by Amy Bloom
“Does he know you?” Andy said.
“I don’t know. He looks glad to see me, so no. But he called me Alison, so yes.”
“See you Friday, unless he completely recovers, in which case you won’t see me at all.”
“You better get me those earrings,” I said, and we hung up. I read my father’s magazines until I fell asleep.
In my dream, it is pouring rain and I am driving our old Dodge Dart. My father’s standing patiently on the steps of the old library, without a coat or an umbrella. He gets into the car and I have to help him with his seat belt. He clasps his wet hands in his lap. I want to drive him to his new apartment in the assisted living place, but he doesn’t know the address and neither do I.
I’ll just pop out here for directions, Daddy, I say, hoping that the two women I see standing under the green awning of a pretty restaurant will be knowledgeable and helpful and guide us to the assisted living place. They’re not and they don’t. One of the women says, Is that your father in the car? And I say, yes, that’s why we’re looking for his apartment, and she says she certainly never drove her father all over kingdom come in a goddamned monsoon without even an address, and the other one says, What a harebrained scheme, and they sound, together, exactly like my father, as I’ve known him. I get back into the car and my father looks at me with hope and just a little anxiety.
Is everybody okay? he says.
Yes, we are, I say, and I just start driving in the pouring rain, hoping that one of us will see something familiar.
My father yelled, “Bea, Bea,” and I woke up and ran down the hall. I turned on the overhead light and handed my father his glasses as I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Oh,” he said, and he clutched my hand. Any fool could see that he knew it was me. “You’re here.”
“I’m here. You probably had a bad dream,” I said.
“Could be.” He’d already lost interest. “That’s a pretty necklace,” he said. “Was it your mother’s?”
“No. I don’t have any of Mom’s jewelry.”
“That’s a shame,” he said. “I would think you’d have kept a few of her things, to remind you.”
I nodded.
“Well, we were a lucky family,” he said. “All around us those years, kids were doing drugs, getting in trouble. People were divorcing, right and left. I always used to say, you know, at parties or things, ‘This is my original wife.’ We were lucky.”
I nodded again and took such a deep breath I felt my ribs separating from my sternum.
My father lay back down and I patted his hand. I smoothed the sheet.
“I’m going to turn out the light. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I got to the door and turned off the light.
My father said, “Is everybody okay?”
PERMAFROST
Terrible is terrible, Frances thought. There’s no comparing one bad thing to another. Whatever it is—hands blown off in Angolan minefields, children in Chernobyl with tumors like softballs, a car accident right around the corner—there’s no measuring suffering. Mrs. Shenker disagreed. At night, while her daughter, Beth, was knocked out by morphine, Mrs. Shenker sat in the solarium, the waiting room for the adolescent-medicine unit. She sat back in a recliner and read aloud from her stack of printouts about the flesh-eating bacteria that had attacked Beth nine days ago.
“Listen to this one,” she said to Frances. “And hold on to your hat. ‘I was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis after a vacation in the Bahamas. We still don’t know what caused it. Even though I’ve had approximately thirty-four operations and three skin grafts on my legs and groin and continue to have some trouble with my lungs and kidneys, I consider myself lucky. My wife and I have run into some financial difficulties and I am unable to drive but we count our blessings every day.’ Can you fucking believe this? Well, you probably can—you’re a social worker.”
Frances could believe it. Frances’s father raised Frances and her sister, Sherri, on stories of polar expeditions that began with terrible errors in judgment and ended with men weeping over frozen corpses, with people suffering horribly and still thanking God for not having killed them outright when they got on the ship. When Sherri was eighteen and Frances was eleven, Sherri said, “I want to experience Jesus’ love and I want to help other young people know that they are not doomed.” “Doomed to what?” Mr. Cairn had said, but he said it to the front hall because Sherri had already run out the door, and it was no different, really, than a girl going off to be a Deadhead or driving to Los Angeles with some badass to become a porn star. When people in the neighborhood asked where Sherri was, Mr. Cairn said, “We lost her,” and nobody pressed him and they certainly didn’t know he meant she’d gone to join the Exodus Ministry in Indianapolis. Sherri sent a Christmas card every year, and other than that, it was just Frances and her father, the storyteller.
S.S. TERRA NOVA
“This one’s a day brightener,” Mrs. Shenker said. “This guy’s an amputee himself, and a world-class athlete …” Mrs. Shenker skimmed ahead a few lines. “Well, not a world-class athlete, clearly. But athletic, and he’s invented these special responsive feet that give energy back to the leg, so you don’t just walk around, clump, clump, clump, and there’s a special suction cup so the whole leg just goes on—” She makes a sharp, sucking sound.
Mr. Shenker stood up. “I’m going to take a little walk,” he said. Mrs. Shenker and Frances saw him through the glass block wall of the solarium, chatting with Theresa the charge nurse and, like magic, two more nurses showed up and they passed a box of doughnuts around and Theresa disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, carrying real coffee cups and giving one to Mr. Shenker. Mrs. Shenker had the solarium and the doctors and Mr. Shenker had the nurses. Frances had bumped into him a couple of times when he was walking out of an empty exam room, straightening his tie, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw a nurse come out and lock the door behind her. The nurses looked transformed; they looked as if they had been handed something immensely valuable and fragile, whose care could not be entrusted to ordinary women. Mr. Shenker looked as he always did, handsome and doomed.
Frances said to Mrs. Shenker, “I have a few patients to check on. Do you want to sit with Beth?”
“Isn’t she napping?”
Frances admitted that Beth probably was napping. (Although napping was not the right word; Beth Shenker was on enough methadone to anesthetize a three-hundred-pound man and the only thing that woke her for the first eight days was a gnawing pain of the kind you get with pancreatic cancer. On the bright side, while almost no one survives pancreatic cancer, Frances thought that Beth Shenker, like most necrotizing-fasciitis victims, would survive into old age.)
Mrs. Shenker said, “All right, it’s almost time for Judge Judy. I’ll go watch that with Beth. Tell Mr. Shenker where I am, when you see him.”
Beth was dreaming. She was five, jumping up and down on her new big-girl bed in the middle of the night, clean sheets under her soft, pretty feet, the cool air tickling her soles as she jumped higher and higher, and in the dream, her little feet lit up the dark room like fireflies.
Lorraine Shenker smoothed Beth’s sheet over the metal hoop that protected her legs and straightened out Beth’s IV line and kept her eyes on Judge Judy, who was looking over her bifocals to tell a fat nineteen-year-old African American mother of twins that she deserved to lose custody of her children. The way Judge Judy waved her hand dismissively and then slipped off the bifocals to award damages to the girl’s attractive, well-dressed brother, whose car the young mother had totaled while he looked after those twins, was wonderful. It would be nice if there were a Dr. Judy, handing down diagnoses and reversing the decisions of other, dumber doctors. Dr. Judy would have taken one look at Beth and said, firmly, This young lady is not going to have a gross and permanent disability. Case dismissed.
Frances walked past Beth’s room, reading over Beth’s chart, and by the time she got t
o the nurses’ desk, Nathan Silverman was taking the cruller she wanted. Nathan Silverman was Beth’s surgeon, and he’d done a great job and he told everyone he’d done a great job, and Frances thought, Narcissistic grandiosity with excellent fine-motor skills, and thinking that made her smile warmly whenever she ran into him.
Dr. Silverman smiled back, yellow pieces of cruller flying everywhere, and Frances said, “Hey, Dr. Silverman,” and put her hand on her second choice, a chocolate doughnut. Her fingers sank deep into the chocolate icing. Dr. Silverman brushed the crumbs from his tie and stretched his arms over his head. Finally, he said, “Is Maria Lopez around?”
Frances said, “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s her break,” and she picked up a napkin with her free hand.
She didn’t say, If you get a move on, you can probably catch up with Maria Lopez when she comes out of Exam Room #2, right after Mr. Shenker.
“I just thought Maria might be chatting with Beth,” Dr. Silver-man said. “You know, cheering her up.”
“Could be,” Frances said.
Maria Lopez was the pinup girl of the adolescent-medicine unit. She liked to slip off her white clogs and massage her lovely calves at the end of her shift and give everyone a good look at her rhinestone-studded toe ring.
What kind of grown woman wears a toe ring? Frances thought.
Dr. Silverman said only, “Let’s get Beth thinking about recovery. She’s just a kid, Frances.”
Frances thought about Beth’s recovery all the time. Beth was thirteen, and although she could wear long sleeves to hide the river of scars that would always run up her right forearm and she could wear turtlenecks to hide the thick red web spread across her collarbone, she would always have a stump at the end of her left leg, and if Frances Cairn had had to contemplate all that at thirteen, she’s pretty sure she would have flipped open her laptop as soon as she was conscious and Googled the most effective form of suicide.
S.S. ENDURANCE
Dear Beth,
I hope your recovery is continuing to progress. As I hope you know, everyone at the hospital was impressed with your fortitude.
Frances crossed out “fortitude” and wrote “strength of character” and went back to “fortitude,” which sounded sort of magnificent, even if Beth was unlikely to know what fortitude meant. Frances had never seen Beth read anything. Frances was with her every day for almost a month, holding her hands while Beth screamed as her arms and legs were debrided and bringing endless cups of juice and endless bags of ice chips. Frances watched Beth come out of two comas, and each time, she was the person who comforted Beth after Mrs. Shenker and Dr. Silverman had to tell Beth what day it was and how long her coma had lasted and then finally told Beth that she had only one foot. Frances did everything she could to bond with Beth and the Shenker family; at Beth’s discharge, she walked the Shenkers to the lobby, she gave Beth a care package from the staff (lip balm and Lifesavers, a photo of Beth and the floor staff, a pink T-shirt that said NO LIMITS!, and a little stuffed penguin with a red-and-white Red Cross scarf around its neck). Between the multiple surgeries and the painkillers and the life ahead, Beth was hardly speaking when she left, and when Frances promised to visit Beth at home, Beth nodded, with her eyes closed, and the Shenkers drove off.
Dear Beth,
I’ve been meaning to visit for the past three weeks but things have been really hectic at the hospital. Remember your old room 13a, the nicest private room? A new patient is in there. T—— has two broken legs—nothing compared to you, I know—and sadly, his father is facing charges for having thrown him off the roof of their apartment building. T——s mother doesn’t speak English and we have not yet found an Eritrean interpreter but Dr. Silverman—I know you remember him—seems to think that if I act out each of his phrases carefully, T——s mother will understand what’s going on….
Frances’s handwriting hadn’t changed since the sixth grade. It was the round, hopeful handwriting of girls who wrote things like: So glad we sat together in Econ! You rock. Let’s B BFF. You are so awesome. Don’t ever stop being who U R! over the pictures of CLASS CUT-UPS and the YOUTH EFFECTIVENESS SEMINAR; things that she, Frances, had never actually written to anyone. Frances’s friends were the disfigured and the disabled, one way or another, and Beth Shenker would have been one of the pretty, giggling girls who looked right through them as they limped and staggered down the hall.
Dear Beth,
I’ve spoken to your parents several times and told them of my plan to visit you. They couldn’t care less, so I am coming this Saturday morning, with cider and doughnuts. Just like old times …
Kentucky Fried Chicken. (“Terrible stuff,” Mr. Cairn said. “Awful,” Frances said, and she passed the cole slaw and the biscuits they loved, a triple order every time, and the creamed spinach. It was a relief to eat hot food that neither of them had to cook, and they had done this every Friday night since Frances moved out to go to social-work school.)
“I’m raking tomorrow,” Mr. Cairn said. “Want to help out your old man?”
“I can’t. I’m following up with a patient. The girl who contracted necrotizing fasciitis.”
Mr. Cairn loved to hear about the dreadful things that befell Frances’s people and to hear about the things that she did to help them bear their various crosses. He might have gone into social work himself, instead of hardware, if anyone had encouraged him. Mr. Cairn shook his head sympathetically. “I can’t imagine.” He finished his second biscuit. “The one with one foot and the father who’s a ladies’ man?” and Frances nodded. One night, instead of going back to her apartment after work, she’d driven over to watch Law & Order with her father, and she told him all about flesh-eating bacteria and the Shenkers.
“Is this an all-day visit?” Mr. Cairn said. “Because I don’t like the sound of this household.”
“I won’t be there for more than an hour.”
Mr. Cairn pushed his chicken around on his plate.
“I could drive you,” he said.
“Daddy, you have to get a life.” Frances smiled when she said it.
Mr. Cairn put his fork and knife on his plate and he took Frances’s hand.
“There’s someone special I’d like you to meet,” he said.
When Frances’s mother died, her father staggered from room to room, crying. Frances and Sherri would walk into the garage for their bikes and find their father sprawled on the hood of the car, face buried in his chamois cloths. One Sunday morning, Sherri dumped a basket of wet clothes in the middle of the living room. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I mean, I actually cannot do laundry. Daddy’s crying in front of the dryer.”
The first day of first grade, Frances had to walk next door and ask Mrs. Cohen to fix her hair because her father was crying so hard, he couldn’t do her braids. Mrs. Cohen did them and did them again the next day, and on the third day Mr. Cairn took Frances to the barber and said, Please give her a haircut. Something short. And pretty.
If he had married Mrs. Cohen he would not now be sitting in front of her with a crumb of fried chicken on his face, telling her to get ready to meet someone special.
“Sure,” Frances said.
“Maybe she’ll take me off your hands,” Mr. Cairn said.
S.S. ENDEAVOR
A short, wide woman with Mrs. Shenker’s sharp chin and thick eyebrows opened the door.
“I am—” Frances said, trying to hold on to her muffler and her purse and the bag of doughnuts and the jug of cider and the brochure about a camp for teenagers with physical limitations, and Mr. Shenker came into the front hall and opened the door wider.
“Hey. This is Miss … Frances,” he said. “Sylvia, this is Frances. Frances, my mother-in-law, Sylvia Winik. Frances spent time with Beth at the hospital. Jesus, Frances, you look like Shackleton on his way to the North Pole.”
“I doubt it,” Frances said. Frances was raised on Ernest Shackleton and brave Robert Edwin Peary and that moron Robert Scott and the tragedy of his
ponies, eaten by the explorers, because Captain Scott was too stupid to use a dog team. (“Too much an admirer of dogs, the way Englishmen sometimes are,” her father had said, as if they both knew people like that, people who loved their dogs so much they would try to go to the South Pole with horses, to spare the dogs discomfort.) Frances knew the beginnings and ends of every polar expedition and nothing she ever did was going to be like Ernest Shackleton, who was a hero in her household, like Kennedy or King, and Mr. Shenker could just keep his big, fat, condescending, adulterous mouth closed.
“You might be thinking of Lawrence Oates,” Frances said, and Mr. Shenker looked at his mother-in-law and smiled. Lawrence Oates was one of the youngest men to accompany Scott and also the smartest, and when he understood he was dying of starvation and frostbite, he stopped eating entirely, gave away his compass, and lifted the flap of his tent to walk into the snow. “I am going outside now,” he said, “and I may be some time.” In their game of Great Expedition, this had been Frances’s favorite part, and she would say those lines and run onto the porch, in her pajamas, and her father would wait just the right amount of time and then carry her back in, as if there were icicles hanging all over her and she had just hours to live.
“Lorraine,” Mr. Shenker called out. “Frances is here. From the hospital.”
Mrs. Shenker came down the hall in sweatpants and a T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail.
“Frances, aren’t you sweet,” she said. “I didn’t know you were … Well, how nice. I was just doing some laundry. I thought it was going to rain, so we gave up on golf.” She put her hand on Mr. Shenker’s chest and he put an arm around her waist. “You were right, I was wrong,” she said.
