“What was so remarkable about your grandfather?”
My lips were stiff. They hurt. I shaped a word. “Special.” He was special because He would not die. Because He loved me. “Because He was so strong,” I said, with lips that were barely my own.
He had been so loving. He had waited so patiently. And then He took me easily, with a kiss.
There was too much light here, and I wanted to close my eyes. I knew that light would cure me. It was so silent, though, and sterile, falling heavily from the sky.
Tweezers plucked gauze away from my nose. Eyes studied, calculated. My face began to hurt again. It felt like it was growing huge. Cotton rubbed cold alcohol on my arm, and a needle stabbed.
I was scattered, like a bag of leaves. Dr. Kirby’s voice was raking me in.
“You’ll live a normal life,” he said. “Like everyone else.”
To be normal was to be weak. To have no Voice.
The loving Voice would never come to me again. I was alone.
“It will take a long time,” said Dr. Kirby.
I knew what this meant: It might not work.
“There may be days when you seem to make no progress.”
I could feel the tape. A nose. The lips were like healed burns. They were raking me together.
“But we have time,” said Dr. Kirby.
When I learned to smile again, I would learn to say without speaking: This is impossible, but I know you are being kind.
One morning Dr. Kirby asked, “Would you like to have one of your cameras?”
To hold, I thought. Just to hold. I nodded.
“You know the therapist wants you to enunciate as much as possible.”
“Yes.”
But I did not mean that. I meant that a camera would remind me of the dark. I had always understood the dark, how with time and care the camera could magnify the barest illumination into noon. It would remind me of more than the dark.
It might bring back the Voice.
I sat in sun some afternoons, sitting under a magnolia tree.
One morning Dr. Kirby said, “I wonder if you would like to see your mother?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to, you know. It’s up to you.”
Because I had not meant yes. I had meant that to see her would remind me of the Voice. That I was afraid. But that I would risk it.
“You’re still recovering from a great trauma,” said Dr. Kirby. “We can take our time.”
So Dr. Kirby knew how to wait, too. Perhaps all real power came from the power to wait.
“I want,” I said, “to see her.”
But she did not come. I knew why. I was not easy to look at. I understood. They were gathering me, but it was taking too long.
It was afternoon, under the warm sun. A magnolia tree spread over me, tangling the light. Water somewhere pattered on the lawn.
A blond nurse stepped across the lawn, trying to avoid the glistening place where it was wet. Green grass clippings clung to her white shoes—two of them on the side of one foot.
“Your mother is here to see you,” she said.
The water on the lawn was a long, airy note. Like the Voice.
“You don’t have to see her,” she added. “She’ll understand.”
I looked away. If I wanted to have a future, it would have to begin. It surprised me, sometimes, that the nurses here could not read my mind. My thoughts were so vivid I imagined easily that they could read them through my skin.
I took a slow, deep breath. I let it go. “I want to.”
She looked smaller than I had remembered. She looked away from me, and then looked again. I stood and held her.
The attendant brought a chair, and the two of us sat in the sun. There was silence. I understood my mother. What was there to say?
Her hand slipped into her purse, and she said, “Dr. Kirby said you asked for this.”
It was my oldest, a Leica M2. I was trembling as I unscrewed the brush-steel lens cover.
“I brought film, too,” she said.
The colors around me pulsed for a moment. This was the world that I could possess, if I wanted it. I was afraid, then, and held the camera to my chest. If my future became precious to me, because it was so possible, perhaps the Voice would come back simply to take it away.
I closed my eyes. The sun was a blush behind the veins of my eyelids. I spoke as clearly as I could. “Thank you for bringing it.”
“I wasn’t sure which one …”
I tried to smile. If only I could stay like this. If only the empty places in me could fill, slowly, with light.
“You’ll be fine,” she said, as though she believed it.
If He leaves me alone.
38
A life is a simple thing, she thought: You live.
Mark was waiting at the car. His face brightened when he saw her, but then he took her in his arms. He plainly did not know to ask.
“He knows where he is,” she said. “And who.”
“That’s a blessing.”
A blessing. It had been a long time since Mary had believed in blessings.
“Dr. Kirby is very pleased. But you know doctors. Sometimes I think they like to see people very sick so they can cure them.”
Mark held the door of the car open for her, but she did not want to get in yet. She wanted to stay here for a moment. Mark was such a healthy man. So solid. He could never imagine what it was really like to have a soul like hers.
But Mark seemed to read her mind. “Isn’t hope one of the great virtues?”
“It can be foolish.”
“Never be too busy to stop and sniff a clover,” her mother had said. Mary had dismissed it as the sort of insipid wisdom her mother was always offering. But that frail woman had done just that, and watched sunsets over the heads of tennis players, and gathered leaves while Mary learned how to throw a knuckleball. A slim figure in white, stooping to watch something small, an insect or a mushroom, while Mary and her father sweated, tossing a football.
“I nearly thought it was a bad idea to bring him a camera. I thought it might bring it all back to him. And you know—I think it might.”
“The doctor wouldn’t have suggested—”
“You’re one of those people who have faith. I’m not. I’m afraid my son may still be lost.”
Mark looked around at the parking lot, and Mary had to look with him. A eucalyptus trembled in the sunlight. If her son never recovered, all this would be lost to him.
Mark put his arm around her. “Just,” he said, “a little faith.”
A jay landed on the rail of the back porch. Paul had been feeding him every morning, ever since they had moved into the new apartment. The jay had a cultivated taste for puff pastry over saltines, but generally he got pieces of whole wheat toast and seemed satisfied.
Paul put down the chapter on soufflés. “All right,” he said through the open back door. “I’ll get you some toast.”
The cookbook was nearly finished, and Paul had just given Ham the last review he was going to do. Ham had said they would miss him, and that he was irreplaceable, but Paul was glad to be finished with the column. Three magazines were offering to run recipes from his cookbook, and Paul’s only problem would be deciding which one to sign with.
Paul broke a piece of toast into fragments. “You’ll hide most of this, just like you hid all the others.” The bird watched, bright-eyed, and when Paul tossed a crust, soared through the air and caught it.
Paul offered Lise the rest of the toast. “See if my bird will catch it for you.”
“Your bird?”
“Well, I trained it.”
“It trained you.”
“Perhaps.”
“He won’t catch it for me.” The jay flapped to the porch rail and eyed her. It called, a metallic bray. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Of course he likes you.”
“No. Look—he’s looking at you.”
“Throw the toast.”
“I’ll feel awful if he drops it.”
Lise did this often—refused to do something she thought might be a bad omen, as though this rational woman believed in good luck, or bad.
Paul folded his arms.
She snapped off a piece of toast. “He won’t catch it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve never had any luck with animals.”
“Try.”
She tossed the fragment of whole wheat toast into the sunlight.
The slowly turning triangle grazed the branch of the ginkgo tree, and spun upward.
It was snatched by the dark beak of the jay, who disappeared into the tree and called, high above them, in the universal language of triumph.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Michael Cadnum
Cover design by Kat JK Lee; photograph courtesy of the author
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2361-0
Distributed in 2015 by Open Road Distribution
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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