by Alix Ohlin
Outside the Starbucks I waited for the light to change. As I stepped into the street I heard one of the children cry out, and turned my head toward the sound; at least that’s how I’ve reconstructed the events. I don’t in fact remember what happened. I only know I wasn’t looking when the taxi turned the corner, entered the intersection, and struck me. I heard as if from a great distance the sound my head made against the curb. I noticed my odd, sharp landing on the ground as you might notice a funny noise in your car just before the brakes fail or the engine catches fire.
* * *
—
I woke up feeling weightless. The lights in the room were very bright and the television was on, playing a show about animals, though the reception was fuzzy and pixelated. Two lion cubs wrestled on a savannah while a voice said, “Playing teaches the young about hierarchy.” The TV was at an odd angle, much smaller than I remembered it, and partially blocked by a white expanse of pillow. At last I understood that I wasn’t in the apartment, but a hospital room, and an IV—surely the reason for my weightlessness—snaked along my arm. The pillow that blocked the view of the TV was in fact my foot, bulbous in a cast.
“Their father will teach them to fight while their mother will ignore them,” the voice said. “The cubs will grow up as enemies until one of them establishes himself as the alpha male of the tribe.” This narration continued as the cubs rolled around, climbing on their father’s back and then falling off. “Their father will abandon them and the kids will be like, What the hell, Dad? But he has to do his own thing. That’s the way of dads. The kids will grow up, fight, hunt, have sex, produce cubs of their own, and fuck those cubs up. That’s the way of cubs.”
The narration didn’t seem scientific. I tried to move my hand to find the remote and change the channel, but found I couldn’t.
“Don’t worry, you’re not paralyzed,” the narration said, “just super doped up. You have a broken ankle and a pretty serious concussion.” I wondered how a nature show knew so much about my personal foibles. My mouth was lint-filled, tongue-scraped, and I had no voice.
“The nurse is going to bring you some water,” the narration said, coming closer, and a head swam into my view. It wasn’t the television speaking. It was Robin.
10.
I was in the hospital for a week. Because it was a teaching hospital, many people observed and inspected me, a troop at a time, ducklings parading behind their mother duck. Because of the concussion, I suffered from double vision, so there seemed to be not five ducklings but ten, or even twenty, their ranks swelling each time I blinked. In spite of their number they weren’t very helpful. They reduced my medication, and pain blazed at my temples; I tried to press my hands against my forehead and missed, palming empty air. I told them the lights were too bright. They told me to close my eyes. I told them the sheets were scratchy, and they told me to lie still.
My room was semi-private, which is to say that a blue curtain hung around my bed and when the ducklings entered they swept it aside as if performing on a stage. Across the room, behind a separate blue curtain, was another patient, who never spoke or watched television or made a sound. The ducklings visited her too and discussed her case among themselves, but they never asked her any questions. Once a day a machine was wheeled in and parked next to her, making industrial pumping sounds. I was at least as interested in her condition as my own. Why did no one come to see her? Why did she never speak? I asked the ducklings, but they didn’t answer. Answering questions was not their job, and I wasn’t sure if I’d even asked them out loud.
The ducklings on their rounds provided my only sense of time passing. Otherwise the hours twirled without markers, merely a vague feeling of days turning to nights and then back again. They’d switched my television off and taken away my remote. I wasn’t allowed any screens. In addition to my concussion I had vertigo, which turned out to be far less entertaining as an experience than it was as a film. It came and went unpredictably, and during the worst of it the bed spun around endlessly, never coming to rest.
“Try to sleep,” the nurses said, and I tried.
But there’s no worse place to sleep than a hospital. Even in darkness the hallways whispered with intent. The sounds of rolling wheelchairs and gurneys. Muttered conferences and beeping phones. It was a place where bodies labored and were repaired; this was work, not rest. Whenever I tried to sit up in bed, my temples ached and the room swam. I lay back with my eyes closed, and lay back again, and again, and again.
Because I complained so constantly about my headache they upped my dosages, and eventually I floated above the hospital noises, noting the smells and voices of the various orderlies and nurses, ranking them. I didn’t care for the ones who made chit-chat; I preferred to be ignored. There was one who held my wrist to check my pulse and I saw that her nails were bitten and ragged. Therefore I didn’t trust her; couldn’t she even take care of herself? There was another who had long nails painted in complex and brilliant patterns, and I didn’t trust her either; wasn’t she frivolous? I felt very sorry for myself, and I was starting to believe I’d been imprisoned and would never be allowed to leave.
I understood I’d hallucinated Robin, that she’d never been there. The nurses asked if there was someone they should call, and I thought of Wheelock and then dismissed the thought; I couldn’t turn to him now or I might, I knew, go back to Briar Neck and never leave again. Helen was in Costa Rica with her capuchins and Min had the twins and Olga was too far away in Berlin and Emma was busy with her family and dairy business. There was no one I wanted to call. But then Robin came back.
“Sorry I haven’t been around the past few days,” she said casually, coming into the room and flicking on the lights, which had been strictly forbidden by the ducklings. “I’ve had a lot to do.”
I squinted at her. My vision was not quite blurred and not quite normal. Parts of her were sharply, overly focused while other parts looked squeezed and stretched. None of her proportions made sense to me. “Are you real?” I said.
She laughed. “Sometimes I wonder.”
She swung my curtain all the way to the side and then swung the one beside me, too. For the first time I saw an old woman, or at least a small body topped with a puff of white hair. “How are you holding up, Mrs. Krugman? Still fighting the good fight?”
Mrs. Krugman didn’t answer. Robin fished something out of a plastic bag, and I heard a quiet pop. “Don’t tell the nurses,” she said to the room in general, and started feeding Mrs. Krugman with a plastic spoon. “She loves pudding,” she told me. “But who doesn’t?” Every once in a while she raised a paper napkin to Mrs. Krugman’s lips and wiped.
I was jealous of Robin’s attentions. Was she Mrs. Krugman’s sister, or mine? I wouldn’t have minded some pudding. I lay quietly stewing, observing my sister. At the age of thirty-two Robin was both ragged and beautiful, lovely in her self-neglect. She was wearing dark purple corduroys and brown, thick-soled work boots, and a blue sweater marbled with black and brown threads. When she came closer, to throw the pudding cup in the trash can, I saw that the black threads were animal hair. Her own hair hung down her back in a braid that seemed to have been made some days earlier and then left to fray. Her face was thinner than it had been when I’d last seen her, and her eyes seemed larger and even wider-set. Around her neck was a pair of glasses on a red string. I watched her move around my side of the room, bent on tasks of her own devising. She tossed some hospital brochures into the trash, wiped dust off the television with the sleeve of her sweater, went out to bring me a glass of water, then left the room and came back with another cup and a toothbrush. Until I saw these things I hadn’t noticed that my teeth were slimy, my tongue gritty and sour. I brushed, rinsed, spat, and she took everything away. Then she came back and pressed a button on the side of my bed until I was sitting almost upright. I’d been lying down so long that even this simple a
djustment made me dizzy.
“You’ll be discharged soon, they tell me,” my sister said, pulling a chair up beside me.
“Who tells you, the ducklings?”
“Yes, the ducklings,” she said, unruffled. “I want to show you some pictures.” Over my lap she spread some color photocopies: wood floors, white walls, a bathroom. I didn’t know what to do with these images. I thought it must be some kind of memory test, one I was bound to fail. All I saw were empty rooms.
“I found you a place,” she said. “In Brooklyn. It’s a garden apartment with a little outdoor space in the back. The landlady says you can have a cat, if you want to, but no dog. I said I didn’t see you wanting a dog.”
I was confused. “I’m moving to Brooklyn?”
“Min and I agreed it’s not good for you to keep staying in what’s-his-name’s place.”
“You talked to Min?”
“She’s sorry she’s not here too, but she’s got her hands full. As you know.” Here Robin placed another picture on my lap: the babies, red-faced and unsmiling, wearing knitted hats. Min had named them Alma and Alvin. I reached out a hand to touch the pictures and somehow missed; I couldn’t orient my body in space, couldn’t make contact where I wanted. My head throbbed and I blinked back small hot tears. I thought I sensed Robin watching me, but when I opened my eyes she was bending over to stuff the photographs into a backpack on the floor. “Are you going to stay?” I asked her.
“For a while,” she said.
“How did you know I was here?”
“The nurses found me in your phone and called me. They said I was the last person you’d tried to contact. Something about Boris? I guess you don’t remember.”
I didn’t remember. “Will you bring me some pudding?”
“Maybe,” she said.
11.
The apartment was in a quiet, distant neighborhood. It was a ten-minute walk to the subway and a ten-minute walk to the supermarket, and not in the same direction. The yellow brick buildings were old yet charmless, and there weren’t any trees. The landlady, Elena Brown, explained that there used to be large, leafy elms on the block, but they’d all succumbed to disease and the city hadn’t planted new ones. “We’re on some kind of waiting list,” she said. “Can you believe there’s a waiting list for trees?”
She was an Italian woman of uncertain age, her hair dyed a brilliant orange, her eyebrows drawn with a firm hand. I knew she was Italian because she told me so immediately and brought it up every time I saw her. She’d married an African-American man named Ed Brown, and the loss of her maiden name, Caputo, seemed to pain her more than the loss of Ed, who’d died of heart disease decades earlier. “I used to be a Caputo,” she’d say longingly, “back in the day.” After Ed’s death she’d raised their three children alone, and they’d shown their gratitude by moving away to Boston, Milwaukee, and Chicago, respectively. “I hardly even see my grandchildren,” she said. “Can you believe this world?”
The world was full of things that Elena Brown couldn’t believe. She couldn’t believe that Robin and I, such pretty girls, didn’t have husbands and children. She couldn’t believe that UPS wouldn’t deliver her package to the back door when she’d explicitly directed them to in a note handwritten on paper torn out of the phone book. She couldn’t believe America had a black president. Ed would be amazed, she said. Never thought he’d see the day. “Next we need an Italian,” she said.
Whenever Robin and I were in the little garden, Elena would stand on the exterior staircase above us, arms folded, watching and talking. We’d always invite her down, but she shook her head and said, “That’s your space, I’m not going to invade it,” then continue with her commentary.
I liked her. I liked that in my apartment I could hear her moving around above me, the thud of her footsteps, the scrape of furniture across the floor, occasional staccato thumps whose cause remained a mystery to me. Sometimes, when it was very quiet, I could hear her sneeze.
Robin slept on the couch we’d bought at IKEA along with a mattress and bed frame. The rest of the apartment we furnished from Goodwill and Brooklyn itself, lugging home kitchen carts and end tables and bookshelves that people left out on the street. That is, Robin did the lugging, as I was still on crutches. When she was done the place was a motley patchwork, with the new couch sitting spotless in the center of the living room like a queen among plebes. In a thrift store on Atlantic Avenue she’d found a box of old postcards and she bought a number of cheap frames and covered the walls with them, pictures of Paris, Los Angeles, Havana, Detroit. On the back of a picture of coastal Maine someone had scrawled, Came here to get away from you.
As my ankle mended, my mind also began to heal, shifting from concussion into clarity. My vision returned to an almost painful focus. The world felt too brightly contrasted, too finely grained. I was sometimes transfixed by Elena’s face, her one crooked tooth or the ring she wore, which was purple and gold and didn’t fit her well, so that she twisted it over and over again with her other hand. My mind would scream, Please stop! and she noticed me staring and only did it more, whether to torment or entertain me, I didn’t know. My ankle ached, but worse was the vertigo, which robbed me of my footing and tilted the world on its axis at unpredictable moments, so that I found myself collapsing sideways onto couches, or bumping into doorsills, clumsy with disorientation.
Quite some time passed before I remembered to thank Robin for her help.
“It sounded bad when the nurses called me. They said you were slurring your words and not making sense. They asked you if you’d been drinking and you said, ‘I do not accept drinks from gentlemen who disapprove of me.’ ”
It was a line from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Why I’d quoted it to the nurses, I couldn’t say.
“I pictured you keeping some rough company,” she said. “Which didn’t seem like you. So I left everything and came down.”
We were sitting in the garden—which was composed of concrete slabs, framed by narrow strips of dirt—on two old lawn chairs we’d found in somebody’s garbage. They’d been grimy and mottled but Robin had washed and bleached them and arranged them at right angles to each other, with an overturned milk crate in between, and on the milk crate she’d placed a potted geranium. We sat in this civilized plastic tableau, drinking tea. The afternoons were getting warmer and the sun hit our faces with tentative light.
“What did you leave?” I asked. “I mean, what kind of life, is yours like?” At times I had trouble speaking; words evaded me or slithered into the wrong places. That morning I’d stood in the washroom after using the toilet, trying to remember the words handle and flush.
“What’s my life like?” Robin repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
“I moved up to Sainte-Agathe, you know that.” A few years earlier, Robin’s American grandparents—the Johnsons of Fox Run, Minnesota, whom she’d met a mere handful of times—had died, willing her a sum of money. With it she’d bought land in the Laurentians, two hours north of Montreal. On the phone Marianne had said that Robin left the city to spite her. Came here to get away from you.
“I mean,” I said. “What kind of place.” With effort, my head dully throbbing, I turned to focus on her. She was wearing the same pants and sweater she’d had on in the hospital. She wore the same thing every day, more or less. Sometimes she rebraided her hair.
She filled her cheeks with air like a puffer fish, then let it out in a long sigh. “It’s a cottage,” she said. “On some land. I have animals there.”
“Animals?” I pictured her riding horses, or raising chickens. “What kind of animals?”
She stretched out her hand as if to say, All kinds. “I like the woods. I had enough of the city. I waitress at a place in town. There’s so much money to be made in tourist season. You wouldn’t believe what some people will pay
for a hamburger in the middle of July.”
“Hamburger,” I said musingly. There’d been a larger sentence attached to this inside my head, but by the time it reached my mouth the rest of the words had evaporated.
The one-word remnant made my sister laugh. “We could have hamburgers tonight if you want,” she offered.
“Okay.”
“I remember you always liked A&W cheeseburgers. With root beer. You used to dig through the apartment for coins, in the couch cushions, in Marianne’s pockets, and when you finally collected enough money you’d take me out to A&W.”
I’d forgotten this, but as she spoke the memory came back to me with startling sensory detail: the lint and grime of the couch where I groped for pennies and dimes, the clink of the coins when I deposited them in my little plastic purse, my sister at my side watching me, as she was watching me now.
“Are you—do you live alone?” I asked her.
“Not exactly. I have a lot of friends. You should come meet them.”
I was silent. I knew I should say that I would like that, and to tell Robin how grateful I was that she’d come to the hospital at a moment’s notice, that she’d set up the apartment, that she was staying with me now. And yet for some reason I couldn’t; the words caught in my throat. So I sat in the sun and folded my hands in my lap, feeling another fit of vertigo approach.
