Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  Nancy had cut her nipple in the shower once. She’d fainted over a bath mat before he found her. A small pool of blood.

  He had not heard her cry, just as he did not hear them now, people around him: someone calling for help.

  His whole life, Murray had known how to suppress pain, but it always came back.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Nancy arrived on a day when the light was clear and warm, the way it sometimes was in September. She had a particular way of entering the lot, which was not by going through the main gate, wrought ironed and chained, but through the east side, on Canal Street, where there was a sliver of grass, a narrow opening. Nancy carried a paper bag with hydrangea clippings, no longer from a garden bush, but from the Ninth Street corner bodega. She’d held the bag on her lap on the train, looking out the window, light casting shadows over the bag. The man at the bodega knew her by now—knew she’d come in the morning every other Sunday after her run. He knew to add fresh greens in with the blue, these tiny clumps of petals whose shade depended on the variety he had available. Today the blue was pale and partly cream, like the sky, though less muted and more brilliant, as she walked to the place where Jean lay.

  The grass was wet by the stone; it had rained the night before, though shouldn’t it have dried? But then Nancy thought this was lucky: that the grass hadn’t dried. She studied the clean carving of the stone, the absence of a nickname she’d always regret, the last name that would never be the same as her own. The bold-faced letters: Murray had chosen the engraving. And there were the dates, this sliver of time that united them.

  Nancy always tied the flowers with yellow yarn from a spool she kept in her dresser drawer.

  Nancy’s mouth felt dry, her eyes twitched, yet there was some joy in remembering Murray’s reaction anytime Jean had smiled at him and grasped toward his face, smooth from shaving, in the mornings. A memory Nancy didn’t know she’d forgotten.

  Over the years Nancy had left Jean short letters, poems, words of wisdom, tucked in with the flowers. She used to clip them onto a stalk, but later she’d let them blow away, and now she didn’t bring them at all, because Jean was her wisdom, not the other way around.

  Nancy used to think about the car they’d taken, alone, to and from this cemetery, the way the driver had spoken of the weather, as though it were any other day. She used to think about Jean’s tiny satin-lined casket lowered into the earth: how Murray had held back that one webbing strap—she hadn’t considered how it must have felt for Murray, in helping the pastor backfill Jean’s grave, in tamping down on the dirt alone.

  She used to think of the box light as air, the temperature of the earth, the question of whether the blanket she’d knitted and the little terry cloth bear they’d tucked in with her would be enough in the cold.

  There was a sanctuary for meeting her child. Nancy had never spoken or written of it, and it had taken her many years to find it. Katherine had once mentioned the possibility of a place where she might like to meet her child. She had asked Nancy to close her eyes, and Nancy had done that, but when she told her to see a place, to imagine its contours of light and sound, she had seen only gray, and when Katherine had continued to prompt her, the image had only turned grayer, a deeper shade of gray. She had reached for her coat. She had walked out that day, shoulders crouched, hand waving goodbye to Katherine behind her head, the way Nancy’s own mother had one day in August when she’d left for college. And that was the last time Nancy saw Katherine.

  The idea of a meeting place had felt impossible—until recently, when she’d been in the middle of an eighteen-mile run in Rockefeller Preserve, a Saturday morning in September when mist shrouded the green meadows, the sky gray and diffuse like fog. She had suddenly pictured hills, golden brown, grass angled in the wind, which she could see up close, though the hills were far away—and there had been Jean, standing in the grass, her legs long, her hair haloed copper—though Nancy could not perceive her face, like in dreams, when there was only shadow, yet which felt as real as any living body she’d felt or seen.

  You can go here anytime, Katherine had said before she’d first tried to find the place, and Nancy had looked up from her chair to the only window of the room, dim with natural light. She may have walked away then, but she’d learned not to punish herself for walking away, because only now mattered, and she was not afraid to walk away.

  She’d found this place unexpectedly, when her mouth had been dry, lungs exhausted from fueling oxygen through her heart. And she could find it again and again, only without expectation, such as now, when she closed her eyes, remembering the scene: the grass golden brown, the sun pouring down, she waited for Jean to appear. She did not know how long it took, but eventually she detected long legs and arms cutting the air, the way they would have been if she were here. Light twitching through the shadow of Nancy’s mind as if through the tinted windows of a moving train—Jean, there, the age she was today: eighteen. Her child was happy, free, unweighted by circumstances, the brevity of her life.

  The day they’d buried her, the pastor had said that she’d lived a full life, that she’d known joy and love and pain, and though Nancy had listened to the words, it had taken all these years to hear them.

  When Nancy opened her eyes, she had to place herself amid angled stone, some flat and pressed like plaques, or propped and square, rounded at the edges. There was another person, two people, holding one another, necks locked, one of them a man, holding his coat between his hands. Nancy watched the image from the corner of her gaze as she left. The ground was soft, air rich with leaves and bark, the roundness of time.

  She walked down Prospect Street until it became College Street, and eventually reached Chapel, where she entered Claire’s and found a table by the window. She ordered a slice of carrot cake with the restaurant’s famous icing, thick with sparkling granules of sugar. She savored each bite between sips of tea, edging the side of her fork into the layered brown.

  Next to her, two students leaned in toward each other as they spoke about classes and fall break. One had long tendrils of hair running down her back, and the other wore a nose ring. It became clear they were sophomores. The student with curls said she’d written a book of poetry around the objects she’d helped archive at a museum over the summer, and the other said she’d helped paint houses in New Orleans. They gossiped about other girls in their dorm and groaned over the subject of math and the difficulty of making office hours around their volunteering and intramural schedules, their terror over a recently assigned series of problem sets. Nancy had wanted to tune it out, to let the clatter of plates behind the kitchen, the smell of the cinnamon in the cake, the sweetness of raisins, subsume her, but the energy of the girls made her curious. They made her wonder.

  She could not picture Murray, in all their years apart, surrounded by such conversation. She could not imagine him in this world, unaffected by its energies, steadfast in his dogma, his structure. She thought about how his girls always did long runs on Sunday, on trails around the golf course. Murray sometimes took these days off, and she hoped he’d gotten better about that, about taking at least one day off for himself.

  She would think this thought again, almost exactly a year later, when she would read about the accident, in her office. One Monday morning in early September, when she would spread out the Times, systematically folding it around salient articles like she did, so she could focus on one story at a time, and then she’d see it, what happened to his runner Becky Sanders. She would see the photograph of him from his first year of coaching—his light hair, his narrow, focused eyes—and she’d wonder what time might have done to him. Then she’d be struck by the white noise of a fan in the room, the ticking of a small clock by her computer. She’d be swept in a rush of panic, and she’d reach for her phone to call him, but she would stop before pressing the tenth digit, the 5, at the end of his number. She’d wait several days to email him, to express her concern, to offer her help, and then she’d wait for weeks, i
n radio silence.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Murray awoke alone, confined to a room. There were tubes running fluids to his arms. A heart rate monitor’s green, jagged rhythms. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He would see the girls standing there, refusing to run—the order of events was unclear, the cause of them vague. Only the sound of voices—Lisa’s in the hospital, Nancy hysterical over the folded laundry, Becky, her smile, her laugh—before silence had overtaken him, filling his car rides, all the time he spent alone.

  His eyes fluttered open and closed. Now he heard only machines, the rasp and ripple of shadows, this gray, windowless space that made it impossible to know how long he’d been here, how to call for help, unless he shouted or rang a bell, but he lacked the energy to be seen or heard.

  Sometime later, after his machines were unhooked, he was led into another dimly lit room. He was wearing sweatpants and slippers. Taped gauze ran along his inner arms. His knuckles were bruised.

  “My name is Dr. Andrews.”

  Murray scanned the woman’s white pin, her photo ID: Dr. Susan Andrews. He waited for her to position two beige chairs. Then he took a seat, pressing his back in firmly.

  “I was hoping we could talk for a bit,” she said. “Does that sound alright with you?”

  Murray just looked at her, the quiet blur in her eyes.

  “Do you remember a meet at Lehigh yesterday?” She had a pen pressed to her clipboard.

  When he didn’t answer, she said, “Do you remember falling? Feeling panicked?”

  Then Murray saw cornfields, the ones he’d run through as a child, and also other fields, the ones his girls had run through. He pushed the chair’s hard edge with his thumb, against the silence.

  “Maybe we should start with your medical history?” she said. “Can we talk about that?”

  Murray studied the glassy film over her eyes. He willed his pupils to tighten. He thought of the detectives in their apartment, Nancy in the other room weeping, the questions he’d tried to answer alone.

  “Are you on any medications?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Any medical conditions I should know about?”

  “No.” He blinked, steadied his eyes’ tremor.

  “How about in your family? Any history of illness or hospitalization?”

  “No.”

  “I’d like to test more of your memory,” she said. “How does that sound?”

  He waited. Nodded.

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  “The thirteenth,” he said.

  “It’s the fourteenth, actually,” she said. “But how about the month?”

  “October,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “New Haven.” He reached for his pockets.

  “No,” she said. “You’re in St. Luke’s Hospital. In Pennsylvania. Near where you’re from?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Luzerne County,” he said.

  “And when were you born?”

  “January thirteenth,” he said. “1956.”

  Then she wanted to know where he’d gone to college, and how long ago he’d graduated. She asked him to name three major rivers and what happened to John F. Kennedy. She asked him to count a series of numbers forward, then backward. She told him a random address and asked him to repeat it back.

  “Good,” she said. “Very good.”

  Murray breathed. Then the doctor moved some papers around. She made her pen ready.

  “Can we talk about why you’re here today?” she said.

  Murray searched for a clock in the room, but there was only the black screen of a mounted television.

  “Let’s start with the bruise on your head.” She pointed her pen to her forehead. “Do you know how you got it?”

  He reached up, feeling for a tender spot.

  “Do you remember hitting your head?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. Then he thought he’d seen the doctor before, or was it the woman that had driven him in her car? Had he slipped?

  “Do you have thoughts about hurting yourself?”

  His chest felt crushed. He swallowed.

  “How about any unusual voices?” the doctor said. “Have you heard any lately?”

  Murray stared at her, the sound of the girls again, in unison. And then there was silence, growing full beyond measure.

  “Or any thoughts?” the doctor said. “Thoughts that come into your mind but are difficult to remove?”

  Becky, he saw the curl of her again in the grass. Nurses plugging their arms under hers, lifting her from bed to wheelchair.

  “Is there anyone you’ve thought of harming?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you under any stress at work?”

  He saw a tube jammed into Becky’s throat, a tangle of tubes and wires. He saw the surgeon’s scalpel, and then blood drained from her skull. He saw her trying to form words again.

  “Do you remember pushing on the ground, doing CPR? The emergency report said you seemed concerned about someone’s survival. Is that true?”

  He waited and watched, as if that would save him: silence growing full.

  “Anyone you’re worried about?”

  Then she asked if he’d had any unusual experiences that bothered him. Like the feeling that people were talking about him?

  Murray heard sirens. The vigorous pace of a pen.

  She asked again if thoughts ever entered his mind, thoughts he couldn’t stop. Lists? Numbers he counted? He tapped his thumb at his wrist. If he avoided elevators or tall buildings or certain animals. She asked him if his job had become stressful lately.

  “Did you hear me, Samuel? Have you been under stress at work?”

  He saw his child there, before she was gone. Jean on the changing table, kicking her legs while he fumbled over a diaper. Jean on Nancy’s lap, tugging a clump of red hair. Jean forgetting to breathe.

  “Who is she?” the doctor asked.

  He looked at the doctor through the dim light, heard a clock on the mantel ticking, but there was no mantel. Where was his watch?

  He pressed two fingers into his temples and held them there. He closed his eyes.

  “Who is Jean?”

  “I said so before,” he said.

  “What did you say before?”

  “—Nothing.” He kept his eyes pinched tight.

  Dr. Andrews went on. “Are you married?”

  “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “You said Jean. Is she your wife?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Someone you miss?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  “Your child?”

  “Yes,” he said, wrists shaking, soft static filling his ears: what he should have heard.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nancy was on the train. The Autumn Express, a line that had been dormant since the eighties but that had reopened fairly recently—though with spotty service—but she found a line connecting New York to Bethlehem. And she watched the valley come into view, purling through ghost towns; she saw Murray running past these fields again, and then taking his team here every year.

  She still could not believe it had happened, could not imagine how it must have been for his girls, seeing him break. The weight of holding his grief in, never talking about what they’d been through, to anyone—she assumed—for all these years. His girls, she guessed they saw him the way she always had, as someone applying this constant pressure—not the one feeling it himself.

  She had been stretching on the floor of her living room when the doctor had called her. Hello, Mrs. Murray? She’d corrected it with Weber, Nancy Weber, but when the doctor had clarified, You’re not the wife of Samuel Murray? she said, No, not anymore, and then the doctor had said he’d listed her in his emergency contacts, that they needed to collect some informa
tion about his medical history. She had answered their questions over the phone, but they’d refused to provide the details of his diagnosis. She just knew that he’d suffered a brief reactive psychosis, most likely due to stress or trauma.

  It was five days later, and he was about to be discharged. She had offered to pick him up. She did not know why, but she had, and he’d consented, and here she was, already thirteen miles from Bethlehem.

  The doctor had asked her about Murray’s parents, and she had confirmed how they both had died. Nancy thought of the coal mining accident: the image of the collapsed shaft, the cold dirt, Murray’s father’s face black with carbon.

  Murray once told her, after they’d visited his mother together, and he’d taken her to see his high school, that he’d started running at thirteen—two years before his father’s accident. He’d told her that the rhythms of his feet, against his breath, three steps for every one breath, had always soothed him. She’d been stunned that he’d found speed through all the overgrown fields, the lack of cleanly paved roads, so unlike in the neighborhoods where she’d grown up riding her bike. He’d broken records on a grass track, too, not the red Tartan she’d assumed all tracks required.

  The fields Murray had taken her through eventually met the woods, and a series of trails of which they’d walked a portion together. When they’d emerged and wound back through town, past the abandoned tattoo of railroads, the smell of soft earth lingering, she had felt hopeful. That despite their divided upbringings, their disparate paths, they had something to offer one another.

  Nancy only had this moment, she thought, to be there for Murray if he’d let her. She’d packed a duffel bag with the things she thought he needed. A bar of soap and a fresh change of clothes from Kmart.

  Were there other things he might want? Books? Records to play? But where to play them? Did he wish to see her face?

  In the waiting area, she took frequent sips of water. There was a television playing the travel channel. The show featured a resort in Alaska that caught and prepared fresh fish. Zoomed-in images of a salmon’s belly severed in half. Egg whites whisked with saffron and poured over salted halibut. A panoramic shot showed the flicker of a campfire, then the Aleutian Range distant and gleaming.