by Lauren Groff
Bit thinks of the poverty of the last years of his childhood, the kidlets with scrawny limbs and terrible teeth, the drugs, the cash going to relief efforts, to the Midwifery School, to the Trippies and Runaways. He thinks of easygoing Handy, and his pride that started the rift.
Well, says Bit slowly. I guess that’s as good an interpretation as any.
Yeah, but it’s not like you Amish are perfect, Grete says. You’re human, too. I mean, even you guys get sick. What happens if you get SARI? I bet your community would suffer.
There are always diseases, Glory says. You’re too young to remember measles, chicken pox, polio. Spanish influenza killed millions in 1918, and nobody ever hears about it. We have survived other things.
Glory nods toward the cookies she brought. Now. Eat your dessert, she says. Allow me to concentrate, thank you. In fifteen minutes, Glory has the computer running. She settles Hannah before it. They wait as Hannah figures out the mechanism that makes it work.
Bit finds himself holding his breath, urging the computer inside his head, making deals. If you let my mother speak, he thinks, I will repudiate my repudiation of technology.
A smooth, light voice rises and startles them, a voice unlike Hannah’s. Only after it has passed does Bit understand what it said into the dimness of the house: Glory be.
They hear from Cheryl and Diana, who come, sobbing. Muffin and her family are missing in Madagascar, and all the news they can get are pictures of bodies lining the street. As they are leaving, the ladies remember another sorrow and tell how Pooh’s two-year-old granddaughter in Seattle has died in the night, and the family is in lockdown and can’t travel to mourn together. The news touches the bone.
Ellis has watched silently, great-eyed, from a chair in the corner through their visit. When he passes her in the hall, she stops him, and takes his head, and gently leans it against her shoulder. He stays there until Grete comes from her bedroom, sees them, and shuts her door again.
In these quiet days, the house is full of slanted light and music from the ancient turntable. Hannah only ever wants Bach. Bit spoons a dollop of chocolate pie into his mother’s mouth. It is hard for her to swallow, impossible for her to chew. To keep her from losing too much weight, they spend most of their days making her eat.
Hannah glances over at her new computer and eyes out some words. Benefit one to sickness, the sultry computer voice says. I can taste as vividly as when I was a child.
What’s benefit two? Bit says.
He sees Hannah’s eyes return to the keyboard. Benefit two . . . , the voice says, and there’s a long pause. He goes to the sink to do the dishes, and when he returns, he peers at the screen, thinking that perhaps Hannah forgot to make the voice speak. But there is only Benefit two . . . trailing into nothing.
At last, he gets her joke.
Ellis comes every other day, mostly in the evenings after she’s showered and had dinner and waited for illness to sneak upon her. Bit and she sit together for hours over tea in the kitchen, eating Glory’s pies, while Luisa and Hannah murmur in Hannah’s room and Grete sleeps the sleep of the young. Ellis tells him, piece by piece, about herself. The good little girl, beloved only child of older parents, piano-playing, churchgoing. Summerton was larger then. There was a Farm and Home store, a Newberry’s, a Kmart, a smattering of hippie boutiques from defectors of Arcadia. She went straight to college at seventeen, to medical school at twenty-one. She wanted to fix people. She saw how her mother came back from the rheumatologist’s glowing, her hands having been gently held for an hour, the power of touch. But her parents both died when she was in residency. She was very alone. She was engaged three times (she blushes). She called it off every time, a few months before the wedding. They were nice guys, she says. She didn’t love them.
Bit folds her small brown hand into his. Her nostrils go red and her eyelids do too and there’s something of the bunny about her as she wipes her cheeks on her shoulders. I’m not sure, she whispers, I’m capable of loving anybody.
Ellis, Bit says. Oh, honey, of course you are.
He lifts her knuckles to his mouth and kisses them, tasting the bitter almond of her skin. She stands suddenly, and says a hurried goodbye, and drives off, and all the next day Bit is afraid he’s scared her away. But she comes again at nine that night, and when she enters the house, the cool air in her clothes, she kisses him gravely on both cheeks, next to his lips, and leans her head against his chest and keeps it there for a long moment, just resting.
Then she says, I have a surprise, and goes out to her car, and a huge yellow Lab comes bounding out, a streak of sunlight in the night-darkened house. He rests his muzzle in Hannah’s lap and Luisa chases him from the kitchen with a broom and he wrestles with Grete until they both pant. Can Otto stay here? says Grete, grabbing the leonine head and shaking it until the dog nips gently at her wrist. Ellis grins at Bit. Not just yet, she says. Maybe soon.
Possibility, so strange in this house of sickness, washes over him. Soon, he agrees.
When Ellis drives away, a door seems to close behind her. In Mexico City, the morgues are full and the dead are stacked in the warehouse of a toy company. On Grete’s e-reader, the images rise: babies in their canvas shrouds, stacked under drifts of dolls with unblinking eyes. The image haunts Bit at night and makes him sit at the window to watch the comforting dark until his vision goes blurry with sleep.
Bit can hardly catch his daughter alone. She comes in at ten. He lifts himself, his body a heavy sack, and meets Grete at the kitchen sink.
Hey, Dad, she whispers. They can hear Hannah in her room, barking No! at Luisa, the last word she can say. Luisa always responds in her soft, kind voice. Grete’s track sweatshirt smells of the woodsmoke of some bonfire. On her breath, there is whiskey.
Oh, Grete, Bit says.
Don’t worry, she says.
I do, he says. The quarantine. Plus you’re fourteen. And you have the genes. I mean, your mother started a little younger than you—
Dad, she interrupts him. In the dim kitchen, she laughs. Listen.
Whippet-thin, she leans on the sink. She talks about running. About how she pushes until the pain builds so high in her limbs that it breaks into bliss, how she is a raw nerve here, at home, but when she runs she’s let loose from anxiety, how it threads itself all the way through her bones until she feels relief kindle in her, a kind of happiness.
I would do nothing to threaten that feeling, she says. Nothing.
He must seem dubious because she looks at him for a moment, holding something in. You’re a lot like Grumpy, you know, she says. You always have to take care of everyone else, and don’t let anyone take care of you. It’s kind of aggressive.
Aggressive? he says, startled. Me?
All I’m saying is, if you won’t let me take care of you, at least take care of yourself. She turns away and closes herself in her room.
In the morning, Bit hears her stir and rolls out of his bed in his running clothes. It is the kind of dawn that seems to seep out of the trees’ vibrant green. Grete comes onto the porch where he’s stretching and says a small Oh!
How far are we going? he says.
Until you drop, old man, she says and vanishes with impossible lightness into the waking forest. It is all he can do to follow on the path where she’s gone, the underbrush still shaking with her passage, each of his steps becoming its own reward, the day its own glory, his lungs’ bursting a good pain and his daughter falling back, at last, in kindness to him.
Hannah makes a wordless bray when Grete goes out the door. Grete waits, impatient, for the computer voice to flute out: You, my darling, are not wearing underwear.
Grete flushes and mutters, Grannah, Jesus. I forgot to do my laundry, not that it’s any of your business.
Hannah snorts, and the voice says, I can see your business. Hussy.
May Day, and he looks for nymphs dancing ribbons around poles but finds only the same sear that once afflicted August in his youth. The radio
is an insect abuzz in the house, reporting heat-related deaths in the cities, five hundred thousand dead of SARI, general quarantine, hospital only for traumatic cases, airlines shut down. He flicks the box quiet before the personal stories begin. He can only bear tragedy if it’s abstract.
Glory comes in the mornings and fills the air with the warmth of baking pies. They cover most of Hannah’s newest smells: the ointments for her sores, the sickly whiff of her breath, the house-filling stink when she can manage to void her bowels.
Luisa lives with them on a cot in Hannah’s room; it is safer for her here, in exile. The hospital is in crisis mode, but everyone is afraid of SARI and nobody but the sickest come in, so the doctors and nurses spend their days playing cards and watching television until the director announces voluntary suspensions of noncritical staff. Ellis chooses this option and comes every morning; she naps beside Bit, atop the covers, when it’s Grete’s turn to watch Hannah. Grete’s school is closed. Yoko and Grete talk on the e-reader a hundred times a day. At night, the family eats the vegetables Hannah once canned, tasting the sun of other summers in them.
Sometimes Hannah seems so distant; he thinks she’s trying to pray. It makes sense, in the light of her decline. Bit also tries to pray when he is unable to sleep, but he keeps his eyes open, because when they are closed he sees God in the form of Handy, who is most definitely not God. He turns toward the window, the cold coin of the moon, and tells it stories about his day, to pull the shapeless mass of his time into some saving form.
At last, Bit comes to Hannah when her face is peaceful, and he asks her what she is doing. The voice says, Practicing.
What? he says, and her proxy voice swims out beautiful and smooth: Make tofu. Baste. Play Chopin. Launder. Shell peas. Curry horse. Bake scones. Fuck. Knead bread. Swim.
He sits in the rocking chair beside her. The women’s noises fill the house at his back. He will make raspberry jam in his head, he decides; he hasn’t done any preserving since he was a boy. He closes his eyes. At first he forgets steps, has to backtrack to squeeze the lemons, clean the berries, measure out the sugar, pluck the glass jars from the boiling water. But when he relaxes, things go vibrant. He feels the furry warmth of fresh raspberries in his fingers, and the smell rises up, sweet and tingling, made even brighter by memory.
The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath. He takes photo after photo with his ruined film, to hold them there.
This is what, long ago, made him fall in love with photography: the paying of attention, the capturing of time. He’d forgotten exactly this.
He walks in, arms full of laundry, to find Grete shouting for him. He drops the clothing onto the kitchen counter, and socks roll across the tiles. He finds his daughter standing in the bathtub, Hannah leaning against the sink, her face gray, choking.
She knocks me back, Grete says. I try to help, she knocks me away.
Bit is also pummeled by Hannah’s sharp elbows but leans in. Her mucus is too heavy for her, impossible to swallow. Bit takes a washcloth, seizes Hannah’s head, and scrapes off the back of her tongue. She gasps: the color slowly flows back into her face. Tears roll down her cheeks and drip off. Bit cradles her head in his arms. When she is calm again, he wheels her into the kitchen to her computer. Into the heat of the afternoon, the voice at last comes: My body, she wisecracks, wants to kill me.
During the rainstorm, the wind in the trees sounds like panting. Bit remembers what Titus used to call his own spells of sadness: the old black dog. How appropriate: fanged and servile, neither wild nor human, but an odd by-product of civilization, hungry and slinking near. He can almost see the dog out in the wild rattling rainstorm, skulking in the blacker shadows among the trees. He can almost feel the softness of its pelt under his hand.
Grete has filled six of Hannah’s skin-thin teacups with water and daisies. They shine in the dawn. These days, they use the antique lace tablecloth and the silver service at every meal. It comforts Hannah to handle things her own mother and grandmother touched.
While Luisa changes the bedsheets, Bit and Hannah are alone.
Hannah peers urgently at the computer. When the voice comes on, it says with gentle calm, My little Bit. Will you forgive me?
Bit’s silence, born of surprise, stretches. Forgive what, exactly? Which of her many failures is she speaking of?
He stares at the claw of her hand until he somehow knows she means Arcadia, their common wound, how she had pushed toward perfection but, tiring, turned away. It is true that most of the children of Arcadia rebelled. Dylan went neocon, Cole became punk, Jincy searched for suburbia, Leif turned antiseptic and inward. It’s the ancient story: the deliberate rejection of what gave birth to the youth and created the man. In the quiet of the house, Luisa’s shoes squeak around the bed, the mockingbird begins a rill.
Bit feels it start to swell in him. The love, which he had turned from, breathes, blinks, swallows. A creature, stirred back to life. He can’t be separate. It is impossible. He is part of the whole.
He looks at his brittle mother and says, There is nothing to forgive.
Within the rebellious clay of her flesh, Hannah kindles, becomes so unbearably brilliant that it hurts Bit to look at her. Still, he keeps his eyes on her. He looks.
Hannah had once been vaster than Arcadia itself, her body so big it enveloped him, the warmth of her, the bread of her, so great that the sun had risen and set in her. Dwindling, she is a burlap sack and bundle of sticks; she is frayed muscles, weeping sores.
He carries her into the Pond. She dabbles her hands and legs, pretending to swim. They hear Grete’s fast footsteps as she runs up. She wades in, still in her clothes, the jeans and boat shoes, the pretty top. She goes underwater and comes up next to them, her hair plastered and eyeliner streaming in black slips down her cheeks. She says, Let me, and carries Hannah away through the water toward Helle’s rock. When she turns around, she is singing the song that Bit used to sing to her, the summers they spent up in Arcadia, when she was little and frightened of the thick water of the Pond . . . swimming all day, In the ocean so wide, Now it’s time to rest, And float with the tide, Hey ho, little fish don’t cry, she sings.
Luisa is calm but pushes through the countryside at such speeds that Bit is afraid of the trees rushing by in the darkness. Bit holds his choking mother. They are in the ER. In a moment, the doctor in his green scrubs brandishes a scalpel and Hannah has a hole in her throat. Cotton descends upon Bit’s mind. For a long, good time, there is blankness.
They wheel Hannah out again. There is a ventilator attached to her. She is weeping. I didn’t want this, she will say at home, clawing at the tubes; but it’s clear, even now, what she means. Luisa says something: refused to talk about advance directives. Hannah. Bit finds himself in the car, going home.
He can administer enemas, hold his mother one-armed over the toilet, wipe her bottom. He can brush the shine into her long whitening hair and file her toenails and rub the muscles that cramp until she gasps with relief. He can spend all his patience from dawn to dusk spooning soup into her mouth which she chokes on more often than not. Even in the hospital, when they asked her about a feeding tube, she had been so agitated they understood her No. He can watch her waste away. To make peace with the problems of her flesh is not hard for him. But something deep in him resists the raw wound in her throat, the way it smells of death.
He watches his hand clean it, anyway. He has locked himself away so that his days are lived by a shred of himself. The rest of him waits somewhere on the outskirts, watching for the end.
But Hannah studies the part of Bit that remains. She is expanding while he is retracting. She is a cup. She overbrims with love.
Hannah cannot swallow her food. She chokes and lets it dribble from her mouth. Bit remembers a story, somewhere, of a woman bricked into a wall. This is his mother, interred alive.
Ellis kneels at Hannah’s side. She isn’t sleepi
ng, either: she is pale, her face drawn in the sun. Bit hears among the murmurs, starvation . . . feeding tube.
No, the computer voice says cheerily. I am glad to have had these months. It was right. But I am almost done. Let me starve.
Ellis lays her brown cheek on Hannah’s hand. You’re right. It’s a gentler way to go, Hannah, she murmurs. We’ll give you opioids and keep you comfortable. As long as you’re still happy with this decision.
Hannah’s eyes dart at Bit. The computer sings out, I am happy, now, to go.
The women tighten, a knot, around Bit’s small family. Luisa and Grete, always; Glory every afternoon. This morning, thumbing their noses at the quarantine, Cheryl and Diana, the Library Ladies. Grete is gone for hours on her runs. When Ellis arrived the night before, she held her soft cheek on his, and he could feel the pulse of her, the promise. Such terrible timing, to find what he had been hoping for, now. She had put her things in his closet, and slipped into his sheets, her body cool as a salve. When he rose to get a glass of water, he’d heard Grete in her room whispering into Otto’s patient ruff.
Before lunch, Astrid, alerted by Grete, sweeps in. Bit doesn’t see her at first, but he feels the house fill with her cold blue flame. Then she is cupping his cheeks in her callused hands. She kisses him on the forehead, and he wears the kiss for the rest of the day like a badge.
Cooking, tending, cleaning: omnipresent like flies, the hands of women.
When it is overmuch, he goes to the Pond and submerges himself in the too-warm water. The weeds grab and slide against him. A hawk watches him from a branch, a blue jay in its talons. When Bit proves innocuous, the hawk bends its head to the bird and down confettis onto the surface of the water. Small blue feathers stick to Bit’s skin when he climbs out.
On his walk back, he sees a man sitting on Scott and Lisa’s porch. Even from a distance, Bit can see the man is Amish: full-clothed in the heat, suspenders black against a white shirt. Bit approaches warily. The man stands and nods, and his beard wags. He’s fair-haired with rosy cheeks and shoulders so square they could be hewn from oak. Bit had seen him on Glory’s arm at Abe’s service; her husband. When Bit nears, the man’s eyes begin to twinkle. He makes a little pinching motion with his fingers and brings it to his lips. If Bit didn’t know better, he would say that it was the universal sign of a toke.
