A Kind of Breathing

“A Pulse” by Aaron Lelito

Suzanna’s divorce became final just before the pandemic began in earnest and she was forced to shelter in place in what was now her house. She occupied herself washing windowsills, cleaning grout, and decluttering kitchen drawers. At night she watched TV in bed, blearily binging on Food Network shows because she couldn’t cook anything more complicated than a meatloaf. She imagined wowing future dinner-party guests with something complicated: Beef Wellington, maybe, or a dish that had to be set on fire.

She couldn’t say she missed Beau—his relentless pursuit of an argument, as well as the need to be the most moral person in any room, were qualities she found insufferable—but she still wasn’t used to his absence. Half the furniture, his clothes and toiletries, his mountain bike, the ancient Forester: The house devoid of these things seemed oddly not to belong to her anymore. She did not know how to reclaim it.

When she told him they were finished, he sighed deeply. “I will always love you. None of this has anything to do with me not loving you,” he said, as though he was the one who’d ended it.

It made her mad. Now every memory of good times together—Sunday car rides in search of coffee and donuts, warm afternoons paddling the Elkhorn Slough, reading David Sedaris aloud to each other on the beach at Rio del Mar, lazy morning sex—was tinged with his spitefulness, the way he couldn’t just let her be the one who’d left.   

***

Except for exercise and short outings to buy essentials, they were penned in like cattle, she in the Aptos home they had shared for nearly a decade, he in a rented condo in Capitola. She comforted herself with the fact that she had only herself to worry about, that Beau’s lifelong and exuberant refusal to do what was asked of him—wear a bike helmet, floss, cut down on carbs—had certainly extended to maintaining appropriate social distances.

Unable to get to the salon, she stopped dying her hair and marveled at the auburn roots beginning to show. She thought, When this is over I’ll be a redhead again. A different person. Maybe someone who will join a book club or run for city council. Who won’t over-apologize. Who will never run late.

As time went on she grew more anxious, disinfected more surfaces, scrubbed her hands raw, washed onions and incoming mail, wore masks and gloves to take out the trash. She scoured the bathroom ceilings for mold and dusted the shelves in the garage. Nothing was clean enough, would ever be clean enough again. Aside from Zoom meetings with clients—she was an interior designer specializing in the deceptively casual look of upscale beach houses—and conversations with a couple of friends, life consisted of ordering groceries, disinfecting them, and finding new pockets of household disarray or filth to attack.

*

After several weeks she began to worry about the old Monterey pine on the side of the house. It looked mangy and top-heavy. Nick (who worked for Bough Down Arborists, the company she’d called) showed up early one morning just as the sun began to burn through the fog. From the living room window, she watched as he circled the tree several times, looking up. It made him seem short: an occupational hazard, she supposed. He wore a mask and a T-shirt inscribed Kickass Tree Surgeon. It looked like something a wife or girlfriend had made for him.

Now she was always wondering who was married and who wasn’t. Eduardo, the Instacart guy who delivered groceries; neighbors seeking respite from walls closing in around them; the doctor who’d diagnosed her headaches via Video Appointment as “quarantine-stress-related.” It had become the single most important thing she wanted to know about anybody. She hadn’t decided whether this was a reaction to divorce or sheltering in place. Either way, she wanted to know who else was alone.

When Nick knocked, she fished a mask out of her back pocket. He stood at the bottom of her kitchen steps, maintaining the requisite distance.

“I think your tree’s got some problems,” he said.

Shaggy hair, broad shoulders. Top-heavy himself.

“What kind of problems?”

“Looks like it hasn’t been trimmed in a while.”

Her heart sank. She had failed to be vigilant enough.

“Bark beetles like dead branches,” he said. “They can kill a tree.”

The one living thing she had to be responsible for, besides herself.

He squinted at her across the distance. “No, no! Don’t cry!” Waving his hands, warding off her sadness as if it were a mugger running at him in a dark alley.

She blinked rapidly, feeling the tears dampening the hem of her mask. “I didn’t know!”

“It’ll be okay. No beetles yet that I could see. I’ll clear that dead stuff out.”

“For a doctor you have a pretty shitty bedside manner,” she said. When he looked puzzled, she gestured toward his chest.

“Oh, this. From my daughter. She thinks ‘arborist’ is snooty.” He laughed. “You got teenagers?”

“No.” Just a dying tree.

“She’s pretty mouthy these days,” Nick said.

“Jeez. Sheltering in place with a teenager.”

“She’s with her mother. I miss her like crazy.”

“Are you Zooming?”

“I’m not good at that stuff,” he said. “I need to be face to face.” After a moment he added, “This isn’t the ideal time to trim a tree. Usually you want to do it during the winter. When it’s dormant.”

Sleeping. Alive but resting, gathering strength, resolve. She thought, Quarantine is a divorce from the whole world.

“Do trees have hearts?” Suzanna asked. She braced herself, ready to be laughed at.

“Not exactly. But at night they move their branches up and down. Very slowly. Scientists think they are pumping water up from the roots. Nourishing shoots and leaves. It’s like a pulse.”

“Just at night?” She liked the idea of trees doing the hard work of living under cover of darkness.

“That’s what the brainiacs think.” After a moment he said, “So I’ll come by next Wednesday. Take out some of those branches.”

It would break the monotony of days bleeding one into the next. Something to write on the calendar. She took out her phone and typed in Nick at 10. It felt like the beginning of something.

***

Within fifteen minutes she received two texts. The first, from Nick, read, That was the longest conversation I’ve had in six weeks.

The second was from Beau: I’m sick. Can I stay with you?

***

He looked ghastly when she let him in: stooped, gaunt, gray. His temple glistened with sweat; his long-lashed eyes above his mask were heavy-lidded, blank. She followed him to the guest bedroom at the end of the hall and watched from the doorway as he dropped his gym bag and fell into bed.

“If you stay here, there have to be rules,” she said. “You wear a mask. Always.”

“Not now,” he murmured, eyes closed.

Dismissed. She knew he didn’t feel well, but still. She was reminded of the small brutalities of life lived with another person.

“Don’t come out. For any reason.” She closed the door. Then she stood in the hall for several minutes, listening to the rattle and rasp of breath deep in his chest.

***

Dicing celery, she tried to reassure herself: The hallway had its own bathroom and was distinctly separate from the rest of the house. The door to the guest room was closed. She could leave food out in the hall.

But what the hell was he doing here? Why not ride out the virus alone? He had friends, maybe even a girlfriend by now—he wasn’t one for solitude—who could be called in a true emergency. Why stay here? Why involve her?

Later she set the tray of soup and bread outside the guest room door and knocked. “It’s hot,” she said.

“Can’t you bring it in?”

“No. Get it yourself.”

She walked to the end of the hall and waited. At first she thought he was too weak to get out of bed, but soon enough the door opened. He bent down to retrieve the tray.

“Beau! You have to wear a mask!”

He rose, tray in hand. “Why? You’ve got one on.”

“Now you listen. In my house you wear a mask. Do you hear me?”

At the other end of the hall, he stared, mouth agape.

“I swear to God, Beau, if I see you again without one, I will kick you the fuck out. Do you hear me?”

She was not given to outbursts.

“Okay. Okay.”

She went to her bedroom and closed the door. Then she pushed the bed away from the wall and dusted the length of the baseboard until she stopped shaking.

***

Late that night, lulled almost into unconsciousness by the TV’s low drone, she remembered Nick’s text, startling herself awake. She reached for her phone and typed, Me too.

Almost immediately he texted back: Researching pedunculate oaks in Europe. You ever been to Sweden?

She wondered if he meant to be sending this to her. No, she wrote. What’s a pedunculate oak?

He sent her a photo. This is the Swedish one. Largest in Europe.

It was a beautiful tree: multiple trunks—gnarled, knobby, moss-covered—lashed together beneath a brilliant, spring-green canopy. She thought the roots and trunks looked like the backsides of naked women kneeling, throwing up their arms in prayer or jubilation. She wrote: It must be very old.

Probably almost 1000 years. No way to tell for sure. Trunk is hollow. You can’t check for rings, he wrote. Someday I’d like to see it.

So many places I want to go. New Zealand. Croatia. Thailand.

New Zealand has good trees.

Are there any pedunculate oaks nearby?

Coast live oaks, he wrote. I’ll show you sometime.

***

The next morning she set a tray of oatmeal and fresh blueberries outside Beau’s door. From the end of the hall, she watched as he emerged and bent for the tray. “Thank you,” he said, the words muffled behind his mask.

***

Now the preparing of his meals began to give shape to her days. She woke each morning knowing he needed breakfast. It seemed important to give him something evocative of health and well-being, food that reminded him how it felt to breathe deeply in and out. Omelets, waffles made from gluten-free flour, fresh-cut fruit. Organic salads, pasture-raised meats, free-range chicken. Eduardo, setting the groceries on her steps, smiled and waved as she watched from the front window and called out, “Good eating!” He must have remembered her orders from the first few weeks: boxes of macaroni and cheese, pints of Chunky Monkey, crackers and tins of pre-made tuna salad that looked like cat food.

***

Nick trimmed the old pine. He spent several hours high in its branches, clearing out debris, thinning the crown so air and light could nourish the lower boughs. Suzanna watched from the steps outside the open kitchen door as long-dead wood piled up along the side of the road. The pole saw’s screech hurt her ears, but the commingled scent of sawdust and sap and needles made her linger, unwilling to go back inside.

After he finished, he stood at the foot of the steps. They were shy with each other: Their week of nightly texting, which amounted to extended musings on where they would go and what they wanted to see when the pandemic was over, seemed suddenly intimate, transgressive. Face to face they were tongue-tied, unsure what the other wanted to hear in person.

“A lot of mess,” he finally said. “I got it cleaned out for you.”

“What’s it like up there?” She was fascinated by treetops: the advantages of elevation and concealment.

“No evidence of disease,” he said, but then he seemed to realize what she meant. “I always liked climbing them when I was a kid. Each one was a personal challenge. I thought of them as existing for my personal entertainment.

“But when I started learning about them, treating their ailments, well, it changes you. It changed me, anyway. They’re alive. They need care and attention. I don’t know.” He seemed embarrassed. “It’s kind of a compulsion now. What I do. Maybe making up for what I didn’t know before.”

She understood him then.

***

Over the next week Beau’s condition seemed to deteriorate. His cough sounded inhuman: the shriek of an animal in a trap, a desperate, last-ditch effort. Sometimes she texted him: Are you all right? Do you want to go to the hospital? He never responded.

She took comfort in the amount he ate. The plates he left outside his door were nearly clean, although he would usually leave something behind— a dollop of mashed potatoes, two strawberries, a perfect square of New York strip—like someone who’d been taught that doing so was polite, a way of signaling he hadn’t been left wanting.

At night, the TV turned low so she could detect sounds of acute distress, she and Nick traded pictures of secluded beaches and trails that wound through dense forests. Every once in a while, he would text We should go there someday. Her heart backflipped each time she read the words, even though he had never professed romantic intention. For all she knew, he was looking for a travel buddy.

One night she wrote I’ve never actually seen your whole face. Send me a pic. A few minutes later it appeared. His skin was ruddy and slightly pocked; his nose had clearly been broken once or twice. Not handsome, perhaps, but brawny, vigorous, which, in her experience, was better. Masculine men didn’t have as much to prove.

Want me to send you one? she texted.

Don’t need it, he wrote back. I know exactly what you look like.

***

It took a full three weeks for her to realize that Beau was probably going to pull through. He still had a cough but had begun sleeping through the night. He said his fever was going down. Sometimes she could hear him laugh at something on his phone, and even though the laughter ended in a paroxysm of hacking and wheezing, she was relieved to know he was beginning to enjoy small pleasures.

Rolling out the dough for a chicken pot pie one afternoon, she wondered why she had not thought to tell Nick that her ex-husband was recovering from Covid-19 in her spare bedroom. In the beginning it hadn’t seemed to be anything he needed to know. As time went on, she noticed neither of them brought up other people in their lives. No mention of family or friends, except for Nick’s daughter that first day. It was as though they lived in a sterile, unbreachable bubble, an island in an empty sea on which both had been improbably marooned. To violate this immaculacy might be to risk rescue.

***

After another week during which Beau made no move to return to his own house, she knocked on his door.

He was engrossed in his phone, unkempt hair longer than she’d ever seen it, shocking strands of silver catching the sunlight from the open window. He was wearing the Ski India T-shirt he’d always slept in, the fabric worn so thin it had separated at the neck seam nearly all the way around. Through the gape in the cloth she could see the whiteness of his upper chest, and the glimpse made her feel protective, motherly.  

“Doing better?”

He reached for his mask and put it on. “Better. On the mend.”

“So what’s the plan?”

He met her gaze. “What plan?”

“The plan for you to leave.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

His eyes, without benefit of nose or mouth or chin, reminded her of the early days of their courtship when, in coffee houses, in theaters before the lights went down, in bed, she had looked intently into them and sworn she’d seen his soul.

“We’re divorced,” she said.

“I still love you.”

“Is that why you came back?”

“You’re my home,” he said.

At that moment she knew she loved him too. She had buried the knowledge deep. But omelets thick with cheese and spinach, salads tenderly arranged like bouquets, potatoes mashed into lumplessness, carrots slick with honey and butter were all the proof she needed. Keeping him alive and cared for: the work of love. A kind of breathing.

“We’ll still have the same problems,” she said. “Nothing is fixed.”

“Nothing is perfect,” he said, and she saw his laugh lines wrinkle with the effort of his masked smile.

***

Was that the problem all along, that she had wanted a man without flaws? She considered this as she organized the pantry, throwing away bottles of age-hardened spices, scrubbing shelves, laying contact paper, labeling bins.

In the afternoon she drove to the forest north of town and parked along the fire road just outside the state park entrance. She wore her mask around her neck in case it was needed, but the road was nearly deserted and the people she passed were careful to maintain a safe distance. No one smiled or made eye contact, as if simply acknowledging each other was a breach of  the required interspace. Everyone, she saw, was afraid.

That was the thing about isolation, she realized. At first it was agonizing, but as time went on it became a cozy enclosure, lonely but safe, harder and harder to leave. Anything else—even people spotted in the far distance—seemed an intrusion, a potential source of harm. She nearly turned back.

But she walked on. The trees along the road—redwoods, cottonwoods, alders, madrones—arranged themselves just for her, fortress-like. She looked up and hardly saw the sky. From the dense canopy chickadees and nuthatches sang out; a family of quail embarked on a skittery march across her path. She heard the creek deep in the canyon, swollen with recent rain. Her breathing eased; she stretched her arms overhead. Her heart—battered for so long—began to beat: a steady, ecstatic pulse.

***

That evening, in response to her text, Nick wrote: Glad he’s okay. When’s he leaving?

Tomorrow. She twirled a fork in her spaghetti Bolognese and brought a mouthful to her lips. After Beau left, she would make fresh linguini for the rest of the sauce.

You just took him in for no reason?

No, she wrote. There were reasons.

What reasons?

Not what you’re thinking.

He didn’t respond, which surprised her. Maybe, in presuming to know what he’d never said out loud, she had offended him.

She thought about texting that she was sorry but fell asleep early, and by morning she’d forgotten the whole thing.

***

She was surprised to see Beau still in bed when she knocked on his door at ten. “Are you packed?”

He looked at her genially over his face-covering. “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

“Now why would I do that?” She hoped she sounded kind. 

“Because I love you. And I know you love me too.” His eyes betrayed the effort of asking her twice, as close as he had ever come to begging.

“You have to leave today.”

She saw the glint in his eyes, knew he sensed gleefully the possibility of an argument he thought he could win. She crossed her arms as he cajoled and wheedled, not saying a word.

Finally he shook his head. “You are heartless,” he said without a trace of tenderness.

***

I think trees have hearts, she texted that night. I think scientists just haven’t found them yet.

Trees, she had learned from Nick, communicated with insects and fungi. They aged, defended themselves, recovered from fire and injury. Maybe their hearts were bruised or scorched, or simply of unfamiliar aspect, indiscernible in bark or roots.

Immediately Nick texted back: Do you want to meet somewhere? Have a picnic, maybe?

She thought of what she might bring: cheese and sundried tomato muffins, minted potato salad, deviled eggs flecked with spring onions.

He wrote: A big blanket. For social distancing.

Maybe when all this is over, she wrote. After all, quarantines, unlike divorces, eventually came to an end. She imagined them both lying flat under a sheltering tree, blue sky glimmering beyond its leaves. The luxuries of pleasant company, a light breeze scented with grass and sunlight, the relief of unconfinement.

But for now—the months or years of uncertainty still looming—she would stay where she was. She would plant a garden and can the tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn she harvested. Buy a small table loom and learn to weave blankets and scarves. She would review project designs to insure code and regulatory compliance and help her clients add texture and color with throw pillows. She would tend gently to herself. She would attempt Duck Pâté en Croûte.

Gina Willner-Pardo has written short stories published in Berkeley Fiction Review, The South Carolina Review, Bluestem, Pleiades, Cog Magazine, Five on the Fifth, White Wall Review, Mad River Review, Origins Journal, Streetlight Magazine, Summerset Review, and Whetstone, which awarded her story “Accident” the John Patrick McGrath Memorial Award. She has also written seventeen books for children, all published by Clarion or Albert Whitman. Gina’s book Figuring Out Frances won the Josette Frank Award, presented by the Bank Street College of Education, to honor a book of “outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally.”

Gina has a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has studied with James Frey.