A Caregiver’s Diary

The days didn’t feel like days. Always either stretched or shrunken, the hours, yawning and vacant, were like gaps in the mouth of someone who’d just lost a handful of teeth. Chip was the only thing that summer that gave any shape to my week. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I walked to his house over the shadeless sidewalks of that garish little beach town, sweating and sweating in all the places where my skin touched itself—way more, it seemed, than anyone else was sweating. As I walked, I’d pass families with elaborate baby strollers, couples swinging their arms between them, small packs of teenagers on bicycles balancing snow cones, and at nightfall, Coronas in koozies. Always, I was the only one alone. The whole summer long I never saw a single other solitary person by daylight—only a few times on the beach at night, a man by himself walking his dog. But still, there was the dog.

I remember that crosstown walk, trying to keep my stride long and sure because I was so glaringly alone, squinting even behind sunglasses, behind the grayish halo my cigarette was making (I was also the only person I ever saw smoking). I relished it though, drank in the silent space cupped around me like a pair of hands, because I knew that, after arriving at Chip’s, I wouldn’t be alone again for a full twenty-four hours. The weeks kept on ticking that way, like two sides of a coin turning in the air: a day on my own, a day with Chip, a rhythm I fell in step with, a sweet and natural division down the middle of things.

There are moments between a caregiver and her charge that almost arc toward romance: holding a cup to his chin, he looks up at me while he drinks, our eyes meeting over the rim of the cup, very close. Sometimes I think: He is wooing me a little bit. Sometimes I think: How strange is it that I know his body as well as I do, and he doesn’t know mine at all? Tipping his coffee cup back, he wants me to notice my own reflection in the dark liquid. We lean forward a little to look at ourselves: a Chip and a Renée, our shapes darkened and sloshing slightly. He says something about Plato and the shadows moving on the cave wall, then makes a feeble play on words involving “shadow of a doubt.” Did I know he minored in philosophy in college? Yes, I know that.

I slide my hands beneath him, lift him smoothly; he is curled against me like a huge, heavy child. This is called a “transfer.” This is the first thing I learned when Chip hired me.

“You look sturdy,” he’d said on that first day, and winked.

I have to fold him forward so that his head rests on my shoulder, and I arrange the wheelchair so it’s at a forty-five-degree angle to wherever I’m moving him to or from. I pivot fluidly, and he makes a sort of breathless noise when I set him down. Chip is not a small man, and this never fails to make me feel strong. I can’t stop myself from saying “There!” proudly whenever I lower him down. And always, always, always, he says: “You’re starting to get really good at that.”

He likes to stay up late, expects me to stay up late with him watching hours of television. If I doze off, he hisses at me, “Psst!” and makes me change the channel for him. Whenever an episode ends he always feels the need to say something about it, as if I am waiting with bated breath for him to weigh in. Usually he says: “Well, that was weird,” because, most nights, we are watching episodes of The X-files on Netflix. He then engages me in a Q and A about the thing we just watched that I was sleeping through. “How different would this show be if Mulder were the skeptic and Scully were the believer?” or “You know what my grandmother used to say to me? She’d say ‘never trust a redhead.’ When she passed away, we found out she’d been dyeing her hair for years; there were all these boxes of red hair dye in her bathroom cabinet. You think Scully is a genuine redhead?” At night, we drink. Almost always. He wants me to match him drink for drink. You know, I am thinking, I will have to lift you from your chair into bed at the end of the night. Maybe he wants me a little bit drunk for this, even a lot drunk—for rolling him onto his side like an enormous infant, unbuttoning his pants. He doesn’t look at me while I do this, looks nowhere, but chatters the whole time about a lady bartender he has a crush on at The Rocking Chair, about one of his prep school students who started a theological essay with the phrase, “If I were a dog…” He laughs a garbled laugh to himself. Not until he is flat on his back again and I am fumbling with the catheter does he look at me. The end of the tube fits over his penis like a condom, and the whole time I’m easing it off, his eyes are fixed on my face. I’ve never asked him if he can feel my hands at all, my fingers trying to gently pull the tube free, but he watches me, and I’m a little clumsy but increasingly businesslike as the days go on. I want to be steady. I want to be sturdy for him. I wonder sometimes if this is its own sort of love moving between us like the curled lip of a rising tide, and this particular brand of intimacy simply boils down to holding someone, the full weight of them tucked against your hip, and praying very briefly that you’ll be strong enough and sober enough not to drop them.

His overnight urostomy bag is larger, holds more liquid, than his daytime bag, and it hangs from the end of his bed on a little silver hook. I take the day bag into the bathroom and empty the last few hours’ worth of urine into the toilet. I raise the seat so it won’t splash. There is a blue valve at the base of the bag. You have to hold the tube in one hand, upright, so the urine won’t leak out, and then turn the bag upside down so all the urine runs to the other end. Then turn the valve and dump. I didn’t realize this the first time and spilled Chip’s urine all over the floor of the bathroom. I mopped it up with a towel, then flung the towel into the bottom of the shower, flustered and embarrassed, almost as if it were my urine, as if I’d just peed all over the floor.

As I hold the bag over the toilet, it flattens like a leaking water balloon. There are little measuring lines along one side of the bag to show how much liquid it contains, and as I empty it, I watch the level lowering slow like floodwater going down: thirty-five milliliters, fifteen milliliters, and so on, the way down to drip, drip, and done. Empty.

On his bed, against the pale sheets, his legs seem tiny. The legs of a twelve-year-old boy on the body of a man, something almost crustaceanlike about them. Reddish with small, fine hairs. The knees are bent slightly and folded a little to the left with his claw-like hands at his sides on the sheet. At the end of the day, when I lift him from chair to bed, he unfolds like a paper flower blooming in water. Then, he begins to shake all over, trembling from head to foot like a tent revival miracle. “Slain in the spirit” they call it. I stand over him and wait for the muscles to go quiet again, to stop screaming. He lies there wincing a little and I place a pillow between his knees. He rests, finally silent, like the space in a musical score, and his body there on the clean white sheet is curled exactly like a quarter rest: I pull the sheet over him, then the thin blue blanket, up just beneath his chin. This is the way he likes it. I stand with one hand on the light switch by the door, wait for his nod, and then the room snaps into darkness. “Sleep tight, Renée. Don’t let those bedbugs take advantage of you.” “Sweet dreams, Chip.”

I duck into the caregiver’s bed in the corner; it creaks as I settle and turn. I wear a giant T-shirt and little cotton shorts to sleep in. I lie awake for a little while, listening to the sound of him breathe, the air loud and alive around him, the shared darkness simmering with the ease of his hushed snore. He always falls asleep before I do. In a few hours, he will call my name across the quiet span of the room, will break into my sleep. I will roll him onto his other side, adjust the pillow between his knees, hold his water bottle to his mouth for the space of two or three loud swallows, and then he will sleep again, will sleep soundly until the morning.

The name of the town was Avalon, as if we could all be fooled into thinking of it as something mythic. It was rich and white, too clean and too bright, the sun seeming to hit every surface at once. My eyes were in a permanent squint that summer, even indoors. Chip’s sunglasses always rested on an end table near the door of his house; I’d place them carefully on his face before wheeling him out into all that light. At times, this small gesture felt like I was decorating him for a parade.

The mother of a friend owned a beach house in Avalon, just two houses up from the shore, and she’d told me no one would be using it that summer. “It’ll just be empty,” my friend’s mother had said over the phone. “It’ll be a weight off my mind to know you’re there looking after things. Really. You’ll be doing us a favor.”

I was invited to stay rent-free in exchange for keeping the place wellaired—opening the sliding glass doors on the balcony and letting the sea air sweep through like huge and ragged breathing. I pulled up the scrubby little weeds that grew among the white stones that lined the driveway. I fished stray leaves and dead dragonflies out of the pool. I swept up the sand I tracked in. I brought bottles of Corona Light up from the refrigerator in the basement and, on my evenings away from Chip, drank them while sitting in the empty lifeguard’s chair on the shore.

Chip and I had found each other over the internet. At the beginning of the summer, I’d responded to an ad on Craigslist for a “Personal Care Assistant” with flexible hours and good pay. He’d written back with his phone number and the link to an article Sports Illustrated had written about him.

His email said, “This story will give you some idea of who I am and my situation.”

I watched a video that opened with a close-up of a sandy-haired, blueeyed man in his early forties. He looked boyish, wearing a little baseball cap pushed back slightly from his forehead, like a kid in a 1950s sitcom. “My name is Chip Doyle. I’m a school teacher, an avid sports fan. I love to work out. I’m a huge fan of live music. Pretty much your average single guy in America.”

The camera zooms out to show the whole room. Chip in his wheelchair. Polished hardwood floors.

“The only difference is: I’ve been in this wheelchair for twenty-three years after sustaining a life-altering spinal cord injury while playing hockey my freshman year of college.”

There was footage of an older woman with curled grayish hair moving him from bed to wheelchair and wheelchair to car. There was something glowing about him—maybe just a trick of the lighting in the video, as if he were made purely from blurred edges. He smiled broadly. He winked into the camera and said, “I’m available, ladies.” He looked bright and solitary

and charming. I liked him immediately. I thought to myself: “Sure. I can do this.” And I emailed him back.

At noon on workdays I walk across town to Chip’s house. Today, I come in without knocking, and one of Chip’s many caregivers is there in the kitchen, wiping out pint glasses with a dishrag, chattering while Chip slumps and fumbles with his Kindle. She works Mondays and her name is Mandy, so Chip calls her “Monday Mandy.” She greets me vaguely. We don’t know each other. Or rather, I only know her through Chip, who will start talking shit about her as soon as she leaves.

“All she does all day is talk about her dickhead boyfriend,” he will say. All his caregivers are young. All similarly tall and willowy with longish brown hair. All female. Chip certainly has a type.

I wonder if, whenever I leave, he talks shit about me. If he says to the caregiver replacing me, “All Renée does all day is smoke cigarettes and drink all my Powerade.”

Isn’t it in his best interest—a survival tactic so to speak—to reassure each of us that we are his favorite? That every single one of us is the only one he has a real connection with?

I know that he is going to keep me talking until lunchtime. I am special because I am “the smart one.” That’s what I have going for me. “Some people you can just talk to,” he’d said early on. “Some you can’t.” So we talk. Mostly about nothing. Mostly about the things Chip loves: pizza and beer and Bruce Springsteen and hockey. He still loves hockey though it almost killed him. There was a day early in the summer when he surprised me by wanting to talk about his accident, unprompted. “The puck got too far out ahead of me,” he said. “And as I went after it, the goalie reached out, and his stick went under my skates. I hit the ice and slid headfirst into the boards. Five seconds later I tried getting up. Ten seconds later I knew something wasn’t right. I couldn’t move anything, or even feel anything. Within a minute, I was pretty sure I’d broken my neck.” He told me that, as they were wheeling him off the ice, he’d looked up at the stern undersides of the paramedics’ faces and remembered suddenly that he had an old high school buddy coming to visit him for the weekend, and he’d told the paramedics: “He’s getting in on a 7:30 Greyhound. Someone has to go to the bus station to pick him up.”

“Poor guy,” Chip had said. “Thinking he was gonna have a wild party weekend at college, and instead just spending the whole time at the hospital.” Chip is generous. “Poor guy,” he’d said of his able-bodied friend who is married now with three daughters and his own law firm. I often think: I would not do so well if I were the one in the chair. I would think, surely,

that I deserved all the love, all the good the world has to offer because I endured a betrayal of fate and of my own body.

I sometimes wonder if he knows the exact space in his spine where everything went wrong. I am probably touching it all the time without knowing it—when I hold the back of his neck while I shave him.

I told him that first time, “I’ve never shaved a man before.” And he said, “I’ve been the first time for a lot of ladies,” our eyes meeting in the mirror and him winking at me, turning his head side to side afterward to examine my work. “Steady hands,” he said. “That’s the key.” There was a tiny nick along his jawline that was welling with blood.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly, patting at it with a damp washcloth. “That’s okay,” he said. “I like to bleed every now and then. Reminds me I’m human.”

And when we talk, we talk about human things. Pizza and beer and Bruce Springsteen and hockey. He tells me about growing up in Philly. “What was growing up in Southern Illinois like?” he asks.

I tell him: “Oh you know. Lots of lakes and forests, sometimes also pizza, also beer. We had a blind dog and a piano that no one could play but was always kept in tune. Okay, that’s a lie actually—my sis and I could both play it, but we didn’t want to. Our Mom made us, always telling us to sit up straight.”

I look at Chip who is slumped in his chair, who needs the pull of my hands beneath his armpits in order to sit up straight.

He surprises me some days, wanting to talk about poetry, wanting me to read out loud to him from the book in my overnight bag. Once, leaning forward a little in his chair, he recited Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” in its entirety. All the way through without pausing, without fumbling for any of the words. The entire time, he kept his eyes locked on mine, cool slate but burning whenever spittle flew and flecked on my cheeks as he repeated that line: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I sat, blinking, forcing myself to meet his gaze. The recitation had come out of nowhere, and when he finished, he leaned back, watching me, waiting for me to weigh in.

“That was fucking intense, Chip,” I said afterward and he laughed a big laugh.

Today he is explaining some economics theory to me, and I am halflistening. He tells a joke I don’t understand about three economists in a bar. I laugh feebly, and he says, “You don’t get it, do you?” I don’t.

We wait until we are that good kind of hungry, when the idea of food is exciting but we aren’t uncomfortably starving. I’m about to run down to the corner to pick up the cheesesteaks I ordered over the phone. I take a twenty from the stash in the junk drawer, tuck it in the front pocket of my shorts.

“Don’t forget to pick up a Powerball ticket,” he says.

“Right, right,” I say. Chip always reminds me. I always forget. “Seriously though. We could be millionaires.”

“You could be. It’s your two bucks.”

“I’ll split it with you. You just have to do one thing for me.”

“Oh yeah? What could that be, I wonder?”

“You gotta write my life story.”

“Uh-huh. You want me to leave the TV on for you?”

“Naw. Get outta here. Those cheesesteaks are getting cold.”

These spaces that open in the day. I feel I am leaving him behind somehow. I am leaving him behind. I breathe and breathe, smoking one cigarette on the way there and one cigarette on the way back. The day is sticky hot, stupidly bright, and the hoods of parked cars are putting out heat like their own suns. It’s strange to miss him, to worry, but also to breathe easy, to be grateful that I’m free of him for a moment. When I get back he is sitting quietly and staring; there is a halo of thought around him hanging in the air, and for a moment I don’t know how to greet him, how to talk to him. His face breaks into a slow smile at my return.

“Did you remember the lotto ticket?”

“God DAMN it!” I always forget.

I do wonder sometimes about his faith in luck. Like how a person’s chance of being struck by lightning increases if they’ve been struck once already, perhaps being singled out by fate makes Chip believe that fate still has its eye on him.

I help him eat his sandwich. He complains that my hands smell like cigarettes, and I go wash them at the kitchen sink. I turn on the TV, and an episode of The X-files plays in the background. A woman asks Mulder if he’s ever tasted blood, and then they make out. Without even thinking, I wipe Chip’s mouth with my sleeve. He frowns.

“There’s a napkin right there,” he says, annoyed.

I fear that, when my shift ends and I walk back home to the empty beach house, he will say to the next caregiver: “She cuts me shaving and stinks of cigarettes and always forgets to buy my lotto ticket.” And on the phone with my sister, I will say: “He drinks too much and tells lame jokes and talks about women’s butts.”

Are we tired of each other yet? I wonder daily.

By the end of the summer, I’d slept in every single bed in the empty beach house. There were two vast kings with eiderdown comforters upstairs in adjoining bedrooms. Downstairs were the basement kids’ rooms; one had a rickety bunk bed, the other had a pair of twins with matching quilts. I moved like a slow planet, night by night, leaving my small deposits of

sand on all the sheets, my tiny geology, compiling these slight timelines of sediment. There was a silence to the house that almost had a flavor to it, would sit on my tongue like old wine. On my days with Chip, I sometimes longed for the flavor of that silence, for the space that curved around me in each of those solitary beds. On my days away from him, I missed his weight and the shape that his routine gave to my day.

On my days off, I started jogging, though I’d never jogged in my entire life, running along the shore, chasing sandpipers so they lifted silver and copper above the surf. I celebrated the use of my legs. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I wondered if Chip missed running along the shore, standing in the surf and daring the lightning to strike. Perhaps, after twenty-three years, he was beyond missing. Twenty-three, I thought as my legs worked against the sand. He has been paralyzed almost the entire time I’ve been in the world.

He always tries to put everyone at ease. He does this by not apologizing for anything strange his body does. The first time I lowered him onto his bed and he’d started shaking, I felt a lurch of fear, thought he was undergoing some kind of seizure.

“It’s normal,” he said. By which he meant: This happens every night.

His body has gradually lost its shape, or gained a new shape, heavy like a pear, settling into density after twenty-three years of sitting down. His chest is thin and bird-like but his beer-bellied gut swells large above his lap, and then his legs: bent pencils below. His hands are curled in on themselves, small undexterous claws. He does not have the motor control to raise fork to mouth, but he can brush his own teeth as long as a caregiver puts the toothpaste on for him. He seems to take pleasure in doing this one small daily task for himself.

After cheesesteaks and an afternoon of The X-files, Chip wants to go out on the town. I pat his cheeks with aftershave and wipe the limp span of his naked chest with a damp washcloth. I dress him in a blue pinstripe buttondown and run a wetted comb through his hair. He is ready. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. “I clean up nice, don’t I?” he says. I assure him that he does. We are both proud of how he looks.

On a typical Saturday night, we sit across a table from one another at a restaurant and make chitchat. When the waitress brings our drinks, I move closer. He sips his gin and tonic, his eyes on mine. His eyes seem especially blue in the dim lighting. I wonder sometimes if anyone thinks we are dating. He never introduces me as anything other than “Renée,” never explains me to anyone.

When our plates arrive, I feed him pieces of shrimp and try not to stare at his mouth as he takes the food from the end of the fork. I wonder sometimes: When will I get used to this? I can feel the light touch of his mouth,

his teeth on the fork’s prongs. I pull back too soon and half a shrimp falls onto the front of his clean shirt, sliding down his chest onto the floor, pink and obscene-looking. The first time something like this happened, I expected him to be annoyed with me, but instead he just leveled his unwavering blue eyes at me and said, “Are you trying to start a food fight with me?”

I duck under the table in search of the shrimp, little stray curl of pure flesh. It rests in the space beneath his wheelchair, that small patch of shadow that moves whenever he moves.

“Leave it,” he says.

I’m not getting this right, I think.

“No one gets it right at first,” Chip told me at the beginning. But I think maybe what he meant was, No one gets this right ever, because there is no “right” to this, nothing right about any of it.

The Rocking Chair is his favorite bar. Everyone knows him there and the bartenders always cut his tab in half at the end of the night. Everyone there touches him when they speak to him, a hand on his shoulder, leaning down to say something into his ear while a smile plays over his face; sometimes it is meant to be overheard by me: “I like your style, Chip. You always keep a pretty girl nearby.” Sometimes they attempt an awkward fist bump with the shriveled curl of his hand. I stand beside his chair with his drink in my left hand and mine in my right, smiling faintly, waiting to be needed. He dances with a tall long-haired woman in a flowing dress named Celia. She pulls his wheelchair toward her on the dance floor, then pushes it away in time to the music. They move in little half-moon arcs, and he raises his arms just above his head so they hang like branches, sways them side to side, bobbing his head. He buys drinks for everyone but especially, it seems, for me. My eyes get sleepy and the air goes soft and golden; the bar smells like the good kind of spill. A three-man band in the corner plays Bruce Springsteen covers, and at some point they call Chip up to the microphone. One of the band members lowers the mic for him, and he leans a little toward it. His eyes are like mine, heavy around the edges; his face and neck have deepened to a light crimson, and perfect beads of sweat line his face like dew on the skin of an apple. He is drunk.

He sings. His voice sounds old and young at the same time, a sweet ringing sharpness like a piece of stray gravel kicking around inside a bell. He sings and makes what seems like very strategic eye contact with some of the women in the room—with Celia, with the buxom lady bartender, then, briefly, with me.

Everything dies baby that’s a fact.

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Put your makeup on. Put your hair up pretty. And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

He sings. He keeps his mouth close to the mic like singing into the ear of someone you want to lull to sleep. Everyone is silent. No one makes a noise, though there is a middle-aged couple half-entwined on the dance floor and they shuffle the air around, stir it into warm billows. Chip’s eyes look full. He seems almost frantic with love for the room, its corners and the people in it. A bleary longing breathes itself outward from him, trembling. It seems almost that he is making the words up as he goes along, as if he knows, through and through, that the song is his, and he is offering it, very graciously, to these people who stand and lean and sway while he sits, and sings. The light is very blue. I think for an instant that I am happy, but realize a second later that I am just drunk. I feel warmth creeping up and down the length of me.

I have never actually given two shits about Bruce Springsteen. This is something that Chip and I used to get into mock-frantic arguments over. But I’ll tell you: this was real. This was what you want to believe music is: a ghost moving in and out of everyone, a man who can no longer walk singing his guts into Maybe everything that dies someday comes back, and then you—the darkest part of you—saying to yourself through the drunk, blue-gold haze, Maybe it doesn’t…

The song ends, and I go up to the stage to wheel Chip away, out from beneath the lights. He wants to go outside, to “grab some air,” he says. He watches me smoke a cigarette and tsks.

“You know that shit’ll kill you?”

“Yeah, yeah. So will a lot of things.”

This is what someone would see if they walked past: a man in a wheelchair, a young girl smoking.

He asks me to check the clear plastic bag strapped to his ankle and tucked modestly inside his pant leg. It has been slowly growing heavy as he drinks, filling up with urine the color of late summer goldenrod, as warm as his hair had been after that afternoon of wheeling him up and down the boardwalk, the sun dusting him, pink and creamy beneath his thin layer of sunscreen.

I bend down and lift his pant leg just enough to see.

“It’s full,” I tell him. “Bathroom?”

“Naw, just dump it here.”

Every night, I always wish him sweet dreams and wonder, inevitably, whether he still dreams about running and ice-skating and sex without complication. Or: those dreams are long gone. Or: the medley of pills in their plastic cup that I hand him mornings and evenings do not let those

dreams sneak through anymore. Or: yes, of course, almost nightly a dream of walking the beach alone, what can you do? Everything that dies someday comes back.

I remember him once saying, “I got bored thinking about it so now I don’t anymore.”

And I remember thinking: I don’t believe you.

And still—rage, rage against the dying of the light. And still—everyone dies baby that’s a fact. And still—hold a Kleenex while I blow. Drink with me and talk about life on other planets with me and empty my pee bag. Help me still believe in luck. Then: Put your makeup on. Put your hair up pretty. Put yourself into life, place yourself there, in its midst, so that when you look into the glossy, dim, quivering reflection in your coffee cup, in your beer glass, you still recognize yourself.

In that video of Chip I’d watched before I’d met him, he’d looked steadily into the lens of the camera and said, “If somebody told you that when you’re eighteen, you’re gonna sustain a life-altering injury that makes you a quadriplegic, and you’re not gonna be able to move all but your arms a bit, and you’re gonna have to depend on other people for pretty much all daily living activities, you’d say, ‘No. There’s no way I can do that.’ But when you’re in this position you really have two choices: you know, get on with your life and make something of it, or do nothing.”

So here we are, light and laughter leaking out from the bar and puddling around us. Here we are: making something of it.

I untuck the little blue tube and turn the valve. With one hand I hold the tube so the urine runs down the slant of the sidewalk, with the other hand I hold my cigarette.

I remember sleeping in those beds full of sand, my feet in the mornings still crusty. On my nights off, I’d wake thinking I’d heard Chip’s voice in the darkness asking for a drink. I’d wake in one of the many strange beds in the beach house and wonder where I was. The dressers in that house were covered all over with things that didn’t belong to me. Even the bottles of Corona Light in the basement weren’t mine. They, too, belonged to the owner of the beach house; I would decide at the end of the summer if I would replace them, or if it didn’t matter. There were little inspirational signs all over the walls that said things like “The best and most cannot be— THEY MUST BE” or “Remember, YOU ARE BRAVER than you believe, STRONGER than you seem, and SMARTER than you think.” I hated them: the people who are actually inspired by these things are the same people who laugh out loud at Garfield comic strips. The shower was filled with rich people shampoo.

“That shit works,” I told Chip once while he watched me brushing out my hair before bed. My hair looked great that summer. No one really saw it but me and Chip, but it was glossy and shining and streaked through in places where the light had changed the color, stained it golden. Sometimes I wondered things like, Do I care deeply for Chip in his own right, or only because I have to, only because I am daily enacting love by cleaning and feeding him? It never felt anything like romantic love, but something that was beyond friendship, beyond employer and employee: the love that passes back and forth between caregiver and care-receiver like a current. It exists in action. In touch. It exists in time shared.

I was constantly trying to recognize some kind of magic in him and wondering if that glowing halo was a reality or if I was just staring into circumstance and longing for those moments of glimmer in this man I was being paid to share the day with. Someone to be bored with. Someone to be alone with. Someone to do nothing with.

Doing nothing, I realized that summer, is such an intimate thing.

I’d shave him knowing he would never be able to see himself from this angle: the side of his face, the curve where his ear began like lichen on a tree trunk, like the lone white bloom of a lily on still water.

The world wrapped itself around him; I was part of that wrapping. He was the center, the center of my day. He was loved. He made sure he was loved. He situated himself so that each person in his life wanted to be his favorite. This, I realize now, is a power we all wish we had.

I remember once saying to a friend: “What if there’s no one to take care of me when I’m old and helpless?”

Her response: “You could always pay someone.”

After we leave The Rocking Chair, I think, I need to be away from this just for a little while. The darkness is at its very plainest and simplest—hovering above the town like a black gull riding the breeze. We don’t know, but we do know. About the darkness. About the questions I think of asking him sometimes: How dark does it get? Like me, I think he gets tired of the workings of his own mind. Like me, he has realized no one wants to be around unhappy people. Everyone sympathizes with someone who loses everything and remains cheerful. Everyone wants to buy them drinks. People live this way and then—put your makeup on and your hair up pretty. Put on a brave face, a happy face. These stupid phrases.

God, I think, wheeling Chip through the night’s easy blue, it fucking hurts like shit to love anyone at all.

I can’t articulate anything worth articulating, and Chip is talking a mile a minute about once winning $4,000 at a roulette table. Chip! My brain is screaming at him. Chip, please let’s go home! But Chip doesn’t want to

go home. He wants to go somewhere where the music is so loud it wipes everything else right out of you, leaves only itself in the dead weight of your limbs. He wants to go somewhere packed with bodies that are like his but not like his. He wants to be surrounded. He wants to drink more, losing gradual sight of himself and being pleasantly swallowed in the night’s misty throat. I just want to go back to his house and order a pizza. I want Chip to ask me if I find David Duchovny attractive and for me to sing that “David Duchovny, why don’t you love me” song for him and then fall asleep sitting upright with an empty paper plate in my lap. But it isn’t up to me. I am being paid for my services. Chip calls the shots.

You can believe in the density of moments. You can think understanding passes between you and another person when really there is nothing— worlds on their separate tracks, planets moving from bed to bed. Here’s something true: every time I get drunk I feel like I am in love, and right now I am in love with Chip. But in twenty minutes?

I wheel him a few blocks to the loud, rowdy dance club he wants to go to. It’s called The Princeton and smells like cheap beer and vomited Fireball. Chip is very drunk—his whole face just one reddish sag. The bartender shouts a greeting at him and tries to make us some sort of special drink, grabbing a bottle of Kahlua off the shelf. Chip stops him, gestures at me. “She only drinks gin and tonics,” he says, which isn’t true but still makes me feel understood. Because I do hate Kahlua. I do hate shots with names like “Slippery Nipple” and “Red-headed Slut.” I do hate the idea right now of milky liquor sliding down my throat and lingering in my stomach, heavy. “You okay?” Chip is finally getting a good glimpse of me, as I lean to gather the drinks off the bar.

“Yeah,” I say.

What’s going on here? How have I lost track so suddenly of what is good? How the fuck am I supposed to hold the drinks and push the chair? I put one drink in the little cup holder on the back of the chair and hold the other, pushing one-handed. I’m not good at this, and I almost push Chip into a couple of backwards-hat-wearing, fake-id-wielding teenagers. Chip is getting cranky.

“Watch where we’re going,” he slurs at me.

“No backseat driving,” I snap back.

He directs me toward the dance floor: a sea of bodies all touching, all sweating. A lot of skin. He wants to be in the middle of it. The crowd parts around us like a fleshy sea. Chip says, “Excuse me, buddy” to the men and “Excuse me, darlin’” to the women. I say nothing. The mute girl behind the wheelchair. Our presence registers briefly with the people around us—that drunk dude in the wheelchair and his lady attendant—then they go back to their standing or swaying or stamping or grinding or whatever it is they’re doing.

Chip wants to be closer to the stage. There’s a DJ up there with headphones half on, and he looks infantile in his giant T-shirt. He is playing the sort of shit you’d expect from a Jersey Shore town on a Saturday night. It’s ugly and too loud, and I’m too drunk. Chip sits like a king on a little throne, bobbing his head, moving what parts he can in time to the music. I hold his drink to his chin. Will there be a night when I drink one too many and drop Chip on the floor? Am I more afraid of this or of refusing him when he orders me another gin and tonic, orders me to drink, orders me to hold his drink beneath his chin so he can sip from the straw? Blue eyes turned upward: “Don’t make me drink alone” or “Just one more, babe.” It is the only time he ever calls me “babe.” I hate it. But I let it slide every time. Is there a point when I say: I’ve had enough. You’ve had enough. Let’s go home. Will I ever be brave enough for this?

I find myself sometimes jealous that Chip has other caregivers. Monday Mandy. I wish sometimes that I was the only one, even though I know I would go crazy if I didn’t have the empty stillness of the beach house to go back to. I wish sometimes that places would disappear after I left them. Like the Garden of Eden, angels with their crossed swords flaming. Instead, people are always tramping over the floors in the spaces you once lived in, tracking sand in, sweeping it up. Does it mean anything that you are forgotten so easily? There are people you think of who don’t think of you anymore. Will Chip think about me when the summer ends? Memory is an active thing—something you have to help along. Your own erasure is very possible.

It is easy to pretend the world loves us when really, it just loves us more than the space that would be there if we were absent, the space we occupy, take up, like water in a cup, like piss in a bag—

Chip is mouthing something at me. I lean down so his lips are close to my ear.

“The bag,” he shouts. “Is it full?”

Again. Yes, you empty, and then it fills again. Over and over—the body and what it does. The body full of beer. I lift his pant leg and the bag is bulging. The urine glows faintly like something radioactive, nuclear. “So?” Chip shouts again. I’ve just been staring at the bag.

“So,” I say. “This shit’s ready to pop. We gotta get you to a bathroom.” His face is all sag. Red sag with lights playing over it. He shakes his head a little side to side like a sad mule.

“Just let it out on the floor.”

Everyone pressing in. People keep stepping back thinking that the space where Chip sits is empty space and then, startled when they realize a man in a wheelchair occupies that space. We are all at eye level. Chip alone, of all of us here, is at waist level, essentially invisible.

“On the floor?” I yell back, hoping that I have misheard him. I feel a sense of time focusing in, adjusting its lens. Something’s eyes are on me. Is this where I draw the line? No, Chip, we are gonna pee in the restroom like people do. I’m drunk. Oh god, am I as drunk as Chip? Am I sag? Am I a sagging bag of piss? Yes. But also that fellow in the white tank top. And her and him. All ugly inside our skins. I kneel. I am about to do what I am about to do. The floor is already wet with spill. The bad kind of spill. Cheap beer and vomited Fireball. Maybe even piss. Maybe even the piss of some able-bodied man-child in a backwards hat.

I’m remembering past times of pissing. Crouching in cornfields at night and watching the red blink of an airplane pass overhead. Smelling the oily corn silk that shimmers, the warm stream making a noise as it hits the soil, like the earth is shifting very slightly to make room for me. Or some cobbled back alley, near the dark solid bulk of a dumpster, its stench making everything sinister and alive.

I am kneeling. I know Chip is looking at me, but I won’t look at him. I don’t want him trying to read my face, the slow drunk unfolding of his eyes saying, “What are you waiting for?” The blue float of them, their quiet press. The tick tick tick of eyes tracking my movements as my hands decide to do what they have done so often.

The urine spreads outward in a gold halo, a loosening; the good kind of spill. The puddle moves, touches the backs of the sneakers of the boy standing in front of us, then moves off to touch a high heel. It moves like a living thing. Seeking.

Chip looks serene and I feel relief, a pressure leaving as if it were my urine on the floor. As if we share a body. The feet of everyone except Chip lift and lower. No one sees me kneeling and holding the valve. No one in this shithole notices the smell of a man’s piss covering the floor beneath their feet. Chip looks drunk and content—a king on his throne. The people around us dance happily in his piss. And I’m down still squatting until the bag is empty. I am just doing my job.

Days and days and days. Always seeming endless when you’re in the grip of them. What do we owe each other anyway when all is said and done? On my last day, Chip and I sat close but without touching, like teenagers afraid their parents might walk in at any moment. We saw each other as equals. We wondered at the presence of the other with a sort of blurred gratitude.

At the end of the summer I decided not to replace the beers in the basement of the beach house. They wouldn’t be missed. Nor the empty bottle of expensive shampoo I threw away. I did wash all the sheets and make all the beds. Erased myself from the floors. I pulled up the fresh

clusters of weeds that were struggling among the stones. I got in my car and drove the distance back to the Midwest, and Chip went back to teaching boys about God and the economy.

When we said goodbye, I bent down to hug him awkwardly, the same motion I made daily when I went to lift him out of his chair. I presented him with a crumpled Powerball ticket.

“Sorry if I was a pain in the ass,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

Walking back, the darkness has lifted and the air is all blue, like the reflection of sky in water. The horror of the bar has already disappeared and we say nothing about any of it. We are friendly again, laughing easily, softly insulting each other.

Outside Chip’s house, I smoke a cigarette, leaning against the railing of the wheelchair ramp. We are looking up at the sky, and it’s all littered across with white light. We watch the moon shifting its weight beneath a cloud, and Chip is trying to teach me about distances. What they are. What they mean.

“Let’s say,” he says, “that your mouth is the earth and the end of your cigarette is the moon. How far away do you think the sun is?”

I hold out my arm to its fullest length.

“Not even close,” he says. “It’d be at least as far away as that lamppost.” He lifts an arm to gesture at a flickering streetlight at the end of the culde-sac. “That means The Princeton would be just about at the edge of the solar system and the nearest star would be in Philadelphia.”

I’m watching my cigarette shrink, watching the distances collapse. My eyes are heavy. I feel sleepy and content and don’t want to listen to Chip’s astronomy lesson right now.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” I ask, yawning. “It’s three a.m.”

“It’s bedtime when I say it’s bedtime,” Chip says, childishly. He doesn’t want to leave the night behind.

The cigarette burns to its end, and I stub it out on the railing where it leaves a black smear.

“Apocalypse,” I say.

“Armageddon,” he says.

We all, each and every one of us, know what it is to be lucky. To be unlucky.

I wheel Chip inside, put him to bed. We lie in the mute darkness, breathing. We reach across the silence to say goodnight. The distance of the room holds us separate, and in that clean unworried space, we sleep.