Separation Anxiety - Laura Zigman Page 0,89

don’t think I would ever leave.

“A hospice nurse is coming tonight,” she whispers. “She’s on her way.”

I nod with relief. “You’ll call me?” I beg, hugging Charlotte in the sling, slipping my arms inside of it to get a fuller embrace and thereby undoing all the work I just did with the lint brush. I know I should be trying to comfort Daisy, who looks calm but must be terrified, her long blond hair up in a neat ponytail and her impossibly young face pale without makeup, but all I can do is reassure her that I’ll be back soon, the second the show is over, which I hope is soon enough.

* * *

By the time we get to the school—the front of which is festooned with hand-painted banners promoting the night’s big event—we are almost, but not quite, late. Gary searches the parking lot, swearing under his breath, every time what looks like it could be a space is taken up by a tiny hybrid or a group of bicycles. Normally he would say “What is this, Amsterdam?” but tonight he just parks half the car up on a curb, the hood pushed under a bank of shrubs, and calls it a day. “Let’s go,” he says. And we do.

He runs, and I follow with the dog, fast-walking into the building. He glances back at me once, negotiating the girth of the sling, and I know he’s thinking he wishes just once we could go somewhere, just the two of us, without my impediment. I’m sure he’s also thinking: I wish she weren’t so weird. It’s one thing when I navigate the world on my own, making my own messes, as I did at the reservoir, and then being forced to clean them up, but when we’re together, he has to confront, yet again, the embarrassing fact that he has a wife who wears a dog in public. If we weren’t so late to the performance, I’d worry that the huge distance Gary is trying to create between us is to make it look like we’re not together—which we kind of aren’t, of course—and while most people at the school know us and know Teddy—this is our fifth year—there are enough outsiders attending that maybe he thinks he’ll be spared at least a few judgmental glances.

Finally he stops and waits for me. “Maybe you should get a therapy dog vest already and use a leash,” he says in a loud whisper, and I know now that he is embarrassed by me. “Is it too much to ask that you get rid of that thing?” He points to the sling.

I stop, look down at myself. The sling is kind of unsightly, as am I, wearing it, and though I’m full of self-loathing I pretend to take only slight umbrage at his remarks. “Really, Gary? On a night when ridiculously dressed People Puppets are going to grace the stage, are you seriously embarrassed to be seen with me?”

He stops, too. “Yes. Yes I am.”

“Wow.” This time I’m not playacting. My cheeks are hot with shame. And yet: I don’t blame him.

He looks around at the empty hallway, then heads for the stairs to the middle school. He’s trying to find us a place where we’ll have a little privacy, since, if we stay here, someone is likely to come out of the multipurpose room to use the bathroom or make a phone call. I follow him, in the opposite direction of where we should be going—we’re missing the early part of the show—the skits with the little kids—the preschool and kindergarten and elementary grades—which isn’t an entirely bad thing—ill-timed marital fights have made couples miss far better things—but still I’m feeling a strange sadness creep over me: we should be sitting and watching our son and his earnest classmates perform while trying to temporarily ignore the fact that our friend is dying, not acting out the denouement of our marriage.

There’s something about the hallway’s echo and the dog’s snout poking out of the sling that makes me want to do something big and dramatic and unexpected. Like take the dog off, lay her down on the cold linoleum floor, and walk to Glenn’s, leaving Gary to deal with the dog and the rest of the evening. But that would accomplish nothing, and I’d miss Teddy’s skit—miss seeing him in whatever sad and ridiculous and ill-fitting costume he’ll be wearing; miss being able to compare his adolescent awkwardness tonight to the unselfconscious