Life Expectancy Read online

  “Hi, it’s Jimmy. I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  My voice had grown shaky and had risen two octaves. I had not sounded like this since I was thirteen.

  I cleared my throat, tried again, and might have passed for fifteen.

  After keying six digits, I started to hang up. Then with reckless abandon, I punched in the seventh.

  Lorrie answered on the first ring, as if she had been sitting by the phone.

  “Hi, it’s Jimmy,” I said. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “I only got home fifteen minutes ago. I’m not in bed yet.”

  “I had fun tonight.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I love your family.”

  “Listen, this isn’t something that should be done by phone, but if I don’t do it, I won’t sleep. I’ll lie awake worrying that my window is closing and that I’m missing my last chance at the mountain.”

  “All right,” she said, “but if you’re going to be this cryptic, I better take notes so later I’ll have a chance of puzzling out what the hell you were talking about. Okay, I’ve got pen and paper.”

  “First of all, I’m not much to look at.”

  “Who says?”

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. And I’m a lummox.”

  “So you keep saying, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence of it—except in moments like this.”

  “I couldn’t dance before I had these steel plates holding my leg together. Now I’ll have about as much ballroom grace as Dr. Frankenstein’s firstmade.”

  “All you need is the right teacher. I once taught a blind couple to dance.”

  “And anyway, I’m a baker, and maybe one day a pastry chef, and that means I’ll never be a millionaire.”

  “Do you want to be a millionaire?” she asked.

  “Not particularly. I’d be worried all the time about how not to lose the money. I should want to be a millionaire, I guess. Some people say I don’t have enough ambition.”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Who says you don’t have enough ambition?”

  “Probably everybody. Another thing, I’m not much of a traveller. Most people want to see the world, but I’m a homebody. I think you can see the whole world in one square mile, if you know how to look. I’m never going to have great adventures in China or the Republic of Tonga.”

  “Where’s the Republic of Tonga?”

  “I don’t have a clue. I’ll never see Tonga. I’ll probably never see Paris or London, either. Some people would say that’s tragic.”

  “Who?”

  In a rush of self-judgment, I said, “And I am utterly without sophistication.”

  “Not utterly.”

  “Some people think so.”

  “Them again,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “‘Some people,’” she said.

  “We live in one of the most famous ski resorts in the world,” I plunged on, “and I don’t ski. Never cared to learn.”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “It reveals a lack of adventurousness.”

  “Some people absolutely must have adventure,” she said.

  “Not me. And everyone’s into hiking, running marathons, pumping iron. I’ll never be in that loop. I like books, long dinners full of talk, long walks full of talk. You can’t talk going fifty miles an hour down a ski slope. You can’t talk when you’re running a marathon. Some people say I talk too much.”

  “They’re very opinionated, aren’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “‘Some people.’ Do you care what anyone thinks of you, outside your family?”

  “Not really. And that’s strange, don’t you think? I mean, only sociopathic maniacs don’t care what anyone thinks of them.”

  “Do you think you’re a sociopathic maniac?” she asked.

  “Maybe I could be.”

  “I don’t think you could be,” she disagreed.

  “You’re probably right. You have to be adventurous to be a good sociopathic maniac. You have to like danger and change and taking risks, and none of that’s me. I’m dull. I’m boring.”

  “And this is what you called to tell me—that you’re a dull, boring, talkative, unadventurous, failed sociopath?”

  “Well, yes, but all that’s preamble.”

  “To what?”

  “To something I shouldn’t ask over the telephone, something I should ask in person, something that I’m probably asking way too soon, but I’ve worked myself up into this weird terrifying conviction that if I don’t ask you tonight, I’ll be foiled by fate or storms, and my window of opportunity will close, so the question is…Lorrie Lynn Hicks, will you marry me?”

  I thought her silence meant she was speechless with surprise, and then I thought it meant she was teasing me, and then I thought it might mean something darker, and then she said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

  PART THREE

  * * *

  WELCOME TO THE WORLD, ANNIE TOCK

  24

  * * *

  The events of September 15, 1994—when a significant portion of the town square was blown up—encouraged me to take seriously the rest of Grandpa Josef’s predictions.

  I survived the first of my five “terrible days.” But survival came at a price.

  Being in your early twenties with a leg full of metal and an occasional limp might be romantic if you’re carrying around shrapnel acquired while serving with the Marines. There is no glory in being shot while struggling with a clown for possession of a pistol.

  Even if he’s a failed clown and a bank robber, he’s still enough of a clown to rob your story of heroics. And render it absurd.

  People say things like So you got the gun away from him, but did he manage to hold on to the seltzer bottle?

  During the preceding eight or ten months, we brooded about and planned for the second day in the list of five, which came more than three years after the first: Monday, January 19, 1998.

  As part of my preparations, I had bought a 9mm pistol. I don’t much like guns, but I’m even less fond of being defenseless.

  I discouraged my family from putting their lives on the line by tying my fate to theirs. Nevertheless, Mom, Dad, and Grandma insisted they would be with me all twenty-four hours of the fateful day.

  Their primary argument seemed to be that Punchinello Beezo would not have taken me hostage in the library if he’d also had to take the three of them hostage with me. Safety in numbers.

  My response was that he would have shot the three of them dead and taken just me hostage.

  This elicited from them the weakest possible counterargument, but they always felt that they won the debate with their forcibly expressed interjections: “Nonsense! Fiddlesticks! Baloney! Phoo! Poo! Poppycock! Bah! Twaddle! Don’t be silly! My eye! In your hat! That’s pure applesauce!”

  You can’t really argue with my family. They are like the mighty Mississippi River: They just keep rollin’, and pretty soon you find yourself in the Delta, drifting along, dazed by the sunshine and the lazy movement of the water.

  Over many dinners, over uncounted pots of coffee, we debated whether we would be wise to hunker down behind four walls, lock the doors and windows, and defend the homestead against all clowns and whatever other agents of chaos came calling.

  Mom felt we should spend the day in a public space filled with people. Since there’s nowhere in Snow Village where crowds gather around the clock, she proposed flying to Las Vegas and camping out in a casino for two circuits of the clock.

  Dad preferred to be in the middle of an enormous field with a clear view for a mile in every direction.

  Grandma warned that a meteorite, smashing down out of the sky, would be just as dangerous if we were in an open field as if we were at home with the doors locked or in Vegas.

  “Nothing like that would happen in Vegas,” Mom insisted, drawing conviction from a mug of coffee half as big as her head. “Remember, the mob still runs the p
lace. They have the situation controlled.”

  “The mob!” my father said exasperatedly. “Maddy, the mob can’t control meteorites.”

  “I’m sure they can,” my mother said. “They’re very determined, ruthless, and clever.”

  “Definitely,” Grandma agreed. “I read in a magazine that two thousand years ago, a spaceship landed in Sicily. Aliens interbred with the Sicilians—which is why they’re so tough.”

  “What stupid magazine would publish such twaddle?” Dad asked.

  Grandma replied, “Newsweek.”

  “Never in a million years would Newsweek publish such nonsense!”

  “Well,” Grandma assured him, “they did.”

  “You read it in one of your crazy tabloids.”

  “Newsweek.”

  Smiling, I drifted in the Delta as I listened.

  Days passed, weeks, months, and it remained clear, as it had always been, that you can’t scheme to defeat destiny.

  The situation was complicated by the fact that we were pregnant.

  Yes, I’m aware that some find it arrogant for a man to say “we,” considering that he shares the pleasure of conception and the delight of parenthood but none of the pain between. The previous spring, my wife, who is the linchpin of my life, had happily announced to the family, “We’re pregnant.” Once she had given me license to use the plural pronoun, I embraced it.

  Because we were able to deduce the date of conception, our family doctor had told us that the most likely forty-eight-hour window for delivery would be January 18 and 19.

  We were at once convinced that our first child would enter the world on the day about which Grandpa Josef had long ago warned my father: Monday the nineteenth.

  The stakes were suddenly so high that we wanted out of the game. When you’re playing poker with the devil, however, no one leaves the table before he does.

  Although we all tried not to show it, we were scared to the extent that we needed no laxatives. As time swept us toward that rendezvous with the unknown, the hope and the strength that Lorrie and I took from family mattered more than ever.

  25

  * * *

  My beloved wife is capable of jerking my chain—“I’m in love with someone else”—and therefore I jerked yours.

  Remember: I have learned the structure of story from a family that delights in narrative and understands in its bones the magical realism of life. I know the routines, the tricks; I might be clumsy in other ways, but in writing of my life, I will try my best not to get my head stuck in the bucket, and if the mouse-in-the-pants number comes up, I’m pretty sure I won’t be booed out of the big top.

  In other words, hold on. What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time. Like life.

  So, flashing back for a moment, there I stood in my parents’ kitchen, that night in November of 1994, leaning against the counter to avoid putting weight on my castbound leg, explaining to Lorrie that although I wasn’t much to look at, although I might be dull and boring and talkative and unadventurous, I hoped she would be thrilled to marry me. And she said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

  I could have wished her a good life. I could have squeaked out of the kitchen with my walker, lurched up the stairs, taken refuge in my bedroom, and smothered myself to death with a pillow.

  That would have meant never seeing her again in this life or in the next. I found that prospect intolerable.

  Besides, I hadn’t yet eaten enough pastries to be willing to trade this world for one in which the existence of sugar is not guaranteed by theologians.

  Keeping my voice steady, determined to sound like a stoic loser who wouldn’t think of smothering himself, I said, “Someone else?”

  “He’s a baker,” she said. “What are the odds—huh?”

  Snow Village was markedly smaller than New York City. If she loved another baker, surely I knew the guy.

  “I must know him,” I said.

  “You do. He’s very talented. He creates pieces of Heaven in his kitchen. He’s the best.”

  I could not tolerate losing the love of my life and my rightful place in the bakers’ hierarchy of Snow County. “Well, I’m sure he’s a nice guy, you know, but the fact is that around these parts, only my dad’s a better baker than me, and I’m closing on him fast.”

  “There he is,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The someone I’m in love with.”

  “He’s there now? Put him on the line.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to find out if he even knows how to make a decent pâte sablée.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If he’s such a hotshot, he’ll know what it is. Listen, Lorrie, the world is full of guys who’ll claim they have the stuff to be a baker to kings, but they’re all talk. Make this guy put his muffins where his mouth is. Put him on the line.”

  “He’s already on the line,” she said. “That weird other Jimmy—the one that kept putting himself down, telling me how plain and dull and unworthy he was—I hope he’s gone forever.”

  Oh.

  “My Jimmy,” she continued, “isn’t a braggart, but he knows his worth. And my Jimmy will never stop till he gets what he wants.”

  “So,” I said, no longer able to keep the tremor out of my voice, “will you marry your Jimmy?”

  “You saved my life, didn’t you?”

  “But then you saved mine.”

  “Why would we have gone to all that trouble and then not get married?” she asked.

  Two Saturdays before Christmas, we were wed.

  My father stood as my best man.

  Chilson Strawberry flew in from a bungee-jumping tour of New Zealand to be maid of honor. Looking at her, you would never have known that she once crashed face-first into a bridge abutment.

  Lorrie’s dad, Bailey, took a break from storm chasing to give the bride away. He arrived looking windblown, looked windblown in his rented tux, and left looking windblown, marked by his profession.

  Alysa Hicks, Lorrie’s mother, proved to be lovely and charming. She disappointed us, however, by arriving without a single snake.

  In the three years following our wedding, I became a pastry chef. Lorrie changed careers from ballroom-dance instructor to website designer, so she could work baker’s hours.

  We bought a house. Nothing fancy. Two stories, two bedrooms, two baths. A place to start a life together.

  We caught colds. Got well. Made plans. Made love. Had raccoon trouble. Played lots of pinochle with Mom and Dad.

  And we got pregnant.

  At noon Monday, January 12, after three hours of sleep, Lorrie woke with pain in the lower abdomen and groin. She lay for a while, timing the contractions. They were irregular and widely separated.

  Because this was exactly one week prior to her most likely delivery date, she assumed that she was experiencing false labor.

  She’d had a similar episode three days previously. We had gone to the hospital—and come home with the baby still in the oven.

  The spasms were sufficiently painful to prevent her from falling back into sleep. Careful not to wake me, she slipped out of bed, took a bath, dressed, and went to the kitchen.

  In spite of the periodic abdominal pain, she was hungry. At the kitchen table, reading a mystery that I had recommended, she ate a slice of chocolate cherry cake, then two slices of caraway kugelhopf.

  For a few hours, the contractions did not become more painful or less irregular.

  Beyond the windows, the white wings of the sky were molting. Snow descended silently and feathered the trees, the yard.

  Lorrie gave little thought to the snow at first. In an ordinary January, snow fell as many days as not.

  I woke shortly after four in the afternoon, showered, shaved, and went into the kitchen as the day slowly faded into an early winter twilight.

  Still at the table, immersed in the final chapter of the mystery novel, Lorrie returne
d my kiss when I bent to her, taking her eyes from the page for only a moment.

  Then: “Hey, pastry god, would you get me a slice of streusel?”

  During her pregnancy, she had developed numerous food cravings, but at the top of the list were streusel coffee cake and various kinds of kugelhopf.

  “This baby’s going to be born speaking German,” I predicted.

  Before getting the cake, I glanced through the window in the back door and saw that about six inches of fresh powder covered the porch steps.

  “Looks like the weatherman was wrong again,” I said. “This is more than flurries.”

  Enchanted by the book, Lorrie had failed to notice that the lazy snowfall had turned into an intense if windless storm.