by Joanna Scott
When Nora’s mother developed a low-grade fever, the doctor prescribed erythromycin. By the next day her lips had swelled and turned the pale, pinkish hue of the underside of her tongue. The doctor changed the antibiotic and prescribed a course of antihistamines to relieve the symptoms of the allergic reaction as well as reduce the stiffness in her neck. The next morning, she sat propped up in bed, a coffee mug tucked in the crumpled sheet between her thighs. She felt improved enough to request a breakfast of scrambled eggs.
Returning to Bev’s bedside with the plate of eggs in hand, Nora thought that her mother had fallen asleep and the mug had overturned. But the way her mother’s head, tilted back against the pillow, moved in a rhythmic twitch indicated that either her sleep was troubled or she was having difficulty breathing. Nora tried nudging her awake. Bev kept twitching. The cracks between her eyelids showed only white.
The seizure lasted less than five minutes, but by then the ambulance was already en route, and Nora agreed to let the medics transport her groggy mother to the hospital. After a wait that extended into the early afternoon, the emergency department physician diagnosed a brain abscess.
An anticonvulsant was given to prevent repeated seizures—this, a nurse explained, would act as a sedative, so Nora shouldn’t be surprised if her mother remained difficult to rouse for another day or two. By ten p.m., Bev was resting comfortably, and Nora’s husband, Adam, who had driven up to Connecticut from Philadelphia, took Nora to her mother’s house.
A call from the neurologist early the next morning brought Nora and Adam back to the hospital. A corticosteroid, administered intravenously to control the swelling in the brain, had failed to have the desired effect. The neurologist needed consent to drain the pus, which involved drilling a small hole through Bev’s skull. This, or Nora’s mother could suffer permanent brain damage.
The procedure took less than half an hour, though Nora imagined that she would have to wait for time to move in reverse before she saw her mother again. While she sat with Adam in the lobby outside of surgery, she heard a buzzing sound—the sound, she was convinced, of a drill grinding through bone. She touched her husband’s arm to draw his eyes away from the soccer game on television and told him she was going to be sick. He grabbed a plastic wastebasket and held it in front of her. It was empty except for a piece of white gum stuck to the black disk at the bottom.
Nothing more than old peppermint gum. Shimmer of a fluorescent light overhead. Colors flickering on the TV. On again, off again. Who’s winning? Everything conspiring to remind her of the contest between life and death.
“Do you still feel sick?”
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
She leaned back into the curve of his arm and took in the action on the screen, the players’ leaping jubilation, a World Cup game, United States leading Spain, 1–0. And then the long exhalation in the aftermath. Bev Knox, formerly Bev Owen, born Beverly Diamond, topped with a turbaned bandage, scrubbed and ruddy and looking younger than she had in years, was wheeled into a private room in the critical care unit.
“Bev? Bev, it’s me, Nora.” The stupid human need to be oneself. And even stupider—“How are you doing?” As if she expected her mother to lift up on her elbows and say through the artificial airway, I’m fine, dear. And you?
“She looks good, doesn’t she?”
“She looks peaceful.”
“She looks like photographs of herself when she was in her thirties. Bev? I wonder if she can hear us. Bev? Can you wiggle your finger for me? This finger here, on your right hand. This one. Can you lift it?”
Between the shush-shushing of the ventilator, the heartbeat graph on the monitor, and the flat gray sky outside the window, the room had a contagious serenity. Adam and Nora stayed with Bev through much of the afternoon, passing sections of the newspaper between them. They spoke in whispers. Adam stared out the window for a long while. When he turned back he seemed to be trying to hide his confusion, as though he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t understand how he’d come to be here.
“We’re not doing much good,” he finally said, stretching out his arms. “Why don’t we go back to the house?”
“You go on. I’m going to stick around for a while.”
But she needed to eat, Adam pointed out. She said she wasn’t hungry. She needed rest, he insisted. She said she’d stretch out on the cushioned alcove bench. She’d stay as long as hospital rules allowed, and then she’d take a taxi and join Adam at Bev’s.
“Look,” she murmured with her eyes closed, “I’m already asleep.” He kissed her on the forehead beneath the peppered arc of her bangs.
SHE MUST HAVE SOME IDEA that she’s not lying in her own bed in her own home. Not working in her garden. Not dancing with Gus. Bev can’t have forgotten that Gus is dead. His final whisper of a groan. Who could forget? The man who had been described to her as a shrink with a passion for tofu. His shroud of gray curls. Straw sandals. Remember the evening of his first visit to the Ridgefield house, Gus chasing a bat around the kitchen with a broom? He finally managed to trap it beneath an overturned pot, and they all relaxed with tall glasses of lemonade and then watched in amazement as the bat flattened itself into a puddle and seeped from under the rim of the pot, unfolded its wings, and flew across the room and out the open door.
Or the time she was pregnant with Nora, and she and Lou stayed in a cheap motel in the Berkshires. Animals crackled through the dry ground cover outside their open window all night. And then when Lou was getting dressed the next morning he discovered a chipmunk asleep inside his boot. Bev, come see!
Lou’s ambition to follow the example of the Raytheon executive who at the age of fifty quit his job and took his family to live among the Bushmen in the Kalahari. Bev, out of necessity, adept at pretending that anything is possible.
Making puppets out of rose hips. Making whistles out of acorn shells.
Benny Goodman’s thin lips and rimless glasses. Good night, my love.
Thinking about all this while she listened to a bird in the garden and waited for Nora to bring her breakfast. Chickadee-dee-dee-dee-dee.
IT FELT GOOD to give in to fatigue. But when Nora found herself awake later in the evening, she wasn’t certain she’d actually been asleep. How much time had passed since Adam had left the hospital? Since her mother had gone into surgery? Since her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer? Since Nora’s birth?
The strange fact of passing time. Acceptance had felt like defeat when she was a young girl and her mother finally convinced her that the Earth was turning beneath her feet. Even now, what she knew to be the truth seemed the opposite of such dependable impressions as these: the day’s filmy residue on her teeth, the steady breathing of the ventilator, the bulge of her mother’s eyeballs under the thin skin of her lids, the figure of a man in the doorway, backlit by the recessed ceiling lights.
“Nora, honey...”
It was her father’s voice, all right, and her father’s bald, freckled head and full beard. Nora half rose, then settled back onto the bench.
“Lou! You startled me.”
“Didn’t Adam tell you I was coming?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see your mother.”
Why? she wanted to ask—a purely spiteful question that would have put him on the defensive. Instead, she remained silent while he stepped into the room. He stepped forward again with a jerk, as though moving through an invisible barrier, and stood beside Bev’s bed.
Watching him graze his ex-wife’s hand with his forefinger and then lift it, tubes and all, to his lips, Nora didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed, offended, or impressed. She couldn’t muster pity; she couldn’t tell whether the gesture was purely for show—an old gentleman’s debonair display of affection. A display for whose benefit? Nora suspected that Lou would have done the same whether or not he’d had his daughter for an audience. He even seemed mildly surprised by either his own impulsive action or by the
taste of Bev’s skin. Beverly Knox, formerly Owen. This wife Lou had left thirty years ago for another woman and who wouldn’t take him back when he came begging.
Lou gently lay Bev’s hand back on the mattress and bowed his head with a solemnity that Nora thought both tender and portentous.
“Were you planning to stay with us at Bev’s house?” she asked.
“Is that all right?”
“I guess so.”
“I appreciate it.”
Nora was used to Lou’s habit of visiting without invitation. He moved around so frequently he used a post office box for his home address. But she was surprised by how old he looked. She’d seen him last...when? Summer a year ago, and he’d been fit enough to dive naked from the dock of the lake house. Shedding his jeans right there in front of his daughter and son-in-law, he’d squeezed together those skinny buttocks of his, pushed off his toes, and with a yelp dove into the water that by then, mid-August, was topped with a thick scum of algae. Right through the green bloom went Lou, and he didn’t surface again for so long that Nora had risen to her feet in panic and was about to dive in after him when he finally did bob up ten yards away, on the other side of the dock.
Rising again from the murky depths in Bev’s hospital room after an absence of eleven months.
“How is Brunswick?” she asked him.
“I moved down to Harpswell for the summer. How is your mother?”
“For a woman with a hole in her head, she’s managing.”
“What in heaven’s name have you let them do to her?”
Nora explained to her father the reasons for the surgery. Lou wanted to know if she’d gotten a second opinion. Yes, she lied. She’d gotten a second and a third opinion, and all the doctors had said the same: surgery or brain damage. Which would you choose, Lou?
“What about surgery and brain damage? What’s the point of that?”
Nora wasn’t sure how best to respond. It always took some time to size him up after a long absence. Youthful was the word others used to describe him even into his seventies. The better word, Nora thought, was incomplete. Whoever her father had been the last time she’d seen him, he’d be more stubborn, more resigned in his misgivings about his past actions, and more blatantly contradictory when she saw him again.
More Lou than Lou. A man who couldn’t see the point of putting a hole in an old woman’s head.
Nora might have folded her arms and scowled. Or she might have given Lou a detailed description of traumatized brain tissue. Instead, she decided to challenge him: “What would Bev have wanted?” she asked.
“Bev?” he echoed, unexpectedly deflated. The Bev who had been his wife, or the Bev who had become a stranger? How about both? Nora had heard him talk on many occasions about his regret over the split. She knew what he would say—he’d never gotten over Bev and had spent the last three decades longing for reconciliation. What unnerved Nora now was that he would say it in Bev’s presence.
He sat on the lower corner of Bev’s bed near where the catheter emerged from under the sheet, and he lifted a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket. Nora reminded him that smoking was prohibited in the hospital. He left the cigarette dangling unlit from the corner of his mouth and looked at his daughter with a raised-eyebrow expression clearly intended to challenge her to pay attention.
OR THE TIME Bev called Nora into the kitchen to examine a germinating bean. Forget the television show, for God’s sake, and come see this. The seed coat disintegrating. The withered cotyledon. Trying to explain the paradox of loss and gain, all that we have to give up in order to move forward, arriving in this place. What place? And who asked Lou to come along?
Deep in thought, running her fingers over the velvety purple sepal of a larkspur. Doesn’t that feel nice? Clouds gathering for a late afternoon thunderstorm. Her garden. Her house, 7 Fairport Lane. Built in 1890, the floorboards warped, the chimney crumbling where the vines had grown into the mortar. The place Gus and Bev went to live out their last years together. Sweet Gus. Plucking dead blossoms off a rhododendron. The perfume of lily of the valley hanging in the humid air. The wind picking up. Silver shine of the poplar leaves.
ON THAT TERRIBLE NIGHT ending with Bev’s assurance that she would never again speak his name aloud, Louis Owen drove north. It was summer, between semesters, and he would miss nothing more than a couple of conferences with inconsequential panels about theoretical rubrics and anthropology’s hidden bias. Talk, talk, talk. Lou had always been too eccentric, as he liked to think of himself, or too lazy, as others thought, to have anything productive to say about theory, and he’d lost interest in the social element of the conferences. He’d met the woman for whom he’d left his wife at one of those conferences; he wasn’t in the mood to meet another woman right then.
He’d intended to keep driving up through Canada into the wilderness of the Northwest Territories, but his car broke down in Niagara just before he’d cleared the border. So he booked the cheapest room he could find in a motel across from a Nabisco factory. How many times had he told Nora about this motel? Seventy dollars a week, morning coffee included, the smell of burned sugar clinging to the sheets and towels.
Finishing this first part of the account, he paused, and, through his unlit cigarette, drew in a long breath that was synchronized with Bev’s ventilator. Lou breathing on his own; Bev being breathed for.
“So you hung out in Niagara Falls for a while.”
“Feeling sorry for myself, I admit. Having lost the love of a good woman, I’d lost my future.”
You and your sentimental clich豬 she wanted to say. Instead—“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know how many people throw themselves over the falls each year? You don’t want to know. Every morning I’d walk from my motel room to the park and spend the day there. What a wreck I was, destined for the junkyard. And yet somehow I found ways to make myself useful—snapping photographs for tourists, pointing them in the right direction. I got friendly with the grounds staff and when one of the guys quit I was offered his job. Did you know that your dad had a job picking up trash?”
“You’ve always kept yourself busy.”
“Collecting soda cans and hot dog wraps, newspaper, old socks, and lost hats. I wish you could have seen me.”
“I can imagine.”
“I was missing you like crazy, Nora. Believe me, I never wanted to stop being your father. You know, I wrote to you. More than once.” How come you never answered me? he would say next. “How come you never—forget it.” He gave a dull shrug. “Your mother forwarded the bills. Of course she did. I’m not complaining. And wouldn’t you know, she sent along the certificate confirming our plots at White Oak Cemetery.”
“Where?”
“Crazy business, eh? We bought our little patch of land on sale. And she’d sent a copy of the certificate to remind me of our commitment.”
“Where did you say?”
At first he’d thought it was a nasty joke designed to remind him that his life would add up to no more than dates carved in stone. But the more he’d thought about it, the more he’d studied the paper and traced his fingers across the numbers, the more he’d been comforted by the idea. He and Bev would be together in the end.
Where?
She’d heard correctly. Cemetery, he’d said. And White Oak. It had to be White Oak. He’d never mentioned this before, and neither had Bev.
“I can’t believe it.”
“A pact made long ago,” he said, his irony tinged with pride, though he admitted it must be disturbing for Nora to imagine her parents, given their years of estrangement, together in the end, planted side by side.
OR THE TIME Nora stepped on the spiny husk of a chestnut, and to stop her from crying Bev split open the nut and showed her the shadow of the seed leaf inside. Then they went inside and Nora dressed up in Bev’s old belted blue dress with padded shoulders. Bev painted Nora’s eyelids blue and dusted her cheeks with cyclamen rouge, and Nora went
clacking around the house in her mother’s high heels. Hey, gorgeous!
Or the time, the last time, Lou came to dinner. Asking for Bev’s forgiveness. Begging for Bev’s forgiveness. Demanding Bev’s forgiveness. Don’t you dare threaten me, Lou! Get out! No. Yes. And snap, she’s an old woman pulling out a maple sapling by its roots and trying to recall a song she once knew about mandrakes. Her back aching, her head throbbing, only wisps of hair left after the chemo, her ears ringing, and Nora’s at the kitchen door calling—
Bev! Bev! Telephone.
Did someone say something, or is that sound the dry leaves moving in the breeze? Sky darkening. All the work she wants to finish before the rain.
IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY, he reminded Nora. She thought he meant it didn’t have to be White Oak Cemetery—he and Bev could have chosen a different place. But he meant that Bev didn’t have to refuse him. She could have forgiven him and taken him back. That they were never a family again was her decision.
He spent that whole summer hanging out in Niagara, having decided that he could never love anyone else but the woman he’d betrayed. What a mess he’d made of his life. Had he ever told Nora about the bar in Niagara? That dingy saloon, where he could drink away his sorrows. A white man adrift. The linoleum floor was sticky with beer. Cigarette smoke hung so thick that he could hold it in fistfuls. Two men were singing with the jukebox. A drunk old woman laughed in delight, her wrinkles like a fine net pressed against her face. Her joy was infectious.
“Did I ever tell you about that woman in the bar?”
“No,” Nora said, though she was thinking yes.
OR THIS SAME DREAM that returns to her when she’s ill: she is in a waiting room. There are strangers sitting in seats against the opposite wall. They are reading books they had the foresight to bring with them. Bev brought nothing with her, so she sits there bored with her thoughts. Idly, she scratches her shoulder and feels an odd patch like hardened syrup stuck to her skin. She touches her elbow and feels the same. She is spotted with this hard, transparent substance—tiny crystals, she sees upon examination. They are on her arms, her legs, and at the base of her throat.
