Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  She drives through what feels like another country. Her pines and lakes and groves give way to golf courses, gated condos, and shopping centers humming with cars. Then come the oversized billboards advertising poker, line dancing, mechanical bulls, beachside pools with “real sandy shores” in the middle of Orlando. Come experience the Caribbean at Sea World. Traffic streams into sports bars, souvenir shops, and there is Rosie O’Grady’s packing them in at two in the afternoon.

  She feels dizzy and small, a turned-around insect making her way through all the buzz until the chaos trickles into lines of shoddy apartments, their white brick strung with fat, multicolored bulbs, roofs with plastic Santas in sleighs. Here and there a small clapboard house, tackle shop, and convenience store, and then acres of designer homes gathered around man-made lakes, long windows twinkling with the tiniest white lights.

  The freeway finally spits her out going east into the small wooded town of Blue Springs. A white country church tucked between pines has the quiet, angelic look of Christmas without even trying.

  Uncle Calder lives in the second-floor apartment of a Colonial Revival he’s owned since before Annie was born. Her tires crunch over the short, pebbled driveway. She hasn’t been here in nearly a year. She isn’t proud of this. She thinks of all that happened when she was young. It shouldn’t matter anymore, it doesn’t matter anymore. It hasn’t mattered in years.

  The entrance to Uncle Calder’s apartment is outdoors at the top of a set of long wooden stairs, and it is there that she sees him near the top in a blue baseball jacket and cap, lugging an elaborate red walker up the stairs. He fumbles once and catches his footing while his arm jets out to hook the stem of the walker, and in that moment it looks as if he might tumble to his death.

  Annie jumps from the car and the air shocks her again. The wind pushes her forward, sucking her long coat against the backs of her legs. The silvery clouds hang low and thick, like blankets draped from a ceiling. Her uncle appears to be standing just beneath them. She nearly weeps at the sight. So many memories are archived inside him, a family library with pages fluttering open faster than she can turn away. She closes the car door and walks with a thickness in her step.

  “Hey there!” she hollers.

  He doesn’t seem to hear. She follows him up the stairs calling his name until he finally turns, losing his grip on the walker, and then catching it again when he sees her.

  “Whoa.” He takes a moment to stare. “I’ll be goddamned. I thought you was going to wait till I was laid out in a coffin before ever laying eyes on me again.”

  “Uncle Calder.”

  “What do you say, squirt?”

  She grabs hold of one of the walker’s back wheels. It’s heavier than she thought, and the two of them continue up the stairs to the landing where they set the walker down with a thud.

  “I’m just coming in from breakfast. You sure got here fast.” The skin along his jaw has loosened. His eyes are the deep blue of her mother’s woolen blanket. Darker than she remembers. The porch light catches moisture around the rims.

  “What are you doing with this thing?” she asks.

  His shoulders are still wide and straight. He lifts his cap with one hand while he smoothes his full head of gray hair with the other. The wind quickly slaps his hair forward again, and for a moment he wrestles it back and forth before cupping the cap on his head. “These people are paying me money to try it out. They call it a Rollator, the Prime 3 Deluxe Edition with a steel-reinforced frame. It’s got lightweight baskets that pull out for groceries.”

  “It doesn’t look to me like you even need the thing if you’re carrying it up all these stairs.”

  “That’s cause of the shoes.”

  She looks down at his white running shoes. “What do you mean?’ she asks, but he is on to the next thing.

  “You have any idea how old I am?” he says.

  Despite the blotchy sunspots and papery paleness of his skin, he doesn’t stand like an old man. He doesn’t give off the bony, jittery gestures of the elderly. His voice is smooth and clear. “I know you don’t act your age,” she says.

  He smiles and gently pats her cheek with his giant hand. He leans forward over the contraption and wraps her in his arms. “You’re looking more like your mother,” he says.

  The mention of her mother, a trace of cigar, has shaken too many things loose, and she is teary-eyed by the time he lets go.

  Inside the dark apartment, a small artificial tree is seized by an oversized string of blinking blue lights meant for a much larger tree. Annie recognizes the same ornaments her mother owns—elongated bulbs, tinsel, a tall, golden spire twinkling on top. The air is cooler than she expects. It smells like Uncle Calder. Like dust and stale cigars, and then a wonderfully greasy smell of something recently fried. She guesses the windows haven’t been opened in a while.

  Uncle Calder hits a wall switch, and a ceiling fan lights the room. The blades begin to spin. He walks over and pulls the fan’s chain, twice. The blades slow to a stop, and Uncle Calder tells her he can never figure out how to turn one on without the other.

  The living room is tidy, newspapers stacked into a neat square on the maple coffee table. Calder’s mug shot is covered by a bowl of boiled peanuts. Two pairs of white tennis shoes make a line by the door. Uncle Calder’s Purple Heart rests on top of its box beneath the lamp on the end table, and she imagines him sitting on the sofa, holding it in his hands, inviting memories to wash over him. When she’d first come across the satin box as a child her mother told her to put it back. “It’s not a toy,” she’d whispered. But it looked like one, like purple and gold jewelry for a girl. Her mother handled it like it was worth more than anything in their whole house. It wasn’t until years later that Annie found a newspaper clipping among her father’s things about Uncle Calder’s ship in the Pacific. Of the thousands of sailors, only several hundred survived a torpedo attack by the Japanese. Uncle Calder had floated for days in freezing, shark-infested waters, waiting to be saved. The arms and legs of so many had been burned from the explosion, including Uncle Calder’s. Their mouths had swelled with saltwater ulcers. At dusk the screams would come, first one and then another and another, and those who were left knew the sharks were taking men down in pieces. Uncle Calder never cracked. He didn’t go insane like some of the others who were convinced they smelled fresh coffee and swam beneath the surface to find it. He stayed alert for four days, watching for fins, his sights jetting beneath the murky water and floating debris for the zigzagging shapes. Twice he lanced a shark’s nose with the bones of his raw and swollen knuckles, twice saving another sailor along with himself. Annie remembers feeling confused by the picture of her gentle uncle, and even more so by the fact that in exchange for saving another man’s life he was given a trinket, a heart-shaped gold charm on a pretty purple ribbon she had once thought of as belonging to a girl.

  “Coffee OK?” Uncle Calder stops in the kitchen doorway. “I’m about frozen to the bone.”

  To the left of the doorway hangs a framed poster of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat. One hand is frozen out from his hip, the other sits on a pistol in its holster. Uncle Calder’s head is now even with Ronald Reagan’s, and she quickly sees a likeness. She slips off her scarf and gloves but leaves on her coat and slides her hands inside its roomy pockets.

  “Coffee would be great.” She sits down in a wooden rocker with blue cushions tied to the rungs. She faces the dead gray television set. “I must have asked you this before, but why do you live up here? Why don’t you rent this one out and live downstairs?”

  Uncle Calder fumbles around in the kitchen, and it isn’t until he finally steps into the living room with two cups of instant black coffee that she realizes he’s heard what she said. He hands her a cup, and when she takes it he squeezes his empty fist in and out as if it is cold or arthritic. Several bruises mark the back of his hand. “Stairs are a good form of exercise.” He smiles and sits on the end of the sofa near her. “Besides
, I like the view of the railroad from up here.”

  An old, metal-framed photograph is placed on the coffee table, and Annie has the feeling it was set there recently. It’s a photo of her father and Calder on a dock with Parson’s Lake shimmering in the background. Calder is no more than ten, grinning for the camera, showing off a bass on a line. Her father appears caught unaware, perhaps looking at her mother off to the side, his long arm dangling around Calder’s shoulder.

  “I found that the other day when I was going through some stuff,” Uncle Calder says.

  “He finally caught a bigger one than me,” Annie says.

  The coffee is watery, bland.

  “Well? What do you say?” Uncle Calder lightly slaps his thigh and then holds his hand out several feet above the floor. “I don’t think you’ve been here since you were this high.”

  “I’m still only that high.”

  He laughs. “I’m glad you came.” A tuft of thick gray hair sticks out from the side of his cap above his ear, and Annie thinks this is exactly how Calder will look when he reaches old age.

  Uncle Calder sees her looking and removes his cap, slicks his hair back once more.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s been hard on me these past few months. I know Calder comes around to see you a lot. To be honest, I didn’t want to run into him.”

  He eases his forearms onto his thighs and nods at the floor.

  “You don’t know the whole story.” Annie thinks of the worst of it, and quickly pushes it from her mind.

  “Which story is that?”

  “What happened to me. I mean, between Calder and me.”

  “I heard some. Don’t know if I heard it all. Probably not. I’ve got no way of checking the facts. I never heard your side of things.”

  She glances toward the window. A discolored plastic shade is pulled halfway down.

  “Why did you ask me to come here?”

  “I saw him yesterday,” Uncle Calder says.

  “How is he?”

  “Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

  “I’m planning on it.” She sets her coffee down on the pile of newspapers and sighs.

  “He’s holding up,” Uncle Calder says. “Except for the tics. He’s taken to jumping again.”

  “Mom told me.” The mention of her mother hangs between them.

  “How is she?” he asks.

  “Seems to be holding up, I guess.”

  “Well.”

  “You can’t expect too much,” Annie says.

  “No. She’s been through plenty.”

  “Haven’t we all.”

  “Coffee all right?”

  “Mmn.” Annie takes a sip.

  “The thing is,” Uncle Calder says, “the tics make him look half-crazy, which don’t do a whole lot for his defense.” He clears his throat and rubs his wrist across his mouth as if he is wiping it clean of sweat. His forearm is blotched with faint bruises.

  “What happened to your arm?”

  He looks at the back of it and shakes his head. “Eighty some odd years is what happened. You start bruising at the thought of moving.” He glances at her hands. “What’s your excuse? Looks like you caught your hands in a meat grinder.”

  “It’s nothing, sanding, picking tangelos. Have you had blood work done? Just to make sure nothing’s wrong?”

  “You see that Rollator over there? Doctors are paying me to try it out.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “You have any idea how many people are willing to pay you to run a study on something you’d otherwise have to pay them for? The internist wants to study your cholesterol, the man on the radio wants to know if you’re depressed, the billboard on the freeway offers to help your hair loss, the woman on TV wants to help with your high blood pressure.”

  “And the Rollator?”

  “There’s a whole other place that does nothing but gadgets. They’re paying me to try out all kinds of things. In the meantime, all the other white coats are drawing blood and looking me over like the wife I never had. They want to know what kind of food I eat and how much exercise I get and how often I use the bathroom. All I have to do is try out these red and white blood pressure caplets and orange painkillers and fancy smelling shampoo for losing my hair.”

  “You’re not losing your hair.”

  “Well.”

  “You’re trying all this stuff out even if you don’t need it?” She gestures to the Rollator. “Aren’t they on to you?”

  “You ever hear that song, ‘The Great Pretender’?”

  “I believe I’m hearing it now.”

  He laughs. “Who knows? Playing around with all this stuff might keep me from ever needing it.”

  “Not only does that not make sense, but you’re likely to forget how to walk on your own if you keep pushing that thing around in front of you.”

  “You see these shoes?” He holds up his white, size-twelve sneakered foot. “Got battery powered insoles.”

  Annie raises her brow.

  “That’s the face your daddy used to make.”

  “I’ve been told.”

  “Anyway, what we’re talking about here is balance control. Baby boomers are about to start falling and breaking their hips. It’ll be a national crisis, just you wait and see. They’re already coming out with a kind of air bag you attach to your hips.”

  She drops her head to the side. “I never know when you’re joking with me.”

  “I swear.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Speaking of which. Happy belated birthday. You’re middle-aged, squirt. Where’d the time go?”

  She honestly doesn’t know.

  “Listen,” he says, lifting his foot again. “They put some kind of electrical current in these insoles. Runs from my feet to my brain. Supposed to steady out the balance that dulls with age. I thought I might take up dancing.”

  “Uncle Calder, you’re going to mess up their research. You don’t have trouble with balance, do you?”

  “Not with these.”

  She shakes her head and lifts her coffee to her lips and drinks. It has cooled and tastes like plastic.

  “Calder needs a better attorney.” His words slice through the air. “That’s why I asked you to come here.”

  She lowers her cup.

  “You’d think in a case as clear-cut as this he’d be just fine with a court-appointed one. There’s no evidence he was even at that bar. They act like cause he’s got tics he’s some kind of four-horned billy goat. I’m taking it upon myself to see that he gets someone else. One of those high-powered ones. Maybe you could help with that.”

  She’s suddenly embarrassed by her hands. Cracked and blistered, taken up with other work, other concerns. She slips them back inside her pockets.

  “Seems like you could use a little help yourself,” he says.

  “What? I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “You look like a short dog in tall grass is what you look like.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you look lost.”

  “Uncle Calder.” She can’t find the words to finish the sentence. You look lost. Such a simple thing to say. But it burrows through the hardest parts to the soft center of her core. She has the urge to spill everything, to tell him what she has told no one, what she has tried to hide even from herself about the morning Owen left her.

  She felt queasy every time she pushed her cart down the aisle, every time the wobbly front wheel pulled in a different direction. She thought she must be getting sick, too, and realized as she ran through her symptoms that her breasts felt tender. Heavy. She was unsure of when her last period had been. Then she remembered several days in a row when she’d forgotten to take the pill. She was thinking about this when a teenage couple asked to have their picture taken with her. How many times had she forgotten to take a pill and nothing ever came of it? But then as she smiled an
d made a peace sign for their cell phone camera, she noticed the boy’s boxers above his jeans and remembered the joke she’d made to Owen about him switching from briefs to boxers. A sure sign of his affair, she would later come to realize, but back then she’d laughed and said, “I’ve read that boxers make a man more fertile,” and this was what was running through her mind after she was alone in the supermarket, her hand on her abdomen, eyes gazing at the laundry detergent she’d wandered toward, her eyes filling with circles of orange.

  On the way home the ordinary ride down the graveled road had an airy freshness to it. She imagined a babbling toddler behind her in a car seat, asking, “What’s that, and that, and that?” The thought, the possibility that this could happen, softened her, as if someone had poured a bubbly liquid into her veins. She recalled a song, just the essence of it, not the song itself, that a man wrote about his daughter back in the seventies. Annie couldn’t think of what it was. “I’ve got a song lost in my head,” she would say to Owen when she burst inside the house, and then tell him the one she was trying to think of and he would know exactly which one, and what a perfect way to deliver the news.

  But Owen’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. And when she opened the front door her body registered the gaps in the room before her mind could catch up. It was June, and an icy cold settled in her bones. Things were missing from the shelves. Owen’s guitar and stand were no longer by the window. But hers was, and worth far more than Owen’s. Books were missing from the shelves. Thieves didn’t steal books. The framed photographs of Owen as a child were gone. An old cigar box he kept receipts in was gone from the mantel. In its place was a note held in place by the tambourine. It was written on her own stationary as if she had written it to herself.