The Family Tabor. Cherise Wolas
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about them since 1987, since seeing them in the rearview mirror of the Caravan, as he and his family drove away to a new life. It is a memory he has never called up in all of these years, not even a memory he has ever had, but it is in his mind now. The girls were crying in the backseat, weren’t they? Yes, he can hear his daughters crying, tiny hands hitting the sealed windows, yelling, “Let the dogs in, let the dogs in, we can’t leave them behind.” But he had left them behind. Had let his daughters cry themselves out. Had not turned to witness the emotion on Roma’s face. She had, after all, sadly and reluctantly agreed to the dogs’ dispensation.
“Hey, you okay over there?” Levitt calls out, rising from his competitor’s crouch, loosening the grip on his racquet.
Harry’s heart is pounding, like a bomb is about to go off in there, and he leans over, head between his knees, hoping those forgotten dogs aren’t a very strange version of his life passing before his eyes, hoping he’s not about to be ejected from his existence by a heart attack this minute, hoping he didn’t put himself in the crosshairs of an evil eye last night by thinking how far he is from death.
But then it passes.
The memory is still there, but its toothy grip is easing.
He straightens up and says, “Sorry. Should have had more than coffee this morning. I’m fine. Let’s go. You ready?”
HE’S SPRINTING UP A winding hill in his neighborhood, his breath loud in his ears, the asphalt black under his beating feet, black ravens flying out of the trees, an avian army buzzing his head, flapping their wings, diving at him, their beaks pecking and pecking and pecking, their claws finding purchase on his head, his neck, his arms, his legs, his back, and then Simon Tabor is awake, fetal-curled, fists clenched, hair and body as wet as if he has just emerged from an ice bath, his insides hollowed out by the certainty that something is desperately wrong. He will never get used to this, to the way he is left with voids—in his heart, as if that organ has lost mass or blood flow; in his throat, as if that narrow tube has opened wide and air is racing inside; and in his abdomen, as if he is starving to death, though it’s not hunger at all that he feels. And this morning, there is a new element, unshed tears blinding his sight.
Slowly he unkinks his cramped arms and legs and turns over. The tears settle in the wells of his eyes, and he is loath to blink, loath to touch them, even more fearful than usual because he has no idea what this latest indignity means.
Lions charging at him yesterday, ravens today, during the frightening half hour of near-slumber, and now he is crying. It’s Sisyphean, when he’s already been laboring with his hijacked sleep, with his terror in having forgotten how to do what is natural, with his inability to figure out why this is happening, at such odds with how he otherwise perceives his life: as a mostly happy man whose marriage, young children, and professional pursuits mostly afford him pleasure and satisfaction.
A movement in the bed, Elena shifting under the striped comforter. In this year of his sleeplessness, he has learned his wife wakes in stages. He had not known that fact before. Deep sleep on her stomach until she shifts to her left side, facing away from him. Then the countdown begins. Twenty minutes until she shifts onto her back, the slightest of whistles coming through her full lips, thinned by dreams. Another twenty before she cracks one eye open, then the other.
He looks at the long line of Elena’s hip. When his misbegotten nights were new, she suggested supposedly surefire ways to shut down his nonsensical thoughts: walking after dinner; meditating before bed; taking a boiling-hot shower in their unlit bathroom and crawling wet between the cool sheets. Desperate, he tried it all. Altered his diet, too—no meat, no cheese, cut back on his drinking. Increased his exercise—yoga first, then cycling instead of yoga, and now, instead of cycling, he runs hard and fast and long every morning. But what is a boon for his body has done nothing for his soul, has not altered his inability to sink down into bliss, too aware of the spirits gathering around him in the dark. Only recently has a thought begun to form, that what he needs perhaps cannot be supplied by healthy eating or abstinence or exercise.
In the beginning, in that first month when he thought his failure to sleep was a temporary malfunction, he rocked the bed in the middle of the night and palmed the perfect globes of Elena’s ass, hoping sex would empty his brain, but Elena had sighed and mumbled, “I’ll get the pills.” A sylph in a nightgown that left her shoulders and back bare, the long yards of her black hair tight in a bun, his sleep guru refusing her mission, and when the light in the bathroom flicked on, Simon called after her, “What pills?”
Sleeping pills prescribed to Elena a year after Lucy’s birth, expired before Isabel was born.
“They’ve expired,” he’d said when she handed him the orange container. He’d looked inside and been unable to tell if, or how many, she’d ever taken.
“I think it takes decades to break down the components. They’re probably as strong, or nearly as strong, as when I got them. Give it a go. Nothing lost and all that.”
He had wanted to ask why she needed sleeping pills during that exciting time when Lucy was walking and laughing, her hands reaching out to the world, but Elena’s eyes were already closed, her breath even and composed.
For several successive nights, he took a pill that was small as a dot and weightless on his tongue, hoping she was right, but she wasn’t; potency was vanquished by time. When he told her the pills didn’t work, she looked at him in frustration. “So call the doctor and get a new prescription.” Which he did, and he took them for several more nights, but his body refused the sedation, simply wouldn’t be knocked out.
Never again has he bothered Elena during his racked hours. Sometimes he watches her sleeping, curious about what she’s dreaming, envying the way she goes under and stays under, missing how they used to wake nearly simultaneously, her first smile of the day beaming him fully alive. He’s forgotten how to sleep, but something’s changed in her, too, and he can’t trace the alteration to any specific temporal point, to any specific event, but she no longer smiles and tucks into him or rolls onto him when she wakes. Now, when she comes to, she sits upright, her face hiding its secrets from him, and it’s only when he’s back from his run, when they’re drinking their second cups of coffee, that she graces him with a smile, but it doesn’t seem to him her same I love and adore you so much smile.
He could be mistaken; it could be some pathology of his sleeplessness that is causing him to blow out of proportion the changes he senses in her, the feeling he has that she’s created subtle distance between them. But what he’s not mistaken about is that Elena no longer dresses like the woman his heart toppled for. Gone are her gauzy skirts and ruffled blouses, her tight dresses with narrow slits and strappy, sexy heels, her fitted slacks with stiletto boots, all replaced with a uniform: jeans, button-down shirt, ballet slippers. And that soft black river that once streamed over her shoulders and down her spine, that he would gather up in his hands because she left it unbound, is now always center-parted and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.
There’s a pretty Chinese bowl from a New York museum in the bathroom, a gift for her when he had been gone for weeks on a case, that holds Elena’s stock of bobby pins. In the two years since Isabel’s birth, he has often considered whether her tightly coiled hair, her adopted uniform, indicates the practicality of doubled motherhood or something far more charged—proof that the loss of her freedom is so wild within her that she must keep herself regimented and pinned together. She is a gorgeous woman no matter the clothes she wears or how she arranges her hair, but she is severe this way, and when he sees the Chinese bowl, he always wants to dump those securing pins in the garbage, shatter that bowl, bring back his sensual, loose-haired Elena, their early-morning lovemaking, her explicit love for him.
Maybe he’s a coward. Maybe he already knows the answers, but he refrains these days from asking how she feels about no longer flying away as she used to. Until Lucy, Elena wrote for glossy travel magazines, and in those halcyon days, Simon occasionally went with her to those off-the-beaten-path places when he could.