“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m done. I was just heating something up.” I take the apple crisp out, pour the nearly melted ice cream over it.
“Boy, that smells great,” the man says, and I must admit he is right. I put extra butter and spices in with the apples.
“Is that for …”
“It’s for my husband,” I say. “Not that he can eat it. He’s … well, he’s in a coma.” I smile, ridiculously. “I just wanted his room to smell nice. You know. Well, actually, I hoped the smell would get through to him, somehow.” It drives Jay crazy, the way I do this, the way I am always giving more information than I have to. Say I stop at a tollbooth and ask directions. I can’t just say, “How do you get to Route 3A?” I have to say, “Hi. We’re going to visit a friend who used to be our neighbor and we got caught in traffic a while back so we’re running late, and we’d like to find the fastest way to get there and another friend of mine told me 3A is actually better than the highway. But he’s not the most reliable source. You know. So I thought I’d better check.” Jay says, Don’t give more information than people need to know. But I always do anyway.
“He’s in a coma?” the man in the kitchen with me asks now.
I look down. “Yes, well …”
“My wife is in a coma, too.”
I look up quickly, wonder if this is a terrible, terrible joke, see that it is not. Oh, it is not.
He shrugs. “Small world, huh?”
I nod. I feel a little sick.
“There’s three people here in comas,” the man says. “The other one, lady called Mrs. McGovern, she’s in her eighties. Stroke. Jeannie, my wife, she’s …” He swallows against his pain. “She’s thirty-three.” He nods, pushes his hands into his pockets. There, in his balled-up fists, is his aching heart.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Of course I understand completely what you’re going through. How long?”
He looks away, thinks. “Six months. God. I’d forgotten.”
Six months! “Three for me.”
He nods again.
“How did she …”
“Aneurysm,” the man says. “She came into the living room after dinner one night, holding her forehead, and she sat down and she had this strange look on her face. She said she had a real bad headache. After just a few minutes, it was much worse and she said maybe we should call a doctor. So I took her to the emergency room and they admitted her to the hospital right away, they were going to do surgery the next day. During the night she lost consciousness. They did the surgery but she never … she hasn’t woken up yet. She hemorrhaged in the OR, she arrested a few times …” He looks away, then back at me.
“I’m Lainey Berman,” I say, finally.
“Ted Nichols.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too. For you, I mean.”
“Thank you. Listen, I have to get back to my children. They’re with their father. I don’t want to leave them alone too long.”
“Right. Well, we’re in 222.”
“203.” I smile, back out of the room.
Out into the hall, I stand still for a minute, try to take in what I’ve just heard. Down at the other end of the hall, I see Flozell wheeling along behind a woman who is painstakingly taking herself for a ride in her wheelchair. “Get along now, Mary,” he is saying. Well, actually kind of yelling. “I got to go faster than this. Let me by.”
“I certainly will not,” the old lady says, barely turning around. She is dressed in a brown-and-white polka-dot housedress and blue plastic slippers, nylons rolled to the knee. Her thin white hair is neatly styled into a French twist. She is wearing huge clip-on earrings, a pearl-and-rhinestone arrangement. The left one hangs down too low, nearly off her ear. “You can just wait for me,” she says. Then, in a lower voice, but one he can still hear, “I declare, you are the rudest man I have ever met.”
Flozell sees the apple crisp in my hand, stops before me. “What’d you bring me, darlin’?”
I ignore him, start to walk away. A nurse comes up to him, sullenly offers him a cup of pills. “I have been looking everywhere for you, Flozell,” she says. “You know when it’s time for your medication. I’d appreciate it if you would stay in your room at those times. I can’t be running all over the place looking for you. I have too much to do. You ought to know that.”
“Lord, listen to you run on at the mouth,” he says, snatching the pills from her, upending the cup over his mouth, swallowing them without water. “Run on at the mouth! I guess every woman in this place done got her period at the same time. You all cranky! Oowee! Man could drown in the female hormones ’round here, you girls vicious!”
“You hush up!” Mary says, then wheels herself serenely around the corner.
When I push open the door to Jay’s room, I see Amy and Sarah stretched out on his bed, one on either side of him. They have removed their shoes; I see them neatly lined up on the floor by the dresser. On the outside I smile at this deeply familiar sight of him, a daughter on each side as though she grows there; and on the inside my heart breaks in half, one side falling neatly away from the other. I do things to help, and they hurt. I do things to hurt, and they help.
It’s midnight, and Alice’s dog Maggie and I are rocking again, though we are on the sofa this time, not in the rocker by the window. She has actually fallen asleep; I can hear her damp snoring. I am thinking about the man named Ted and his wife Jeannie. I still can’t think who he reminds me of. Maybe nobody. Maybe he’s just the kind of person who’s good-looking enough that you think he ought to look like someone famous. I’ll bet people come up to him all the time saying, “Are you …?” And he has to all the time say, “No.” I wonder what his wife looks like, what kind of couple they made. And then I think about all the other people there must be who have loved ones in a coma, who live in a state of desperate hope, not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing, not knowing, not knowing. And then, because I just can’t think about this anymore, I turn on the television. I flip through the channels until I see Lucy saying, “Awwwww, Ricky!” and then I sit back to watch. I hope Lucy calls Ethel on the phone. Every time she calls Ethel on the phone, it’s a good one.
Maggie is actually getting a little heavy. I shift her over to my other shoulder. This wakes her up, and she pushes away from me, walks stiff-legged along the sofa to the end of it, lies back down. She puts her chin on her paws, sighs loudly through her nose.
“Well, pardon me,” I say.
Her ears twitch.
“You want some baloney?” I ask.
She raises her head, looks at me.
“Baloney?” I say.
She cocks her head, actually looks cute.
I go into the kitchen, peel off a slice of baloney, bring it out to her all rolled up.
“Don’t get it on the sofa,” I say.
She eats it in one bite, looks to me for more. “Forget it,” I say. “But maybe later we’ll have popcorn.”
She barks.
“Yeah, all right. Whatever you said.”
“ ’Course, we never watched television,” the ghost woman says. She is standing in the corner, opposite the set, in her faded red chenille robe and white nightgown and slippers, hair in a braid over her shoulder. “Didn’t have one till after the kids were gone. We used to play cards a lot: gin rummy, canasta, poker, too—just for pennies. We’d set up the card table, invite the neighbors over, or my husband and I would just play ourselves. We did a lot of gabbing, laughing. When other folks were over, somebody would always run to Dixie Cream for donuts, bring back a whole box of them and then of course we’d have to make a pot of coffee. The kids played out on the porch, all rough-and-tumble, somebody was forever coming in crying, but then they’d want to go right back out there. Worst thing that ever happened is the night little Billy Ellerby got smacked in the head with the porch swing—we had a big white porch swing out there, lovely to sit in and watch the world go by. Well, he got seven stitches and you’d have thought
he’d been elected king of the universe. Other kids couldn’t get enough of looking at them, standing up close and staring at them till they got the willies; then they’d run away, and then they’d come back and do it all over again. He charged a quarter to feel them, never mind that he could have gotten a terrible infection, you’d have to practically call out the reserves to get any of those kids to wash their hands before dinner. But he charged a quarter and darned if he didn’t earn enough money to buy the supplies he needed to make a go-cart. Built it right out in the backyard, entered it in a contest at the State Fair that summer and won himself a blue ribbon.”
I rub my eyes, sigh. I’m not much bothered by this anymore. I’m used to it. It’s my odd comfort, listening to simple stories about a simpler life. I look back at the TV screen—Lucy is calling Ethel on the phone!—and when I look back, the ghost lady is gone.
At the commercial, I get up, stretch, yawn. I ought to go to bed. I turn off the TV, look out the window at the moon, draw comfort from its presence. I call Maggie, let her out the front door onto the porch, then outside. She’ll stay in the yard, sleep behind the rosebushes. Alice and Ed let her run free, I really like that. She doesn’t even have a collar.
I close the door to the porch, then walk to the end of it, look up at the ceiling. There, where I knew they would be, I see the marks from the hooks that held up the swing. And it comes to me as naturally as taking the next breath what her name was: Evelyn Arlene Benson, called Evie. And then I understand that there is an explanation for all of this. I remember that after I first moved in Alice and I found some old pictures of the house in the basement. Surely there must have been a photo of the porch swing. There must have been some old letters, too. I probably read them and then forgot about them. I must have. I do that sometimes, forget about things. Jay used to get mad at me for that. I would forget things he told me. “Why don’t you pay attention when I talk to you?” he’d say. “What is it that you’re thinking about all the time?” And of course I’d say I didn’t remember. I close the front door to my house, lock it, dead bolt and chain.
I awaken to the sight of my younger daughter beside my bed. The clock says 1:50. Amy is making little snuffling noises, crying, her hands held together before her and caved in a little, as though in lazy prayer. “What?” I say sleepily, hold out my arms to her. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”
She climbs into bed with me, turns onto her side, pushes her butt into my stomach and her thumb into her mouth. “I had a bad dream,” she says.
“You had a bad dream?” I say. “Is that what you said?”
She turns around, pulls her thumb out, studies my face. “Yes. It was about a man who had no eyeballs. It was all white in there where his eyes go. He kept looking at me, though.”
“That must have been really scary.”
“Yes.”
“But you know it was only a dream.”
A pause, and then, “Yes.”
“Would you like to stay here and sleep?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
She turns away again, and her breathing changes within a minute; she’s back asleep. The man she dreamed of had eyes that were all white, but he could see her. It’s Jay she was dreaming of. He seems blind to us, but he sees. That must be it. This dream is the fragile intervention I need to keep up my faith. Not tearing up sheets. Why did I think that that kind of acting out was going to get me somewhere? If I lie on the floor kicking and screaming, who will be moved? The hard and constant lesson is that we are only observers here. We do not move the pieces. We do not chart the course. We have our little parameters, like an insect captured in a shoebox. We strut back and forth, arranging and rearranging the arbitrary layout of the grasses we’ve been given. But with all the head-nodding we do, all the lip-smacking, all the self-satisfied pats to our overfull bellies, all the putting forth of what is really only speculation from our beginning brains, we aren’t aware at all of the thing that is before us. Jay and I used to talk about this, how something superior must be so amused. Inside the box, we arrange and rearrange. We plan and plan. We are so foolish, but we can’t help ourselves. The shoebox seems so much to us. We plan and plan.
I get out of bed quietly, go to look at Amy’s sheets. Yup. I take them off her bed, put them out in the hall. Tomorrow is soon enough to wash them.
After the kids go to school in the morning, I put Amy’s sheets in the wash, then get back into bed. I’m too tired to go and see him. I need some rest, or I’ll fall apart. Just after I go back to sleep, the doorbell rings. I punch the pillow, punch it again, harder. Meter man, I’ll bet.
I yank open the door, annoyance all over me, and stare out at nothing. Then I look down and see Timothy looking up at me.
“What are you doing here?” I say. “You’ll be late for school.”
“That’s secondary,” he says.
“Uh-huh. Well, what’s primary?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you know, why are you here?”
“My mom’s sick. She needs a thermometer. We can’t find ours. Do you have one?”
I open the door wider. “Come in, sure, I’ve got one. I’ll get it for you.”
He follows me to the bathroom, and I find a thermometer in the medicine chest, hand it to him. “Should I come with you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Up to you.”
We cross the porch to their side, go into their house, and I see Alice lying on the living-room sofa. I sit beside her and before I can say anything, she says, “What’s wrong with you? You look like shit.” Then, to Timothy, “You didn’t hear that. I think you’d better go on, honey. I’ll be fine.”
He looks at me. “Go,” I say. “I’ll be here.” I say this, and I mean it, and I want to do it; but I am also thinking, Oh God, oh no, I want to sleep, and then I need to go see Jay. But I’ll go tonight when Ed gets home. I’ll do the day shift with Alice, the night shift with Jay. The edges of my stomach ache.
But then I look at the circles under Alice’s eyes, her wan color. I love her. Someday I should tell her. “I look like shit?” I say. “You ought to see you.”
“I know,” she says. “I’ve been puking. I’m sorry.”
“You’re ‘sorry.’ For God’s sake, Alice.”
She smiles. “No. You know. I can’t watch your kids this afternoon.”
“Oh dear. I’ll have to fire you.” She starts to say something and I say, “Alice. Thanks for getting sick. Thanks for letting me do a little something in return. What can I do, by the way? Should I stay here?”
She thinks about it, then says, “No. I’m loaded up on medicine, I think I’ll sleep for a while. If you could just bring me the phone. I’ll call you if I need anything.”
“Are you going to take your temperature? You look kind of flushed.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” she says, and slides the thermometer under her tongue. The mean thought comes to me that now I’ll have to get another one what with the way no family wants another family’s germs. Then I think how terrible I am to think that and that no one else would. I go to get their portable phone, which is in their bedroom.
The bed is unmade, a stain in the center of the sheet. I know what from. I lay my hand across my stomach, stare at the stain. It occurs to me that I’d forgotten all about that. I try to remember the last time; then, thinking it is too dangerous to do that, I go back downstairs, hand Alice the phone. She puts it beside her, then pulls the thermometer out of her mouth. “Yikes.”
“What is it?”
“A hundred and two point six.”
“Are you serious?”
She nods, a cross between pissed and sorrowful.
“Want me to take you to the doctor?”
“Not unless it turns into a hundred and two point six.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, it’s the flu. It’s just the damn flu. Just put a pan with some water in it beside me here. My mom always did that with us when we were kids.
If you were sick, you got to lie on the living-room sofa with a pan of water to puke in. It was only for puking, thank God, imagine how we’d have felt if she’d have mashed potatoes in it the next day. Anyway, if I have to puke and don’t think I can make it to the bathroom, I’ll do it in there. Then I’ll call you to empty it, aren’t you lucky?”
“I don’t mind, Alice, I really don’t. Please. Don’t worry. Just get better.”
“I’m telling you, you don’t look so hot yourself. Honestly.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Okay.”
“Want me to turn the TV on for you?”
“God, no. Then I’ll puke for sure. No, I’ll just sleep. I usually get over these things really fast. I’ll be all right.”
Back at home, I sit in my kitchen, listening to the birds. I can’t go back to sleep. I am so scared she has something bad. I am so scared she’ll die, that’s what it is. I don’t know why this kind of thinking should surprise me. But it does. I twist the dishtowel in my hands for a good twenty minutes, asking for a calm that does not come and then I get dressed.
Here, at the back of my throat, a tickle. A cough? Winter and the snow falling in fat flakes, a silhouette before glass, fire. On my knee, a child sitting, my live hand on the back of her head, such fine yellow hair. The sound of your voice, Lainey, coming from the kitchen, sliding drawer, the bang of a pan. Silver, tinfoil stars, blunt-ended scissors, the first day of school. Mittens wet on the radiator, rippled air. A rustle of paper, the news on the television, steps walking across the carpet, those big shoes, my own father. Dad?
Ted and I are in the little break room at the nursing home. It’s mostly used by the staff, but visitors can use it too. Ted is eating Cheez Doodles and drinking a Dr Pepper. I’m having a Nestlés Crunch. It’s a celebration, because Alice did not die. No, did not die and felt fine the next day and showed me that not everything turns out crazy. It’s 7:30, dark outside; really, I should go home, but I saw Ted in the hall on the way out and it was clear he needed to talk.