This Is Where I Leave You

down the socket wrench and grabs on to my knee with both hands. “Here we go,” he says. He pulls on the prosthesis, which slides off my knee and splits down the middle, and his hands come away with one half of it in each, and there is my real leg again, hairless and pink, but whole and unharmed. Th en helooks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood, and the love surging between us is electric and palpable. When I wake up I squeeze 228my eyes shut, trying to escape the dim silence of the basement to fi nd him again, but there’s only darkness and the sad, steady whisper of the central air handler behind the wall, telling its mechanical sec rets in the dark.

Chapter 33
    5:38 a.m.
    Up on top of the house. Looking over miles of roof; slate, concrete, copper, clay, all bathed in the pink glow of the sun rising over Elmsbrook. There’s a bird, maybe a cardinal, maybe a robin, I don’t know, it has a red chest. It’s chirping in the branch of a tree of equally uncertain nomenclature. Elm, or oak, or ash. I think I used to know things like that, the names of birds and trees. Now it feels like I don’t know much about anything. I don’t know why planes fly, and what causes lightning, and what it means to short a stock, and the difference between the Shiites and Sunnis, and who’s slaughtering whom in Darfur, and why the U.S. dollar is so weak, and why the American League is so much better than the National League. I don’t know how Jen and I became strangers in our own marriage, how we let something that should have brought us closer derail us like a couple of amateurs. We were two reasonably smart people in love with each other, and then, one day we were less so, and maybe we were headed here anyway, maybe she just got there first, because she felt the loss of our baby more acutely. For a moment, a feeling circles me, something approaching clarity, maybe even acceptance, but it fails to settle and ultimately dissipates. I think about Jen. I think about Penny. I could probably have something with Penny, but I’d still be thinking of Jen. I could maybe try to win 230Jen back, but I’d still be thinking of Wade. And so would she. He’d be a ghost, haunting our bed every time we touched. So what do I do? There are just too many things I don’t know. The girl in last night’s movie saw the way the sheepdog trainer carried his injured daughter and she just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing mattered more than being with him. She knew. But she wasn’t a real person, that girl, she was an actress with an eating disorder who was charged with DUI last year and who slept with her married director just long enough to wreck his life before falling out of love and off the wagon. That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.
    I just don’t know.
    There’s a scraping sound behind me, and Wendy climbs onto the roof, still groggy with sleep.
    “Hey there.”
    “Good morning.”
    She stands beside me and reaches into the chimney for a second, her hand emerging with a box of Marlboros and a lighter. “Want one?”
    “No, thanks.”
    “Mind if I do?”
    I don’t answer because it wouldn’t matter. You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.
    Wendy lights up, inhaling so deeply that I can picture her lungs inflating and darkening with smoke. “So, Barry’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”
    “Where to?”
    “Everywhere. California, Chicago, London. His fund took a big hit last year with the whole subprime thing, and I say that with no actual concept of what the whole subprime thing actually is. But apparently everything depends on getting this deal done.”
    “Are you worried?”
    She shrugs. “It’s Barry. This is what he does. If I worried, that would defeat the whole purpose of being married to him.” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “So, you slept with Jen last night?”
    “Penny.”
    “Oh! Good for you.