Dan grins. “Great, Dad, it was great.”
Is it the treatment that makes Gus remember? Or is it just one of those odd moments?
Dan is home for Christmas. It’s his Christmas gift for her, he says, to give her a break. It’s no break because she’s been cleaning and trying to buy presents off the net. Thank God for the net. She’s bought Dan cookbooks and cds, a beautiful set of German knives that he’s always wanted but would never get because he never cooks at home. She’s spent way too much money, but what would she buy Gus? She’s bought Gus chocolates for a palate gone childlike. A couple of warm bright shirts. A puzzle.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says, and she can feel her face stretched too wide.
“I’m here,” he says. “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be? Lisa says hello.”
Lisa is the new girlfriend. “You could have brought her,” Mila says.
Gus stands there, vacant and uninterested.
Dan says, “Dad, I’ve met a really nice girl.” She’s told Gus about Lisa, but mostly it’s to hear her own chatter and because Gus seems soothed by chatter. Whether the magpie left of his mind has noticed the name, she doesn’t know.
“I didn’t bring her,” Dan says. “I thought I would be enough disruption.”
Gus doesn’t even appear to try to follow the conversation.
“I’ll show you your room,” Mila says. She’s putting Dan in the guest room, which means she’ll have to sleep with Gus. This week he has been going to sleep at ten or even earlier. And sleeping until early morning, say, five or six. That, she thinks, has to be the treatment.
On Christmas Eve, Dan makes a fabulous feast. On Christmas Eve they used to eat roast beef, and then on Christmas day they’d eat roast beef sandwiches all day, but in the last few years she’s made just a normal meal for the two of them. Dan makes a Christmas roast and Yorkshire pudding. There are purйed chestnuts and roasted potatoes and a salad with pomegranate and champagne dressing. “For dessert,” he says, “crиme brыlйe. I borrowed a torch from Corot’s.” He brandishes a little handheld torch like the ones in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” he cackles, which has been his joke for years, an ironic reference to all those Christmas television specials.
Gus does a puzzle. He has been doing them in therapy and the therapist (a different one from the first one, who is now on maternity leave) says that there are definite signs that the cells are grafting, filling in. Gus likes puzzles. She buys the ones for children eight to twelve. Cannonball Adderly is on the cd player. The tightness in her eases a bit. Christmas has never been a time for good things to happen, not in her experience. Too much at stake, she always supposed. All those expectations of the best Christmas ever.
But at this moment she is profoundly grateful.
“Do you need help?” she calls into the kitchen. Dan has told her she isn’t allowed in on pain of death.
“No,” Dan calls out.
The smell of beef drippings is overwhelming. She has been living on microwavable dinners and food picked up at the grocery where they have already cooked stuff to take home and eat and Chinese takeout.
“Why’d you get rid of the microwave?” Dan asks from the kitchen.
“It shorted out,” Mila says.
Gus doesn’t look up from his puzzle. Does he remember that evening at all? That was after his brain was scrubbed out, so it isn’t something he would have lost. But did he ever have it? Does he know what he is living through, moment to moment, or is it like sand?
“Are you in there?” she whispers.
At six o’clock, there is more food than three people could ever eat in a month. Dan has sliced the beef and put beautifully finished slices on their plates. (Gus’s is cut up, she notices, and her eyes fill with gratitude.) The beef is cooked beautifully, and sits in a brown sauce with a swirl of horseradish. There is a flower cut out of carrot sitting on bay leaves on her plate and on Dan’s-Gus’s has the flower, but no bay leaf to mistake for food. The salad glistens and the pomegranate berries are like garnets. There is wine in her glass and in Dan’s-Gus’s glass has juice.
“Oh, my,” she breathes. It’s a dinner for grown-ups in a place that has never seen anything but frozen lasagna and Chinese takeout. “Oh, Dan,” she says. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It had better be,” Dan says. “It’s what I do for a living.”
“Gus,” she says. “Come eat Dan’s dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” Gus says.
“Come and sit with me while I eat, then.”
Sometimes he comes and sometimes he doesn’t. Tonight he comes and she guides him to his seat.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Dad,” Dan says. “It’s roast beef for Christmas Eve dinner.” She wants to tell him not to try so hard, to just let Gus make his own way, but he has worked so hard. Please, no trouble, she thinks.
“Roast beef?” Gus says. He takes his fork and takes a bite. “It’s good,” he says. She and Dan smile at each other.
Mila takes a bite. “Where did you get this meat?” she asks.
“Reider’s Stop and Shop,” Dan says.
“No you didn’t,” she says.
“Sure I did,” Dan says. “You’ve just cooked so many years you don’t remember how it tastes when you’ve just been smelling. I got all my cooking talents from you, Mom.”
Not true. He is his father over again, with the same deep thoughtfulness, the same meticulousness. It is always a puzzle, cooking. She cooked as a hobby. Dan cooks with the same deep obsessiveness that Gus brought to model rockets!
“I don’t like that,” Gus says.
“What?” Dan says.
“That.” Gus points to the swirl of horseradish. “It’s nasty.”
“Horseradish?” Dan says. “You always liked horseradish.”
Gus had made a fetish of horseradish. And wasabi and chilies and ginger. He liked licorice and kimchee and stilton cheese and everything else that tasted strongly.
“It’s nasty,” Gus says.
“I’ll get you some without,” Mila says, before Dan fights. Never contradict, she thinks at Dan. It’s not important. “He’s not used to strong tastes anymore,” she says quickly to Dan, hoping Gus won’t pay attention, that she won’t have to explain.
“I’ll get it,” Dan says. “You sit.”
Dan brings a plate. “What have you been eating, Dad?” he asks. “Cottage cheese? Mom, shouldn’t he be getting tastes to, I don’t know, stimulate him?”
Gus frowns.
“Don’t,” she says. It’s hard enough without Dan making accusations.
Gus has retreated from all but the bland. He eats like a three-year-old might. Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Tomato soup. Ice cream. And she’s let him because it was easy. She thinks about telling him that Gus has hit her. That they have been getting through the days.
Maybe inviting Dan was a mistake. Gus needs routine, not disruption.
“How’s that, Dad?” Dan says.
“Good,” Gus says. Gus eats the roast beef without horseradish, the potatoes, the chestnut purйe. He cleans out the ramekin of crиme brыlйe with his index finger while Dan sits, smiling and bemused.
And then, full, he goes upstairs and goes to bed in his clothes. After an hour she goes up and takes off his shoes and covers him up. He sleeps, childlike and serene, until almost seven on Christmas morning.
“I’m getting better,” Gus announces after therapy one day in February.
“Yes,” Mila says, “you are.” He goes to therapy three times a week now, and does the kind of things they do with children who have sensory integration problems. Lots of touching and moving. Evenings after therapy he goes to bed early, worn out.
“I remember better,” he says.
He does, too. He remembers, for instance, that the townhouse is where they live. He doesn’t ask to go home, although he will say that he wishes they still lived in the other house. She thinks there is some small bit of recrimination in this announcement.
