Swan Dive

John. Used to do a lot of criminal defense work, then got religion and does world-class divorce stuff. It proves that this guy Marsh is the real thing, financially speaking.”
    I thought about Chris and how much this case probably meant to him and Eleni, ”financially speaking.” I thought about how I had lost Beth, a day at a time over months, while Chris was losing Eleni, a day at a time over years. I had agreed to do dumber things for worse reasons.
    ”Okay, I’m in.”
    Chris came forward, wringing his hands like a big winner about to rake in a poker pot. ”Great, great.”
    ”Are we meeting Hanna there?”
    ”Naw, her car’s on the fritz, so I picked her up this morning. She and the kid are with Eleni. In the kitchen. C’mon.”
    As Chris grabbed his coat off the hook behind the door, I said, ”By the way, what does this marauder do for a living?”
    Chris balked. ”Marsh?”
    ”Yeah, Marsh.”
    Chris turned away and began walking. ”He sells insurance.”

    She looked worse than I could have imagined.
    Hanna Marsh stood up when Chris and I entered the kitchen. She rose a good inch taller than Chris, even in flat shoes. A sturdy figure that childbearing had made a little fleshy. She wore her platinum hair short enough to show dark roots if there had been any. A blond girl clutched the woman’s right leg at the knee with both arms, causing Hanna’s simple blue wool dress to bunch up. The child first buried her face in Hanna’s thigh, then looked up at me bright-eyed and said, ”My name’s Vickie, and this is my mother.”
    I tried to manage a convincing smile at both of them, but Eleni’s appearance had shocked me. A doctor friend once told me that multiple sclerosis waxes and wanes. For Eleni, it looked like straight-line deterioration.
    I recalled her first with a cane, then metallic polio braces. Now the MS had shoved her into a wheelchair. The hands and arms looked normal, but whatever was left of her legs was hidden in folds of a long black skirt, and there was an intermittent twitch in one of the muscles in her left cheek, creating the bizarre impression of a woman caricaturing a flirtatious come-on. The hair had grayed unevenly and seemed dried and pulled. Had you seen her from the neck up, and without the twitch, you might have called her a striking woman of sixty. If I had my dates right, she’d just turned thirty.
    I looked for traces of the laughing, dancing woman of eighteen that Chris had introduced as his ”arranged” fiancée. A black-haired, green-eyed immigrant whose independence wasn’t much tempered by an almost complete inability to speak English. She’d come to America to avoid the restrictions of the old ways on what women could do and what men could do to them, but the disease had bowed her in a way that millennia of tradition hadn’t.
    ”John,” said Eleni.
    I leaned over and took her hand, kissing her lightly on the cheek. ”Thank you,” she whispered into my ear.
    Chris said, ”Although it’s pretty obvious, I guess, John Cuddy, Hanna Marsh.”
    ”And me,” said Vickie.
    ”And you,” I said, looking down at Vickie as I shook Hanna’s hand. It was dry, but trembling.
    ”Mr. Cuddy,” said Hanna, her voice husky and catching, ”I am sorry, but I want to thank you for coming with us today.”
    ”Mrs. Marsh...”
    ”Hey,” said Chris, ”what’s with this Mr. and Mrs., huh? It’s John and Hanna, right?”
    ”And Vickie,” I said, beating the child to it by just a bit, which seemed to please her.
    ”Where are we going, anyway?” said Vickie.
    ”Not you,” said Eleni, gracefully, ”You and me stay here and make the files. Remember?”
    ”Oh, right,” said Vickie. She looked up and beckoned me to squat down to her level. ”John, when you and Mommie get back, I want you to meet Cottontail.”
    ”Cottontail?”
    ”Yes, she’s my little kitty and she’d like to play with you.”
    ”She would, huh?”
    ”Uh-huh.”
    ”Well, we’ll see if we have time afterwards. Okay?” Vickie was crestfallen. ”That’s what my daddy always says. ‘We’ll see.’ ”
    Chris said, ”Hey, let’s get rolling here.” He moved to Eleni and bent down as if to kiss her, but I don’t think they made actual physical contact. ”We’ll probably be there awhile, so be sure to give her lunch, huh?”
    ”Don’t worry about us. Me and Vickie gonna be office people together. Right, Vickie?”
    ”Right.”
    Making the files and office people together. As