For my grandparents
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
ONE
Lord knows how long he’s been lying out there: flat on his back in the middle of the vegetable garden. I see him through the smudged window over the kitchen sink as I’m carrying the groceries to the counter, the day burning bright all over him. I wasn’t gone but an hour. I set down my bags and hurry out the back door. I’ve got two more waiting in the car.
“Frank,” I yell. “Are you all right?”
He doesn’t say a word, not until I’m looming right over him, my shadow draped across his chest and following the wrinkles in his plaid shirt before falling flat onto the dirt. He looks up at me, not even squinting against the sun. Three or four of his tomato plants are crushed underneath him, their silver-furred vines curled about his arms and knees like something that wants to pull him into the earth. He’s broken a stake in trying to haul himself up, and ripped two more from the ground, torn cuts in it clotting with dark soil.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Just needed to lie down for a second.”
“In the middle of your tomato plants?”
“Just wore out from the sun,” he says. His speech is sloppy and slurred as a drunk’s.
“Smile for me,” I say. One corner of his mouth twitches upward while the other stays still, pulls his face into a lopsided grin.
“Can you raise your arms?”
He lifts them both, but one drifts right back down just as soon as it’s risen, pulled back to the dirt by an insistent, invisible hand. I squeeze the one reaching for me. The green smell of tomato leaves is on his fingers.
“Don’t you move,” I say, and I get myself back in the kitchen quick as I can and call for the ambulance. The operator doesn’t sound like she’s in too big of a hurry, and I’m fairly sure she’s eating doughnuts. Makes all her words sound fat. I pace the tile thin waiting for her to take down Frank’s name and our address.
“And be quick about it,” I say. “It’s an emergency.”
“That’s what they all say, sir.”
The phone’s mounted on the wall. I leave it off the hook, swinging by its cord over the floor, in case they need to trace the call in order to locate us—I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to find out she’d written our address wrong—and take Frank out a glass of water. I hold it to his lips, but then if only half of him’s still working, he might not be able to swallow it right and choke to death before they get here to rescue him, and he’s so heavy, I don’t believe I could even roll him over myself. I yank the glass from his lips before he can take a gulp, but he doesn’t seem to care, just looks at me with that same muddled expression. His old blue baseball cap’s tilted backwards, nearly fallen off his head. He keeps that thing perched so high and loose any breeze might knock it away, and usually does, spends half his time out here picking that cap up from wherever the wind’s taken and dropped it. But he hates anything to squeeze his skull.
“Well,” he says, as if we’ve lingered here just a little too long after the conversation’s run its course, and things have become awkward.
“Does anything hurt?”
He raises the one eyebrow he can. His cap rustles up with it. “Half of me feels mighty strange,” he says. “Like it ain’t hardly there.”
I snatch the cap off his head. Sweat stains along the band have turned the inside pale green in a few splotches. I stand here in the bright heat and fan him with it, stirring the thick air into the measliest of slow-moving breezes, barely trembling the white wisps of his hair, for what seems like two hours of waiting while he stares up at me with a blank, lopsided grin. Gives me the creeps.
“Stop smiling like that,” I say. “It gives me the creeps.”
The raised half of his mouth slowly slips down his cheek, toward his chin.
“It’s too hot out here. You shouldn’t have been working out here in the first place.” He’s eighty-three years old, for heaven’s sake. An eighty-three-year-old doesn’t have any business being outside in the middle of the day like this. I’m sure there’s some kind of heat advisory in effect, warning people to get their pets and their elderly inside, safe in the air-conditioning. And of course he’s only got the sleeves of his shirt rolled halfway up his forearms: never an inch higher, even in the full heat of summer.
Sweat trickles down my back. I hate to sweat.
Finally the siren wails down the road, and the ambulance tires grumble on the long gravel drive through the trees and up to the house. Sun’s blazing so bad I can’t even see the swirling red lights. They skate invisible over the leaves, over the house’s white vinyl siding. I open the wooden gate to the backyard and lead the paramedics to him. Panic splashes across his face, running under his limp features, as they kneel over him.
“I feel fine,” he says, “just wore out from the sun,” before they can even press the stethoscope to his chest and ask him what symptoms he’s suffering.
“You can go on,” he says.
It takes the both of them a good couple minutes of heaving and hawing to peel him off the ground and lift him onto a stretcher. The earliest tomatoes are splattered like gunshot wounds all across his back. I pour the glass of water over the crushed vines and into the dirt. The dark stain of it sinks down and down and disappears.
“You coming along?” one of the paramedics grunts as they lift the stretcher into the ambulance. I’m not too keen on the looks of them. They’ve both got thick, scuzzy mustaches over their wet mouths, and I don’t like close quarters like that anyway, everybody breathing their germs all over each other, and who knows what they’ve picked up from the seeping wounds and phlegm of this town’s sick and injured.
Frank stares at me, wide-eyed and worried as his face permits, as they fit the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
“Hold on just a second,” I say.
My car door’s still wide open, the alarm bell dinging and two plastic bags slumped in the backseat, waiting to be carried inside. I close the door and hurry back and let one of the paramedics help me up the ramp. Frank and I are careful not to look at each other too much. They close us up and speed down the drive, tires hissing ruts in the gravel, the siren stretching behind us, still wailing in the yard long after we’ve turned onto the road and the trees have blotted it from sight.
At the hospital, I tell the worn-out woman behind the desk I’m his brother. Saves us all the ugliness of some kind of scene. The first couple times I did it, I felt so jittery and nervous I was sure they’d catch me, but by now I hardly think about it. Sometimes I even enjoy it a little.
“I’ll need to see your ID, please,” she says. She’s wearing scrubs with dancing teddy bears printed all over them.
I reach for my back pocket and pretend not to feel the bulge of my wallet. My last name’s printed clear as day on my driver’s license, like it has been since the world got so many people in it you had to start providing photographic evidence that you haven’t invented your entire identity or stolen somebody else’s, but brothers have got to have the same last name. At least they used to, before a woman could have children by as many differen
t men as she pleased without her family disowning her.
“Oh my,” I say, and pat the other pockets of my trousers, dig through them good and frantic. “Oh my, I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve—all the commotion—”
She heaves a heavy sigh. “Someone’ll come get you when he’s ready,” she says. The befuddled routine usually works all right. Ladies who lack the couth not to demand an elderly gentleman’s ID usually also lack the patience to endure his flagging faculties. She points me down the hall to a holding cell, where I sit and wait with people coughing and fretting and softly weeping on all sides of me. One family holds hands in a big circle while they take turns whispering some kind of ostentatious round-robin prayer. I hate hospitals. They’re too full of piety and hush, and the air’s cold and stale, and the smell of iodine smeared on all those papery yellow wrists is enough to make you sick if you weren’t already. They won’t let anybody just die in peace at home anymore. The only people who get to die at home now are the victims of violent crime.
I try to look through some of the wrinkled magazines they’ve got lying on the table, but the pages all feel so greasy, smeared with hand-sweat and moist from people’s coughs, that I can’t bear to flip them. At long last a doctor saunters into the room. From the looks of him, bright twinkling eyes and shiny hair he’s clearly spent hours carefully crafting to look mussed, he couldn’t be more than twenty years old. Everybody in the room stops what they’re doing and looks up, hoping or dreading theirs will be the name he calls. The prayer circle lifts its myriad faces in beatific expectation.
“Mr. Clifton?”
I nod and push my way out of the chair. Takes me a minute to do it, too, I’ve been sitting so long.
“Hi there,” he says, with a little too much enthusiasm for my taste, reaching out to shake my hand. He looks like the sort of fellow who’s used to everybody liking him. “I’m—”
“How is he?”
“Well,” the doctor says, “he’s had a mild stroke.”
“I know that. How is he?”
“He’s in stable condition, but we—”
“Was it the heat? I told him he shouldn’t be out in that heat.”
“The heat probably didn’t help. But from what I can tell, it was really just a matter of time before one of those arteries got clogged.” He says all this real bright and friendly, as if he’s explaining it to a child. “Anyway, we’ve got him hooked up to the IV and we’re pumping him full of drain cleaner, so it ought to be cleared out soon. He’ll need to stay in the hospital for a while, of course.”
“But he’s going to get better?”
“Oh, definitely. For sure. Yeah, he’ll definitely get better. It’s a little too early to tell exactly how much better. But you got him here pretty quick, so.”
I wait for him to finish his sentence. He smiles a bland smile.
“How long have you been practicing medicine?” I say.
“We’re also maybe a little concerned about his heart.”
“His heart? His heart’s just fine. He just had a new valve put in a couple years back.”
He scribbles that down on his clipboard as if he didn’t already know, when Frank’s got a bracelet on his wrist that tells you all about it in tiny letters etched in silver, and a stack of surgical records thick as that same wrist from this very hospital.
“Has he suffered heart trouble before?”
“Of course he has. He had a heart attack. Why else would he have gotten a new valve?”
He scribbles this down, too, his head bent close to his clipboard. When he raises it again, he says, “That makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense. We’re going to need to run some more tests, just to—”
“You can run whatever tests you want,” I say, “but his heart’s fine. They fixed it. What you need to worry about is his brain.”
“All right,” he says, smiling to himself, highly amused by my ignorance, and taps his clipboard twice with his pen, like he’s rapping a gavel to officially bring this meeting to a close. “You can go in and see him now. Room 214, just down the hall and around the corner,” which actually means down the hall, around the corner, and through a labyrinthine series of doors and forks it takes me ten minutes and the condescending kindness of two nurses to navigate my way through. The hallway’s lined with empty beds they’ve stripped of their linens and pushed against the walls, unplugged electronic contraptions with blank screens still clamped to their rails, monitoring nothing.
Lying there in the bed, he looks so wrinkled and flat, his skin so colorless you can hardly tell it from the dingy hospital sheets folded neatly back from his waist, that I have to lean against the doorjamb. His cheeks are sunken in as if he’s got no bones to hold them up, and every few seconds they quiver with his breath. His hand hangs limp over the edge of the bed, tubes running into the back of it, right into his knotty purple veins as if extensions of them, drawn out through slits in his skin.
I sit in a chair beside him and rest my hand on his forearm. The hairs on it feel dusty and dry. On the other side of the dull pink curtain that divides the room, somebody whimpers.
“I’m here,” I say, but Frank doesn’t hear me. He sleeps and sleeps.
I sit here and watch him while the last of the sunlight fades from where it struck the other side of the curtain, and the gray fluorescent lights, which seem to slowly rise in contrast, sanitize the room. I switch the TV on to Win, Lose, or Paw, the game show that tests the bonds of pets and their owners. It’s his favorite. But he doesn’t stir, doesn’t even turn his head to one side or the other, and that hand just dangles there, out in empty, open space, completely still.
A tall, skinny nurse, a colored woman, comes in to check on him. “You want something to eat?” she says as she squints at the level of clear fluid in his IV bag.
“No, thank you.” I refuse to eat food that’s been inside hospital doors, and especially not that pureed stuff they bring you. She lifts his wrist and presses two fingers to it. Her lips count silent numbers as she studies the jumble of tattoos scrawled from his shoulder down to his forearm. If he was awake, he’d be scrambling to tug the sheet over them.
“You ought to go home and get some rest,” she says. “You look about as exhausted as he does.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I need to be here when he wakes up.”
“They’ve got him knocked out good,” she says. “He’ll sleep all night.”
I don’t know how she can count and talk at the same time, but she’s the first person I’ve met all day that seems to actually know what she’s doing. I nod at her fingers on his wrist. “Doesn’t the machine do that for you?”
“There’s things the machine can’t tell.”
I thought they’d be able to tell us everything by now. I thought the future would be nothing but robots, robots everywhere, doing everything, so you’d never again have to worry about or depend upon the messy, illusory phenomenon known as a human being.
She looks at the clock, lets go of his wrist, and writes his pulse and some hieroglyphics in red marker on a whiteboard on the wall.
“I’ll stay a little while longer,” I say. “Just in case.”
She nods. “Just don’t run yourself into the ground right off the bat, okay? You’ll be here plenty for the next couple weeks.”
“Weeks?”
She lifts his other hand, the one dangling off the bed, and sets it on top of the sheet, tucked to his side.
“Thank you,” I say. Something bubbles in my chest, reaches cold up into my throat.
“Let me know if you need anything,” she says softly, and slips around to the other side of the curtain.
I wake up in my cot beside his bed at eight in the morning. My neck hurts, and everything around me looks bright and slow-moving, like it’s happening through a sunny haze. Frank hasn’t changed positions, hasn’t even moved his arm.
A new nurse comes in to check on him. This one’s red-faced and in a rush.
“He hasn’t moved,” I s
ay.
“He’s resting,” she says.
“Is he in a coma?”
“No,” she says. “He’s definitely not in a coma.”
“Then why hasn’t he moved?”
“He’s resting.”
“I think he’s in a coma. You need to have somebody come in and evaluate him. Shine that little flashlight on his eyeballs.”
She jabs a syringe into his IV tube. I lean real close so I can make sure she doesn’t pump any air bubbles in.
On the other side of the pink curtain, a man groans.
“That man needs your assistance,” I say, but she starts fiddling with the plastic clothespin they’ve got clipped on Frank’s middle finger. “It sounds like it’s very bad.” I turn on the TV, bolted high on the cinderblock wall and looking every moment like it’s on the verge of crashing down on us, to drown him out, and finally she stomps her way around the curtain. On the morning news, they’re looking for an eight-month-old boy that’s gone missing up in Virginia, just a couple hours north of here. His mother set him down in his bouncy seat while she went to run the water for his bath, and when she came back, he was gone. They keep showing the headline HAVE YOU SEEN LITTLE LARRY? in black on a band of yellow, like the caution tape police use to cordon off brutal crime scenes, underneath a picture of him wrapped up in a powder-blue blanket and looking like every other baby in the entire world.
The bouncy seat, the newsman says, was still quivering with his last bounce.
A hand lands heavy on my arm. I turn in my seat and Frank’s eyes are open, bleary but conscious, looking all about him.
“Where are we?” he says, real slow.
“The hospital,” I say.
“Naw,” he says. “That don’t sound right.”
“Look around. Where do you think—”
“How long have I been here?”
“Since yesterday afternoon.”
“Did you water the garden?” he says.
“Of course,” I lie.
“Good. Don’t let the weeds get ahold of it.” He pats my hand weakly and smiles, one corner of his mouth moving quickly, the other slowly catching up. He heaves a heavy breath and dozes off again.
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