones and shoulder bones jab into your body. And you lean against the tub and rock her gently. “What have you done,” you say. She grins the sloppy smile of the dying, and you kiss her forehead, adjust her wig.
“Sh’posed to be at work,” she says again.
You scoot the bottles closer to you and pick them up. Tylenol, Marinol, and a second prescription, the name you’ve forgotten but are pretty sure is only an antibiotic.
“You’ve run quite the gamut,” you say. You hold up the bottles. “Headache? Check. Infection? Check. Magic carpet ride? Definitely check.”
“An’ that.” Behind the toilet is the two hundred dollar bottle of vodka you bought on your honeymoon in Moscow. Molly wanted to start trying right away. When people asked for pictures, you both shrugged and blushed, just photos of the hotel room in a single packet in a drawer. And one of Molly clutching the lapels of her fur coat under her chin, one bare knee slipping out. It was going to be the bottle you snuck into the delivery room.
“I shried to drink ish all,” she says, “but then I felt shick. I didn’ wanna jes’ frow ‘em all back up again.”
“Right,” you say. “Makes sense.”
“How’s Jonas?” you ask after a bit.
“Fine,” she breathes. “Zey pulled him out zis morning. Hish foot got twishted and broken, but he’ll be ok.”
“Chake your vitamins,” she says, “an’ shon’t forget to feed Larry and Churly.”
The cat slides through the door and nuzzles her knee. You make to kick at it, but she’s happy to see him. He bats a pill bottle behind the sink and waits for you to retrieve it.
“Oh,” she says, “hi, Mo-mo.”
“Do I have to feed him?” you ask. You and the cat have never gotten along. Now that you think about it, you’re not really sure why you hate that damn cat. But it could be because of his terrible timing.
“Feed him,” she says. “One more shing.” She draws a heavy breath, and you panic because it’s starting to hit you that you aren’t playing pretend anymore. She isn’t going to lift her face from the water and ask if that’s the best dead man’s float ever or what.
Molly never tells you what that one more thing is, though. And she doesn’t need to, because you’ve heard it before, every time the drugs and the pain slingshot her across the border into Deliriumopolis. But, you’re glad she doesn’t make you promise anything because the only person you can imagine being married to has just died on the bathroom floor.
So you carry her into the bedroom and lie her down on top of your pajamas. You reach for the phone but remember that Molly left it downstairs after talking to her mother last night. There are phone calls to be made, but you’ll think about that tomorrow.
You call the ambulance and leave the front door cracked. Then back into bed where you hold your wife and try to remember the scent of her hair before she got sick. Like fresh cut grass and wet earth.
Then you think how pissed Molly’d be if Curly managed to nose her way out. From the junk drawer you grab a post-it and tell the ambulance guys to come on in, you’re waiting upstairs, and to please not let the dog out.
When they come, they don’t look like the EMTs you’re used to seeing on TV. One is short, and fat in a way that makes you think he was once very fit. The other is older, in his fifties and carries his weight in front. Molly’d say he was in his third trimester and then cackle, cackle. They drop their overstuffed duffel bags onto the bed and shoo you out of the way. They take her pulse and blood pressure. They listen to her heart, and you try to remember just what you told them on the phone. Did you say she had died or that she was dying? You feel the need to point out that she’s gone.
They ask you questions. You tell them about coming home from work early. You hand them the pill bottles, but you tuck the vodka further behind the commode. It occurs to you that it’s something you’d like to keep.
“So, you found her in the bathroom after she’d taken all the medication.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t call the ambulance then. When you first found her.”
“No.” Clearly.
“Sir. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you call us right away? As soon as you got home?”
You take your wife’s hand and sit with her on the bed. They pack up their bags and go downstairs.
At the station, a female officer in a too-tight uniform and a blonde flip shoves you the phone. “Five minutes!”
You don’t have a lawyer or even any idea what kind of one you need. In fact, when the officer asks for what number, you can’t think who in the world you should call. So you call your neighbor Dale. You have to tell him five hundred times that it’s just a misunderstanding, but could he please check in on Larry, Curly, and Mo tonight and in the morning. You give him the number of your boss and then your parents as well.
Reciting for the seven millionth time the first phone number you ever memorized has a nostalgic quality that makes you yearn for childhood. For a time before words like metastasize and malignant and survival rate became part of your daily vocabulary.
Now they’ve added negligent homicide. You won’t get the taste of that out of your mouth for a while.
Before the phone hangs up, you remind Dale where to find the spare key. In the fake pile of dog crap in the mulch by the garage.
At the trial, the prosecutor – a shark named Dena McClug – parades a stream of doctors, whom she refers to as “experts,” across the stand. Then the EMTs. And in a surprise twist meant for shock value - Dale. He is there to tell one story – about the time he overheard you and Molly arguing by the pool. How he heard you say that if she didn’t cut it out, you were going to drown her for her life insurance. The part he left out was how you also said you were going to flee to South America with the maid. You try not to be angry; it isn’t his fault his wife has the sense of humor of an earthworm.
In the evenings, the house is quiet. A month after Molly, the cockatiel died. What used to make sense – at least to Molly - when you introduced your pets as Larry, Curly, and Mo no longer does. You consider changing Curly to something she can adapt to – like Carrie – but the words don’t fit right in your mouth.
You’ve stopped sleeping in your bed. You considered moving into the spare room, but after opening the door, you remember that you’d never bothered to paint it back. The walls are the color of ripening bananas. The border of baby circus animals on parade is beginning to peel. In the corner, filled with boxes of Molly’s old work stuff, is the crib. She bought it, oddly enough, at a baby store in the airport the day you returned from Russia.
When the State rests, your lawyer calls Molly’s team of oncologists to the stand first. Dr. Morrow testifies that at the time of her death Molly had only days left anyway. I didn’t know that before. The prosecutor argues with this until she finally manages to get the doctor to admit that, yes, she could have lived for a month, maybe. Dr. Morrow looks into the jury box and describes the pain Molly endured, she says that death was a blessing.
“Objection, Your Honor,” says the prosecutor. “Dr. Morrow is making assumptions about things which she could not possibly know for a fact.”
Your lawyer stands. You’ve begun to notice that he smells like formaldehyde. When he moves, the odor drifts up from beneath his clothes. They say that soulmates are attracted to everything about one another, even the smell of their lover’s piss and sweat and shit. It’s hard to imagine a woman who could get a tingle below her belt at a sniff of that.
“Your Honor, Dr. Morrow is an expert not only in the field of breast and ovarian cancer, but also,” your lawyer stares at the jury box, “she is an expert in Molly Schneider. Whatever Mrs. Schneider confided in her doctor about her physical or mental state is relevant to the case at hand.”
They go back and forth until Judge Howe raises his hand. He is not the geriatric judge you were expecting. He wears biking shorts beneath his robes, and sometimes his wife brings their small son to the courthouse for a picnic on the steps.
“I won’t strike it from the record, Ms. McClug,” he says. “But, I will direct Mrs. – I mean, Dr. Morrow to limit her remarks to what she knows based on physical examinations, lab tests. So on.” He bangs his gavel.
Dr. Morrow then describes Molly’s illness in astonishing matter-of-factness. She describes the first mastectomy. Her second. Her year of remission. The scan that revealed a growth on her ovary. That by the time she had surgery, it had spread to both sides and she woke up in recovery completely scooped out.
After the doctor, come the nurses. You recognize one as the nurse who mainly took care of Molly on chemo days. She testifies as to what, if anything, Molly said about how she wanted to go. The tears you’ve refused to drop fall as she describes the pajamas, the pills – she covers it all - right down to the tuna casserole waiting in the oven.
The last person to testify on your behalf is Molly’s mother. Before your lawyer can begin questioning her, she says sheloves you and knows you only wanted the best. She crumbles behind her scarf. The judge hands her a box of tissue.
“Objection.”
“On what grounds?” demands your lawyer.
“On the grounds that it’s ridiculous,” McClug says. When she catches Howe’s deadpan look, she says, “Prejudicial, Your Honor. The only purpose of Mrs. Akern’s testimony is to inflame the hearts and minds of the jurors. Facts are facts.”
Ridiculous, you think. Finally, she’s hit the nail on the head.
“I’m afraid you opened the door to character debate when you invited the neighbor onto the stand. I’ll allow it.”
The trial ends in January. A week shy of the day they finally let you put your wife into the ground.
CNN and MSNBC fill your voicemail with requests for interviews. Local news vans keep a vigil outside your front door. You catch photographers hanging from the limbs of Dale’s oak tree. That night, you get really drunk and stumble across the lawn to Dale’s house, where you find him getting really drunk as well. The two of you finish off a six-pack, then rev up your chainsaws. When it crashes down, the tree takes out half the fence and your shed. Dawn hits just as you finish bringing the last of the limbs and broken boards to the front lawn. The pile stretches the length of both your yards and is taller than Dale’s wife in her slippers.
You take up your position on the couch, sawdust and pieces of bark falling into your glass. Curly settles in next to you. Mo tries to get on your lap five thousand times until you finally relent. CNN pops up on the TV screen. It is the one year anniversary since the day they pulled Baby Jonas from the well. They show him hobbling across the lawn, his foot in a cast that runs up to his thigh. The news anchor describes the two surgeries he’s endured as they work to rebuild his foot and ankle.
The father does not make an appearance on-screen. He has taken work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Jonas’ mother is also absent. The respectable news programs say she is not feeling up for interviews, but the tabloids expose how she’s ballooned to 600 pounds. She’s become that person who needs a portion of the wall removed to get her out.
In the background, Joann-jo sits on the porch. You can tell from her expression that she thinks this entire scene is beneath her, too pathetic for words. She stands and slings one arm round the two-by-four holding up the porch roof. The other she wraps gently around her growing belly, as if to say she’d never let something like this happen to her child. You can’t be sure, but it looks like she’s wearing CK jeans with elastic zipped into the band.
You raise your glass to her and slam it back, vodka and sawdust and all.
glued to the television set. She flips between CNN and MSNBC at an almost constant rate. A long-haul truckdriver in West Virginia left the cover off his well and his two year old fell in. He is stuck for two days before Baby Jonas Well Watch hits on a national level.
The screen fills with images of scabby-kneed siblings standing with their fingers in their armpits. The mother of all these children, a three-hundred pound testament to lard in backwoods America, sits on the tree stump over which her son tripped, and fumbles through Green Eggs and Ham. She plays with her son’s favorite toys at the lip of the well. Once, the microphones tune in enough so you can hear his little voice calling up, telling her that the dump truck is supposed to run over the G.I. Joes, a game you remember except the victims were your sister’s Barbies.
When the meteorologists predict record-breaking rains for the East Coast, CNN begins 24-hour coverage. On the left of the screen, the producers superimpose a computer-generated depiction of the well. Rather than an illustration of a human child, a teddy bear is lodged three-fourths the way down. As the water table continues to rise, the blue arrow creeps higher, covering first the teddy bear’s feet, then his knees. At two in the morning, you’re more likely to find your wife sitting on the coffee table wrapped in the afghan, than in bed.
The news teams come at this from every angle possible. The eldest daughter, a possum-faced girl of thirteen named – no kidding – JoAnn-jo, is flown to New York where she appears on the Today Show. Katie Couric repeatedly asks the girl what they could use – food, clothes, toys, furniture. What can America do to help? The girl looks into the eyes of stay-at-home moms across the country and says Calvin Klein jeans.
“That girl looks like a possum,” you say.
Your wife tells you to stop being racist. “You know what I mean,” she says to your baffled grin.
Due to the constant deluge and remote location, the rescue teams cannot keep water pumps running for any significant amount of time; eventually, the motors become waterlogged and burn out. Three men have been electrocuted while switching from one pump to the next. Two died and the third has lost the ability to walk or feed himself; their families start appearing on TV too. An engineer in an orange parka describes how, even if they could get a pump to work for more than a few hours, the location of the family’s home is only slightly higher than the lowest point for miles around. Regardless of how many hundreds of feet of pipeline they attach, the water continues to gather in the well.
When you come home from work Friday, no one greets you at the door. You expect to hear the blurbs of soundbites, the quickfire questions from the TV, but the house is silent. The paisley sheet is draped over the cockatiel’s cage so he’ll think it’s night and shut the hell up. The dog, who normally runs to the door as soon as she hears your car pull in, is nowhere to be found.
You go into the living room, expecting to find your wife on the couch taking a nap, but the afghan lays folded across the back of the armchair. So you drop your coat on the dining table and open the fridge. It’s only two, but you crack a beer anyway because it’s the weekend and you’ve taken off early because your boss is home preparing for a colonoscopy.
The kitchen smells like dinner. A covered casserole dish sits in the oven. Through the window above the sink, you survey the yard and finish your beer. The pool has grown a green film across the top. It looks like you might have the brewings of the next primordial soup back there. Molly isn’t lying in the hammock either. That means she’s in bed and it’s been another bad one.
At the top of the stairs, you see the dog. Like the loyal golden retriever she is, her nose presses to the band of yellow light seeping from the bottom of the bathroom door, sniffing and whining to be let in. You step over her and go into your bedroom.
Instead of your wife, you find your pajamas laid out on the bedspread. It looks like that thing Christians talk about - the Rapture - where all of Jesus’ people just disappear in the middle of whatever they’re doing and leave behind a pile of clothes. Then you notice she’s put them in the middle of the bed instead of on your side. She’s also set out a glass of water and your vitamins on the nightstand.
You find your wife slumped in the two feet of space between the toilet and the bathtub. Her wig has slid forward and her bangs flutter beneath her nose. It is amazing that this is the same person who raced you to the top of Half Dome. Who crawled on her belly through cave mud and laughed out loud when her butt was too big to fit through the narrowest part. You kick aside empty pill bottles and gently pull her out.
“Yer home early,” she says, wrapping her arms around your neck.
“Yes,” you say. “Michael’s got polyps.”
She weighs as much as a bag of flour. Her hip bones and thigh bones and shoulder bones jab into your body. And you lean against the tub and rock her gently. “What have you done,” you say. She grins the sloppy smile of the dying, and you kiss her forehead, adjust her wig.
“Sh’posed to be at work,” she says again.
You scoot the bottles closer to you and pick them up. Tylenol, Marinol, and a second prescription, the name you’ve forgotten but are pretty sure is only an antibiotic.
“You’ve run quite the gamut,” you say. You hold up the bottles. “Headache? Check. Infection? Check. Magic carpet ride? Definitely check.”
“An’ that.” Behind the toilet is the two hundred dollar bottle of vodka you bought on your honeymoon in Moscow. Molly wanted to start trying right away. When people asked for pictures, you both shrugged and blushed, just photos of the hotel room in a single packet in a drawer. And one of Molly clutching the lapels of her fur coat under her chin, one bare knee slipping out. It was going to be the bottle you snuck into the delivery room.
“I shried to drink ish all,” she says, “but then I felt shick. I didn’ wanna jes’ frow ‘em all back up again.”
“Right,” you say. “Makes sense.”
“How’s Jonas?” you ask after a bit.
“Fine,” she breathes. “Zey pulled him out zis morning. Hish foot got twishted and broken, but he’ll be ok.”
“Chake your vitamins,” she says, “an’ shon’t forget to feed Larry and Churly.”
The cat slides through the door and nuzzles her knee. You make to kick at it, but she’s happy to see him. He bats a pill bottle behind the sink and waits for you to retrieve it.
“Oh,” she says, “hi, Mo-mo.”
“Do I have to feed him?” you ask. You and the cat have never gotten along. Now that you think about it, you’re not really sure why you hate that damn cat. But it could be because of his terrible timing.
“Feed him,” she says. “One more shing.” She draws a heavy breath, and you panic because it’s starting to hit you that you aren’t playing pretend anymore. She isn’t going to lift her face from the water and ask if that’s the best dead man’s float ever or what.
Molly never tells you what that one more thing is, though. And she doesn’t need to, because you’ve heard it before, every time the drugs and the pain slingshot her across the border into Deliriumopolis. But, you’re glad she doesn’t make you promise anything because the only person you can imagine being married to has just died on the bathroom floor.
So you carry her into the bedroom and lie her down on top of your pajamas. You reach for the phone but remember that Molly left it downstairs after talking to her mother last night. There are phone calls to be made, but you’ll think about that tomorrow.
You call the ambulance and leave the front door cracked. Then back into bed where you hold your wife and try to remember the scent of her hair before she got sick. Like fresh cut grass and wet earth.
Then you think how pissed Molly’d be if Curly managed to nose her way out. From the junk drawer you grab a post-it and tell the ambulance guys to come on in, you’re waiting upstairs, and to please not let the dog out.
When they come, they don’t look like the EMTs you’re used to seeing on TV. One is short, and fat in a way that makes you think he was once very fit. The other is older, in his fifties and carries his weight in front. Molly’d say he was in his third trimester and then cackle, cackle. They drop their overstuffed duffel bags onto the bed and shoo you out of the way. They take her pulse and blood pressure. They listen to her heart, and you try to remember just what you told them on the phone. Did you say she had died or that she was dying? You feel the need to point out that she’s gone.
They ask you questions. You tell them about coming home from work early. You hand them the pill bottles, but you tuck the vodka further behind the commode. It occurs to you that it’s something you’d like to keep.
“So, you found her in the bathroom after she’d taken all the medication.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t call the ambulance then. When you first found her.”
“No.” Clearly.
“Sir. I don’t understand. Why didn’t you call us right away? As soon as you got home?”
You take your wife’s hand and sit with her on the bed. They pack up their bags and go downstairs.
At the station, a female officer in a too-tight uniform and a blonde flip shoves you the phone. “Five minutes!”
You don’t have a lawyer or even any idea what kind of one you need. In fact, when the officer asks for what number, you can’t think who in the world you should call. So you call your neighbor Dale. You have to tell him five hundred times that it’s just a misunderstanding, but could he please check in on Larry, Curly, and Mo tonight and in the morning. You give him the number of your boss and then your parents as well.
Reciting for the seven millionth time the first phone number you ever memorized has a nostalgic quality that makes you yearn for childhood. For a time before words like metastasize and malignant and survival rate became part of your daily vocabulary.
Now they’ve added negligent homicide. You won’t get the taste of that out of your mouth for a while.
Before the phone hangs up, you remind Dale where to find the spare key. In the fake pile of dog crap in the mulch by the garage.
At the trial, the prosecutor – a shark named Dena McClug – parades a stream of doctors, whom she refers to as “experts,” across the stand. Then the EMTs. And in a surprise twist meant for shock value - Dale. He is there to tell one story – about the time he overheard you and Molly arguing by the pool. How he heard you say that if she didn’t cut it out, you were going to drown her for her life insurance. The part he left out was how you also said you were going to flee to South America with the maid. You try not to be angry; it isn’t his fault his wife has the sense of humor of an earthworm.
In the evenings, the house is quiet. A month after Molly, the cockatiel died. What used to make sense – at least to Molly - when you introduced your pets as Larry, Curly, and Mo no longer does. You consider changing Curly to something she can adapt to – like Carrie – but the words don’t fit right in your mouth.
You’ve stopped sleeping in your bed. You considered moving into the spare room, but after opening the door, you remember that you’d never bothered to paint it back. The walls are the color of ripening bananas. The border of baby circus animals on parade is beginning to peel. In the corner, filled with boxes of Molly’s old work stuff, is the crib. She bought it, oddly enough, at a baby store in the airport the day you returned from Russia.
When the State rests, your lawyer calls Molly’s team of oncologists to the stand first. Dr. Morrow testifies that at the time of her death Molly had only days left anyway. I didn’t know that before. The prosecutor argues with this until she finally manages to get the doctor to admit that, yes, she could have lived for a month, maybe. Dr. Morrow looks into the jury box and describes the pain Molly endured, she says that death was a blessing.
“Objection, Your Honor,” says the prosecutor. “Dr. Morrow is making assumptions about things which she could not possibly know for a fact.”
Your lawyer stands. You’ve begun to notice that he smells like formaldehyde. When he moves, the odor drifts up from beneath his clothes. They say that soulmates are attracted to everything about one another, even the smell of their lover’s piss and sweat and shit. It’s hard to imagine a woman who could get a tingle below her belt at a sniff of that.
“Your Honor, Dr. Morrow is an expert not only in the field of breast and ovarian cancer, but also,” your lawyer stares at the jury box, “she is an expert in Molly Schneider. Whatever Mrs. Schneider confided in her doctor about her physical or mental state is relevant to the case at hand.”
They go back and forth until Judge Howe raises his hand. He is not the geriatric judge you were expecting. He wears biking shorts beneath his robes, and sometimes his wife brings their small son to the courthouse for a picnic on the steps.
“I won’t strike it from the record, Ms. McClug,” he says. “But, I will direct Mrs. – I mean, Dr. Morrow to limit her remarks to what she knows based on physical examinations, lab tests. So on.” He bangs his gavel.
Dr. Morrow then describes Molly’s illness in astonishing matter-of-factness. She describes the first mastectomy. Her second. Her year of remission. The scan that revealed a growth on her ovary. That by the time she had surgery, it had spread to both sides and she woke up in recovery completely scooped out.
After the doctor, come the nurses. You recognize one as the nurse who mainly took care of Molly on chemo days. She testifies as to what, if anything, Molly said about how she wanted to go. The tears you’ve refused to drop fall as she describes the pajamas, the pills – she covers it all - right down to the tuna casserole waiting in the oven.
The last person to testify on your behalf is Molly’s mother. Before your lawyer can begin questioning her, she says sheloves you and knows you only wanted the best. She crumbles behind her scarf. The judge hands her a box of tissue.
“Objection.”
“On what grounds?” demands your lawyer.
“On the grounds that it’s ridiculous,” McClug says. When she catches Howe’s deadpan look, she says, “Prejudicial, Your Honor. The only purpose of Mrs. Akern’s testimony is to inflame the hearts and minds of the jurors. Facts are facts.”
Ridiculous, you think. Finally, she’s hit the nail on the head.
“I’m afraid you opened the door to character debate when you invited the neighbor onto the stand. I’ll allow it.”
The trial ends in January. A week shy of the day they finally let you put your wife into the ground.
CNN and MSNBC fill your voicemail with requests for interviews. Local news vans keep a vigil outside your front door. You catch photographers hanging from the limbs of Dale’s oak tree. That night, you get really drunk and stumble across the lawn to Dale’s house, where you find him getting really drunk as well. The two of you finish off a six-pack, then rev up your chainsaws. When it crashes down, the tree takes out half the fence and your shed. Dawn hits just as you finish bringing the last of the limbs and broken boards to the front lawn. The pile stretches the length of both your yards and is taller than Dale’s wife in her slippers.
You take up your position on the couch, sawdust and pieces of bark falling into your glass. Curly settles in next to you. Mo tries to get on your lap five thousand times until you finally relent. CNN pops up on the TV screen. It is the one year anniversary since the day they pulled Baby Jonas from the well. They show him hobbling across the lawn, his foot in a cast that runs up to his thigh. The news anchor describes the two surgeries he’s endured as they work to rebuild his foot and ankle.
The father does not make an appearance on-screen. He has taken work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Jonas’ mother is also absent. The respectable news programs say she is not feeling up for interviews, but the tabloids expose how she’s ballooned to 600 pounds. She’s become that person who needs a portion of the wall removed to get her out.
In the background, Joann-jo sits on the porch. You can tell from her expression that she thinks this entire scene is beneath her, too pathetic for words. She stands and slings one arm round the two-by-four holding up the porch roof. The other she wraps gently around her growing belly, as if to say she’d never let something like this happen to her child. You can’t be sure, but it looks like she’s wearing CK jeans with elastic zipped into the band.
You raise your glass to her and slam it back, vodka and sawdust and all.
