[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  Clare grinned at him. “It’s swell, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t it swell?”

  Hurd pulled the truck slowly to a stop by the train station, which perched on a bluff within view of a long wooden pier that ventured a hundred yards into the waves. “It is,” he said. “I’m glad we saw it.”

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Hurd said, staring off at the water as Ansel and Clare swung down from the truck. Ansel couldn’t stand for Clare to leave now, so he was glad they began walking alongside him to the platform. “Ida likes to come here once a summer and douse herself,” Hurd said. “She brings home buckets of shells. Me, I just sit under an umbrella and take in the sights.” He gestured toward the expanse of cold sand and wagged his eyebrows. “In the summertime, there are plenty of sights.”

  Clare stuffed both hands in his pockets as he strolled along, and kept his eyes on the ocean, grinning. The salty air made his cheeks red and his hair more boyish, flapping a bit in the breeze. “We should come here again when you get back, Dad,” he said. “We could go in the water.”

  “Sure,” Ansel said. “I’d like nothing more than that.”

  Clare watched the waves and Ansel could see him imagining the future as it could never be.

  Hurd issued from the station wearing a smile. “Wonder of wonders,” he said. “Train is on time.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “But we won’t be, Clare, if we don’t get a move on.” He nodded and winked at Ansel instead of shaking his hand, then told Clare he’d go bring the truck around.

  A shorebird screeched and the ocean rolled forward and sucked away. Hurd wheeled the truck to the near corner of the parking lot.

  “Okay then,” Clare said and stuck out his hand, but Ansel put one hand on the sleeve of the boy’s coat and tapped the boy’s shoulder with his other, so there was none of the skin to skin contact forbidden by Dr. Quigley’s Rules to be Observed. Clare seemed confused by this, but nodded and tried to grin and then he was walking away. But he turned back once.

  “Hey, Dad,” he called. “Check on Mom’s radio. Mom and I covered it up pretty well but she seems worried about it.”

  “Sure,” Ansel said. “I’ll be sure to do that. And you be sure to keep up with your studies.”

  The boy nodded. He liked school; the studies were no problem for him. “See you at the wedding!”

  Ansel nodded.

  Hurd’s information notwithstanding, the train was late, but Ansel didn’t mind. When he’d looked toward the parking lot, the packinghouse truck was turning out onto the street and for a moment the form behind the wheel seemed more Clare’s than Hurd’s, but that was impossible, or at least unlikely, and besides, they were beyond him now. All of that was beyond him. He waited a long time on the platform, lost in his thoughts, idly watching the storm advance above water that was a pale, gemlike green only when it rose up near the shore and the light showed its emptiness. By the time the rain began to sluice down, he’d found himself a seat in a nearly vacant passenger car. The rain fell with such force that even as he watched, a channel formed in the sand and a stream of silty water churned down the beach into the sea, where waves pushed the new water back onto the sand. The train began to move.

  76

  Clare gazed at the dashboard and said, “Dad let me drive a truck like this in Kansas.”

  Uncle Hurd’s expression slowly opened, and Clare wondered if he thought the idea coming to him was his own. “Okeydoke, then,” he said, “why not?” and slid over so Clare could take the wheel.

  Clare had driven a truck like this, but only over the rutted farm roads of Kansas. Still, he turned from the parking lot and shifted through the gears without difficulty, and they were on their way. Clare discouraged Hurd’s happy yakking, which was hard for him to take when he was picturing what his father might do in Kansas, by concentrating on the open road.

  When the rain began, Hurd merely reached across the seat, switched the wipers on, and said, “Maybe your dad will take some of this rain with him.”

  Clare acknowledged that he should.

  The wipers smeared the window and made a pulsing click-clicking sound that felt somehow connected to the beating of a heart.

  “Well, look at that,” Hurd said. “It’s beginning to hail.”

  Clare hadn’t even noticed. He’d been thinking about his father at the station and not hugging him, about him going away to their house, and to where Aldine was, too. Clare would later try to remember the sequence of events as they then occurred but all he could remember was squinting through the windshield imagining Aldine holding on to his father in the barn when, at a turn in the road, he felt the metal cab sliding slantwise as he pulled the wheel gently and then too hard to the right, and felt in the great mass in which they were riding the strange uncorrectable momentum and, for a shorter moment than it would later seem, glided ahead in the sensation of detachment, and then hearing the slow crack, which was softer in his memory than he thought it must have been, given that the tree sank so deeply into the truck. And then? And then he didn’t know. He’d gone somewhere else.

  77

  Ellie knew the plan but couldn’t bear to picture it. Dr. Quigley intended to nail Clare’s leg back together as if he were a wooden marionette. Nurse Roover would hold the leg steady and Dr. Quigley would introduce the nail—that’s how he’d put it—and she would sit in the next room where she couldn’t hold Clare’s hand or see Clare’s face or, really, be Clare’s mother, which was what at this moment she wanted most to be.

  “We’ll give him nitrous oxide first,” Dr. Quigley had told her. “Then we’ll introduce the nail.”

  It had to be nailed because the neck of the femur was lacerated (at first Ellie thought he was saying Clare’s neck was broken, but he said no, he meant the neck of the femur, the slender curve of the thighbone) and they would need to secure it with something called a transfixion nail, a piece of metal three-sixteenths of an inch wide. He used his fingers to show how narrow that was, how minuscule, really, but she registered the fact that he didn’t show her the actual nail. He said he had used the method several times, that it was very effective, very safe, the only way to make sure that the edges of the bone stayed together. That was important, Dr. Quigley said, in order to avoid deformity. So that’s what we’re doing, she thought. Avoiding deformity.

  A calendar hung on the wall before her, a hunting calendar featuring a wet spaniel mouthing a limp duck. Ellie studied the spaniel and the duck and the grid of days that represented the month of November. Hurd sat nearby, staring at the floor, his clothes dirty and wet, his fingers crusty with blood. He’d sat with Clare’s head in his lap in the backseat of a car driven by a stranger.

  “My fault,” he said now to Ellie without looking up. “Not the boy’s, not anybody’s, just me.”

  “No,” she said.

  Hurd stood and walked heavily down the hall. Toward the bathroom, she supposed.

  A woman’s voice from the inner room seemed to say, Oh good Lord.

  Would a nurse say that? Say, Oh good Lord?

  Dr. Quigley had thrown Miss Roover a look when she exclaimed at the damage. He’d flexed the knee, swabbed it with iodine, then drawn the skin upward. It was more than Roover normally saw, but the woman was a nurse for crying out loud, and the boy’s mother was just on the other side of the door. He made a short vertical incision, less than an inch but bisecting the greater trochanter and external condyle. He pushed the nail to the bone while Roover held the boy’s leg. “Steady,” he whispered and when he glanced up, he saw she had her eyes squeezed shut. He tapped the nail with his bone mallet until he felt it transfix the bone. There the skin had to be drawn upward—he had to cut it so the nail could pass through without piercing the skin. Piercing the skin would cause acute pain, he knew, the kind of pain Ellie would imagine in any case when she saw the nail projecting an inch on either side of Clare’s leg. That was the hard part, the mental acceptance of a nail driven through flesh and bone, making visible the grisly stuff y
ou could normally hide beneath layers of plaster.

  It mattered to him what she thought. He wanted to make sure she didn’t see the nail right away. He watched as Nurse Roover covered the wounds with dressing soaked in a solution of iodine and sterile saline. He’d asked her to prepare a dram of iodine, a pint of sterile saline. After the wet dressing, he fastened the spreader to the ends of the nail and showed the nurse how to wrap it with dry gauze and cotton, firmly but not so firmly that Clare couldn’t flex his knee. Ellie would have to do this after the first forty-eight hours—it was clear the Prices couldn’t afford to keep the boy in the hospital for six weeks of bed rest. Six weeks, at least. And every other day Ellie would have to change the dressings. But he could come by to help a bit with that.

  Hurd dozed in his chair. Ellie studied the spaniel. She studied the duck. Through the door she heard tapping sounds, squeaks, metallic clicks, Dr. Quigley’s muffled voice. Each noise pricked at her mind, and she smelled what she thought was blood. Bits of debris and muddy footprints had dried on the waiting room floor, and the dirt made what was going on in the next room feel uncontrolled.

  Finally the sounds from inside the room ceased, and a short while later Dr. Quigley came out. It went well, he said, looking from her to Hurd, who was straightening in his chair. Nurse Roover hurried past them, her wrinkled face pale, her hands wrapped in a towel, and went into the kitchen. Water ran. The hospital was really just a made-over house. Where they sat now, she guessed, had been a living room, the operating room was once a bedroom, and Nurse Roover was using the kitchen to wash the blood off.

  “You should go home and come back in the morning,” Dr. Quigley said. He wore a pale pink shirt under his white coat, and his shoes were Mercurochrome brown. There were spatters of blood on the white coat. She appreciated his slightly mournful expression. He was not brusque the way Neva’s doctor in Kansas had been, and he’d been among the very first to patronize the café, and he loved her pie.

  “I’d rather stay,” she said. “I won’t be able to sleep at home.”

  She expected him to insist, but he went into the examining room and returned with a blanket and a pillow. “You might prefer the sofa,” he said, pointing to a green cloth couch that was more like a bench than a bed, but it was long enough to stretch out on. Hurd said he’d better go home and give Ida the news, and he promised to look in on Charlotte and Neva. Ellie didn’t expect to sleep, staring in the dark at the closed door that lay between her and Clare, but she did, and awakened to bright sunlight and the sound of Nurse Roover’s footsteps on the hard linoleum.

  Ellie glanced toward Clare’s room and asked if she could peek in. Nurse Roover nodded and said, “But don’t wake him,” so she tiptoed in and stared quietly at Clare in his white metal bed. He looked both frailer and larger than Ellie had expected, perhaps because she didn’t see him lying down much anymore, certainly not stretched out like that on his back. As a baby he’d slept curled on his side, and as a child, with all his limbs flung out. She wanted to touch his forehead but didn’t. She looked at his hoisted leg. Whatever was broken was hidden under layers of gauze.

  The room was comforting because it was so obviously a bedroom once, with a big window that let in the morning light. She still felt surprise to find herself in California, marveled when she looked out and saw trees, fruit, and green hills, all of it fed by water, none of it suffocating in dust. The window by Clare’s bed looked out over a small orchard: one tree each of lemon, orange, grapefruit, and persimmon. The persimmon tree, still dripping with rain, was the prettiest: all its slender brown branches studded with bright orange fruit. The leaves had fallen off but the fruit remained, as though someone had hung masses of red glass balls on it for Christmas. When Ellie looked hard, she could see that most of the persimmons had been pocked by hail or crows’ beaks, and the crimson scraps of skin hung down to tempt more birds. Even as she watched, a crow came and picked at the flesh, then stood on the branches and bent forward with each hard caw, its body like a black pump handle.

  Clare stirred and, a moment later, opened his eyes. He saw her and at once mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  He’d gone through a phase in childhood where all he did was apologize, saying “sorry” even when he stirred in his sleep, or when his elbow brushed hers at the kitchen table. “Don’t say that,” she said, her eyes filling with tears she had to dab at before she could crush his hand in hers. “It wasn’t your fault, so don’t be sorry. How do you feel?”

  Clare closed his eyes, opened them again, and flinched. “Don’t tell Dad, okay?” he said. “Crashing Mr. McNamara’s truck . . .” His voice trailed away.

  Mr. McNamara had met them at the hospital. He said not to mind about the truck; he thought it would be fine. He just hoped Clare would be okay. Ellie told Clare all this, but she wasn’t sure what he heard. His eyes had again fallen closed.

  78

  Ansel stepped off the train slowly, reading twice the carved letters that said Emporia before he let go of the railing. The original limestone building, the one he could have sketched in his sleep, was now surrounded by red brick. The old place had been without shade or shelter; you were either indoors, or you were out. Now a series of arches stretched from the depot to the tracks. He walked to the corner of Third Avenue and Neosho Street and saw that the rest of the town was not much changed, except for the hard, dry browns and grays of it all. The drought endured. From the train window, he’d seen mile after mile of blown dust and abandoned buildings.

  It was midday. Streaky clouds that Ellie called mares’ tails spread their feathery ice across the sky. Bare cottonwoods and maples, their shapes as familiar to him as his own hands, fringed the tracks where town ended and the prairie began. The air was cold and bright when the sun hit it slantwise, the way air was supposed to feel in November, and he felt that after a long time of wearing someone else’s clothes he had once again slipped into his own.

  He walked east in the direction of the Harvey House and noticed that he still felt beneath his feet the steady a-way, a-way, a-way rhythm of the train, a pulse that was stronger than his own light footsteps. When he stood, at last, before the heavy glass-and-mahogany door of the old lunchroom, he took a breath and stifled a cough. The place had seemed grand in the old days, a place of bustling wealth where passengers gave off an electrical surge of anticipation. He had been young then, with no responsibility but to do his job, amuse himself, and stay loosely on the lookout for the right girl to marry and take back to Dorland. It was a strangely unhampered life. There had been plenty of time, plenty of food, plenty of people, plenty of cheerful girls, and then, in the end, one more interesting and serious girl, whose name was Eleanor Hoffman.

  The ceilings, when he pushed open the door and walked in, were still elaborately patterned, the walls around him still of that height and breadth that meant no expense had been spared, but there was about the dining room a stillness that smelled of brown gravy and old steam.

  It gave him a turn when a girl came out of the kitchen in the same uniform Ellie used to wear: black dress, white apron. Funny how it hadn’t changed in all this time. “You can seat yourself at the bar,” she said. Her voice was raspy and she looked even younger than Aldine, which was odd because she had a 2 on her apron badge, and seemed almost to be in charge. She was looking him up and down, assessing whether he was a tramp or paying customer, he guessed. She gave no sign that she took him for a customer.

  “I’m looking for Gilbert Dorado,” Ansel said. “He around?”

  “You aren’t here about a job, are you?”

  “Nope. Gil’s an old friend.”

  The girlish woman nodded. “That’s good because we don’t have jobs,” she said, studying him a bit more. “I have to say that ten times a day.”

  He took this in and gazed across the room at the empty tables with their white tablecloths, heavy silver place settings, empty goblets and cups. Aldine had been here, and now she was gone. It was lunchtime but not a soul was eating. �
��I expected more people to get off the train here,” he said.

  “Was the train full?”

  “No . . . no it wasn’t.” He’d been glad of its relative emptiness, truthfully, because twice he’d been seized by fits of coughing and the Chinawoman traveling with her children had been able to move away from him.

  “Sometimes they are, but usually they aren’t,” the waitress said. “I’ll go find Mr. Dorado. You going to want lunch?”

  He wanted lunch, but he couldn’t waste money on it here. “No, but thank you,” he said.

  “Well, the menu’s right there,” she said, pointing to the bar, “if you change your mind. I’ll be back.”

  He looked around, took it all in. For months Aldine had walked across this room, carrying trays, touching the silverware that lay within his reach, talking to strangers, thinking . . . well, who knew what she was thinking. He rubbed hard at his forehead. It hurt him physically to remember her slender hands, the way they curved up at the fingertips like a hawk’s wings in flight.

  Ansel sat down on one of the stools and opened the menu. Beef Steak Frascati. He’d watched Ernie cook so many of those he remembered it A to Z. Breaking an egg yolk on each tenderloin, sprinkling it with pickled capers, minced onions, parsley, and garlic salt. The rich taste of seared beef in a pool of Bordelaise, the way the salty capers spilled onto your tongue.

  “Selmo!”

  Gilbert Dorado walked out of the kitchen smiling hugely, his funny shock of black hair thinner but still flopping over one eyebrow, his short body with big feet pointing outward as he hurried close. “Selmo! Selmo! Selmo!” he said. “At last you’ve come for your cooking lesson! I’ll teach you everything I know!”