A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  After a few hours of slinging plates and taking orders, I remembered how it was done. I answered diner patrons who brightened when I served them their coffee and pie, as if I had been on a long journey and only just returned. No one mentioned Penny at all. Even the regulars who sat at the counter and spent each day asking Penny for ketchup or a refill, who knew her voice and hands and smile, who said her name three times every visit—even they didn’t ask where she was. Maybe they were afraid to say her name out loud, to test the boundary of unknown space and tip the fates in either direction.

  Other things were not altogether the same. Clara continued to search me for cracks in the molding, the fragile places where I might snap. Through the server window Rico moved quickly between the counter and stove. When he caught my eye he looked away, knowing words were needed and not knowing which ones to use. I was markedly slower than before, like someone redistributing weight around a phantom limb. Clara left at dusk and following her exit the narrow diner appeared to double in size, there were suddenly twice as many tables and chairs, the civilized patrons swallowing coffee and toast transformed into repellent maws masticating paste. The sight of them brought to mind Lamb vomiting his yellow bile. If anyone noticed when I sat a glass of Coke down with a shaky hand or took a few extra minutes to sort change from the register, they didn’t say.

  Until Penny returned or Jake hired a new waitress, the diner would close overnight. After we locked up, Rico scraped his knives against the stove, wiping down the griddles. I scrubbed the counters and swept the floors, transferring tubs of ice cream from the cold case to the backroom freezer. After I carried the last one inside, I shut the heavy door and turned over an empty mop bucket, taking a seat to collect myself, rubbing my bare arms to get the goosebumps to disappear. Rico materialized in the doorway, untying his apron. “Conejita, tengo que irme. Ven conmigo.”

  “You go. I’ll stay and finish up.”

  He hesitated. I felt a small twinge of panic at the prospect of being left alone, but I forced a smile. Rico, a father, too.

  “I’m okay. I promise.”

  Rico shook his head and gave me a long look as he gathered his things from his locker. How could I tell him I was afraid I’d never be comfortable in the dark again? Making him stay would only delay the inevitable. I heard him moving around the front of the diner, stacking chairs on tables before his keys rattled in the front door. After a few moments I forced myself to stand and turn over the mop bucket, rolling it over to the ground sink. I poured bleach into the bin and ran the hose. Even after I turned off the faucet, I could hear the water trickling from the pipe behind the hollow wall. A stream of cool air escaped the crack between two loose tiles, blowing gently against my cheek. I kept my eyes fixed resolutely on the mop bucket; I didn’t want to see what else might lurk in the crawlspace—a man? A skeleton? I scanned the back room, the giant walk-in freezer and rows of shelving, boxes of stock stacked high enough to hide behind. From where I stood I couldn’t quite see around the corner, the heavy emergency door Rico disabled so he could sneak out for a cigarette between customers. He was meant to lock the door after closing, but we never checked. Even Rico could have forgotten, tonight, a million other nights. I remembered the lie I fed to Fischer, how it might not have been a lie at all—a man Penny was afraid of, a man who frequented the diner and lingered outside, waiting for her to finish her shift. I could feel the formless vapor seeping in, settling in the dark corners of the room.

  I pushed the mop bucket in a corner and wiped my hands on my apron, surprised to find them unsteady. There would never be a good time to come back here, not unless Penny came back, too. The phone rang as I was pulling off my apron. I grabbed the receiver and stood on my tiptoes in an effort to see around the corner of the room.

  “Jake’s.”

  “Cale, it’s Fischer.” Though his voice grew more familiar as he spoke, something kept me from feeling relief. “I just tried you at home. I want you to come down to the station when you can. We might have found something.”

  “What is it?” I twisted the phone cord tight around my finger, watching the tip of my finger turn pink, then red.

  “It’s hard to explain. Come by the station tomorrow. There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

  The tip of my finger, purple now. I waited to feel it.

  “Are you there?” he asked.

  “Yes, I heard you.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for you to be back at work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I picked you up from the hospital you were . . . I thought you would take some time. I’m sure they’d understand.”

  “Picked me up when?” That inky vapor collecting in the corners of the room seemed to coalesce, lurching closer across the floor. Because here was a fragment of memory entirely lost, never to be recovered.

  “Weren’t you wondering how you got home?”

  “No, I thought . . .” I unwrapped my finger from the cord. There it was, a sharp pain, running through to my wrist. Pinpricks.

  “The doctor gave me something to relax,” I said to him. “There was a resident there. I thought . . .” What had I thought? Stupid, stupid.

  “I was looking for you—I remembered when you called before, you said you were at the hospital. The doctor explained. It’s okay not to remember.”

  “No, it isn’t.” There were moments Lamb was in the hospital that I couldn’t forget, no matter how much I longed to. But I also meant, It’s not okay that I don’t remember you. The idea that we shared an encounter I couldn’t recall. Fischer wasn’t anyone to be afraid of; he wasn’t the sandman or a stranger, he wasn’t like the men who lingered on the stools at the diner counter watching Penny move. But I recalled again his finger moving on my knuckle, the involuntary thrill; my hesitation, too. The weight of Fischer’s hand on the back of my neck, his thumb moving down my spine. It was almost funny to recall my embarrassment, that white hot shame. It was almost entirely gone. It was as if the doctor had cut me open while I was sleeping and carved out all the useless feelings. I would have to search carefully to find out if anything remained.

  “Are you all right?” Fischer asked.

  “It’s only—I’m surprised the dogs let you in.”

  “They nearly didn’t.”

  “How did you convince them?”

  “Cale. I had something they wanted. I had you.”

  43

  It was still early when I returned to the hospital. I bypassed the emergency room where I’d seen the smokers the night before, and took the elevator down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, bringing it with me to the fourth floor. I walked the long, lonely waxed corridors of the oncology department and sat awhile in the cool, quiet waiting room. I stood in front of a large window overlooking the back lot, watching the sun wink off the hoods of parked cars. Behind it were a number of small laboratories, but only a little farther out everything disappeared, the morning light filigreed over a desert landscape that stretched for miles in every direction. I hoped Penny was out there somewhere, just waking up. Or, more likely, just turning in to bed.

  I finished the coffee and left the paper cup on an end table piled with dog-eared magazines. There was a recent desire to litter detritus like a trail of bread crumbs back to my person, a physical history of coffee cups, crumpled receipts, chewed-up gum, and strands of hair as proof of life. I went back out to the hall and entered the oncology department through the back door. There was only one nurse frowning pointedly at me from her desk in wrinkled teal scrubs, but she didn’t get up, continuing to talk on the phone tucked into her shoulder.

  I found Lamb in his room propped up against the pillows, still asleep. I took a seat on the edge of the bed. There seemed even more space for me on the narrow mattress than the night before, as if Lamb had shrunk in the hours I was gone. He began to stir, sensing another body in the room. His machin
es were beeping steadily, two bags of fluid hanging from the IV pole, the tubes disappearing underneath his blanket. I dug around in the sheets, hunting for his leathery hand. His fingers, so often gnarled and dry, were swollen fat and tight with fluid. I unfurled them and laid his hand over my face, breathing the faintest trace of tobacco still lingering in the braided nooks and valleys. He struggled to get his bearings, to parse the morning and this strange, colorless room. His eyes had lost none of their depth, though in recent years they had begun to lighten from a deep, dark brown to the color of amber held up to the sun. Now they searched mine, seeking clarity, Lamb flipping through a mental catalog of all the faces he had ever known, comparing them against mine to see which one fit.

  Beyond the door the phones were beginning to ring, the halls filling with the traffic of footfalls and loud snippets of conversation. Someone knocked on the door, and a nurse entered carrying a breakfast tray. She set it across Lamb’s outstretched legs.

  “Where’s the coffee?” he asked, his voice granular, the feel of sandpaper rubbed against a thumb. He was coalescing before my eyes, reemerging into personhood. The nurse excused herself to fetch the doctor, leaving me to deliver the news.

  “You’re not allowed,” I said.

  “Then what’s the point?” A lock of hair fell across his forehead. I resisted the urge to push it back, to soothe him as if he were a child. The point is to survive. The point is me. Instead I lifted the plastic cover from his meal to reveal a lump of scrambled eggs, a child’s juice box, toast, and green Jell-O. Lamb looked it over, considering. I unwrapped his utensils and handed him the fork. He poked at the scrambled eggs. Once. Twice.

  “Did you bring the book I wanted?”

  “Of course. How were your tests?”

  He set down his fork without bothering to bring any food to his mouth. I watched him take a sip of his juice. It took a minute for him to work the liquid around, to swallow. He set it back down on the tray.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  “What is? The juice, or the tests? At least try the eggs.”

  “Not these. I like my eggs. Your eggs.”

  “I’ll make some for you tonight. Every night.”

  “Cale—” He hesitated, a pause so pregnant, so cavernous, that it threatened to swallow us whole. Could I fit everything inside that I needed to say? The sandman, Penny—Lamb’s heart and how I yearned to be the only thing in it. We were interrupted by another knock at the door. The nurse returned, the baby-faced doctor trailing behind. He, at least, looked healthy, though I was comparing him with the other faces in the room, we who had already relinquished vigor. The nurse carried another bladder of clear fluid.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” the doctor said, and we watched the nurse begin to replace Lamb’s IV. “We found an infection in the right lung. We’ll run antibiotics every few hours. He can rest a bit in between. It should clear up in a few days.”

  Lamb settled himself back on the pillows, none of it seeming a surprise. At some point the night before, he had already heard the news. As before, I was the last to know. He closed his eyes, finished with his breakfast, the nurse, this conversation, me.

  “Does he have to stay here? If you show me what to do, I could bring him home.”

  “It’s just for a few days, Cale. I’m afraid I was right before, the cancer has spread. We’ll wait until the infection clears, but moving forward, radiation is still the best option.”

  “What about surgery? Can’t you cut the bad part out?” Unless all the parts are bad parts. But they didn’t know about Lamb’s startling adaptability, how he had learned to live without Catherine and his daughter, how he might be willing to live entirely without lungs. He could learn to breathe through his skin, the first man to ever do it. Lamb looked as if he were already falling asleep again.

  “Can we get a more comfortable chair?” he said with his eyes still closed. “For Cale.”

  “I don’t want a more comfortable chair,” I said. I didn’t want the nurses to get used to us, to expect that we would stay. The doctor redirected his clinical squint, reaching for my face. He turned my chin up in the light, grazing a light thumb over my remade brow, the fresh pink scar. I turned my face into his palm, but the nurse cleared her throat, redirecting the doctor’s attention toward Lamb’s chart. His hand fell away, and they began to consult with each other in hushed tones. I wanted to interrupt, to ask a million questions of my own, but I really only ever had one, and I didn’t think the doctor’s answer had changed.

  I left them to walk down the hall to the bathroom and splash water on my face, just one more step in my new hospital routine. By the time I returned to the room, they were gone. Someone had, in fact, brought in a bigger chair. I sank into it and closed my eyes. I would synchronize my sleep with Lamb’s, the way a new mother might doze and wake with her child. Only I couldn’t get comfortable, no matter how I tried. Finally I gave up and dug in the overnight bag I had packed with Lamb’s clothes and medications, the book he requested I bring. Milton’s epic poem, with its clash of angels and demons, had always seemed too grand when Lamb used to read it out loud, the ornate language irreconcilable with our own modest lives. But hours later, when Lamb began to stir, I reclaimed my seat on the edge of his bed and, amid a tilting sense of déjà vu, began to read it to him. This time, the violence and chaos seemed infinitely more real.

  Lamb listened faithfully, adjusting himself against his pillows, finding purchase with some invisible point on the ceiling. The sun moved higher in the sky, flooding the windows with bright light. The nurse brought in another covered tray and left it on the bedside table, where it remained for hours untouched. Wasn’t this how prisoners marked time, counting every meal? I read until my voice had been rubbed rough and hollow, bearing up against those intricate, striated sentences built like ships out of sound. The nurse brought a pillow and a blanket and set them on the big chair, lingering, waiting for a break on the page.

  “How about an intermission?” she suggested.

  “I’m fine.” My throat felt sore.

  “Not for you.” She pointed at Lamb, his eyes closed again. “He’s been struggling to keep up.”

  In fact, Lamb’s breath was beginning to rattle, to lengthen. He was a deep sea diver pushing into the dark leagues, and I was just a girl waiting on the shore. The poem was the only thing between us, a single thread tied to us at either end. The nurse clicked Lamb’s morphine drip and smoothed the sheet across his chest. She was one of the good ones, I could tell, generous and kind. It wasn’t enough to keep me from wanting her to disappear. She took a seat on the opposite side of the bed and pulled a package from the pocket of her gown. I watched her stretch out his arm, tying him off with a thick rubber tourniquet.

  “Oh, please don’t do that. You’ll wake him up—”

  She ripped open the package, unwinding a small butterfly needle to pierce him as she met my eyes. Lamb dripped out, ruby red, into one vial, then the next. The nurse’s hands made quick magic of twisting stoppers and smoothing labels while they filled. She pulled out the needle with a delicate flourish, taping a bandage into the bend of his arm. When she left, the vials clinked together in the pocket of her gown. I imagined I heard them all the way down the hall.

  49

  Alvaro didn’t move to get up, nor did he appear very surprised to see us. Either Flaca had already told him we were coming, or there was very little in the world that might startle him. The A/C unit continued its steady, audible drone and there was a tamped energy in the room, like a basement that had been shut up damp for months and was now hungry for light and air. Standing close to me, Flaca touched my wrist, the gesture too small for Alvaro to notice. “Relájate,” she murmured. To Alvaro she said, “¿Tío, te acuerdas? Trabaja con Penelope.”

  Alvaro was studying me as one would an animal having wandered, lost, onto his land, his eyes as black as the curved backs of clown
beetles that overran our yard. He draped an arm around the girl and she scooted closer, nestling against his bulk, her legs bare from shorts to ankle. She wore a pair of lavender bobby socks trimmed in faux lace, the kind sold at the swap meet in pale turquoise and banana yellow and cotton candy pink. We had all worn these socks, we loved them. I regretted the pot; it lent the evening a surreal quality. I was developing a paranoid suspicion that the rest of Penny’s family might soon emerge from the carpeted hall one by one in funeral procession, a mother, the older brother she had mentioned once in passing.

  Alvaro asked Flaca a question in Spanish I didn’t catch, and Flaca answered too quickly for me to follow. They had the shorthand of familial connection between them, the ability to transpose meaning in a look, a gesture. Was this the moment Flaca meant for me to interrupt, to ask a question about Penny and where she might have gone? I already knew she wasn’t here. If I slipped out of the room and stole Flaca’s car, if I drove it back through the darkened streets to the familiar warmth of our old house, was there a chance I might find Lamb reading Milton in his favorite chair? Bespectacled? Resurrected? Whole?

  “Come on,” Flaca said. She moved toward the carpeted hall, gesturing for me to follow.

  I looked to Alvaro, but he had already turned his attention to the daughter by his side, a girl who, if not as shrewd as her sister, seemed infinitely more amenable. The hall was cluttered with sliding stacks of magazines and rows of empty bottles: clear glass, sea green, beer brown, indigo. At the end of the hall Flaca pushed open the door. In the dark I could see a giant glowing rectangle, a fifty-gallon animal tank illuminating a rocky habitat dotted with leaves and scrub. Flaca hit the lights and the rest of the room jumped into focus, the perimeters of the room shifting as if we were standing in the center of an erratic labyrinth. Like the hall, the room was crowded with magazines and bottles, a sprawling collection of plastic storage containers in varying sizes atop one another in Tetris-like formation. A folded playpen by the wall was gathering dust, a stationary bike shouldered lidless shoeboxes overflowing with rubber-banded audiotapes. A bookcase in the corner was jammed full of videocassettes. We were standing at one end of a narrow pathway that cut through the chaos to a queen-size bed, the edge of the mattress pressed flush against the tank. A second path, less clearly defined, ran from the bed to the room’s only window, covered by a heavy blackout curtain. The south wall was lined with more irregularly balanced storage containers, numbers scrawled along their sides in different colored markers; 4, 8, 16, 29, 45. Every free surface of the room was filled with more containers loaded into asymmetric piles.