Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  Cold March air filled her lungs, burned her ears and fingers. She did not think about her weak calves or knees, her nonathletic feet. Just get to mile one, she told herself. But the minute she saw the first mile marker, time, distance, was no longer the road ahead, but her heavy legs, and the seconds it took to breathe each breath, to place one foot in front of the other. When she rounded another bend, there was more loud cheering, more strollers and spectator signs. A man in a leprechaun costume passed, shimmering in green spandex and a matching metallic hat. Nancy lacked the strength to smile. Air flattened into the cap of her chest. She couldn’t catch it, oxygen pressed in and closed.

  “There is a water stand at mile two,” Caroline said, stopping as Nancy had stopped.

  “Go on,” Nancy said. “Please, just go!”

  “I’m not leaving you,” Caroline said. “Five slow breaths.” She placed her hand on Nancy’s back. “Then we’ll ease into a jog.”

  Nancy tried, but there was no such thing as ease. Didn’t Caroline understand that? Her whole life, God had made uneasiness the point.

  “Follow me,” Caroline said, reaching for her hand. Nancy closed her eyes and opened them. She was in the ocean again, carrying a wooden marble in her hand, she swore she heard Jean crying—as if to tell her, Mother, I was crying, I warned you, but you were unable to listen. You were my mother.

  She heard more cheering and whistling, though it felt distant, as though she were looking in at all the spectators, all of their poster-board signs: YOU CAN DO IT, PROUD OF YOU, I LOVE YOU. Nancy began to feel even lighter—like the fizz of a soda bottle, suddenly opened.

  “You made it to two!” Caroline said at the water station. She handed Nancy a paper cup, which Nancy gulped, but most of the water spilled because Nancy kept moving. She knew if she stopped moving again, she would stop for good, and she had come much farther than she imagined she would; she only had one mile left. But these later steps did not register with her, the way her body wrenched like oranges, acidic and pulped to their skins. She did not feel minutes—each of the eleven still required to see the finish line, another black clock flashing red with milliseconds—willed forward by the waxing throb of crowds. Nancy closed her eyes tight and opened them, closed and opened them, to sustain the figment of a dream not yet broken. She thought of the sky and the road, their stillness, their indifference to time—what it would be like for Jean to run in her shoes, feel the road beneath her, that exhilaration of feeling her body overcome gravity for the first time.

  “Less than half a mile!” Caroline cheered, the muted sound of gloves clapping.

  Nancy pinched her lips together, salty with sweat. She tried not to think about heat on her neck, about the tiny air sacs that differentiated the lungs of a six-month from a seventh-month fetus . . . Weak air sacs, Katherine had maintained, were not the reason Jean had stopped breathing. Nor was it because she’d been sleeping on her stomach and not her back.

  Their child hadn’t died because she and Murray might have been ambivalent about having children for a time, or because they had fought the night of their anniversary, not because they’d made love in those moments, breathless, that excess of breath, while Jean took her last. There was no such thing as causality, she thought—things happened in the order that they chose to; you could try to predict the order, spend your whole life projecting into the future, but life would still arrive when it decided to; life would prove you wrong, and the only thing you could do, she thought, was try your best. Try and try.

  Seeing the finish added translucence to the picture. She felt emptied of terror, of rage, of pain, the boxes she’d packed and failed to unpack for years, none growing smaller or lighter each time she’d tried. But she saw the blanket she’d knitted for Jean as light, thin and diffused through a slit of window in a room. She inhaled, exhaled. Horns and bells beat her on: beat the unidentifiable noun that lived between her throat and the base of her ribs. This invisible weight that never let her fully take a whole breath.

  She heard Jean crying again, but for a moment it felt not like the one she hadn’t heard, but the one she was hearing now. The one that asked her to stay here in this moment. Here, so there was no more holding on to what hadn’t been before or could have been after. For so long she’d been carrying the marble, and she still had it, now slick with her own sweat, cold and alive in the winter air.

  There were studies Nancy had found later—the ones she’d taken years to read, about how the act of breathing had to be learned. At some point during an infant’s development, breathing moved from the lower to higher registers of the brain, from the part that was primordial and automatic to the part that was conscious and learned. Sometimes an infant got stuck, Nancy remembered; Jean had gotten caught somewhere in the middle, taking her breath too late.

  Let it go, she wanted to say out loud, to someone, the breath Nancy had forced in and now held on to in the cold.

  Letting go.

  It didn’t have to mean that she’d loved too little, too far between.

  NINETEEN

  Friday

  11:31:02 a.m.

  Murray cut through Old Campus, where all of the freshman lived, past Lanman-Wright Hall with its statues of lions and its bare dogwood trees in the courtyard. L-Dub, it was called, reeking of beer and mildew.

  Three students were throwing a Frisbee on the lawn. Exaggerated wrist flicks and lunges. Laughter.

  He noticed a young girl, hair wrapped in a silk kerchief, reading on a blanket. Her tote bag bulging with books, like the one Nancy had carried around with her everywhere, in case she was ever caught waiting.

  He paused before Battell Chapel: a host of flyers for theater and improv comedy and poetry readings, but he found no mention of a vigil. He turned the heavy iron handle, peering into the empty space. Inside, his eyelids twitched as he gazed up at the blue coffered ceiling, then at the sign of the Trinity on the pier walls. Apse windows by the altar. Stained glass flanking the nave.

  He sat down in a pew and looked up again, tracing the sunken panels, these miniature octagon shapes. He had never painted a ceiling, only the walls of rooms: first there had been yellow, then lavender; finally white, for Nancy. It was February when Murray had painted it again. She’d said she needed to breathe.

  “Do you mind if we set up?” A large bald man in a navy T-shirt gripped a white plastic bucket.

  “No,” he said. “I was just leaving.” He felt as though two televisions played the same channel in adjoining rooms: broadcasted echo.

  “Just setting up for an information session. You’re welcome to stay.” The man tugged at an earlobe. “If you, or anyone you know, is interested in the Peace Corps—it’s never too late.”

  “I don’t know anyone.”

  “Do you work here?” the man asked.

  “I don’t,” he said. “Do you?”

  “You’re funny,” the man said. “Coach. Now I see it.” He pointed to the XC for cross-country on Murray’s jacket. The stopwatch in his hands. Murray tightened his fists, eyes locking harder on the blue sandstone walls, a wood-beamed ceiling encroaching.

  “I’m John,” the man said, wiping a hand on his jeans.

  Murray nodded.

  Another man, young, walked in. He didn’t shake John’s hand; rather, he hugged him tightly. They talked about how long it’d been, his train ride up, what the young man was doing with his life.

  Murray didn’t feel himself turn the handle of the door—or drifting back—through the green, where the English major was still reading.

  Becky’s first semester had required reciting the first lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. She’d volunteered a recitation for him one morning on the way to the course. She’d been giddy with the newness of college, he guessed. The first line mentioned April. He remembered nothing of the rest, the length of the journey the poem was meant to cover.

  Nancy had once said that inside they were opposite people; she, fueled by a vivid inner life, while he understood
the world as material. He had not countered her, words broken and sawed off within him, like numerated letters on a Scrabble board, this game they once played over a span of weeks.

  He drove to the Walgreens nearest the hospital and walked up and down the aisles, searching discounted appliances, scanning flashlights and batteries and headphones. The watch was different from the kind he was used to, but it was enough, so he crushed the sides of the plastic with his hands, and when that didn’t work, he tried tearing it apart with his teeth.

  “I hope you plan to buy that,” a voice said. A woman in a red apron: hair black with a white skunk streak.

  “Yes,” he said several times until the register, where he asked for a pair of scissors.

  Outside the store, two seconds before the first stopwatch hit its maximum, he clutched the new one, ready to start, at the exact moment. It was a windy day, and a plastic soda cap blew near his feet, and he could hear sirens outside the hospital.

  He kept the watch by the gearshift and studied, on and off, the approach of five minutes, then ten, after he’d stopped the car. When he felt he could focus on the road again, he restarted it.

  At home, he boiled water and took a shower. He thought of going back to the campus at night to see if there wasn’t something else going on, if maybe the men had been also helping set up for a campus vigil. He went to his door and peered out the tiny hole, expecting more sirens, a line of police cars, but of course he couldn’t see that through a hole, so he stepped outside, his heart palpitating, breath short. He was wearing boxers, and he felt his bare legs, his cold ears. He went back inside and had to grip the kitchen sink. The teakettle hissed. He poured tea. He turned on the news, but after fifteen minutes, he couldn’t sit there, waiting for footage. He imagined Rodney carrying a bag stuffed with little candles, rubber holders, snuffs for the vigil she might still be planning. Anna too? Didn’t they know vigils were bad luck; vigils suggested defeat? You had to wait, to be patient for Becky to regain her strength.

  His tracksuit had not been washed in seven days, but still he stepped back into it, in the bathroom, zipping the jacket three-quarters of the way up. He parted his thin hair as if it made a difference.

  He thought of the course, of driving around at this time. His log had recorded rounds almost every hour except between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m., when he usually had to be at practice, but today was Friday and the girls had done an easy run in the morning. To save their legs.

  He reached for his jacket and hopped to put on a shoe. He had to sit to tie the other one. His hands were shaking. Murray, he heard someone say. We’re trying to speak. Why won’t you listen?

  And then there she was. Becky’s mouth forming unintelligible words.

  Jean hasn’t crossed yet. You have to help her cross. He saw Nancy’s back over the bed, rising and falling, after waking from another nightmare. He saw himself zipping his jacket again and finding his clipboard. Saw himself turning the other way, hoping she’d fall back asleep.

  He hadn’t noticed the extent of the apartment’s silence—hadn’t heard the depth of her restless mutterings, her tossing and turning through the night, until she went missing, her side of the bed empty more nights of the week than not, her absent toothbrush.

  He went to his computer and turned on the reading lamp. He waited for the machine to start, for the tiny hourglass to load applications onto his screen. He had saved three different messages from her in a folder. He had read them twenty-two different times, not to analyze them, but to affirm their existence. To consider his reply.

  He opened the latest one, from last week: Dear Murray. I am thinking of you.

  A message so simple it needed a simple reply. Dear Nancy . . . In typing, fingers twitching, same as this near-constant twitch he felt in his sleepless eyes, he began to inch toward other words. Longer explanations he still couldn’t provide.

  How can I know what you’re thinking? she’d once asked. How do you expect me to know anything?

  Nancy never had to know. Weren’t his actions clear enough? Everything he did, had done, had been because he loved her. She need only to account for his actions. If she’d added them up, she would have seen.

  Now he stood, looking out the window. Across the street was a white house; in the night, it glowed blue. Above it, a sliver of moon.

  After some time—he didn’t know how much—a car rolled by. It paused before a house, two tubes of light over the drive. The clock turned eight before a girl skipped out. She was wearing a sweater and blue jeans. Then a boy stepped out of the car. The engine still running. Murray had cracked open the window to hear its thrum. He watched as the girl hugged the boy. He was tall and lanky under a baseball cap.

  When the car sped away, Murray paced back to the kitchen.

  He had reheated the teakettle, and he poured more into his cup. He sat down and looked over a packet with seed times for next Saturday. He had figured Anna’s performance four different ways, factoring in the time she’d taken off and the time she still had to put in. Just two days until she started running again.

  Then, he thought, if she’d surprised him once before, she would again. Children surprised their parents. His girls had always done that.

  He could not feel his tongue in contrast to the temperature of the tea burning it, but he hoped that if he closed his eyes and visualized Anna’s strong back and thighs in uniform, her cleats digging into the dirt, no matter the time of day or temperature, his heart might steady.

  Then Murray saw himself. 1975. He was nineteen and standing on Scranton’s crushed cinder track for the mile. There had been a dozen other runners, two rows of them, and he had stood in the second row.

  It had been raining, water pulsing along his eyelids and down his mouth. He had tried to shake it off like a dog, and then leaned in as the gunman counted ten seconds before it was time.

  He could not hear the sounds as they were, but the rain—it was still palpable, spitting bullets at his ankles and knees. His hair hard and cold by his eyes.

  Now he had his eyes closed, and he was barefoot and crouched, knees shaking as though a line had been painted on the hardwood floor in the kitchen. If he could just hear the gun, imagine his body flying through the room—through the room—outside to the road like a catapulted car.

  Maybe he could sit down and type a reply or pick up a phone to make a call. He’d write Lisa, tell her he was sorry for anything he’d said. What had he?

  Coach!

  He nearly shouted, eyes still closed, fists knotted by his side.

  Becky walked toward him: hips swinging crookedly, hands closed and twisted, mouth twisted.

  A spoon locked in her fist as she scooped cereal. A book with pages she couldn’t turn by herself: From now on, would someone else have to turn them?

  He pushed his two watches into his pocket. The library was open until midnight on a Friday, so he drove to Sterling Memorial and used a computer to write down a series of call numbers. He had checked the screen and his bit of scrap paper several times—maybe four different times—to make sure he had the numbers right, then he took the elevator up to the stacks, to the thirteenth floor, for more titles on brain injury.

  He tore through case studies and dense science, a memoir by a woman who had recovered full function of her brain and body, who had returned to work and achieved impossible feats. He researched the exact nature of her injury, scrutinizing the anatomy of the brain, translating what controlled what—the process involved in this woman’s surgery—where the hematomas had been removed and how regions might have been rearranged around these absences.

  After his apartment had been emptied, Murray found a way to take up all the extra space—filled every room with his notebooks and old mail, filled each up like a sea around him. No one visited—no one would criticize him—no one to recommend the couch closer to the television, his desk closer to his bed, his manuals that belonged on shelves, not the floor.

  The full rooms made it like a maze in the morning and at
night on his way to bed, so he didn’t have to think; he would tire himself stepping around these things, getting closer to that final point of exhaustion, always—the one that let him sleep.

  Yesterday, Rick had knocked on the door to Murray’s office. Printed itineraries lay over the floor, and torn sheets from his legal pad, but Rick hadn’t said anything about that. He’d said, Murray, I want to talk to you. Murray had sat up straight in his chair, away from the new to-do list he was making.

  Sure, Rick, he had said, calm as ever.

  Then Rick had said, Murray, there have been some complaints. Then he’d paused. I’m not talking about the accident. I’m talking about the girls. They’re concerned. He’d paused again, and Murray had asked him what he meant, and he’d said, They’re concerned that you’re talking to yourself. Mumbling things they can’t hear.

  Murray knew it wasn’t true—he’d told Rick that the girls were young, that they misunderstood him. He was figuring splits; he always figured the math aloud. No, Murray, Rick had said. I’ve noticed it too. You’re—you look like you haven’t slept. Murray began to explain he was working overtime, but Rick had cut him off. We’re under a lot of scrutiny right now, he’d said. We know this isn’t your fault, but we have to be careful. Becky’s injury is sensitive.