Remedies

by Kate Ledger

  “Twenty dollars,” Jamie repeated, flabbergasted, sitting back in the seat, and it wasn’t clear if it was the size of the bill that amazed her or the inexplicable, impulsive largesse for a boy on the street.

  But nobody was asking. “Not everyone’s had all the advantages you have,” Simon answered her in the rearview mirror. “You should always remember that.”

  For Emily, there were no explanations and no good deeds left. It had been this way for as long as she could remember: He had all kinds of kindness in reserve for people he hardly knew—for strangers. But all of that kindness had been at her expense. They pulled up curbside at Departing Flights. She stared at the ribs of dirt that wavered across the windshield, between the wide streaks where the glass had gone clear.

  PART THREE

  Simon, returning from the airport, had only one aspiration for the evening. He hoped that by nine, when visiting hours terminated, he’d find the scans read, the pathology revealed, his father labeled with a diagnosis. No pain at all? Impossible. He knew his father’s determined privacy, the clenched jaw of his reserve, but he hardly imagined Charles would go to such lengths to play the role of hero. It was an insult. Anyone could tell you the agony of a broken rib. He’d had a patient, a Jake M-something, a long time back, who’d tumbled down concrete front steps on an icy morning, breaking both his nose and a rib. The man had an intimidating build, like a beer keg, and he didn’t care about his nose, which had still been shapeless as a zucchini when Simon saw him a week after the accident. But he was in such pain from the broken rib, Simon couldn’t put a hand against his chest without him whimpering. That Jake was left taking shallow inhalations, mere teaspoons of air, because it hurt that much to breathe and, in fact, wound up with a case of pneumonia two weeks later because he refused to try to draw deeply into his lungs.

  Simon wound his way through the labyrinth of pressboard walls in the hospital’s construction zone, the shrill scent of spackle tingling in his nose. No pain? Does he think I’m a fool? He was confident the CT would bear evidence of a neurological compression or lesion, even a minute mass that would explain it all. A man couldn’t be so invulnerable to wounds. Furthermore, it was insensitive of Charles to act like everyone else was making an unnecessary fuss. The least the old man could do, Simon thought as he found himself in a wrong corridor and had to stop and double back past the elevators again, was express a little appreciation that Simon had made the trip. A simple thank-you would do. Simon had corralled his entire family, dragged everyone to Florida, for chrissake, just to be supportive. But this was how it had always been. Simon had been waiting for some sign of appreciation for years. By now, it seemed, his father owed it to him to have a tumor.

  Simon let himself be guided through the temporary corridors by pieces of paper taped to the walls, computer-printed signs pointing to the main throughway. Neon x’s and arrows in spray paint on the pressboard provided additional instructions. In the maze seemed to be implicit promise about the shape of the future space—hospitals all over were ever becoming more grand, more like shiny hotels—and this one would have a lobby with marble columns. He knew as well as anybody that medicine was as much about the experience of being treated as it was about the treatment, and he knew that each institution was struggling to keep up. But the construction only revealed to him that the place was as contrived as any other, and he believed his father would be sent home simply for saying nothing hurt. “Some hospital,” he muttered to the sleepy-looking security guard, who sat placidly at a curved desk and played with a pen, as Simon paced in front of the elevator. “It’s like a third-world country in here.”

  “Sixteen-million-dollar renovation,” the guard responded, sounding as though the people who passed through were generally dumb and he’d grown bored hearing their complaints. “Can’t get better without them having to take it apart first.”

  “They should hurry up and get it over with,” Simon said. Dinging sweetly, the elevator appeared, and he stepped into it, remembering, just as the doors began to close, that it never served anybody to be an ass. “’Nice night.”

  “You too.”

  When he reached the fourth floor, he found the nursing station deserted, the halls resounding with echoes. Dr. Smitts was nowhere to be found. Likewise, his parents did not greet him when he entered the room. With faces lifted toward the mounted flat-screen TV, they’d fallen under the spell of disaster reportage. A shooting spree in a local convenience store. The clerk had been killed, along with a child who’d come in to buy a slushie. They shook their heads at the tragedy. They tsked at a report about a train wreck in India, in which two hundred had been maimed and injured. Lucille rested a hand on the sheet covering her husband’s leg as they watched brush fires raging out of control in California. Aerial views revealed the creeping fire line, an orange-rimmed wave. They watched a recurring loop of film: a little prop plane dumping a billowing trail of chemicals, the firefighters disembarking from an emergency vehicle, homeowners being escorted down hills, some of them carrying belongings tied with string, the kind used for binding cardboard recycling. The reporter-on-the-ground, a young hopeful journalist in a neck-tie that fluttered above a flame-retardant vest, shouted against the wind. The loop replayed; Simon couldn’t take his eyes off the string, binding clothes and books and boxes of jewelry into tiny parcels. All the things they’d amassed in their lives—millions of dollars’ worth—reduced to a bound package that could be toted in one hand down the hill. Life was simple when you got to the core of it. Poignantly simple.

  “What’re you watching this for?” Simon broke in. “This isn’t going to help him relax.”

  “Started naturally,” said Charles, nodding toward the television. “Drought’s been going on so long, the hillsides are practically kindling. That’s millions of dollars of loss there.”

  “Those poor people,” Lucille murmured. Simon’s eyes went again to the string. So little holding together so much.

  “It’s how nature cleans up after itself,” Charles informed. “Sets its own fires to clear the debris. If humans never interfered, the forests would be destroyed anyway. The real problem is, you got people building homes that aren’t designed to be in a fire-prone environment in the first place. They don’t think. That’s why we have a government spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars to get in there and save the property.”

  He’s showing me up, is what he’s doing, pretending nothing has happened. His display is an act. He’s trying to put me in my place, Simon thought.

  Charles was bald, except for a fringe of frost-colored hair that wound around the back of his head. The crown of his skull shone pinkly, with coffee-and-milk-colored liver spots that seemed to deepen in intensity when he went up in arms on a particular topic. Arthritis had stiffened and slowed the carriage of his body, but his trunk and his limbs were still lean as a dancer’s. He owed his thinness to an abstemious diet—no sweets, no red meat, no alcohol. His hands, even in age, had retained their powerful angularity, the hard backs of the knuckles, the crusading joints of the thumbs, which Simon knew by heart without even having to look at them. Charles prided himself on being disciplined and principled, but he was also regimented to the point, Simon thought, of being cruel. Why, the old man cared more about his regimens than he cared about the people around him! He was righteous, money-conscious, with an old man’s politics that were often party-line conservative but occasionally tended toward libertarian. As if he were too good for the government, too. You couldn’t have a conversation of substance with him without wanting to tear out your hair. You had to remind yourself his views were informed by television, talk radio, and the guy who sold him his daily paper. It was important to know when to stop listening to him.

  “Fires are burning hotter than they did only twenty years ago,” Charles continued. “It’s because people are mucking up what’s fundamentally a natural process.”

  On the television, the hills were colorless heaps of shadows. Shadows upon shadows. They wat
ched the footage of the prop plane in its course above the flames again.

  “Time for me to take you home, Mom,” Simon said finally, taking control. “We’ll come back first thing in the morning.”

  “Is it time?” she murmured, still watching.

  Simon waited, but neither of them moved.

  “Got late fast, didn’t it?” Charles said with a sigh. When Lucille patted his leg, he murmured, “Go on, now. I’m fine here.”

  She reassured him. “You won’t have trouble sleeping. You’ve had enough excitement for a whole month.”

  “If they have enough sense to leave me alone,” Charles replied dryly, “I’m sure I’ll sleep.”

  “Can he ask the nurses?” Lucille wanted to know. “Can he request nobody wake him? He’s feeling fine, after all. He doesn’t need them taking his temperature or whatever all they do in the middle of the night. He gets cranky if he doesn’t get enough sleep. Trust me, I know him.”

  Simon tried not to sound as exasperated as he felt. “Can’t he just let them do their job?” He turned to Charles. “If they need your temperature, just let them take it.”

  “But every few hours?” Lucille protested.

  “If he’s feeling as fine as he says he does,” Simon retorted, “he won’t care. And you’ll be more help to him tomorrow if you’re well rested.”

  Lucille gave up the fight. She bent over the bed. Reflexively, Simon looked away as they kissed. He was ready to leave. “C’mon.”

  “I’ll be back first thing,” she said to Charles, leaning into his face with intimacy. “You speak up during the night if you’ve had enough.”

  As she followed him to the elevator, their shoes on the polished floor shucked like clucking tongues, tuk, tuk, tuk, like reprimands. “I’ll carry that.” He took his mother’s purse out of her hands, cradled it like a football against his forearm. The purse was white, some kind of shiny patent leather, like a kid would have as part of some dress-up costume.

  “I’m not an invalid,” she protested hotly, though she didn’t take it back. “I can still manage my own handbag.”

  “Indulge me,” he said, steering her through a revolving door at the end of the maze of newly crafted walls. In the garage, he held the door for her as she got into the rental car and shut it like a gentleman on a date. She sat hunched, small in the seat and, he thought, gnomelike, as he walked around the car to the driver’s side. Her skin was faintly translucent, periwinkle under the surface when you looked closely, but her cheeks were still mostly unwrinkled. Her mouth sealed in a fine line as she watched him. She saved her best expressions for her husband.

  “Jamie’s gotten taller,” she commented when he got in. “Almost wouldn’t recognize her.”

  He buckled himself. As patiently as possible, he said, “In two years, yes.” If you waited that long to take interest in your own grandchild, of course you wouldn’t recognize her.

  “Are you sure a hotel wouldn’t be more comfortable?” his mother asked as he started the car. “We don’t even have a room for you. Just the couch. I can’t imagine how you’ll sleep on it.”

  It dawned on him, in all the years since he’d moved away from home, he’d almost never found himself alone with his mother, just the two of them. His relationship with her—from first memory—was wedged by the presence of Charles. When Charles was in the room, Lucille trained her attentions on her husband like a spotlight; Simon floated out of sight. At dinnertime throughout his childhood, Lucille had filled Charles’s plate first, heaping generous portions of the best of the meal, the whitest, heartiest piece of breast meat, the slice of bread second to the heel. She then would pass the platter to Charles, who served a plate for her. Simon, waiting, received his helping last. Lucille commented on the freshness of the meat or the process of preparing it; Charles complimented Lucille’s fine touch in the kitchen. Then Charles described his day, and Lucille listened. They didn’t suffer spoiled children or obstreperous behavior, and they did not engage him during mealtime. They insisted on formalities, acute politeness, children being seen and not heard. One time, so frustrated by the chains of his invisibility, Simon had reached over and plucked a petal from the centerpiece, placed it in his nostril and blew it clear across the table. He received the belt for his untoward manners during an otherwise pleasant meal and was sent to his room with no dinner at all for abusing his mother’s flowers.

  He glanced sideways at her, sitting in the car. She’d always been a petite woman, and he was aware of the impression that she was getting smaller. He felt he shouldn’t be surprised, but he did feel alarm to note how quickly the changes had crept up on her. How long would she live? he wondered. Another five years, another ten? Would her death come as a shock or would he watch a slow decline, a sucking away, like quick-sand? His biological father—whom he’d never known—must have been tall because Simon was nearly six feet with broad shoulders. The times he’d dared to ask about the man, Lucille deftly changed the subject, and he couldn’t broach the topic in front of Charles. The story of how Charles had adopted Simon had been narrated privately by his mother with almost no alterations, so rigidly it was almost liturgy. And always she underscored his debt of gratitude, as if, as a baby, he’d had anything to do with any of it.

  And then his wondering was followed by a strange thought: Would he miss her once she was gone? He could hardly fathom it. Months went by when he didn’t see her. He didn’t even think of her if she didn’t call. What he suspected was that the feeling when she died would be less of an acute distress and more of a slow, protracted anxiety, something more along the lines of, Well, this is it, we’re next. “We” being him, Emily, and everyone they knew, the Groves, the Ebberlys, but it wouldn’t be connected to missing her. He’d never had that kind of relationship with either of his parents. In fact, the first time Emily had seen the new condo, she’d pointed out its inhospitable limits. One bedroom, one modest bathroom. An adjoined living room and dining room with a blond carpet whose shifted plush revealed the tracks of the last person who had dared to cross the room. At the dining room table, two chairs, and none for guests. Folding chairs hung on a hook in the hall closet. Beyond the living room, a spacious balcony with an aqua-painted wrought-iron railing overlooked the courtyard. There was a table on the balcony, covered by an umbrella, but only two seats for anyone to enjoy the view.

  “That’s because there’s just the two of them,” Simon had explained when Emily pointed this out. “It’s streamlined and efficient and inherently practical.”

  “They could’ve afforded a three-bedroom.”

  “He’s an ascetic,” Simon said. “It’s his way of showing off. He still wants everyone to know how hard he’s had it his whole life. Just so that it’s clear he’s toughed it out and isn’t indulgent.”

  But Emily had insisted otherwise: “They don’t want anyone else in their space.”

  He liked his explanation better and grumbled that Emily had no right to her certainty. She couldn’t possibly know them better than he did. “Why do you insist on defending them?” she challenged angrily. “She’s clung to him her whole life because she’s terrified of what she’d do without him. She has no sense of self. She validates his existence, and he lives on her fawning. It’s the emperor with no clothes. She’d never give an honest opinion, even if she could formulate one, and he’s perfectly happy with that. They don’t need anybody else around wrecking such a perfect arrangement. Including you.” Simon retorted that Emily had no right to be judgmental. She called him obtuse. He said she didn’t understand. No, he didn’t understand.

  “I’m fine with the couch,” he assured his mother. He steered onto the highway, and they passed chain link that enclosed a gutted foundation for a building underway. “So much construction going on down here,” he said, changing the subject.

  “We’re getting a new shopping center right near our complex. A Publix and a Chinese restaurant and possibly even a cinema. Traffic’s already a problem. I’ve written to the city p
lanning committee. There ought to be speed bumps on the road in front of the complex.”

  He’d forgotten about the letter-writing, and his throat tightened to think of it again. It had annoyed him his entire youth: her thrice-folded missives, “LB” in looping, interlocked script at the top of the page, underneath which she wrote out her directions or questions or remonstrations or reproofs. Every letter closed with a flourishing phrase, “Ever so sincerely yours,” sounding like it hardly meant to be intrusive and couldn’t possibly cause any offense. Though she was no southerner, her letters (at least the closing line) had always sounded to Simon as though they were meant to be read in the voice of a debutante, inquiring about the catering for the coming-out ball—practiced, carefully rehearsed sincerity that had been taught in a class. She’d sent him to school with letters. Letters for the principal, letters for the French teacher, letters for the football coach. Somehow, he’d never been ballsy enough to throw away the envelopes he was expected to deliver. He’d stood there while the recipients read their mail, watching their eyes dart back and forth across her spindly print. The recipients would say, “Ah,” or “Hm,” and fold the paper, reinsert it into the envelope and then respond to Simon, “Tell your mother . . .” And he’d endured it. How strange. What was wrong with him back then? Why did he stand for it? For some reason, it hadn’t ever occurred to him that he could have put an end to it, simply refusing to be the mailman. Or he could have pretended to deliver letters and concocted responses for her benefit. He hadn’t, of course. He’d played the role of dutiful messenger. Only as an adult did he realize he could have rebelled. It had never dawned on him that, as the resident carrier pigeon, he was actually more empowered than, say, a kid whose mother made phone calls.