Do you Love Me(Peter Edward Evans) Preface:


The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart, To love is nothing. To be loved is something. But to love and be loved, that’s everything.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.

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If I thought you Loved me, then I would tell you this, I have cancer and that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that now I understand there is no hope. If I loved you, I would say you shouldn’t be so hard on us, “On me and on Robert, because it may not even be just the cancer.

For all you know we have a brain-damaged son living in an inadequate institution thirty miles from our house. For all you know, we agonized one long, cold winter night six years ago over whether to send him there. But then, broken, exhausted, we finally stood together in our kitchen, staring hard at each other, both of us the worse for scotch, and just knew, just then, at the exact same moment, that we couldn’t manage him at home any longer.

Not with him so big I couldn’t bathe him by myself. Not with him so Strong. Not with me just diagnosed and in for my second round of Chem,. there’s so much you don’t know.

For all you know I have three, maybe four months to live and Kevin is up every night trying to figure out how he’s going to break it to our brain-damaged son that I won’t be coming to visit any-more.
And I’m lying right there next to him, hour after hour, trying not to think about the possibility that our boy will be angry at me for this. Or maybe worse, maybe better, that he won’t even notice that I’m gone.
You want to build a fence between our homes, it will be wood, you tell us.

You’re tall, and you’re young, and you paid a lot of money for that enormous house next to ours. It will be solid wood, you say, with no space or light between the slats. And it will be six feet high and run along the property line you had surveyed just this week.

Understand, you say, I didn’t ask the surveyors to add land to my land. It just turns out that the line’s much closer to your house than anyone thought. I was every bit as surprised as you. And for a moment all three of us, you, me, and Kevin, stare down at the pachydermal-covered ground. But if you build a six-foot-tall solid wall, I say, if you build it right where the pink flags are, I won’t be able to open my car door.

Not without banging into your fence. Not within twenty feet of my front door, anyway. I’ll have to park at least twenty feet from my door. You only nod. Kevin walks along the line, from flag to flag, then says, You’re telling me those hemlocks belong to you?
You’re saying they’re not ours? It turns out they’re on my land.

We’ve been paying to have them sprayed for years, I say. It’s been sixteen years. The whole time we’ve lived here.

We thought they were ours. You say nothing. Kevin says nothing. Why six feet tall? I finally ask. It seems awfully high. It’s so close to our house. We’ll just see a wall every time we come outside. We’re used to looking at the hemlocks. We’ve always had a view. Maybe they don’t belong to us, but we’ll feel like we’re walled in.

We will be walled in, Kevin says. I need it that tall because I’m going to get an animal. An animal could jump over a lower fence. We’ve been staring at these trees for sixteen years, I say. It’s going to be a big change. But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we won’t be able to park in front of our house. You nod. And then you hand me a letter. Our full names are typed on the envelope—complete with our middle initials.

You’ve been looking through public records. You are doing this by the book. This is no friendly note held in my hand. It’s a document.
Here is the part I go over in my head: When I think about you buying the house, having the land surveyed, finding the property line just about in your neighbours’ driveway, telling them you’re going to build a wall, a solid wall, right there; this is the part that I still don’t understand. You know nothing about the reasons it might matter to us to be able to park right in front of our door. For example, in the cancer scenario, I’ll grow weak. That’s inevitable.

Walking twenty feet will feel like a mile to me. Maybe I could do it, make the walk from the car, if we were just a foot or two from the house. But all the way down the drive, all the way from where there’s room to open the door, that’s just too far. So Kevin is going to have to take out the folding wheelchair from the back.

And wheel me up the drive. And then help me out from the chair and then, when he’s settled me in the house, he’ll have to wheel the chair, empty now, back down the drive to the car. And every time he does this he’ll suffer.

Every time, his heart will break. Because one day soon, he knows, the chair will be empty for real. But back inside the house he tries to make me laugh—by imitating you. We’re going to get an animal, he says. An animal! A hippopotamus, in fact.
What’s the deal, I ask, with a man who can’t just say dog? And then Kevin says, Just don’t set a foot onto my land. My land, my land, he says in an Orson Wells voice, his fist raised in the air. And I try to laugh—for Kevin.
But eventually I have to raise the question of whether it’s time for us to tell our son. Because I can feel that there are only three or four more visits left in me. Power is running from my legs like sand down an hourglass. Do we tell Stuart in advance? Or will I just be gone one day?

We hire a lawyer. I don’t want to, but your letter quotes township statutes and talks about your rights as a landowner. It’s just possible, Kevin says, that we have rights too. He looks so worn and haggard as he speaks. He looks as though this is one thing too many. I say, Go ahead, honey.

Hire a lawyer. Let somebody else take this on. Our lawyer sends you a letter. It says that we want you to hold up on construction while we investigate the situation. We want you to give us a chance to see if there’s any way around this.

The phrase adverse possession appears in the second paragraph.
We also send you a handwritten note, behind our lawyer’s back, saying we don’t want this to be a legal fight. Please. We just want you to let us open our car door in front of our house—as a courtesy. We only hired a lawyer because you gave us that document, you made it seem so official. We felt we had to do everything we could.

Your response comes hand-delivered, overnight. “I have every right to erect a fence on my own property.” It says a bit more. But not much. There’s a conversation that hasn’t been had, I tell Sam. The conversation human beings have with each other. He isn’t quite treating us like people. He isn’t quite a person, Kevin says. He’s a creature. He’s an animal himself. He’s like a yeti or something.

He is! He looks exactly like a yeti. That scowl on his face. The way he stomps around his land. It’s inspired, I say. He’s the yeti. And that is what we call you after that. I suppose it’s this ability of yours not to care that intrigues me so.

If I loved you, I would tell how much you’re missing because of that. I would find ways to convince you that I exist. I would resist erasure every moment that I could. For several weeks the letters fly back and forth.
You’re amazed that we think we have any rights. We’re amazed that you think rights are what’s at issue here. Kevin says he’s going to paint a bright red stripe on our side of the line. It’ll be wet paint, he says. I’ll put it down on the day they’re building the fence. So if they set a foot on our property… if they set even one foot on our property… I’ll sit out there with a shotgun, I say.

First one of them steps in red paint loses a leg… I want to scold you in the harsh, caressing tones of a mother to a child. I want to help you, make you understand more about the ways things should be than you do, make you think more, give you some imagination. I want you to imagine that I have a life.

A life that matters. You should care about my life. Kevin stares out the kitchen window every night when he comes home from work.

I’ll miss the plants and bushes, he said, I really will, that makes matters worse?

Another possibility is that Kevin is in danger of losing his job. What if I have cancer, our son is out there in the institution, and, because the boy and I take up so much time, Kevin is having trouble putting the hours in at work?
They’ve tried to be patient with him, they know the situation, but the irony is it’s dragging on for too
long. If I’d died six months ago instead of four months from now, there might not be a problem. They’re good guys.

They do care. But this is too much. The fence goes up on a day when we’re out. And you have no idea where we’ve been.

If I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so much to us, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t shared with you.

You don’t know us. But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there. What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?

Why do you think you should get what is your right? You’re so uncaring, so unreasonable. It must be a defence mechanism of some kind. I’m sure that it is. But Kevin says that’s ridiculous of me. Even to think about you that way.
It’s late at night and neither one of us can sleep. I say to him, I’m sure that the yeti must have been hurt.

Very badly. At some point in his life he must have been very badly hurt, or he’d understand our side. No one can care so little about other people unless they’ve been very badly hurt.

Not necessarily, Kevin tells me. Maybe the problem is he’s never been hurt. He can’t imagine real pain because he’s never experienced it. I can feel his hand reach across the bed for my arm.

Or maybe some folks are just bad, he wraps his fingers around my wrist and maybe some folks are just bad.
My poor sleepless husband, he says that to me very often.

On the day of the mammogram I was more worried about the technician seeing all the bruises on my arms than about the results. You’ll be lucky, I told Kevin, if they don’t come and arrest you for wife abuse. I hate to see you look like that. I was standing in just a bra and panties.
The bruises were all different colours, the newest ones purple, the oldest turning yellow. It’s not so bad, I said. He doesn’t mean it.
He doesn’t know he’s hurting me. I know he doesn’t mean it. I’m not angry at him—you know that. I just hate to see you this way. It’s nothing big, I said. He gets upset. He can’t talk to us, so he lashes out. But I understood that the words were pointless, just filling the air between us with sound. There was nothing I knew that Kevin didn’t know.

There was only this ritual of repeating back and forth what we both already knew. We kissed in the door and I watched him pull out his car—just behind mine in the driveway.

He didn’t wish me luck and it never occurred to me that he should. So, first there was the mammogram, at which I stood with my breasts and my mottled arms exposed.

As the technician squeezed my flesh into position I mumbled something about having fallen off my bike. I bruise very easily, I said. Not: My son had a stroke while in utero and is severely brain-damaged. He isn’t a bad boy at all, but he has these moments of violence and these are the results.

Not that. Then came the letter ordering me back for more tests, an ultrasound, the biopsy, the meeting in my doctor’s office—this time Kevin right there by my side.
And through all of this, about three weeks, right up until the surgery, all I could think about was Stuart. Not even what would happen to him if I died—I couldn’t die, that was out of the question, not on the table for discussion—but little things like who would watch him while I went in for the biopsy, and could I possibly take him to the doctor’s office with me and have him there in the room.

It used to seem so simple: you’re young, you go through school, you fall in love, you marry, you get pregnant. And then the road takes a certain kind of curve.

Your sense of self can disappear. Stuart: cannot speak, cannot walk, barely hears, is blind in one eye. Cannot control his bladder or his bowels. Does he know us? It’s never been clear.

Until now, I’d always hoped that he did. I’d always hoped that it gave him some kind of comfort to have me and have Kevin there with him. But now I’m not so sure that I want that any-more. Now I find myself hoping sometimes he never really knew who I was.

Now, my yeti, I find myself hoping he may be like you. And so won’t ever miss me when I’m gone.

There was spread into the lymph nodes. One doctor spoke about saving the breasts and I said, Just do whatever will make this stop.

I don’t give a shit about my breasts. New questions arise: Just how many fifths of scotch were the two of us going through every week? We tried not to count them in the recycling bin. And eventually we began to throw a couple of bottles into the garbage cans instead, split them up. Maybe Kevin would take a bottle or two in the car and dump them somewhere else.

It’s almost funny. We were drunk the night we realized Stuart would have to be moved. In a glass of brandy, in whiskey are decisions born.

Is this the brave thing to do or the coward’s way out? Kevin said, I don’t know, honey. I just know it’s what has to happen to now. And so do you. Lawrence House. It’s a low-lying building filled with heartbreaks, amongst whom my son looks like part of a crowd.

And people like me and like Kevin pass one another with guilty looks on our faces. The first year, I went to see him just when I was well enough. The second year, there was no sign of spread. I was off chemo and I went almost every day.
Maybe we could bring him home, I said to Kevin. We managed before and I’m feeling fine now. He could come back. Kevin’s voice was quiet. He said, I don’t know if that’s something we should do.

Remember how the two of you used to struggle? You were covered with bruises, Barbara. You couldn’t handle him at all. Well, let’s think about it anyway. Let’s just not say that we won’t. Okay. If you want. We won’t say that we won’t.

Kevin deals the cards, counting quietly to himself. We’ve kept the same deck beside Stuart’s bed for all these years. King’s? I ask.

So I draw from the pile.
No, I say. Not a four, It’s your turn.
I look over at our boy. He is staring somewhere else.

My son is eighteen years old. His head is covered with thick black curls like my own used to be and his eyes are the same bright blue as Sam’s. He would have been a very handsome man.
He would have been something wonderful, I’m convinced. But for the travels of a blood clot to his brain, while he burrowed small and silenced in my womb.
It’s been two months now since your six-foot fence went up. Two months, more or less. From my bed, I can hear your children playing on the other side. Sometimes I turn the television up louder just to drown them out. It’s a terrible thing to feel yourself hate a child.

Kevin didn’t want to go to work today but I argued him out through the door. Nothing will be improved by you losing your job, I said. He drives my car these days. It was always the more dependable one. It’s parked down the drive, near the street, of course—thanks to you. His is stowed in our garage.

He argued when I first told him he should take my keys.

We went through the game of my telling him not to be silly; it would just be until I felt stronger. It wasn’t a big decision at all. Stop being ridiculous, I said. You look like you’re murdering me. It’s just the better car. You should use it while I can’t.

I’ll be taking it back soon enough. And so he gave in. I know that you go to work a little after he leaves—I hear your car door, the ignition.

I know the hours you keep, can predict when you’ll come home. And I know you have a wife.
A friend who visits me, brings us food, brings me gossip, has told me that your wife is very pretty, slender and naturally blond, in her thirties.
She stands on the corner in the mornings and puts your daughter on the bus.

Then an older woman comes in and watches your little boy, while your wife keeps herself busy, though no one in the neighbourhood knows exactly what she does. There are speculations about you.

The new family on the block. There are rumours that you’re putting in a pool. But winter is coming now, I know, and it isn’t the right time.
Maybe in April, when the world has thawed again so the ground will be soft enough to dig.

Kevin drives out alone to Worcester Hospital now, every two or three days. My last trip was two weeks ago. I said my goodbyes in silence, the language of my motherhood. There were other periods when I wasn’t there. There’s no way to explain to my child that this is different.

And probably no reason that we should, though I still carry this awful fear that he’ll think, in whatever way he thinks, that I have given up on him.
I held his heavy head one last time, pulled it gently to my chest, no longer soft. That day, in the car driving home, Kevin was unusually talkative, telling me stories about a new co-worker, and then about an old friend. Both of them had done hilarious things—as though everyone Kevin knew had taken on an antic side, every situation holding a fistful of punch lines.

And it was funny, genuinely funny. I laughed out loud as he drove us both home.
I don’t drink any more. I lost the craving.

But Kevin brings the bottle upstairs now and he sits by the bed. Sometimes we watch television.
Sometimes we just talk. He pours freely for himself on the understanding that I’m not keeping track.

I pick through our lives, recounting good moments, like looking for treasures at the flea market, he listens, sometimes even smiles.

I know you must have heard by now that I’m sick. It’s that kind of town, that kind of neighbourhood. Our story: the boy who was born so damaged, the mother who won’t make it to the spring, it’s all well known.

We’re the kind of family people talk about.
Kevin phones me from the office to let me know he’ll be late because he’s visiting the boy. I tell him that’s just as well. I’m feeling tired.

But by the time he gets home, I say, I’ll be awake. I say it, but who really knows? The clock has lost its meaning. My relationship with time is more personal now.

Just take care of yourself, he says. I hate to have you there, alone. I’ll just take a nap.
Just don’t go on the stairs. I won’t go on the stairs. I won’t even go to the bathroom. I won’t get up. I’ll just rest. Just take care.

Just. It’s a word we use a lot now—though in only one way that we might. As though we have lost our knowledge of the other meaning. Just be careful. I’ll just do this tiny thing. Just move my pillows a little higher up. Just don’t worry. Just be good to yourself. Just take care.

If you’d just moved the damned fence just a foot… It was the little note of grace that we both needed then. I sometimes think that when I’m gone Kevin will drive his car right into your well-constructed fence.
I can picture it so easily, Kevin behind the wheel pulling up into the drive, speeding; and swerving left.
If the tables were turned, there’s no doubt it’s what I’d do. Because who is there left to be angry at? Except you?
We used up all the other obvious candidates long ago.

When he gets home, Kevin climbs heavily to our room, the whiskey bottle and a glass in his hand. I have been dozing, but am now awake. I hope he feels bad about what he did, he says. If he were the type to feel bad, I say, speaking slowly, he wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

If he cared a tiny bit about us and our lives he wouldn’t have acted as he did. He’s indifferent to us. It had all been decided before we met.
There was never any hope. I don’t tell him about these now-fading fantasies of mine. The ones that started early on. About trying to reason with you.

Trying to make you believe in my life. The simple fact of my existence. I don’t tell him that. I am so close now to being entirely erased. I see things that were invisible to me before. Kevin sits there, and he drinks, a flush beginning to spread through his cheeks.
He’s indifferent? he asks. Is that really what it is? There is a universe of sorrow, wide and dark, in my husband’s staring eyes.
An eternity built there, constructed over time, forged gradually of the realization that this is in fact our lives. This is what we have been dealt. It’s possible, I say to him, that you were right. What you said about some folks just being bad.

But as I speak, I realize how little I want to say what I have learned. How reluctant I am to admit to

Kevin what indifference truly means, and has long meant to us both. I do not want to play a role in confirming that cruel universe that dwells inside my husband’s eyes.

But I do love him. I do. I love him very much. And so to him— if not to you—I speak the truth.

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