Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories

— In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind —

“Don’t leave.”

The first time he said it, it sounded like a command. The tone was so unlike George, Millie nearly dropped her hairbrush. They were in their bedroom, in their home of sixty-six years. Outside the French doors, fresh snow settled on top of old snow. The lights in George’s sprawling tree house made it stand out against the otherwise unbroken white. George sat in the chair at the telephone desk. He was in the middle of changing his socks, one leg crossed over the other, when he dropped the new sock to the floor and coughed once. Millie glanced in the mirror on her vanity, caught him staring at her.

“Don’t leave,” he said again.

She turned around to face him.

The third time it arrived as a question, a note of confusion lurking in the space between his words. “Don’t leave, please?”

He seemed to struggle with the next sentence, his last. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about, old man?” she asked, but he was already someplace else. He opened his mouth as if to say more, but no words came out.

She had always been calm in the family’s minor medical crises, but this time the words this is it blazed across her brain and crowded everything else out. She took deep breaths and tried to remember what she should do. She crossed to his chair, put her hand on his chest, felt the rise and fall. That was good. She didn’t think she could get him to the floor, much less perform chest compressions. She stooped to put the clean sock on his bare foot, then reached across him to pick up the phone and dial for an ambulance. Should those actions have been the other way around? Possibly. This is it.

“I’ll be right back,” she told him before leaving the room to unlock the front door. He was still in the same place when she returned, collapsed slightly to the right in the chair. His left eye looked panicked, his right eye oddly calm. She dragged the chair from her vanity over and sat down facing him. Behind him the snow continued to fall.

“I wonder if this will be the storm that proves too heavy for that poor old sycamore,” she said, taking her husband’s hand in hers and looking out at the tree house. “I think this is going to be a big one.”

It had snowed the day they met. Chicago, Marshall Field’s, December 1944. He had held the door for her as they both exited onto State Street.

“Ladies first,” said the young man in the army overcoat, gesturing with the fat notebook in his free hand. He was shorter than her by a few inches, and she was not terribly tall; if he hadn’t been wearing the uniform she would have mistaken him for a boy.

“Thank you,” she said, giving him a smile over her shoulder. She didn’t see the patch of ice beyond the vestibule. Her left foot slipped out from under her, then her right. He caught her before she landed, losing his own footing in the process. The pages of his notebook fluttered to the ground around them as he broke her fall with his body. They both scrambled to their feet, red-faced and breathless.

“Thank you again,” she said.

He brushed snow off his backside and bent to grab several loose pieces of paper from the pavement. She picked at one that had plastered itself to her leg.

He pointed at it. “It likes you. You should probably keep it.”

She peeled the page from her nylon and examined it. Even as the ink blurred and ran she could tell it had been a skillful sketch of the grand staircase and the Tiffany dome at the library. The soaked paper tore in two in her hands.

“It’s ruined!”

“It’s okay, I have more.” He held out the others. She saw the Field Museum, the Buckingham Fountain, the building they had just left, all bleeding away.

She put her hand to her mouth. “Your drawings are ruined, and you’ve torn your coat, too.”

He shrugged, touching the ragged edges at his elbow. “Don’t worry about it. These were just for fun. Practice. I’m an architect. George Gordon. You don’t have to memorize it. Everybody’ll know it someday.”

“Millicent Berg. Nice to meet you. And I’m sorry about your drawings, even if they were only for fun. Can I make it up to you?”

He scratched his head in a pantomime of contemplation. “I’d ask you to have lunch with me, but I’ve already eaten. You might let me draw another for you over coffee, I suppose.”

Millie glanced up at the clock jutting out from the building. She shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m already late to meet a friend.”

“Another time?” he persisted, rubbing his elbow in an obvious fashion. In another man she might have found it rude, but there was something about him that she liked. Too bad.

“Sorry. I’m only visiting Chicago until Tuesday. I go to college in Baltimore,” she said.

His grin chased everything ordinary from his face. “You may not get out of this so easily, then. I’m stationed in Maryland. Fort Meade.”

Out of such coincidences, lives were built.

The emergency workers tore two buttons off of George’s pajama top. Millie, who had dressed while she waited for them to arrive, slipped the buttons into the pocket of her cardigan. The EMTs checked George’s pulse and vital signs. They talked to each other but not to her. She hovered behind them as they worked.

“Will he be okay?” she asked. Nobody answered her, and after a moment she wondered if she had asked out loud. She glanced at herself in the mirror. The old woman who had stolen her reflection several years ago stared back at her. They nodded to each other in greeting.

When one of the paramedics finally spoke to Millie, it was to tell her they didn’t want her to ride in the ambulance with George.

“There isn’t room,” said the young one, the girl.

What she meant, thought Millie, was that they didn’t want to have to worry about her, too. She was spared the trouble of arguing when Raymond and his boyfriend, Mark, arrived.

“Don’t worry, Grandma,” Ray said. “We can ride behind them.”

Mark helped her into the passenger seat of their Toyota. They were good boys. They took her to the salon, took her and George to dinner and to plays and concerts. Of all the children and grandchildren, she was glad that Ray was the one who lived nearby. He was the one she trusted most to actually listen to her if she said something.

Mark dropped Millie and Ray at the emergency bay. After filling out insurance paperwork, they sat in a waiting room until a tired-eyed woman in scrubs appeared. An ischemic stroke, the doctor said, on the left side of George’s brain. They had stabilized him. She could see him if she liked. Millie wondered about the phrasing. Did anyone ever say no, thank you very much, I’ve waited all day, but on second thought, I wouldn’t like to see him? After so many hours in one position she struggled to get to her feet. Raymond offered his arm, and she leaned on him all the way down the hallway to Intensive Care.

The right side of George’s face sagged, the eye tugging downward at the outside corner. His right hand lay limp on his hip. His left hand busied itself, roaming the white sheets in sweeping motions.

“He’s awake, but not really responding to anyone,” the doctor told her. What was the doctor’s name? DeSoto, like the mouse dentist in the book she had read to the grandchildren. She could remember that. “The stroke was on the left side, so we’re looking at right-side hemiparesis, possibly hemiplegia. He probably will need therapy to regain speech, and that may be a long way off. For now, we’d like to see if he acknowledges you in any way.”

Millie approached with delicate steps. The man in the bed looked like George with all of the Georgeness scooped out.

“Hello, old man,” she whispered, just for him. A little louder she said, “Hi, George. It’s me, Millie.” That felt oddly formal, like an introduction. She didn’t want to touch the dead hand, and reached instead for the roving one, his left.

He brushed her away with a force she hadn’t expected and then resumed his interrupted motions. Millie fought back tears. He hadn’t meant it, couldn’t mean it, but the insult still bruised her.

“Believe it or not, that’s a positive sign, Mrs. Gordon. That’s the first time he’s responded to stimulus.”

Ray rested a hand on her shoulder. “He probably didn’t know it was you, Grandma. He wasn’t pushing you away.”

Millie looked at the doctor. “Doctor Gordon,” she said.

“No, I’m Dr. DeSoto.” The young woman glanced at Ray.

“And I’m Dr. Gordon,” Millie said. “Just so you know.”

She lowered herself into the chair by the bedside, then looked up at the doctor and her grandson. They both knew everything, and knew nothing.

“He’s drawing,” said Millie. “All that motion. He’s trying to draw. He’s left-handed.”

In their first months of courtship, she had once asked him to show her his designs.

“They’re just buildings,” he said. “Nothing special.”

She couldn’t believe that anything he did might be less than special. As far as she was concerned, everything about him was clever and funny and attentive and romantic. He had called her father to ask permission to see her, and replaced the ruined picture of the Tiffany dome with one of her college’s stately main hall. He brought her handmade bouquets of paper roses, since it was still winter. Her friends buzzed about the fact that she had found an older man, a qualified architect, twenty-four to her twenty. They all dated Hopkins boys, rich and bland.

“Bring me some of your blueprints,” she begged him one night in her dormitory’s well-policed lounge. “I know it can’t be the ones you work on for the army, but maybe something from when you were in school? I want to see what you do.”

“Really, they’ll bore you,” he said, but he looked pleased. The next time he visited, he had a leather portfolio tucked under one arm. He spread the diagrams on the table in the visiting room.

“Is this a skyscraper?” Millie traced the outlines.

He grinned his charming grin, with a touch of sheepishness built in. “Yes—but that one isn’t being built or anything. Not yet, anyway.”

“I can tell it’s going to be beautiful. The doorways, the decorative touches. It’s lovelier than the Chrysler Building!”

He leaned over to kiss her, though a sharp cough from the dormitory matron interrupted his course. “The Chrysler Building was what inspired me to do this, you know,” he said, pushing his drawings slightly to the side to sit on the corner of the table, facing her. The enthusiasm in his eyes lit his whole face. “That and the Empire State Building. We lived in New York back then, and I would slip out of school to watch them going up. Nine, ten years old, and I knew right then that I was going to make things that people would want to see.”

He pointed to other drawings in the portfolio: towers, mansions, a stadium. Millie was amazed at his vision.

“When do you get to start making these?”

“As soon as the army’s done with me.”

“I’ll bet they don’t have you designing anything as beautiful as this. Just barracks and bases.”

“There are some interesting projects. Hypothetical stuff, with the engineers.”

“Hypothetical?”

“Made up. Like out of the pulps. Barracks for soldiers who are ten feet tall, prisons built into the side of mountains, guard houses underwater. I know it’s all ridiculous stuff, kid stuff, but it’s fun to imagine. The engineers tell me what is and isn’t possible. I draw, and then they take my sketches away or tell me things to change. Mill, I thought my skyscrapers would be the future, but they’re showing me all kinds of futures I hardly know how to think about.”

When he proposed to her a month later, she said yes. She loved the sweet touches, but also the dreamer architect. She wanted to be part of the future he envisioned.

A nurse brought a piece of butcher’s paper into George’s hospital room, and Dr. DeSoto put a fat marker in his hand. Millie sat in the chair by his bedside. Their son Charlie, Charles now, brought in a second chair to sit next to her. Jane was due on a flight that evening. The room was getting crowded, but Millie didn’t know whom she could ask to leave. She contemplated stepping out, excusing herself to go to the bathroom or the vending machine and not coming back. No, she would never get away with it. Charlie had become a hoverer, attending to needs she didn’t have, fetching her tea and a pillow for her chair and antibacterial sanitizers that turned her skin to paper.

The odor of the marker cut through the hospital smells. Why was it only the acrid scents that came on so forcefully? Charlie had brought two huge bouquets, but Millie couldn’t smell the flowers at all. Then again, it was winter, and these bouquets must have come from a supermarket or the hospital gift shop; they were probably scentless. She thought for a moment of the paper flowers that George used to make for her during the months that nothing bloomed.

George’s good eye opened. He didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular, but he began to draw again. Quick, sure strokes.

“The marker’s going to bleed through the paper!” Charlie half rose from his chair.

“Let it,” said Millie. “White sheets are boring anyway.”

“Wait until the hospital bills you for them,” her son said under his breath. He had perfected that stage mutter at the age of five. She ignored it, as she always had.

Millie had seen enough of George’s blueprints over the years to know that this was an unusual one. He started from the center, instead of the perimeter. The sweeping motions he had made without the pen in his hand now transformed into curved walls. Thick walls, judging from the way he returned to them over and over. Shapes she had never seen him draw in any of his professional work.

He labored for an hour. Dr. DeSoto excused herself, saying she would be back.

“Should we stop him?” Charlie asked at one point. “He’s exhausting himself.”

“He’s almost finished, I think,” said Millie. His hand was slowing down, making finer adjustments now. The thickness of the marker obscured the delicacy of his sketching. What was going on in his head?

Someone echoed that thought, and she looked up to see that the doctor had returned. Dr. DeSoto gently took the marker from George’s hand, which trembled now. She held up the drawing.

“What did he draw?” Millie strained, but was unable to see well enough at that distance. The doctor brought it closer.

Charlie was the one to say it out loud. “I think it’s some kind of prison.”

Examining the sketch up close, she knew he was right. Thick concentric walls, ramps that suggested someplace far underground. No windows, no doors, except to and from the central guard tower. This was a place nobody was meant to leave.

In the early years, when he and the other junior architects were first throwing their hats into the partnership ring, George often stayed out for a drink after work or a late night in the office. They attended dinner parties and groundbreakings. Millie loved the meetings with new clients and their wives. She liked to watch George sell them on his vision for their buildings as if his ideas were their own.

“When I make partner, I’ll build us our dream house,” he said. In the meantime, they moved out to the county. He did his best to balance work and new fatherhood, though it was clear that fatherhood was tipping the balance. He started the tree house when Charlie was still an infant, making preliminary drawings with the baby asleep in the crook of his right arm. Millie would wake up to find the two of them in George’s office. “We couldn’t sleep, so we thought we’d get some work done,” he would say. The early years were all sketches and crumpled paper, false starts and fresh ones.

“They’re too young to ask for a tree house,” Millie said once, after Jane was born. “How do you know they want one?”

“Look at that tree,” George said, pointing to the enormous sycamore in their yard. Its leaves blazed gold and orange in the soft October sun. “How could they not?”

He started the actual construction when Jane was a year old and Charlie was three, working through the weekends and summer evenings. Millie didn’t help with the tree house. Instead, she lingered in the garden, seeding and weeding and nurturing her flowers. She had only recently discovered the joys of gardening, but already it was becoming a passion for her. More than that, it was a chance for them all to be together, even if they were involved in different projects. She dug to a soundtrack of hammer and saw. A slight note of sawdust drifted in the air beneath the heady aroma of her roses and peonies. She liked listening to George explain to Charlie what he was doing, and loved the ways in which he involved Charlie, starting a nail and then inviting the boy to finish it. “You’re some builder, kid. Look at that workmanship.” If Millie could have bottled a moment, it might have been one of these.

As the children grew older, George allowed them to assert their own personalities on the design.

“I want a giraffe,” said four-year-old Charlie, and so George tore out the conventional ladder and constructed a wooden giraffe with stairs built into the neck. When Jane wanted a Rapunzel tower, George built a platform accessible only by a thick flaxen braid. Long after the structure was completed, if one of them asked for a new element he found a way to incorporate it.

“Someday they’ll stump you,” said Millie.

“They haven’t yet,” her husband replied. He was right; they never did. The project that she had envisioned as a simple Our Gang style fort began to assert itself in contrast to her manicured flowerbeds. Over the years he created a pirate-ship deck, a Pippi Longstocking wing, a Swiss Family Robinson addition, byzantine passages and secret compartments, and a crow’s nest high in the branches. He wired it with thousands of lights, which switched on by timer every evening and danced like fireflies in all seasons.

He didn’t let the sycamore limit his vision. He strayed yards from the tree in some directions, like an invasive vine. The tree was merely a guide; Millie suspected that if the tree were hit by lightning, George’s structural supports would hold it in place. Some additions were more aesthetically pleasing than others, and some looked better in one season or another, but George didn’t care about the aesthetics of the project; he seemed happiest when the whole thing was overrun with children, theirs and others, which was most of the time. The only thing he ever refused them was a rocket. “Spaceships aren’t made of wood,” he said, with more seriousness than Millie thought the topic was due. “It wouldn’t make any sense.”

Jane arrived from Seattle, buzzing into the room with the manic exhaustion of air travel. Hugs all around. Millie marveled, as always, at the fact that two such quiet people had created two such loud ones. Five of the six grandchildren were loud too, everyone but Raymond. Maybe silence was a recessive trait.

Charlie and Jane spent ten minutes arguing over who would stay the night and who would take Millie home. Millie wasn’t sure if she was the prize or the punishment. In the end, Jane said she wanted to spend some time alone with her father, since she had only just gotten there, and Charlie said that he and Millie could both use some proper sleep in proper beds, and it was all decided. Millie considered arguing that she wanted to stay at the hospital as well, to make the point that she had a say in the matter. Truth be told, she did want to leave. Too much time in a hospital wasn’t good for anyone, even a visitor.

She took George’s sketch with her, folding it across her lap for the ride home. Charlie was a good driver, but everything felt too fast. The car was some strange rental, full of glowing buttons and gauges, like the cockpit of an airplane.

“We’re going to have to make some plans,” said George—no, Charlie. How strange that her son was now older than her husband when she pictured him in her mind. She knew he was Charlie. George never took his eyes off the road, but Charlie stared at her now, waiting for her response to his statement. What kind of response did he expect? She fought the urge to say “duuuuh,” as the great-grandchildren did.

“Look where you’re going, Charles.” Millie pointed at the windshield. Charlie shifted his eyes to the road, but continued throwing glances her way.

“You’ve done a great job of staying independent, but if he needs rehab you won’t be able to take care of him.”

“I know,” said Millie.

“And I’m not sure it’s wise for you to stay in that big house all by yourself.”

“Raymond checks on me.”

“He’s a good boy. I’m glad he lives so close to you. Still, he can’t be expected to take on all the responsibility.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Millie.

“You have to consider—”

“I’ll consider.”

“You’re eighty-eight years old. The fact that the two of you have been able to live on your own for this long is a minor miracle.”

“I’ll consider,” she said with finality.

They drove the rest of the way in silence. The snow that had fallen the day before had compacted. Charlie left her in the car with the engine running while he shoveled and de-iced the walk. Even from a distance she saw his exertion. How strange to watch her son grow old. Did he consider himself old? If he was old, what did that make her? Red-faced and sweaty, he helped her up the salted steps.

Later, alone in her bedroom, Millie reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out the two buttons from George’s pajama top. She wondered what had happened to his pajamas now that he was in a hospital gown. These would be easy enough to sew back on for him, if they would only give her back the shirt. George was forever losing buttons, busting them off outgrown pants or catching his shirt on the edge of his drafting table. This time it wasn’t his fault, of course.

She went through the motions: brushed her teeth, changed into her nightgown, walked her brush through her hair. No need to look in the mirror; she knew she was a mess. Instead, she looked out at the illuminated tree house. What would happen if George wasn’t around to change the lights? She couldn’t bear the thought of it going dark for a single night.

Maybe Charlie was right, and they should consider moving someplace easier to maintain. If George passed, maybe it would be better to be elsewhere than to live with the memories that suffused each corner of this house. She couldn’t think of a time when she had spent a night in the bed alone. No, that wasn’t true. How had she forgotten? There had been a whole month in 1951, the year everything changed.

George had only ever taken one trip without Millie, in the fall of 1951. A letter had arrived from the army asking him to fly to New Mexico.

“You don’t have to go,” she said. “You’re not a soldier anymore. They don’t even tell you in the letter what they want you to go for. Just ‘project maintenance.’”

“I suppose I’ll find out. Maybe one of those theoretical designs actually got built. Maybe I’ll fly into George Gordon Airport.” He swooped Jane into his arms and then up into the air. “Maybe they want to give your daddy a medal! Valor in the face of bureaucracy!” Jane giggled.

He was gone two weeks, then three weeks, then four. They picked him up at Friendship on the afternoon of Jane’s third birthday. Up until the moment she loaded the children into the Packard, Millie kept expecting the telephone to ring and George’s tired voice to say he had been delayed yet again and would she get by for another week. She attacked the ingredients for Jane’s birthday cake, the batter fleeing up the sides of the bowl. Don’t ring, she willed the telephone.

But no, he was already there when she drove up, his suit rumpled and his shoulders sagging. He looked every bit as exhausted as he had sounded. She had been prepared to let him know the stress his absence had caused her, but instead she kissed his stubbled cheek. The kids leaned in to hug or possibly strangle him from the backseat.

“Sit down, both of you,” he said, slapping their hands from his neck.

“Do you have presents for us?” Charlie reached over the seatback for the blueprint tube George was holding between his knees.

“Don’t touch that! Sorry, kid. No presents.”

Millie saw Jane building up a wail, and tried to head it off. “I have a lovely dinner planned for tonight. All of Jane’s favorites, and steak for you.”

“Jane’s favorites?”

“Yes, she got to pick for her birthday dinner, of course. Like a big girl.”

He scratched at two days’ growth of beard.

“Janie’s birthday dinner. Of course,” he repeated. “Janie, how would you like to pick your own present out tomorrow? Big girls do that.”

The tantrum dissipated. In the backseat, Charlie began to run down a list of toys he thought Jane might like, all of which were actually toys he would like better. Millie glanced over at George, who was pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. She hoped to get a chance to ask him what was wrong, but when they got home he disappeared into his office. She busied herself making dinner. He snapped at the children twice for fidgeting over the meal; after losing patience a third time, he excused himself before they could sing to Jane.

That night, Millie rolled over in the bed to find George wasn’t there. She checked his office, the kitchen, the children’s rooms, the den, before finally noticing the unlatched patio door. The air and grass were already laced with frost. She wore a flannel robe, but wished she had put on shoes. George’s sobs traveled down from the tree house and across the lawn.

She climbed the giraffe’s-neck ladder, crossed the bridge of the pirate ship. The first fallen leaves made some of the steps slippery. George cried like a child in the crow’s nest above her. She wasn’t sure which frightened her more, his strange mood earlier in the day or his tears now. Maybe he’d rather she climbed down, slipped back into bed, and pretended she had heard nothing.

Her foot crunched a leaf as she took her first step backward.

“Don’t leave,” he said.

She stopped. “George, what’s the matter?”

“Don’t leave, please,” he said. “I had no idea. I had no choice.”

She wanted him to continue. It wouldn’t take much to keep him from speaking. One wrong word, one wrong step. She stood still, trying to figure out how close he was from the ragged sound of his breath.

“They said the scenarios were hypothetical.”

She waited.

“They were real, Mill. Defenseless, harmless things. Their ship was destroyed. They’ve been in there four years, and the army wants me to design a newer, better place, to make sure they’re stuck ‘for the indefinite future.’ I should have said no and gotten right back on the plane. ‘For the security of the country,’ the lieutenant said. He said to think of you, and Charlie, and Jane. I had to, you see?”

She didn’t see. She waited for him to say more. She asked questions in her mind: who were “they” and why were they stuck and why couldn’t they go back and where couldn’t they go back to? Why did he call them things? Was it better to know or not to know? She decided he would tell if he wanted to tell. Minutes passed. Shivering, she climbed four wooden rungs bolted to the trunk. An ungraceful shimmy brought her into the crow’s nest. George, in his striped pajamas, sat in the corner, his knees to his chest like a child.

She wanted to go to him, to hold him as he had always held her, to tell him to put it behind him. Instead, she kissed him on the top of his head and leaned out over the edge. She had never been all the way to the top of the tree house before. From this solid perch she could see the delicate curves of her dormant gardens. Then past that, over the rooftops, past the lamplit neighborhood, out to the dark farmland beyond. She didn’t know what time it was, but the faintest glimmer of dawn colored the place where the earth met the sky. Even at this height she trusted his workmanship. The platform was steady, the railing secure.

She sat down beside him. “You’re a good man, and a good husband, and a good father,” she said. “Whatever you did, I’m sure you had to do it.”

After a moment, he put his arm around her. She knew that whatever he had allowed to surface he now had buried. Who would have imagined that such an intimate moment would become the line between before and after? Maybe she should have asked more, pushed more, given more comfort. How had it taken sixty years to come back around to the things he had spoken of that night? That night, she had no idea what he was talking about. She had let it go, let him carry it alone.

Millie dialed Raymond first thing when she woke up. Mark answered the phone, half asleep, and she realized she had no idea what day of the week it was. If it was a weekend she was calling far too early. Mark put Ray on.

“I think I lost a day at the hospital,” she said by way of apology.

“It’s okay, Grandma. What’s up?”

She took a deep breath. “I was wondering if you would do me a favor if you’re planning on coming… no, actually, that part doesn’t matter. Regardless of whether you’re coming to the hospital today, I was wondering if you would stop by the house and help me look for something.”

“No problem. What and where?”

“I’m not sure exactly what, and I’m guessing at the where. There may be nothing. I’m just curious, and I can’t go up there myself.”

“Up there?” he asked.

“The top of the tree house.”

When Charlie woke, Millie insisted that he leave for the hospital without her. “Raymond is on his way,” she said. “He’ll take me.”

“Why are you dragging him over here?” Charlie poured coffee into a mug for her, then rummaged in the cupboard until he found a travel cup for himself. He took the milk from the fridge, sniffed it, and then splashed some into her coffee and some into his own.

“He’s going to help find some paperwork I misplaced.” Before Charlie offered his own assistance, she added, “I had asked him to put it in a safe place for me, so it makes sense for him to be the one to figure out where he put it.”

He clapped the lid onto his cup and gave her a smile of sympathy. “Like his uncle, huh? Do you remember all the stuff I never saw again that I had put away for safekeeping? I still expect you to call someday to say you found my Brooks Robinson rookie card.”

She kissed him goodbye and managed to push him out the door. Poor Raymond didn’t deserve to be lumped in with Charlie on this one. Nobody lost things like Charlie.

When Ray arrived, she explained what she wanted him to search for, or rather the fact that she had no idea what he was searching for, but he would know it if he found it. She made him put on one of George’s hats and a pair of gloves before sending him out to the tree house.

Once he had stepped outside, Millie set about her own search. She made her way down the hallway and pushed open the door to the office. The air in the room was cold and stale; though Millie would be sitting at the drafting table in a few weeks to plan her spring gardens, neither she nor George had much use for the room in the winter. As in their bedroom next door, the windows faced the backyard. She watched Raymond’s progress through the snow before turning to the task at hand. She didn’t know if George had kept anything here that might explain his actions, but it was worth looking.

She started with the file cabinets: not hers with the house bills and contracts and warranties and receipts, but the wood-faced one he had built for himself. The drawer slid open easily. The plans inside were neatly labeled, arranged alphabetically. What might she find here? “S” for “secret.” “P” for “prison.” Unlikely.

The phone rang. Once, twice. Why had they never put a telephone in the office? Three times, four. The bedroom was closer than the kitchen, but she wasn’t yet ready to sit at the desk where George had been. Five rings, six, seven. The ringing paused, then began again. She wasn’t sure she wanted to speak to anybody who wanted to reach her that badly.

She lifted the phone from its cradle.

“He had another stroke, Ma. They don’t know if he’s going to wake up.” Jane was crying. Millie tried to comfort her, feeling absurd in doing so. How could she explain that she had already begun mourning George as she had picked the buttons of his pajama top off the floor?

“Hang on, Janie,” Millie said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. I have to wait for Raymond to come back inside.”

She hung up and leaned against the doorframe. From the kitchen doorway, she saw into the den. George’s childhood desk stood in a dark corner beside the stairs; he had brought it back to the house after his mother’s death in 1969. Funny, the things that become background, beneath notice. She hadn’t given that desk a second thought in years.

The writing surface swung upward on protesting hinges, revealing layers of children’s hidden treasures: a princess doll from some Disney movie or another, a metal car, a comic book, some foreign coins, the joke wrappers from several pieces of Bazooka gum. Beneath three generations of lost toys, she discovered something else: a piece of plywood. It took her some effort to pry loose the false bottom.

Inside, she found a small leather-bound notebook of the type George had carried when they first met. George had signed and dated the inside of the front cover, 1931. Each page was filled with diagrams. Castles, skyscrapers, scaled city maps, all done in a more fanciful version of George’s trained hand. Everything he had put away of himself, bound into one sketchbook.

In retrospect, Millie was able to look back on that single trip and the confession in the upper branches of the sycamore as a turning point. They climbed down as the sun rose, dressed the children, drove downtown to run some errands, went to Hutzler’s for an early lunch and a belated birthday present for Jane. Life seemed back to normal. Millie put George’s upset out of her mind over shrimp salad on cheese toast. Later there were other conversations, bigger battles. It was easy enough to say in hindsight that George had become different overnight, but by the time she noticed, the changes had already taken root. By the time she noticed, the architect was gone.

The man who replaced him was similar in most ways, but without any hint of boyishness. The only remnant of the child who had sketched skyscrapers was in his work on the tree house; he still mustered enthusiasm when planning something with Charlie and Jane. He ceased to bring designs home from the office at all.

“Work can stay at work,” he said.

She was baffled that someone who still poured so much of himself into a project for his children had stopped putting anything into his occupation. She watched as he was passed over for promotion after promotion, never progressing beyond junior partner at any of the firms he worked for.

They wanted me to work overtime,” he’d say after leaving another job. Or, “They wanted me to travel.”

“So travel! The kids are old enough that I can manage for a few days on my own.”

He just shook his head. It was as if he knew every trick for self-promotion and then set about sabotaging himself. Millie didn’t complain. When money was tight, when Jane needed braces or when a storm blew the roof off the garage, Millie found work. She tried not to resent the change. Whatever it was the other architects had that drove them to create no longer seemed to be a part of George. He designed bland suburban houses, and later strip malls and office parks. The high-rises and mansions and museums went to other, more ambitious draftsmen.

“Show me your designs,” she begged him. “The projects you want to work on.”

“They’re only buildings,” he said, shrugging. This time it was true.

“A new subdivision?” She tried to ask in a way that sounded excited.

“Yes. A whole neighborhood, but just three different house designs.”

“Are you designing all of them?”

“No, I’m in charge of the four bedroom, but I have to work with another fellow so that they look like they came from the same brain.”

“You’re very talented, you know.” She said this as often as possible without sounding trite. “I wish you would get a chance to make all those things you used to talk about.”

He laughed and turned away from the drafting table. “You’re sweet to say so, but it’s not art. It’s just my job. I make what they want me to make.”

When the wives of the firm’s partners mentioned their husbands’ latest endeavors, she smiled and volunteered nothing. If he didn’t want to be an artist, he didn’t have to be, but she couldn’t understand how he took pride in his draftsmanship and dismissed it at the same time. Try as she might, she was unable to put her finger on what exactly he had lost. How could she complain about a man who helped with the dishes every night, who read to the children, who taught them to measure twice and cut once? She tried to encourage him, but he turned everything around.

“Why don’t you get another degree?” he asked one day, after the children had both started high school. “You’ve always wanted to learn more about your plants.”

She did it, half hoping to motivate him again as well. She had a master’s degree and a doctorate in botany by the time she realized she would never goad him into competing with her. He let her take over his office and his drafting table when she needed them for her garden designs. He corrected others when they assumed he was the doctor in the family, and spoke of her accomplishments, but never said a word about his own. When she tried to brag to others about his work, he responded with self-deprecation. She hated herself for wishing him to be anything other than what he had become, and worked on loving him for the person that he was. He was a match that refused to ignite; she felt selfish for wanting him to burn brightly.

Over time, it ceased to matter as much. Her career bloomed, and she learned not to press him about his. The children grew up and left and came back and left and had children of their own. In retirement she found him to be much easier company. She enjoyed watching his comfortable way with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loved it when he began to design new tree-house additions for the new generations.

She wasn’t sure if it was fair to judge anyone by the man he had been in his twenties. The person you marry is not the same person you grow old with. She was sure he could say the same thing about her. She was sorry it had taken her so long to learn that, to stop pushing him, but that was probably the way of it.

Raymond drove her to the hospital, then returned to the house. “I’m on to something,” he said, kissing her on the forehead and dashing out again. Millie watched reruns from the straight-backed chair beside George’s bed. Jane and Charlie took turns beside her, occasionally slipping out to talk in the hallway. She thought she heard Charlie say “retirement community” at least twice.

She let the TV distract her. Every man on television seemed to be an architect. Every sitcom and every movie, from the Brady Bunch on, seemed to feature some young man with blueprints and skyscraper dreams. Why was that? It was artsy but manly, she supposed. Sensitive without being soft. A perfect occupation for a man with a creative side who also wanted to support his family, at least until the day he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. That didn’t seem to happen on television.

Raymond arrived back late in the evening, the glow of success evident in his face. It only took him a moment to convince his mother and uncle to go grab some dinner before the cafeteria closed.

“I think I found what you were looking for, Grandma.” It was amazing how much he looked like a young George when he smiled. Taller, thankfully for him, and with a strange lop-sided haircut, but with the same rakish confidence that she had so admired. She returned the smile. She hadn’t really thought there would be anything to find, but it had been worth a shot.

“There are a bunch of compartments all over the tree house, but most of them are still filled with toys and baseball cards and stuff. Anyway, I remembered that one time my cousin Joseph was chasing me ’cause he wanted my Steve Austin action figure. I didn’t know where to put it that he wouldn’t find it. I was almost to the top when I realized that the metal struts that support the crow’s nest are hollow, if you have something to pry them open with. I had my pocket knife with me. The first one I opened had something wedged in it, so I stashed Steve Austin in the second one until Joseph went home. Never thought to look at what was in that first one until now.”

With a flourish, he produced a blueprint tube from behind his back. “I opened it to make sure there was something in it—there is—but I didn’t look at what’s inside.”

She tried to keep her voice from quavering. She hoped the others would stay away from the room a little longer. “Shall we?”

Ray slid the rolled paper out, laying the drawing across George’s legs.

“George, we’re looking at the blueprints you hid.” She thought it was only fair to explain what was going on.

This was the same prison he had drawn on the butcher paper. Done on proper drafting paper, and more detailed, but still with an unfinished quality. He wouldn’t have been allowed to bring the actual plans home; he must have sketched it again later. Her eye roved the paper, trying to understand the nuances of the horrible place. She had seen enough of George’s plans that they rose from the paper as fully formed buildings in her mind.

“It’s the same,” she said, but as she said it, she caught the flaw that she had missed in the cruder drawing. She looked closer, but there was no mistaking it. In this all-seeing prison, a small blind spot. To her knowledge, George had never made an error on a blueprint. Had he done the same thing on the original? Had anyone else noticed, in the engineering or the construction? She had no way of knowing if this sketch was true to the thing that had been built, or if he had changed the design in retrospect. She could still only guess at what to say to ease his mind.

Millie leaned over to kiss George’s stubbled cheek. She whispered in his ear. “Maybe you did it, old man. Maybe you gave them a chance.”

Jane spent the drive home updating her mother on her own work and the escapades of various children and grandchildren. Millie lost track, but appreciated the diversion. When they got to the house, her daughter headed straight for the kitchen.

“Tea?” Jane was already picking up the kettle.

“Tea would be wonderful,” Millie agreed, before excusing herself to the bedroom.

She crossed the room in the dark and opened the French doors, letting the winter air inside. She had never tired of this view, not in any season. Tonight, the light of the full moon reflected off the snow and disappeared in Raymond’s footprints. The naked branches of the sycamore were long white fingers outlined in light; they performed benedictions over the empty platforms of the tree house.

Millie stepped through the doorway and onto the patio. The drifts were nearly up to her knees. She took two more steps, toward the tree. The cold made her eyes water.

She wished she could go back to that night in 1951, ask George what he had done and how she might share his burden. She was too late for so much. She allowed herself to grieve it all for a moment: her husband, their life together, the things they had shared and the things they had held back. It surrounded her like the cold, filling up the space expelled by her breath, until she fixed her eyes again on the tree house. Everything missing from the body in the hospital was still here. The Georgeness.

“Oh,” she whispered, as the day hit her.

“I won’t leave,” she said to the tree. Raymond would help her, maybe, or she would hire someone who would. The lights continued to dance after she had made her way back inside. They danced behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes.

Millie remembered the dream house that George used to promise her, back when this was a passing-through place, not their home. She was suddenly glad he had never gotten the chance to build it, that he had instead devoted himself to countless iterations of one mad project. Even the best plans get revised.

In the morning, there were pamphlets for a retirement village on the kitchen table.

Jane looked apologetic. “Charlie says we should talk about your options.”

“I know my options,” Millie said, setting a mug down on one of the smiling silver-haired faces.

She refused to let Jane help with the briefcase she carried with her to the hospital. When they got to George’s room, she sent Charlie and Jane to get breakfast.

“I’d like some time with my husband,” she said.

Then they were alone again, alone except for the noisy machines by the bedside and the ticking clock and the television and the nurses’ station outside the door. None of that was hard to tune out.

“We’re going to draw again, old man.”

She opened the briefcase and pulled out a drawing board, a piece of paper, and a handful of pencils. She managed to angle a chair so that she was leaning half on the bed. George’s hand closed around the pencil when she placed it against his palm. All the phantom energy of two days previous was gone. Her movement now led his, both of her hands clasped around his left.

He was the draftsman, but she knew plants. They started with the roots. She guided him through the shape of the tree, through the shape of his penance. Through every branch they both knew by heart, through every platform she had seen from her vantage point in the garden. The firehouse pole, the puppet theater, the Rapunzel tower. The crow’s nest, which had kept his secret. Finally, around the treehouse, they started on her plans for the spring’s gardens. All that mattered was his hand pressed in hers: long enough to feel like always, long enough to feel like everything trapped had been set free.