Such as how could I have been so blind?
The night Isaiah and I followed the stretcher into the emergency room, for example. Against a background of running feet and urgent intercoms, a nurse cornered Isaiah with a form on a clipboard, and he pulled himself together to answer her questions.
“Next of kin?”
Without hesitation. “Rosalie Bohn.”
“That’s her married name? You wouldn’t know her birth name?”
“Pence.”
Rosalie. The one-name girl with the voice like a bell. Rosalie Pence.
The name was a clap of thunder in my head that reverberated for a long time. My old fantasy returned, the one where the girl with the voice like a bell gets off the Greyhound bus in the Versailles dust with her hair streaming down her back and her baby in her arms. I made the leap: could that baby have been Isaiah? That would mean—I’d never checked it out—that Isaiah had been the California baby, and I was born here in Versailles.
I have no proof. His name on his birth certificate had been Isaiah Pride. And yet so much fits together. Mrs. Pence’s fondness for Isaiah and his for her. The lengths to which Mrs. Pence had gone for me, rescuing me from under her blue spruce and taking me into her own home. Paying for my crow’s clothes, helping me to find work.
My white bedroom on the second floor of Mrs. Pence’s house—could it have been Rosalie’s?
A stir from the bed, faint as an air current, interrupts my surmises. The face that lay on the pillow for three days, almost as white as the pillow, with oxygen hooked to the hawk’s nose and the hawk’s eyes closed, now turns toward me.
“Mrs. Pence!”
“Rosalie?”
“It’s Ruth.”
A sigh.
The hawk’s eyes open to wander the room. “I’ve been listening to Liszt for days,” she whispers, “and I’m sick of him. All that rubato. Why can’t he get hold of himself?”
I’m on the verge of laughing as I get up to stop the CD player and rummage for the disc of Beethoven piano concertos and change the Liszt for it. “Is this better?”
She listens through the first several phrases and recognizes the piece. “At least he’s got backbone,” she whispers and closes her eyes.
Morning is breaking through the east-facing windows, red streaks against pale blue. Isaiah is due any moment. For once I have something to tell him besides the stark No change. I’m giddy, hilarious. She’s going to recover! Even if, as the doctor kept repeating, she’s nearly ninety, after all.
Rosalie. She had hoped I was Rosalie.
When Isaiah doesn’t appear in the doorway, I glance at the bed and see that Mrs. Pence seems to be sleeping naturally, her chest rising and falling beneath the white hospital coverlet, so I slip on my backpack, steal out to the elevator, and ride it down to the lobby.
I leave the elevator just as Isaiah pushes through the glass doors into the lobby. The day is lightening behind him. To my surprise, Jamie is with him, his arm around her shoulders, her arm around his waist. They must have run into each other in the lobby. Jamie’s face is blank, Isaiah’s anguished.
“She’s dead,” says Jamie.
“No! That’s just it! She’s alive! She opened her eyes ten minutes ago, and she talked to me! She said she was sick of Liszt!”
“Not Mrs. Pence,” says Isaiah. “Catina. Catina is dead.”
26
A sad-eyed Jonathan meets me in Mrs. Pence’s foyer with his stub of a tail wagging in slow motion. I set down my backpack and stroke his head, and he licks my hand. All looks undisturbed since last night, when I let Jonathan out the back door and filled his food and water bowls and called him back indoors before I fled with my pillow and blanket to Isaiah’s apartment to sleep on his couch. Isaiah hadn’t spoken to me, but he let me stay.
This morning the umbrella stand and the coat rack are waiting for me in Mrs. Pence’s foyer, and the stairs with the walnut bannister rail offer the dim second floor to me, but the objects have lost their substance. Even Ray Pence’s faded smile seems forced.
Jonathan patters down the hall behind me and up the stairs, where I drop my soiled shirt and underwear into the hamper and sort out fresh clothes to change into. Instead of getting dressed, though, I sit for a moment on the bed.
White walls, white curtains, white furniture. Above the dresser hangs the print of the cathedral in the trees with the storm clouds gathering above the blue. Storm clouds gathering.
Nothing to do but get dressed. Clean blue jeans, a T-shirt. When I go to the mirror to brush out my hair and braid it, I see the little Polaroid of the sullen young man I found between the glass and the backing—when?—last May, for god’s sake, and now we’re starting September. His baleful eyes have been watching me from the time I stuck him to the mirror and mostly forgot about him.
I study the snapshot for more clues. What I can see of the backyard looks much better tended than its current dried-out and paint-flaking condition. The blue spruce is so much smaller; the picket fence behind the young man is freshly painted. And what of him? The pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt suggests an outdated toughness, a belligerence I associate with retro movies. He’s looking for trouble all right, and his muscled arms and shoulders, his thumbs hooked in his belt, tell me he thinks he can handle trouble. Imagine his surprise to find himself taped to a mirror in this white room.
Stay on the mirror, Baleful Face. Don’t come down and look for trouble with me.
*
Yesterday Isaiah and I had followed the ambulance that carried Mrs. Pence—I couldn’t think of her by a more familiar name—from Versailles Memorial Hospital to the Orchards Villa nursing home. Moving her to the Villa was the right thing to do, her doctors assured us. At the Villa she would get the skilled nursing care and the therapy she needed, which Isaiah and I couldn’t provide for her. Besides, we both had to go back to work. There would be bills. Medicare would cover her for a while, but neither Isaiah nor I knew for how long. So much I never knew I’d need to know that I couldn’t take it in.
Would she recover, we asked again and again, and got the same answer: Well—she’s nearly ninety.
Mrs. Pence herself had been weak but cheerful, observing all the mysterious fittings and appurtenances of the ambulance and thanking the young driver when he adjusted her stretcher so she could raise her head and see better. In the room where we settled her at the Villa, her hawk’s eyes noted the aggressive cheer of rose-colored walls and flowered curtains and framed prints of children playing in summer meadows, and she whispered that it was all very suitable. I plugged in her little radio that I’d brought along and set it where she could reach the knob, and Isaiah showed her how to push a button and raise her bed to sit up, and we both promised we’d be back to see her in the evening, and she held Isaiah’s hand as he kissed her on the forehead while the Villa nurse waited in the doorway.
He had not spoken a word to me on the way home, and I wondered if he blamed me and for what.
Jonathan follows me downstairs and past the door to the piano room toward the kitchen. I hesitate, and so does Jonathan. The lonely pianos, all by themselves.
The upright Kimball, the spinet, the beautiful Steinway. No, I won’t touch her Steinway, but I strike middle C on the Kimball and hold it for a long time, and it reverberates while Beethoven glares out from his niche, angry at what is happening, I think.
The note fades. Just as my birthday has come and gone. Isaiah had brought over a small bakery cake and lit candles for me to blow out, and he and Mrs. Pence had sung “Happy Birthday” to me. I think of striking middle C again and don’t.
In the kitchen, where morning sunlight falls on the ancient sink and stove and shelves and highlights the chips and scars of years of use, I open the back door for Jonathan and add a scoop of dry food to his bowl and pour water for him.
Then I fill a bucket with water at the sink and carry it out the kitchen door to the back yard. Jonathan follows me as I water the rows of
lettuce and carrots and onions and Isaiah’s burgeoning marijuana plants. It takes me three trips from the kitchen sink to the little garden with buckets of water. Given the watering restrictions, I don’t dare to use a hose, and the sun is hot and I’m sweating by the time I finish.
I drop the buckets and sit on the back steps in the narrow strip of shade. Jonathan flops down at my feet while I look across the brown lawn that stretches past the garage and the blue spruce to the picket fence that is worn and scabby now but once was freshly painted. People say the grass will revive and grow when the rains come in the fall, but I fear we’re coming to an end of some things.
“Ruby?”
I shade my eyes, but the sun reflects off the pale siding of the house, and all I can make out through the glare is a dark figure rounding the corner and through the side gate.
“Ruby? I rang the bell and didn’t get an answer, so I took a chance you’d be back here.”
Something familiar about that voice, that walk.
A tall big-boned man climbs the steps and sits beside me. He’s wearing Levi’s and a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled above heavily muscled forearms. Dark-hazel eyes, deep vertical creases below his cheekbones. Hank of dark hair that falls over his forehead.
Bill the Drummer.
I levitate back to that last night in Anchorage, Bill the Drummer and Brazos cursing each other outside my door, and I have to lay my hand down on the wooden step and feel its grain to remind myself I’m sitting on Mrs. Pence’s back porch in Versailles, Montana, isolated in the middle of the sagebrush on the northern prairie, and Bill the Drummer of the Idaho Rivermen is sitting beside me.
“How’d you get here?” is all I can say.
“I drove. Well—yeah, that must sound stupid. Brazos asked me to drive up here and help him pack up Annie’s house and move her back to Boise.”
I haven’t seen or heard from Brazos since his outburst when I sang with the Working Poor, and I don’t know what to say to Bill. In the silence a robin flies down and pecks at the damp soil around the carrots, and a squirrel ripple-humps his way along the back fence and pauses with his tail up.
What are you looking at, squirrel? What’s it like in your world? Mine is upside down.
A song from some old songbook . . . I wish I was . . . a squirrel . . .
“You and Brazos must have made up after your fight.”
“You heard us in Anchorage that night? Well—kinda, I guess. But what he also told me when he asked me to help pack up Annie was that he’d found Ruby.”
I raise my head, find Bill’s eyes on me.
“He said he’d found Ruby in Versailles, Montana, and she was singing with some half-assed band with a guy she said was her brother.”
“Not that half-assed!”
“You’re looking good, Ruby. You doing okay?”
. . . away I’d sail . . .
How to answer Bill’s question. No. I’m not doing okay. And it’s not making it more okay to be in the here and now in Mrs. Pence’s backyard, where the grass is dying and Jonathan grieves and squirrels and robins go about their squirrel and robin business, and at the same time be thrown in the then, where Bill was a fixture as familiar and dependable as the electrical cords he wound up and the amps he stowed and the drum set he dismantled and packed whenever we moved from gig to gig.
And now Brazos, taking Bill’s help for granted in moving Anne all those miles to Boise.
“What is it?” Bill says. “Brazos and Gall?”
“Partly.”
I don’t know how to tell him about Mrs. Pence or Isaiah or Catina, none of whom he knows, and so our silence stretches while the morning sun rises overhead and our strip of shade narrows. The temperature will hit 100 degrees, 110, by noon. The smoke in the air is heavier than yesterday’s. Forest fires and grass fires all summer, just like every summer. The aides at the Villa talked last night about fires near Yellowstone burning out of control. Things are out of control here on the back steps too. Oblivious, the robin moves on to the onions, thinks of something else he has to do, and wings off.
If I look up, I’ll find Bill’s eyes on me, so I look at his hands instead. A drummer’s hands but also the hands of someone who works with his hands, as good with a hammer or a screwdriver or even a pair of barber scissors as he is with his drumsticks. He must have been working with his hands recently because one thumbnail is blackened.
. . . I wish it would rain . . .
Catina. How I wish I could cry for her, but I can’t, not a drop.
“Why are you here, Bill?”
“I wanted to see you.”
I look up, and I do find his eyes on me, and I can’t break his gaze, and I realize he is probably the person left in this world who knows me best.
“What you need to remember,” says Bill, “is that Brazos is always having to help people. You, for example.”
I remember. Brazos urging me through the high school equivalency exam. Brazos pushing books on me to read. Teaching me to sing harmony. Teaching me how to sing in a band.
“And now he’s helping Anne? And he believes everything she tells him?”
“Something like that. He’s known her since they were kids.”
“Brazos said Anne is brilliant.”
“She was. Is. Ruby—look, you scared us half to death when we were already half-scared to death over Gall. His father had flown up to help, and he cried when he saw Gall. It took all of us to get him from the jail to the medivac plane, and he was crazier than a screaming coot, fighting the straps and cussing us and trying to kick us, but we wrestled him on board, and we watched the plane fly off. And when Brazos and I got back to the motel—he’d told me what he’d done to you, which was what sparked Gall’s explosion. And I was burned as hell at him and said so—well, yelled it at him—and maybe it finally sank into him because in the morning he came with me to look for you, to see if you were okay. And you weren’t there. We searched your room. Brazos was—I never saw Brazos look like that. Never want to again. Your clothes were still there. Your goddamn toothbrush was still there.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
It’s a moment before he can continue, and his voice wobbles. “Then Sharyn followed us in and looked back of a panel under the bathroom sink and said Gall’s wad was gone. And I knew the Rivermen were over and done. And I was so damned scared I’d never see you again.”
“I bought my airline ticket with Gall’s money.”
We both just sit there. The sun keeps rising inexorably, and the strip of shade along the back of the house narrows until the line between shade and sun falls across my bare feet and Bill’s feet in the same old Justin cowboy boots that I remember from Rivermen days—one of those boots hitting the TV screen—and the memory feels like an electrical surge.
The squirrel makes a leap for a branch of the neighbor’s maple tree and chitters and scolds down at whatever angers him on the other side of the picket fence, a cat perhaps, and Jonathan wakes up and charges the fence, yapping.
“I packed your clothes and brought them back with me. I brought your red suede outfit, in case you want it. In case you decide to keep singing with your friend and his band.”
What else had Brazos told him?
“He’s my brother!”
“Your brother.”
“He is my brother!”
27
On Monday I creep back to campus with the retro station on the Pontiac’s radio playing Loretta Lynn and Jack White’s “High on a Mountaintop.” I can hardly bear to listen. I lock the Pontiac and drag myself up the three flights of stairs to the Office of Student Accounting in the black clothes that feel strange after wearing the same pair of jeans for almost a week.
The office feels strange, too, although the coffeepot is perking and Jamie is making the rounds of her plants with her watering can. We’re both early. When the coffee is brewed, she pours us each a cup and sits beside me in Catina’s chair, at Catina’s wo
rkstation. The closed door to Anne’s office is a surly presence, but Jamie says nothing, and I say nothing, and the cups of coffee sit in front of us and cool.
We both look up when Dr. Brenner lets himself in. Jamie starts to get up, but he waves her back and pours his own coffee and pulls up a chair to sit with us.
“How’s your grandmother, Ruth?”
“Oh—better,” I say, surprised. Then I wonder why I’m surprised. All the longtime residents of Versailles have elephants’ memories. My story hadn’t been a secret to anyone but me. “She tires easily, but the physical therapist visits her, and she eats real food.”
And tells me what to do about her piano students.
Dr. Brenner nods, and Jamie looks up—“That’s good to hear.”
“And Isaiah?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me.”
“Hard on him.”
The three of us breathe in the tranquility of spider plants and travel posters and the silence of the third floor. A silence to be shattered next week by the beginning of the fall semester and the rush of students.
“I’m afraid there’s plenty of work ahead for you, Ruth,” says Dr. Brenner.
Plenty ahead that I haven’t allowed myself to think about. Medical bills, nursing home bills. Will the house in the Orchards have to be sold? What about the pianos?
Unexpectedly, he reaches over and pats my shoulder. “In the meantime we’ve got to get the situation in this office straightened out.”
“Mrs. Albert—?” asks Jamie.
“She won’t be coming back,” says Dr. Brenner.
His words sink in.
“Her friend is helping her pack up her house and put it on the market. He’s taking her back to Boise with him. So, Jamie—”
Details of the office: dust on the file cabinets, one of the framed posters hanging slightly askew, brown edges on the fronds of the spider plants. So much for tranquility.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 15
