The Air Mattress in Our Basement
For nine nights now he had been lying directly underneath it.
The door was open a few inches. My mother was on her knees on the bath mat. My husband was sitting on the edge of the tub in his sweatpants with a washcloth in one hand and her knit hat in the other, and he had his palm flat between her shoulder blades.
“I’m sorry,” she was saying. “I’m sorry, Rick. I tried to be quiet. Go on back to bed.”
“Quit that.”
“It’s fine. It passes.”
“It’s not fine, Joyce.” His voice cracked right down the middle. “It’s not fine. None of this is fine. I ran the water till it was warm, here.”
He handed her the washcloth. She held it against her face.
“Is it like this every night?” he said.
“Not every night.”
“Most.”
“Most,” she admitted.
He sat there. I could see the side of his face in the mirror, and I had not seen that look on him since the night Josh was born blue and they took him out of the room.
“My mom had it,” he said. “I was nineteen. My dad said it wasn’t for me to see, and he shut the door, and I let him shut it. I was glad he did. I went out to the shed and worked on a truck for four months.” He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “I never went in that room. Not once. Then you came here, and the whole house smelled like that room, and I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted one door I could close.”
My mother turned around on the bath mat and looked up at him.
“That’s a reason,” she said. “It isn’t an excuse.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You put me on a cement floor.”
“I did.”
“I’d have slept in my car before I’d have told Angie I minded. You knew that about me. You counted on it.”
He did not look away from her, I will say that.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
She nodded. She held out her hand, and he took it and got her up off the floor, careful, like she might come apart.
“Well,” my mother said. “That’s the first true thing you’ve said to me in a month. Now walk me back, my feet are gone.”
I slipped back into bed before they saw me. He brought her to the door, and he stopped there, at the edge of the carpet. He did not step into the room.
“Night, Joyce.”
“Good night, Rick.”
I listened to him go down the hall, and open the basement door, and go down all thirteen steps.
He never asked to come up. That is the part that made me start to believe him.
The following Saturday I woke to the sound of a ratchet. Rick was in the guest room on his knees, putting the bed frame back together. He had carried the mattress in from the garage the night before and stood it against the hall register to warm through. The desk was already gone.
“Where’d the desk go?” I said.
“Basement.”
“By yourself?”
“Josh took the other end.” He tightened a bolt. “He didn’t say anything. But he took the other end.”
He put the lamp with the pull chain back. He drove to Eau Claire and came home with a bath stool and a space heater for the bathroom.