Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  Ten minutes later, they were back, blundering through the door, dazed, her father with the blanket around him, still holding her mother’s hand. He sat stiffly at the kitchen table as she bustled about filling the bathtub. She unpeeled the blanket and his sodden clothes, and helped him into the steamy bathroom.

  Iris had stood dumbly by, unable to say anything, clutching the end of the limp rope.

  They’d closed the door and gotten in the bathtub together.

  * * *

  It was warmer now, the humidity rising with the morning, and Iris, her fingers quick to get cold these days, was comfortable in the day’s heat. It was difficult to conjure the feeling of that blizzard almost sixty years ago, but her heart still ricocheted recalling the ferocity of the storm, how close, in those minutes she sat with a rope in her hand, life was to death. The stories had trickled in for days about those who had died: duck hunters stranded on river islands, a family buried in a stalled car, a young farmer who went to get wood from the barn and got lost, ending up frozen in a field. It could have so easily included Samuel Olsen, lost half a mile out in his wheat field, who’d picked a direction and started walking, hoping his internal compass was right, and came upon his fearless and dogged wife, a tether around her waist, who’d come to bring him home.

  “That was so brave, what you did,” she had said to her mother the next morning.

  “You do what you can for those close to you,” her mother had said. “There’s nothing brave about it.”

  Even now, Iris didn’t know what to make of her parents’ marriage. As a girl she had begrudged them for not holding hands or kissing or dancing to the radio. Later, she believed that neither had expected a lot from life, so they had been satisfied with mere companionship. But now it seemed their devotion was something far greater, quiet and abiding: faith that one was always looking out for the other.

  Iris swung her feet off the couch and sat up wincing, her head swimming in stars, a deafening pulse in her ears. When her eyes cleared she looked around the room at the things she could clear out now so her children wouldn’t have to deal with them: a bowl of conch shells she’d found on morning beach strolls, Scrabble—Henry’s—and Yahtzee, a glossy book of photos of Sanibel’s “Ding” Darling Wildlife Refuge, even the TV. But maybe Samantha will want to watch something while she’s here, she thought.

  Although it was never stated as such, Samantha was coming to care for Iris until she died. After the double mastectomy and the radiation had failed and the cancer was everywhere, Iris had asked her oncologist how much time he’d wager she had left. She had thought he’d say a year. He raised his shoulders and palms in a defeated shrug and said, “Maybe six months if you’re lucky.” Lucky. That wasn’t how she would have put it, but here she was six months later, still ticking. But the ticking was stalling, skipping, slowing a bit more each day.

  Samantha would arrive tomorrow. Iris sometimes thought of her daughter as a twittering bird, anxious and restless. Marriage and art—Samantha was an accomplished potter—had been grounding for her, but now that she was pregnant, Iris saw the nervousness come flooding back. Her son-in-law Jack was not all he could be. He was fine, Iris supposed, though she had hoped for someone with a little more oomph. Maybe she’d never gotten over his weak handshake. She knew she was being unfair, surely she was afraid that her daughter was repeating her own mistakes, her willingness to settle for just okay. And Samantha was not like Iris, it was true. Samantha ached to be a mother. She was exhilarated by each passing week of pregnancy—“Mom, she’s the size of a baseball!”—and didn’t see motherhood as a duty to fulfill. Iris worried about what would happen after the euphoria wore off and the grind set in, those long hours tending to a baby insatiable for food, attention, comfort. Those long hours trying to figure out if it was worth it after all.

  Oh, Samantha, Iris thought. I wish I could be there for you then.

  A succession of quick knocks hammered the door, startling Iris. Samantha? No, no, she was still in Wisconsin. I am here on the couch in Sanibel, Iris said to herself, trying to settle her mind. The knocks began again.

  “Coming,” she said weakly, wiping the drool from the corner of her mouth. She rose and teetered to the door, at the last minute realizing she was still in her robe. “Who is it?”

  “Honey, it’s me, Stephen. From next door.”

  She opened the door, the day clear now, the muggy warmth soft and heavy. Stephen was shirtless, his chest muscled and hairless and bronzed an orangish hue, and he wore his uniform pants and tasseled loafers.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” he said breathlessly. “This is super embarrassing. I’m locked out? I went to say goodbye to a friend. The door was propped open. Oh, it doesn’t even matter, does it? The point is I’m going to be late for work and I can’t be late for work. The convention has descended. The wacky orchid people.”

  What is he talking about? Iris wondered.

  “Is there some way I can help you?” she finally asked.

  “I need to climb over your balcony to mine. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” she said pulling open the door. “Come on in.”

  “I love your place,” he said, looking around. “So…”

  “Old Lady Florida-ish?”

  Stephen spun around.

  “Hardly. It’s kind of mid-century chic. White lacquer is very in these days.”

  Iris chuckled, indulging his flattery. He had kind eyes underneath the showy affectations, river green and clear.

  Stephen bent down to pick up her book, which had fallen to the floor when she’d risen.

  “Book club?” he asked, examining the cover.

  “Of one,” she said, pointing to herself.

  “Do they get there?”

  “What?”

  “To the lighthouse?”

  “I don’t know. The young boy wants to go, but the father always has a reason not to take him.”

  “I know the feeling,” Stephen said, handing her back the book.

  All at once she wished she had made more of an effort with him over the years. Invited him for tea. Or dropped by with scones after the man of the night had left in the morning. And why had she ignored that pea-sized knot she had felt in her breast the night Henry had told her he could not leave his wife? She had felt it, and then pretended that she hadn’t. Was it fear or denial or resignation? Or was it that she wanted to opt out? Even now, she couldn’t really say. It wasn’t until many months later, when her breast had become hot and painful, that she could no longer pretend. Now it seemed loony that she had let it go, giving the disease an irrevocable head start.

  “I will owe you forever, Irene,” Stephen said. “You’re a doll face. That new haircut really suits you, by the way. A pixie Anna Wintour.”

  His compliment was preposterous, but still it brightened her. It would be her last haircut, and she was pleased that he had noticed.

  As he passed the kitchen, Stephen registered the pill bottles on the counter with the subtlest of eye flicks. Iris was about to explain, but he moved quickly past, not wanting her to reveal the details. Life was hard enough, she imagined him thinking, without someone else’s suffering ladled on top.

  He wavered a little as he climbed over her balcony railing, his legs wobbly like a colt’s.

  “If you ever need anything,” he said. His offer trailed off as he slid open his glass balcony door.

  Iris started to wave, but Stephen was already gone.

  The encounter had worn her out. Iris went into the kitchen and stared down her pills. She took them grudgingly, each one leaving a hard, chalky path down her throat. She stared into the refrigerator, then pulled out a bowl of raspberries and set it on the table next to her book, before easing into the chair.

  Why did Mrs. Ramsay want everyone to get married when her own marriage wasn’t so great? Iris gingerly chewed a berry, not biting too hard for fear of the seeds. Was marriage ever that great? Iris did miss Glenn sometimes; those yea
rs together had bred a comforting shared history, an ease of communication, not about their feelings for each other maybe, but a shorthand of words and body cues with which to navigate the world. After the divorce she was sorry she had lost the one person she could really talk to about Samantha and Theo, the one person who could understand without setup or explanation. “Theo is being Theo, isn’t he?” or “I worry that Samantha is going to pull a Sally Reed.” Iris hoped that Glenn missed her sometimes, too. Maybe when Marie was prattling on about dream catchers and turquoise jewelry and sagebrush incense, or whatever it was they talked about, he would think fondly of Iris. She wondered if Glenn would attend her funeral. Should there be a funeral? No. She would be dead, and that would be that.

  Her mother had died of a heart attack, in her sleep, at the age of seventy-nine. She had lived alone on what was left of the farm, some chickens and two pigs in the yard, in the faded farmhouse, the porch sagging some and partially obscured by the lilacs, which Iris had watched her father plant, now a fragrant tangle of overgrown branches. Her mother had always been a hardy sort, never admitting to being sick or sore or tired, and Iris was particularly glad that she had not had to experience an insidious, hostile takeover of her body by disease. Her mother had died without having to think about death, and that surely beat worrying about it.

  It was eleven o’clock. Iris needed to shower, to get dressed, to mimic the routine of normalcy.

  “Soldier on another day, dear,” Henry would have said. And she would have hopped to it, his warm, quiet voice a trigger. She missed him terribly.

  He was tall and rangy, his shoulders a little stooped, with full white hair and a roman nose, on the bridge of which rested a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. How perfectly professorial, Iris had thought, given he had been the chair of the history department at a small New England college. She had known he was married from the beginning. But even after they’d met twice for coffee and spent a languid afternoon strolling the Indigo Trail in the wildlife preserve, pointing out different species of birds, Iris didn’t realize it was the beginning of an affair. On the way home, after driving past the low scrub pines and palms and sea oats, the sand creeping onto the road along the edges, the sky an infinite blue haze, he reached for her, his hand knowing and soft around her fingers.

  “You are lovely,” he said.

  She blushed so fiercely she had to turn toward her window to hide her face. She felt her heart thunder ahead. She had never considered she would date again after Glenn, never thought she would feel the melting heat of a man’s attention.

  A trio of pelicans arrowed low across the road.

  “I suppose I should say goodbye,” she said, as he pulled up to her condo.

  They looked at each other and then broke into giddy laughter.

  “I know this situation is not ideal,” he said, “but I’m afraid you have made me weak in the knees.”

  “I’m guessing your knees were not so sturdy to begin with,” she said.

  “I’ve only had one replaced.”

  “Would you like to come in?”

  “I would like that very much.”

  They didn’t sleep together that day, or even very many times in the months that followed. Sex was almost beside the point. But what developed was an intimacy that Iris had never experienced. It was as if they had known each other long ago and had come back together without all the silly cares of youth or the anxieties of middle age. They were old, he even older than she, and that was part of the beauty of it. She didn’t have to play a role or worry what she looked like or wonder if she was making him happy. She could just be, and that had been a revelation.

  * * *

  Sometimes she tried to make herself feel better about Henry leaving by telling herself she was spared his witnessing the wrath of her illness and her grueling, humiliating physical descent. That’s some silver lining, she thought dryly.

  Get yourself together, Iris. She stripped off her robe and her nightgown—the seagulls surely wouldn’t mind her nakedness—and stretched her arms over her head with as deep a breath as she could muster. She walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  She needed to figure out how to see Henry one last time.

  SAM

  Sam would never get over the feeling that had rushed to the surface when she’d reached down and felt the top of the baby’s head emerging. She’d almost laughed, it was so alien, so absurd. Ella was two weeks late, surprisingly unwrinkled and clean, her hair full and dark, her pink body more than nine pounds and long, her legs immediately folding back up like wings. And when the midwife placed the still-attached little body on her chest, and Ella looked up with blind baby-bird confusion, Sam felt, in her euphoria, that she had stepped into the continuous stream of history and humanity from which she hadn’t even known she’d been excluded. Did all mothers feel this? Did her own? Sam remembered thinking that nothing would ever measure up—no experience, no achievement, no hope—to giving birth. All the stupid things she had worried about before! Even her career. Who cared if she sold another vase? How quotidian. She was a mother, and everything else was a mere subcategory.

  There had been dark moments, too, that she didn’t want to remember, those haunted late nights when Ella wouldn’t sleep or be put down after hours of nursing, rocking, bouncing, pleading, crying, even praying in a glassy-eyed stupor, a cyclone of exhaustion and despair raging in Sam’s head. She had felt broken by her baby’s will, ready to leave her in her crib and walk away, out the front door. Jack had slept, oblivious, in their big bed while Sam eventually curled up on Ella’s floor at dawn. Thankfully there had always been the morning, her mind restored by the daylight, her mother instinct righted, the corrosive fury of the previous night chalked up to sleep-deprived irrationality.

  She stood in the doorway of her studio, a room converted from the cement-floored basement. For most of the year, a row of glass-block windows in the house’s foundation let in a steady flow of light. It still smelled like clay dust despite the room’s year of disuse. Sam moved her eyes from her wheel to her array of tools, like a medieval surgeon’s, crude and sharp and strange, and her fingerbowl of chamois strips—now desiccated and brittle—for smoothing edges. Above them, her bulletin board was pegged with images of pots that moved her, that made her sigh with longing, from ancient Japanese to mid-century Scandinavian to Brother Thomas. Sam quickly looked away. Once this room had seemed like the answer to everything. She shut the door and went upstairs.

  The box Theo had sent was on the table where she’d left it. She slid her keys through the packing tape, pulled open the cardboard flaps, and called Theo.

  “Hey. Did you get the box?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks. Did you even go through the stuff in it? Or did you just send it?”

  “I went through it. A little.”

  “I just opened it, and there’s mouse shit on top of the wooden box inside.”

  “No. Really?”

  “Theo.”

  “Okay. I was too tired. I looked in but then taped the whole thing up again.”

  Sam shook her head. Through the kitchen window, a large, furry, stump-legged animal waddled across the back patio and into the side yard. A badger? A hedgehog?

  “Where was this from, anyway?” she asked. “The condo was bare when I left.”

  “Dad’s basement. He said he must have taken it with him by accident.”

  “He didn’t notice it for eight years? Fucking Dad.” Sam knew she sounded like a bratty teenager. Theo brought it out in her.

  “Come on, Sammy.”

  Sam rarely spoke with her father. He and his second wife, Marie, twenty years his junior, lived in a tract home in a suburb of Las Vegas. When Glenn had been married to Iris in Chicago, he had been an estate lawyer, conservative and dignified. Now Marie had turned him into a parody: a golf-shirt-wearing, country-music-loving retiree. He even wore sandals. It smacked of life crisis to Sam, and she found it insulting to her mother. She missed him, but she could
n’t bring herself to smooth it over just yet.

  “No wonder it took him so long to find it. They’ve been so busy traveling around to NASCAR events,” she said.

  “They happen to be in Canada at the moment,” Theo said. “Don’t be such a snob.”

  “I’m sure Cindy would be thrilled if they pulled the RV into Georgetown.”

  “Cindy likes Dad.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point? That you’re still angry at him for leaving a loveless marriage and finding happiness with someone else? Mom liked her life after Dad. He did her a favor.”

  “You don’t know shit about Mom,” she said, with melodramatic flourish.

  “Here we go. You were the martyr who took care of her for a month so now you have proprietary insight. Let’s not forget I had ten more years with her than you did.”

  “That’s mature.”

  “I have to go. I have a meeting.”

  “Ella’s up anyway,” she lied. “Say hi to Cindy for me.”

  “Tell me what you find in the box.”

  “You wish.”

  Whatever was in the box had waited this long so it could wait a little longer, Sam thought, jittery with hunger. From the refrigerator she pulled what was left from last night’s roast chicken and set it on the kitchen table, then returned for the orange juice. But she knew she had to pump first. The bovine indignity of milking herself was yet another reason to leave Ella as infrequently as possible. How did women do this at work? She took off her shirt and bra and sat at the table, strapping the funnellike attachments to her breasts. The motor whirred and thwunked, and her milk dribbled into the bottles as she tore off a chicken wing and gnawed at the skin. She ate and ate, pulling every last piece of meat from the bones with her fingers, digging underneath the carcass for anything she had missed, and chased it with orange juice straight from the carton, her greasy fingers slipping as she set it down, spilling some into her lap. She hoped that the mailman would not come early. What have I become? she thought.