You Can’t Follow Him There by Lisa Bubert

The illness had been buried in the genes—James’ mother had it and her mother too—so it was no surprise to Janie when James began to disappear into various rooms of their house and transform them into whatever memory he inhabited in that moment. Yesterday, their spare bedroom reverted back to their TV room on the day of the moon landing. Today, the screen on the back patio disappeared, leaving just the original concrete foundation and a bigheaded boy dressed in military uniform. James sat in the sun on that bare concrete all day, looking not a day over nineteen and playing grown-up by smoking a cigar too old for him. How he puffed it with such importance. This was the year before he’d gone to war. Janie could almost recognize that face. He’d always had chipmunk cheeks that reminded her of his mother, no matter how hard he tried to lean himself down. She didn’t mind him being out there—she could keep an eye on him as she loaded the dishwasher—but she did mind this version of James. This was a James before they were James and Janie. This was the James Janie liked least.

The rooms of their house had become oppressive with memory. James, sequestered into each of them, swaddled in a world of his own making. All of this expected. And still, all of it happening far too fast. They were supposed to go back to the deer lease in two months’ time for the annual hunt, but that was off now, forever. The last family Christmas was only weeks ago. The last, the last, the last, and neither James nor Janie had suspected it to be the last. Ravaging, this disease.

And yet, so slow. Now that it had started, doctors said it would be years, possibly even a decade or more of this coming and going, in and out of rooms Janie hadn’t seen for eons, not since the kids were kids.

The first time it happened, Janie found James in the old family room, the one they used for sitting and visiting until they remodeled it in ’74 to become Janie’s new sewing room. That day, as she walked past the open door, there sat a younger James, a virile forty-something lounging in that old chair Janie had thrown out decades earlier, clicking the remote on a bunny-eared TV they had replaced in ’79.

Janie stood at the threshold, her breath caught. She knew what this meant. But how bad could it be? Everyone always said it was so awful, but this was something else—her husband young again, the lean, tanned muscle of his arm resting on the chair, the gold watch shining again, his jaw set and the cords of his neck strong. So young. So young and so completely oblivious of her. She took a step to enter the room and found she couldn’t. There was no barrier; she could see him clearly. And yet, she couldn’t move forward to join him.

“James,” she called, and he kept on clicking the remote, channel after channel of shows Janie couldn’t see for static.

“James,” she tried again, more insistent. Nothing. Her James would have turned his head for his wife. This James simply couldn’t hear her.

Janie stood there for hours, first coaxing then crying, until she gave up and sat at the dinner table where she could still see him. She sat and waited and observed. He clicked and clicked, so absorbed in the nothing he was watching. An occasional laugh broke through the smile that first broke Janie. She had loved that smile. She loved his smile now, but it had grown weathered with age. This smile on this younger James was the original, a touch more radiant than the demure smile on old James, the one that kept more secrets.

She fell asleep in the chair waiting for him. When she woke, he sat at the dining room table with her, setting out cards for solitaire and asking after dinner. An old James to match his Janie once again.

§

Hoping this first stumble was a blip. Knowing it wasn’t. Janie took James to a neurologist to be evaluated.

“It will be like this now,” the doctor said. “More and more. He’ll go in and out.”
“What am I supposed to do with that,” Janie said. James waited outside the door, not interested in hearing what he already knew to be true.

The doctor shrugged. “It’s like a ride,” she said. “Some people grow to like rollercoasters.”

§

After that first room, James didn’t disappear into any others and Janie thought really, truly, maybe it had been just a blip and there would be no rollercoaster after all and they would go on as they had, eating forever breakfasts in the morning-light kitchen and spooning forever ice cream in the nightly TV glow. But later that month, James disappeared again. And then again. And then again and again.

Once, into their pantry where she caught a teenager scarfing down the secret stash of cookies.

“Shoo!” she shouted. “Your blood sugar,” she warned his deaf ears.

Once, in the laundry room where she caught him at fifty digging through her underwear.

“Surely, we were too old for that,” she said, blushing and smiling.

It could be funny. That’s what people said who weren’t watching the rooms of their homes dissolve daily into dissident memories. It could be funny to see what came up.

But it could be awful too. James at twenty-three, sitting naked on their bathroom toilet and sobbing. Janie remembered this day, the day he’d come home from the war. He’d been quiet, first wearing that demure smile that would be his forever. But then he’d retreated into their bathroom for a shower and stayed for hours. The family, come to celebrate his return, slowly left and Janie had waited outside the closed door, knowing better than to coax him.

The door was open now, and now she knew better than to try and step inside. She could only watch, only observe the way his shoulders racked as he heaved and sighed, the way his face grew red and sweaty with tears. Breathe, she wanted to tell him. Take a breath. But he wouldn’t have heard her anyway. He would breathe on his own when he felt like it.

§

It bothered Janie that James would never come out of a room for her, nor would he heed her pleas to stay in the room they were in together.

“I’ll be right back,” he always said, waving her away. “It’ll be just a minute.”

And then he would be gone. Another man on another day in a completely different dimension in their same house. He would stay there for hours and Janie, frustrated, would stamp her foot.

“You remember all this but you can’t remember you said you’d be right back,” she shouted at his doorstep.

Their daughter, Karen, begged Janie. “We have to move him out of the house,” she said. “The house isn’t good for him. It’s too easy to get lost.”

Janie shook her head. It didn’t matter either way. She knew James would transform any room he was in.

Case in point, when Janie and James attended the funeral of an old friend and then went out to the Chinese buffet afterward for lunch, James disappeared into the bathroom only to be discovered a half-hour later clowning around in what had become the old bathroom in his brother-in-law’s house, the pink tile Janie loved and everything. James and Kenneth had been close, best friends, and it frustrated Janie that James would transform a room that included Kenneth but not a room that included her. James laughed into the mirror at nobody. He was around the age he’d been after the birth of their daughter, twenty-seven or so. He spoke as if Kenneth was right there with him, but Kenneth wasn’t there. He’d died years earlier when he fell and smacked his head on that same pink tub in that same pink bathroom.

The restaurant offered to call an ambulance. Then, they threatened to call the police when James refused to vacate the room. Janie put them off, ever patient, and ever unsure. Eventually, James told Kenneth he was going to fetch a beer and emerged into a restaurant full of troubled faces.

“He’ll get worse and worse,” their daughter said. “He’ll get to the point where he won’t leave the room, and you won’t be able to get to him.”

Janie laughed. They had been at that point for months, but better to keep Karen in the dark. She would only worry more than she needed to.

Because even if James disappeared for hours, even whole days, into a room of his own making, the room was still in their home and he was still James. And he was a younger James, a lighter James, the happy-go-lucky James Janie hadn’t seen for so long it seemed cruel to both him and her to yank him out of it. Not that she could even if she wanted to.

As time went on, she thought how nice it would be to be able to join him in those rooms. If she could step over that threshold—would she transform too? Would she be the younger Janie, the beautiful Janie, the Janie James married on day one? Would he see what she saw? Or would he see an old woman, one he didn’t recognize, or worse, mistook for his mother. It would be impossible to know the answer—the disease didn’t allow her to join him.

§

One Tuesday, Janie was short of breath. She just made the chair at the kitchen table, and she sat, breathing and breathing. James had gone off the hour earlier claiming he just needed to grab something, and who knew what room he’d disappeared into now or when he would remember to come back for his wife. And here, Janie, breathing and huffing and wondering. Would she be able to get up? To get up and walk just long enough to get to the phone?

She would not. So she sat and sat and sat and watched the sun go up and then back down and she sat and her stomach growled and she sat and her bladder released onto the chair and onto the floor and she sat and still James did not come for her. She didn’t even try calling for him.

Somewhere in the house Janie could imagine his younger self. Maybe planing a length of cedar in the woodshop, maybe laughing at a family meal, maybe getting dressed in his blue jumpsuit, maybe flexing younger muscles in the bathroom mirror. His hair jet black, then lighter, then salt and pepper, then white. His sideburns in seventies mutton chops, cut short for army, grown long and unruly to meet the hair in his ears. Each version of him Janie loved. What she would give to get up from this chair and just join him, finally.

The phone rang and nobody answered. Karen came to check on them and found Janie sleeping upright in a soiled kitchen chair while James toiled away at the renovation they’d completed in the seventies.
“This is untenable,” Karen said. “This can’t stand.”

And then it happened. The kitchen flickered back to decades before. Janie stood at the table wearing a sundress and cutting into a roast chicken. A dozen dyed eggs waiting on the counter to be hidden for an Easter that must have been decades ago. The kids were all so old now. All this just for a moment. Then back—a dark, dirty kitchen, urine pooled on the floor, and an old, confused woman gripping the table as if she might fall sideways.

An appointment was made with the doctor.

§

Who knew how long Janie had until the house dissolved complete into memory. How little it mattered anyway. The disappearance had felt like the blink of an eye, a tiny hole in her psyche. All this time, she thought he’d been enjoying it. When really, in his mind, he hadn’t even been there at all.

§

More soiled chairs. More disappeared rooms. More unanswered phones. An agreement was made that both James and Janie would be moved to a home.

“Two weeks,” Janie begged. “Just give us two weeks.”

Two more weeks of time that didn’t move like time. James, finally back from a long journey in what used to be the mud room, balked when Janie told him.

“What do they want to do all that for?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

He’d grown so thin, months of missed meals as he spent whole days in rooms of memory. To James, it felt like the last Christmas was only last week.

“No,” Janie showed him a calendar. “It’s August now. Don’t you see?”

“Piddle,” James said. “You just forgot to change the days.”

Two weeks gone so fast Janie wondered how much of it had been spent in her own sea of memory. Which rooms had been transformed in her absence? Where had she gone? It was one thing to watch James enjoy the past—a whole other now that she understood it to be nothing more than another day to him, the mundane memory he was in just as normal and forgettable as the first time he lived it.

The day of their taking. Janie had marked it with a big, red circle on the calendar. But who could trust that? She only knew they were still here so the day mustn’t have come yet.

James, an old man in hunched shadow, passed by the doorway and Janie, for once, had the strength to get up and follow. He stood at the threshold of their daughter’s old bedroom. He was going there. Like he knew he was going and he was doing it anyway.

“James,” she said, and he did stop this time, turned to look at her. Then he turned back, and disappeared into the room.

Janie followed and stopped at the door. Inside, all pink and pastel, like the day they brought Karen home from the hospital. A little bassinet. The sun coming through the window just right. Yellow, embroidered curtains. Janie hand stitched those herself, then packed them away when Karen turned thirteen and pronounced them too babyish for her new age. And there, James—the man he was on the day he became a father.

He reached in the bassinet and picked up a little bald-headed baby. He laughed at her, brought her close to his face. There, that smile Janie loved and loved and loved. He turned and settled into the rocking chair, the bald-headed baby in the crook of his elbow, his smile as endearing as a gap in the teeth. Janie remembered this day so well. How she’d allowed herself a break, five minutes alone in the bathroom to cry over everything she wasn’t sure about, and then back to the nursery to find James with the baby looking like he’d never belonged anywhere else. He still looked that way now, just like the memory. He didn’t belong anywhere else.

Janie’s hip ached. Her hands on the door trim old and wrinkled and dotted with brown spots. Somewhere in the back of her mouth, a tooth throbbed.

“Please,” she said. And this time, James looked up. Dark hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders. Arms that made Janie ache.

“Well,” he said. “Come on then.” He extended his arm out for her. Come, it said. Let’s sit.

And this time, Janie took a step over the threshold, let herself in. She reached for his hand, settled it around her hip. She sat on his knee, rested her forehead under his chin, cooed to Karen, and closed her eyes for a nap.

Lisa Bubert is a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Washington Square Review, Carolina Quarterly, Natural Bridge, and more, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. She is currently at work on her second book. Find her at www.lisabubert.com.